Angela: a body needs rest

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
This is emotion art

(00:02):
Welcome. I hope you realize just how unique you are
If you don't I hope you start looking for it because you are the only person that is exactly like you in
the best possible way
Also, I hope you know why you're on this planet if you don't an out of ten would recommend looking for it

(00:23):
Because there is a reason and it's not to do the things that you really don't want to be doing but you feel like you have to
That's not why you exist truth is the reasons just as unique as you are. So I
Have a feeling that the person who becomes aware of how exquisitely and beautifully unique they are
At the same time realizes why they're here

(00:46):
Interesting if true
Thank you to the emotion art team buddy Anderson on sound engineering and the awesome original music
You should check out this stuff on Spotify at from another Mista
It's cool
Angela cook
artistic and everything partner editor and erstwhile co-host and

(01:08):
now guest
This is a conversation I had with Angela cook good job facing your fear Angie
You found your power of choice
Welcome to the fairy tale
Emotion art emotion art where we sit down and make art with
emotion art
Creative creative creative energy moving outward in conscious expression of feeling the motion are the motion are the motion

(01:34):
I'm emotional emotion because we are literally made of emotion art because everything we do wants to be art emotion art
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Emotion art emotion art a space for emotional art creative energy moving outward in conscious expression

(01:55):
Emotion art an emotion art gallery this this this this this this this this is emotion art
Yeah, welcome

(02:16):
I feel like this conversation could go in like a million different ways. We could talk about anything
This is the way I want to live my life
Just walking into each moment as it is. Yeah, what do I want to do right now? Okay, it feels comfortable
Feels like being home and ironically, you're also at home. Yes. I like this place

(02:37):
The forge. Mm-hmm feels like one of the places of being and I really like it
I especially like the people that live here. She's so loud
See if you can get her to purr into the microphone
Come on meow meow
Angie Michael

(02:59):
Here we are. We did it. It is very nice to be sitting here with you. There's something that we like to do together
Sit places I feel nervous
I'm not nervous, but I am nervous at the same time as I say here and look at you
It occurs to me that our life is very different than either of us ever imagined

(03:21):
thankfully, it gets weirder by the day and
Every day is like
How could it have gotten even better?
Every day feels like that it does now it hasn't always felt that way
That is a very new thing for me. There were definitely a lot of days in a row where it was like
How could it have possibly been better yesterday and today is worse and when yesterday was already?

(03:46):
Really really hard. I think right now we're moving in a
a place where every day feels
more
exciting
more peaceful more connected
question yeah viewer to try to draw a
Verbal diagram for somebody just the shape of your life right now

(04:07):
How do you see yourself?
Well, I often answer a question like that with what I do I get a lot of my identity by what I'm doing
Except that right now my who I am is resting
I'm resting
Which is a doing?

(04:27):
By not doing who you are is resting. I am resting. That's the first thing that comes to you. Yeah, welcome resting
My number one goal every day is to have a period of rest
which it as you know comes on the heels of
many years of not prioritizing rest do you see yourself as

(04:47):
unemployed
Joyfully unemployed
Mm-hmm. Yeah, so I spent two years in massage school and I was working at the same time
among other things moving and selling a house
And merging houses and parenting being a construction worker
in our own house

(05:08):
But now that I'm done with school, I'm an LMT. I'm a massage therapist
Building my own practice, which takes time
So I am unemployed in the true sense in that I do not have an employer
But every once in a while I get paid to do some work for somebody
So in that way

(05:28):
The for tax purposes I am employed
self-employed
Do a lot of volunteer work. I was just thinking about
how
the way
The shit the kaleidoscope of our life the shape that it's come to at this point
You're very much a glue that holds everybody together

(05:49):
And it doesn't feel like it's becoming less and less of a stretching thing for you like something that's pulling you apart
Because you're naturally a glue. Mm-hmm
But it's becoming more and more of you're the glue in exactly the ways you want to be
I don't think that I view myself in that way

(06:10):
I think that
part of my process over the last
Really 15 years, but probably more so in the last five years is to
Kind of undo some of those ideas that I have about myself
Imagining myself as a glue that holds anything together is just so far outside of my understanding of

(06:32):
The chaos that happens inside of me. How can the chaos that is inside of me be a glue for anything?
but objectively
Like if I view myself from the outside, I can see that that is true
Just doesn't necessarily feel true
I think we were talking about all my volunteer work updating your images of yourself. Yeah, I mean, oh, that's a

(06:55):
That's been a very long and tediously
Slow process for me. Do you have any idea of the timeline on when you'll be done with that change?
Should we mark a calendar? I'm just wondering if you have an idea. How long do you expect it? How much longer do you expect?
It to take you to change
Yeah, well, I think it's a little bit more than that

(07:15):
Change. Yeah, well, I'm who you want to be I think I am becoming who I want to be
And I think that that's going to be it could take me the rest of my life
And that's okay at this point in my life. I don't feel frustrated with how long it's taking
in times past I have felt very frustrated with how
slow

(07:36):
The process is I remember there were some times during that whole process where people would be like I haven't seen you
What have you been up to?
And literally the only thing that I had been spending all of my time on is unraveling some of those
balls of twine in there that were
so messy messy so messed up

(07:57):
And that it just it felt like it took a lot of effort a lot of time and a lot of space
And it was important work, but I didn't really have anything to show for it
I appreciate your serious answer to my irreverent question
Because you know, I'm sure you know, I was playing when I asked it because I believe that to be human is
To be learning and growing and changing constantly

(08:19):
I spent the first
Decades of my life putting all those things in there somehow either they were put in there by other people's words or my own ideas or
experiences I had so
Wouldn't it make sense that at some point of time you would be able to undo all of that?
Because now I'm adding other pseudo definitions into who I think I am

(08:42):
Which may or may not be
Fully true and then you tease those apart too and figure out which pieces fit and which pieces need to kick rocks
How do you feel about?
The level of transformation happening in your life lately level of change. I should say simpler word
Externally or internally?
Your life is becoming more and more

(09:03):
Your life is becoming more different than you would have ever thought that it would be every single day that goes by
That that's happening to you. How do you feel about that? I'm ecstatic
I mean
there was a there came a point in my life where I
I wanted to stop living a life that I wanted to run away from

(09:25):
That became a just a massive push for me is to just
Not want to run away
anymore
Yes, you know like when you go on vacation
And everything feels fantastic and then you come back home and you're like back to this
That was the feeling that I had on a pretty consistent basis and I just didn't want to feel that way anymore

(09:49):
And so then how do you make changes to?
Set your life up that it always just feels
Awesome for the most part
The changes that I've been making over the last few years move me closer to that direction of not wanting to run away
so I feel very
Well, I feel very proud because those are not those are not easy. A lot of those decisions were not easy

(10:11):
Yes
A lot of them are heartbreaking actually. Yes, and
I feel proud that
even in the face of the hard choices just to like
Continue moving forward to a life
That's full. Have you ever heard the quote that says don't live the same day
Over and over again for 75 years and call it a life

(10:32):
I feel like I've seen something like that on a Facebook meme or something. Yeah. Yeah, it was like a gut punch
Yes, and I think that
Ideas like that were coming at me really really fast like highway speeds
and all of the all of those feelings of like
Can't live the same day over and over again and call it a life

(10:53):
Don't want to live a life that I want to run away from you could be living a life. That's joyful where you have
The choice of what you want to do every single day
You don't have to work in a job for somebody else
You can kind of just do what you want to do build the life that you want to build. I
Was collecting a lot of those messages because you know like what the seeker seeks

(11:14):
The finder finds I think I was looking for something
else some other way that life could be and so I was finding messages like that
What did those messages do for you? How did they how did they shift you? Did you start to believe them?
I think I had already known them
They gave you language to what?
Knowledge I even think I had the language. I think it's something I had always known

(11:38):
I've been thinking a kind of a lot about this actually. Oh, this is so interesting
When I was a kid, I didn't be like I want to be a doctor or I want to be a lawyer
Whatever. I was just like I don't care what I'm doing
I know what I want it to feel like and I always wanted to try so many different things
I never wanted to do one thing in my life
But you had a sense of what feeling you wanted to move toward. Yes. Oh my gosh. That's so interesting. I never wanted to like

(12:05):
be in a place
for very long
I had this idea that we should move
To Ireland and work on a sheep farm for a year and like be in the culture and then move
Somewhere else like Italy and learn to make a wine and then

(12:25):
Move to France and learn to make bread something like really specific to that culture
And like I just had this idea that you could do that. You could live a life where you were
trying and learning and exploring
Are you talking about growing up? So this is as a child?
Like that particular idea came later to me but ideas like that like I just I just didn't understand why it was like

(12:50):
then you do this and then you do this and
So when I started seeing those messages, it was like, oh, yeah
Remember that?
I see you actually that's the thing you wanted to do
You never really wanted to stay put and have a life that everybody else
had
And then I forgot

(13:11):
And then I remembered plug into a gear spot
I think i've kind of always been of two minds in some ways in those things
I had this idealized dream of what it could be but
Then of course I plugged myself into a gear spot because it was safe and comfortable and you were taught to
Expected to I mean it's logical
But my dad is a dreamer. He always had these really big weird dreams

(13:33):
He just never did him
But really the concept that you fit into a gear slot because you were expected to
Still doesn't have anything to do with your dad or anyone else just your story about him. I don't think my dad
Expected me to fit in a gear slot
Well, i'm just i'm just saying anyone in your life that you ever had to do that
Oh, I need to be this way in order to make this person happy or make them comply or whatever

(13:58):
Yeah, yeah
I mean I think that I I think I still had that like this is what a successful life looks like
Kind of story told to me the other society story of what's a successful life looks like
And so then at some point I was like well you have to grow up and like be an adult now
And just kind of like
Be successful. I mean this is this is what life is supposed to look like you're supposed to get a job. You're supposed to have a retirement you're supposed to

(14:22):
own a house and
1.2 dogs or whatever it is, you know
It sounds like you accept that that was a place you put yourself
Definitely not that you were pushed there by your upbringing or by your anything
You feel like that's a newer perspective or is that kind of how you feel?
I feel like that's a newer perspective
I definitely didn't see it that way for a long time

(14:47):
But I think it's been a developing perspective. Yes, probably since the time I had logan
I mean, I remember after logan was born just going
What are you doing?
Just that feeling
Shifted everything my whole life has changed since then sometimes slowly and sometimes very quickly
Where did this life start? What's the

(15:07):
What's the intro story to angela cook?
I don't think i've ever
told an intro story
I've heard bits and pieces, but the truth is you don't talk in stream of consciousness. Like I do
That's what I mean. Like I don't know that i've ever sat down. I mean like here is my story
You know like you and mariah you've told your story so many times

(15:30):
That you're like, we don't know how to stop telling it
But I don't think i've ever really done that so i'd like to hear it
I'd like to hear i'd like to see what kind of a summation comes out of your brain about
The life and times of the life and times of the little girl
Angela, where were you born? I was born in portland

(15:52):
Um, and then when I was one my parents moved to bend
And they lived there until
After I graduated from college, so I've only ever lived in bend
How did it feel to live to be to basically be born and raised in bend?
Well, it's not the bend of now
definitely, so um
But the bend of you of your era, how did that feel to be to be in that environment?

(16:16):
It was a small town like a working-class town
very
blue collar
Lots of people were born in bend
very blue collar lots of ranchers and loggers
I wouldn't say it wasn't rough. It was a very safe place to live
But it wasn't
Very wealthy like it is now. It's a very wealthy place now

(16:40):
But you still had we still had access to a lot of the recreational stuff that is there now was just a lot less crowded
so
My family was pretty
nature loving we would go to the rivers and the lakes and
Go mountain biking. My dad was really into caving. So we got into the desert and go into caves and

(17:02):
Clean up all the garbage
Go hiking in the desert go on
Multiple hour road trips looking for a specific bird out in eastern oregon, you know, just like
a lot of nature centered things
but it was also
The 80s and 90s. There was no internet or anything like that. So it was also really small. It felt my world felt small

(17:26):
It's just your neighborhood
Those are the people that you knew
little tiny town locked in the mountains with a bunch of
Rednecks and yeah
What did you do for how did you what did you do? What did you do to entertain yourself?
What did you do to feel alive? Well, we didn't have we didn't even have like public transit in bend at that point in time

(17:48):
So my friends and I we rode our bikes everywhere and my parents were very free with me
I could do anything. It was just like be home by dinner and they didn't care where you were you just
Come home by dinner. How do you feel that that was their approach to you?
I think that it fits very well with the self-reliance
Science that I was also a part of

(18:13):
the parenting style my parents parenting style was very much
Learned to be self-reliant, but I also
Feel like there's a little bit of a hole there where I wondered sometimes if they cared about where I was
What am I beginning myself into sitting here now? Yeah remembering back to that time. Yeah
How did what is the gut feeling the first feeling that you have the biggest feeling you have towards?

(18:38):
Those parents that had that approach to raising their daughter
I think that the largest part of my feeling is just gratitude. I feel really grateful
I never felt a weight of responsibility when I was young
I could do anything I wanted and
In some ways like my friends and I were raising each other, you know
We were making decisions with each other without like any helicopter parenting kind of situation going on

(19:03):
There was none of that none of like my good friends didn't have that it we we all kind of were
Moving in packs in neighborhoods and riding our bikes everywhere and playing at the playground at the school down the street
And how did you guys do with raising each other? Sometimes?
It went poorly
Like those are the funnest memories probably we were miseducated each other in a lot of ways

(19:26):
But I think it was pretty good. Yeah
My no huge regrets
Huge I said, yeah, okay
My older sister though, she's six years older than me as a kid
so she was you know, quite a bit older than me once I was out roaming the streets and
she was always
Quite generous with her time and her brain for me. Like she always made room for me

(19:51):
So if there was something her door was always open to me
Her door was always open to me that makes a lot of sense with the experiences i've had with her
Yeah, she I think she's still that type of person. She is yeah, she's very I mean
It's very very much who she is, but I felt particularly like
If I didn't have anywhere to go. Yeah, I could go there

(20:12):
an anchor point
Definitely. Yeah, so I spent a lot of my childhood just like playing
My best friend low down the street from me. So we were just always together riding our bikes or
Playing zack zack. He's a lego maniac in the street
Is that a game or a song? It's a game. So she had sisters as well
And then we had other kids in our neighborhoods

(20:34):
We had just a ton of kids and one person would be in the middle of the street
And your goal was to get it's like frogger. It's like frogger
You could start on one curb and you'd try to get to the other curb before getting tagged
But you had to yell
Yell as you were running across the street
Zack zack. He's a lego maniac

(20:56):
His requirement so it's like a game of tag it was tag
But within the confines of the curbs of the street and only one person was it? Yes
Oh, that sounds like a really inventive way to get expand a lot of energy quickly
So what's your overall feeling of that childhood?
If you break that whole part of your life into a phase
Yeah, what's what color is it?

(21:17):
I don't speak the language that you do
What does that make you think of then?
What the fuck are you asking me?
I mean, I would just pick a color that I like right. What color does it what color is it? Oh, it's like a
soft orange
That's the color that was in my head

(21:38):
I'm not even joking right now. Like I would totally joke like that, but that's literally what I was looking at
That's funny. It was a good childhood. It didn't feel weighty
Do you feel like you were aware of your feelings? Fuck? No, I mean that's one thing when I look back
I go I wish that I would have had someone in my life that could have taught me emotional intelligence
I had no concept of myself

(22:00):
I had more concept of how to be in a
Situation like how to respond how to react?
What things to do to get you liked what works what doesn't work?
Well until you get to like middle school and then fucking nothing works. What part of school was your favorite?
I like elementary school just felt really
peaceful and fun

(22:21):
Joyful. Mm-hmm played a lot. Mm-hmm great teachers
super awesome
friend experiences family life dynamic
Just feeling of it. I don't have a feel of it. I don't think
just
just dry and warm
I mean I have
Kind of weird snapshot memories of that, but I don't know that I have an emotional feel of it. Mm-hmm

(22:45):
And then I really liked high school
I had
a
Group of really goofy friends
And we would be weird together. You've met one of them kimmy
Yeah, and she and I had a really cool friendship in that we would talk about real stuff
But we also had just had so much silly fun together. We would just do silly things

(23:07):
And then we were really just like we were really like doing silly stuff
We were obsessed with TLC the group. Yo
And so wait, wait is that don't go chase? Yeah?
Please stick to the rules
You
Yeah, yeah, but before that song. Yeah, okay

(23:29):
We would like dress like them at school just to be weird and
to entertain ourselves.
So you were like 80s stereotype girl.
Well, then it was the 90s, but yeah.
But in the 90s, were you trying to keep up with the trends
or were you like still kind of punked out?
No, I was not a punk.
When I was a kid, I was a tomboy.

(23:50):
Tomboy.
Yeah, I played a ton of sports.
So-
Like my grandmother, one of my grandmother's
deepest regrets was that she never saw me in a dress,
almost ever.
So what would have been the average outfit?
Just like basketball shorts and-
Well, yeah, except in the winter time.
Basketball shorts and long johns.
Long socks.

(24:10):
Long socks.
Long socks.
Yeah, I mean, I just wore-
Or like a cheer, did you just always wear
a cheerleader outfit everywhere you went?
I've only ever worn cheerleader outfits, even right now.
Wow, that's team maroon snuggie.
Yeah, snuggie team.
Wait, snuggie and kitten all curled up in your lap.

(24:31):
No, I was very sports oriented.
It was one of the ways in which I felt competent.
Even though I was really average at sports,
I just felt like I fit there.
Is that where most of your friend group was?
I mean, maybe most, but definitely not all.

(24:51):
But that's not why you felt like you fit there.
No, I always just liked team atmosphere.
Competition.
Very competitive when I was a child.
I am now.
I'm less competitive now, but I still am quite competitive.
I mean, I was like obsessively competitive,
like to the point where it was not fun
to be around me at all if I was playing.

(25:11):
Okay.
Yeah, so I'm far less than that now.
I've grown there, but I am still competitive.
So are you able to think of your life in,
I mean, you do it, you're pretty much do most
of the editing of all these conversations anymore.
So you kind of know-
What you're gonna ask me.
Well, literally.
So, and I recognize that.
That's an interesting dynamic for me to kind of watch

(25:33):
from my periphery mind,
but are you able to think of your life in stages?
And if so, what feels like the end
of that stage of your life?
Yeah, I don't know that I ever would have thought
of my life that way until I started editing the podcast.
And then that's just kind of the language
that you started using.
And then I was like, huh, I wonder what my stages are.

(25:54):
So how long did that stage last?
Until I was about a sophomore or so in high school.
How old is that?
Sorry, I didn't go to school.
So I have such a hard time associating those words.
Yeah, it's about Ike and Logan.
They're juniors, but about 16.
Okay.
But there were still elements of it,

(26:15):
just even in that little bit of time after that.
But then I like wanted to get out of my innocence
and throw myself headlong into taking bigger risks
and things like that.
So it wasn't a shift in location or anything like that.
It was a shift in mindset.
Yeah, I was just like, I felt,

(26:37):
sheltered isn't the right word because it wasn't put on me,
but I felt pretty ignorant and innocent.
Did you feel bored maybe?
No, I was really busy all the time.
You know how Ike and Logie are never home.
There's just always something going on.
There's always people to go see.
There's always things to do.
I was very busy.
Oh, but you're saying that it felt like

(26:58):
there was something deeper and you wanted to find that.
Not even deeper.
It was just that I was very wholesome.
And right around 16 or so, I was like,
you're ready to do things like smoke pot and have sex
and like just bigger stuff.

(27:19):
You just wanted to experience life,
see what's out there, feel it for yourself.
Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
So I did that.
What triggered that?
Was there like an event or a moment that feels like
that's kind of where that really set in?
I don't think so.
I think a lot of it actually had to do
with the culture of my school.
A lot of my friends were doing that same thing.

(27:39):
And I was just like, I don't know anything about this.
Like I was so ignorant about all of that stuff.
The only way I knew how to experience things
was either talking to them, misinformation,
or doing it myself.
So how long did that phase, like,
how long did that phase last?
16 plus.
That lasted until what?
No, it really only lasted like two years.

(28:02):
I wasn't really like wild.
You just unlocked the gate.
Yeah, I was just like.
I'm just gonna step out.
Just see what happens, yeah.
And you probably found out a lot about yourself
and realized some things that you really liked
and some things you really didn't.
I think that's actually one of my regrets
is that I didn't really approach it
in a way to learn anything about myself.
So like the first guy that I did in high school,

(28:23):
for instance, I didn't really even know if I liked him.
It was just like, oh, okay, great, he likes me.
The way that I talk to the kids now,
even about their friends is like,
does that person make you feel good?
Do you like that person?
Do you like the way that they treat you?
And I just, I was not self-aware
enough to ask myself any of those questions.

(28:45):
I just kind of was, just did.
I don't know.
Our poor kids don't have a choice.
They're constantly facing these questions.
I can't find everything.
Whatever, they're lucky.
I know.
Then my junior year of high school,
late in my junior year, I started dating this guy
and I really liked him.

(29:06):
We did a lot of really connective things together.
And then that summer, the summer before my senior year,
I got pregnant and I had an abortion
because I was young.
It wasn't even a question in my mind.
It wasn't like, should I, shouldn't I?
It was just like, well, that's the next thing.
And that summer shifted everything.

(29:30):
It started this spiral of chaos around me
that changed the trajectory of everything that I did for years.
So I had an abortion and of course,
he's a teenage boy and I'm a teenage girl.
And the fact that I got pregnant was terrifying
and way too much seriousness,

(29:51):
way too much responsibility all at the same time.
What am I doing?
What am I doing?
I'm still a kid.
So we broke up in the fall
and I was completely blindsided.
I didn't, like, there was no lead up to it.
It was just, I think we should break up.
And I was just like, what happened?
And so this is my senior year of high school

(30:13):
where you kind of have to make a decision
about what you're gonna do next.
Or so you have been led to believe.
I don't even think there was a question in my mind
about what I was gonna do.
It was just where I was gonna go to college.
It wasn't like a think about it.
What do you wanna do?
College is the next thing.
Yeah, so like where are you gonna go to school?
So for me, the timeline is like get pregnant,

(30:37):
have an abortion,
which was something that I don't even really talk about.
Why not?
I think until I met Bonnie,
I had only ever told two people.
Because it's such a hot button thing
that I fear the judgment.
It also carried with it a lot of trauma with my friends.

(30:59):
Basically what happened was I had an abortion
over the summer.
I only told one person at school.
She's the person who drove me to the clinic.
And it was in Springfield.
We had to drive from Bend to Springfield.
There was no, and that's like two hour drive
over the mountains.
Because I didn't wanna tell my parents.
They didn't know until well after the fact.

(31:21):
Then I showed up at like the back to school,
come back to school barbecue or whatever we had
at the beginning of the school year.
And everybody knew.
And so that was like doubly devastating.
So it became like this really hard decision.
Even though it wasn't really a decision,
it was still like emotionally scarring for me.
It's kind of a big decision.

(31:41):
And it has an effect.
And it has an effect.
And then to come to school with the whispers
and the judgment and the gossip.
And then my boyfriend and I broke up after that.
And so like all of this like really devastating
social stuff happened to me all at one time.

(32:03):
And each piece feels like the end of the world in itself.
Yeah, especially when you're that age.
How did you even just keep coming to school?
Well, I didn't.
I didn't.
And I had really what was my first real
catatonic emotional breakdown during that year.
I ended up in therapy.

(32:25):
My parents were worried about me.
Like you became nonverbal?
Like I still went to practice,
basketball practice and stuff.
I stayed in my activities.
I didn't stop doing those things.
But it was just like when I think about that time,
I can like imagine myself standing at the end
of this really dark hallway.
Everything was so far away.
I was so far removed from like being emotionally involved

(32:48):
in my life.
Did you feel like you were watching someone else
live their life from inside it?
Maybe a little bit.
Just going through the motions.
Yeah, definitely that.
Yeah.
Robotic kind of like.
Yeah, but at the same time,
knowing that I'm on the verge of having to make
this decision where I'm gonna move in six months
to go to college.

(33:08):
So like it's just stacked.
So many things stacked on top of each other.
And that decision feels very important.
And it's like, it feels like a lot of pressure.
The way that I looked at it is like,
I'm committing the next four years of my life to a thing
that I, it's a kind of big choice to make when you're 18.
It feels like a big choice.
And knowing what I know now is like,
you can always reverse any choice.
You can undo anything.

(33:29):
You can choose something else.
And I didn't understand that then.
But maybe that's.
Black and white.
The world was black and white.
For so long.
So what did you do?
Well, I still did all the things.
I still played all the sports and did all the activities
and went to the dances.
Just without any purpose, without.
And just feeling so emotionally wrong.
Like my friendships just felt like

(33:50):
they kind of were falling apart.
I think this is something that you know about me.
This is something actually a lot of people know about me.
It's one of the things I'm most vocal about
is that I really dislike gossip.
Yes.
And it stems from many of those experiences
that I had during that time.
Your whole face changes
when the conversation becomes gossipy.
Yeah.

(34:10):
It makes me sick to my stomach.
And you don't always say something or do anything.
It feels so horrible to me
because I was on the other end of it.
And the people who I thought were my friends,
like really my friends,
like friends that I had had for six or seven years
that were like deep friendships.
It was just gone in an instant

(34:32):
because I realized that those people
were actually just part of the,
it's like they're part of this some other machine
of social status of,
I have this salacious piece of information about somebody
and this is how we're gonna bond over it.
It wasn't a real friendship.
It was just like a.
It's like they're using someone else's misfortune

(34:54):
for status points.
Yeah.
It's like a game.
It turned it into a game rather than human connection.
The one person who I called for help
getting to the clinic in Springfield,
I would have considered my closest friend at that time.
And just to realize that
it was actually just part of the clique.
So mostly I just wanted to get out of there

(35:16):
at that point in time.
Did you then go to college as soon as you graduated?
I mean, I was home for that summer,
but essentially as soon as I graduated from high school,
I stopped talking to most of the people
that I had known my entire life.
It's a small enough town that you go to the school
with the same people your whole life, right?

(35:36):
Yes.
And I just shut it off
and I literally don't talk to any of them anymore
except Kimmy.
What triggered that?
What made you feel that way?
Well, I think it's a couple of things.
One, I felt really heartbroken
that the friendships that I thought that I had
were still part of the game of gossip at school.

(35:58):
I was in a deep depression
until probably late into my first year of college.
And when I am in that place, I'm very withdrawn,
very avoidant.
Not a lot of things emotionally register for me
as important to other people.
Yes.
So I was just that and I was away from home.
I didn't really know anybody.
And so I could just kind of sink

(36:19):
into my own little dark hole.
I didn't have to keep in contact with anybody.
So I didn't.
Where'd you go?
I went to Ashland, Southern Oregon.
I love that town.
Yeah, it's fantastic.
It was a new place.
And that's what I needed.
How long did you live there for?
All of college, four years.
What were you studying?
Well, that's kind of an interesting thing.
So I was a good student, but an average student.

(36:41):
I didn't really apply myself to get like great grades.
I just liked it enough to like live a B plus life.
Why not?
You don't need to go for an A, you know?
But at the same time, because I never really
learned to apply myself, when I got to college,
I was just like, that major looks too hard.
That major looks like more work than I want to do.

(37:04):
So I just kind of like landed in this communications major
where I was like, I can like average my way
through this major.
Which is good, because I really liked to write.
I used to do a lot of creative writing
when I was in high school.
I read a lot of poetry, did a lot of writing.
But I didn't want to write long things.

(37:25):
So journalism allows you to write short things.
Like you were a haiku journalist?
And actually, no, I mostly focused on sports.
In journalism, you have to do a lot of other things.
But like I was the sports editor
of our college paper and stuff.
Can you like tell me one of your haikus right now?
I didn't write haikus.
Oh, okay.

(37:45):
You know a haiku?
Isn't a haiku, you have to have like a certain meter
and a certain number of syllables in each line
and they're all different.
It's like three, seven, five or something stupid.
Yes, and that's about the extent that I know about it.
Minus the three, seven, five.
I have no idea.
Number, number, number.
It's one if I'm gonna try to think of a haiku
and my brain is just gonna go limerick.
Are those are the ones that are like

(38:06):
the Irish drinking songs?
There once was a something from something.
Yeah.
And it's always has like a pun in it.
Yeah, that was my fun.
Yeah, so I went to school there.
My second year of school is when I went, met, met.
So he's going to school there too.
Mm-hmm.
What was his major?

(38:26):
What was he going to school for?
He got his degree in geography and then.
Oh, and then you just have to have,
so you have a degree in geography,
you can use it for education.
Then you get a master's in education.
Oh, gotcha, okay.
So how long did that phase last for the college?
Well, I think that that's really like two phases.
So like the first year of college was still part of that,
like that darkness cutting myself off from everything phase.

(38:53):
I remember the moment when I came out of that dark tunnel,
I could feel myself like re-emerging from under the water,
which are not being able to breathe for a long time
and just kind of coming back into the world
and re-engaging with people and not feeling like

(39:14):
everything was full of despair.
What do you attribute that to?
Nothing.
You weren't like getting therapy.
No, I didn't do anything to help myself.
I just remember the feeling of it.
I can still feel it.
You know, the exact place I was standing,
what I was looking at, way the sun felt.
When it started to shift?

(39:35):
Yep.
Can you describe that?
Like that same feeling that happens
when the first warm sun hits you in the spring
and you can feel it through your clothes,
feel it on your skin.
It felt just like that.
Do you remember what else was happening
in your life at that time?
No, everything from that time is just dark,

(39:55):
really, really dark.
And then you just have this memory disconnected
of being inside of a room
and just feeling the sunshine warm you to the bones.
And then I was like, oh, it's gonna be okay.
What do you attribute that to?
Okay. I really don't know.
I asked three times and you said, I don't know three times.
I feel like that's your actual honest answer.
Yeah, I really don't. Interesting.

(40:16):
But it was powerful enough
that I got a tattoo of it on my back.
Just the sun, the sunshine.
Thank God for serendipity, right?
Something coming out of the blue
and just warming up your day a little bit.
Well, and especially if you feel like
you've been in a dark cave for a couple of years
and then all of a sudden you go,

(40:37):
oh, it's light outside.
Incorrigible, but I just have to ask one more.
Okay.
In hindsight, what comes to mind
when you think of why that would have happened?
Sense or no sense?
I'm okay with the same answer again.
Well, I've thought about it a lot.
Okay.
And I don't know.

(40:57):
Okay.
I just- Oh my gosh, this is great.
The best thing that I can think of
is I needed to get away from home.
Oh.
And it took me that long to feel like I was away.
Oh, gotcha.
Like I needed out after all of the pain of the last year
and it took me another seven or eight months

(41:19):
to be like, to like move for my nervous system to reset.
But I don't know if that's true.
And I wasn't doing anything to help myself.
I just know that those were the circumstances
in which it happened.
But Ange, I'm not asking you for what actually is true.
I'm only ever asking for what is it that you feel?
What's the first thing that comes to your gut?
And so even if you know what's made up,

(41:41):
if it's the first thing that comes to your gut,
it's kind of what I'm asking for.
It's really hard to fake the very first thing
that comes to your awareness.
Yeah.
And so- It is.
Well, that's always what I'm looking for.
Toward the end of college,
I was just like checking all the boxes to get done.
You know, like I wasn't inspired to do it anymore.

(42:02):
By the time I was done getting my degree,
I didn't even want to be a journalist anymore.
So then what?
Matt and I moved to Bend,
and I got a job at the local newspaper there,
working in the advertising department.
And then Matt and I got married
a year after we graduated from college.
Wait, you got married after you moved to Bend?
Mm-hmm.

(42:22):
We were living in Bend when we got married.
How did that feel for you?
I mean, because your previous experience in Bend,
you had to be gone for a year
before you started to breathe, it sounds like.
Yeah.
So how did it feel going back?
It still feels similar to me
as it did when I moved back there after college,
where I kind of, every time I went out in public,
I dreaded seeing somebody that I know.

(42:43):
Do you think that came from the stigma
that you felt around your abortion?
That was a big traumatic thing.
It was a huge traumatic thing for me.
And actually, I remember when I was gonna tell Matt
about it, because you know,
like you're just learning about each other,
and you're just trying to tell each other
your stories and things.
And I was so afraid to tell him.
I was crying for hours beforehand.

(43:07):
And then I finally told him, and he's like,
he was so gentle and sweet about it.
And I just kind of thought that was gonna be,
it was gonna be the end when I told him.
But it wasn't.
In talking about it over the last few years
with different people, they're like,
oh, I had an abortion too.
And it's just like almost this thing

(43:28):
that you don't really talk about it
until you know it's safe to talk about it.
And maybe that stigma is less so
with different generations, I don't know.
But it was definitely very heavily stigmatized
in my generation.
How does it feel now?
Like, is it still scary?
Does it still feel convoluted or twisty?
Or do you feel pretty open about it?

(43:49):
Like pretty healed?
I think the circumstances around that
have shaped me socially since then.
Like you said, I'm a pretty closed person.
Until then, I would not have considered myself
a closed person.
It taught me that there are things
that you could tell somebody, and even if they know you,

(44:12):
it will change the way that they think about you forever.
How much of that do you think is your story
about something that felt scary because it was exposure?
Sure.
And how much of it is do you think actually
that their stories were as negative about you
as you were afraid they were?
I don't know that I had actually specific people
that had negative stories specifically about me,

(44:35):
but it is such a heavy topic.
And when you hear people talk about people
who have had an abortion electively,
and they weren't raped,
there wasn't extenuating circumstances.
I was just a 17-year-old kid
who didn't wanna have a baby.
And then there's all this rhetoric around it

(44:56):
that's like, you made the choice to open your legs.
You should have a baby.
You're killing a baby.
I know.
There's also the emotional weight of knowing
that I killed a baby every April,
which is when I would have been due to have a baby.
It's a marker for me.
Exactly when it's gonna happen.
Like it still emotionally sits in my body.

(45:19):
And the conversation around abortion is rife with judgment.
In all directions.
In all directions.
Yes.
And so it's just something that I don't talk about.
How does it feel inside you?
Like now forget about everybody else around you.
How does the judgment feel?
Or what is the feeling inside yourself?

(45:42):
Well, the first thing that comes up
is I think that that's maybe a pretty large piece
of the embarrassment wound that I have.
And especially since I walked into my entire high school
feeling like...
Like you felt everyone was laughing behind their hand.

(46:03):
Before walking in there, I felt solid.
And within minutes, it was like getting hit by a waterfall,
overwhelming shock.
Like everybody was looking.
Everybody.
And I left.
And you still carry that shame wound.
Oh yeah.

(46:23):
So there is still a part of yourself that is ashamed.
I mean like objectively,
if you look back at a 17 year old kid having a baby,
I believe that it was the right choice for me.
And there is so much shame around the choice itself.
Yes.
I don't know how to tease those two apart.
So can you still feel ashamed about a good choice you made?

(46:46):
I guess so.
I do.
The challenge of being human.
Yeah.
So when we moved back to Bend after college,
Matt, he got his license for being a financial advisor
and he was working on a financial advisor firm
and he got a job up in Seattle.
So we moved up there.
Were you excited at the move?
I was kind of excited to like just build something

(47:08):
that looked different than everything else.
And everything that I had known before,
small town, small town.
Matt had a great opportunity in a career
that he was excited about.
Sounds like it kind of felt like a fresh start.
Yeah, it felt really good.
And like there's so much to do in Seattle.
And there's nothing to do in Bend at that when I was a kid.

(47:29):
And there's nothing to do in Ashland really.
I mean, you can go to some plays and stuff,
but it's not like, there's not like big music venues
or like events or.
So I was excited to move to Seattle.
And then about nine months after we moved,
Matt and I moved to Seattle,
my parents sold their house in Bend and moved to Seattle.

(47:53):
My mom had finished her schooling in her drafting program.
She was a computer drafter
and she worked for a small avionics company in Bend.
And then my dad wanted to go to boat building school.
It was kind of like one of his wondrous dreams.
And one of the things that we were doing,

(48:14):
Matt and I had just been renting a shitty apartment.
We were sandwiched between highway 99 and Lake Union.
It felt very claustrophobic.
So when my parents decided to move up,
Matt and I did the house hunting with them
and we picked a place that we would also be able to live
with my parents.
This was right, just right around Thanksgiving time by then.

(48:36):
And Matt and I had loaded up our U-Haul with all of our stuff
and driven across the city
and arrived at my parents' house with all of our shit.
And my mom said,
your dad told me he didn't wanna be married anymore.
So I'm moving out.

(48:57):
So when Matt and I moved in is when my mom moved out.
That's like really a lot to process.
Yeah, I mean, it's really one of those bomb moments
where I'm standing in the driveway with my stuff
in a U-Haul about to move in with my mom and dad
after all this planning.
And it's the disillusion of my parents' marriage.

(49:20):
The whole world shifts.
Everything.
You never suspected.
I didn't ever feel like my parents' marriage
was super connected and connective,
but I also didn't know really anything different.
And so I figured it worked for them for the most part.
But then I also kind of wasn't surprised.
You weren't surprised, but it felt like a blow.
It was a huge blow.

(49:41):
My nuclear family just moved from my hometown from Bend
and then fell apart.
Now my parents were gonna be living in two separate places
and houses that I had never had any connection to at all.
And so it just felt like the nucleus
of that time period of my life up until that moment

(50:03):
had just disintegrated.
I had no home anymore.
And for the first time in your life,
you jumped and your landing point
dissolved before you landed.
Yeah.
And so my dad was in a deep depression
and it was really difficult.
I was really angry with him.
He basically didn't talk for months, just silence.

(50:27):
And I took that really personally
and it was really painful
and it didn't take very long for Matt
to decide that we couldn't stay there.
Yeah.
We had to go.
Also during this time, Matt's job kind of fell apart.
His anxiety about it was through the roof.
He was really stressed.
That living in the city was not at all

(50:48):
what we thought it was gonna be.
It was just like, yeah, there's stuff to do,
but how often do you do that stuff
when you're just working and paying rent?
You're not making enough money to go do all of those things
that are really cool to do,
to go to the cool restaurants and go to all the concerts
and the museums and all that stuff
costs too much money for us to afford living in the city
on 22 year old people working people's income.

(51:13):
So it was just like a lot of stuff in the city
that we didn't end up doing.
And what we were doing though was navigating space
with millions of people, tons of traffic.
And it's gray.
And I was moving from a place like Bend,
which is like sunny 300 days of the year.
And I had grown up, it was chaos.

(51:34):
And I had grown up in a place that was full of nature
and Ashland was full of nature.
And now I was in this place that if I wanted to go
for a hike, I had to drive for an hour and a half.
And when you got there, the parking lot's full anyway.
And so when Matt and I decided
that we were just gonna leave Seattle
with all of those things kind of culminating

(51:54):
all together in a very short period of time,
we only lived in Seattle for a year and a half.
So all of that happened very, very short amount of time.
And we just decided to move here.
Decided to move to Corrales.
Fantastic choice.
Most beautiful place in the world.
Yeah, Matt grew up here.
So his family was here.

(52:17):
So it was a sensible like let's regroup.
Every decision we made when we were very young
was quite sensible, which is interesting.
Always very sensible.
Very logical, very sensible, which is interesting
because I started this conversation saying
I always had these like whimsical dreams and that was true.
And then I forgot and I started making a lot

(52:39):
of really logical and sensible decisions.
And then when I saw those little memes or whatever
and I was like, oh yeah, remember?
I mean, you've talked about a couple
of different traumas that have happened.
Sure.
And I'm wondering if those traumas made you feel
like you had to plan your life to avoid all
of these obstacles that are gonna make you feel ashamed

(53:02):
in front of the whole school or like your landing pad
just dissolved when you're coming in for a landing.
Like mitigate.
And so it's time to start planning every little detail.
Does that feel true?
That feels very true.
Yeah. Interesting.
How can I create the air bubble around myself?
So do you feel like, do you feel like, I mean,
probably it was building for a while,
but do you feel like your move to Corvallis

(53:23):
was really where you started?
Like where everything became more structured or planned?
Very much, yeah.
So when we moved here right around 2003.
That's like when I moved to Montana.
Oh, that gives it a frame of reference for me.
Yeah.
We had been married for a couple of years
and we bought a house, a little house on Kings.

(53:46):
And I thought, gosh, we're 25 already buying a house.
Already can afford that.
You know?
That felt good.
Oh yeah.
I felt like we were making good decisions
to build the life you're supposed to build.
Get the job, own the house, have a retirement.

(54:08):
Now positive reinforcement on the planning.
Yeah, exactly.
And there are still so many pieces of that
that I carry with me.
There are so many pieces of that that I carry forward now.
Like the planning sometimes mitigates my anxiety
and sometimes it does really help avoid disaster,
but sometimes the over planning is exhausting.

(54:32):
Also, yes.
And it still doesn't mitigate anything.
And so I haven't, I'm still trying to figure out
when to plan and when to not plan it.
Anyway, that's not linear.
A very interesting journey.
It is a very interesting journey.
I'm enjoying watching that process.
Yeah, so we bought a house and we fixed it up.
Super cute.
Then kind of, I had never really wanted to have kids.

(54:54):
And then all of a sudden I just like got punched
in the chest.
It was like, it's time for you to have a kid.
Cause you felt safe.
I think so.
Biology.
Oh my gosh, that's hilarious.
And like, I've always had like a young looking face,
but I was like 27 when I first got pregnant.
And I think people thought I was a teenager.

(55:15):
Oh my goodness.
And so it kind of reopened those wounds for me
where I would be walking around town
and people would be giving me like weird looks, right?
And I'm like, I'm 27 and I'm married and I have my own house.
I'm like, I deserve to be here.
And did I mention I have my own house?
And I plan this, you know, like, of course.

(55:40):
Yeah. And so then, then.
But we're going to imagine that people are thinking
whatever we imagine.
Of course, because that's my wound, right?
My wound is that people are judging me.
And some of them are.
And some of them are definitely not.
Right.
Yeah. Yeah.
So interesting.
Yeah. And I did all of the things
that a first time anxious Angela parent would do,
you know, stop drinking before you start trying

(56:01):
to have a baby, you know, not drinking coffee
and eating all the right things and doing all the things.
And that's how you wanted to do it.
It totally.
Are you glad you did it that way?
I think it would have been fine either way,
but if it where my mindset was at the time.
Perfect.
So we lived here and Matt's family lived here.

(56:23):
His parents lived here.
His brother lived here who he's very close with.
And so we had a lot of family around.
Then I got pregnant with Mia and had Mia
and Matt had decided to get that this point
while I was pregnant, he had decided to go back
and get his master's in teaching.

(56:45):
His mom was a teacher.
So it was like a familiar pathway, I think.
And I had a job, I worked for the city.
Was the job in journalism?
No.
Oh, okay.
Ironically not, it was a budget job.
I was a budget analyst.
So I started out when we lived in Washington,

(57:05):
I taught preschool.
And then when I moved here,
I worked in the playground programs for like the young kids,
like four and five year olds,
because they used to teach preschool.
And then they needed help at the front desk.
And I was like, I can do that.
And then I became that person.
And then the payroll person left and I was like,
well, I can try to do that.
And I started doing the payroll.
And then the budget analyst quit.

(57:29):
And they were like, do you think you could try your hand
at this?
And I was like, sure.
And I did a good enough job that I was just like getting
more and more responsibility.
Your brain is so good with numbers.
It is.
It is.
Like taking a bath, you're like, oh, numbers.
This makes sense.
Yeah.
So because I had a pretty good job and had like insurance

(57:52):
and all of that stuff,
Matt was just getting out of school
and didn't yet have a job.
He stayed home with Mia for the first year.
And that was kind of an interesting process.
Cause I was like, I wasn't physically breastfeeding,
but I was pumping milk at work.
And then he was at home with her and being a stay at home
dad and a stay at home mom are two very different cultures.

(58:15):
Yes.
So he would go to the park where there were other parents
or really mothers with their kids that are the same age
as Mia and nobody would talk to him.
And you would go to the library to story time
and nobody would talk to him.
He was very lonely.
It was a very lonely year for him.
He had no social interaction.

(58:36):
We do have weird concepts still like based on gender
about who gets to do what.
And doesn't always work the same for everybody.
No.
Whether or not you are suited to taking care of children
and nurturing and stuff has nothing to do with

(58:57):
whether you're a man or a woman.
It has to do with how you see life.
And he was, he's a really good caretaker for her.
Like he, he's very nurturing.
Yes.
But it was very socially isolating for him.
It's really difficult.
And then he got offered a job,

(59:19):
the place where he had been a student teacher.
And so we made the decision that we would kind of
switch places.
He would start teaching and I would quit my job.
How did you feel?
How did you feel at the thought of making that shift?
Were you super into it or was it like, ah?
I think both, but for different reasons.
I was super into it because I was excited for Matt.

(59:40):
Like to facilitate that space for him to-
Make a shift.
Make a shift and get the job that felt like
a really good fit for him.
But given his experience as a stay at home parent,
how lonely it was, I was, felt nervous about that.
That makes sense.
And Mia was not an easy young kid.

(01:00:01):
She was headstrong, which knowing who Mia is now
at age 19, it's like just her as a baby.
Of course that's what she was going to be.
But I didn't know anybody with kids.
Like I was the first person in my family to have a baby.
I didn't really have any friends with babies.
And so I didn't know, I thought I was doing it wrong.

(01:00:23):
I guess is the best way to put it.
Like maybe you're not maternal.
Maybe you don't know how to be a mom
because you have this baby that's mad at the world
because she can't move yet.
She's like stuck on the thing and all she wants to do
is crawl cause she's got all this pent up energy, you know?
Just all these little things.
You just get her so frustrated.

(01:00:44):
Mia is unique.
Yes.
There is no one else like Mia.
Yes.
And she's always been very in her own skin very much.
Like this is who I am.
You're not going to convince me otherwise.
And as a first time mother who didn't know
what they were doing, I was like,
I don't even know how to categorize it,

(01:01:05):
but it was really hard.
And so I was nervous about that.
Just being like 24 seven,
the person that has to figure out what to do
every 15 minutes because she would get really bored.
You just had to sit it out and wait until she was old enough
to entertain herself and then poof.
Totally.
And that's what happened.
Like magic.

(01:01:25):
That's exactly what happened.
So then I started staying home
and the first few months were really hard.
But then when she was about a year and a half,
I started just kind of going and doing
as many things as possible, mostly for my own sanity.
Like, yes, I could couch it as enrichment for her,
but it was mostly like I needed to talk to people.

(01:01:45):
I needed to get out of the house and talk to other adults.
And the first person that I met was at swim lessons
who had a daughter the same age as Mia
and her daughter was extremely well suited for the water,
very much a fish and was just like so happy

(01:02:06):
to be at swim lessons.
And Mia was so not happy to be at swim lessons.
But we would go in the locker room
and Mia would be like talking in full sentences
and like fully verbal.
And so she was just like, why doesn't my kid talk like that?
And I was like, why does my kid hate swimming lessons?

(01:02:26):
Like we would, so we just kind of bonded in this,
how each, especially at that age
and for those first few years,
each kid like kind of grows in different ways
and different levels.
You know, it's like.
So true.
Yeah.
So she and I would see each other
a couple of times a week at swim lessons.
And then she told me about story time at the library.

(01:02:46):
So I started doing that.
And Matt and I decided to sell the house on King's
cause Mia was walking.
We didn't want her to walk out on the busy road.
Essentially it was kind of a fear choice.
Yep.
And so we were like. That makes sense.
Yeah.
King's is a busy road.
And so instead of trying to sell a house

(01:03:07):
and then buy a house at the same time,
we decided just to sell this place
and rent for a little while
and then find a different house.
And we were living in this apartment out at Grand Oaks.
Those ones that are all stacked on top of each other.
All in the big oak tree. So dark.
So dark.
Yep.
There was water coming in the walls.
Nice.

(01:03:28):
It was like, it was just chaos.
But I looked out the window one day
and there was Karen and Ava.
And they had literally just moved from Canada
and knew nobody.
And Ava and Mia were the same age.
And they basically saw each other
and went like, kid my own age.

(01:03:48):
And so Karen's like, I don't know anything.
I don't know anyone here.
And so I just basically gave her my schedule.
Here's when we go to swim lessons.
This is the day we go to the library.
This is like this other person that I know, Sunny and Grace.
We just come hang out.
And that's what we basically created, Playgroup.
So I had this like social circle of women

(01:04:15):
with kids their own age that got along really well.
And it was like the first time since high school
that I was bonding with girls that didn't feel catty.
Wow.
It was the first truly good feeling women friendship
that I had had in a really long time.

(01:04:38):
And it was super awesome
because all of those kids are so different.
All of us moms are really different.
And so we got to be like, well, I tried this
and I tried this and I tried this.
And what do you think about that?
And we talk about our marriages
and we talk about raising children and all of that.
And then we just start collecting more and more friends

(01:04:59):
and then Afton, I met at the library at story time.
She thought Mia's outfit was really awesome
because Mia used to dress herself really, really crazy.
She'd like, what color am I missing?
Ah, I need orange leggings today.
And then Afton's like, I like her style.
And so we just kind of started collecting all these moms.
And that's where I met Bonnie.

(01:05:20):
She came with Sunny one time while you were in Iraq.
Does this feel like the start of a new phase for you?
Or does this feel like just kind of a transition
within a phase?
I think this starting to stay home was a definitely
a new phase.
When I say, when I-
It was when you started saying home.
When I decided to just be a stay at home mom,
that whole time period from the time when Mia was one
and I was staying home all the way until Logie

(01:05:42):
was in kindergarten is really kind of one chunk.
Yeah, so mom, that whole time we called it play group
and we would go to story time at the library.
And then after that, we would go to like Noah's Bagels
and have a bagel or whatever.
And then we just started having too many people,

(01:06:06):
too many moms and everybody had multiple children
by this point in time.
And like we couldn't even be sitting into Noah's Bagels.
It was like a small little coffee shop style size thing,
like a Starbucks size.
With a child army.
With a child army.
I mean, they liked that we bought 800 bagels,
but there was nowhere else for anybody to be.

(01:06:28):
So instead of doing the, in doing that,
we decided to like have play group
at people's houses every week.
So we just kind of trade off
or meet at a park in the summertime.
And that was a really cool experience
to be surrounded by a lot of people who were kind

(01:06:49):
and generous with their time and their energy.
And we all parented each other's children,
but just also really supportive of,
Karen and I used to say we grew up as parents together.
Like we kind of taught each other
and learned from each other and shared ideas,
but there wasn't a crap ton of judgment
about the way that you do it or the way that I do it.

(01:07:13):
Did you meet every week?
Every week for years.
I mean, then people would come up to us and be like,
are you guys a preschool?
And we're just like, no, we're just like a bunch of moms.
And they're like, can I come too?
We're like, yes.
Wow. Yeah.
And I met a lot of people, even like people we still know
or were a part of that group,
or even a lot of our kind of extended community now

(01:07:36):
has roots in that play group.
Then how long did that phase,
that idyllic play group, frustrating as hell time?
When Mia was two, I decided,
I kind of like started to question this idea
of having only one, especially since my sisters
were kind of the only solid thing

(01:07:56):
I felt like I had left from my childhood.
And there's just like this already built in history
that felt safe for whatever was happening in life.
So then I was like, well, I think I should have another baby
so that Mia can have a sibling, essentially.

(01:08:18):
And so when she was two, I got pregnant with Logan.
Another plan, plan baby.
What's the right spacing for having children?
Oh, this is about perfect.
Ready, go.
Have a baby.
The books generally agree.
Exactly.
Do some research.
And again, it feels like approaching it that way fit you.

(01:08:40):
Absolutely. Yes.
Okay. Yeah.
So no ragrats.
Nope. And even more so,
like I was super sick with my pregnancy with Mia.
I did not feel very maternal after she was born.
I had a lot of questioning of my own parenting
after she was born.
I struggled a lot emotionally.
Did it take you a while to connect with her?

(01:09:00):
It took me a long time to connect with her.
But part of that too,
is I think I had some postpartum depression in there too.
Breastfeeding was really hard.
Were you able to look into the research,
to learn about it, to talk about it?
And no.
And the thing is,
I didn't even know that it was something
that I needed to talk about.
I just thought that's what parenting was.
And so I would go to my appointments with my OB

(01:09:22):
or with the pediatrician
and they'd ask me how I was doing.
And I'd be like, you know, this is parenting.
And so I didn't even know that I could say,
hey, this part feels really hard.
Is that normal?
And I didn't know anybody else that had babies.
So I didn't even know what else it could look like.
And you learned all that through?

(01:09:42):
Play group.
And then, so then when I got pregnant with Logan,
my pregnancy was different.
It was very, it felt like a very warm, cozy, comfortable.
I never got sick.
I felt connected to her,
even like through the whole pregnancy,
I felt really good physically.

(01:10:03):
So all of it was really, really different.
So my initial desire to have another baby
so that Mia could have a sibling,
turned into this just beautiful experience for me
as getting to be a different parent too.
Like to experience it in a really different way.
And that changed the way that I parented Mia also.

(01:10:26):
Like, oh, I can just approach the whole thing this way.
I don't have to fight everything?
No, and it was so, it was like,
it was a huge turning point in my parenting in general,
just having Logan.
Wait, do we teach our children or do they teach us?
Both, gosh, more so they teach us, I think.
No kidding.
I mean, we teach them to brush their teeth or whatever,

(01:10:47):
but they teach us to.
We teach them how to make complete asses out of ourselves
and then figure it out and do better.
Yeah.
They're welcome.
They're welcome.
But that also, so when I had Logan, I turned 30.
And I remember when she was about three or four months old,
just waking up one day and going,

(01:11:08):
what the fuck are you doing?
And just like realizing how much of myself I had set away
and forgotten about to build this very reasonable,
responsible life that I really didn't connect to very much.
And that started the whole unraveling of everything.

(01:11:31):
Your entire life.
Everything.
That's when everything changed.
That's when everything changed.
Because you looked around you and you said,
what am I doing?
Yeah.
Emotionally, I had made myself very small.
My true recollection of it is that it hit me again,
kind of like a gut punch.
I don't recall having really deep questioning of myself

(01:12:00):
until the moment when the question hit me.
You're making yourself really small.
You only get to do this once.
You get one life.
What are you doing?
Are you doing what you actually want to be doing?
Exactly.
And when you asked yourself that question, the answer was?
Nope, not doing what I want.
There's so many things that I want to do
and I'm not facilitating any of those things.

(01:12:23):
I feel also like I had walked,
like just turned around and walked the other way
from everything that I had wanted that at that point,
I was so knee deep in parenting toddler baby
that I didn't actually know what I wanted anymore.
I just knew that I didn't want to do that.
I mean, not that I didn't want to be a parent,
I just knew that the life that I was building

(01:12:43):
wasn't actually what I wanted long-term.
Which really is just a realization that comes out
of the awareness that you don't know what you want.
Yeah, and that kind of started a lot of questions in my head.
It filtered down to like the smallest things,
like what do you want for dinner?
I had no idea.
What does so and so want?
Or what is the- Anything's fine.

(01:13:04):
And I can make do with anything.
I would be happy having anything.
And it felt true for me,
but that it started to bother me
that I didn't have an opinion.
About anything. About much of anything anymore.
And one of the first things that I talked with Karen
about after this, thanks Karen for letting me talk about you,
was when I was in high school, I really loved to dance.

(01:13:29):
And so I was like, I gotta figure out
how I can do that again.
And she was like, how do you do that?
And I just told her, I was like,
I just really want to figure out how to dance.
And she was like, great.
And that was like the first thing I identified.
And then I started like making myself
have an opinion about something.
So somebody said, what do you want to do
for Thanksgiving this year?
I would just say whatever.

(01:13:50):
Even if I didn't hold strongly to actually feeling that way,
I just wanted to have an opinion.
Let me try this on.
Yeah. What do you want for dinner?
Tacos?
I probably still didn't care,
but I wanted to have an opinion
and just see if that was fit me.
Yeah.
Just trying on everything to see who am I.

(01:14:11):
Yeah. Yeah.
That makes sense to me.
I bet it does.
I don't even know when I met you.
Let's see.
Well, when Bonnie showed up, I was like you said,
I don't even know if I was, I don't know that I was in Iraq.
I think it was before I went.
Ike and Logan, no, you were definitely in Iraq.
I was, okay.
Ike and Logan are the same age.

(01:14:33):
So I met you after that kind of what feels
like a really watershed moment in my life
where I was like, you don't get a do-over,
and what do you actually want to do now?
And so I met Bonnie when I was pregnant with Logan,
and she was pregnant.

(01:14:53):
No, Ike was already born.
Okay.
So you met Bonnie right around when I left.
Yeah. Yeah.
Okay.
And so- That would have been 2009.
Right.
Yeah.
So she and I were just like in that play group together.
We would get together once a week.
And also I was really enjoying being home with the kids.
Like I was part of a co-op preschool with Mia.

(01:15:16):
So I would take her to preschool
and work in the classroom sometimes,
making friends with new moms and new kids.
And my life felt very socially full.
And like I felt like I had good scaffolding
around me for me asking those questions about myself.
But I also had this very intense feeling
that I didn't fit in the life that I had created for myself.

(01:15:38):
Like fully, I had walked into it with-
You created it.
With my choice.
Yes.
Like I'm not the victim of anything.
I chose it.
And then I realized it didn't fit me anymore.
So during that time, I would say then
I was feeling trapped, feeling stuck.
It sounds like you guys were on a similar path.

(01:16:00):
I think we were, though we didn't really communicate
about it very well with each other.
Maybe we thought if we didn't talk about it,
it would go away, that feeling.
Oh, that's a hard feeling not to give into too.
Yeah.
And once you practice it,
it becomes easier to not talk about it.
Yes, true.
And then I don't wanna dig up all the details
of all of the choices and how we intertwined,

(01:16:23):
but at some point in time, we, all four of us
decided to be in a kind of, what do we call it?
Polyfidelity.
Polyfidelitous relationship, yeah.
Where it was just, we were in a relationship together,
but it was not like this open swing.
But about the digging into the details,

(01:16:45):
you can't dig into the actual details
because the only thing you know is your perspective of it.
Sure.
So none of it's gonna be accurate or not accurate.
It's just your perspective.
And so, and I mean, for me, even at that point in my life,
my memories are still so patchy.
I couldn't string it together cohesively if I wanted to.

(01:17:06):
No.
And what I do put together, I know it's just my version
that could be pretty close to what happened,
or it could be wildly different than what happened.
I have no idea because, but it's what I remember.
So it's all just how it felt.
And how did it feel?
How did that time feel?
So we'll talk about a huge transition,
transitioning from nuclear, Judeo-Christian,
Western culture, and not that you guys were Christian,

(01:17:29):
but just kind of that Western.
No, but still very, very siloed Western culture.
Strong sense of- Nuclear family.
Right, and wrong, and morality,
and this is what you do the work.
And that's a huge shift.
It was a huge shift.
It was really exciting.
And it felt life-giving individually for me,

(01:17:52):
and it was really, really hard.
I think the overwhelming feeling from that time
is it was really, really hard.
For people who have stacks of emotional trauma
from childhood and on,
who are all individually feeling like,
what am I doing in their own way?

(01:18:15):
All coming together and then trying to form
some sort of a different, interconnected relational bond
that we didn't have a model for,
and we're all broken anyway.
I mean, what a recipe for chaos.
Yeah, and I remember we would sit on the bed,
all four of us, and we'd talk about how we wish

(01:18:37):
there was a place where we could go and ask questions
about how other people did this, and how does this work?
And what do we need to know?
How do you structure this that's okay?
I mean, we had kids in a small community and we're-
In Philomath.
And family nearby that we were terrified.
And we were so hidden.
It was so scary.

(01:18:57):
I mean, how many conversations do we have
where we were like, please,
if we could just find somebody to talk to?
I think I told you recently,
once a few of our friends kind of asked questions,
like, what's going on?
You guys spend a lot of time together, blah, blah, blah.
We kind of became the poster children for polyamory

(01:19:18):
in our friend group.
I didn't know that until much later.
I knew it.
And it felt so uncomfortable
because I felt like we were failing all the time.
And in a spotlight being judged,
talk about the shame wound.
Oh my goodness, that would have been so hard for you.
Well, yeah, and internally it was like,
this is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.

(01:19:41):
And I feel like we're not doing it right.
And I wish we had somebody to talk to.
And then all these people are like, look at you guys.
That's so cool.
Hey, can we ask you questions?
And it's just like, you don't wanna know
what my experience is.
My experience is not the experience you want.
It's not easy.
Oh, I've always liked it when people were curious.

(01:20:02):
Well, I like when people are curious,
but I didn't like that people thought it was,
you know, like how hard is a marriage?
And multiply that by two more whole relationships.
But it's like times two, times two, times two, times two.
Exactly, it's exponentially more difficult
than one marriage.

(01:20:24):
If you're trying to do it with a set of standards
and regulations, a set of expectations.
Which we all had.
None of us knew any differences.
Sure, yeah.
And so that's what we were doing.
And so we were like, we would have like,
my relationship with you, my friendship with Bonnie,
my marriage to Matt, all of us together,

(01:20:45):
the interplay of each triangle, like is so hard.
And each of our personalities was so wildly different.
So wildly different.
And we all gave it everything we had.
Every one of us left everything on the table,
just being like, I'm gonna try this
and just see what happens.
Yeah, I feel like that's very true.
And we were in that model for what, like eight years?

(01:21:09):
At least.
Some of the most beautiful memories that I had
are from that time.
And some of the most painful moments were from that time.
So it was like, it was all of it, all at once.
Then it became increasingly clearer
as you sunk deeper and deeper into your dying times.

(01:21:33):
I mean, you and I had a lot of conversation about it.
And I knew that the very best thing for you,
your own health, your own personal health
was that we had to stop being in relationship.
And half the time I could be supportive of that
for your benefit only.

(01:21:53):
And the other half of the time I was so angry
and so heartbroken to have to be the one to say,
yes, please break up with me.
I know that's what you need.
And knowing that I was gonna break my own heart
by saying those words.
And so my pendulum emotional swings
during that time were really wild.
Like there were times when I would walk you through

(01:22:15):
an anxiety attack and then turn around
and be so mad at you and get so angry.
So what I hear you saying is that
you're talking about going through a time
where it was becoming more and more clear
that our relationship needed to end.
And you felt torn between not wanting it to end
and wanting altruistically to provide that end.

(01:22:38):
No, knowing it was absolutely the only thing
that was going to work.
So it's like you knew it was inevitable.
I knew it was inevitable.
And I was fighting the inevitability the whole time.
Like both were true.
Did it feel a little bit like what they talk about,
the stages of grief?
Totally.
Okay. Yeah.
Because there were times when I had complete acceptance.

(01:22:58):
And I would even tell you, I'd be like,
of course that's what you have to do.
Of course, of course.
And you're the only one strong enough to do it.
You're going to have to be the one to do it.
And then there were other times where I would be,
you know, the despair or the anger.
I remember a lot of shouting matches just in all directions.

(01:23:18):
Yeah. And I remember those too.
And I also remember just laying in bed next to you
with you curled in a ball, not speaking for hours.
And I would be speaking to you and explaining to you
what I saw and giving you so much support and safety
in knowing that you were going to have to make that decision.
Those times did happen.

(01:23:39):
It was such a complicated feeling inside of me.
And so then when it happened, I knew it was going to happen.
Yes. Yes.
Didn't come as a surprise to anyone.
It didn't come as a surprise.
None of this happened slow.
This was years and years and agonizing years at the end.
In the beginning, it was fantastic.
Yeah, but your dying times were what?
Like 18 months.
Yeah.
And my dying times were going to happen no matter what.

(01:24:01):
It needed to happen.
And so like to me, when I look back on these times,
I just feel overwhelmingly appreciative
of the intensely compacted emotional chaos
that just catalyzed my dying times.
That just made me face myself in a way
that it would have taken me much longer to before.

(01:24:24):
Yeah, and I think that the poly relationship did that
for all of us.
One of the first things I learned about myself
were the things that I pointed my finger outward
and were frustrated with in my relationship.
I was then repeating in another relationship simultaneously.
It really forced me to look at myself.

(01:24:47):
It's easy to point your finger outward in one relationship.
But when that starts complicating,
it starts making it so hard to lie to yourself.
Yes, and that was part of what was hard.
It was a really difficult thing.
To face your own, the things you're ashamed of,
your behaviors.
Yeah, because the common denominator is you
and you're doing it in both places.

(01:25:08):
So you can't point your finger outward anymore.
Maybe I'm not a victim.
Maybe I'm just completely codependent.
And that is excruciating.
Yes, it is.
And then to tease apart your codependency.
And I think part of my 30-year-old wake-up moment
was realizing that I had made myself small

(01:25:31):
and that I was codependent and not having any idea
how to undo any of it.
And I was a fucking bull in a china shop for a while
where I was swinging wildly the other way.
So if you're not codependent, you're fully independent.
Not interdependent, just like, don't tell me what to do.

(01:25:53):
No grace, no softness.
Like you have to pendulate into narcissism.
Yes, absolutely.
And I did.
Yes.
That's not easy to live with.
It's not.
It's not easy to live with from the inside,
from inside yourself.
No.
Because you're having to watch every day.
You're seeing this grotesque version of yourself
in front of the mirror.
Once you see it, once your eyes are opened, you just see it.

(01:26:16):
And it's like so demoralizing until you realize that it's
just yourself crying for help.
And once you stop and look at it and give yourself help,
then you're actually not the person you thought you were.
Swinging wildly in this other direction
into this person that I actually am not
and didn't want to be.
And the deep feeling of like, you

(01:26:37):
can't go back to the codependency either.
So what are you going to do?
You're going to end up alone.
Nobody can live with this.
Yeah.
And I think that decade was me coming to terms with
and accepting that I can and will probably end up alone
and being OK.

(01:26:58):
And then eventually you find out that you already
are alone even when you don't think you are.
And it's all just stories we tell ourselves.
And so then you're like, oh, actually I'm already alone
and I'm completely safe.
And look at all these people that
are here being alone with me.
Sure.
Yeah.
Once we can be alone together.
I just had to get a little abstract philosophy in there.
Thank you.
There's not enough of me.

(01:27:19):
So then we broke up.
Yes, we did.
And you and I did not speak to each other for many months.
Six or eight months probably.
Yes.
Except for on a couple of occasions
when I asked you for help with some really specific things.
Yes.
But otherwise, we did not have emotional conversation.
We didn't even really have friendly conversation.
Nope.
But we also didn't hate each other.

(01:27:41):
We were just hurting.
I was really in a lot of pain.
Oh, you kind of hated me.
I actually, I was going to say that I didn't hate you,
but I was hurt.
I was so hurt and in so much pain.
Well, I also was doing that pendulating stuff.
Hello, narcissism.
But a couple of things happened during that time period

(01:28:03):
that I think would never have happened without that break.
And so as painful as that was, I feel so grateful for the
catalyst that it became.
So listeners.
Yes.
We've not talked much about this.

(01:28:24):
We're not going to.
So it might come as a surprise.
But my marriage was not going well.
And about five months after we all broke up our poly
relationship, man, I got divorced, decided to get
divorced.
And that's like hammer blow on top of hammer blow.

(01:28:46):
How did that feel?
It's deeply sad.
But my reason for walking away from that marriage
feels very good.
I had already grieved and I was all done being angry,
wasn't mad anymore.
I just wanted something different for myself.

(01:29:09):
I wanted to be a different parent to my kids.
And I wanted him to thrive in a place that I knew he wasn't
thriving with me.
We had a really good relationship for a really long
time.
And then to be honest with yourself and realize that it's

(01:29:30):
probably not the right relationship for either person,
even if you really care about each other,
to let each other go in a really positive way is so
bittersweet.
But I tried everything that I could think of.
I didn't leave anything out.

(01:29:50):
He and I had talked about that.
We left it all.
We tried all the things.
We came up with all the ideas.
We shifted all the every little thing
that we could think of to shift aside from becoming
a completely different person, like within our own selves,
who we are, what we believe, what we want.
I think both of us tried everything.

(01:30:11):
But becoming a different person was the journey you had started.
And the only end of that journey is becoming a different person.
Yes, but I mean, becoming a specific person that
would fit into the specific person that that other person
would fit with.
Some people play that game their whole life.
Right, exactly.
And some people convince themselves
that they're happy in it.
Yeah.

(01:30:31):
I think that's true.
And some people can be happy in it.
Yes, the more I see of the world,
the more I realize that I'm the only one that experiences life
fully the way I do.
That's been such a hard concept for me
to wrap my mind around that life feels different to the person
next to me.
But starting to get that.

(01:30:52):
Yeah.
Staying in that relationship meant
a compromise for both of us that was really unfair to both of us.
Yes.
I just didn't want to do that anymore.
It felt like almost like the culmination of that question
mark when I was 30.
What are you doing?
What are you doing?
You only get to do this once.

(01:31:12):
And I left that marriage feeling like I had made
the right choice for both of us.
I was proud of myself for making the choice for myself
to be willing to do life alone, be a single parent,
start over.
Face the unknown, the fear of the unknown.

(01:31:34):
And knowing that I was creating the best case scenario from Matt
to also set the world on fire in his own way, burn bright.
That was a conscious motivation for you in the moment.
Absolutely, yes.
That's beautiful.
He and I talked about, going back to the thing
that I learned about having your parents get divorced as an adult
and breaking apart the nuclear family

(01:31:56):
without having anything that felt familiar.
I didn't want to do that.
So at this point in time, Logan was 13.
And I could have waited five years for the kids
to be grown and move out.
But I also wanted to give them an opportunity
to create something else that looked like home
while they were children.

(01:32:18):
So not only was it a conscious decision
to undo a relationship so that both of us could thrive,
it was a conscious decision when and why.
It wasn't fire.
When you get to the point where you come away to things
that you hadn't realized before and it's time for you

(01:32:39):
to become a different person, you can't stop it.
It will happen no matter what.
I definitely knew where my train was going.
And his train was going somewhere else.
And we both knew it.
And it took us a long time to admit it to ourselves
and then to each other.
And then we made the choice together.
We're going different directions.
Let's do this now while we still can have a communication

(01:33:00):
piece about it and not let the animosity
and the resentment grow.
And while our kids still feel like they have a safe, warm home.
Exactly.
Wow.
And so we went away for our anniversary weekend.
Had a pretty good time actually.
It was joyful.
But there was also this undercurrent in our conversations

(01:33:21):
that was leading us to this decision.
You hadn't talked about it specifically yet.
Overtly.
No, not overtly.
But we had been talking about the ideas of, wow,
we really don't want the same thing.
We really want different lives.
All of these ways in which you sparkle are not things

(01:33:44):
that interest me at all.
Like we were honest about that, but not what it meant.
Maybe because we didn't know what it meant.
And it's a huge paradigm shift to go from,
I will make this work no matter what,
because that's the cultural thing,
to I get to throw in the towel if I need to.
Yeah.
That's a hard, hard position to shift.

(01:34:07):
Thing to look at.
It's scary.
Especially when you still really like that person as a human.
I mean, I even had this conversation with myself
multiple times.
What's wrong with you?
Yeah.
There's nothing really wrong here.
He's a good man, good father.
He's committed to your family, dedicated to your family.

(01:34:29):
What's wrong with you?
Why aren't you happy?
I mean, almost immediately I was like,
what am I gonna tell people?
Gotta manage those expectations,
the way people see you.
And then I think maybe you told me,
you don't have to tell them anything.
And I don't.
I've heard a lot of the misconceptions out there

(01:34:50):
about me and about my choice.
Well, you are a home wrecker.
I am a home wrecker.
Well, that's different.
That's new.
Oh, that's not what you were talking about?
No.
That was the first thing my brain went to
because you like hate that.
Well, I do.
But like one-
It's also not true in my experience.
Well, I mean, sometimes I do demolition around here

(01:35:12):
in that way of a home wrecker.
And in that way, you're also actually
being a home builder because the projects you make
come out whimsical and beautiful
and well thought out and well finished.
Thank you.
But one of the people that's in our community
that I've known for a really long time,
like a long time, said to me afterwards,
well, it was an easy decision for you to leave

(01:35:33):
because you already had your relationship with Michael.
Like I was just leaving that to step into this.
And I was like, no, that wasn't the choice
I was making it all actually.
And that's not what happened.
Michael and I were not together.
I was choosing to be a single parent to work

(01:35:54):
and raise my kids by myself.
I thought that it was completely over.
I would completely let it go.
Yeah, same.
The two pieces of catalysts that happened
after we broke up was it forced Matt and I
to really look and be honest.
Because now we had just gone through eight years
of looking at ourselves in the mirror

(01:36:15):
and no longer being able to lie to ourselves
about the places in which we are creating chaos
or we are codependent or we are whatever it is
that we learn about ourselves.
But now we're bringing that into focus with each other.
And there was no, you can't turn that off
once you start to look at it.
I couldn't turn it off once I started to look at it.

(01:36:38):
So then I had to be honest in that relationship.
That hurts.
And it was painful.
Yes.
So our breaking up was a catalyst for that.
But the secondary catalyst is my own personal growth
in overcoming the pain of not being in a relationship

(01:37:00):
with you because even though for a lot of years
our relationship was really volatile.
Extremely.
There was something about you that I knew
would change everything about the way that I look at life.
Because I'm a fucking weirdo.
You are a weirdo, but it's different than that.
It's not, it's, there's just something about you.

(01:37:22):
There was something about the way that I felt about you,
the way that we connected, the way that the honesty
that we could have with each other, it was just different.
The thing about the dynamic between us maybe.
Between us, yes.
Okay, okay, that makes sense.
And when we broke up and then we were not in communication
with each other for months, I had to make a decision

(01:37:44):
to forgive you for the pain that I felt
like you inflicted on me.
And at this point we were still living
literally across the street from each other.
Yeah, and I would see Bonnie every day,
but I would not see you.
Because I was always gone.
You were always gone.
Working.
And we were no longer communicating like via text
or on phone call or whatever.
Yes.
So I had to like work through my own pain

(01:38:04):
and then make a choice to just let it go.
And then I remember going like, okay, now you have to go back
and figure out how to be friends
because I wanted you in my life,
even if we were not romantic partners anymore.
Because I've just valued your brain

(01:38:25):
the way that you think,
the honesty that we could have between each other.
Even if it meant that we couldn't be
in relationship anymore, I just wanted you
in my life so I had to go,
I had, I like made myself not avoid you.
A little bit like what we were talking about with Kay,
when she was like, you have to break the pattern

(01:38:48):
of thinking inside of yourself by choosing something else.
Remember when she was saying you have to,
instead of going to the refrigerator,
you do something different.
And so instead of just holding on to the pain that I felt,
I made myself walk across the street
when I knew you would be there
and have an interaction and then go home.
Knowing it was probably gonna be awkward and painful

(01:39:11):
and feel closed and cold.
And bring up every hurt molecule that was in my body
every time, because I wanted it to be different.
Yes.
And every part of the Michael who just freaking wanted
to do the right thing, figure it out somehow.
Which I knew about you.
I thought that was like,
that was the only thing I could see to do
was just be like, I have to,

(01:39:32):
it has to be a complete transition to the next thing.
And I'm not sure that there was another way to do it.
So I didn't make it easy for you though.
No, you didn't.
No.
But I also- Or for me.
I also just decided that that's what I wanted.
I just wanted you in my life as my friend.
And so I chose that.

(01:39:54):
Thank you.
You're welcome.
I think that I learned a deeper level of forgiveness
in those months than I have ever,
had ever had access to at any other time in my life.
Your foray into the world of forgiveness.
Yeah.

(01:40:15):
And just probably closer to that unconditional love
that most people when they talk about unconditional love,
that's not actually what they mean.
They mean you'll do what I want no matter what I do.
Well, a lot of people's love comes with conditions.
I think that sometimes when people talk about
unconditional love, it's like, I love my children

(01:40:35):
and I will always love them.
But sometimes I don't love them.
You don't accept them.
Are you saying that it's easy to confuse unconditional love
with unconditional acceptance?
What I'm saying is this,
this is what I hear people talking about with their children.
I love my kids unconditionally.
And I think what that means is you have a bond of love

(01:40:55):
with them, but you don't verb love them.
You're not loving them.
It's, you're talking about a feeling
as disconnected from an action.
Yes, the action of loving.
Oh, and they, and those two things are one in the same.
You can't do one without the other.
I think that's what I learned.
I think I learned that loving someone.

(01:41:18):
Feeling love for someone.
Yes, is not the same as like being bonded to them.
It's like an action.
You're loving them.
What?
Are you saying that when people talk about unconditional love,
oftentimes in your experience,
what they have been referring to is unconditional bonding.

(01:41:38):
I think so.
Whereas the word they're saying denotes an action.
Yeah.
Hmm.
That they may not even know exists.
Correct.
Which is unconditional.
Which is unconditional love,
which is also unconditional acceptance.
Yeah, which means that I'm going to love them,
even if it means everything else
that I thought it was going to be is not who you are.

(01:42:02):
I want to love who you are,
even if it means this whole relationship
that I cherished is over.
Okay.
Well, thanks for exploring around that a little bit.
To try to get the feeling of it.
Yeah, I think it's still a little bit muddy, but I'm.
Perfect.
That's why we like talking about it.
But I feel like I learned something more
about what it means to love someone and accept someone.

(01:42:24):
Because if I love you and I know of you
that you are trying to make the best decision
that you can given your sensibility,
your desire to do the right thing,
your drive to do the best you can for your family.

(01:42:45):
It gives you the ability to step into my worldview.
Yes.
Yeah.
That makes sense.
More than that.
So when Matt and I got divorced, I felt,
I mean, there was a time when you and Bonnie walked
into the house and I was catatonic.
I couldn't even move.
I was like, it was devastating for me.

(01:43:06):
And I had the opportunity to go,
but I do know a couple of things.
I know the kind of parent that I would like to be.
And I felt more free to be that parent.
And I knew that if I was going to be in a relationship,
I wanted it to be more honest and more open,

(01:43:29):
even if saying the thing is really, really hard.
Cause I had hidden a lot of myself away.
And might really, really hurt someone's feelings.
Might really, really hurt someone's feelings.
I knew I really wanted to give myself permission
to take up space.
Like I didn't want to be small anymore.
And that was a really uncomfortable idea for me
because I grew up being a people pleaser.

(01:43:52):
I could read a room and figure out where to fit.
I can, you talk about being a chameleon.
I feel like I could do that really, really well.
And I just didn't want to do that anymore.
Which is what you were saying before.
You wanted to know what you wanted.
I wanted to know what I wanted.
Exactly.
And when you are uncomfortable taking up space

(01:44:13):
to give yourself permission to have a voice
or permission to be loud or permission to be a mess
or permission to be opinionated.
You also are giving yourself permission to be soft
and to be kind and to be gentle.
I just wanted myself to get as big as it wanted to be.

(01:44:34):
And sometimes I was really, really messy.
Sometimes the big was big angry or big so sad
that I couldn't move.
Oh, I remember your fire girl phase.
Yeah.
Or you were coming awake to that there's a fire,
a fire monster inside you.
Yeah, that I was holding too tightly.

(01:44:55):
That you were terrified of
and you had it walled into a cell.
Yeah, and then if I didn't give it space,
it would turn into a volcano and I would explode.
And damage your life.
Damage things you love.
Yeah, it would damage things I love.
And it would take me days to get over the shame of that.
For the lava to cool.
And yeah, exactly.
And then so then to just start allowing more

(01:45:17):
and more and more space for that anger
to get as big as it wanted.
And then once it was out,
to just move to the next moment and not be like,
I'm so sorry, oh my gosh, I feel horrible.
Like I have worked on that so much
to just take the next step after it blows itself out.
And now I feel like I have the flash of it,

(01:45:38):
but it doesn't last nearly as long.
When you needed to become fire girl,
you had to create an environment
where you weren't gonna burn your world down.
That was a long learning process.
No shit.
But I got to watch you become aware of fire girl
and then slowly accepting her.

(01:45:59):
And then eventually fall in love with her.
And I feel like I've watched you fall in love with her.
And I feel like you just become the same person.
And so now she's not scary at all.
I used to be terrified of her.
She's not scary at all.
She's just cute and harmless
and has a lot of intensity and color.

(01:46:19):
I think the acceptance of that intensity
has allowed me to channel it into other things
about myself that I also really like.
And you don't take it seriously like,
oh, now I have to burn the world down.
You're just like, oh, there's fire girl.
It's no longer about fire girl story.
It's just about her herself.
I feel really strongly about this thing.

(01:46:40):
Why do, what is that?
Oh, interesting.
I feel there's an injustice here or whatever that is.
Why do I see it that way?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's been a fantastically entertaining
and transformative even for me process to watch.
Yeah.
Not even for me.
I'm freaking close to it.

(01:47:00):
It's very been very transformative for me.
Most of the time you are the indirect line
of the wrath of it.
Yes.
It has uniquely given me the space to face myself,
my scary parts in the mirror that it provides me
and realize that, oh, not only is there nothing scary in her,

(01:47:22):
but there's also nothing scary in me.
I just get to watch it and just sit and wonder
at how complex and confusing and colorful
and it just all becomes wonderful.
Okay.
I am super rambling now about this whole,
like I appreciate being able to feel my triggers,

(01:47:45):
you creating an envelope that I could feel my triggers
so that I could face them, so I could walk through them.
So I could become who I wanna be.
So I could ask myself the question, who am I?
And I could answer it with, here I am.
I'm doing this thing.
Yeah.
And you have a more enlightened viewpoint of that
than I do at this point in time.
I still get heavily triggered in some pieces

(01:48:07):
and I don't as gracefully walk through it as you.
Well, it is a competition with levels
and I'm at a much higher level than you.
Yeah. Good job.
No, I think that there is no such thing as levels
in human development.
It's just humans doing the best they can.

(01:48:27):
Like you were talking about, why am I so bad at this?
Yeah.
Well, why am I so bad at this?
Oh, we're both bad at what we're bad at
and we're just humans doing the best we can.
I think it's not healthy to compare yourself all the time,
but if you find somebody that's inspiring
and you recognize a place where you go,
oh, there's more I can do here.

(01:48:49):
There's a more peaceful place
or a more graceful place I can get to.
It is okay to use that as like a marker.
But it sounds like you're finding language from people
rather than comparison.
Yeah, maybe so.
There's language for something
that I am looking for in myself.
Yeah. Great.
This kind of goes full circle to where we started,
which is really nice way to wrap things up.
But except that right now, as far as I know,

(01:49:12):
we're sitting in this nowhere land where we're broken up.
No, we're not. Hang on.
Oops.
So in the last three and a half years, you and I broke up.
Matt and I got divorced.
And we started this conversation by saying,
I've been in massage school for the last two years

(01:49:32):
and was working.
And we moved into this house and we've merged families.
And right now I'm resting.
So in the last three years,
Three and a half chills right now.
In the half years, my whole life is different.
I'm no longer in a polyfidelis, this relationship,

(01:49:56):
not married.
I changed my career.
I moved, merged households with you and Bonnie.
And I don't know.
I think if you look at the stress marker sheet,
like I have the top five stressors.
Like if you've dealt with one of these things
in the last year, I think death is on there too.

(01:50:16):
And we had a close person to us there.
Are you talking about relationship, money?
Yeah.
No, no. What are the top stressors?
What do you mean?
I mean, like the major life events
that create the most stress.
Yeah, stress for you.
It's like divorce, moving, changing your job.

(01:50:36):
Oh.
Yeah.
Just like a lot of the things that we have done
over the last four years.
I've learned so much about myself, what I'm capable of.
Like I can do hard things and I can still learn
and become a more grown woman.
I can do hard things and I can still learn
and become a more graceful person through them.
And I'm really tired.

(01:50:58):
I have been really tired, though I've been resting
for the last month or so, which is really helpful,
but it's taken that long for me to feel capable
of having long form conversation.
As soon as I got the thing that said,
you passed your licensure, I had like,
you're gonna go to sleep now and you're so tired

(01:51:19):
that you can't do anything today.
Today, you're going to do nothing.
So this started after really you put the final touches
on the massage studio too, right, at the same time.
You got that completed.
You were working on multiple projects here in the house,
all of the inter-family trying to figure out
how to become shifting parents

(01:51:40):
with a shifting population of children
that is just intensely trying to find their place
in the new found structure that we have,
whatever it is, as their life got torn apart
and put back together so many times.
And they've just kind of rode right through it
and they have all the traumas that you could imagine
and all of the beautiful things.

(01:52:01):
It's just such a complex situation
and everyone's just trying to find their place in themselves
and you have all the conversations
and are always coming up with solutions and ideas.
And you just put two sliding barn doors

(01:52:21):
on each of the hallway closets and you're doing massages
and starting to make money and building connections
with all these people and finding what your path is
into this part of your life.
And you've been finding your flow into that,
having all the conversations with your massage friends

(01:52:43):
and just building your perspective, your worldview there
and what you're offering, which by the way is fantastic
to watch because you're not just walking into it
the way that you were taught to walk into it
or the way everyone else does, you're saying, who am I?
And you're walking into that.
Yeah, I'm basically building a business
that most of my massage teachers said,
why are you doing that?

(01:53:04):
But that you know- You're doing exactly the opposite
of what we're trying to tell you to do.
But the decisions you're making come from the question,
who am I? Yeah.
And it is intoxicating to watch the colors,
that are swirling and exploding out of that.
And chores and bedtimes and how much screen time
do the kids get to have and where are they anyway?

(01:53:26):
And all of that stuff and picking up from school
and dropping them off, you are helping to facilitate
all of it, you're having the conversations,
you're the middleman between, I mean,
Bonnie and I haven't yet found out how to communicate.
I stepped out of being the middleman.
Which gave you the capacity to just be yourself in it.
You didn't step out of it.

(01:53:48):
You stepped out of trying to be the glue
you thought you were supposed to be.
The bridge.
The bridge to just being yourself
and you're in the middle of all of it.
Learning how to have the conversations
with everybody that needs to have a conversation
and not let it wreck your world.
And you answer, you're sitting there doing homework
and answering, you're letting your brain become a resource

(01:54:11):
where it's not exhausting you.
Cause you still say, by the way, I'm talking about
what you're doing while you're quote, resting here.
That's true, that's all stuff that I do while I'm resting.
And you're doing more than half of the editing
for this podcast.
You're just allowing your mind to step into it
and just be like, okay, this is really fun for me.

(01:54:32):
And so what do I wanna do?
And like your days are full.
Yeah.
And I'm just watching you balance it
and take the time you need for yourself and be like,
today I did nothing and I feel good.
There's all these projects in the 911 emergencies
happening around me right now and I did nothing.

(01:54:53):
Go me.
And it's just like, so functional as a person
who is just accepting things,
starting to accept things at least as they come
and let everything be an opportunity
to ask yourself again, that question, who am I?
And here you are.
Good job resting.

(01:55:15):
Well, when you put it that way,
it doesn't sound like resting, but it feels like resting
because more and more in each of the moments,
I'm not doing the things I don't want to do
just because I feel obligated to do them.
So if I'm doing chores, it's because I really appreciate
when the bathroom is clean.

(01:55:36):
I just do.
It makes my brain feel less chaotic
when I walk out into the living room and all,
the pillows are not on the floor.
It just feels good to me.
And I'm not doing all of the things.
I'm only doing those things for the amount of time
that I want to do them and then I just stop doing them.

(01:55:57):
I still do a lot of things,
but I'm not overdoing them as much anymore.
I think I still do some days.
Some days I just burn myself out
because there's so many things.
I mean, we live in an house with 10 people.
And some days are slug days.
And some days are slug days.
And with each pendulation,
there's like a little bit of a better sense of the middle.
Yeah.
Part of what feels like rest to me

(01:56:19):
is I don't feel anxious
about how slowly the business is growing.
And that's a lot of that was really helped along by you
saying, don't worry about making money.
I mean, it'd be really nice if I could make enough money
that you could be doing something
that you really want to do.
Like right now, you dedicate so much of your waking hours

(01:56:44):
to working two hours away from here,
which is a very, very, yes.
Which is a very, very, it's a huge, huge commitment
and dedication.
I would love to be able to say,
oh, look at this, now I make enough money
that you can do something totally different
or nothing for two years for your rest period.

(01:57:05):
I don't even know how long you would need to rest for.
That sounds like a reasonable starting point.
Since I've known you,
you've been going a million miles an hour.
And I'm very aware of that
and the toll that it takes on you.
And I can't fix it.
You're aware of it because you also have been.
Yes.
And I'd love to be able to create the garden bed

(01:57:25):
necessary for the seeds of something else to sprout.
But you did tell me you're gonna be done with school
and you don't need to worry about jumping
into a full-time massage practice.
Just let it grow.
Let it do it.
Let it do it on its own.
I saw you starting to shift back into it.
I need to do the work.
I gotta do the thing.
Yeah.

(01:57:45):
And.
Gotta do the right research,
figure out the right data points.
And I was just like, whoa.
Is this really what you wanna be doing?
And it's not.
But it did feel like an important part of it
after all the time that I committed to schooling
and all that.
Well, so we have a lot of kids and it's expensive.
Accurate.
Our house is expensive.
Yeah, accurate.

(01:58:06):
Our number of cell phones is expensive.
Wow, what an interesting.
What interesting things you have to learn
when you have a household with as many people as we have.
And I want to contribute to that
in a meaningful way financially,
toward the end of my schooling.
I stopped working so I could finish school.
And then. Thank you.
Building the business is slow.
Took me a long time to talk you into that.

(01:58:27):
And so really all told, if I look at it logically
from an Angela brain, I have been not working
for six months, which is really not that long.
But in my brain, it's like, what the fuck are you doing?
You're an adult in a house with seven kids.
You need to be making money to help this situation.

(01:58:49):
That's the way my brain works.
But I'm really trying to exercise that idea
of this business will build itself based on who I am.
I believe in the work that I do very, very strongly.
Every massage that I have is just a reinforcement

(01:59:10):
that I'm doing something that fits me,
that builds into my intuition.
And it's so, so, so helpful for the person on the table.
And I really only want to do those kinds of massages,
which is why I've set up the practice the way that I have.
And so I can't force more people to want to come
and hang out with me for three hours.

(01:59:32):
But once the people who want to be there find me,
they won't go somewhere else.
You actually could.
I don't want to.
You don't want to force.
No. You just want it to grow organically.
Yeah, because so much of what we do
in those sessions is energy related.
And subjective.
It's subjective.
It's a collaborative situation.

(01:59:52):
It's not me massaging.
It's us creating healing in somebody together.
And the people who want to collaborate with me in that way
will come to me in time.
And in the meantime, it gives me a lot of time
to edit podcasts and do the mountains of laundry

(02:00:16):
that we seem to accumulate.
Every day.
And when I found this house and brought it to you guys,
it was like, do you think we want to do something crazy?
Like buy a fixer upper?
That.
Game off.

(02:00:36):
You have to open up a Sunbelt Bakery Fudge Chip
chocolate chip bar.
Cause I'm like low blood sugar all of a sudden.
That's staying in.
I'm just kidding.
You're going to edit this whole thing.
Cause I'm going to be out of the country.
I love editing, Ange.
I know.
I'm so thankful that you love it too.
And I've stepped in and have the time and energy to do it.

(02:00:58):
And it just makes it beautiful when I get to just sit down
and just lose myself in sculpting.
Yeah.
Oh my gosh.
It's so fun and beautiful.
It is fun.
Okay. Back to you.
We've done multiple construction projects together.
So many.
Building the practice slow has also given me the space

(02:01:20):
to do some of the things here that feel really good to do.
Like fixing the closet doors or painting the kitchen
or you know, like all of those little things that if my
practice was full and we were trying to do this podcast
and we have the kids and we want to connect and we want to
see our friends.
And we were turning one liver, one,
one living room in a bedroom into three bedrooms

(02:01:43):
and a hallway.
Yeah. But we were doing that when it was in the school time.
I'm talking about.
For remodeling two bathrooms.
Yeah. I'm just talking about.
For building a loft in building one living room
into two bedrooms with a third bedroom loft.
These are all projects that you have masterminded,
done all sorts of involvement.
Well, yes, I know.
But what I'm talking about right now.
One addition in your old house,
two additions in our old house,

(02:02:04):
full master bedroom bathroom suites, two of those.
I mean, okay.
Yes. You have done quite a few projects.
Yeah. But what I'm saying is the, the slow building
of the practice allows me to, to do some of those projects.
Now.
Now in a way that doesn't feel overwhelmingly stressful
or like it's taking away time for you and I to spend time

(02:02:26):
together or to go to ecstatic dance or to do that's tonight
by the way, or to, you know, like it,
it allows us to make progress and move forward in those ways
without like taking away from those other things that are
also really important.
Dude, ecstatic dance changed my life.
Same.
Okay. That's a topic for another topic.

(02:02:48):
That's so interesting.
I'm so excited to be, it's been so long since we went.
Yeah. I'm excited.
If you haven't been to ecstatic dance before,
10 out of 10 would recommend.
Yeah. Find an ecstatic dance in your area.
It's for everybody.
Yes.
You don't even have to dance.
Nope.
You can stand there and build a little energy bubble

(02:03:09):
and just move it around the room.
Or you can sit and meditate.
Just feel the energy.
It's just joyful people who are simply expressing themselves
for their own sake with no awareness of the,
of people's perspectives and no judgment for each other
and just meet yourself.
Yeah.
Kind of like yoga, kind of like any of these things

(02:03:30):
where you are just in a space where you're there
with yourself to see your reactions to what happens.
Yeah. It's just, it's like a meditative movement
through dance, but it's also, there's no right way to dance.
So sometimes people roll on the floor
and sometimes people do yoga.
And sometimes people are dancing, stomping their feet

(02:03:52):
and getting their aggression out.
And sometimes it's so lyrical and beautiful.
And, and none of it feels like a meat market at a bar.
You know, it's not that kind of dancing.
You're not allowed to talk.
You're not allowed to talk.
No cell phones are allowed.
And then you have DJs who are creating an emotional journey
with music.

(02:04:13):
So even if I lay there on my back
and just go into a meditation, I am on this journey
with this, from this other person's consciousness.
It's so cool.
Yeah. The way that different DJs build their set
for a dance really, it's really unique to each person.
Like we've, we've had some DJs that start very slow,

(02:04:36):
almost like a warmup.
And then there's like this, it's building and building
to this huge crescendo song.
And then it starts to go back down.
And other DJs bring in a lot of like world music
that they'll have like a lot of African beats and others,
like it, others have a lot of lyrics, lyrical songs.
And it's just, it's, it's really cool.
You never know kind of what it's going to be.

(02:04:57):
I think our ecstatic dance community here in Corvallis
is a little bit like my play group, Mom Experience.
I've heard other people talk about play group experiences
and didn't have a similar, like accepting non-catty,
non-judgmental time of meeting other moms.
I think it, I think it can still turn into that.

(02:05:19):
I have heard that some other ecstatic dance communities
have situations where it feels more like a meat market bar.
Really? Yeah.
I've never been to another ecstatic dance.
Which I can't imagine, because the only ecstatic dance
I've been to is here in Corvallis, which is very much like,
if you like ecstatic dance, that whole community,
you could have a connection or conversation with anybody.

(02:05:41):
And it would be an interesting one.
You know, most of the people that come there
come from a place of holistic wellness, healing,
journeys to the inner self,
wanting to find connection in community,
wanting to better themselves,
interested in self-improvement,
but not in like a let's go read a self-help book,

(02:06:02):
kind of a way more like, I want to know who I am,
kind of a way.
Let's figure out how to be humans together.
And that has been our experience in this community.
And so almost everybody we've ever met
through ecstatic dance is like, oh, I know you're kind.
I know who you are.
I know that you're a good person, kind of a thing.
My gut feeling says that most experiences

(02:06:23):
are gonna be more like ours.
That's kind of what I always thought.
I did too, until I heard a couple of other stories.
Okay. Okay.
Is there anything that you want to know
except for don't ask me what I'm afraid of
and don't ask me what I would say if I die.
Cause you have asked those questions two times today already.
Are you making rules for me?

(02:06:44):
No, but you could ask me a different question.
Could I?
No.
Which question would you like me to ask you?
That one.
Which one?
That one you just asked me.
Okay. What's your answer?
I already answered you.
I like you.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Normally at this point I would be asking,

(02:07:04):
so who do you see yourself to be now?
But my Lord, you have covered that very well
for my emotional.
You actually started that conversation,
this conversation with that question.
You asked me that first.
I said I was resting.
Yes.
Right now I'm resting with two kitties on my lap.
Okay. So I guess the question I want to ask you is,
what are you most afraid of?

(02:07:26):
Like if you were just to like kind of zoom out
and just look at yourself overall and be like,
there's that feeling again that keeps coming up.
And I know it's just fear and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But what does it say?
What is it that you're most afraid of?
I think that I am most afraid that the work
that I have done is false.

(02:07:48):
It's not actually work.
But it's just, I'd lucked into it
and I don't know actually how to heal.
Sounds like imposter syndrome.
Because there's a big part of me
and I talk with Mary about this sometimes.
It's like, am I actually healing
or am I just in like a good patch?

(02:08:11):
Is the fear that maybe you are spiritually bypassing?
I don't know what that is.
What is that?
Basically where you start doing a practice
to distract yourself from looking at the pain,
the darkness, the fear,
whatever it is that you really need to look at.
But instead you just like, oh, meditate
or go do this practice or try to tell yourself this mantra

(02:08:33):
over and over and over to try to bypass that feeling
and get to enlightenment beyond it.
That doesn't feel like it fits.
It feels more like, okay, imagine you're going
on a hike in a forest you've never been in before
and you start down this trail.
And there's some obstacles and you have to figure out

(02:08:55):
how to go around or over or through or whatever it is.
You know, like it's tough.
You're going on the side of the cliff
that's about to drop off
or you have to climb over this big log
or you have to make a choice on which path to take
when you come to the fork.
And then after some time, you realize that all you've done
is come back to the beginning of the path again.

(02:09:15):
That is just a loop.
You haven't ever actually gone anywhere.
You haven't actually made any progress.
It feels more like that.
Like I'm doing, sometimes it feels like hard work
and I'm trying to suss it out.
Or sometimes I'm just trying to sit with it
and let it marinate.

(02:09:36):
But then my fear is that I'm gonna end up right back
where I was when I was 30 and going, what are you doing?
You only get one shot.
I think it's that.
I think I'm afraid that the journey
that I have put myself on that I feel really proud of

(02:09:59):
is luck or something else other than like me
actually taking control of choice and power in my own self.
On a scale of one to 10.
One being the most minimally funny thing you've ever heard
and 10 being the most hilarious thing you've ever heard.

(02:10:20):
Where does that fear fall on that scale for you
when it comes up?
Funny, on the funny scale?
How amusing is that fear to you?
It's not amusing.
Not at all.
It's scary.
It's terrifying.
So it's a legitimate fear you have.
Yeah.
Because okay, the image I had when you were describing that
was emotional growth is like a spiral.

(02:10:41):
Yeah.
So.
I used to be so frustrated with the spiral.
Because it was always a rut.
Yeah.
And even if you can tell you're not
in exactly the same place,
it feels too much like the same place
to feel like you've made any progress.
And so when you decide you're here, you are starting here.
So you actually turn the spiral into a rut.
But what it actually is, is a spiral.

(02:11:01):
It's always moving.
And so as you keep coming around that spiral,
it's hard for you to remember
that little tiny bit of movement added up over time
makes a completely different person.
Which is maybe why when I look back at myself compared to,
myself now compared to where I was 10 years ago,
I can see growth and change.

(02:11:22):
But one of your first questions was,
how do I feel about the change that's happening right now
or the possible changes coming?
And I don't, I just can't answer that question
because maybe the spiral's too close.
Except what I was actually asking is,
how do you feel about how far apart the spiral's getting?

(02:11:43):
How do you feel about the rate of change that's happening?
That was what I was actually asking.
I do feel like remember,
I can remember back to a time where I felt so frustrated
at the spiral, how tight it was,
how quickly I would come back around again
to the same things and how slow the progress was.
Like I was saying, it felt like you were coming back
to the same place over and over and over again

(02:12:04):
without any progress, even if you know one tiny molecule
of it has changed.
I feel like the rate of change inside myself,
it's no longer overwhelmingly slow,
but it also doesn't feel chaotically fast.
I feel very comfortable.
I feel comfortable in it.

(02:12:25):
Sometimes I'm drawn to upending everything in one moment
to just find change.
And you have fought that so hard.
And I understand why now.
And I understand the incredible value it brings to my life
and balance, so.
Because I have discernment.
You have discernment.
Oh, speaking of which, I'm gonna do that test,

(02:12:45):
the working genius test.
The book is the six types of working genius
by someone with an Italian name.
Patrick Lincione.
Patrick Lincione.
Unbelievable.
Mm-hmm.
And he just did an episode on the Art of Charm podcast.
He also wrote five dysfunctions of a team,

(02:13:07):
which is a fantastic book.
Which was a life-changing book for me on the work side.
But it isn't as comprehensively
in emotional insights changing,
where you see yourself from a different angle
than you've ever seen yourself before.
Yeah, that book, the five dysfunctions book,
is probably really helpful if you're like a manager

(02:13:28):
and you have choice in where you put people on a team.
Or any team, any member of any professional team
and family, really, it's for anybody.
The six working geniuses, though,
is such a personal look at the things that you're good at
and the things that you really struggle with.
And then the places that you're competent,
but it's still, you have to be aware

(02:13:50):
of how much time you're spending on them.
The thing that I liked about the podcast
was kind of just to know how your partner
and your children function,
so that you're not asking somebody to do something,
not that they just don't wanna do,
because there's just stuff that most 12-year-olds
don't wanna do chores, right?
That's just a thing.

(02:14:10):
But really things where they struggle
because they don't work that way.
Yes.
Like you are full of wonder.
You just ask questions all the time
about the way the world works and all this stuff.
And I just don't, my brain just doesn't do that.
Yes. It just doesn't do that.
So sometimes you'll come and you'll be like,

(02:14:30):
what do you think about this huge idea
that has never crossed my mind?
And then I'm saying to you,
I found a very efficient way to do the blah, blah, blah,
because that's the way my mind works.
And it's- Look at how I made this nook
line up with this other nook.
Yeah, exactly.
And so if you were to become,

(02:14:53):
and I think this has happened in our past,
or you become frustrated when I don't have a big answer
of all the metaphysical stuff
that might possibly go through your brain
where it's like, I just don't think about it, right?
Well, part of what we talked about with Kay
and part of what is helpful with that book
and then the podcast is you can be the wonderer,

(02:15:17):
but I can tell you if that idea is gonna,
it actually has some merit to it.
And you can be wrong.
And I can be wrong, sure.
But like you bouncing ideas off of me
is what you wanna do.
And-
Yep.
What I'm gonna do is kind of rattle it
through my little sieve and see what pops out.
And sometimes that felt really frustrating to me

(02:15:38):
because I was like always your dream crusher,
which is the language that Kay was using.
And I have felt that before
and you and I have talked about that.
Like, I feel like I always have to say no
to all of your ideas.
And it's like kind of soul crushing to me
to just be like your naysayer, you know?
But I just am a soul crusher and a home wrecker.

(02:15:59):
That's what I do.
And-
That's who I am.
You're figuring it out that you actually don't have
to say no to anything.
Well-
You just have to be true to saying yes
only to the things you want to say yes to
and everything else, let it be.
It'll be what it is.
But I can also learn to tell you
that I think it's a bad idea or it won't work
and then just step back.

(02:16:19):
Yep.
My discernment of it doesn't necessarily
hold the weight of it, right?
Your discernment holds weight
because I care about your discernment.
No, what I mean-
Not because it's somehow-
What I mean is-
You're always right.
It's not the last word.
Never.
Like I can give you my discernment.
Yes.
And if you choose to not take my opinion about it,

(02:16:40):
that's fine too.
Like I can let go of the weight of responsibility
for whether or not you agree or don't agree
or choose or not.
And I know that I am free
to take your opinion or not
and learn the lesson I learned from it.
And there won't be any consequences
because you also recognize that what I have to bring

(02:17:04):
is unique to me alone.
And if you want a life with me in it,
then you just have to let me be me.
And I appreciate that.
I appreciate you.
I appreciate walking next to you.
I appreciate that you're walking next to me
and that I'm not walking in your path
and you're not walking in my path.

(02:17:25):
We're just asking ourselves and each other the question,
who are you?
Who am I?
And then whatever answer we find, we do that.
And it's so fun.
Yeah.
And I'm so excited for the future,
including this present moment.
Yeah.
And I appreciate being able to not make sense-

(02:17:48):
Most of the time.
And just be accepted in it.
Just be allowed to be that person, whatever person I am.
Oh.
Thank you for existing.
You're welcome.
I'll tell my mom.
This is very fun.
Thanks.
You're welcome.
You're welcome.
You're welcome.
You're welcome.
You're welcome.
You're welcome.

(02:18:31):
Thank you.

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