498 -- Uncompromising -- a personal message and a conversation with Leela Sinha

This is a two-part episode: (1) a hard and raw update of the state of my life right now, and (2) a conversation with Leela Sinha, who persistently believes there are ways to make the world a better place event when I'm whimpering in a corner.

Guest: Leela Sinha, https://intensivesinstitute.com/

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Art: Laura Eccott
Music: Jake Pierle -- https://jakepierle.bandcamp.com/

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Ignorance Was Bliss online: https://linktr.ee/iwbpodcast

Sponsor: Bath By Bex (code CBDkate for 25% off)
Sponsor: Komuso Design (code bliss15 for 15% off)

Episode Transcript

(00:05):
Hey, this is Kate with meis willem hie. It's been a while,
I know. And this is actuallykind of a double episode because I
do plan on running a conversation thatI had with a dear friend of mine
afterward. But little minisodes are allwell and good. But I've opened my

(00:30):
life to you guys, you know, from day one almost and so five
minute episodes saying Kate's not doing realwell, she's in the hospital. That
doesn't really give a picture of whatI'm facing. So I asked told them
to come down because I don't.I don't entirely know what I'm facing.

(00:58):
And that's a for me when Ilook at any other human being and be
like, can you come down withme and help me say words like that's
that's not me. But so theshort is there a short version? There

(01:22):
was a short version last year.I got sick. And when I say
I got sick, I mean Februaryfirst. I started throwing up like it
was my job. And I've hada couple of episodes about gastrophrasist and so
you kind of have a sense ifyou've been following along. But it didn't

(01:46):
get better, and it was supposedto get better, and nobody knows why
it got better, like to thepoint where I had a doctor in the
hospital this pastime tell me, couldyou just not be sick? Which was
brilliant and not helpful. So Imean, my days right now they look

(02:22):
I mean beyond pathetic. Bleak isa nicer word than pathetic. I sleep
a lot because I'm not really gettingenergy. I'm getting calories through a hole
in my chest, which I wishthat was some sort of euphemism, but

(02:44):
now that's actually what's happening. AndI mean I sleep past noon most days,
and it's a It's a success forme on a day if I wake

(03:06):
up and I'm not crying. AndWillam married a very independent woman. He
married somebody who is the original Ido it myself girl, and she's gone
right now. I don't know whereshe is. But like the other day,

(03:34):
I had such a hard time sittingalone all day. I had such
a hard time sitting in my headalone all day. Then I went to
work with William in the evening.He teaches night classes at a local college,

(03:55):
and I went to work with himjust so I could sit in the
lobby and not be alone. Idon't know how to be this person.
Yeah, I don't know what tosay. It's I think this all stems

(04:17):
back to twenty ten and after therecovery from those events, we all knew
that Kate was fragile in a way, that she had a weakened immune system,
and that there was a danger thatshe could get sick in the future.
But for the next ten eleven,twelve years, when she did get

(04:39):
sick, it was usually one systemof her body, and it was temporary
in the sense that it happened onceor twice, and then it was dealt
with with medication or or you know, the doctors were able to diagnose it
and treat it and return her tosome semblance of you know, zero,

(05:04):
I guess, get her back tozero. The difference is that this,
to me, the difference is thatthis past year has been multiple systems failing,
all at the same time for differentreasons, doctors in many cases doing

(05:28):
their best to diagnose and treat,but really not being successful in a long
term sense. You know, sometimeswe come up with something that works temporarily
and for a short period of time, but then something has to change,
and then you know, and thensomething else comes up and so she's really

(05:49):
been overwhelmed on all sides and justbetrayed by her body for an extended period
of time right now, and there'sno you know, the thing that scares
me the most is that she's losinghope. And this is very recent,

(06:12):
as recently as just this past monthwhen she when she came home from the
hospital. She's always been you know, I know that we sometimes use this
word pejoratively or at least in jest. She's always been a trooper and she
has though, is that she's she'salways taken these really serious problems and changes

(06:39):
to her life and to her personalityand to her just daily activities with grace.
And I know she doesn't feel thatway, but I'm the one who's
watching her, and I think she'sbeen very graceful and very strong throughout all
of this, but just just recently, and you can hear it in her

(07:00):
voice, she's losing hope. Andshe's reaching the point where she doesn't have
any reason to believe that she's goingto get better, that she's going to
get back to zero. She's goingto be stuck in the negatives. And

(07:24):
that's a scary thing to wake upto. And it's a scary thing to
watch her wake up to. Iwant to be clear that I watched my
dad go through this, this lackof hope, this loss of belief that
it's ever going to stop, thatit's ever going to get better. And

(07:47):
in his case, he was aloneand dependent on his daughter, which I
think he found a little bit embarrassingat best humiliating worst. We tried not
to make him feel that way,but you can't make another person feel any

(08:07):
sort of way. And the thingwith my dad is he was alone,
so he was that loneliness. Hetried to make friends, but he wasn't
very good at it because he waskind of an asshole. I loved him,
but man, he was and hefelt so frail. And I think

(08:33):
that's what I'm getting too, isthat I feel frail. I feel broken.
Yesterday I went to Walgreens. Ihad a fight with them because they
were overcharging me for a medication,and I won. I went and got
my car inspected six months late,but I got it inspected. I checked

(08:56):
my woefully empty PA, and Icame home all by myself. I'm forty
six years old. That shouldn't bea big deal, Like there's nothing preventing
me from driving, there's nothing preventingme from functioning in public, except my

(09:18):
brain said this is huge. Andso in the moment that it occurred to
me, like go do this,it was throw on jeans and leave the
house quick and don't think about it, and just get in the car and
just go, go, go,go go before you lose strength to do

(09:39):
it. And so that feeling ofbeing pathetic, that's new for me.
And I don't know how to bepathetic. I'm used to being the smart
girl, you know, or atleast the capable one. And I was

(10:01):
telling them, I mean just lastnight, we've heard these we've had these
very dark conversations, and I wastelling them last night and what I want
is a mom. I just wanta mom. I want somebody who is
not my partner, who's not supposedto be my equal in life, but
I want somebody to come and justpet my hair and tell me it's going

(10:22):
to be okay, even if they'relying. And I don't have that.
And I don't have that by choice, by her choice, because we gave
her a script and said say thesethings and we'll forgive you, and she
said no. So I'm dealing witha lot on the emotional side too,

(10:46):
But the bigger I think that thenumber that gets people's attention is that I
just spent twenty seven days impatient inthe hospital. That's a month. It's
a long goddamn time. I wentin because I have what's called a pick
line PIICC. It's a line thatgoes in through your arm generally and leads

(11:13):
directly to your heart and lets youget medication and nutrition and hydration. And
if you get a fever over onehundred, you're supposed to go to the
er because it's a line and thatgoes to your heart. And so we
did December sixteenth, we went tothe er. We had gone a couple

(11:35):
of times before then, but mybody's really good at homeostasis, and so
I would have a fever, butit would go away by the time I
got to the er, and thistime it didn't, and so they admitted
me for observation, and then afterthat they gave me strap and after that

(11:56):
they gave me COVID, and afterthat they gave me a fungle in fact,
and it was it broke me,It broke who I am, and
I felt pathetic. I felt alone. Williams visited every other day. I

(12:16):
didn't want the kids to visit becauseI didn't want them exposed to the latest
wave of COVID and whatever else isgoing around. Because yeah, I got
COVID. I got a fever ofone hundred and six point six. You
don't want your children around that.But nobody else came. I have friends
that live nearby, and nobody came, and I that did something to me.

(12:48):
I have always my biggest fear hasalways been being disposable, being ignorable,
being unimportant. You know, Iwas raised to measure myself by what
I could accomplish, and I knowthat's my mother's fault, but knowing where

(13:09):
it comes from doesn't help. Andsitting there in that hospital and being not
just feeling ignored, but being ignoredand being disposed, I don't know what
to I don't know how to describeit. So I'm working on getting into

(13:35):
therapy. I've got a bunch ofnew specialists. I'm seeing a hematologist for
my profound anemia. I'm seeing agastrotrologist because they think that I should switch
from a pit line, which isnow in my chest not in my arm.

(13:58):
That doesn't make me feel any better, but they think I should switch
to a feeding tube. I'll beseeing a pomonologist because I have a nodule
on my lung, which that's notgood. I should be seeing my neurologist
because I had some sort of neurologicalevent and fell down in the bathroom the

(14:22):
other day and I have a gloriousscrape on my forehead that hurts like a
son of a bitch. She's like, I have all these specialists, plus
I have nurses that come to thehouse twice a week. It's all a
lot. And so because of allof that, I qualify for something called

(14:43):
palliative care. That sounds really scary, and it is, like, let
me tell you, it is reallyscary, but palliative care is meant to
help you. Man. Is thesymptoms of your daily life that are getting
in the way, so that doctorscan focus on the syndromes of your life

(15:07):
that are getting in the way,so pain management, sleep, nausea,
social issues, whatever. I don'tfully know. That's that. The reason
I'm recording this right now is becausenone of it's happened yet, and I
wanted sort of a blank slate.But I've got a lot coming up,

(15:31):
and I'm asking for help and Idon't know what help means. But I
sit alone. Every day. Isit alone, and I try not to
text will him because I don't haveanything positive to say, and I try

(15:56):
not to text him. Hey,I'm crying again. So I don't know.
I don't know how to ask forhelp. I don't know what I'm
asking for. But but if youlive in near bib, please help me.

(16:18):
If you don't live nearby, pleasetell me. Like I don't know,
I would never self harm. That'snot an option. I saw what
it did when my dad died,and that's not even on my list of
options. But there are other waysof disappearing. And that's what I'm doing.

(16:49):
And I'm not doing it on purpose. I just like I'm flailing.
Yeah, I'm I'm in the innercircle. I see it every day.
I see the scars and the theroutine that she has to go through.

(17:18):
You know, you know when shewhen she says she's on TPN, which
is this what is it like twogallon bag of nutrients? Yeah, whatever
it is, it's a big bag. It's a big bag of nutrients.
She has to do that every day, which means that she has to go
through a very specific procedure that probablytakes about ten minutes, you know,

(17:44):
and it has to be medically safe, so she's risking infection every time.
And then she gets herself connected tothis thing, and then for the next
twelve hours she can't go anymore.Now she's able to do that mostly while
she's sleeping, but still imagine beingrestricted to your bed for twelve hours,

(18:11):
you know, And she can getup and go to the bathroom, but
she has to carry this thing withher, this entire set up, which
likes to beep in the middle ofthe night and you know, sometimes cause
problems, although generally it's pretty wellbehaved. And then during the other twelve
hours that she has she has toalso take a bag of sailine, which

(18:33):
is an entirely different setup process.And that's four hours. So there's sixteen
hours of every day that she hasrestricted to her bed and you know,

(18:55):
just alone with her thoughts while shetakes in nutrients, you know. And
and and I will say again thatyou know, the the despite some hiccups
here and there, that the processhas gone relatively smoothly, and and she's
been really good about getting it together, but but nevertheless she's she's alone,

(19:17):
and this process happens every single day. She doesn't have a weekend like I
do from work, she doesn't havea vacation or a holiday. It's every
single day. And that has takenjust an enormous toll on who she is,

(19:44):
how she sees herself. You know, she, as she said before,
she's she's always been very smart,very tough, very resilient. And
now I just I see a lotof doubt, a lot of fear,
and when I talk to her,I do my best to build these things

(20:10):
back up, but it's it's artificial, it's external. You know. It
only lasts so long before she's backalone with her thoughts. And I've I've
considered taking time off work. Iactually did take away one of my jobs
that I one of my one ofmy night jobs, and I'm actually really

(20:30):
happy that I did that because itgives me extra time to be around the
house and help out and just generallyreduce the stress. But even with that,
I'm still out of that. I'mconstantly, I'm constantly on this knife
edge of what do I do.Do I stay strong and keep calm and

(20:52):
carry on and do the things thatI need to do to earn a paycheck
and pay the bills and you know, all of that sort of thing.
Or do I go into my boss'soffice and say, hey, I'm taking
twelve weeks off to take care ofmy wife because there are systems in place

(21:15):
to do that. You know,they're unpaid, which I don't even know
how you would deal with that,but there's systems in place where I could
keep my job. So it's justthis constant, it's this day, you
know. I think that that analogyof the knife knife's edge is very apt.
Here. I'm on a knife's edgewith my on a razor's edge with
my job, what do what doI do? And Kate's on a razor's

(21:38):
edge with her health. It's thatlike every day it's something good maybe will
happen. There's there's a diagnosis,or there's a treatment, or there's a
medication, or there's something that mightmake things better. But at the same
time, there's all of these otherthings here that are negative and bad and

(21:59):
and and there's no you know,there's no positive outlook. I think that
you can a way of sort ofgauging how healthy one's lifestyle is is to

(22:23):
think about how far ahead they makeplans. You know, if you're able
to make plans a year or twoin advance, you're pretty healthy, you
know, because you can you canhave that vision and you can connect the
dots financially and logistically to make itwork. Whereas if you're sick, you

(22:44):
know, that window closes. Andnow you're talking about maybe months or maybe
weeks. And we're at the pointwhere Kate is living. It's not even
just day to day, it's hourto hour. And when you're when you're
mind said, is that shallow?That's when the loneliness really creeps in and

(23:11):
stays because there's nothing to look forwardto. It's just about getting through the
next hour and the next treatment andthe next appointment and the next nurse visit.
And that's where she's at right now. You know, every day is
a bunch of phone calls and abunch of arguments with insurance. She hasn't

(23:33):
done anything for herself in so longbecause she can't. And also why bother?
Like that's I've gotten stuck in awhy bother mindset of just wh bother?
I'm not gonna live long enough tofinish both pairs of this sock,
So why bother make a pair ofsocks? Why bother fight with insurance because

(23:57):
I'm gonna die before this case isresolved, and so they'll drop it then,
you know, And that's not that'snot good. So I'm trying,
like I'm trying. I'm trying reallyhard. Every day. I'm trying to

(24:19):
celebrate even the stupid fucking winds,like getting my car inspected, Like I'm
trying to celebrate that. I celebratenot crying in public, which when's the
last time you were in the grocerystore and cried over the grapes, you
know, And so I'm trying reallyhard to to celebrate the little stuff.

(24:45):
But it feels fake, and itfeels false, and most importantly, it
feels alone. So I'm doing mybest, but I'm trying not to lean
so heavily on villain. He's justthe only person it's showing up right now.
So so that's it. I mean, that's it. Here, we're

(25:08):
half an hour and that's it.That's that's my life right now. And
I wanted to record it right nowbecause over the next couple of weeks there's
going to be some major decisions made, decisions about surgeries, decisions about whether

(25:30):
I'm allowed to keep driving, decisionsabout what my tolerance is for care if
that makes sense, Like what doI need? Because I think I probably
need more than I'm asking for.I just don't know how to ask for
it. And so I wanted torecord something raw rather than bringing it to

(25:57):
like, Okay, well here's theplan, because I don't trust the plan
anymore. I mean, the planwill be great. We'll have a plan
and it'll be a lovely plan.Somebody will write it down, it'll be
great, and I won't trust it. So I wanted to come to you
more honest and and I'll update you. You know, once the plan happens,

(26:26):
I'll let you know what it is. It's going to take some time
because it's three or four different specialistscoming together and I don't know how to
make them talk to themselves or eachother. But that's what I get.
That's where I am, Like,I'm not taking a break, I'm not

(26:47):
on hiatus, I'm not on vacation. I'm lost. So I have a
handful of episodes that I had recordedbefore I got really sick, and I'm
going to try to put those out. Willem got me a laptop so I

(27:10):
can do most of the work frommy bed, which I need to do
because I need to go up andhook up soon to the nutrition and stuff.
But this isn't a vacation. Thisisn't fun, and it isn't even
okay, and I don't know howto make it okay. So if you

(27:37):
have a way of helping, Andwhen I say help, I don't mean
money, I don't I'm not askingfor that. I don't know what I'm
asking for. You just know thatthere's this person sitting in a room alone,

(28:00):
lost and I don't know how tofind myself anymore, and I don't
know how to be like this.Hey again, this is Kate trying to

(28:22):
restart an actual normal episode instead ofwallowing in whatever misery I'm having in the
moment. This is a conversation withmy friend Leila, who helped tremendously the
other day. I really hit ahard spot and Leila has this ability to

(28:48):
hold unhappiness and yet transform it andhelp you find ways that are okay to
be within your unhappiness. I don'treally know how to describe it, especially
because Leela focuses more on business stuffthan I do like I've moved away,

(29:10):
far far away from the business seaworld, and Leila's been moving right on
in and so I mean, goodfor Zoom, but it's not only thing.
But you'll hear that there are differentways to think about being corporate.
There are different ways to think aboutgetting your work done. Are you sure

(29:34):
you really want to know? Thisis ignorance? Was bliss? Hi?

(30:15):
My name is Leela Sen Huh.I'm a Unitarian Universalist minister. I'm a
writer, I'm a coach. I'ma consultant. I work primarily with people
with very intense personalities who have bigdreams and want to change the world and
somehow keep kissing people off on theway there, I mean, which is
frankly, my goal is to sortof kiss people off because if they're if

(30:38):
they're upset, then they're at leastthinking that's true, that's true. I
love I love it when the potstring works, even if it makes them
throw up their hands and storm off. It's like, I'm going to live
rent free in your head for someperiod of time and maybe you'll have a
thought, which is which is whywhen I still or the pot I try

(31:00):
to ask myself, like, whatreally is my goal here? Like what
do I want to have happen?What is my endgame? Because so often
it's really tempting, at least forme, it's really tempting to say something
that I know will piss someone offbut will not actually accomplish the goal at
all, even a little bit.But if I can ask one question that

(31:22):
we'll rent free in their head,then maybe my work is done. Maybe
that's all I had to do withthat person. For me, because of
my line of work, you know, and having worked in forensic psychology and
worked in prisons and everything, there'sa reverse to what I would maybe expect

(31:42):
or what people expect in that.What pisses people off is how mundane the
answers are or how do you know, like how simple they are, because
they want me to tell like thesethese terrible stories is about how earth shattering
it is to sit in the roomwith a serial killer, or how awful

(32:06):
all inmates are, and how weneed to build more prisons and punish more
harshly, and I'm like, actually, they're all just human, and we
have too many prisons as it is, and most of them are not doing
us any good. They're not andwe should let them out earlier, and
just in general, like, there'sjust people. And by the way,

(32:30):
you don't need to spend your timeworrying about, you know, somebody lurking
on the street corner or trying tobreak into your house. And frankly,
if they really want in your house, there ain't no number of locks going
to keep them out. That thepeople who are most likely to hurt you
are the people you live with,the people you go to school with,

(32:51):
the people that coach your kids.You know that kind of thing. You
already know them. So pay attentionto who you're around. Don't stare at
the weird guy on the corner.The weird guy in the corner is probably
just having an extra bad day anddoesn't have the privilege of having it in
private, I'm saying, And peopledon't like it. And so I've discovered
that the more mundane my answers are, the more pissed off people get,

(33:13):
which I love. Who are youtalking to? I know you'd think,
well, but see this is wewere talking before I hit record about how
you don't live in the world oftrue crime, right, I would suggest
you not moved there. My showis pretty much entirely true crime for the

(33:35):
first year or so, and thenI sort of widened the lens and moved
out. And one of there's manyreasons why, but I like to describe
things in story form, and thatis, you know, the voyeurism and
the sensationalism. So I was doinga live show with friends of mine in

(33:57):
Chicago and we were gonna I wasgoing to cover uh Ed Green and they
were going to cover Leopold and Lowe, so just local. Ed Green is
from Wisconsin and he's the the it'swhatever you don't need, you don't need

(34:17):
scary stories. But he's pretty wellknown both for the crimes but also for
having been found not guilty very reasonof insanity, spending decades that way being
found sane enough to stand trial,at which time they found him not guilty
by reason of insanity and sent himright back to the hospital. So that's

(34:39):
where he died. And Leopold andLoebe were sort of the first known in
the in the era of early radioand national news thrill killers to college age
kids who who killed a much youngerchild. And so the point is I

(35:00):
was preparing for this live show,and you know, live shows about true
crime or tricky because you want tokeep it rolling and keep it light question
marks as light as this true crimeshow can be, you know what I'm
saying. But I was taking Iwas I was sharing the stage with two

(35:22):
defense attorneys, and so I wasgoing to talk about the mental health side
of things, and they were goingto talk about the defense side of things,
and that's how it's going to be. And so I was sort of
prepping that morning and there were awhole lot of us in town for a
conference, and I was sharing anairbnb with like ten people, as one

(35:45):
does, and I had my laptopopen, and I'm looking at crime scene
photos that I had obtained, andthey're they're pretty unpleasant, and so it's
like, I'm not going to showthese. I'm not going to post the
life show was in a bar.I'm not gonna stick ease on the wall
in a bar, like nobody needsthat. I but I wanted to refresh

(36:06):
my own memory in case anybody asked, and just to know how to describe
it. And another true crime podcasterwalked behind me as I was looking,
and I don't know what I expected, but what I got because I was
in the process of, oh,sorry, gonna close the lid. But

(36:29):
what I got was, oh,no, that's cool. Can I see?
And I was like, I'm notdoing this anymore. Like that's that's
who I'm talking to, you know, is people who think this is cool.
And I'm like, there's nothing.There's nothing cool, there's nothing sexy,
there's nothing exciting, like it's adrenaline, and then it's misery. That's

(36:52):
what crime is. And so providingmundane answers tends to people because they want
to feel like there's some magical waythat they can if they learn enough about
it, especially in the gory details, they'll be safe. And I'm like,
that's not how it works, no, so don't do crime. That's

(37:16):
a really interesting idea though, theidea that if you if you learn enough
about something, then you'll be safefrom it. I think that turns up
a lot around disability, turns upa lot around mental health. This idea
that we can learn, that wecan intellectualize our way out of quote unquote
danger, which you know, wecould go into a whole thing about whether

(37:38):
or not becoming disabled is dangerous inthe in the classic sense. I don't
think it always is. But theidea that that we can somehow save ourselves
through through knowing enough. I thinkis absurd, but it's a very common
absurdity in our culture. Well,that's know, you've heard of the stages

(38:00):
of grief, Elizabeth Cooper Ross.Those were not written about death. That
that's those weren't created intended for relativesof a dead person. Those were created
for people who have received a terminalor chronic diagnosis. And so it's you

(38:22):
know, denial makes sense, right, But the second step is bargaining,
And people wonder what is bargaining mean? What bargaining means If I learn enough
about this, if I go vegan, if I talk about it enough,
if I don't talk about it enough, if I get a different doctor,
if if then I won't die fromthis terrible thing. And that's how the

(38:43):
brain do. Yeah, yeah,And getting all the way to acceptance is
a project, sure is, Imean, and I don't think I don't
like that it's stages of grief becausethere are times, but you know,
I'm on disability and there are timeswhen I've gotten there, I've gotten to
acceptance, and then something happens andI'm like, oh, we're not there

(39:07):
anymore. I'm back to depression.I'm back to anger. Yeah. I
mean, we know now that itwasn't meant to be linear in the first
place. And it's not linear,that's not how it works. It's more
like, here's a pile of legosthat you might encounter on your way to
getting to some kind of acceptance,at least for a while, until something
changes, either in your brain orin your life or in your body,

(39:29):
and then you might not be acceptinganymore. You might be mad about it,
and that's reasonable. Yeah. Andyou know, for me, I
just I collect diagnoses. It's sortof a hobby of mine that I'm going
for full coverage on the medical bingoboard, right, And I would have
thought that, having gone through thisbefore, maybe this time it'll be a

(39:52):
little easier for me to accept.Because every time I have a new diagnosis,
every time I have a new disability, a piece of me is carved
away, A thing I could dois gone, an aspect about me is
no longer simple, like it needsan asterisk for everything. And the answer

(40:15):
to that is no, No,it's hard every time, and it sucks
every time loss is heard. Everytime. Yeah, so give me some
examples, then if you would ofhow do people want to change the world
when they talk to mostly I endup talking to people who want capitalism to

(40:37):
not be wreaking its horrors on theirlives and the lives of the people around
them, and also who have hita point of frustration with the institutions around
us such that they are either selfemployed or very seriously considering being self employed.

(40:57):
Now, this partly happens because soI have a personality framework where I
talk about levels of intensity, andso we have intensives at one end and
expansives at the other end, andI talk mostly to and about intensives.
Intensives are people who are intense,and most of the time, intensives like
to solve the big problem instead ofthe small problem. So instead of being

(41:21):
handed solve this symptom, solve thissymptoms, solve we want to go three
levels upstream and solve the thing that'scausing the symptoms. And that happens with
us when we look at justice issues. It happens with us when we look
at capitalism itself, and it happenswith us when we work for somebody,
and if that institution we work forit doesn't let us go three levels upstream
and keep saying no, it's notyour job to think. It's just your

(41:43):
job to solve these symptoms. Eventuallypeople get frustrated and they quit. And
when they quit, then they goto start their own company. And so
they want to create a company that'sprofitable, that's a great place to work
and that they enjoy, that theyfeel really great about about running about bringing
into the world, and also thatmakes enough money that everybody can live,

(42:05):
which is tricky, yeah, becauseit's not impossible, not impossible. But
the cool thing to do, atleast when I pay attention to such things,
is like put a ping pong tablein the break room and that'll make
it where everybody wants to work.And it's like, that's not the thing.
You can do that, but that'snot the answer. The ping pong

(42:28):
table is a symbol, or atleast it was during both dot com booms.
The ping pong table is a symbolof a recognition that people do not
have to have their butts in theirchairs and their eyeballs on their screens eight
hours a day in order to beproductive, and in fact, when you
give them more space for their ownhumanity, they will be more productive.
Now, not everybody needs space fortheir humanity at a ping pong table.

(42:52):
But that's what it symbolized. WhenI was back in the late nineties,
I was working for or, ateeny tiny little cabinet making company in Minneapolis,
and we were doing a build outfor a dot com boom company that
was expanding their offices, and theywere putting in all that kind of stuff.

(43:13):
They were putting in a nap roomand a ping pong table, and
it was really interesting to see howpeople thought that those things would make people
happier at work without really thinking abouthow they make people happier at work,
which is by recognizing that people needto take a nap, that people need
to have ping pong time, thatthey need to have recreational time, they
need to let that problem bounce aroundin the back of their head. And

(43:36):
as people get more as people getmore crunchy is the word, I want
to create a squished up ball oftinfoil. As people, as our society,
as our culture, as our financesis everything gets under the kind of
pressure that we're under right now,people tend to withdraw those things first.
And when they withdraw those things,what they're really withdrawing is space for people

(44:00):
to enact their humanity in their workplace. And when you take that away,
people don't want to work for youanymore. It's not that nobody wants to
work well, I mean when Iit's when I moved. I used to
work in New Hampshire and then Imoved down to Massachusetts, and by that
time I had left the forensic arenaand I was doing crisis work in the

(44:22):
emergency rooms and the like, andyou know a lot of crisis valuation kind
of places the And this is incrediblylazy to me and false and wrong,
and I'm sorry about it. Butthe attitude is shadow someone else for a

(44:43):
week, then they will shadow youfor a week, and then you're ready
to go on your own. Butthere's no possible way to predict what crisis
will look like, so we can'treally train you. And I lack adequate
vocabulary to clearly express what bullshit thisis. Because yes, when I'm called

(45:06):
in, let's say they say,go talk to Lula. There's something going
on we need you to figure out, can can you can you start discharge
or do you need to find ahospital bed or something else? Like?
Okay, First of all, thereare certain routines and rituals that have to
go with that, certain paperwork thatyou need to go with, certain phone

(45:29):
numbers that you need to have athand. And what they did when I
came down here to Massachusetts, theyhanded me a three inch finder. They
contained every piece of paper that anyonehad ever collected. It was, you
know, and you know how everycopy you make is a little more askew
and a little a little less sharpand whatever. All of those just thrown

(45:52):
in this binder and no order.Some of them were years out of date,
and you know, some of them. It just there was no differentiation
between say, substance abuse treatment andmental health treatment, which those requires different
categories, you know, different whatever. And so you're on for your shift.

(46:13):
They were they were ten or twelvehour shifts when I was there,
And so my first thing that Ispent doing was like just organizing this because
usually you're busy, but there's alot of wait time too, because I
talk to you and let's say youhave to go to the hospital so they

(46:34):
don't have to write a paperwork,and I have to call your insurance company
or if you don't have it,I have to call medicaid and Medicare and
figure that out, and I haveto call around a bunch of hospitals to
say I have somebody, and thenyou wait for two to four hours for
all of that information to come back. And so I would just sit there
and organize this binder, and thenI realized, like, I'm getting a

(46:58):
lot of paper cuts and this isjust stupid, and so I took it
upon myself to create a PDF ofyou know, here's the substance abuse treatment
places. Here's the hospitals, here'sthe phone numbers, here's what they treat
in, what medication or what insurancethey take. Blah blah blah. That
makes so much sense you'd think theywere blown away, like just astonished that

(47:24):
it even occurred to me to dothis thing. And so I was able
to take it from a I'm notkidding when I say a three inch binder,
like I'm showing like anybody can see, but like, hold your hands
three inches apart, that's a lotof pieces of paper. I got that.
I boiled that down to thirty pagesbecause there was just so much repetition
or whatever, and then it waslike, okay, so that's the how

(47:46):
to of the job part. Butthen there's also a piece of training that
took me on my own months tofigure out. I didn't need a ping
pong table. I didn't want aping pong table, but the nap thing.
Oh my god, when you're waitingat three in the morning for a

(48:07):
hospital to call you back with abed, you need to know where in
the hospital is there a room witha couch and a private phone line and
a door that shuts chaplain's office.Well I didn't necessarily have access to those,
because often they needed them, butthere's always a family room that you
can use that the emergency rooms haveso that if they have to inform the

(48:30):
family of a death or similar,or if I needed to sit with a
family member. So you know,often the chaplain's offices were in the inpatient
side of the hospital, and Iwas looking for how close to the er
can you be so that I canget right back down for that, And
the family rooms are usually right there, because so many times the crisis for

(48:52):
the family is right in the airor the ica exactly. And so that's
that became a thing where I learned. We worked down here. I worked
at four different hospitals, and Ilearned where is that where is the bathroom,
Where are the snacks? Where arethe free snacks? Because just as
just I'm just I'm just I'm notsaying there's free snacks in every er in

(49:15):
the US, but I'm saying there'sfree snacks. You just have to know
how to ask and who to askfor it. And so I effectively formed
a training program and it was justa three day thing where you know,
for two days we kind of wentthrough you know, the first day was
the state paperwork, and the secondday was these thirty page document I created.

(49:37):
And the third day was okay,now I'm going to take you to
each hospital and I'm going to walkyou from the parking lot in I'm going
to show you how to use yourID card and where to go and where
this room is to get set up, and you know, and just sort
of walk you through where the nearestbathroom is, where the bathrooms are that

(49:58):
get cleaned often than other bathrooms.That's important, and so you know,
the basic human need of the employees. And guess what, the people that
I trained got on their feet alot faster than other people. And I
actually just heard from one not verylong ago saying, like some of the

(50:19):
stuff you taught me still stays withme now. And you know she has
left the company and works somewhere else, but she's like, I think about
those things. I think about thosebasic human needs, and I'm like,
cool, I'm not going to starta training company because I'm disability. But
that's the kind of thing. It'slike, people who are working crisis don't

(50:40):
need ping pong tables, but theyneed they need netrooms they do. Yeah,
I just posted earlier today on Facebookdreaming of HI departments that advocate for
the humans in question. Oh forthe company HR is not your friend,
Yeah, it's it's not, butit could be, right, Like,

(51:01):
we could tomorrow decide to reconceive ofany of these things that are already in
place as a thing that actually supportsand advocates for humanity. And that's the
basic principle of all the work thatI do. But it's also the basic
principle of how I move through theworld. Because so little of our of

(51:22):
our community infrastructure is designed to supportpeople these days. It's really frustrating.
Well and I frankly ironic. SoI have I have. I have three
master's degrees in a doctor which justmeans I had a lot of student owns,
but one of my master's degrees wasin mental health counseling, and that

(51:45):
means I had significant overlap with humanresources. There were a lot of human
resources and like public administration, inmental health counseling all had a lot of
core curriculum overlap. And I waslike, if we're learning the same thing,

(52:06):
how is it that we're going tograduate and you're going to work for
the opposite direction that I work in? Like, I don't understand this.
And that's because I was twenty oneand then I learned about capitalism and wasn't
that fun? No, No,that's not fun. No, it wasn't
fun. But so the concept ofintensive when you were describing that, that

(52:27):
is I have two sisters and we'renot super close now because my family is
a podcast of its own. Butshepplicated your family is complicated. That's a
gentle way of wording it. Yes, but but she I mean she she
we grew up in upstate New York. She moved out to Eugene, Oregon.

(52:51):
Because that's as far as she canget it from my mother without actually
getting her feet wet, Like that'sthat's that's my family. Right there,
but she is and intensive, likehardly. She just wants to change the
system. She wants to burn itdown. She wants to storm the capitol
in a very literal way. Andlike, of the three of us,
she's the only one who's ever beenarrested for attending a protest. And that's

(53:17):
funny because she has muscular astrophy.You could break her in half by looking
at her wrong, like she's literallytripped and fallen and broken around like it's
it's She's very delicate and physically doesn'tlook like what people might think of as
an intensive but man, she'll kickyour ass given the chance. And that's

(53:38):
so her like she just I've alwaysbeen more one to like, if I
want to change, and I didwant to change the criminal justice system.
I decided, now I'm not goingto become a cop, but I'm going
to find my way in and thenI'm going to find ways to build out
the humanity within, you know,from within. And she was like,

(53:59):
oh no, let's throw the doorsto the prison open and let them all
go. And I'm like, okay, that's great, but it's never gonna
happen, so right, And there'sa certain amount of pragmatism that comes with
like, So I think a lotof intensives, especially when we're younger.
I'm definitely an intensive. A lotof us when we're younger, really do.
We're just like uncompromising, absolutely uncompromisingabout what should be and some of

(54:24):
us stay that way and some ofus, as we get older, become
crafty and strategic. And if Ihad to guess, I would guess that
you are probably an intensive who iscrafty and strategic, and you move more
slowly because you have a bunch ofmedical issues getting in your way, but
you're crafty and strategic. I thinkthat's fair. It's not words that I

(54:49):
normally think of with myself, butabsolutely, you know, I my husband
and I joke that you can takeme out of the engineering school because that
was my first three we're studying mechanicalengineering. And a lot of times I
think that way. I think verysystems and where you know, operations of
production management, OHPM? Where alongthe where's the bottleneck you know in the

(55:16):
factory? Or how do you makethings move more smoothly and more? And
so there are times where my sisterwould get frustrated with me about like why
aren't you doing more to change things. And I'm like, i am,
but not now or not here,or not in the way that you're saying.
And I'm also I'm fourteen years olderthan she is. And so especially

(55:37):
at the time when we were havingthese conversations, you know, she was
just like burn it all down,and I'm like, okay, yes,
but then what right, Right,You're like, I have an endgame and
this is my endgame, and Iwill slow myself down. So there's this
thing that I talk about tempering intensives, temper ourselves. When we have something

(55:57):
we want and we have to actless intensive, more expansive to get there,
we temper. So I talked aboutHillary Clinton as an example of this.
Right, she's clearly an intensive.If you read her valedictory speech,
it's really clear that she was anintensive. And then she went to law
school at Yale in the nineteen seventies. She could not be intensive as a
woman at law school at Yale,which is known to be a conservative graduate

(56:22):
school in the seventies if she wantedto get anything done, so she tempered
her public intensiveness in order to getthere. And so many of us,
as we get older, are likeI don't think there's anything wrong with my
intensiveness that would be being squished ifyou did. But I know that if
I want that, I have toact more expansive in this context for this

(56:44):
time, or I have to thinkmore expensively, or I have to think
more strategically. I have to Ihave to plot. I have to be
the evil vizier or the not soevil vizier drumming my fingers against each other
in the corner because I have aplan, and in your case, I'm
going to get into the criminal justicesystem and make it more just right and

(57:05):
make it more even. For me, it was a step beyond that because
I don't think criminal justice really hasanything to do with justice right. I
wanted to make it more humane.I told the story before on my show
about early on the first you know, the first week or two that I
was working in the prison. Theygive you the easy jobs just to get

(57:29):
you used to being, especially workingin a men's prison. And I was
in my mid twenties at the timeand female and just go a little overwhelming
a little bit, and so itwas my job to do intakes. But
they would give me intakes for repeatoffenders, so people who had already been

(57:50):
through this a few times. They'dbeen it, they knew what to say,
they could almost just do it themselves. But it helped me understand what
we were asking and why. Andalso, so you know, I learned
I took this later when I wentinto the crisis world of working, that
it really matters how you ask questions, like the specific words you ask.

(58:12):
And this is part of where Ilearned. It is, you know,
saying, for instance, what didyou do? You know, what crime
did you commit? They're all goingto tell you nothing because they don't they
you know, they don't know yetam I a cop? Or am I?
You know? Am I safe totell? And so instead it's what
are your charges? And that's becausebecause yeah, but what are your charges

(58:37):
is what does somebody else say youdid? That's a very different question exactly.
And so it was learning that.And so one one of the first
guys I ever dealt with just Imean, he so my husband is six
' four. This s guy dwarfedmy husband. He must have been six
seven or six eight, and justin prison life, he had been in

(58:58):
prison more than he had not hisadult life, and so he kind of
had to duck and turn sideways,let it a little to get through a
door. You know, just buildlike a brick shit house. Just just
it's kind of a scary, dude. And the corrections officers walk him in
and they handcuff him to the plasticchair he's sitting in. So I'm like,

(59:19):
great, you've just turned this intoa weapon weapon, you know,
like now it's just got a fulkrum. This is cool. Okay, okay,
And then they walk out and I'mjust alone in the room with this
guy. Okay, that's part ofthe job agreement. Okay, here we
are. And so I went throughthe paperwork, and you know, I
don't know what kind of paperwork youdealt with over time, but you learn

(59:44):
over time like whoever writes the paperworkis an the user, and so you
learn to ask questions in different orders. Like that was part of actually late
much later, the training that Iwould do is I would show them like
I ask these questions first the threequarters of the way down the page.
Then I go up and ask thetop questions. Then you know that kind

(01:00:04):
of thing. But this is whereI learned it, and you know,
early on it was you know,can you spell your first and last name
for me, and what are yourcharges? And do you have any mental
or physical diagnos season around any meds? And just whatever, and a list
of questions. And at the endof it, I just to be you

(01:00:24):
know, I always, I always, always, no matter who I was
speaking to, said thank you topeople for speaking with me because they didn't
have to. I can't reach inand take the words out of you,
you know, so thank you fortalking to me. And this guy his
name wasn't Joe, but I saidto him, Okay, I'm all done,

(01:00:46):
Joe, thank you for talking tome, Thank you for your time.
And Joe burst into tears because nobodyhad said thank you, nobody had
used his name. Oh my god. That's how inhumane are our prison system
is? Is that other inmates callyou by your last name or a nickname,
and the guards call you by yournumber number or they scan your wristband,

(01:01:09):
but there's no human so and youknow, he pulled it together pretty
quickly and he like sort of apologizedand he was like, I haven't heard
you know, my family is stoppedtalking to me. I don't get visitors
anymore. You know, when I'min court, they refer to be my
mister whatever. I haven't heard anybody, especially a woman, say my name

(01:01:32):
like that in probably ten years,and I wasn't ready, and I was
like, oh my god, Likethat's you know, it's bad, But
it's moments like that where you realizeit's really bad. And that's what I
learned then, was to start everyevery interaction with somebody knew by saying what

(01:01:54):
would you like me to call you? What do they call you in here?
Or how some form of that,because that's how inhumane our criminal justice
system is. Like I thought aboutgoing into law instead and looking at the
justice side of things, but that'sa lot of politics and I'm not good
at that. No, but Ithink you picked places where the where this

(01:02:21):
system had room for you to insertyourself, because if you're inserting yourself in
the so called justice I'm making scarequotes so called justice system. On the
legal side, you have very littleopportunity to humanize the experience. And generally

(01:02:42):
those who are trying are defense attorneyswho either have very wealthy clients or are
wildly overworked. And I didn't wantto be I didn't want to deal with
wealthy clients, and I didn't wantto be wildly overworked. Yeah, and
you know, because initially I wasgoing to go into profiling, you know,
the visit the crime scene and figureout like, based on the placement

(01:03:07):
of this pen it must have beena forty three year old white guy who's
five and a half feet toe,you know whatever. And then I realized,
oh, those are cops. Idon't want to be a cop.
Yeah, what can I do?That is like that, but not that.
Also that profiling is a lot ofguesswork, and I don't want to

(01:03:30):
live in the world to guess work. I want to actually talk to people,
right, Yeah, I mean it'sa fascinating profiling has always fascinated me
as like that's a really interesting puzzle. But I don't want to be interesting
puzzling with somebody's life, right,because it turns them into a puzzle and
not a person anymore, right,you know. And so it's you know,

(01:03:54):
it's such I walk such a delicateline with it. So like as
of for instance, you refer topeople as intensive or expansive, and on
one hand, that's jargon, andI understand the need for jargon. It

(01:04:15):
shortens the conversation, it cuts tothe bottom line, and it means Okay,
we don't have to repeat the long, full definition. Now we could
just say this one word and everybodyagrees on what it means and we're cool.
On the other hand, when Iwrote reports and when I testified in
court, I avoided jargon at allcosts because it was really important to me

(01:04:39):
to make sure each person was there. And you know, so it's the
difference between talking about the concept ofan inmate. I'll say that that's fine,
But if I'm writing about you,or if I'm speaking about you in
court, I don't ever say theinmate, right. You know, it's
a it's a it's a tricky thing. And so this is the end of

(01:04:59):
the idea of applying words to ourselves. You know, I, you know,
crafty, fair, I could becrafty. I don't think of myself
in that way, partially because I'moutspoken, sometimes to the detriment of myself
and those around me. Strategic Iused to be. Now my strategy is

(01:05:23):
to get through each day because I'vemy body hates itself, and so I'm
not looking anymore at how am Igoing to change the world. I'm looking
at how am I going to livethrough today? But those are words that
I could see applying to myself.But I struggled initially when you said,

(01:05:44):
like, this is probably a thingyou are, I was like, only
because I don't think of myself inthat way anymore. But yeah, I
think that's fair. I think evennow, my experience of you is that
when you are faced with a problemwe especially if somebody has pissed you off,
especially if somebody is threatening someone youcare about, that crafty strategic side

(01:06:05):
is still there. Sometimes you're usingit to get through your day. And
I think that's true for a lotof intensives in a lot of different context.
Sometimes we have to be crafty andstrategic about the medical system, or
our own bodies, or our ownbrains. In my case, it's mostly
my brain that's out to get me, and it's like sometimes the strategy piece

(01:06:26):
of my brain has to be fullyoccupied with managing my brain, which is
very meta but also effective. Sowe'll take it. It's it's silencing the
brain wheastles just for a second.Yes, yes, that's it. So
then I I think I understand whatyou mean when you say intensive. How
do you explain it to someone ifyou think that they are expansive expansives are

(01:06:49):
the slow and study. So theeasiest metaphor is the tortoise and the hair
story. The hair is an intensive, the tortoise isn't expansive. So expansives
are the one foot the other foot, one foot the other foot, even
study reliable planning that like things tobe predictable. They don't particularly like wide

(01:07:12):
emotional expression, wide ranges of emotionalexpression. So an intensive will when they're
excited or they're not excited. Youcan tell because an intensive who's excited will
be like yay. An intensive who'ssad will be like, oh my god,
I can't move, I can't breathe. This is terrible, right,
And an expensive will be excited likewill mean the same level of excitement that
I just expressed for an intensive,but we'll say, wow, that's great.

(01:07:35):
I'm so glad to hear it.I didn't you. I didn't have
any idea that I was entering intoa session of marriage counseling. But do
go on. If you, asan expansive, don't understand, especially as
an intensive, if you, asan intensive don't understand that, Wow,

(01:07:55):
that's really great. I'm glad tohear it means the same thing as when
you say yeah, then you constantlyfeel like you have to impress upon that
expansive how important or how momentous orhow whatever this is, because they clearly
don't get it, because they're notmatching your emotional tenor. And in fact,
expansives, if you imagine like anX axis, baseline, expansives go

(01:08:16):
like one unit up and one unitdown and that's the whole range, and
intenses go ten units up and tenunits down and that's their range. So
if somebody has gone to one hundredpercent of their range and they barely look
like they've moved off the baseline,you have to know kind of intellectually how
to translate that, Yeah, that'syeah, this is mirriage therapy. So

(01:08:38):
I am the I am the intensivein this scenario. In my husband is
the expansive that that he is justhe's a kind you know, I mean,
he's a I think he feels justas strongly as I do, but
he doesn't express it and he doesn'tlike he gets stressed out when I get
wound up, and it's like I'mnot yelling at you. And it's been

(01:09:01):
an interesting process because I was ableto mask for a long time for thirty
some years, I was able tomask as an expansive for the sake of
my relationship, for the sake ofmy family, for the sake of my
job. Like I could never returnto forensic psychology now because I'd be on

(01:09:25):
the stand telling them what I actuallythought, which is kind of not the
way the justice system wants to work. But for the first thirty six years
of my life, I could mask, and I knew when I had to,
and I knew when I didn't haveto, and I knew when I
could, like offer a disclaimer,like, Hey, I'm going to tell

(01:09:47):
you a story about my day.I'm going to sound like I'm really upset.
I'm fine. I'm not mad atyou, I'm not mad at anybody.
But here we go. And thenat thirty six, I developed epilepsy.
And the epilepsy the lesion in mybrain. I'm pointing as though anybody
can see it. I know,but it's right. It's right my right

(01:10:08):
frontal lobe, which is where it'swhere you're executive functioning sits, and so
your ability to form a plan,follow it through and then assess how well
it is. And it's also whereimpulse control lies and I have a lesion,
a scar on my brain right there, and so now shit just comes

(01:10:31):
out of my face sometimes like Idon't you know, and the way I
express myself, like I sound likeI'm pissed or I sound like I'm ecstatic
when sometimes I'm really not. ButI don't know how else to get the
message across, you know. Ialso have a degree of it's not as
bad as it used to be.I used to have from when I was

(01:10:54):
thirty two. I was in acolumn collecting diagnoses and when I woke up,
I had complete a phasia, whichis no words. I didn't understand
speech and I couldn't come out in. Most of them have come back,
but it's a struggle. Like everysentence I work through, I'm only a
word or two ahead. Normal peoplecan go like a sentence at a time,

(01:11:15):
and I'm like shoving through. Andthat's why I pause and I hesitate,
and I getting a lot of umsand uhs and stuttering, and that's
just how it rolls. But it'sharder for me to find exactly the right
words now. It's harder for meto explain to somebody here's what I need

(01:11:35):
to do today, or here's howI feel right now, but I can
convey it in an emotional way withmy tone of speech and with hand gestures,
sometimes very massachusetin hand gestures, andsometimes just flailing around whatever. And

(01:11:56):
I've had to learn how to explainall of this for my husband, who
is still the same person. Roughly, he's he's always been more contained,
and he still is more contained.And so for him, he's looking at
me like, I don't know howto I don't know how to deal with
you right now, and I'm likeme too, So it's that explaining to

(01:12:23):
him that, like I will tellyou when I am mad at you,
I will tell you when I ammad at me, whatever the case is.
But just because I'm like, youneed to tell me that you can't
handle my swings of emotion right now, because it's not I don't have bipolar
disorder where I'm out of control ofit. That would be a different situation.

(01:12:46):
This is just how I am communicating. I could stop, but it
would take effort. It would fine, that's fair, you do, you
do that in a relationship. Butthe effort is also on his side.
He needs to tell me when I'mbeing too much. So one of the
other things about expansives is that theyare not as good at direct communication as

(01:13:08):
intensives are. And what you're describingis actually really common, even in situations
where the intensive has not been throughall of the various medical things that you've
been through, where we just getexcited and we get loud and we get
gesticulated, and that's just who weare and how we are. And you

(01:13:28):
can tell that we're engaged and excitedabout something because our pitch goes up,
and our volume goes up, andour hands start to go and our faces
start to go. And a lotof expansives find out overwhelming for one reason
or another. Either they find itoverwhelming because it's just a lot of input,
or they find it overwhelming because theyinterpret it to mean things about our
emotional state that are not true,but it's kind of on this deep,

(01:13:50):
subconscious level and they can't unhook thosethings. And I literally have suggested,
both to bosses and employees and tofamily members that if the intensive person needs
to be like that and communicate somethingand the expansive person can't handle it,

(01:14:11):
that they should literally stand fifty feetapart or twenty whatever you've got right,
just stand further apart. Then theintensive person will still be as expressive,
the expansive person will not be soclose, and so it won't be such
a sensory assault. And you cancommunicate that way, or you can have
these are all things like call buffers. Right. Another option is that you
can make a voice memo and thensend it to auto dot AI and it

(01:14:33):
can be transcribed and audit is prettygood. It's not perfect, but it's
pretty good, and then the otherperson can read it, just read it,
and if they need to check theaudio, they can check the audio.
But it creates this space where wecan be intensive without trying to make
ourselves smaller or quieter or less,and the other person can receive us at

(01:14:54):
a pitch and volume and magnitude thatthey can that they can in j I
mean Willan and I went through fairlydifficult phase about a year and a half
ago and before we could get intotherapy, which everybody who's listening, please

(01:15:16):
just just get into therapy, justdo just just just do it. Trust
me that it's worth the money tohave somebody whose job it is to be
on your side. That's an excitingthing, but there's usually a wait time
and in that wait time, neitherof us wanted to say or do anything
to cause more damage. But sometimesthings can't wait, and so we do

(01:15:43):
some of the You know, thereare tricks and tips in marriage therapy,
such as set a timer. Eachof you gets five minutes and that's it.
Write things down, you know,that sort of thing. And what
Willan and I started doing was textingeach other even if we were in the
same room, yep, because thenit's forcing both of us to think about

(01:16:06):
our words. And you only getthe words, you don't get the inflection,
and then you can ask what doyou mean by this word, rather
than taking the pitch and tenor ofthe expression and making assumptions about it.
Right. Yeah, I have donethat with a lot of my partners in

(01:16:27):
my history. Is you know,just text just I'm just going to text
you, and it's I know it'sa medium that a lot of people find
depersonalizing, but I find that sometimesit's the best way to really be deliberate
about my communication, to really beable to look at to type it,
to read it back, to belike wow, that could be misinterpreted.

(01:16:48):
Hit delete, delete, delete,delete, delete delete, start over until
I have something that works well.And it's never intended at at least buy
me, buy any marriage or othercounselors that I know. It's not intended
to replace spoken communication. It's intendedto open the door. It's intended to

(01:17:14):
allow you a bridge until you develophabits that each of you can tolerate.
Yeah. I mean, there's somuch we can do other than asking the
other person to be to strain themselvesto be small and Expansives are brilliant,
often at things like spreadsheets. Theylove spreadsheets, they love lists. They

(01:17:40):
are often the people who have acute little ruler with a colored pen and
they use the ruler to cross offthings on their lists. It's a perfectly
straight those people. And I don'tunderstand that. I look at bullet journaling
as like, wow, that looksreally interesting. No, I will never
ever maintain a system with that manyrules. That's just not how I function.
And what my hope is is thatusing these categories, because you're right,

(01:18:08):
the categories can be a trap,right, like call it. The
category can trap us into forgetting thehumanity behind the category, or it can
be a useful, a useful toolfor helping us broadly understand what we might
expect from someone else. But myhope is that by using these categories,

(01:18:28):
we come to appreciate each other.I am not. If you hand me
a stack of disorganized paper, itwill go in a pile in the corner
and it will just stay in thecorner forever. I can't. I can't
with piles of paper. But thepartner that I live with loves stacks.
It loves like making smaller piles outof big piles, and the smaller piles
I'll have categories, and they loveto figure out where to put the pieces

(01:18:51):
of those, And I'm like,that's great. Can you be in charge
of that for our household? BecauseI'm not going to do it. And
that's the magic thing, I thinkis finding finding the brilliant in the things
that you can't do, rather thanspending time beating yourself up. But the

(01:19:14):
fact that you can't do them,you're not broken. I mean I am,
but also but not for that,But not for that. I have
a we're coming up on an hour. I don't want to keep you because
we could just keep going, butI don't want to keep you too too
long. But I have it.It's an entirely different question that I have.

(01:19:35):
I often ask people people who workas spiritual advisors. I don't remember
the term use ministers that the I'man ordained minister, but I don't work
in parishes. Often when people hearme say I'm a minister, they think
of, you know, standing upin the pulpit every Sunday. And I
did that for four years and thenI didn't do that anymore. So I

(01:19:57):
sometimes guest preach. I definitely workwith kind greations as a consultant, but
a lot of my spiritual and religiouswork now is very informal. I cooderate
a big discord of trans masculine folks, and in that discord, there was
somebody who knew that I was aminister and who pinged me the other day
and was like, Hey, canI talk to you about something? I
don't know how to talk to aboutthis experience I'm having. And that's that's

(01:20:21):
not atypical at all. That's partof part of the question that I had.
But also like, do you havepeople that apologize for swearing around you
all the time all the time,especially if they don't know me? And
I've just offhandedly mentioned, you know, it's funny. When I was in
the pulpit. I had business cardsthat said rev on them, and I

(01:20:45):
sometimes wore clericals in public, andpeople would constantly forget that it was the
nineteen hundreds and would think it waslike eighteen twenty, and they would they
would be like, Oh, Ican't talk about sex, are you?
I'm glad to have sex. CanI swear in front of you? And
or they would just assume they couldn'tswear in front of me. I had
someone apologize the other day for sayinghell on a phone call with me.

(01:21:11):
I will tell you that most ofthe clergy I know swear like sailors,
including myself, and people just don't. I mean, speaking of people that
people think aren't people, clergy areprobably right at the top of that list,
right, you sleep underneath the pulpitand you eat dust bunnies or something
like. You don't have a life, you don't have a brain, you
don't have a function outside of yourjob. Not only that, but people

(01:21:35):
people have retained a very nineteenth centurysense of what it means to be clergy,
and so this idea that we haveto be absolutely flawlessly impeccable. Examples
of some kind of antiquated morality,and also that we are like people people

(01:21:57):
are. I mean, the wholething with clergy sexual assault is terrible,
and people are are weirded out.There's some juna se quoth thing about clergy
and sex that people are just notusually willing to approach in a healthy way.
And I think as a culture we'restill working through that. But my

(01:22:17):
denomination is Unitarian Universalism, and wedo healthy sexuality education, and we are
working hard to become better at thethings we're not good at or that we
haven't been historically good at. Iwon't say that we are perfect at all.
We are definitely not, but we'reworking on it actively. We're mostly
in consensus that that's the work weshould be doing. So it's I often

(01:22:42):
have to say so I no longerlead with the minister when I introduce myself.
I don't usually Today I did,which was funny because I didn't rehearse
that. But I don't usually leadwith I'm a minister. I usually lead
with something else. I work withlarge organizations I work with. When I
was still in the pulpit, Iused to say I'd sit down on an
airplane next to someone if I didn'tfeel like being a minister that day.

(01:23:03):
For the person I was sitting nextto, I would I would just say,
I, you know, I hadsmall nonprofits. That's what I do,
and it's true. But people,yeah, people have this very you
know, especially women ministers. AndI'm not a woman, but people read
me that way. People approach meas though I'm a nineteenth century schoolmarm slash

(01:23:32):
clergy person and I'm going to youknow, whack their knuckles for saying hell,
like, I don't know what kindof life you think I lead or
who you think I talked to.But that's not how it works. I
mean, fully, there's something thereare certain categories in you know, my

(01:23:53):
husband's is a teacher, and there'sdefinitely an assumption that teachers they live under
their desks and they eat chalk,that's how they live. And hearing them
sway, you know whatever, that'sthat's wild to them. And you know,
when I was that people make assumptionsabout people in healthcare, people make
assumptions on you know, a lotof and there is this this judginess that

(01:24:17):
come, you know, they rushto judge if you don't meet their ideal
of things. And it was interestingbecause my husband so two years ago worked
at a college all the time,and I don't know whether he ever.

(01:24:39):
He never swore at a student likebecause he, you know, the expansive
thing. He doesn't get outwardly ragefilled very often. But I don't know
if he swore around his students ornot. It didn't really matter. They
were all adults, right. Butlast year he switched to teaching advice,

(01:25:00):
which is like spitting distance from ourhouse. And he made a point pretty
early on. Uh, there wasa kid who was acting out. And
when I say kid, I meananybody under the age of twenty five.
There's a kid who's acting out.And William pulled pulled him into the hallway
and was just like, look,you know, I know you don't want

(01:25:20):
to be here, and I knowyou've got stuff going on, but this
is what we need to do rightnow, and if you like this,
the whole classroom needs to do it. And so if you can't, you
know, you need to find someplace else to be. And the kid
responded, well, that fucking sucks, and William sort of without missing me,
he said, yes, it doesfucking suck. Welcome to life,

(01:25:43):
like a lot of life does.And the kid was blown away that a
teacher said that, and another teacherhappened to be in the hallway at the
time and was like, you know, and but the answer was what the
kid was going through did suck it? Did fucking suck in? And acknowledging
like yet it does, and you'reright, well, we got to do

(01:26:04):
it anyway, and so can areyou able to return to the classroom or
do you need to go to theyou know, the nurse or the counselor
or whatever. And in willm camehome and he was like, I don't
even know, like I swore thekid today and I'm like, no,
you didn't you know before you thekid? Yeah, exactly, I'm like,
before you even told the story.I'm like, no, you didn't,

(01:26:25):
Like I know, you don't evenswear at me, like and you
should at times, but it wasexactly that is it was, you're speaking
to the kid, you're reflecting thekid's language back to show that you've heard
them. But there's that sort ofI mean, especially living in New England,
there's that sort of puritanical morality oflike teachers are held to a different

(01:26:48):
level and I'm like, what doyou want your teachers to be paragons or
perfection or do you want them tobe empathic beings that can connect with your
kid? I mean, do youwant them to be paraguns of perfection or
do you want them to be effective? Yeah, it's funny. I have
a story to tell you about that. So when when I was in the

(01:27:11):
middle of high school, about halfwaythrough high school, I was hospitalized for
suicidal Tennessee's and depression, and itwas a three week hospitalization. It was
actually one of the best things I'veever done. Don't knock it. If
it's what you need, it's agood place to be, or it can
be if you're in the right program. And before that program started, I
had never sworn. I had justelected not to. I was like,

(01:27:33):
words have power, words have meaning. If I use these words all the
time, then they won't have thepower I want them to have. So
I'm not gonna And I already hada reputation for being a goodie two shoes
for like eighteen thousand other reasons,so it didn't phase anybody who knew me.
But when I went into the hospitalafter I'd been there a couple of
days, and you know, hospitalinpatient mental health support for folks who haven't

(01:27:55):
been there. Usually involves a mixof one on one time with psych techs
and therapists or psychologists, and grouptherapy and sometimes some other things coloring and
sometimes coloring, sometimes occupational therapy that'sactually useful, and sometimes coloring, and
really bad food, especially if it'sin an actual hospital, really bad food.
Anyway, So it happened that therewere seven adolescents on the ward.

(01:28:20):
It was a twenty five bed ward, but there were seven of us who
were adolescents, and we bonded prettyfast, which is, I guess unusual.
The staffhold us it was unusual,and we had all come in within
a few days of each other,and we were in group therapy. And
after a couple of days, Irealized that if I didn't start to swear,
I wasn't going to have the credibilityI needed to be effective in that

(01:28:42):
context. And that's how I startedswearing, because I realized that even though
I had seen a lot and donea lot and hung out with a lot
of people, nobody was going tobelieve me if I wasn't using the language
that the people around me were using. So I started swearing, Yeah,
and here you are at twenty one, still swearing, uh huh yeah.

(01:29:09):
But it's like, you know,I got in the habit of not swearing
when I was testifying in court onthe regular because you're not supposed to,
you know, there's there's all thesesort of there's no like laws against it.
You're just not supposed to and yourgive, especially as a woman,

(01:29:30):
given less credence by the jurors ifyou do. And then as soon as
I left that world and entered intothe world of crisis work, these people
are like active in crisis and theyneed you to not screw around, and
they need to not feel judged.They need to be able to say whatever
they got to say in that moment, and so that means sometimes swearing right

(01:29:56):
back at them, right. Theyneed to be met there, right,
yeah. Yeah. The minute Ileft. I did something similar when I
went into the parish because especially inNew England, especially someone perceived as a
woman, there wasn't really room forme to swear. But as soon as
I left parish work, all thosewalls came down because the work that I

(01:30:16):
do in the world now involves meetingpeople who have felt pent up all of
their lives often and they need tohave a space and a person and a
way of thinking about themselves that isn'tconstricted like that. It's like such an
artificial constriction. We don't need thatone. I could list dozens that we
don't need. But you know,like I said, yes, we do

(01:30:40):
have we do have time constraints.So are you are you? Are you?
Are you doing what you want todo when you grow up? That's
such a fascinating question. Recently,I've had a lot of trouble with my
marketing, and so I have periodicfantasies of running away to the woods and
just being a painter and a poet. Poetry is my first language. Everything
else is modified out of poetry.But but insofar as there's a job in

(01:31:05):
the world that I would be goodat that I want to do, yeah,
I mean this framework came to mekind of out of nowhere, and
it changes people's lives. It changespeople's lives in five minutes. The moment
that you had just a few minutesago, where you were, where you
were saying, this is marriage counseling. It's it's that kind of thing.

(01:31:28):
But it's that kind of thing inevery context, including at work, where
people spend most of their time andmost of their misery, and so I
would love for this to become bigfor me to be doing, you know,
more public more visibility, more talks, more, more trainings more.
I want people to have this toolbecause it changes lives for the better.

(01:31:56):
The idea of being uncompromising about whatshould be that baffles me right now.
Like that's why I put the firsthalf hour specifically connected to this episode,
because this episode feels like there's somuch hope and optimism wrapped up in it,

(01:32:24):
and I want that. I don'tknow how to get that, but
I see it, and so itmust be possible, right right, right,
So Leela, thank you both foryour time in recording, but also

(01:32:45):
in the times afterwards when I've justfallen apart and you've borne witness. It
matters, it really does. Thankyou guys for way to thank you for
your patience, and thank you forlistening now that I have something to say.

(01:33:08):
I don't cry, I don't break, but I did here because that's
my truth. That's my life rightnow. So if it made you cry,
if it made you break, well, welcome to my life right now,
I guess, and we'll figure itout. We have to figure it

(01:33:31):
out. There's not a choice butto figure it out. I just I
don't know how right now. Butwhat I do know is that I'm not
totally alone. Like I'm physically alone. I don't see people, I don't
have visitors or get togethers or whatever, but I have people to check in

(01:33:56):
on me, and I have peoplethat care about me. And that's the
first step. And you do too, like you may not know you do,
but talk to me about it,and then you will. You matter,