A Renaissance of Our Own: The Stories We Tell Ourselves with Rachel Cargle

Can grief be an opportunity for growth and self-understanding?

The answer, of course, is yes: but it’s a bit more complex than that. This week, author, philanthropist, activist Rachel Cargle on survival optimism, the resilience narrative, and why questioning the stories you tell yourself - with curiosity and kindness - is a powerful path of healing. 

 

In this episode we cover: 

 

• How was grief modeled for you growing up, and how does that affect later grief?
• Can your memory of childhood grief be… entirely wrong? (or at least, inaccurate)
• Can you do grief wrong?
• The difference between curiosity and judgment
• Is it ok to feel relieved when a sick person dies? 
• Rachel’s new book, A Renaissance of Our Own

 

We're re-releasing some of our favorite episodes from the first 3 seasons. This episode was originally recorded in 2023.

 

Looking for a creative exploration of grief? Check out the best selling Writing Your Grief course here.

Related episodes:

Gabor Mate on why we celebrate trauma, aka: resilience 

Illustrator Aubrey Hirsch on the power of storytelling as an act of healing

About our guest:

Rachel Cargle is a writer, entrepreneur and philanthropic innovator. Her new memoir, A Renaissance of Our Own, centers the reimagining of womanhood, solidarity and self. In 2018 she founded The Loveland Foundation, Inc., a non-profit offering free therapy to Black women and girls. 

 

She’s also the founder of Elizabeth’s Bookshop & Writing Centre, a literacy space designed to amplify, celebrate and honor the work of writers who are often excluded from traditional cultural, social and academic canons. For more on her many endeavors, visit rachelcargle.com.

 

About Megan: 

Psychotherapist Megan Devine is one of today’s leading experts on grief, from life-altering losses to the everyday grief that we don’t call grief. Get the best-selling book on grief in over a decade, It’s Ok that You’re Not OK, wherever you get books. Find Megan @refugeingrief

 

Additional Resources:

Read Rachel’s new book - A Renaissance of Our Own

 

The Great Unlearn – a self-paced, donation-based learning community

 

The Great Unlearn for Young Learners – an online learning space for young folks launching in 2022

 

Want to talk with Megan directly? Join our patreon community for live monthly Q&A grief clinics: your questions, answered. Want to speak to her privately? Apply for a 1:1 grief consultation here. 

 

Check out Megan’s best-sellin

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I started to question all the narrative I'd been telling myself,
Like what else have I been moving through the world?
What stories do I usually tell when people ask me
about my life? And how true are they? And I
got the chance to ask my mom a lot of
questions about what I understood to be true about myself,
about her, about my dad, about my family, and some
things just absolutely were not true.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
This is It's okay that you're not okay, and I'm
your host, Megan Divine. This week on the show, The
Incredible Magical Rachel Cargle on the time travel portal that
grief opens up in your life and the opportunity for healing, growth,
and curiosity alongside whatever pain you're in. Settle in Friends,

(00:41):
Rachel Cargle coming up right after this first break before
we get started. Two quick notes. One, this episode is
an encore performance. I'm on breaking on a giant new project,

(01:01):
so we're releasing a mix of our favorite episodes from
the first three seasons of the show. Some of these
conversations you might have missed in your original seasons, and
some shows just truly deserve multiple listens so that you
capture all of the goodness. Second note, while we cover
a lot of emotional, relational territory and our time here together,

(01:21):
this show is not a substitute for skilled support or
a license mental health provider, or for professional supervision related
to your work. Take what you learn here, take your
thoughts and your reflections out into your world and talk
about it. Hey, friends, I get to talk with the
most amazing people because of this show. It is a

(01:45):
lot of work to bring these conversations to you. But
every time I sit down in front of the microphone
and get a chance to connect with someone whose work,
whose being I have loved and admired from afar, it's
just so special. Rachel Cargle is a writer, entrepreneur, and
philanthropic innovator. Her new memoir, A Renaissance of Our Own

(02:08):
is a reimagining of womanhood, solidarity, and self and explores
one of my very favorite topics, how we are in
relationship with ourselves and with each other. In twenty eighteen,
she founded the Loveland Foundation, a nonprofit offering free therapy
to black women and girls. Rachel is also the founder
of Elizabeth's Bookshop and Writing Center, a literacy space designed

(02:31):
to amplify, celebrate, and honor the work of writers who
are often excluded from traditional cultural, social, and academic canons. Honestly,
Rachel has created so many things and opened so many
important and powerful conversations it would take me most of
the show to list them all. I want to get
right into this conversation, but some of the top themes

(02:53):
in our conversation this week, Rachel and I get into
this really nuanced discussion of childhood grief and how it
intersects with any new loss in your life. I hear
this sort of stuff a lot, right, like when your
parent dies, or friend dies, somebody close to you dies,
and people say, oh, you're only having a hard time
now because you have all of this unhealed grief and

(03:13):
trauma in your past, right, And it's always said with
that sort of smarmy, snarky, condescending tone, right, It's such
toxic shaming trash. Rachel and I really get into the
difference between judgment and curiosity here and how, yes, older
grief really can come back around, but it's not wrong

(03:35):
that that happens. It's not a sign that you didn't
work hard enough to process your life. We get into
what Rachel calls her childhood's survival optimism and how that
relates to a really sort of surface unnuanced idea of resilience.
We talk about her father's death when she was a
child and her mom's recent death and why Rachel says

(03:58):
she feels grateful for the chance to understand herself in
this new time of her life and that it's terrifying
at the very same time. We get into a lot
of both and in this conversation, I bet this episode
is going to give you a whole lot of aha moments.
I want to hear about them. I really do. So

(04:21):
be sure to comment on social media posts with clips
of the episode and leave a review of the show
wherever you get your podcasts. Reviews are a great way
to tell me how the season's guests are affecting you,
and it encourages others to listen. So this is like
a win win for everybody. All Right, on with the
show with this week's guest, Rachel Cargle. Rachel, I am

(04:47):
so excited to have you here with me today, so
thank you for making the time.

Speaker 1 (04:52):
I'm excited to be chatting with you as well.

Speaker 2 (04:54):
So I've known your work for a while and one
of the things that has drawn me and recently is
you speaking about your mom's illness, the last few weeks
of her life and her death. So if it's okay
with you, there are so many places we could start
our conversation, but I'd love to start with your mom.

Speaker 1 (05:13):
Yeah, my mom. She passed away on November fourth of
twenty twenty two. And it has surprisingly been such a
big part of my work. You know. Obviously it shows
up in the day to day in our bodies, in

(05:36):
the way that we can pay attention or not what
we pay attention to grief and death. Particularly in my experience,
the death of a parent just completely gives you a
new lens, a new calibration in the world. So since
that time, it has been just an unfolding of a
new version of myself, that is a woman in the

(05:59):
world world without her mother. And it's been such a
particular experience so far.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
You wrote the way she raised me was an ongoing
invitation to see what I was capable of.

Speaker 1 (06:15):
Yeah, that's very true, and I feel so grateful for
that because I see all the ways it shows up
for me. Now. I've been talking a lot about the
gifts of grieving, and there's the obvious devastation and excruciating
experience of moving through life after loss. But I've also

(06:39):
seen so many gifts of it, including seeing all the
ways that my mother is in me without her being here,
because then I'd be like, oh, you know, it's something
she just said recently, or something she just reminded me of.
Or I noticed that I rest my hands the way
my mom rested her hands. I noticed that I make
the same noise in my mom used to make when

(07:00):
she would yawn. When I yawn, sometimes I look in
the mirror and I see her face in my face,
and it is really cool, particularly the quote you mentioned
about how she really always pushed me to see what
I was capable of, and I'm seeing now the ways
that I do that every day, and that was planted

(07:22):
by her.

Speaker 2 (07:24):
So many good structural, foundational self things, it sounds like,
really came through your relationship with your mom.

Speaker 1 (07:32):
Yeah, you know, my mom had a disability, so she
never worked, not that disability means not working, but with
her particular disability as well as her raising me and
many other children who weren't necessarily my siblings, but people
she just cared for or she ended up adopting, she
stayed home, and that meant I spent a lot of

(07:53):
time with my mom. And I'm realizing as I talk
to more and more friends, that wasn't their experience remember
ever having a babysitter. I don't. I can't name or
have reference to any one time of being babysat by someone,
aside from like spending time with my grandma or my
older sisters keeping me for something, for my mom to
go out for a run. So I really spent a

(08:16):
lot of time with my mother, for better and for worse.
And some of the for better is that we had
a lot of time for her to seed into me
the things that she found to be important. And I
really value you now getting to see the fruits of
that within me, as well as the things that she
seated in me that don't resonate with me, and me

(08:36):
being able to say, oh, that was mom, Okay, I
can let that go. That isn't that's not mine to carry.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
Yeah, to see the me and the not.

Speaker 1 (08:43):
Me Yep, Yeah, that's that's something particular. That's a particular
gift that comes with losing someone, because grief is also
an identity crisis of who am I when I'm not
in direct relationship with that person here and now in
the same way I've always been. And I think there's
some beautiful realizations about who we are to ourselves as

(09:04):
well as the celebration of who we were to the
person that we lost. And I think that that has
been a really wonderful unfolding as well to witness.

Speaker 2 (09:17):
How was grief model for you growing up?

Speaker 1 (09:19):
It wasn't. It wasn't at all, and I'm really struggling
with it now. I lost my father when I was eleven.
I was closer to my dad than I was to
my mom at that time. And it also is an
adulthood where you recognize how much you romanticize things, and
so I think I romanticized my dad a lot, because
of course I was with my mom all the time,
and I was like, Oh, my dad's so much more fun.

(09:41):
And I'm sure he got to be the fun one
because he wasn't doing all the day to day things
with me. But I'll say that after he passed, I
just didn't have time to grieve. I remember he was
sick for a long time before he passed away too.
It wasn't sudden or anything, and when he passed, he
was at a hospital and they called the house to

(10:04):
say that he had passed away. And I answered the
phone and they just told me. They didn't ask for
my mom or anything. They were just like, hi, this
is the hospital calling to say that Larry Brooks has died.
And I was like, okay. I was eleven years old.
My mom was upstairs sleeping in the bed. As I said,
my mom had polio, so she couldn't run downstairs and
pick up the phone. I was going to be the
one who was going to pick up the phone regardless.

(10:26):
But just thinking of that now as an adult, how
hard that must have been me. And I remember still
going to soccer camp the next day and thinking I
want to go, and my mom taking me and letting
me go, and how life just went on after that. Really,

(10:48):
I didn't have time or space to grieve. There were
so many other fires that my mom had to be
putting out. I was always the most functional of anyone
else in our home, and so I was either being
a involuntary cope to a lot of the kids she
was raising, or I just wasn't getting the support that
I needed because I was the most functioning, so I
was the least to be concerned about, and so I

(11:09):
really didn't have the guidance that was necessary as a
child to acknowledge feelings, feel the feelings, and ultimately grieve.
And so right now at thirty four, with my mother passing,
I'm invested in this also being a space to be
in relationship with the feelings that never got to have

(11:32):
a voice or a space during my father's passing as well.
So that lack of model of grieving I am now redefining,
or I should say, defining what grief will look like
for me in my life and in my body and
in my world and in my work. And I feel very,

(11:52):
very very grateful to have the time and space and
intention do that, because I know so many of us
who are grieving don't.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
Yeah, as I was sort of reading through your collected
works and articles and listening to you speak getting ready
for our time here together, you said something about that
you're only now starting to look at the pain points
of your childhood. And this is true, right, like new
fresh loss intersects with older losses, and like as a therapist,

(12:22):
I mean think sometimes the language can be really shaming
and punitive. We're like, oh, that's coming up because you
didn't deal with it instead of Wow, that's interesting, Like
all of these channels of love and relatedness, they go
back and forth in us, like curiosity instead of condemnation
for the things that we had to survive and the
models that we saw. But I love what you said

(12:43):
about this, this childhood loss and childhood grief coming back
and intersecting. You said, the consciousness of this in the
midst of the grief has thrust me into an unexpected
era of reckoning and healing. I'm honored and grateful for
the chance to understand myself and it's terrifying all at
the same time.

Speaker 1 (13:02):
You know, we have so many moments like this in
our world. Imagine how we must have felt learning how to.

Speaker 2 (13:06):
Walk back terrifying and excited to.

Speaker 1 (13:09):
School for the first time. You know, we don't always
remember those feelings, but it's things that we've had to
come up against. And when we're younger, the exciting part
of it gets more attention, Like you're going to school
for the first time, you're walking, and it's celebrated. But
as you get older and there's less celebration of firsts,
or there's less we often give us ourselves less room

(13:31):
to grow or develop to be new, to learn something new.
It becomes this judgment, like you said, this lack of curiosity,
this condemnation for how come you didn't know? How come
you haven't figured it out? And so I really started
having a consciousness about how my childhood might have played
into things, maybe about a year before my mom passed,

(13:53):
so I was able to ask her a few questions
that gave me, you know, gave me some tools to
continue to build my pathway towards my healing, which I'm
certainly still in the beginning phases and in the midst
of now. But I've been thinking about a quote that says,
you know, death isn't an end of life, It's a

(14:13):
part of life. And so this cycle, this moving towards
another part of life and it not just being this
end date also is making me think about obviously the
visual of it seeing my mother actually pass away, but
also the journey towards healing, and how much I would
have loved for my mom to continue healing up until

(14:34):
the very moment. It's worth it up until the very
moment for you to have clarity, for you to have consideration.
And I'm grateful for being ushered into this journey. I'm
grateful for what my mom was able to add. I'm
grateful for going through her stuff and finding small things
that you know. Just this morning I was going through
I'm back in Ohio and in my hometown. This is
my first time back since my mom passed, and this

(14:56):
is my first time going through a lot of the documents.
And I found a college transcript from my mom when
she was in college. And what I found was and
my mom didn't graduate, She only did one semester and
her grade in early child development, which is what she
was studying, but it was like an early child development course,

(15:18):
and it's what my mom loved. Like my mom loved kids.
If you were under the age of seven, you were
her favorite person, regardless of who you are, where you were.
And even in the week of her passing, she kept
going in and out of consciousness, and whenever she'd come out,
she'd say, where's that room with all the kids? Like,
I really think her heaven is just a room full
of kids, because she kept mentioning that, and I think

(15:39):
she was kind of going in and out of it
or like previewing it, and so I really think that
that was her thing. But Anyways, on her transcript, she
got an F in early Childhood Development. And what I
love about that is that my mom still stayed true
to the thing that she loved even if the authority
that be didn't give her a good grade in it,

(16:01):
and it also or she didn't do the work to
get a good grade in it. But also how hard
she pushed me about grades and things and how I
want to be like, we have some things to talk about.
You actually got an F and you like, were fine,
and you moved on and so these this healing comes
from knowledge. It's a framework that I use in my

(16:25):
anti racism work. Knowledge, empathy and action equals allyship. That's
what I use that formula a lot. But also this
knowledge of who my mom might have been at this
younger time is pouring into my empathy towards her, because
lately it's been a lot of anger, a lot of
the grief anger, a lot of just anger from things
that I'm learning that happened or didn't happen for me

(16:46):
in my childhood. And it offers me this level of
intimacy that is a material of my healing, and it's
necessary and I could only touch that once she passed away.
These are things that she that my mom's privacy wouldn't
have allowed her to necessarily share with me. But that
as I know this, I understand my mother more, which

(17:08):
allows me to understand myself more, which allows me to heal.
And so that's again one of the some of the
goodness of grief is that you have access to this
person in a way that you might not have ever
had before, and it gives you. I feel closer than
ever to my mother, I really do.

Speaker 2 (17:22):
There's that thread of both and yep that I've been
watching unfold as you've been talking about this and listening
to you now talk about this, that like all of
these things get to be true at the same time.
M hmm.

Speaker 1 (17:35):
Yeah, they have to be.

Speaker 2 (17:36):
They have to they have to be because they are
right like this this is enough for like discussion, like exactly,
there's this allowing that this is actually the way that
things are, that both and is the state of existence.

Speaker 1 (17:48):
It's a place for us to be kind to ourselves.
It's an opportunity for us to be gentle with ourselves.
And when we condemn ourselves to say, but it's this,
we can say, and what else is it? And where
else is their goodness, and where else is their relief?
And where else is their possibility. It's really a practice
of kindness to ourselves when we give enough nuance and
breath to a conversation to be both and and that

(18:12):
also allows us to lean into one or another whenever
we want, knowing that there's the ebb and flow that
you'll go to the other side at some point. So
when I feel, you know, whatever shame I feel about
the relief I feel because I no longer have this
sick mother to have to worry about and have a
loop of concern in my head at all times, I

(18:33):
can like actually rest with that relief because I know
that probably in about two point five days I'm going
to be on the floor crying about the fact that
she's not here. So, yes, it gives a bit of
kindness to ourselves to be able to move through what
grief is when we acknowledge and lean into the both and.

Speaker 2 (18:50):
Yeah, I feel like so many people their first experience
of allowing the both andness of life comes through an
experience of loss. I feel like your kindness to self
and your choosing of yourself predates your mom's loss. Though,
is that does that feel accurate.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
I think. So it's so funny. I'm happy that I'm
here during this conversation with you because it gives so
many touch points for my childhood and for my grief
in particular. And I was just going through a journal
from college from two thousand and seven of mine, and
I was like, ooh, what was I thinking about. I
kept a note of how I was feeling when I'd

(19:33):
wake up in the morning, and I'm like, oh, I
feel so sad today. Oh, I feel really good today.
And so there seemed to be intention there around not
just acknowledging the feeling, but recalibrating me towards something that
might put me at a more comfortable, content easeful space.
I wouldn't have had that language then, but I have
it now. And I think that I did as a

(19:56):
mode of survival, as a mode of survival, hyper self
aware in order to know what I need to meet
my needs.

Speaker 2 (20:06):
Yeah, you once describe your younger self as having survival optimism.

Speaker 1 (20:11):
I absolutely did. I grew up in what I now
am seeing as a fairly tumultuous place. I had gone
through my teenage years, in my early adulthood, certainly with
a narrative in my head that wove in the survival
optimism of it was fine. I was fine, Things were good,
things weren't that bad. I did this, and that my

(20:34):
mother was able to do this, my father was able
to do that. And while many of the things that
I was mentioning were true, there was a lot of
it that I had discarded in order to, as we said,
survive all the negatives. There was this survival survival optimism
to say, things aren't that bad, I have what I need,

(20:54):
I can keep going. And part of healing for me,
I found is sitting down with those narratives. Particularly I
had one around grief, and it's chan and I used
to say all the time that, you know, my dad
really was obsessed with me in all the best ways
that dads can be obsessed with third children, and he

(21:16):
was so loving and so considerate, and so I just
thought I was the most interesting, beautiful thing because my
father made me feel that way. And so when he
passed when I was eleven, all of these years later,
I was still saying the narrative like, oh, yeah, my
dad passed, but I was fine because he loved me
so well, and you know, I didn't have to grieve

(21:38):
that much because it was all so good before he passed,
and that was a narrative I like, not only said,
but believed myself. And then someone said to me, Rachel,
that can't be true. It can't be true that he
was both the most important person in your world and
you weren't affected when he passed like that, that's impossible
for it to be true. And I thought about it like, Okay,

(22:00):
that does sound rational.

Speaker 2 (22:02):
So it was like, oh, let me be curious about that.

Speaker 1 (22:06):
About that? So I my mom was alive at the time,
so I reached out to my mom and I was like, Mom,
what was I like in the weeks after dad passed?
And she said, Rachel, I had to take you to
the hospital so many times because you kept complaining about
stomach pain and no one knew what it was. And
I was like what. One I could not believe I
didn't remember that. Two, I can't believe me and my

(22:28):
mother had never talked about it before. And three I
was floored because as an adult, I know that my
stomach is the number one place where I have a
reaction to something, when I'm falling in love, when I'm
scared of something, when I'm anxious about something, it all
shows up in my stomach, and I work with my
stomach now to process those emotions. It's something I learned

(22:49):
as an adult. But thinking about how that eleven year
old me was working with my body in the same way,
my stomach was the thing where all of that grief
was being held, and my mom didn't think of it either.
You know, my mom didn't have enough understanding around grief,
around the body, around somatics to understand, oh, this might
be something related to the grief, instead of rushing me

(23:10):
to the hospital every you know, every other week. And
so these narratives that I had of survival optimism that
made me believe that I've done hard things, I can
continue to do hard things, and that I will just
get through it. While it did indeed help me get
through things, there comes a time where you have to
address them because these narratives just begin to peel away.

(23:32):
It's like this old paint. It's like, wait, there's something
behind there that's not true. And so with that, I
started to question all the narrative I'd been telling myself,
Like what else? What else have I been moving through
the world? What stories do I usually tell? When people
ask me about my life and how true are they?
And I got the chance to ask my mom a
lot of questions about what I understood to be true
about myself, about her, about my dad, about my family,

(23:54):
and some things just absolutely were not true. Some things
just absolutely were not true. But I had created a narrative.
And so while I'm grateful for how that tool served
me as a child, because it really did get me
through some really difficult truths about myself that might have
drowned me in whatever depression or emotion would have negatively

(24:15):
impacted me, it's something that I feel grateful to have
the chance to unravel.

Speaker 2 (24:19):
Now, there's so much in there, right, because that how
you describe that survival optimism and the stories you needed
to tell in order to survive what you needed to survive.
Like that's the cultural narrative, right, like resilience and optimism
and you got this and you're strong and you can
survive this, like all of that singular trash right, sort

(24:40):
of singular trash as set apart or set in opposition
to the both and right singular trash versus the both,
and like we do what we need to do to survive,
and that doesn't make it necessarily a good thing. It
makes us something that we read the room and we
knew what we needed and we did what we needed

(25:01):
to do to survive. And it's just like, there's so
many interesting intersections there, I guess is where I'm going.
One that you look back now and you see that
as something you had to do to survive, but it's
something to heal from now, that story and how much
that survival optimism matches with what we tell people they're

(25:23):
supposed to do in the face of adversity, which is
look on the bright side, suck it up, be strong,
be powerful, draw on your own strengths. It's one of
many things I love about you.

Speaker 1 (25:33):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (25:34):
Yeah, the both and is a hard thing to nail.
I think when we're talking about any kind of difficulty, right,
that we can lean into our strengths and celebrate our
strengths and at the same time be on the floor
crying so much we vomit. Right, Like, these things are
all true, and we get to invite that totality of

(25:54):
self into things that interested in.

Speaker 1 (25:56):
Knowing our whole selves all right, about our whole selves
might be I'm intrigued by that person might be who
gets to process these things, who gets to know the
truth about myself, even the hard truths. And the thing
about being adults now, you know a lot of that
survivals in childhood, where we have no control over our environment,

(26:17):
where we have no control over our ability to get
through something. But as adults, we have this opportunity to
be in relationship with our younger self to say, you're safe. Now,
let's talk about this. You know you have tools to
get through this, Let's talk about this, let's feel this.
And I've noticed that as I do more healing of

(26:39):
my psyche, my emotions, my body, which are all inner related.
You know, when I'm caring for my body, I see
that my psyche is better. When I care for my psyche,
I see that I can, you know, care for my
body better. And one thing I've really been enjoying is
that I have become more and more able to touch

(27:01):
base with things that gave me joy as a child,
because I've dusted off a bit of my childhood and
I can see some of it, i can access some
of it. And I mean, I'm not a therapist at all,
but what I've learned from my own personal journey is
that as I really look at my childhood and have
to dust some things off, you're also cleaning off the
spaces where good things are. You know, you're not just

(27:23):
going to this box of bones and figuring out all
the hard, terrible things that happen in your childhood. You're
also remembering that childhood rhyme that you used to say,
and you're also you know, finding I don't know stories
you used to write. And I have a really I've
been feeling very grateful for how I'm able to tend

(27:47):
to my inner child.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
You know.

Speaker 1 (27:49):
One of the things that it makes me think of
is my mom was a poor, black disabled woman who
had many children to care for, and so I certainly
didn't get the type of care that would have been
as fool as if she had more resources. And so
what that means is that, you know, some of the
activities that I did, I couldn't do all the activities
that I wanted, or we couldn't afford some things, or

(28:12):
my mom just did what she thought was best without
taking much consideration in what I wanted, per se. So
I really wanted to dance when I was younger, like
do dance classes, and I really wanted to play a
stringed instrument, and they just weren't options. So now I
have been going to cello practice and I found adult
ballet classes and things that used to be anger points

(28:34):
for me, like, oh, I'm so mad that I didn't
I had this type of childhood. I'm so enraged that
my mother didn't have the emotional capacity to do X
Y Z. Now, with this type of knowledge and empathy,
as I mentioned that's coming into me, I can say,
you know what, I'm going to let that anger go
because I can see that she really did her best.
And now I'm an adult and I can provide myself

(28:54):
with some of those things. How can I do that?
And it feels like I'm in relationship with my mom
for that too. I played soccer a lot when I
was younger, and my mom she came to watch me.
Like I said, she had polio so she couldn't run,
so her watching me run was something for her. She
loved to watch me run up and down the field.
She would say that often, and since she had crutches
on rainy days or early mornings when it was dewey,

(29:16):
she couldn't get to the field. And my mom position
petitioned for the city to build a sidewalk from the
parking lot to the soccer field so that she could
watch me play, and they did. And I recently ran
into an old friend who's like, Oh, I'm coaching a
women's extracurricular soccer team in the city. You should join.
It's like, oh, my gosh, I would love to join.
And that has now become something between me and my mom,

(29:40):
Like I feel like my mom is on the sidelines
with her sign the way that she used to the
way that she couldn't always And it's nice to carry
myself and be in a relationship with my mother in
a way that just couldn't have happened when she was here.

Speaker 2 (29:57):
There's such continuity in the way that you talk about
all of this. I also remember reading that you said
when you were when you were a kid, sort of
writing was your power, right, Your ability to tell stories
and to be a writer was your power. And I
feel like there's there's so much weaving through what we're

(30:17):
talking about around storytelling and narrative and voice and the
stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell each other,
and how much authority right, authority, authorship, right, sovereignty, sovereignty, authority,
author who gets to write the story of your life

(30:37):
and which voice is speaking at any time? Like it's
just like, as as a fellow writer, I just I
think that's such fascinating and beautiful territory when you allow
the entire story to show up, and then it's terrifying,
it's terrifying, and it's terrible, and honestly, like, what else

(30:59):
is there? Why? It's because if you're not telling your
own story, whose story are you telling?

Speaker 1 (31:06):
Yes? While you were speaking earlier about the way that
society insists that we just move past it, get through it.
While you were saying that, I was thinking to myself, like,
to who's end and does that benefit? It benefits capitalism
because we're getting back to work, And benefits patriarchy because
we're getting back to taking care of our homes and

(31:27):
our children. It benefits you know, just every standard that
is meant to benefit other entities besides ourselves and certainly
besides our own healing. And so I think it's really
wonderful to take a pause and when we're moving through
a hard thing, to ask ourselves to what ends does this?

(31:49):
Who does this benefit? How does it benefit them? And
what of myself? Do I have to quiet in order
to meet that need or in order to meet that expectation.
It makes me think of a friend. A thing my
friend Dana Sue Cow used to always say is who's
benefiting from the insecurities you have? You know a lot
of things like, oh, I'm so insecure that by that

(32:12):
I have hair on my legs, and so now there's
some razor company making millions of dollars off of something
that really isn't a concern.

Speaker 2 (32:18):
Or yeah, these manufactured insecurities.

Speaker 1 (32:22):
Factured insecurity, And I think I'm seeing that play into
my grief of who benefits from the way that I
show up in this space, the way that I engage
with this feeling, And what role has this feeling had
in other spaces, in indigenous spaces, spaces from places on
the continent of Africa where I know my ancestors come from.

(32:44):
What does the ancestral connection with this particular experience that
I could be in relationship with. Yeah, like you say,
being curious and asking questions that invite us to know
ourselves better.

Speaker 2 (33:05):
Hey, before we get back to my conversation with Rachel Krgle,
I want to talk with you about that both and
we've been getting into. Grief can cause such like emotional whiplash. Right,
you feel relieved, and then you feel guilty for being relieved,
and then you're not sure how you feel. It's really
tough stuff to navigate. If you've got questions about how
that both and works in your own grief, come talk

(33:27):
to me about it. Once a month, I hold a
live video Q and A for patrons. Visit patreon dot
com backslash Megan Divine to get your questions answered once
a month every month. Link is in the show notes. Friends.
All right, back to my conversation with Rachel Cargle. There's
so much picking to be done at the institutionalized structure

(33:50):
around emotional reality, which is a big mouthful, but like
who benefits from us pushing through grief faster, pushing through
discomfort faster? Like why I spent so much of the
you know, the first ten years of my career doing
this grief work, talking about individual grief and like you
don't care about the bigger stuff when your kid dies

(34:12):
or your sister gets sick. And I remember when my
partner first died. I mean I had been doing social
action stuff and working in sexual violence and questioning some
of these things, and then Matt drowned and I was like,
I don't give a fuck, Like I don't care about
the systems right now. And it took years before I

(34:35):
cared about that, or or before I cared enough to
come back to my suspicious questioning nature of the underlying
systems of around everything. And it is true that I
think sometimes in really fresh grief, the structures that impact
you in your grieving or in your healing aren't super relevant.

(34:56):
It doesn't mean we aren't being impacted by them, though,
Like this push to get better faster and to be
strong and to be resilient. I love flipping that around
the way that you just did to say, like, who
benefits from me getting quote unquote better faster? Who is served?
Who who gets their needs met? If I repress mine?

Speaker 1 (35:14):
Yeah? That exactly. I really like what you said about
how long it took you to get back to that.
One of the things that I have been leaning into
is that I am grieving, So I'm going to use
it as a platform to be as thoughtful as I
need to in this moment, because death, loss change causes

(35:39):
us to question reality again, and we don't get that
often because usually we're in the you know, in the
run of it. We got to go to work, pair
of bills, take care of our kids, move through. We're
on this life escalator that really isn't much space to
get off, and grief is a stop. Grief is a
large halt that And so it's an opportunity in that

(36:02):
it's a moment where we really do get to ask
questions and take a pause to things that we usually
don't get to to do so, and it's certainly been
that for me around work, around relationships, around friendships, around space.
What I understand is home, you know, all of these things.

(36:22):
And I really find that as one of the gifts
of grief as well, that it put a halt to
this trajectory that I might have forever been on if
there wasn't this jolting to say, wait, what really matters?
How do I really want to spend my time? How
do I want to die? How do I want to
be surrounded or not surrounded in hard times like these?

(36:46):
And I have been making shifts based on what that
pause required me to consider, required me to question. And
I hope that all of us who are grieving can
alchemized some of those feelings we have to turn into
some answers to questions we've either been asking ourselves quietly

(37:08):
in the back of our mind, never got to ask ourselves,
or are recognizing, like, Wow, this is something I really
need to consider before I hop back on this escalator.

Speaker 2 (37:17):
There's a line that I read of yours who I
am right now can be home for me. It's actually
a much longer passage. And of course I'll link to
the Instagram post where you talk about that, but that's
what I'm reminded of as you speak about this, like
it's not that you needed air quotes here for everybody, Like,
it's not that you needed your mom's death to wake

(37:37):
you up to other things that you wanted or needed
for your own pacing or your own concepts of home.
And at the same time, your mom's death has shifted
your focus and shifted things. So it's not like I
think again, we get we can like it gets sort
of flattened in the outside world around Oh see, you
needed it. You needed it as a wake up call

(37:58):
to know what was important, which is like, oh, but
I really appreciate how you speak about it as this,
like here is this thing, this event that happened, and
I can bring my skills of curiosity and reflection and
self inquiry from a place of kindness into even this,

(38:22):
especially this, especially this, and find out who I am
now as a person whose mom is no longer physically
present in this way? How does home change? What does
home look like for me? Like? These are such fantastic questions.
There are such fun, trusted questions, and I'm so thankful
to you for asking them and asking them publicly and

(38:45):
encouraging other people to ask them, because we just don't.
We don't have enough spaces where we are encouraged to
have that both and and to ask ourselves those questions,
especially kindly. Right, I think it's like easy to like
flip into interrogation like murder. Why should a little budget?
Like No, everything you do is just steeped in so

(39:07):
much kindness.

Speaker 1 (39:09):
Thank you. I appreciate that. I think that might rebuttal
to what you said about what people might say like, oh,
you need this thing. It reminds me of what we
do about the pandemic, and people say like, oh, because
of the pandemic, I was able to do this, which
I understand. It's hard, especially for people who lost someone
during the pandemic. Of course, there's no desire to hear
any good that could have Yeah no good, Yeah no good.

(39:31):
And I get it, and I honor that. I honor
that feeling. And when we have a loss, we are
a different person. So there have to be new answers,
there have to be new questions, there have to be
new some things. And throughout our lives, mostly other people
have decided that. And sometimes it's the person who passed

(39:53):
who decided, in my case, my mother, who decided so
much about what I understand about myself. So when my
mom first got her diagnosis, I remember wailing and wailing,
laying in the lap of a woman, the woman I
was dating at the time, and saying, how will I
ever read if the person who taught me how to
read is dying? How will I ever walk if the

(40:15):
person who taught me how to walk is dying? It
felt like her leaving took away everything I understood about
myself in the world, and in her passing, this pause
to say who am I to me is profound and
terrifying as well. Both profound and terrifying to say who

(40:37):
am I? With everything she gave me and with everything
she couldn't Who am I with everything I know about
myself now and everything she reminds me about myself? And
there is this newness emerging that requires questions, and I
hope that we don't shy away from those questions because

(40:58):
they offer us some calibration and towards where we're going next.
And So while you didn't need a loss to make
you think you're a new person, and that makes you
think not necessarily the loss itself, but the fact that
you are different because that person is no longer physically
there with you. It's a call to make new considerations.

Speaker 2 (41:16):
Yeah, I love that you just used to the word call,
because I was going to go with call and response,
right like that sort of external structure of this linear
healing model, right like the future self, the highest self,
the healed self, like that destination point.

Speaker 1 (41:33):
And I am so happy that you brought this up
because I've been evangelizing this so much, this idea of
your chosen self, that it's not this higher, better self.
You weren't previously a lower, worse self. It's justly you
that you continue to choose. And so every day that

(41:54):
can be either reinforced, it can be changed, it can
be shape shifted a little bit, It can be edited
bit because you're getting new information every day. You're having
new understandings about yourself every day, so that should and
will continue to change. But the only self that needs
to be that energy needs to be put towards is
your chosen self, who you choose to be. And maybe

(42:15):
in your grief, your chosen self is someone who's a
little more reserved and spending a little bit more time
to yourself. And maybe it's someone who's all of a
sudden becoming a bit more community centered since you have
had a loss. Whatever it is across the spectrum of possibilities,
the fact that you chose it is what makes it
the best self.

Speaker 2 (42:34):
Sovereignty, authority over your own life, being the author of
your own life, and choosing.

Speaker 1 (42:40):
And I say your best self is your highest service.
When you step into your best self, you are now
primed to be kinder, to be gentler, to have more capacity,
to be more honest, to be more grounded, and so
trying to be all of those things in little pockets
to people please will never be as effective as just

(43:02):
settling with yourself, considering what your values are, moving with
your intentions and you will certainly show up better for
the world when you have really settled with your chosen self.

Speaker 2 (43:17):
And that's so counter to the messaging that we get
right of like, serve others, serve others, serve others, and
you really do need to choose yourself in order to
be of the most service to the world and creating
the world that can also serve you. Right, both and
both and all over the place. I want to make

(43:38):
sure we have a little bit of time to talk
about your new book. And I think the both and
is actually a really great transition here, because writing writing
a book is a really long process. So I'm guessing
that the creation, the writing, the editing, all of the
before launch stuff with a book like that came during

(44:02):
your mom's illness. I don't know how it intersected with
her death, but how has this grief experienced, this loss experience.
And I'm saying that rather than only the death of
your mom, because so much has fed into that and
mixed with that, how has that both ended with the
birth of your new book.

Speaker 1 (44:24):
I signed this book deal in twenty eighteen. It's been
a long time of me working on this book, and
it was in the midst of the book that I
had that first moment of I want to call it consciousness,
but I don't really like that word because it seems
so inaccessible or something. But my first moment of deeper
consideration about who I'd been, who I was, and who

(44:46):
I want to choose to be. And so in the
original manuscript where a lot of those survival optimism narratives
that I had written, so I had to go back
and change them, and I also engaged with the topics
a bit different. So the book is arranged in various

(45:09):
chapters that speak to different ways of reimagining. The book
is a memoir and a manifesto talking about reimagining, and
it's reimagining love, reimagining education, reimagining feminism, and looking at
all of the ways that I approached these aspects of
life a little differently with my own values and intentions,

(45:31):
and every single one of those were so informed by
what my mom either told me about myself or told
me was right in the world, based on her own
religion of Christianity. And so there was a lot of
having to comb through the narrative and see what I
had come up with myself out of survival and what

(45:53):
was actually true. Another thing that was particularly related to
my mother and the book is that, in coming to
a lot of these conclusions and understandings about myself, there
were some things in the book that I knew my
mom might feel shame about. Particularly, I have two older
sisters who both still since when I was in high

(46:16):
school to this day, have been their whole lives have
been ravished by addiction, and my mom always was very
disheartened by the distance I had to take from my
sisters in order to be okay, and so I think
I also had a lot of anxiety about how she

(46:36):
might feel about reading what I felt about my sisters,
her children, her children. And a few weeks before my
mother passed, I sat by her bed in the hospice
since here she was in, and I read her a
little chunk of the book that was clear enough for
me that was like, there wouldn't be too much tension

(46:58):
in what I read to her. And the one thing
I will say is I writ it to my mom
and my mom says, Wow, that was so much better
than I thought it would be, Like, Okay, thanks, Mom,
I'm actually a writer.

Speaker 2 (47:08):
And I did.

Speaker 1 (47:10):
So one it was that funny aspect of her really
still not having any clue what I do in the
world or how I how I do my work, but
also the fact that she passed just a few weeks
after it and just a few months before the book's
published date. They talk a lot about authors who usually
can't get the book out until the person who they're

(47:32):
really addressing in the book has passed because there's all
of these anxieties about if they read it, how they'll feel.
So I think that definitely came into play. That was
a truth for me for sure, because I don't know
if I could move with the confidence that I do
with the book if I knew that my mom would
have to read it, but also deal with however other
people feel about it is written in the book. So

(47:54):
I'm grateful that I don't have to have that experience
that was giving me a lot of anxiety. But I
also wish that she could be here for the excitement
of the book coming out. There's that both and as well.
But I will say, going back to that first story
about her still not really knowing about the work that
I do, the fact that I have the desire and

(48:18):
the capacity to write about grief in the way that
I do, to share it with my readers, to be
in conversation with my readers. This is the first time
it feels like my mom is in my work. She
knows she's she is my work right now for the
first time in a way that she never was. She's
in it. How me and her engage in my dreams,

(48:39):
in my body, in the seemingly supernatural things that go
on in my world that seem in relation to her.
This is the first time that I feel like my
mom is deeply engaged with my work. And I love that.

Speaker 2 (48:53):
That's really cool. I hadn't thought about that. I really
dig that, you know, as somebody who will probably not
publish a lot of things until after my parents die
for those those same reasons. I love that though, that
there is a way now that you can be seen,
you know. I think sometimes we think that like death
ends a relationship, and what you're describing is like new

(49:14):
rooms in that relationship open up all the time.

Speaker 1 (49:16):
All the time, and it's to shape shifts. And that's
also why grieving has to be done, because that's where
the relationship continues. If you skip that, you're missing out
on opportunities to continue to build that relationship. You know,
I had like a deep breakdown moment the other day
because I was thinking about so many things about my

(49:38):
mom that came up and could only have come up
during her passing. And one thing that I was just
like crying and crying and crying about is that my
mother didn't really like to travel. She didn't travel much.
The only stamp in her but she got her passport
a year before she passed, and that's because I invited
her to come visit me in Jamaica. And she has

(50:01):
one stamp in that passport, which was her visiting me
in Jamaica. And my mom had never been out of
the country before. So I remember during her dying, I
was so stressed because I'm like, this woman doesn't even
like to leave the city. She must be terrified to die,
Like it's terrib like just think, just think about how

(50:22):
excruciatingly scary that must have been for her to sit
on that bed and be like, I have no clue
where I'm going. Yeah, that's into the sentence. I have
no clue where I'm going outside of her beliefs and
where she hoped she was going, but we just don't know.
And so you know, I had this deep wailing cry

(50:45):
of sadness for her, and then I had this moment
of like, oh my gosh, I'm so proud of her.
She did the one thing we are all terrified to do.
We are all terrified to die, and my mom did
this badass thing of like doing it. I know my
mother and well enough to know that she literally had
a moment to be like, you know what, I'm just

(51:05):
gonna go, like I gotta let this, Like she had
been fighting it so hard over her last few weeks
to the point where I was like, Mom, just go.
You are hating every moment of this. We are hating
every moment of this. We're so proud of everything that
you've done.

Speaker 2 (51:21):
Just go.

Speaker 1 (51:22):
Like many people, she passed the one night I decided
to stay the night at home instead of stay the
night on the floor of the hospice like I had
been doing. And I remember I was here at my
house that evening with the lover of mine, and I
remember holding on to her torso we were like kind
of sitting on the couch and I was like kind
of hugging her, and I remember just feeling so dizzy.

(51:44):
I felt like I was in some sort of wild
vortex and I'm like, it could have been anything. It
could have been the exhaustion, it could have been the grief.
But I think my mom was dying in that moment
like that if we look at the timeline that was
about the time and I I just feel like she
was there was some part of her that was still
like sticky to me, kind of sticky on me, that

(52:06):
was keeping me. Like I feel like I went into
this like the spin of it with her and just
the depths of both of the feelings, the depth of
grief that she was terrified of it and the depth
of pride that I have for her to do that,
and her having died, and you know, now she doesn't
have a body that she can't walk with. I hope

(52:26):
my mom is doing cartwheels and running and doing all
of these things that she never got to do. And
I'm so happy for her, Like I'm so happy for
her that she's not dealing with the things that she
was dealing with here and you know, the things about
the living that constrain us. You know, how she might
have felt about having a queer daughter, how she might

(52:47):
have related to me based on whatever are the rules
of the world. She didn't want to break or she
didn't want me to break. Those no longer apply. So
that means that I can have a particular joy in
my relationships. I can have a particular conversation with her
that if I had it with her before, she would
have felt so much shame about what her sister might

(53:08):
have felt or what her mother might have felt. And
I feel like this is such a beautiful, excruciating shape
of us that I don't take for granted and that
I actively participate in because it is something different and
it's something new, and it's something that I'm grateful for
in the shape shift of a relationship from her being

(53:29):
here physically to not, you get.

Speaker 2 (53:32):
To have a totality of relatedness.

Speaker 1 (53:36):
Right.

Speaker 2 (53:37):
As devastating as this is, there is the end of
that sounds so like such a blessing, like such a liberation. Right,
And to come back to your book like that's a renaissance, right,
that is a relationship renaissance. Yes for me and thriving exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (54:00):
Yes, the title of the book is a renaissance of
our own medmoir and manifesto on reimagining. And if the
book hadn't been on the deadline that it was I
think I would have had a chapter called Reimagining Grief
because there is such a difference in how I have
been able to approach it that seems to not follow

(54:21):
the guidelines of society of science, even that invites me
to have a different relationship to my grief and my mother.

Speaker 2 (54:30):
Yeah, and that through line right of curiosity for self,
the chosen self, authoring your own life, inquiring with kindness
but also with like, with your own narratives, like, all
of this is that arc of coming closer and closer
to that chosen self by being curious about the stories

(54:50):
of ourselves and others, and ourselves in relationship with others,
And that that is what's possible. Right in the promotion
for your book, you have written, I stand as living
proof that a life reimagined is possible, proof that with
a willingness to do the work, to make peace with
the unknown, and to believe that we are worth the effort,
there is a renaissance that awaits. Yeah, I think this,

(55:17):
This feels like such a hopeful, a hopeful place in
this both and like devastation and renaissance and choosing yourself.
So I think I think it's sets It's up pretty well,
for my last question for us here together, which is
knowing what you know and living what you've lived in
all of the stories of your life, what does hope

(55:38):
look like for you right now?

Speaker 1 (55:43):
For me, hope is really rooted in the same things
we've been talking about, hope that I have and will
continue to have the opportunity to cultivate tools to be
well with myself and with the rest of the world

(56:04):
that I live in, the land, my community, my oppressors,
my joys, space place. I think as we lean into
our healing, we all have what me and my peers,
we've been sitting around eating pasta together talking about what
our squishy thing is. When we talk about what we

(56:27):
build about building up walls, those walls are to protect
some squishy thing, and that squishy thing usually was created
in childhood. And for me, my squishy thing is autonomy.
I didn't have a lot of it as a child,
and so now that is the that's my squishy thing
that I'm constantly trying to protect. And in both I

(56:49):
think I'll say psychology because I feel like I've heard
it a lot in more scientific academic text, but also
in mainstream conversation. It's always like, break your walls down,
break your walls down, figure out how to not have walls.
And I am now feeling more hopeful than ever for
my own goodness and wellness and for my ability to

(57:09):
show up in the world because I no longer feel
like I have to break those walls down. I just
have to know them, I have to honor them, and
I have to maintain them because they were there to
protect something and I want to still protect that thing.
But I can do it by this self study, this
self understanding, this intention of being my chosen self. And
so I feel very hopeful by this being broken, the

(57:33):
brokenness that came from and continues to exist because of
losing my mother. There's only up to go. It's one
of those like I feel. I feel like right now
I'm in the worst part of my life. I keep
telling my friends, if this isn't the worst, I swear
I'm missed. This better be the worst, or I'm going

(57:55):
to be livid. And so you know, for all the
days I wait up in the morning crying, for all
the times I fallen to the floor in the kitchen
in the middle of cooking a meal because a memory
came up, and all of the times that I've pushed
people away because I just didn't know how to grieve
in community, and all the times that I have, you know,

(58:15):
just been undone in the way that life happens. I
am tending to my squishy part, and that's the only
thing I can control. Nothing else. Really. I can't control
what the government's doing. I can't control what racism, capitalism,
all of these things, how these ways are showing up.
I can't control how my neighbor, my lover, my family

(58:36):
remember what they do or how they feel. But I
feel very hopeful about the work that I'm doing on
supporting and leaning into myself, and there's there's some hope there.

Speaker 2 (58:48):
There are so many ways that I want to go
with that, but I also want to respect your time,
So I'm not going to dive into all of those things,
but I so much look forward to listening to you
explore those things and share them with the world.

Speaker 1 (59:00):
Yes, I will be doing them. I learned that I
also do these things out loud. It feels true for
me and natural for me to do that. And that's
another thing with healing. You accept what's true for you,
and you no longer get stressed about how other people
feel about them. You just can answer like, oh, yeah,
that's my truth. I've really looked into it and I
know it's true for me. So I'm just going to
keep going this way. And so I think that might

(59:21):
be a little bit of hope too, that when you
know yourself, when you continue to look into yourself, you
could have a truth that you can kind of stand
more firmly with.

Speaker 2 (59:29):
Yeah, I love all these things. Okay, it has been
such a joy and such an honor to talk with you.
Now we're going to link to your website, the Loveland Foundation,
which we didn't get to talk about today, but we'll
be in the show notes, and obviously to your new
book and your bookstore and all of the things. But
is there anything else you want people to know about
where to find you or what's coming up.

Speaker 1 (59:47):
No, I'm just working on a lot of opportunities to gather.
So I hope people continue to follow and look for
ways that we can get together virtually and in person
around grief, around generational conversation, around knowing ourselves. I'm looking
forward to being in and more conversation with people virtually
and sharing space in the same room.

Speaker 2 (01:00:09):
Excellent. I cannot wait to see what happens next. All right, everybody,
stay tuned. We will be back with your questions to
carry with you right after this break. Each week I
leave you with some questions to carry with you until

(01:00:30):
we meet again. Now, Rachel said something. Okay, she said
a lot of things, but something that really stuck with
me about how we revisit our past. Like usually it's
this excavation of awfulness, right, like searching for the places
that you didn't get enough or things were terrible. Rachel said,
I look at my childhood and I have to dust

(01:00:50):
some things off. When you do that, you're not just
going to the box of bones and figuring out all
the hard, terrible things that happened in your childhood. You're
also clearing off the spaces where good things are. I
love that. It's part of that curiosity we talked about
so much together, coming to your own personal story with
like not with this like rabid bloodhound approach of rooting

(01:01:16):
out the ways that things shaped you in a negative way,
but with a gentleness, an openness and a kindness and
a curiosity about how the story of your life has
shaped you. It's such a gentler way of being with
yourself right. I love it. You don't have to be
a bloodhound excavating terrible things. You can be a curious,

(01:01:40):
gentle explorer of your own life. How about you? What
stuck with you from this conversation. Everybody's going to take
something different from the show, but I do hope you
found something to hold on too. If you want to
tell me how today's show belt for you, or you
have thoughts on what we can let me know. Tag

(01:02:02):
at Refuge and Grief on all the social platforms so
I can hear how this episode affected you, and remember
to leave a review too.

Speaker 1 (01:02:08):
Please.

Speaker 2 (01:02:09):
This season's guests are incredible and reviews are a great
way to let me know how this season feels to you.
Follow the show at its Okay pod on TikTok and
Refuge and Grief everywhere else. To see video clips from
the show, use the hashtag It's okay pod on all
the platforms, so not only can I find you, but

(01:02:31):
others can too. Conversations are important. None of us are
entirely okay right now, and it's time we start talking
about that together. Yeah, it's okay that you're not okay.
You're in good company. That's it for this week, Remember
to subscribe to the show and share it with the

(01:02:51):
people you love. Coming up next week, Everybody the original
climate activist author Bill mca hiven. Follow the show on
your favorite platforms so you do not miss an episode.
Want more on these topics, Look, grief is everywhere. As
my dad says, daily life is full of everyday grief

(01:03:13):
that we don't call grief. Learning how to talk about
all that without accidentally grief, gaslighting somebody or gaslighting yourself.
That is an important skill for everyone. Get help to
have those conversations with trainings, professional resources, and my best
selling book, It's Okay that You're Not Okay at Megandivine
dot Co. It's Okay that You're Not Okay. The podcast

(01:03:37):
is written and produced by me Megan Divine. Executive producer
is Amy Brown, co produced by Elizabeth Fozzio. Logistical and
social media support from Micah, Post production and editing by
Houston Tilley. Show notes and research support from our fabulous
intern Hannah Goldman. Music provided by Wave Crush and background

(01:03:58):
noise this time provided by The Big Crows tap dancing
on the metal, awning outside my window. My Crows