Fantastic. Before we start anything, I
wanna say hello and welcome. And we are so glad and so
grateful you are here today. This is going to be
an amazing event. I've said that like eight times, so now it has to be true. I wanna say special thanks today before we jump into
Strengthening the Heartland who is sponsoring today's event. Strengthening the
Heartland developed through the
collaborative efforts of faculty from South Dakota
State University Extension and North Dakota State
University Extension, with generous grant support from the National Institute
of Food and Agriculture and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health
Services Administration. Strengthening the
Heartland is dedicated to providing services
that prevent opioid misuse in rural communities
across the Dakotas. So shout out to
Strengthening the Heartland. Thank you so much for
sponsoring today's event. I'm just gonna tell
you real quick. Hi, I'm Sarah. I'm going to be speaking
with and interviewing. This is gonna sound weird, but one of my literary heroes,
I'm sorry, if that is weird. I am a podcaster, I'm a writer and creator here
in South Dakota. And so with that, I
would like to say hello and welcome to our
guest, Anne Lamott. Who is, let's see. I asked earlier how Anne
would like to be introduced and she said very modestly,
but I'm still going to say Anne is the author of 19 books, a New York times
bestseller, an activist, an all-around amazing person. Lives in Northern California. Hello, Anne. I am just ecstatic
to see you today. - Oh, thank you for
doing this with me. - Thank you. This is very, very,
very exciting. I wanna start off easy. I mentioned earlier, I have all of these like really deep and
meaty questions to ask you but I wanna start with something that'll maybe get
us into things here, and that is, can you
tell us a little bit how are you getting
through this pandemic? How are you coping? How are you living day by day? - Well that is a great question. Let's see, I've been in
recovery almost 35 years. So I find groups of sober people or the tiny control freaks
who are in a program to support alcoholics
and addicts. And I find them
online and I check in and I say my name out loud. And I go for a walk
every single day on these sore, aged feet. And when I feel nuts
and stressed out, I pick up the 200 pound phone,
which is really the secret of health, mental and spiritual, and I tell someone
that I'm struggling. I tell either my
son or my husband. I ask them if they have a minute and I take a nap
every afternoon. When you're a little
older, you can get away with this although I started
doing it at about 50. I just shut down from the
world for a couple hours. I have a lot of demands
on my life and time. And I close up for about
two hours with the kitty and read and sleep
for about 45 minutes. - That's beautiful. - Yeah. - Oh my gosh, I love that. I wanna ask too, I
talked to a lot of folks during this time and a lot
of people aren't picking up that phone and reaching out because they're afraid that
they're going to be a burden. What would you say to that? - Well, my alcoholism and in fact, some of my
mental health diagnoses are all diseases of isolation. And everything in me
tells me to stay by myself and to keep it to myself, because I was raised
to keep it to myself. You know, the classic
don't talk, don't feel. And it's funny there
were a dozen of us in our car port the other
day, all double vaxxed but all in recovery,
12-step recovery. And we were talking about fear, and all the great acronyms that
I've amassed over 35 years. The first one was all this
false evidence appearing real where you see things,
someone said on Saturday they're a great observer,
but a bad interpreter. So you see something and
you make something of it that is probably dangerous. If you grew up around
people that were not well, there's a lot of danger
in your brain pan, potential damaging danger. And it's mostly
just mental for me. And so the false
evidence appearing real, and then forgetting
everything's all right, is a great fear. And future events already ruined is a great acronym for fear. But the recovery one is,
fear expressed allows relief. And so for me, if I will just
take a chance on the healing, that happens 100% of the time if I share what I'm going
through with a safe person, who will look back at me and who won't say, why on
earth would you think that or worry about that? You know, they
would say, oh honey, I was there the
other day on Tuesday, and actually what I did was, and can I get you a
lovely cup of tea? Or do you wanna come over? Do you wanna go for a walk? And so the disease
of both addiction and mental illness tell me
to stay very, very small and self-contained. And the voice of my
beloved community and my higher power tell me
to say the words out loud. I hate everything. I'm scared. I'm kind of vaguely
sick to my stomach, and then I have never
once had a safe person. And so you know five of
'em in the whole world say, well, that's crazy,
that's ridiculous. They don't. They go, oh honey, tell me more. - Beautiful, beautiful. I almost wanna ask you how do we find
those safe people, but it sounds like it might
just be through living and experiencing. - Well, I think, Mel
Brooks had a great line that I tell all my
writing students. And it was, listen
to your broccoli and your broccoli will
tell you how to eat it. Of course, he meant intuition. And so I tell people or
newcomers in the program or whatever, listen
to your broccoli, you'll know who's safe. You know, there's so
many people that left to my own devices I think I
need to get to like me more or to esteem me because
I grew up thinking that the respect was out there. And if the right people or
institutions thought I was cool that there'd be trickled
down and I would too, but it's an inside job. And so there are
people who I feel this kind of adrenalized anxiety
around of trying to get them to like me and esteem me,
those aren't safe for me. That's my childhood. And there are people who
I can do the sacrament of ploppage with, I can sit down and let my shoulders cave in, and I can be real. And there aren't gonna
be that many of them. They're gonna be, and
I know who they are, and because I'm also
that person for them. And so it's like a
contact between our souls. You look very young,
but when I was coming up and in the 60s, everybody read
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein, right? And his person, the
stranger, the visitor, and we're all a stranger
in a strange land. Anybody I've ever known, anybody
I would ever sit down next to at the dining room table
has felt like a stranger in a strange land. But the verb he
used was grokking, that he could grok you. And that meant
beyond intelligence, and beyond sussing
out the data stream but grokking you in my
heart and in my spirit. Well, heart and spirit weren't
big topics in my childhood because I was raised
really to perform as a perfectionist because
my mother was English which I blame a lot
of my problems on. There's a special
12-step program for the children of the English, and they were both
intellectuals. And they were unhappy with each
other, and so it fell to me to help everybody feel
better about themselves. And so I didn't
have like broccoli. I wasn't able to
trust my intuition. If I could see
something was going on and I said what I thought was
going on with mom and dad, I often went to my
room without eating. My brothers and I all did. It was very 50s and early 60s. And so for my writing
students, and I think maybe for everyone to
get back that faith that you are a reliable
narrator of your own life and experience, is one
of the hugest gifts you can ever give yourself and be given and be
helped to reclaim. And so that's how
you find safe people, as you know you grok 'em and
you take a chance on 'em. And so you try
out, you give them kind of a little
bit of a soft pitch, and if they sit down and
they say, tell me more or I know exactly what
you're talking about, or how can I serve you,
then you know they're safe. 'Cause they're not
gonna try to get you to try to appear to be
doing better than you are. That's another great
acronym for fear is the frantic effort
to appear recovered, which is hand in hand
with the perfectionism. And the perfectionism is
the enemy of the spirit. It's the voice of the oppressor. And so when somebody
will not try to get you to think that you feel
differently than you do, that person is safe for me. - Because they allow the
truth to come through. - Yeah, they allow the truth
and they allow the real. - Wonderful, was it just
time that allowed you to slowly reestablish your
relationship with truth, with being able
to tell the truth? - It was time and
just some incredibly beautiful profound
teachers along the way. From every different
realm poets and Buddhists, and every possible
spiritual reality realm, had teachers for me. And they taught me
slowly how to be human, how to throw this stuff
out of the airplane that was keeping
me flying too low, I was just kind of
grazing tree tops because I'd been carrying
around so much crap. If we're allowed to say
that on your podcast. So much false stuff, so many false
narratives about myself. So many things that I
thought were like awards, like swimming
participation awards, but that I just
didn't need anymore. I needed to make more messes. I needed to space out
and waste more time. I needed to kind of unlearn a lot of what I
learned as a child. And that took time, but it
also took the willingness to be what do they
call it in Buddhism? Beginner's mind, there's a
Suzuki book, Beginner's Mind. I'm teachable, I'm not positive that anything I know
is true anymore. And I wanna start
from ground zero. My son and Reese,
his business partner and best friend have a
podcast called How to Human. And it has all
these people on it that helped me along the
way, like Jack Kornfield in the Buddhist tradition and
Byron Katie and Julia Cameron, the wonderful
Artist's Way writer. and I could go on and on, but they're all these
intimate interviews about How to Human. How to get brave enough
to not look quite as good as you always agreed
to look, right? And I was a superstar. I was a superstar student. I was a tennis
champion, all of it. And I thought that's who I was. And all of these people, I mean, some people who have
found salvation say in Jesus or in the Buddha. And I found salvation
in the women's movement when I was 15. And the first issue of
Ms. Magazine came out and the women were saying, we are going to be doing
very real from now on. And if you are
uncomfortable with that, maybe you might be reading
and listening to other sites and other writers, but
we're gonna do real. And we're gonna do
ugly when ugly is real, and we're gonna do furious. When I was coming up, a
angry woman was exiled. She was usually divorced and replaced with a much
younger cuter woman, who would not stand
up to the man. And the women in the early days of the movement said,
we're gonna cry. We are crushed by what we
have believed about ourselves. And we are furious about
how we were told to behave in the world to be accepted,
we don't care anymore. And I remember sitting
with my best friend, Pammy on her piano bench when
the first issue arrived. This is sort of off the subject, but when I was young and
maybe when you were young, remember when the
Sears catalog arrived, and you'd sit with your girl,
cousin or your best friend and you'd have this huge
catalog, was like a phone book shared over your laps. And you'd turn the pages and you felt kind of a
proprietary ownership of whatever was on your page. And then you long for
whatever it was on their page and you realize they
were both yours. Well, that's how Pammy
and I read Ms.Magazine. Even the ads, it was the
first time the ads hadn't said how much happier women would be if they could just
get their weight down, or if they had a much,
much smoother foundation. And our minds were blown. It was like sitting
next to a Buddhist gong. And that was where I found
salvation in chapter books, too. I bet you did, too. At five, I mean, I was a
very early reader. And when it turned out
that you could get lost in these worlds that were
two-dimensional pages but entire worlds. And then in being lost in that very singular way,
you were gonna be found. Whether it was Stuart
Little, who you were or Pippi Longstockings, who
you were or Little Women. And in getting found the
miracle was that the next day the story was gonna go
on and you were safe. And no matter what the world
threw at you in kindergarten or whatever grade you
were in, you were safe. You had a home. And the home was in
the chapter books and in the wisdom and
beauty and incredible humor that these writers were
offering young people. - I don't know how you did that, but you just spoke to
my entire existence. So, thank you. I know that I have your new
book here, Dusk, Night, Dawn. Those of you who
haven't snagged a copy, please do, it is stunning. One of the things
that you talk about in this book, you just mentioned
this act of being seen, of being found, of being
safe, of being home. And that's one of the
themes that I saw resonating throughout this book. And you talk about being
seen, not just for this facade that we put up, but
feeling truly seen. And you say in the book,
you not the mess of you. Can you tell us
a little bit more about what that means? - Well, being seen is a
huge theme of my life. My entire life and being
safe is the other theme. It's like, my husband,
he needs to be right. You can go to his website,
shapesoftruth.com. He has a book out tomorrow. His thing is that he
needs to be right, and he usually is. He's like completely
over-educated, and I'm not, like I'm a dropout, but I felt invisible. Girls were invisible. I remember that I had this gift for math and I broke
the codes really early, and that's all math was. And I broke the codes,
but it was like wrong that I was better than
all the boys in the class. And I remember in third grade
there would be throat clearing because I would know the answer
before the smartest boys. Because it was just
something I was able to do. It's funny, I
wasn't afraid of it. I guess that was the main
thing, I wasn't afraid of all those numbers. They were fun for me. And so to be seen and
to be safe were meant that little by
little, by little, I needed to become
an internal being. And that really wasn't something
girls were supposed to do because you got
your sense of value from how the men around you and the boys around
you felt about you. And I was very, very strange,
looking really, really skinny had really skinny, had
this crazy kinky hair, had these huge green eyes, and I was too smart. I skipped most of fourth grade. And so then I went into
fifth grade, a year younger at a time when all of
your value came from whether the fifth grade boys
thought you were cute or not. And little by little, by little, mostly through girlfriends
and reading, I realized that it was all an inside job. That you could get people
temporarily to think that you were okay. Like my mom got my
hair straightened when I was about
13, maybe younger, and then I set if for
years with dippity-do. Some of your listeners
will remember dippity-do. And so I could
temporarily be okay. And then in my case be weather and my hair would frizz
up, or there might be there would just be
something that would wreck it because anything outside of
you that makes you feel good about yourself is temporary. Let me tell you one story
from the How to Human podcast that I really live by. Sam and the great composer
and songwriter, Paul Williams did a podcast, you can Google it or you can go to I guess
you go to Hello Human and then you put in
Paul, I can't do it, but I feel like your
listeners are younger and they can do this. So Paul Williams told Sam,
and they were both in tears as he said this, that the
night he won the Oscar, he was still using and drinking for the Barbara Streisand
movie that he scored. He said, you know hundreds of
millions of people worldwide were watching me
and exalting me. And I said, it was the
most incredible feeling I've ever had and said,
it bought me 24 hours. So anything you can
achieve or buy or look like or appear to be or
marry or own or lease, is gonna buy you 24 hours. So you have to do
the deep dive in. And usually for me, and so much of all of my work,
I think is about it's not like we're trying
to avoid the adorable, charming, erudite
parts of ourselves. We're trying to avoid the parts
of us that are scary to us, that we have shame around. The insecurities and
the infinite judgment and the secret
hostility we have, and the racism and all the
isms and all the stuff. And so there's a great, it's not I don't know what you call it. But in the recovery program
for families of alcoholics, we see the word intimacy
is really meaning into me, I see. And if I can have another person
see those very dark shadows in me and say, I have that too. God, thank you for trusting
me, I have that too, then it diminishes it. it's like that
acronym I told you that fear expressed
allows relief. Well, self-loathing
expressed allows relief. But everything in me says,
don't say it out loud. You know, either
try to get over it or pretend that, oh, you
know what, my Jesuit friend I know you've come
across this in my books. Tom Weston told me
this thing for shame, about shame 25
years ago, at least. And he said the five rules
of being an American adult are you must not have
anything wrong with you or different about you. The second rule
is that if you do, you really have to get over
it quickly as possible. The third rule said, if
you can't get over it, if you can't correct
this situation, you should just
pretend that you have. It's no longer an issue. The fourth rule is that
if you can't even pretend that you've gotten over it,
you should just not show up 'cause it's so painful
for the rest of us. And the fifth rule is that if you're gonna insist
on the right to show up, you should have the
decency to be ashamed. - Oh my gosh! - I think that's what all of us and every writer
I've ever worked with in my writing workshops
is up against. And so how do we
deal with the shame? Well, you start to
become aware of it. You know, shame is for
me one of the symptoms that I'm in my disease. I'm not in my interior life. I'm not in radical
self-love or self-care. It became a funny comfort
zone for me as a child. This obsession with how
everybody else was doing, this toxic obsession with
other people's potential. The shame I felt as kind of
a public service to my family because I took on a
lot of their shame. I put my mom and dad's
shame in backpack because I was trying to keep
the boat of my family afloat. I believed as a public
service that I was defective. But what comes with that, is
that I'm also responsible. So it's a very dicey position
to try to live from that, that there's something
inherently wrong with me that I need to correct, and that I'm responsible for
everybody else being okay and feeling safe and esteemed. So it was a lot to carry. I mean, I could write a
whole book about this. I've written about
it in every book. But it really
begins with the sake what Martin Luther King
called the precious community, and Henri Nouwen, and the
brilliant French theologian, I think he may have
been a Jesuit called the Beloved Community. It's like the community. For me, it's a
people in recovery. It's people who understand that I have certain
mental illnesses that when I pretended
I didn't have 'em, made me so much worse
that I wanted to die. I spent a lot of time. I wasn't actually suicidal but I just didn't
wanna be alive anymore. And as soon as I
could express them to girlfriends typically,
or have a couple two gay men that I can tell anything to. My son and my husband now
are my two very best friends. I can literally say, I
have to tell you something, I haven't told anyone before. And they know that
they just let down into their quietest
heartful, the heart cave, and they listen. And it takes away so
much of its power, but I needed to become
aware that these were ways, that these were
comfort zones for me. As a child, there was a
certain kind of caffeinated separation from self
that helped me deal with the fact that mom and
dad didn't like each other and that I wasn't ever sure
that dad would come home. Now, my dad didn't like my mom and she didn't like
him much either, but both of them loved me. And I really needed
to be my dad's wife, and I needed to be the
reason he came home. And so I learned
certain female skills and I mean I was raised to
be a great conversationalist, because that meant dad
and my dad's friends all of whom were alcoholic
were glad when I was around. I read the right books so I could talk to
them, to men about them. And so I needed to trace
it all the way back to having been a survival tool. When I was four and five, I had chronic migraines
from the age of five. I weighed 40 pounds and I couldn't have
any light or any sound. And it didn't
occur to my parents that I and my whole
family needed help. It wasn't a part of
the conversation. I didn't know anybody
who had a therapist. If you had a therapist,
it meant you were cuckoo, and that you had to go
probably be hospitalized. And there was no awareness that I was the most
stressed out child, that I was desperate. And all I knew to
do was to perform at an even higher level,
'cause that gave me a fix, that gave me a hit. I was a perfectionist
and that gave me, that was like a
junkie getting a fix. If I brought home all
A's, everybody was happy. But also when I stayed
sick, everybody did better. When I had a migraine it
was like, Anne's in bed, don't go in her room. Or can you take Anne some cold
compresses, but don't talk. And the family got so
quiet and kind of elegant, and so compassionate
until my headache. You know, it was
usually the next morning that I would wake up
and be okay again. So I could stay very sick. And I bet two-thirds of
the people listening, agreed to stay sick or
overweight or emaciated to help the family
as a public service. - As a public service. - So you trace that back
and you start to realize, it didn't work all that
well at five years old, and it doesn't work
all that well at 67. Now, if I'm really stressed
what I usually try to do if I have a disease of
good ideas for other people and I have ideas for my husband
and my son, my grandson, and my two or
three best friends, that I'm positive
will help them. And you'd learn in recovery
and over many years that your help is
really not helpful. My help hurts people. If it's not my problem, I
probably don't have the answer. But my son who's right here
right now, will be 32 this year. And if he's stressed, I wanna
get on to his hero's journey with him and run just
slightly behind him, so I won't be a problem
with like sunscreen and a juice, a Capri Sun and
a packet of nuts, you know? And when I do that, it's
abuse not child abuse, it's adult abuse. When I do that with my husband, when I try to get him
to behave a certain way because his choices were
making me uncomfortable, I'm in trouble,
I'm in my disease. So let me tell you one tool
that really helps me a lot when I'm in the, I
hope this is lucid. - Oh, this is perfect, yeah. - So many tangents going on. When I'm there, when I'm either in
defective and responsible for all of life or I'm in
shame and toxic obsession, there's a tool in recovery, it's called a three As. The first A is awareness. And you get better
and better and better. It's a habit. It's a habit of awareness, of checking in with yourself. I'm there again, I'm completely obsessed
with how Neil's doing. He's not in a good mood and I can't be okay
until he's okay. That's the equation
from childhood. If they're okay, I'm safe. That in a nutshell is the
equation from childhood. If they're okay, I'm safe. So if Neil's okay,
if Sam's okay, if my grandchild's
okay, I'm safe. And I'm in my disease if no, I need to go on a diet. It's almost summer. If I have the awareness of it, if I can just control what I eat and what I look like and
how I present, I'm safe. So if I have the
awareness of that, that's the first step. That really breaks the trance. You go, oh my God, I'm there. The second A is acceptance,
of course, I'm there. Everywhere I turn on TV
and magazines, it's women in swimsuits, it's swimsuits
in which I am going to magically look much
more like a Kardashian than a 67-year old grandma
who forgot to go to the gym after she had a baby thirty
one and a half years ago. I certainly mean
to though, probably if we check in next
week, I'll be at the gym. But so far not the acceptances. I was trained to see myself
to have bad eyes on me, to have the bad
eyes of the culture, and of men and of
predators on me, but I don't need to let
those eyes beyond me anymore. I'm completely safe
right now where I am in the studio with two men, I
literally trust my life with, in my room with the kitty who
I mostly trust my life with. But the acceptance that
it's really natural, I was raised to do this. This is the owner's
manual I got. Think that I'm defective
and I can do better and look better and my stomach
really could look better and so on and so forth. And so I put down the
acceptances, I accept it. And I'm putting down
the owner's manual and I'm gonna like you
said, when you're talking to our listeners,
I breathe again. And the third A is action. And the action is
always loving self-care. We have kind of a compound
here with a bunch of people. I always ask people, can
I get you a cup of tea? And so I asked myself, can
I get you a cup of tea? Do you want something
a little bracing or do you want
peppermint, camomile? Are you warm enough? Are those pants
really forgiving? Are those pants welcoming or are the pants a little tight? We've been in quarantine
for 16 months, and the pants have
had shrinkage. And the world is hard enough us without our pants having
an opinion of our value. So maybe I need to put
on sweat pants, right? And maybe I need a cup of tea. Maybe I'm hungry. People say, I never
ever, wait I forgot. My mind just went blank, I forgot what people
have said before, but it's like we're never
aware of how angry we are. We're just aware of how
wrong everybody else is and how annoying
everybody else is. When really our anger
probably predates even knowing that person
in my case 50 years. And so the action is
the radical self-care. The action is
picking up the phone and saying, I'm like, I'm
a Sunday school teacher. I'm like this sweet, kind of waifish person
a lot of the time. And to realize I'm in a
murderous state right now. I hate everyone and all of life. And if I called Janine,
if I tell Neil or Sam, they're gonna go, oh my God, that's so funny you said that. I was there yesterday,
but then you called and we went to Target and then I got
really happy again. But on the way we talked
about who we're angry at. And we talked about the parts, ourself is usually the
person we're angriest at but we usually projected
it out onto somebody else because it's so miserable
to be withholding from yourself and to be
in really bad self-esteem. So we usually find somebody
to blame for our discomfort. So, okay anyway, I know
you have a lot of questions and I know people
in the audience have a number of questions. - We do. And also I'm speaking
to that audience, we do have a Q and A box. So please, do put your
questions in the Q and A box, so that we can make sure
to collect them all. And then almost said,
like pelt Anne with them but I feel like that's
not polite or good. I love this. I love talking
about anger and rage because it's something I
feel like even more taboo than talking about things
that are actually taboo. How do we realize when
we're in that place? How do we realize in our darkest and most out of control moments, that we can ask for help or that we're allowed
to ask for help or that how do we even
think to search for hope? Because you know, I
have depression, anxiety and a lot of things too. And when you're
in that dark space all you're thinking about is
continuing on in the darkness. - Yeah, well, because
it's home, right? - Yeah. And for me, home was scared. And if I'm in a certain
kind of scaring myself or withholding any meager
affection for myself, it means maybe mom
and dad are nearby. Because I keep recreating
my childhood home which was scary. And there was depression and
mental illness and alcoholism. And my mother was really,
really overweight hugely. And my little brother had
a really what turned out to be bipolar, but he
had just a social terror and I was the middle child. And I was in charge. I felt I was led to
believe I was in charge of trying to help everybody
feel a little bit better. So if I'm feeling that, if I'm feeling this massive
overarching anxiety disorder, for which I'm really
beautifully treated and helped, but when I'm in it, I
don't wanna get help for it because mom and dad
might be nearby. And if I get help or if
I can break through it or move into a different home, I have to give up the
dream that I'm ever gonna have had a really healthy
mother and father. It means my parents
are seriously dead. My dad died when I was
25, I was really young. My mom died in 2001. And if I stopped trying to
live for them and help them and be a certain way, it
means they're really dead and that's excruciating. And it means I never really
got to have healthy parents. I didn't have parents
who modeled love. I didn't have parents who
modeled sharing real stuff with each other or
their best friends. They did incredibly
elitist lofty conversations with their friends. It was like ping pong. It was like a
Harold Pinter play. It was brilliant, but you didn't
say what was true and real. So for me to say, what's true
and real is really scary. I just told my best friend and then three days
later, my husband something I've never
told anyone before. And I'm really old, I
mean, relatively old. And I told them, and
they both like heard me. And so the next time I
go into this caffeinated, clenched trance, a caffeinated
clench trance for me is home. And mom and dad may come by and finally it turned out that they got the
therapy they needed and they got into recovery
and they learned self-love. And they had real esteem
that was not based on whether, my dad was a
writer, sold enough books or weighed the right
amount in my mom's case. They just had gotten the message of living from the heart. And they were able to
see and delight in me now instead of expecting more of me. But if I leave that, I'm
never gonna have had parents who could offer me that, and
that's very, very painful. So one thing is and I know
you know this firsthand, is that you find the
person who can help you have those terrible,
terrible feelings in a really safe place. An in my family what we did it
was sort of the American way is called forward thrust. And you just keep moving,
so you stay one step ahead of falling into
the abyss, right? And the abyss was always there. That you might bring
home a B in my case or for my dad, you might not
sell your book very well, or whatever the abyss was. And it was forward thrust and it turned out for me. And when I was 32 in 1986,
when I fell into the abyss usually what I'd
do is go to Ikea and get a cute throw,
trick it out nicely. That's still my default
except for now I go to Target 'cause it's closer. You can trick it out,
trick out the abyss. And it turned out that
all of the healing to my soul was gonna
happen in the abyss. When I said to somebody
you can come on down, and they came and
they sat in the dirt. And you know it's
called the abyss 'cause it's pretty abysmal. It means that who
you agreed to be is no longer who
you're going to be. And it's scary. It's like skin that
doesn't fit quite right, but so was all of my disorders. And I really have every
possible addiction and disorder you can
have except for gambling which people tell me
is a big yet for me. But I always take
it really personally when I lose money like
in a slot machine, I feel like victimized. See now victimize,
self-righteousness that's a default place for me. To be victimized by the world,
by the people I'm closest to. And then self-righteous about it after all I've done for them. That's about, okay,
when I'm there if I can get the
awareness that I'm there, and that this is a survival tool from childhood victimized
as a survival tool for me. It means someone may come
along who can help me. If I'm there, then I do
the awareness with it and I accept it, of course,
I went here right away and relationships are hard and people are really,
really damaged. All of us, every
single one of us, every single one of us is
scared and angry sometimes. Every one of us is really
disappointing sometimes. And anyway, if I can be
real, which might mean angry and ugly and victimized and
self-righteous and in shame, and I can say it out loud, to someone else,
I'm halfway home. I'm more than halfway home. And so I sort of
forgot the question but I hope this was
sort of an answer is that it really begins with, it takes that great
Anaïs Nin thing where she said that the
pain of staying tightly in bud finally became
too painful for her, and she decided to bloom. And in 12-step recovery,
people always say the willingness
comes from the pain and that if you're kind of
faking it or winging it, the hangovers aren't
really, really that bad and you haven't
gotten a DUI yet, you're probably not willing. But if the pain, I love
that Anaïs Nin thing. I mean, those were books
that saved me as a teenager. I bet they were for you too. The pain of staying
tightly in bud became more painful than the
pain of beginning to bloom. And they weren't
warning us against that as children just to
keep us really scared. It's real, it's scary to bloom. It's scary to grow. I hated growing. I shot up six inches one
summer and I hated it. And I held onto my knees
for an entire summer. And if I had anything
to do with growing, I'd be like four foot two. Cause I hated it. I hate being moved. I hate being challenged. I hate, I really
just hate it all. I just wanna stay. If it were up to me, I
would say very very small and self-contained. - Yeah, because it's
safer, it's warmer. Oh, my gosh! So much of this
obviously is resonating. And I'm looking at the comments and so many people in
the comments are like, oh, my gosh, you are
speaking to my heart. You talk about fear
and growth and change. And even in your book
you talk about light. There's different kinds of light and everything is
sort of this paradox. Like you talked about
how fear kept you alive but then later you
realized that it was fear that was keeping
you from living. And then I watched your
Midnight Gospel episode, which I loved. And something that stood
out to me there was that you talk about
the truth is a paradox. How do we get comfort? Or do we ever get
comfortable with paradox? And how do we allow
that into our lives? - Well, I mean, if
you think about it anything that you're
positive is true and verifiable
scientifically is proved to also have a paradoxical
element to it, everything. Like light is beams
and it's particles. And it's not one thing,
nothing is one thing, horribly. Which I hate, because
I would like there to be a more organized system. - Me too I would like all of life to
be like a silverware drawer where the hard things,
were where the knives are and then where the regular
forks go there would be things that pretty much work
most of the time. And then where the salad
forks go, there were things that you still had to master. And then when the
dessert spoons were, were really funny things
that really good memory, and it's not like that. It's all jammed together, and it's all marbled together. And it's not easy to
get comfortable with it, but the willingness
comes from the pain when you keep insisting
that you're right. And you know, the Buddhist
say, do you wanna be right or do you wanna be happy? Well, I wanna be right and being right makes me happy. Well, none of that
sentence is true. But it really is true,
I do wanna be right. I believe I'm right. If I didn't think I was right, I would have a
different thought, which
would then be right. But see I'm not addicted to it. My husband is addicted,
he's a know it all, which he admits. Getting comfortable with
paradox is like a daily habit. It's practice like learning
the piano or tennis that you practice. Is it really okay that some
of the most of in fact, the most illuminating
experiences in my life have been
in the darkness. In what St. John,
The Divine called the dark night of the soul. And in that darkness
there was light and in that the brightest
light I've ever experienced, there was just so much shadow. But then without shadow we
don't have any art at all or any music because it
wouldn't be capturing life. It was just all
light and meadows and baby rabbits, it's not life. Life is heartbreak
as much as it is. Sweet moments of
comfort and peace and even joy sometimes it's
all of it marbled together and it just doesn't
work for me at all. However, I'm gonna make
myself completely crazy if I stick to what
I'm positive is true. And so, I pray a lot. I am a Sunday school
teacher, and I pray. Like when I write, I pray,
help me get out of my way so I can write what
wants to be written. Because I believe that something inside of me knows what it
is and where it's going, but then I want it
like grip the pencil. Once when Sam was little and you're gripping
his pencil, he referred to it as grippage. And he would say that he
was practicing grippage. And so we always
talk about grippage around here when we're in
like sort of hyper OCD. Well, I'm just doing
grippage right now. And when I'm in
grippage at my desk with a pad of paper or a
computer, I'm in my own way. And I think I might know
what I'm gonna do today. I might write about walking
out to Bass lake last week and how slowly I had to
walk 'cause of my companion and how much it hurts
my feet to have to walk. So slowly same with
at peace marches, as much as it kills you to have to walk so slowly,
I might write about that but I kind of don't know what
it is that is wanting me to, or that it is gonna lead me
to, or what the experience, really the nourishment
of the experience or the extreme wonderful
imaginative weirdness of it all is. When I spend a lot of time with
my writing students talking about the weird, imaginative
kind of unknowing of it all, and that is gonna get
them to better and better. You know, same with you. You have to
cultivate imagination and that means you have to agree to not know what you're doing. And so if you could,
yeah, if you can agree to not know what you're doing, then all sorts of
things are gonna float. When I'm writing and they float
into my head like goldfish, like a memory, an
image, a vision, or even a way of
expressing something I didn't even know was
part of the photograph, the polaroid that I took. I thought it was about
the lake and the old lady and the clothes on the
bank and the hummingbirds, but actually what it was about was these tracks I
saw a few inches away. And so it's like
that, but it's hard. I'm not saying
that you can just, that life and God,
don't have magic wands. But you agree, you
agree to not know how things are gonna go
either in your writing or in your relationship, or in your getting
a little bit older. And it's very scary. I'm not saying it's not scary. So, but you ask for help. There's a whole chapter
in my writing book Bird by Bird, that you
get to ask for help, that's not the American way. The American ways is
you should do it alone, master it alone and
be excellent at it, and have everybody be
really, really impressed. But you know, one
of the acronyms for shame is should have
already mastered everything. - Oh my God! - So if I call someone. I talk to Neil all the time. I don't know how to do this. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to talk about like with the
last book or on spirit. And so I'll say,
can you help me? Can we just jam? Can we just talk? And I'll say, what do you how would you even start? How would you even
describe spirit? What are we even talking about? And he'll start talking, and then also in my
writing about I get it all down on paper, because I was
a spaced out five-year-old I'm a spaced out older woman. Or like this hike I took
with this older woman, I said to her on Wednesday, can you
help me recreate our walk? Oh, she was so excited. People love to be asked. People love to be asked for you to share their
experience, strength and hope. Because it's like we
were at five years old, finding ourself and being
lost in chapter books. People love a mirror
held up to them. And in the world, in
the culture, and on TV, it's like a fun house mirror. You should look like this. You should really be
able to do this already. This is a little
disappointing, right? And that's the God that a
lot of people grew up with. This is a little
disappointing, to be honest. And so instead of
the fun house mirror that somebody mirroring
for you a shared experience is just so life-giving. That's why in recovery
people tell the story of what it was like when they
were still drinking or using or trying to an Al-Anon manage and manipulate everybody
into doing what they thought was best, you
share what it was like, and then what happened,
when was the moment that the pain got your attention and that you didn't know
what the future held but you kind of believe you
know who holds the future, and you're gonna take
a long quavery breath. And now what, what
it's like now? Well, my life is a lot
messier really in certain ways than it's ever been before. And it's a lot more free and
it's a lot more expansive because I most of the time
don't have a clue what is in anybody else's
best interests, barely
in mine, you know? So that's the mirror
of good writing. And that's a mirror
of people in recovery. And that's a mirror of people
at your church or synagogue or mosque or in
the Tai Chi group that has been
meeting in our park. You know, for 16 months
now, six feet away in masks in any beloved community
or precious community people are holding
up the loving mirror that maybe you didn't
experience as a child. - I'm looking away because
I'm writing that down. - Ah, that's fine. - I didn't wanna
seem disrespectful. Oh my gosh, that
beloved community. That's one of my questions that I was gonna ask you
today was about salvation. And even earlier
when you were talking about wanting to run after
your son with a Capri Sun and the sunscreen. - Sunscreen. - And the sunscreen, right. Like, let me help
you, let me save you. There's such an
interesting balance there. And I've realized we've
got about five more minutes before we're gonna
start our Q and A. But there's just this
interesting need in us to help other people. But like you said earlier, that's part of the disease
talking like that's, yeah. And that's so complicated. That's such a hard thing for
us to wrap our minds around. - Yeah, I know it is. And all of it takes time, and all of it takes
daily practice. And just like any relationship,
it takes forgiving yourself a thousand times and
forgiving the other person. People are disappointing and people are doing
the best they can. And people had terrible
childhoods in my experience. I mean, it's funny. The people that I wanna
sit next to at dinner had scary childhoods. You know, if somebody
says my parents were just incredibly
healthy, they were in love, they were married 44,
they were so in love, and each of us was different and they delighted
in our differences. If somebody had that experience, I'd think, why are
you telling me that? Like please don't sit down,
don't get comfortable. But if somebody says, my dad
was a black belt co-dependent, and my mother was abusive to him and she had
Schizoaffective disorder, and my older
brother's an addict, and my younger
sister is whatever, but I'm in recovery and I'm
in a spiritual, I'm on a path. I will say, have a seat. Let me get you a cup
of tea, let's get down. Because that's a mirror for me. That making a comeback
it's one day at a time and it's two steps
forward and it's one back. And I retreat to
those comfort zones we've been talking about
at the drop of a hat. But then I've cultivated the
awareness, I'm there again, I'm thinking I'm
defective and responsible. I'm in toxic obsession with
somebody else's behavior, and how much more
comfortable I would be if they changed how they
are and who they are. Then I go, oh, I'm there again? Well, okay. Of course, I'm there, I'm
stressed and I'm tired. I'm not getting enough sleep. I'm tired, I can accept it and then the action
is God release them, just release 'em to the
care of their own behavior and their own higher
power in their own lives. They get one life here. And one image that
really helps me a lot in recovery is the idea that we all have an
emotionally acre. And I have one, my child, all
the people I love the most. Donald Trump gets
an emotional acre. And you get to do with
your acre what you want as long as you don't
destroy other people. I'm not sure about Donald Trump, I wanna take that back. But most people that
say get in emotionally most people don't have the
power to do a devastation. But so if I am going on to
like Reese's emotional acre and I'm thinking that
he should not have those rusted car parts there because he's been saying, I've known him for 10
years and he's been saying for 10 years he's gonna
do something with 'em. And he hasn't. And if I go on there I also have my carry on
luggage of good ideas and neuroses my own mental
illness and whatnot. If I go onto his acre, that's
abusive, that's invasive. If he comes onto mine and says, what are all these
religious goo gahs and these books, I mean,
there's too many books who are not gonna
read all these books. And I was like, well
you're not gonna use all those rusty You know what, it's
like, get off my acre. I didn't have an
acre as a child. People just routinely arrived with their carry on
luggage of projection. My mother grew up
with a dock worker for a father in Liverpool
who died when she was young. Her mother was 43
when she had twins. My mother has a lot
of inherited trauma and I have a lot of
inherited trauma. And if I go on, if you see me,
I just wanna tell you, Sarah. If you see me headed
for your emotional acre with my carry on, just
run for your life. Just run for your life because my help is not helpful. But if I see you or someone
coming to me with ideas about how I should
be living better, what I should be eating, and the exercise I
should be getting, and the weight training
I need to start getting, it's like you can't come
on, you can't come on. I like roses and I like
books, and I like pets and I like sugar. And if you're not
comfortable, please go back to your own acre and go
get some unborn kale salad, or whatever makes
you comfortable. I don't want it. So anyway, you need to move
us towards questions, right? - I do, but, oh my gosh! This is, thank you. Thank you for all of this. Let's see, we have so many
wonderful questions here. I'm going through them. And those of you from
Strengthening the Heartland if there's anything that
you want to highlight, any of these questions that
you would like specifically, just message me and let me know. Here this is a
question from Anie, and this dovetails a little bit with what we were just talking
about with forgiveness. So Anie says one
of the major themes in your book is forgiveness. What advice would you give to someone who is
struggling to forgive? - It's hard. Forgiveness, I think is
the hardest work we do. And I've always said and written that earth
is forgiveness school. And once again, it's
that reality that
the willingness comes from the pain and
the healing comes from the sharing of the pain. Pain shared, pain
divided is pain shared and so that you're not just
carrying it on your back. I've written really
whole books about it, so it's hard to
answer in a nutshell. But usually, again,
that awareness that you won't forgive this
aunt who is always kind of cold and weird with you,
and withholding when you just really wanted her to kind of enjoy your company
or your conversations, and she clearly didn't. And so you begrudge her. So she needs a lot of help now. It's like, well, you know thanks for sharing,
sorry about that. But then you realize
that it only hurts you, that to have a hard
heart only hurts you. And that it's from a
spiritual point of view. Well, my belief and what I
tell my Sunday school kids is that they're forgiven before
they've even done anything they have to be forgiven for. It's before giving,
before giving. And that we're here
to give, you know we think that we're starving
for what we're not getting or achieving or amassing, but
really we're just so starving for what we're not
able to give and share. Generosity of heart is
what literal heaven is like when your heart is open
and warm and generous, and you just can't
give away enough. Like little kids are that way. Little kids can be beasts but they also give
away everything. You send her to school with
a peanut butter sandwich 'cause you want them to eat
the peanut butter sandwich, and they give 1/2 of it away because someone
forgot their lunch. But for a child to
give away a sandwich, they give away everything. And to be in that place, that's
really what heaven is like, to just wanna give it away. And so you get to not
forgive, that's your choice. And it hurts not to. A hard heart, a
cold heart hurts. And so God, there's so
many books I could.. All of Jack Kornfield's
book or this podcasts he did at How to Human is very, his whole work is
opening the heart, healing the heart, healing
the unforgiving heart. There's just so many books
that I would recommend. There's another interview at How to Human
called by Byron Katie. Some of the younger people
can find How to Human and then find Byron
Katie, can they, Sam? Is it there? Yeah, it's still there. And what she does is that work that I think is very profound. If it's four or five things. The first thing is, is it true, what you're thinking true i.e that this person is just beyond the realm of
forgiveness, is it true? The second thing is, are
you positive it's true? All of my problems and neuroses
and coldness are mental because I've decided
something is true. So second thing is
you ask yourself people can go to
the Byron Katie too and not just here,
but just Google her. The third thing is
when you think this or feel this way,
how do you act? Uptight, rigid,
clenched, self-righteous? And the fourth thing
is who would you be if you didn't have
this thing going on? God, I'd be so grateful today. Grateful is what heaven is, grateful and service
and generosity are
what heaven is like. If I wasn't having
this obsession with how cold my aunt was to me, and I have to go see her
but then I don't want to. And I should rather
go shopping at Target, but then I should. Who would I be if
I didn't have this? I'd be in gratitude. I can go visit for half an hour and I'll feel great afterwards. I can be this person who is
slowly evolving, we all are. I mean that's what Neil's
book Shapes of Truth is that we are. That life airs on the side
of goodness and evolution. And it doesn't always feel,
sometimes it's too long. But some of those
things helped me with the forgiveness. What I think about
this person even true. Yeah, well, are you positive? Well, kind of, pretty positive,
sort of positive, right? Who would you be if
you didn't have this? I'd have a really happy day. - Yeah, I love that. Thank you, thank you. Our next question here
is from Blake, who says as a mental health
counselor, I work with people who are
emotionally hurt and emotionally hide as
not to be seen by others. What are ways you think
we can best help people to feel safe, to
be open and heal? - Well, it's back to
the precious community, to a safe trusted community where people have
similar problems whether it's a
group for bulimics. I mean, I have bulimia. I had really, literally
every disorder you can have. But if I was somebody
who's bulimics, in fact, when I was in a group
we would share these terrible kind of shameful,
humiliating stories. And it was all we could
hold up to the mirror. I didn't do it yesterday. I didn't binge and
purge yesterday, and I haven't today. And people are like,
wow, that's incredible. Well, I did this morning,
but I kind of along the way I think I won't, again,
today and tomorrow. What I'm gonna do instead
is I'm gonna check in with someone here
when I wake up. And little by little people
are saying this works, shame never works,
don't bother with that. Call me at 7:30 tomorrow morning and we'll just sort of
make a menu for the day of the things that will help
us not need to mood alter 'cause all of these
disorders are mood altering in some way or another. For mental health communities
there's a 12-step program for everyone. And I know one of my
best friends is much
younger than I am and she's probably
gonna die at some point. Maybe she'll last
this year, maybe not. And so she's in this group of
the sickest possible people, and they live for their meetings 'cause they don't have to
pretend and be cheerful or say that they're any
different than they really are. And they go to dog parks
and they sit on the benches 'cause they mostly can't watch. And they watch these
idiot dogs and puppies and cranky old men
dogs with long beards, and they get to say
whatever is true. I know a lot of people with
extreme mental illnesses in my family and they're
like Kaiser's or something a lot of people in
my family are in. There's groups for people that
have had suicidal ideation. There groups are people
that are bipolar, who have severe clinical
depression and you go there and people aren't
gonna say, oh, buck up, look at the silver lining. People are gonna say, boy,
I know what that's like. I'm just gonna tell
you I'm there too. And then you say, well, okay,
thank you for saying that 'cause I don't feel
like a freak anymore. I'm not in that kind of
sheet metal isolation that I am so singularly damaged. It's like something, I personally have a
biochemical imbalance, there's something very
different about me. And without help, I
have to work very hard to get where most people
just start the day. And so I have a
great psychiatrist, I take the kind of
medicine that over 20 years in the lowest possible amount that makes it mean not
have to start way below where people that don't have
my biochemical disorders start. And if I tell people
who understand that and then they go, oh, me too, oh, me too. And then if I tell
people who don't have it or who are anti-medication
or anti-psychiatrist or whatever who think you
can do it spiritually. I was in church for a
year before I got sober. Church didn't get me sober,
precious community did. So if I'm with people
who are opposed to my path of healing, first
of all I have to ask myself why I would set
myself up like that, to be shamed and talk down to? But if I'm with people who then we start jamming and
we compare notes and we riff and it's like making
music and we laugh. And laughter is
carbonated holiness. I've said again and again
and again, if I'm laughing like we had 12 people
here to kind of impromptu 12-step meeting at our car
port with mostly family, people were telling stories
that would cause regular people to draw back and go,
why would you tell that at a group level? Or, oh my God, you
didn't really do that! We were all going, oh yeah,
yeah, right on, me too. My biography is different
than most of theirs, but my heart and my soul, my
damage, my battered spirit as a child is really
familiar to them. And we were practicing that
fear expressed allows relief. And we were sharing fear,
and we were sharing rage, and we were laughing. But mostly what we were
doing is listening. And we were in a small circle and we were looking
into each other's eyes and listening and
going, ah, wow. And then at the
end of every show we said, hey, thank you Lisa. Thank you, Steve. So it's blessed instead of
more trauma, it's blessed. - I love that so much. - And we are molecularly
changed by being looked at like that, we are molecularly
changed by eyes of love on us. - And being seen, yeah. I love that, we're
molecularly changed by that. I have in our last
three minutes, can I ask one final question? - Of course. - It's a tie between these two but I've been prodded
to ask this one. So Doll asks, how
do you parent well when your experience of parents
has not been super healthy? - Well, my son is glaring at me. You know, you do
the best you can. And every parent fails
miserably some of the time. What helped me was talking
to other single parents and other parents who
didn't have the money to provide what most of their
schoolmates were getting. And I talked to other
mothers who were just so stressed and crazy. And in all of us where
my son is a father of an almost 12-year old now. You know, you make
horrible mistakes, you kick yourself, you could
only give what you had. You know, you sort of
dance as fast as you can to try to make up for it
all, but you really can't. You keep starting over. As you see and begin
to love yourself more, you begin to see your
children with clearer glasses. You know, you see
what they need, you see what didn't help,
you see that you are. There's sentences you
swore you would never say to your child and
you just said 'em. But you start to notice
that they keep forgiving you for everything you
couldn't provide, everything you did wrong,
every mistake you made, and that they start to
realize how hard it was. And I learned to parent
because of the books and the shares of other parents, who did not have
ideal marriages, with plenty of money in which
to raise ideal children. I talked to parents like me and I talked to
spiritual mentors and I talked with therapists. And I'll just close, I think
we have one more minute. There was this guy that
helped AA got off the ground. A priest who was not
actually himself an alcoholic but he said to Bill
Wilson, the Co-Founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. He said, sometimes I think that heaven is just a
new pair of glasses. And I think about
that almost every day. And I think with my regular
glass, the bad glasses on, I just see how
disappointing everybody is. I see how much better
we could all be doing. I see what we still need to do
around here on the compound. I see what I really
should have done when I blah, blah, blah. And if I put on a
good pair of glasses, I noticed that Neil's
roses are blooming. I notice how much
love we are sharing just unconditionally
with each other. I mean, in spite of it all. I am seeing how
far we have come. My son got sober
10 years coming up on 10 years ago. And the miracle that
that he and I are, and it's not perfect. And we can just drive
each other crazy. But if I have the good
pair of glasses on, I'm just so, so, so grateful for the people who helped
us every step of the way. - I love it. Anne, you've helped so
many people here today. This has been beautiful and
astounding and eyeopening. It reminds me to
remind everybody, pick up Dusk, Night,
Dawn by Anne Lamott, and pay a special attention
to the quote on the back where it says "the
center will hold." Anne, thank you so much for
holding space with us today. Thank you for being here. Thank you all of you
listening and watching for your questions, your
participation, your engagement, your love for each other. Thank you for doing this. This has just been an
incredible, incredible event and we are so grateful to have
spent time with you today. So, thank you so much. - Thank you, Sarah. You did an amazing job holding
space for this conversation. - Thank you, thank you. And thank you
Strengthening the Heartland for sponsoring this event today. And please make sure to practice
radical self-care today. Drink that water, go for a walk, spend some time in nature. And yes, remind someone
that they are loved and that they are seen. So, thank you.
