Episode 14: You're not crazy, you just FEEL crazy
Plus bear, bunny, headbangers, masks, and a gymnastics apparatus
A special episode but not in the same way that, like, Alf or Full House would have a special episode
I keep saying it about a lot of episodes but this episode with Megan Devine was kind of special. As you may recall, it was meant to be a 15-minute segment at the end of last week’s episode with Stephanie Wittels Wachs. In that one, Stephanie and I had a lot to say about our brothers’ lives but we didn’t say as much about how we were doing after their deaths. Words about grief are sometimes hard to come by because it can feel like scorchingly loud industrial pounding or it can feel like the kind of silence in a movie where the hero looks around uneasily and then gets pounced upon by the monster.
Really, it feels like going crackers. Cuckoo. Bananas.
So Megan Devine specializes in talking about grief. She’s a therapist and an author and has access to those words that so regularly elude the rest of us. As we spoke, I got this feeling of dread because it was going to be hard to cut it down to 15 minutes. There was just too much to say, especially when she eloquently talked about the loss of her partner Matt twelve years ago. So I made it its own episode and interviewed her a second time and we then seamlessly spliced the interviews together.
Megan’s take is that “going crazy” is not an especially useful term to describe the feeling that led her to forget how money works at one point. It is pain, it’s confusion, it requires support and patience, but it’s an honest response to what’s going on.
What Megan has to say is kind of liberating and could, I think be applied more often to a broader mental health context. You’re going through something and you may need some help but to dump it all in the broad category of “mental illness” is to classify yourself as broken and that blockades any effort to gather the meaning of an experience.
BONUS CONTENT
One thing that didn’t make the edit, the kind of SPECIAL SECRET ACCESS ONLY AVAILABLE HERE, is a brief exchange I had with Megan about public speaking, which we both do a fair amount of. I told her that I am getting it built into my contract that I won’t do audience mingling after a speech. The reason for that is that in a lot of my speeches, I tell my own story, which gets kinda rough and afterwards, well-meaning people will come up and tell me the worst things that have happened in THEIR lives in terms of mental health and suicide.
And I am extremely honored by this intention of theirs. It means that they are opening themselves up to conversations, which is a thing I actively encourage in the speech I just gave. It also means that they connected enough with me as a speaker that they feel comfortable connecting in a one-on-one setting. The only problem is that I then take on what Chris Gethard calls the psychic damage of these experiences these people have had. Being a person who is sometimes more empathetic than I wish I was, that stuff can really knock me around. So now I give my speech and disappear backstage where I can visit with the event host a bit, decompress on my own, and maybe leave the venue through another route or wait folks out.
Megan does it differently. She will stay after a speech and give time and attention to everyone who wants to meet her, at which point those people will lay down their own grief story to her. She’ll stay there all night if that’s what it takes to connect with everybody who wants to connect. Then when it’s over, according to her contract, she is to be whisked away to her hotel room and given solitude. No lingering, no further chit chat. It’s her way of managing the weight.
I don’t fault myself for choosing my path over hers. I think a lot of the reason for the difference, though, is that she’s a therapist. She has built a career out of listening to people lay their burdens down at her feet. And it’s not that this has made her tougher or that it has given her a hugely gigantic and expansive sense of sympathy or empathy. I think it’s just that in her line of work, especially with grief as a specialty, she’s just got super well-defined boundaries. She knows how to manage the emotional toll and all the contact so that everything stays where it should be.
I wish all encounters after a speech were like this:
It’s the masks
Went out for Vietnamese food last night with my son and, because the mandate has been lifted and my county is doing really well with covid numbers, no one at the little restaurant wore masks. And it was fine. I noticed it and I’m sure other people did too but I felt comfortable and safe.
It’s a family restaurant, in that it’s run by the parents and adult children of one family, might be a few non-family employees here and there but it’s small so mostly family. We go there fairly frequently. I go up to pay at the end and that involves the handing my card back and forth with the guy through a hole at the bottom of a big plexiglas shield.
At the end of our transaction, he says, excitedly, “I’m taking this down tomorrow!” referring to the plexiglas.
“Oh that’s great!” I said. “Now it feels like we’re climbing out of this thing.”
“I HATE the masks,” he says. “Eight, ten hours a day with a mask on. Oh, I hate it this whole time! I tell my mom, I take down the plastic tomorrow! I can’t stand it.”
It was obviously a strong feeling, one so strong that he can just vent about it unprompted to a rando like me.
I know covid isn’t over and I know we must still wear masks sometimes and I know some people will still wear them because they feel safer that way and that’s great. But! The removing of the masks has had an outsized impact for me. If 100 is everything being normal and covid eradicated and 1 is the worst, most bleak times of the pandemic, the lifting of the mask mandate has taken me from 30 to 70 in a very short amount of time.
Which I wasn’t expecting.
That picture is taken from an article with the headline Do Halloween Masks Protect You From COVID-19? If someone thinks they might, I’d be surprised that person hasn’t accidentally died by accidentally eating pencils or something.
Oh hey this is neat
We’re on Mashable’s list of best new podcasts!
Oh hey this is likewise neat
I was a guest on Shelby Stanger’s very cool Vitamin Joy podcast. It’s not about vitamins.
Hi. I've so enjoyed your podcasts and the last two episodes were especially good. I want to ask if you've seen Bo Burnham's new Netflix special "Inside." It was hard for me to get through, but I'm glad I did. Many of the songs are stuck in my head and the themes are exactly on that mark which punches both deeply sad and funny. Naturally, I thought he might be a great guest!