When A "Do-aholic" Grieves With Kristen Meinzer

In 2018, Kristen Meinzer suddenly lost her job. She was left with questions, grief, and the inevitable identity struggle that job loss produces. Today, we're talking about what to DO in the aftermath of sudden loss (and why Kristen embraces being a do-aholic), the difference between forced gratitude and practiced gratitude, and what Dolly Parton and Pollyanna have to do with grief!

Transcript

Grief Growers,

I am so thrilled to invite Kristin Mainzer here on Coming Back today.

She is one of my touchstones in terms of podcast influences and inspirations,

But she also has a really interesting loss story that we don't talk about here often on Coming Back.

So Kristin,

Welcome to the podcast,

And I'd love if you'd start with your loss story for us.

Well,

Thank you so much for having me.

I really appreciate it.

So the loss story that I want to talk about happens to fall on roughly the one year anniversary of it happening,

And that is me losing my job.

And what happened was the podcast production company I was working for told me about a year ago that they were closing their doors,

And they were no longer going to be producing content.

They were going to be working more on ad sales and distribution and other kinds of parts of the business,

But no longer on content making.

And I was their director of nonfiction programming.

I hosted two of their shows.

I managed a team of direct reports,

And I absolutely loved all the people I worked with.

I loved walking into the office every single day and saying good morning to everybody.

I loved at the end of the day saying have a great night,

And I loved complimenting people throughout the day on their great work.

And it was a loss then,

Not just of doing work I loved,

But of working around people that I loved.

And also just as an extrovert,

I really get so much of my joy in life from being able to just have those small interactions every day with people.

And so it was a loss emotionally.

It was a loss professionally.

And I had to really think long and hard about who am I going to be without this job?

Who am I going to be without these people?

And I have lost jobs in the past before,

But I don't think I've ever lost a job that I felt so emotionally connected to or that I felt my identity was so closely tied up in.

So that was a year ago,

And I've worked really hard to think about all those questions that I had about what am I going to be and what am I going to do and what is my day to day going to look like.

I thought long and hard about all those questions back then,

And I continue to visit those questions regularly now.

Now that it's a year later,

I don't even fully have all of those questions answered.

But yeah,

It was a major loss for me,

And it's something that I don't think has destroyed me by any means.

And I think I've come back from it in ways that I didn't even imagine.

But I think it's important that we talk about job loss.

I think that it hurts when it happens,

And I think that there's a lot of shame around it.

I think you're absolutely right.

And I love that you touched on this idea of identity because that's the cocktail party question is,

Hi,

Your name is,

Okay,

What do you do?

It's just like the immediate segue that people do.

And so this alignment that we have with our jobs as a form of identity is massively huge.

And so to take,

It's like taking the leg off of a three legged stool,

All of a sudden it falls over.

It's like,

Who the heck are you now?

And that's a question that comes up a ton in loss,

And we just don't honor how big job loss is.

Because I mean,

You even listed down,

I lost this group of people,

I lost this ritual,

I lost this literally like a location to go to,

A physical space to enter as well.

Yeah.

And one thing I didn't mention is that a lot of people have said over the years that I'm a workaholic.

One of my mentors who I just love,

He says,

You're not a workaholic,

You're a doaholic.

You like to do things,

You like to have a full plate,

You like to have a list of tasks that you have to accomplish every day.

And your therapy to a great extent is doing,

And people self soothe in lots of ways.

Some people put on facial masks at night or burn candles or do yoga.

And for other people,

It's the joy of actually doing things like work.

And I'm one of those people I absolutely just love to do.

So part of my self-soothing was taken away too.

It was my identity,

It was my location,

It was my community.

But it was also one of the things I do to be happy was just taken away.

So what does a doaholic do when they're told they can no longer do?

Well,

I started to plan.

Well,

First I had two margaritas back to back.

And I let myself feel sad,

And I talked with all of my direct reports,

And I let them know that I valued them and I was as shocked as they were,

And I would do anything I could to help them.

I started pounding the phones to try and network so that my direct reports would have new jobs lined up.

I was actually more concerned about them than I was about myself in some ways because I'm very,

Very fortunate.

I'm married and I knew I could get health insurance through my husband.

Most of my direct reports were unmarried and they would be losing their health insurance at the same time.

So I was trying to help them immediately because I knew that this was more of an immediate crisis for them.

But then also that was another form of doing.

So if I'm a doaholic,

One thing I knew I could do was try to help my direct report.

So it was also self-serving.

It was a way to help soothe myself was I know I can do all of these things right now for my people.

But then I got to doing other things.

I got a book deal,

So I wrote a book and it took me about two months to write that book,

But I did it.

And I knew that I had to work to move at least one of my shows over to another network.

I host a show called Buy the Book with Jolenta Greenberg and we needed to move Buy the Book somewhere because if this content arm was shutting down,

Our show wouldn't be produced there anymore.

So what could we do?

Could we buy the rights to the show back?

If we couldn't buy the rights to the show back,

Was there the possibility of another podcasting company buying the rights for us and then hiring us to make the show there?

And so we weighed a lot of options and we'd already been in contact with an agent,

But we signed our papers and made it official with that agent.

Shout out to Liz Parker,

Our wonderful agent.

And she helped us negotiate a new place to land,

Which was Stitcher with our show.

So we were able to move our show.

We were able to plan our second show,

Which we recently launched,

Which is called We Love You and So Can You.

It's a makeover show for your heart,

Kind of like Queer Eye,

But without all of the hair,

Makeup and clothes and much more about just trying to help promote self-love with people going through predicaments.

So our agent helped us with Buy the Book and We Love You and So Can You.

And our agent also lined up our book deal that Jelenta and I have together.

We have a book coming out in March called How to Be Fine.

And she negotiated my book,

Which just came out in August.

And that book's called So You Want to Start a Podcast.

So thankfully,

Having an agent helped me to put a lot of things back on my do list.

So suddenly,

I wasn't just flailing around.

I had things on my to do list to do.

I had to write a book.

I had to write a second book.

I had to continue making Buy the Book.

And I had to start the planning process for the second show.

So all of those things,

If we didn't have an agent,

I don't know if any of those things would have happened,

To be honest with you.

I don't know how I would have just walked into a publishing house and said,

Hey,

I have a book I can write for you.

But I'm just very thankful that there were people there to help with all of that.

And so I have to thank my agent,

And I have to thank Jelenta.

Because I think that if I were just doing this alone,

I just think we are all lucky to be surrounded by people who want to help us.

We might just not know it.

And during that time,

I really realized that was the case,

That I can just call in a lot of people.

I can just put it out there.

I want help,

Or I need help with this.

And I'm really grateful that I did that,

Because that's how I got to where I am now.

And then in addition to that,

I tried to try – I haven't fully succeeded in this.

I tried to start remedying the other things that I felt were lacking with the job loss.

Like how am I going to make sure I see people every day?

And one of the big things that I feared was I would get depressed,

And I would get lonely,

And eventually it would just be me in my pajamas all day in the refrigerator watching reruns of Little House on the Prairie,

Which nothing's wrong with any of those things.

They're all wonderful.

I love all those things.

But I didn't want to be doing that all the time.

And so I tried to set up what I call the freelancer's club.

I'm friends with a few other freelancers.

I'm friends with some students.

And I tried to set up minimum once-weekly work dates with those people.

And in some cases,

When I meet up with those people,

It's not very productive at all.

It's people who get stir-crazy from being alone all the time.

So it turns into not the most productive work date,

But it does force us out of the house.

And we bring our laptops,

And maybe we each will just respond to a few emails and not get everything knocked off our to-do list.

But it's important for me to see people,

And that will start off my day.

So even if I just do a three-hour block where 75% of my time is a work date where I'm not working,

At least it will put the wheels in motion so that for the rest of the day I'll do more things.

So that's been really good.

And then another thing I've done to make sure that I'm around other people regularly is at Stitcher,

The production house where we have Buy the Book and We Love You,

Jilint and I asked them,

Is there a way that you can set aside a desk for us so anytime we have to come into the office to do a taping of one of our shows or have a meeting,

We can just stay in the office for the rest of the day if we feel like it and just work there.

We can write scripts there.

We can read or do research or planning there.

And they were very kind and they now have a desk for us all the time there.

So between having at least one work date a week and going into the office minimum twice a week,

That has cut me from just being pajamas and refrigerator all the time.

That's really helped a lot.

I mean,

I'll be the first to admit that I was introduced to you and your work first through the podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin as the producer.

And then – exactly.

And then through your own podcast,

Buy the Book.

And this is something that really put me in a place of awe and also astonishment for both you and Jilinta because your job loss happened within the realm of the public eye.

It's not like you were sitting in a closet in the IT department of some company that shut its doors.

You were serving a bunch of people who were waiting to listen to the things that you produce every single week.

And all of a sudden in one episode,

You're like,

Now we're homeless.

And we don't really know what to do.

And the way in which you communicated that to two listeners,

To people who had been on your journey for so long,

I thought was really remarkable.

So I'm kind of wondering what those conversations looked like in the back end of like,

What are we going to tell people?

Because I mean,

You kind of had the – I don't even know if this was an option for you,

So correct me if I'm wrong,

But it's stop the show until we find another place for this or quickly find another – scrounge together another place for this or some other third option that I'm not thinking of right now.

But it felt very – even as a listener,

It felt very sudden and unexpected,

Which adds on to the severity of a loss.

Oh,

Yeah.

And we on Buy the Book,

For anyone who's never heard the show,

It's a reality show in podcast form.

In each episode,

Jolenta and I actually live by the rules of a different self-help book.

It's kind of like recipe testing if you're going to compare it to a cookbook.

Like what if everybody tested every recipe in a cookbook?

How many would actually turn out okay and how many would fall flat?

And so every episode,

Jolenta and I live our lives while following a different self-help book.

And so when I lost my job,

We were living by a self-help book at the time.

And so that ended up in the episode.

And we decided we weren't going to edit it out.

We would just be very frank about how it was upending our lives.

We wouldn't try to gloss over it.

And it would also just be more fair to our listeners.

So our listeners,

If something were to happen with a show,

If,

For example,

We'd have to kill the show entirely,

They would know that it wasn't us just disappearing on them.

They'd know the place that it came from.

And so we decided just to include it and to be honest about it.

And then on our social media channels,

As soon as we knew where we landed,

We let everybody know.

But we were in limbo for a while,

But we tried to communicate that through the show.

So nobody would be wondering what happened.

One of my favorite books that you lived by,

I think because it was so controversial,

Was How to Hold a Grudge.

Oh,

That was.

.

.

I'm so glad.

That's one of your favorites.

I love this book.

I have a couple of favorites on By the Book and that one is one of my all time favorites.

The other one is The Art of Dying Well,

Because it actually motivated me to get Alua Arthur on Coming Back and she was on about a month ago and it was a wonderful interview.

She's amazing.

I know.

Oh my gosh.

And so if you have not listened to that episode with Alua Arthur,

It came out on September 25th.

And so go back and listen to that one with Alua Arthur because she's just in a measurable presence to behold in the way that she talks about grace and death.

But I found her through listening to your episode.

But going back to How to Hold a Grudge,

I read this with the lens of grief glasses on.

And so a lot of people hold grudges against people who are no longer alive or people who they've divorced from or broken up from or even hold grudges against themselves as healthy people post-diagnosis when they are no longer healthy.

And so it was just this fascinating book that after you all read it,

I was like,

I have to read this through the context of grief.

But it made me wonder as you were talking about how sudden this shutdown was and that the podcast production company was closing its doors and going in another direction and we were in limbo for so long,

I'm wondering if a grudge is something that you hold towards them.

Well,

You know what?

At this point,

No.

I think at the time,

I had a lot of mixed feelings about it.

And I think any time we lose a job,

There are going to be questions in our head like,

Why wasn't the company more transparent that this might happen?

Why didn't I get a warning?

Could anything have been handled differently?

And I certainly had questions like that.

And like I said,

I think most people do have a lot of questions in their mind when a company folds like that.

But there were moments of very high stress where Jolenta and I just didn't know where we were going to land with our shows.

And there was at points definitely some anger,

But I wouldn't say it was a grudge.

And one thing that I said in the How to Hold a Grudge episode of By the Book,

Which I think is very true is,

I'm not really good at holding grudges.

In that episode,

I tried really,

Really hard to hold a grudge and boy,

Did I get blowback.

We got probably more angry letters from that one episode than any other episode.

Because I was trying really hard to hold a grudge and people thought I was being way too mean and way too judgmental toward my grudgy.

In fact,

I was just trying to follow the instructions of the book,

Which kind of tell you to do that.

I'm just not very good at holding a grudge actually.

I can do it based on the instructions of a book for a two week period,

But I'm not really good at it otherwise.

My general way of dealing with things that other people would hold grudges for is I cut those people out of my life.

For example,

If somebody really,

Really does me wrong,

I probably just will never talk to them again.

I'm talking really bad here.

I'm not talking about you showed up late for dinner.

I'm talking about really,

Really horrible transgressions.

At this point in my life,

And I think this is something that's only happened as I've gotten older,

I just cut them out of my life.

So even if I was more of a grudge holder,

There'd be no way for me to hold a grudge against this job I lost because they're out of my life now.

Does that make sense?

Yeah,

That absolutely makes sense.

It's kind of like when their doors closed,

So did yours.

I'm just getting this visual in my brain of like their doors closed,

And you're like,

Well,

My doors are closed to you.

Yeah,

I'm going to walk this other way.

I'm going to walk down this hall through this other door.

Exactly,

And not even in like a middle finger kind of way.

It's just like,

Well,

All right.

You just turn on your heels and go the other direction.

I want to go in a totally different direction for this next question,

And it's because I know that you are as obsessed with the Golden Girls as I am.

Oh,

Yes.

Hold on.

What are you?

Are you?

Oh,

I have.

.

.

This is very complicated.

So the Golden Girl that I love the most is Dorothy,

But it's because I'm nothing like her.

I am a very strong Blanche with a little bit of naive rose in there.

Oh,

My God.

I love that you're a Blanche.

I never meet people who just come right out and say I'm a Blanche.

Oh,

No.

I'm very proud of it.

So you're a saucy Southern gal.

I am a saucy Southern gal.

And you just own it.

You have no apologies to give.

You just own it.

Well,

That's a very Blanche thing to do as well.

Yes.

I don't think she ever apologized for any piece of herself.

Oh,

Never,

Never.

She just was who she was,

And she owned it,

And she cherished it.

Yeah,

That's great.

Yes,

And who are you on the show?

Oh,

I'm a total rose.

Most people say that I sound like Rose too because her character is from St.

Olaf,

Minnesota,

Which is an imaginary town in Minnesota.

But I'm originally from Minnesota too,

And some people think I have a strong Minnesota accent.

So there's that.

But also,

I think that she was a pretty good-natured person,

And for the most part,

I think I'm really good-natured.

And I think that she and I would patiently – I mean,

I would say she and I are both pretty patient people and pretty able to laugh at things.

And I like to think that I'm as kind as she was.

I always thought she was very kind.

Well,

And listening to you speak too about not being able to hold a grudge,

I think that's a very Rose trait as well.

And the reason I bring it up is because in several seasons of The Golden Girls,

Actually,

Rose gets put out of a job and goes on the job hunt herself and has to deal with things like ageism in the workplace and her job at the grief center being outsourced and all this other stuff.

And I'm wondering if the show The Golden Girls has ever influenced kind of how you've progressed through the loss of your job or if there's another pop culture outlet that's served as a guidepost for you through this,

Because I think that we're so informed by the media that we consume.

Wow.

Well,

I'm sure I've internalized a lot of The Golden Girls.

I've seen all of those episodes multiple times.

I used to watch the show with my Nana,

Who comes up a lot on By the Book.

She was my best friend for many years until she passed away.

And so I'm sure I internalized it.

And I'm sure that I've gotten a lot of guidance from other places in the world.

I absolutely adored Dolly Parton,

Who also just,

She has such a great way about her.

In order to have the rainbows,

You got to put up with the rain,

Is what she always says.

And so she just has such a great perspective on things too.

So Dolly Parton's another pop culture figure.

And then also,

Just to go back to By the Book for a second,

When I lost my job and when we lived by the book,

At the time we were living by a book called A Simple Act of Gratitude.

In A Simple Act of Gratitude,

We were essentially supposed to be writing letters every day to people who,

They could be people we loved dearly.

It could be a doctor who took care of us.

It could even be somebody who did something that was hurtful to us.

So just to tie it back to pop culture a little bit.

So this book by John Kralik,

We were living by this book at the time.

And I did exactly what the book instructed.

I wrote letters to each of my direct reports to thank them for everything they did.

I wrote letters to my bosses who fired me.

I wrote letters,

And every single letter was a thank you letter.

Thank you for giving me this chance.

Thank you for letting me learn by being your supervisor.

Thank you for all the good work you put in.

I wrote letters to,

I was also going through some medical issues at the time.

So I wrote to my surgeon to thank my surgeon.

I wrote to everybody who helped me.

And so many people came out of the woodwork to help me during that time.

If it weren't for my friends,

I mean,

I don't know what I would have done.

There were people who I hadn't talked to in ages who just,

As soon as the news was published,

Reached out to me.

I didn't even have to reach out to them.

And so I wrote back thank you letters to a lot of people.

I wrote,

I think,

Two dozen thank you letters in two weeks,

All handwritten.

And then I also emailed a number of people and so on to thank them as well.

So yeah,

So sometimes a little slim volume of a self-help book.

I'm not majorly into self-help,

As you know from listening to buy the book.

I'm definitely the show's skeptic.

But that was a book that was also very handy at the time.

It was the right book at the right time for me.

I think that there's a really important difference between forced gratitude and practiced gratitude,

Because they can seem really,

Really similar,

Especially when you're in the midst of something.

You're like,

What's a way to kind of not fix this or turn the entire situation around,

But how can I inject some different perspective here,

Even if it doesn't feel good to start off with?

And you're here writing two dozen thank you letters in the midst of this really awful thing that's happening to you.

And a lot of people who listen to the show and who are in the communities,

They ask all the time,

How can I be happy in the midst of this?

I'm like,

I don't know if the goal is necessarily to be happy,

But if you want to gather a different perspective on what's going on,

See how far outside of yourself you can see,

Whether it's seeing to your direct reports or seeing to your bosses or seeing to the friends who supported you or seeing to your surgeons.

If you can see that far,

Maybe it's just a little one step outside of yourself.

And it's a practice.

It's like,

I'm forcing myself to be happy about this awful thing that's happening.

Yeah.

And I think that trying to be happy all the time seems so unrealistic to me,

Actually,

Because oh my God,

One of the great things about being human is we can feel so many kinds of emotions.

I love going to see a tear jerker.

I absolutely adore it.

I love reading something that opens my mind and makes me think,

How did I never see things that way?

Is that a happy moment or is that one where I'm realizing I am thinking more academically?

There are so many other emotions beyond just happiness and life is great if we can feel a wide range of them.

We can feel wonder.

We can feel sadness.

We can tap into nostalgia.

There are a lot of different feelings to have other than just happiness.

And it's okay to be sad.

And yeah,

I think that to seek happiness all the time seems like a fool's journey,

But to feel all the things.

And sometimes one of the things that can help us feel a wide range of feelings is tapping into gratitude or seeing things from other people's point of view or seeking understanding rather than happiness,

Understanding of others and ourselves.

Ooh,

I like that.

Seeking understanding rather than happiness.

And that speaks to another guest on coming back talked about shoot for neutral instead of shooting for positive.

So many people just instantly when they're in a dark place,

Like,

How can I be positive?

I'm like,

Let's start with neutral.

Not because you're not capable of positive,

But just because being in a place of neutral is going to be a little bit easier to access at first.

Yes.

Yeah.

That makes sense.

And so I am somebody who aims for positivity a lot of the time.

And Jelenta,

My co-host,

Sometimes is just like,

Oh,

You're such a Pollyanna.

But I don't think that's a bad thing.

I mean,

One thing that Pollyanna did,

She wasn't trying to erase the trauma in her life.

I don't know if you're familiar with this character,

With this book or this movie,

But it was the positivity she tried to tap into wasn't a version of denial of what's bad.

It was to give her the fortitude so she could make it through what was bad.

That's just a holistic perspective to have on loss.

It's like,

I'm not going to erase this.

I'm going to acknowledge it and then include it with these other practices of gratitude and fortitude so I can face the next hard thing that comes because it's always coming.

I want to segue into your other podcast,

Which is called We Love You and So Can You.

And it speaks a lot to people who are stuck or down on themselves or kind of doing something that I would call mind circling,

Where they're kind of stuck in this place of reiterating or rehashing the same conversations in their brain over and over and over again.

And what I love about you and Jelenta is you kind of come in as these pattern disruptors as the fairy godmother advice giver types.

And you're like,

Here's what you should do to kind of unstick yourself from this situation.

And I'm wondering where this,

From the world of self-help and the life that you've lived,

Where this love of self-love came from and if how you see yourself and love yourself has changed because you are so intensely focused on this corner of the world of self-love.

Wow.

Isn't it RuPaul who says,

If you don't love yourself,

Ain't nobody else going to?

But,

And I think so many figures in the self-help world have said that over the decades,

Oprah,

Everybody we can think of who's a major figure of self-confidence and owning yourself,

They all say like,

You have to love yourself first,

Right?

And I think that's true,

But I think it's really easier said than done.

And I think it took me a really,

Really long time myself to accept and love myself.

I've gone through long periods of life where I felt ugly or invisible or where I didn't want to be around.

Especially when I was younger,

There were a lot of periods in life where I thought,

I just don't know if I can keep doing this.

Life is really hard.

And I had a lot of hard things growing up.

I'd lived in an abusive household.

I was frequently the only non-white person in my community or in my school or in my classroom.

And a lot of the times I really just was unhappy.

And so I tried my best to be cheerful and I was really good at being cheerful,

But I wasn't always happy.

And I think that I would talk to my Nana and she would say things that were important about self-love and so on.

But it took me actually time to grow into it because I think people can tell you a million times you have to learn to love yourself,

But it has to be something that we practice because love is a verb,

Not just a noun.

And so I don't know how to tell other people necessarily to love themselves,

But Jelenta and I on By the Book at least try to – you had a really good term for it there,

Just like disrupt people's patterns where they're not loving themselves and then hopefully give them some suggestions on maybe how they can going forward make plans and take steps and do exercises that can maybe lead them to love themselves a little more.

We know we can't cure people overnight.

We know we can't fix anyone,

But sometimes action is the only thing that will make a difference.

So if we give them a set of self-love steps and they start the action of things,

Then they're doing the work.

We're not doing the work for them.

They're doing the work and hopefully over the course of things,

They'll realize whatever script they have in their head that's telling them they're awful through the practice of doing other steps.

Maybe they can disrupt it or maybe doing this one little action every single day for a couple weeks will remind them like,

Oh,

I'm okay.

I'm not as much of a mess as I thought I was.

Or maybe I'm not broken and it's the world that's telling me that I'm broken that needs to shove it and I'm just fine the way I am.

I love that perspective is probably my favorite because I love much of the work that I do and much of the things we talk about here on Coming Back or about telling the world to shove it because it has these preconceived notions about who we're supposed to be,

Especially as we're grieving.

And something's coming to me right now from a book called Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb.

She's a therapist who wrote about her experience as a therapist with her clients,

But then she as a therapist had a therapist of her own and she talked about what it was like being in the space,

Being there by somebody else.

And she speaks of therapists as the editors of other people's stories.

And so people come to them and ask,

Will you edit my story?

Will you help me see the story from a different perspective?

And I think that's so much of the work that you do both on,

On by the book and we love you and so can you.

I love that you said,

A,

This is something that's a verb,

So it's a thing you must do to practice self-love,

But also B,

It's something that grows.

And so it's not like people are like,

Just put on a face mask and you'll love yourself.

I'm like,

That's not how this works at all.

And I'm going to take a second actually to push back just a smidge on what you and RuPaul and Oprah and everybody else have said about,

You know,

No one else will love you until you love you because I saw,

I saw another post that's been circulating online in a lot of mental health spaces about how we can do the work of loving ourselves intensely,

But unless we feel like we're part of a community or a chosen family or friend group where we truly belong and feel loved and held in those spaces,

It's,

It's near impossible to cultivate self-love in an exterior space where you are told you are not loved or accepted or wanted.

It's such a vital conversation that nobody's having yet.

Oh,

That is such a good point.

You know what?

You're right.

You're right.

And I should be careful about mindlessly rattling off like feel good mantras like that.

The truth is we all need and deserve the foundation of love.

You're totally right about that.

And it's really hard not to love ourselves without that.

But you know,

I think the reason I sometimes do say things like that quote is just that for me,

I know I became much more lovable when I began to do the work of actively loving myself and I was way more fun to be around when I wasn't constantly telling myself I was garbage and treating myself like the least important person on my list and putting myself down in front of other people all the time.

I just know I then became easier to love.

But all that being said,

I'd like to reiterate just you are 100% right.

We all need and deserve that foundation of love.

And that's magnificent.

And I think that's the piece of clarity that hasn't yet entered the conversation about self love.

Because so much of it feels transactional,

Like no one else is going to love you until you love you.

So everyone's going to withhold their love until you give it to yourself.

And sometimes it's like,

No,

No,

That's icky.

That feels gross.

Mm hmm,

Yes.

And you know what?

You just convinced me that I need to just make sure I'm not quoting them verbatim and just make it clear what I mean by that.

And so I think that,

Yeah,

There's a better way to say it.

No offense,

Oprah and RuPaul,

I still love you.

But yeah,

There's a better way to say that.

Well,

And this is something I love about your podcast too,

Is that so often you and Jolenta do absolutely the best you can to update yourselves on what are the new ideas,

What are the conversations being had on privilege,

Where are we in terms of these larger conversations.

And so it's like,

You know better,

You do better.

You learn better,

You talk better.

I don't know a better way to phrase that.

But I want to circle back to this idea of self love in the midst of you losing this job and this identity and this ritual of going to work and this idea of work as who you are.

I wonder how you cultivated love for yourself at a time when there was a really big opportunity for you to not.

Well,

I mean,

I knew all along that it wasn't my fault.

I had nothing to do with this part of the company closing.

So that made it easy for me not to blame myself for anything.

But the idea of self love,

I mean,

I think that this is a tough question because I don't mean to sound pompous here,

But it never occurred to me to love myself less during this.

The number one thing that occurred to me wasn't,

Am I going to love myself less?

How can I love myself?

But it was,

How can I do the things that feed my soul?

How can I make sure I'm still working?

How can I make sure I'm around other people still?

How can I make sure that I'm not letting anybody down?

Those were much more the questions in my mind than self love.

I think I may have felt differently if I was trying to immediately search for another nine to five job and nobody would hire me.

I was very lucky that I had enough stuff on my plate,

But it can be hard to feel the self love when it feels like maybe the world's not loving you back sometimes.

I was lucky because I felt like a lot of the world was loving me back.

God,

I feel horrible saying that out loud.

That makes me sound so pompous and that's not how I mean it to sound.

I don't think so.

I think your eyes are open in a way.

That's exactly what I'm registering from that is like,

And whether it's the work you've done on By The Book,

If it's the work you've done off of By The Book,

On yourself,

In your own life.

I mean,

Pompous is not the word I would use.

I think aware is the word I would use is that your eyes have been opened in this way to look at all of this love that exists around me.

And yes,

There is privilege and there is luck in that to have it swoop in the instant that you need it.

And not everybody is,

Do I use the word blessed?

Not everybody is blessed with that.

In the instant something falls apart,

But even so,

Oftentimes,

Even when things like that happen,

Sometimes there is an opening or an opportunity for us to stop loving ourselves when loss happens.

Like sometimes those can go hand in hand.

And so I'm really glad that you answered that way because it just makes so much sense to my brain.

I felt my shoulders drop when you were like,

It never occurred to me to stop loving myself.

And I think that you've gotten to a really healthy place is what that sounds like to my ears.

Oh,

I feel really lucky about it because I haven't always been in this place.

I've definitely,

And I think I'm pretty open about it on all of my shows that I've hosted over the years.

I'm like,

I'm certainly not perfect and I've gone through a lot of lousy times and I haven't always treated myself the way I deserve to be treated.

I've done,

I've self-sabotaged and I've turned pain that other people gave me into compounded pain by giving it back to myself.

So yeah,

I feel really lucky that I'm at this point in my life right now.

So I'm wondering as we're drawing closer to the end,

If you could write a self-help book for people who have just lost their jobs,

What would you call it?

What would I call it?

Wow.

I want to be careful about not sounding too pat because I know people can be in a lot of pain when losing a job.

And do you know the song Closing Time by Semisonic?

Oh sure,

Absolutely.

Closing time,

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

Or something else I say all the time to people,

I mean to sound a little bit more elaborate,

Let me think about this job title while I tell you this.

I tell people all the time when I talk with them about,

Oh,

Why haven't I found my dream job yet?

And it's a letter we get a lot from listeners of By the Book and We Love You,

Like,

Oh,

I feel so old,

I'm 38 and I still haven't found my dream job yet.

What's the point anymore?

And I just laugh,

I'm older than 38.

But this is a number we hear a lot,

34,

36,

38.

There's something about the mid 30s where a lot of people,

It suddenly hits them like,

Oh,

Damn,

This isn't the life I thought I would have.

I thought I'd be married by now or I thought I'd have kids by now or I thought I'd have this dream job by now or I thought I would know what my dream job would be by now because I still don't know what my dream is.

And I tell everybody,

Think about Colonel Sanders and think about Julia Child.

Colonel Sanders never sold chicken until he was 65 and now there's KFCs over every square inch of the planet.

And Julia Child never took a cooking class until she was 37.

And so many people in this world didn't even figure out what they enjoyed,

Much less what they wanted to do or who they wanted to be with until way past whatever age that you're upset about now.

And it's never too late to start again and you can find another career you'll love.

And you can find another career that maybe you don't love but that pays the bills while you do something else you love.

It's okay.

There's no one script as far as how someone's professional life should go.

And frankly,

For anybody my age or younger,

If you figure out what you're dreaming of doing by the time you're 55,

That means you'll have two decades straight of doing that thing before you can even collect social security.

So you have plenty of time to do that thing.

So I'm sorry,

That's not a really good title for a book.

That's like 12 paragraphs that is,

I don't know,

Maybe the book title is called Think of Julia Child.

Oh,

I like that one too.

I think I like both.

Maybe one's just on the back of the book and one's on the front of the book or like a subtitle or something.

We can definitely work with that.

But I love that too because I think especially when it comes to,

I talk about the three Ds a lot,

Death,

Divorce,

And diagnosis,

These really monstrosity things that totally alter the course of our lives.

People are like,

Well,

Now my life is over.

I'm like,

I don't know that I necessarily agree with that.

I agree that it can look that way.

And there's something that Sheryl Sandberg who wrote Option B talks about where there's three P's that step in as soon as loss comes through.

One is personalization,

The other is pervasiveness,

And the other is permanence.

And the most dangerous one is permanence,

Which is the thought that this will be exactly this way for the rest of my life.

And it's something that so many people butt up against when loss rolls through is my life is going to look exactly like this for the rest of it.

And it's really,

Really hard to come out of.

So I'm grateful for forces like you in the world that do the job of story editing and disruption and jumping in and being like,

Self-love is still possible here and a different path is still possible here.

And it's almost like a personal cheerleading service,

But from cheerleaders who have also been like,

We've seen some shit,

Which is really phenomenal because that's really what you want from the people who are witnessing and by standing your story is to know that they've also been there too and not have just pointlessly positive people standing by telling you just get up,

You can do it,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

We've lived in that gravel,

In that dirt before in our own ways.

And so we know that there's something else coming next,

Not even something else totally different or 180 or it doesn't need to be fixed,

Just needs to be lived through.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And sometimes it's going to feel like what you're living through will last forever,

But it may just be a few weeks or a few months or a few years.

And that's okay.

Five years is not forever and five weeks or five months or however long it is,

It's not forever and the world changes and the people around us change and our circumstances change.

We won't be in that moment forever and our feelings will change and our hearts will change.

We will all be fine.

There's so many things that are,

Yeah.

Thank you for touching on all of those things because there's so many factors and facets that change.

It's literally impossible for everything to stay the same.

And there's a lot of,

This is a trite word,

But there's a lot of hope in that is that nothing will be the same.

Guaranteed nothing will be the same after this.

Oh,

Thank goodness.

Thank goodness.

I know.

I'm so thankful.

Thank goodness.