Show Notes
“It's startling to realize how narrowly we avoid, or miss, living radically different lives.” - Rachel Aviv
Have you ever wondered why your life worked out the way it did? Yes. You have. We all have. Why are some people a success? Other’s not so much? Why do some people with similar diagnoses, DNA, and environments have such different life outcomes? I have wondered this throughout my life. It comes in waves. I asked a mentor once in art grad school if she could tell me who would become a famous artist. After 30 years of teaching, she still said she had no idea who would be able to make it in the art world. That she was always surprised. I think this is honest. I am dubious of people who think that they know things like this. Often, when we can account for our own bias, lack of knowledge, and mood, there are too many open variables to guess with any accuracy. (I know that Annie Duke would disagree with this. She argues that we have more information then we think we do.) I grew up in a house where it was okay to be sad. At least those words were said out loud. I think that our house promoted other feelings in actions: for example, positively rewarding happy moods something very common in my generation, perhaps it still is. People in the family who were more beautiful, outgoing, and smart were met with interest. In some ways, you could argue this is a normal thing, that the feelings we put out attract like feelings, happy people attract happy people. But what about the people who are sad? Don’t they need love too? What can pull a person out of a sad spiral? At the age of 10 I started seeing a therapist, at 15 I started on an SSRI. I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. To this day, I am kinda unsure where they each end and begin. As I now understand it, I think I have anxiety that turns into guilt, which turns into depression. And it could pop up, or manifest like a chronic illness at any time. Being turned on almost by stimuli that I can never really fully understand. And I am lucky. I somehow was able to keep living. Through processing all these uncomfortable emotions, and make it through the hard parts of my “illness.” That with a flip of a coin, things could have been so different. I know this. And if I think too hard about it, I falter. That dark area gets closer. There is always some amount of active avoidance of the pointlessness of it all that I need to function. In Rachel Aviv’s book, Strangers to Ourselves, Rachel meets a woman who is seemingly on a parallel path to her. They are both young, from similar backgrounds, and are being treated in an inpatient program for anorexia. Rachel's institutional moment becomes an anomaly and for some unknown reason, Hava’s becomes chronic. After years go by, Rachel seeks out Hava only to find out she is no longer living. Hava has spent most of her life battling her anorexia. The mystery of their tangled lives and possibilities is poetic. Context is everything. Each situation is different. There is not a catch-all. There is not one solid definition of mental health that everyone agrees on. At a time when most people I know have some experience with anti-depressants, without creating a false nostalgia, is life that much harder now? That we have to drug ourselves to get through each day? (I do.) I pathologize stories of mental illness that are deeply personal and situational. I am human and I like simple explanations. I contort my mind into shapes that it can fit in within an “evidence-based” medical system. One answer or explanation feels so good when opposed to the truth that we don’t have any answers. And all systems of understanding have some truth to them. But what if mental illness is also a reflection of our community? The good, the bad and the ugly? We are afraid to talk about these things because they might become contagious, and we should be afraid to an extent. I feel it when I am with someone who is deeply in pain. But what if we need to talk about it as a commu
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A few months ago, I posted this episode, because I thought it was SO good behind a paywall. BUT I really want you all to hear what Savala has to say, so here goes. On Being Good with Savala Nolan Last night my husband was disappointed about a hot dog. He wanted a braught. Like not the thing I brought home. Not metaphorically. An actual hot dog, the wrong kind, because I’d gone to the store and grabbed a veggie one and we had some hot dogs. He didn’t make a scene. He was just quietly, visibly disappointed. And something in me lit on fire. I am not good at letting his disappointments not affect me. Because he had taken a nap. He deserved a nap. We all do. I stood in the kitchen doing the math that women have been doing forever — the meal planning, the grocery run, while doing laundry, the pickups, the social planning, the bedtime routine, all of it running parallel to a full time job — and I thought: I have spent my whole life trying to be good. And this is what it looks like. I’ve known Savala Nolan for a few years, since her first book Don’t Let It Get You Down stopped me cold. So when Good Woman came out — one of Ms. Magazine’s most anticipated books of 2026 — I couldn’t get my hands on it fast enough. Savala is a social justice lawyer, a mother, a writer, and about a thousand other things. And in Good Woman she asks the question I didn’t know I’d been waiting for someone to ask out loud: what does it actually mean to be good? Not good in the abstract — good as a woman. Good as a daughter, a partner, a mother. Good in the way we were all quietly handed a blueprint for and told to follow without question. Her argument is not gentle. We have been sold a lie. The lie is that goodness — the performing of it, the exhausting maintenance of it — will make our lives good in return. That if we are pretty enough, helpful enough, quiet enough, we will be rewarded with happiness, contentment, safety. That the hot dog will be appreciated. It won’t. It never was going to be. Savala has a practice she’s developing with her own daughter, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since she told me. She calls it raising her wild. Not wild like feral, not wild like out of control. Wild like: allowed to feel what she feels without being shamed into swallowing it. Wild like: she gets to choose what she wears, who she loves in movies, what she wants to be when she grows up — even if what she wants to be is the Wicked Witch and not Dorothy. Wild like: she can play in the mud because it feels good on her skin and that is reason enough. I am trying to do this with my daughter Margaret too. It is harder than it sounds. Because the training runs deep. I catch myself doing it — the gentle redirect away from the big feeling, the suggestion that maybe we don’t need to be quite so loud right now, the subtle steering toward the easier, softer, more acceptable version of herself. The good girl version. And then I have to stop and ask: good for whom? Savala’s point is that this is where it starts. Not with the hot dog, not with the marriage, not with the years of quietly shrinking — it starts here, in childhood, when we first learn that our hunger is inconvenient. That our wildness needs managing. That being good means making ourselves easier for everyone else to be around. What if it didn’t have to start there? What if we let them stay wild long enough to know what they actually want? I don’t have it figured out. But I am paying attention now in a way I wasn’t before. And some days Margaret comes home from school and something happens and instead of telling her to calm down I just say: tell me everything. And she does. And it is loud and it is messy and it is completely, perfectly her. That feels like a start. What I love about Savala is that she doesn’t just burn it down and leave you in the ash. She asks: if we don’t have to be good, what is the something else we’re all quietly yearning for? How do we even name it after a lifetime of not being al
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