What if the hard thing you didn’t want to share was also the thing that made you most human and brought people closer? Anna Sale knows A LOT about this. Anna is the creator of Death, Sex & Money, a podcast about “the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more.” She is also the author of Let’s Talk About Hard Things, which is an invitation to discuss the tough topics that all of us encounter. The New Yorker said it’s “like a good conversation with a friend” and we agree! Anna has this calm, resolute quality that zeroes in on what matters and then the patience to let some magical moments rise to the surface. In this episode, Anna and Laura talk about working through issues around money, how we see ourselves after divorce, and the power of going first. If you haven’t already, please make sure you check out Death, Sex & Money and enjoy! You can find Anna here: https://www.annasale.com/ Get your Death, Sex & Money here: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/deathsexmoney Spotify playlist for this episode: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/09ooYTs6KWhpuZpbsQZeYL Tell Me Something True is a 100% independent podcast. There are no corporations or advertisers backing this community. We are 100% funded by the TMST community. Support TMST today so you can hear the uncut interviews, attend private events with Laura and help keep TMST ad-free: https://tmst.supercast.com/
Tell Me Something True with Laura McKowen
Anna Sale on Finding Connection by Talking About Hard Things
[00:00:00] Laura McKowen: Hey, it's Laura. If you're listening to this, you're not hearing the complete unedited version of this conversation. If you want in on that, you can get it by becoming a TMST Plus member. Just head over to our website at tmstpod.com and click support. All right. Enjoy this.
[00:00:29] Hey there it's Laura. Today, we talked to another podcaster about her book no less, which is all very meta and kind of basic sounding. Except our guest is a very special person with a huge mission and both her podcasts and book are wonderful. Anna Sale is the creator of the Death, Sex & Money podcast. You might've heard of it. She’s the author of let's talk about hard things, which is an invitation to discuss the tough topics that all of us encounter. The New Yorker said about her book, “that it's like a good conversation with a friend”. And I totally agree. For those who haven't met her yet, Death, Sex & Money is a podcast about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about. I love that her work has this calm, resolute quality that zeroes in on what matters. And then the patience to let some magical moments rise to the surface. Anna has a real gift for cutting through the white noise that so often overwhelms our most urgent high stakes conversations.
[00:01:41] She's teaching us how to listen to each other again. You might remember in our episode with Melissa Urban, that she talked about how after going through her divorce, she decided that she'd be the one to go first to talk about the hard thing first and publicly. Anna is definitely also one of those women. When she launched Death, Sex, & Money seven years ago, which by the way, it was way before podcasts were such a big thing, she had definitely made a decision to go first. I am excited for you to spend this time with her. Enjoy.
[00:02:27] Well welcome, Anna.
[00:02:29] Anna Sale: Thanks. Thanks for having me.
[00:02:31] Laura McKowen: Can you talk about your journey as a journalist? That's the short version of how you ended up doing what you're doing today.
[00:02:39] Anna Sale: Yeah. Um, I started out as a journalist in a very sort of conventional newsroom sort of model covering the West Virginia state house for public radio.
[00:02:52] That's where I trained and got pretty quickly focused on politics and worked in West Virginia and then Connecticut, and then came to NYC who I still work for in New York. And, you know, the thing that sort of motivated me in my politics reporting was really that kind of like mission driven work of like, I'm going to show up at the Capitol and I'm going to tell the people who have better things to do during the day, like what the people who they elected are doing on their behalf. And just really thinking about like, being really clear. And I never really gotten to like the, the horse racy stuff or the backroom deals, that wasn't my strength. It was more just trying to explain the stakes of what was going on and why it was happening the way it was.
[00:03:42] And so in that way, I think of my work as now, which is very much more about the emotional landscape of our lives is sort of very similar to that of just trying to be like, no, I really want to tell personal stories where we actually talk about how things are and why in each of our cases they have unfolded the way they have and how we make sense of them.
[00:04:07] But, you know, from an outward facing look, my job looks really different now. Like my, the stories we may get on Death, Sex & Money are about, you know, the most personal things that we go through and struggle with when we started the show and kind of came up with the conceit of death, sex, and money. Really just trying to be really clear that like, we're not going to skip over the stuff that's messy or taboo or uncomfortable, or that we don’t have often readily available words for, um, so that's what the show has been for seven years. And then I just wrote a book. Didn't just write a book. I worked on a book for many years. Just came out.
[00:04:50] Laura McKowen: That's all right. Yeah, I know that whoa.
[00:04:54] Anna Sale: They are hard to do, but it tried to build on that work of saying like, instead of just being in, in, I think of the show as being so much about kind of witnessing conversations about those hard moments in life and the book called let's talk about hard things.
[00:05:13] I wanted to pull back a little bit and try to sort of reflect personally and also talk to other people about, well, how have these conversations unfolded in your life and when they have unfolded in an effective way that has made you feel closer or more connected or more clear, what is it about those kinds of hard conversations that were successful?
[00:05:35] Laura McKowen: So to try to put to words what the processes,
not a lot of people want to go there. So what was stirring up in you when you came up for the concepts of docetaxel?
[00:05:47] Anna Sale: There was a real personal engine along with a sort of intellectual curiosity. I mean, I think in my work always, what I've loved about radio is that it's, uh, it's journalism, that's built on an interaction.
[00:06:03] Like that's what you're capturing. You're capturing tape of something happening. And, and what happens in interview when you connect with someone. Sometimes it, you know, you've just run across, you know, in a parking lot. Now they're telling you something really nuanced about their life like that. Those are really, I love those moments and that's why I became a journalist.
[00:06:24] And, but why I wanted to sort of really hone in on the building blocks of our lives and what happens. The bottom falls out to bring in another metaphor. Like where you, when, when you lose the scaffolding, that's been building up your life. What, what do you do that was, that was happening in my life. When I came up with the show concept, in my early thirties, I got divorced when I was 32 from my ex, we had been together throughout my twenties. I met him when I was in college and, and just sort of, we launched into young adulthood together. And then we got to that place that some relationships end up where you realize, even though you've shared a lot and have a lot of fondness and have promised each other, you're going to be there with each other forever, that it wasn't working anymore. And it was a real shock to both of us, for me, came with a lot of shame and feelings of failure. And I didn't really know, like I, you know, I, I sort of consumed all the self-help books I could and did all the therapy that I could, I was, and I, but I was like looking for more, just like I wanted more stories and more company.
[00:07:46] How to get through and what to do next. I remember this feeling of feeling like I was a helium balloon that was floating above in an out of control way. I didn't know how to get my grounding back. And I remember for me feeling that that was a really terrifying feeling. And so that was a real motivation for the work, just like finding people who would share with me when they had felt a similar thing.
[00:08:15] And then to say, here's the first thing I did. And then the next thing and the next. And, and to not tell stories where they were sort of simple and then it all worked out stories, you know, like I, I wanted to tell stories that were messy and that showed that life is about trade-offs and times of ambivalence and, and, you know, trying to show up for yourself and for others.
[00:08:43] Laura McKowen: The first line in your book is so great. I might not get it exactly, but when at the age of 30, I was lost for words.
[00:08:55] Anna Sale: Yeah, words failed me.
[00:08:57] Laura McKowen: It's failed me. I was like, I knew it was better than that.
[00:09:01] Anna Sale: Wait. Yes. Well, cause it's both, it's like, I didn't have the words. And also like I have this faith in my words, like if I think about it hard enough I could articulate the thing that was going to fix this impasse. You know, that's not what words can always do though. I needed to learn words. Don't always have that capability.
[00:09:25] Laura McKowen: The information doesn't always do that. It's so funny because words are all we have. Language is all we have. And when you talk about this, they only touch on what is an ineffable experience of being alive. And so I see your project as trying to do that, trying to find the words, trying to, to gather the words through people's direct experience for something, for the things that we have the hardest time putting into words. Right? So this is a quote from the book.
[00:09:59] And you say though we think of rebellion as warrior-like, it’s really about making the self vulnerable in heavily armored world, living a life where you, where we talk about hard things is not like an, it's not an innate human. It's not how we're born. It's not, certainly not how we're raised culturally.
[00:10:24] It's a set of skills. It's like a willingness and it's a practice for sure. So what do you say to people? Who you can tell, want to open up and want to have conversations about hard things, but they just can't bring themselves to do it. What do you say?
[00:10:45] Anna Sale: I always think of first, starting by modeling, you know, like rather than say, it's really important that you talk about your deepest pains and shames that they tell you, you need to be doing this.
[00:10:59] I think it's more about, you know, it can be so powerful to witness someone talk with self-compassion. Around moments of, you know, mistakes or uncertainty. And, and that creates this safety, a place of, of being able to also say like, oh, I screwed up in a similar way. Let me tell you my story. You know, one of the most important parts about creating the conditions for that kind of conversation to happen is to, is to sort of, kind of like by modeling, like here's the sort of values around how we're going to talk about this. Like we're gonna come at it with a spirit of curiosity rather than righteousness or judgment, and also that, uh, a spirit of, of listening in a way that's a dignifying, you know, even when the content itself might not be dignified, like to just indicate that you will be heard.
[00:12:04] At the beginning of interviews, for Death, Sex, & Money for example, sometimes I find myself saying like, you know, you've not heard about this show. Maybe let me explain this, you know, very like body and face podcast title. Like here's what we are. I might ask you about some personal things. Here's why, like our show is built around this idea that I'm sharing around these things.
[00:12:29] That we think about a lot, need to talk about more that, that, that creates community and pulls us out of isolation. There's this larger project that we're yeah, I sort of explain that. So that later on 20 minutes in, when I say like, oh, what, what happened there? Like when did that relationship end? It doesn't seem like I'm just like digging for tabloid fodder or something. Just the way that you actively listen with someone canbe the thing that, that makes someone comfortable sharing something they haven't before, you know, because they are feeling that, feeling, that feeling that's so rare of, of really being listened to.
[00:13:14] Laura McKowen: Talking openly about the truth and what the possibilities are in that space is something I think about constantly as someone in recovery and it is the central part of, of recovery for me, was learning to talk about the things I didn't think I could talk about. You could be in a room with strangers, right? All people who are suffering from addiction or have. And are still willing to talk about it. You're all there for the same reason.
[00:13:46] You're all there for the same goal and you know, where you're all coming from. Whereas in relationships, in partnerships, marriages, you know, parent, child, coworkers, all the other types of relationships that we have, where we don't necessarily have the same goals and we definitely don't have the same level of experience.
[00:14:13] We don't have a common denominator necessarily. I'm just thinking that that makes it so much harder. I'm wondering if you just have any thoughts about that, like, because you have to find that you have to find that that place where you can meet someone, even if you've never experienced what they have before.
[00:14:32] Anna Sale: Yeah, you're actually making me think about, I have a friend who has been in recovery for a long time. And before I started this work, for sure, I started Death, Sex & Money when I was still a regular old politics reporter. I went to an anniversary meeting with her and I had never been in a recovery meeting setting before.
[00:14:53] And, you know, I sat in the back and we watched people share, share their stories and was overcome with just what that space was. You know, this was like a random basement in Brooklyn. It was very early on in my time and living in New York city. And I don't know my experience of living in New York city was that like, I couldn't find any place where I felt like I could be not on guard and like not put together and hustling all the time. And so then to find myself in this space where it was all about, you know, humbly like, and concretely describing struggle and mistakes and supporting each other through that was very powerful. And I remember when I was starting Death, Sex, & Money,that was one of the things that I thought about. I was like, how do you create an environment that has that feeling? When you don't have the biographical detail that brings you together, you know, in a recovery meeting, you share that you've had different, you know, struggles with addiction or substance use and abuse, or like a Weight Watchers meeting.
[00:16:08] You're all gathered together. Talking about your relationship to food, for example, or in an evangelical church service, you're gathered together, talking about your shared belief that you're all sort of fallen, um, flawed. So those who need to be saved. And I've also found those experiences of being in those church services, very moving. Like when you gather together around the stuff that's hard and it meant that there's things that you have trouble with. And. I don't know that I have figured that out with creating this space of Death, Sex, & Money, but that was one. I wanted it to feel like that I wanted it to feel like this is a show.
[00:16:51] I can press play on where I can just come as I am. And I'm going to like hear somebody sharing something that’s probably a little bit messy. Maybe I'm going to have some feelings about the choices they made and would make the same choices, but they're going to make me reflect on my choices. And it says in a spirit that when we listen to each other, we're, you know, we're building an important sense of community and also helping each other.
[00:17:20] I do think that the recovery meeting model and what happens in those rooms, it's astounding and it's unlike any other, I mean, I made the comparison to Weight Watchers and church, but it is also unlike any other social space I've ever been apart, been witness to they're so powerful.
[00:17:42] Laura McKowen: It was like relief to me because honesty feels like that. And I think even when it's uncomfortable, it does feel expansive and like relief. What you're saying speaks to another thing that you touched on your book that I'd never thought about before, which is we don't have the structures, institutions that where we would go like a church or, or a recovery meeting or, or whatever it is that we're so built into our daily lives for so long.
[00:18:17] They're still there, as you say, but digitized and we're not connected to them in like a physical way or they're there, or that we've just dropped out of institutions. Can you talk about that? Cause it was so it was like a whoa. Oh, that's right. No wonder. It's so hard. Yeah.
[00:18:39] Anna Sale: We don't have like writing about talking about hard things. I thought a lot about like, first of all, what do you have to say about hard things that it's not been said for, you know, millennia, like the, the hard things have been around for a long time and people have said a lot about them, but I do think that we're undergoing a pretty important societal shift in how we engage with hard things.
[00:19:06] And, and like you say, it's like, I don't see it as good or bad. I see it as just like, listen, look clearly at how the landscape is different. And then what that means about how we as individuals have to engage with hard things. And, you know, you look at our mistrust of institutions, whether they're religious organizations or government, or, you know, are that joining spirit in a community to show up in a community hall, to do something together that has receded in American life.
[00:19:36] People who self report feeling lonely, feeling disconnected and that's related to, you know, anxiety, depression, you know, the epidemic of loneliness is something that has been talked about and is something that's real. And I think what those two things have to do with one another is like hard things in our lives are not new, that's not something that's happening for the first time, but the way the places we have to go and what we have to do is less ritualized. And the onus is more on each of our own shoulders to figure out. Where am I going to find support in this? So, I think that difference just means, like, you do have to figure out how to talk about hard things living in this world right now, because the onus is on us more as individuals to figure out for ourselves and to help people in our lives, you know, like, I, I don't think my parents had similar conversations with their fellow peers, with young kids of like, how the hell are you paying for childcare? What are the ways that you're putting this together with scotch tape and how are you also saving for college and how like the, the things that.
[00:20:56] I had to figure it out as a young parent right now and how that overlaps with money. Like, and, oh, my retirement account is in this weird account that somebody manages over here. I don't have a pension, but it's like also diffused. And the only common denominator is I've got a deal. I don't think a banker, like my parents had a banker, like what, you know?
[00:21:18] Um, so, so that's another way we've changed you. We have to figure out how to talk about money and how are we going to, you know, share around that in a, in a more sort of comfortable way to help each other because we're being tasked with figuring out some pretty complicated things.
[00:21:36] Laura McKowen: It's like when you're swimming in an ideology and you don't realize you're swimming in it. And that ideology or that system is making life more difficult than it maybe used to be, or that you even realize it to name it and to say, oh yeah, that's an actual thing is so helpful.
[00:21:56] Anna Sale: Yeah. And it's not just, you know, it's having a hard time. Oh, there are these historical phenomena that have conspired to make this hard. For me, it's not my personal failing that I'm having a hard time figuring out how to make this.
[00:22:24] Mikel Ellcessor: Hi, I'm Mikel. I'm the executive producer of Tell Me Something True and I co-created the show with Laura. We built TMST and our online community with the hope of creating a sane spot on the internet. We're really passionate about the ad-free nature of this work. Our belief is that this project works best if we're not hustling to keep advertisers happy, and we keep our attention on you, the TMST community, and this is where you can play a major role. TMST Plus is the membership group that helps to keep this podcast going. Whether it's through a monthly membership or a one-time contribution, TMST Plus members are vital to this experiment. As a TMST Plus member, you get to join Laura for member only events, send in questions for the guests, hear the complete unedited interviews and connect with other TMST community members. You know, sometimes we feel like we can't make a difference in the world. With a TMST Plus membership, you can be keeping this space alive and thriving for a one-time gift or for as little as 10 bucks a month. You can find the link in the show description and then please head over to tmstpod.com right now to support the show. And thanks.
[00:23:52] Laura McKowen: Melissa Urban, I don't know if you know her. She's the CEO of Whole 30 and she's a big vocal person about a lot of things. She's a recovering addict. She talks openly about trauma and her own trauma. And she's, I would say, borders on sort of an activist. I had her on recently, and she was really passionate about the power of going first, being the first one, raising your hand to talk about the hard thing.
[00:24:21] Like, okay, I'll do it. When she got divorced, she got to a place where she said it was like she made a commitment to be the one to talk about hard things that she’d gone through. And to go first. So you've been open about your own divorce, about the path you traveled with your feelings about money specifically. What did you learn sharing about those things? Cause I read your pieces about money and going into your second marriage and I don't, I'd never really seen anyone go into it like that. It was so refreshing.
[00:24:57] Anna Sale: Oh, good. I mean, there's part of me that I'm like, oh, the parts of me that seize up around money, I find just like so embarrassing.
[00:25:07] It's just like, so. Oh, come on, Anna, like evolve and, and I evolve, I slowly, but surely I'm like seizing up a little bit less around, around money, but I, that's just, it's part of my makeup that I have when I go into catastrophic thinking, I, it takes the form of money and it takes the form of like, You shouldn't have done this thing that you knew was going to was irresponsible. You should have just been shoveling money away and savings, and that's the way you stay safe. And that's the way that you never have a hard thing, bad thing happen to you. You just squirrel away money and don't take risks and that's not a very healthy-
[00:25:49] Laura McKowen: I'll let you continue. I just want, I want to affirm like, no, my god don't, don't feel bad because I know you're not the reason it was.
[00:26:03] Anna Sale: Well, no, tell me your read. I want to know. No, what you were going to say there.
[00:26:07] Laura McKowen: I, I don't have this similar thing around money. Mine looks different, but I had a lot of shame around money. I was in a really, really, really bad financial spot after my divorce. And because that also coincided with like the worst of my addiction and it was something I just thought I would never get out of it.
[00:26:26] I'm actually writing about it as part of my book right now, because it is so profound, it was like the thing I couldn't talk about, I would rather talk about my drinking, which were some really shameful stories than money. It was, I couldn't even bring it out of my mouth because there was so much there. It was so layered.
[00:26:43] And I know it's like that. I know it's like that for a lot of people. The thing that I loved the most was you start one of your essays with saying like, when he's your husband now, but when you first met him, he said he might need help around managing his money and that you were like repulsed by it.
[00:27:00] Anna Sale: Yeah. Isn't that not a very loving statement. I was like, kinda threw up a little bit in my mouth. I was like, don't tell me that. I can't, I can't take that on. I mean, I like, uh, what was it like for me to talk about money? I like it's just to me, it's embarrassing that also I find, I find money stories so endlessly fascinating, because you can be both. The level of concrete is like so available to you, it just is about how, how brave you're going to be. You know, and also like all of us are doing this thing with these numbers and bills and checks and, you know, payments online payments. Like we're all participating in this thing that we don't ever talk about. And it touches on so much.
[00:28:05] It touches on our feelings of vulnerability and survival and ability to trust and, and be vulnerable with somebody else and interdependence and our feelings of what, what is worthiness and value. So, I wanted to explore that in some of the memoir pieces of my book, because I do like, when you hear that somebody's marriage unraveled, you know, you're sort of like, oh, I wonder if it was infidelity or money. Or, you know, there's like these big ideas that we, we, there was like big buckets, which kind of force was it? It's somebody coming out, you know, but in mine it was like, oh, I guess mine fits in the money bucket. But that seems so just like, doesn't capture it, you know? So I wanted to just like, tease that out of like, what really was this about?
[00:29:01] Cause I didn't understand that at the time it surprised me when it unfolded the way it did. So I wanted the money chapter in the book to sort of somehow contain all of that, like, when you're talking about money, you're not just talking about what personal finance choice we should make, you know, to spend or save or invest, et cetera. You're also talking about these deep, deep cultural beliefs that come from our families of origin and related to trauma.
[00:29:38] Laura McKowen: Well, it's not that different from sex in a way, like the way you, you talk about sex. And I wouldn't have thought of it this way, but it's about kind of control and wants and are you willing to do this when you're talking about in relationship with someone, right? Are you willing to do this? Is this what you want? No. Okay. What do you want? There it's as much of a dance and as intimate in a way as, as sex.
[00:30:04] Anna Sale: Yeah. If I do this for you, will you do this for me? But yeah, it's very, very similar negotiations that happen. And I think that it is with money, that idea of like going for that can be really powerful because then it can be like, oh, you know, I don't know. I love this. Pre pandemic times of when, when I could sit around a table with colleagues and like, we would be talking about work and then someone would be like, oh God, yeah, they didn't give me a raise until I did this. And then it was like, oh, we're really gonna talk about this. You know, like when the conversation turns and it is really, it's so generous to be that one person who's like, okay, if you all are curious, I'll tell you how, how this happened, you know? And of course everyone's like, yeah, Please tell us, you know, of course that creates you need the right conditions for that, of, of trust and context.
[00:30:58] And knowing that you're in a space where you feel comfortable sharing more specifically. But I think that is, it's so generous to say, um, I'll tell you some of my mess, you know, or some of, some of the, how this actually went down. And I just want to say, when you mentioned the shame about divorce, it made me think of that's something I really felt a lot. And then some in something that, speaking of words, one word that really helped me was I decided to really embrace self-identifying as a divorce say, because I thought it made me seem interesting and sexy and like complicated. And so I feel like for anyone listening, who is in that phase, emerging from a marriage that ended just think about, can you be a divorcee? Does that make you like, want to go to Miami? You know, and like have a trip with your girlfriends and celebrate?
[00:31:58] Laura McKowen: I embraced almost all the negative, supposedly negative subversive labels as that. I just like it. I'm like, yeah, so I don't call myself an alcoholic cause it's way too, it feels too punitive to me, but like, yeah. I struggled with addiction and I'm a divorcee. And I think, I think it's good if we, if we just gave one person that permission, that's awesome.
[00:32:26] Because I think it, it feels very different. Like, yeah, it does make you interesting. Your holes are interesting as Augusten Burroughs says, what have you seen that's like a shared trait or I don't know, skill or competency with people who are willing to have hard conversations?
[00:32:47] Anna Sale: Hmm. It's interesting to think about that. I've had these kinds of conversations with so many different sorts of people. There's a quote that comes to mind. Nadia Boltz Weber says that when you are talking about hard things, you want to talk about them from scars and not wounds. And what she means by that is like, you know, after just that first layer of scabbing over has happened, if you're, if you're doing like sort of sharing, um, in a sort of vulnerable way, you know, you can talk from wounds. If you're in a therapeutic environment, of course you can reach out if you're in crisis, but, but in that kind of sharing socially, you know, and I, I think that those scabs can take a lot of different forms. Like for example, somebody who has embraced divorce, say of like, oh, now I'm integrating this fact into my identity. I'm not shying away from that. And so now that I've integrated this, the fact that I had a marriage, that it didn't divorce, I'm going to tell you about it.
[00:33:56] Here's what I learned. I'm going to share. And I actually learned some things like, I think that's a trait of people who are comfortable talking about hard things is that they have seen the value of what can happen when you allow that in to who you are and share it with others, you give other people permission to allow and things, facts about their lives that maybe they've struggled to face or, you know, are deep in grief around, for example, you know, I think about a friend of mine who I write about in the book, who she had a stillbirth and you know, that there's so many strange absent social conventions for grief or pregnancy that ends that way. There's no mourning rituals.
[00:34:44] And she was just like, I don't, I'm just going to tell people that I'm sad. I'm going to cry in public. When tears come, I'm gonna cry. Every year on the anniversary of my son's birth and death, I'm going to mark it and it's going to be, it might make some people feel creeped out, but like, that's what I need to do.
[00:35:03] And her doing that, she's become a place where people who are facing pregnancy loss in all its forms, they know she's there to talk to you about it. So, right. What else? You know, I also just think a sense of humor and like, humility is a really, you know, it's easier to talk about hard things and places in your life that it a little tender when you have that ability to be like, Yeah, that's a part of me too. That happened.
[00:35:45] Laura McKowen: Yes. That happened. It's true. In my experience, people, the thing that keeps them from sharing is shame. Almost always shame and probably fear. Second of all, what's going to happen if I do, I'll lose all my attachments and then ironically, of course, sharing is what helps relieve shame when it's received in a safe place.
[00:36:11] And so it's this interesting tension between that. I have always found out that it takes a moment of kind of jumping off a cliff. I listened to your interview with Ezra Klein. You were saying in your conversations, you kind of imagine that at the top of a deep hole or a well, and you're going to go like Spelunking together, you're going to drop down and see what's in there. I thought that was a really good way to put it.
[00:36:39] Anna Sale: Yeah, there is that well, because you're going into a different mode, it's like, what's going to happen when I say this, you know, and you don't know, and it could be a really powerful connection and it could be disruptive. Disruptive in a way that's as an outcome, maybe you didn't want, but you are stepping towards the truth.
[00:37:03] You know, like there's, there's more truth there than there was before. And I thought once before, right. I think of it as sort of like that moment, like maybe before you can talk about hard things, you have to have that moment of like crumble, you know, like crumpling up and like. Just like, maybe it's something of a fact that you... I'll use the example of my divorce. I can remember coming home from a night out when my marriage was ending and a friend of mine, we shared a cab back to Brooklyn and we got out and he could tell I was a little bit shaky. And we sat on the stoop and he gave me a cigarette and I just like sobbed. We talk about that the night that he was my angel, my little cigarette angel, you know, cause you need to have that time of like blending in because so much of hard stuff is like, I'm just gonna pretend this is not happening and gonna just be numb to it and denial.
[00:38:11] So I think that sort of like, just letting yourself have it wash over you is maybe part of letting in that shame, you know, and all the feelings that it brings up. Shame is a big, I just, shame is a big thing. It's such a lot. It contains that word. Like it shows up in so many ways. Yes.
[00:38:37] Laura McKowen: Yes. I mean, there's a reason Brene Brown has dedicated her whole field of study, her whole career really, to studying it. There is so much there and my experience was kind of always being slightly ashamed of myself and who I was before I even had any reason to. And then, you know, I created real reasons to, and, and yeah, so I think it's a, it's an interesting phenomenon that I studied a decent amount of Buddhism and one of the things that Pema Chodron comments on a lot, she always comments. It's a phenomenon of the Western world, primarily that she would say people in say Tibet, when these teachings were brought to them would be so confused at the level to which we could beat the shit out of ourselves. So to me, it's heartening in the sense that it's helpful in the sense that like what you were, when I asked you to talk about the lack of institutions and sort of help in processing things, it's similar to that.
[00:39:46] It's like, oh, that's a thing. It's a thing we do that has a name and it's, and it's, it's a phenomenon of our culture. So maybe I can choose to, to sort of extract myself from it. It's just not, it's not just the way it's not just the part, just who I am. It's not that.
[00:40:03] Anna Sale: Yeah. And the other thing that I think that shame, like you, you feel the feeling before you understand why. And so you sort of have to name that you're feeling ashamed to then go like, wait, I'm feeling ashamed because of a set of societal conventions and beliefs, like, wait, I don't buy those. You know, you have to like name the shame to get back to the thing to be like, hang on. That's bullshit. I don't need that.
[00:40:29] You know, like, or I don't believe that. And then you can sort of build back this other way of sort of talking back to your shame. Doesn't make the shame go away, but like, you can talk back to it.
[00:40:40] Laura McKowen: So I guess I'm curious about how things have changed for you since. Since you started the show, how has it changed you to have these conversations to do this work with these people? How has that reflected in your own life?
[00:40:58] Anna Sale: Oh, my life is so different now than it was in 2014 when the show started. And I think in large part, because of the work on the show, you know, over the course of seven years, got married to Arthur, my husband, and we've had two kids and we moved across the country to California and we bought an expensive fixer upper, which I still feel a lot of anxiety about around this bottomless pit of money. Um, yes. Naturally thinking about the world in 2014, there was a lot of suffering and bad stuff going on, but it kind of feels quaint compared to now. I think interviewing people and talking with people about things like, what is happening in their lives now and what led to what's happening in their lives.
[00:41:51] Now the history of leading to that, like ,it's been this really cool thing to have that like working when you talk to people and you're always kind of tracking the narrative around and then you can call them back in two years and you can see how the arc has changed when you're making stories all the time, where there aren't like tied up endings.
[00:42:14] It has made me be so much more able to recognize like, oh, I'm in this time of life is really tough, but I'm in this season of x you know, it's not just life is really hard. You know, it's like this faith of just the way that time, it doesn't necessarily make things better or worse, but it changes things. And that can be a comfort to just allow me to sort of keep focused on, you know, just like narrow the frame of the sets of my anxieties, you know, to just try to be like more in the moment. And you know, the other thing that's helped with that is, is having little kids, like they, you know, they make me be very responsive to immediate needs. So yes they do. I think that the other thing that I think one way I have evolved as an interviewer, I hope and continue to think about a lot is like, just like what kinds of conversations I have and lead as an interviewer. And I'm continually kind of becoming more thinking more about what it means when the conversation is led by me and that's a specific encounter. What I mean by that is like, just being clear about my orientation in an interview when it comes to the facts of my identity and the facts of where I've come from and how that lines up or doesn't with the person I'm talking to and how that creates whatever is happening in that moment.
[00:43:54] And so I think that there's ways that I try to be more sort of just like name that as an interview now than maybe in 2014 when I was starting thinking about like, oh, let's just share, you know, like, um, yes, let's share now I think, but like also let's be real about like what I think you can Intuit about my experience and what I think you can like where we're, where we're different. And let's talk about that.
[00:44:23] Laura McKowen: Interesting. So what would be an example of that? Because like, I think I know what you mean because of how the world has changed since 2014, but what would be an example of it? I think I want to ask, because I think it's helpful for people just in their everyday context.
[00:44:42] Anna Sale: Yeah. I don't think that the world has necessarily changed since 2014. It's like I, as a white woman, have changed and I'm seeing things more clearly in the world that have been there a long time to be really clear. Like I had a wonderful conversation with Claudia Rankin, the poet. This is an episode that came out earlier this year on our show, and it was one of those interviews where she had just come out with this, this incredible book called Justice. She'd done interviews all over the place. And I was like catching her in her book tour and I'm like, oh, she's been talking about this book, how do I make this conversation feel different? And it really was different because it was like, it was about kind of describing her part of what she writes about in the book is calling upon herself to be brave and not socially lubricate moments where she felt particularly with white men where she would just kind of like prioritize their comfort. Instead, she would say like, oh, I see that. I see you, you know, kind of call them out like an airport airplane line, for example.
[00:45:51] And what happened when that happened? So what was interesting about that conversation was like talking about our own, you know, we have had different ways. Like talking about race and the way if I express like, oh, that's interesting. Will you tell me about that? How is that read differently than when a black woman says that to someone?
[00:46:13] Oh, that's interesting. Tell me about that. That can create defensiveness when she says it in a way where it can be sort of charming and non-threatening coming from me, um, depending on who we're, who we're talking to. So just those sorts of examples. I mean, I was not trained as a journalist to think about that. Like, you know, I thought when I was at state houses covering politics, I was going out and I was going to tell the people what had happened. I was going to report back the truth. And now I'm more aware as a journalist and as an interviewer, I'm reporting back on the encounters that I had while I was out collecting stories.
[00:46:54] Laura McKowen: This feels dark to say, but we've, we've sort of been hinting at it a little bit. It feels like as a society where we're completely incapable of having public conversations about difficult topics. And I don't know that maybe we've never been able to. And we're just seeing it now, maybe the method in which we're trying to have them is completely incompatible with actually having them and being successful. Like social media, not convinced that conversations can actually happen there. What is your sense? How have we become worse at it? Has it always been this bad? Are we just seeing it now? What, what is your sense?
[00:47:38] Anna Sale: I think it's like all of it. I think that there's certain forums that have become less able to contain conversation or that just feel more useless than ever at helping us connect and deal together. Like I think of when I say that something like, you know, cable news, for example, I don't feel like that's a place that is designed to like let's share and see each other. That's not the spirit behind cable news. And, and so, you know, if you're talking about like, just the way our largest media institutions are framing hard things and how those stories get told, I don't think that's a place where it's happening effectively. The thing with social media, I feel like, yes, social media is a cause of a lot of the ways that these kinds of conversations have become kind of more tribal and more like sharp and capable of reaching consensus when you're talking across difference, but at the same time, it's also a place where, you know, I did an interview today with a woman who was struggling with sobriety and grief and the real power that she in connection, she has felt through this one Facebook group.
[00:49:12] Having a place to share in her life has been really meaningful. So I think, you know, you can have these little micro environments where really important connections are happening and, and think hard things are being talked about. And I think that's something that podcasting has enabled, you know, whether it's for bigger podcasts that are creating sort of creating a demand and then filling a demand for sort of emotionally nuanced storytelling or all the ways that podcasting is allowing people to find conversation that is, is maybe, you know, niche, but very much speaks to their particular identity, your moment, where they are that's meaningful. People or get something from listening to conversations, like the ones you're having.
[00:50:02] So I feel like both things are getting worse and things are getting better. And so the thing, the thing that I think about is like, okay, well, if like, just, how am I participating in the parts that are getting better? You know, how am I trying to fortify the places that have the potential to help us? Even like volunteering for my kid's preschool. So for how they talk about racism, like that's a way of just fortifying our ability to have the vocabulary to do this together. But it feels like the immensity of the suffering, the scale of this suffering, all the different ways it's showing up. I don't know if it's worse, but if it feels really hard right now between the isolation and the grief and the loss because of the pandemic on top of ongoing inequality, the challenges of inequality, it feels very in climate. Like everything feels very big and hard. We have to figure out how to be with each other as we confront all this stuff.
[00:51:18] Laura McKowen: How do you do that in your own life? You're willingly putting yourself in these conversations. And you know, you're not necessarily experiencing the hardships and the pain and all of that yourself, but you do have secondary experiences. When you are in a conversation with someone, how do you take care of yourself? How do you not fall into hopelessness and despair? And maybe you sometimes do. What have you been doing in the past year to really help yourself and help the people around you?
[00:51:55] Anna Sale: Yeah. One big life hack that I'm really leaning into right now is trying not to talk as much. And what I mean by that is like, I really am helped by going out on a walk and not immediately calling someone or firing up a podcast. I'm all for digging in when the conversation comes up, but also like there there's something to be said for like giving yourself a little pause from the ticker tape of talking and of inputs. And, and I think that makes you a better talker, that reactive kind of talking that's basically like fueled by stimuli, you know, like it's not a sort of like deeper sharing, you know, or, or a deeper listening does. It's more sort of frenetic. I'm trying every day to take time for quiet and that sounds sort of like, isn't that nice? Anna's doing self care, but I actually am realizing it's a matter of like I have to, for my mental health and to manage my anxiety. I am also better at my work and I'm better in my life when I do that. I feel better. So it, so I should do it.
[00:53:37] Laura McKowen: Yeah, I don't think it's cute or quaint, or I think it's actually sometimes difficult to be. Well, you're just lovely. It's been so nice spending time with you. And I'm so glad I got to see the person behind the show and I'm excited for people to hear more about your book and get it. How has the experience been of publishing a book? Do you want to do it again?
[00:54:09] Anna Sale: The predominant emotion I have right now about book publishing is it feels really good to not have to write. I'm really glad that that's finished for now.
[00:54:23] Laura McKowen: Yeah, that'll go for a few years. I would imagine it has it's a whole thing. It's hard. It's like having a kid.
[00:54:31] Anna Sale: Yeah, it was a lot, but I'm really, it's so gratifying to hear, to talk with people about it. Share this thing that was so much inside my own head for so many years to be able to talk about it is really nice.
[00:54:51] Laura McKowen: Alright, thank you so much for being with us today. If you want more TMST head on over to tmstpod.com and become a member. Members get access to the full uncut versions of these conversations, previews of upcoming guests, invites to join me for members only events, and access to our members only community where I hang out a lot, especially now that I'm not on social media. We decided from the beginning to make this an independent project, we don't have sponsors and we don't run ads. This means that we can make the show all about you and not what our sponsors or advertisers want, but it also means we're a hundred percent reliant on your support. So my request and my invitation is simple. Support the show by becoming a member, or you can simply make a one-time donation of as little as $5.
[00:55:49] I cannot stress this enough. You can make a huge difference for as little as $5. Please head over to tmstpod.com right now Tell Me Something True is engineered and mixed by Paul Chuffo, Mikel Ellcessor and I dreamed up this show and we're looking forward to joining you online and next time on Tell Me Something True.