For Risa's first interview for the podcast since being diagnosed with cancer she sits down poet, philosopher, and friend of the podcast Jarod K. Anderson who returns to share kindness from his new book, Something in the Woods Loves You.
Bats can hear shapes, plants can eat light, and bees can dance maps. When his life took him to a painfully dark place, the poet behind The CryptoNaturalist, Jarod K. Anderson, found comfort and redemption in these facts and the shift in perspective that comes from paying a new kind of attention to nature.
Something in the Woods Loves You tells the story of the darkest stretch of a young person’s life, and how deliberate and meditative encounters with plants and animals helped him see the light at every turn. Ranging from optimistic contemplations of mortality to appreciations of a single mushroom, Anderson has written a lyrical love letter to the natural world and given us the tools to see it all anew.
Transcript
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You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. Be a witch! Be a witch! Be a witch! Be a witch! Be a witch! You must be a witch.
We have the same haircut.
I've had mine longer.
Yeah. Every time I complain about it, Mark's like, well, no, you just know what it's like.
There are upsides, you know, like, like wind isn't a factor. I know, like it's easier to get ready in the morning. I, these are the upsides I thought about when I got rid of my hair.
Yeah, I mean a main one for me is like, you can shower and be dry.
Yeah, fast. Really
fast. I've never had that my whole life. It was always like, really thick and heavy and long. And it was like, there's some serious calculations involved in getting wet.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yep. More aerodynamic. Mm hmm. Probably faster.
Yeah, totally. There's lots of pros to cancer.
Oh, God. Ugh. Fun sentence.
Yeah. I gotta do that, but, cause it helps me, but I apologize if that is painful for you.
I do the same thing with, with depression. Yeah. Yeah. Gotta, gotta find the upsides.
Yeah. And you just kind of make like the darkest joke possible.
Oh yeah. Yeah. My, my mom went through breast cancer and when she lost her hair, her dark joke was, she was telling all their friends, what'd she say? She was telling all her friends it was AIDS so that my dad couldn't remarry if she died.
Oh, I like her.
Yeah. That's the sort of family I'm from.
That's really fucking dark. I like that. We have like a Missing Witches. Uh, circle in the morning on weekdays where we just like work quietly together that's hosted by a member who's writing their Ph. D. thesis right now. So we just kind of keep each other company and then check in at the end.
And I was telling them I was preparing for this interview and that like last time we interviewed I had like 60 pages of notes from your poems and this time my plan was just to read your own book at you for like an hour and a half and be like, good, eh? Good. Good. It's really good.
Honestly, I, I, I appreciate any time you do that because my memory is such that I Don't count on me remembering everything I've written, you know
I'm saying this as much for you as for myself.
Like we don't have to have our shit together
That's not really an option for me anyway, so
Perfect This is uh, my first interview since You Canceling interviews when I got diagnosed. I feel like I'm probably really bad at it now. I have like a terrible memory. There's holes in my memory now. I just feel like I'm not sure that I still know how to do this.
So we'll just like figure it out together.
I'm happy to be chatting with you and I don't think there is a wrong way. So, it's already a win. I'm just happy to, to be here chatting.
Yeah. I figured this was a low, low lift one, because I feel like we're really good friends, even though we hung out once.
I agree.
Yeah, no, we hung out late into the night reading poetry. If that doesn't make you good friends, what does?
Yeah, right. Plus I spent this weekend rereading your book. And so that has that effect where like you've, you know, it's, it's like a, such a personal memoir. So now I feel like really close with you and Leslie and your therapist.
That's been an interesting one where I've gotten emails about the book and lots of people have done some, some deep sharing with me. And it is like, you know, they have that, that term parasocial for feeling like, you know, somebody really well, but. On the other hand, it's weird for me because it's like, well, if you read that book, you do know me pretty well.
Like that's all, there are people who are close friends of mine who read that book and learned a bunch of stuff they didn't know, you know? So yeah, I, I'm pretty unfiltered in that book.
Yeah. And I assume that just because you wrote about it all, it doesn't mean you're always ready to talk about it all.
I kind of am, honestly, because, um, I'm not good at practicing what I preach all the time, in terms of mental illness, where there are things that I have figured out and I even write down in the book and then I still have to relearn them in the moment.
But one thing that sticks with me again and again is kind of the idea of not being quiet about it. I've done a pretty good job of killing off any embarrassment related to my mental health struggles. So, once that's achieved, there's no reason not to. Talk about kind of whatever. So yeah, there's really no part of my story that I'm, I'm shy about talking about partly because I've made a lot of connections by being open about it and gotten a lot of encouraging little notes on, on social media, people who said, thanks for talking about this.
So yeah, I don't, I don't, I mean, it can be emotionally hard as I'm, I'm sure, you know, to rehash certain things, but. Also, that's kind of a thing I'm always doing in my own head anyway. Right.
Yeah. I relate to that piece. How was it writing
the book? Daunting. At first it was, I've been kind of chewing on this project for, Four or five years.
It started in a very organic way where, as I said, I would, I would talk about struggles with depression and then I would get notes from people who I used to tell Leslie who wanted to talk shop, you know, And I was happy to do it, but also, I'm not a therapist, and also, I couldn't really talk about everything I wanted to talk about within the context of DMs.
So, the book took shape as, as the thing we, we talked about as the long conversation around here. This idea that I wanted to go on a long camping trip with. With all of these folks and have a long talk about, about my own struggle or what I had learned or just dope as a writer, it was clear to me it had to be a book.
It was a book length thing. But then it was daunting because it's like, all right, I have a topic for a book, nature and mental health. It's like, all right, well, that's huge. That's too big. So it took me a while to find a way in because I knew I had plenty of stuff to say, but for it to be a book, it had to have some kind of organizing principle.
So eventually I settled on, all right, well, You know, the writing I like often centers on some kind of specificity, so then I started to make my own notes about creatures, plants, and animals that really meant something to me, and that list got long, and then it got pared down, and then I started to have different columns, it was like, Plants and animals that meant a lot to me, points I wanted to make about mental illness, and kind of personal anecdotes that were related.
So then it's like I have these three strands, and I had to then figure out how to, how to braid them together. And then that was, you know, the outline, and it, it, it went from there, but. But at first it was kind of a scary prospect because it felt like it was, it was an ambitious thing to try to cover.
Did writing it drag you back through it?
Yeah, this book made me cry a lot. Yeah. As I was writing it, and then even more so when I recorded the audio book, which is a thing I didn't consider when I agreed to it. Oh,
God, yes. I cry a lot in the recording of our audio book.
Oof. It was just me in this recording studio with like, there was a local engineer and then a guy in Los Angeles listening along.
And I didn't account for how many times I would have to just stop and pace around. But it was, it was hard, but it was, it felt medicinal. I mean, I wouldn't, I wouldn't quite say cathartic, but it was also good for me to articulate some stuff that, I felt like I knew, but it's just a recurring thing that I don't know what I know or what I believe until I try to write it down, you know, because it can live in the abstract, um, but it's different when you have to tie it to, to concrete words and put them in order, you know?
Yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah. I mean, one thing that's really moving in the book and also very satisfying is that you just talk about suicide a lot. And I don't mean that satisfying as in like, whatever, whatever shitty interpretation somebody might have of that, which I don't think any of you listeners would have, but I just mean like, we dance around it so much.
And it's so. It's, I mean, if your life hasn't been touched by it, I'm happy for you. But
yeah, I'm so used to the idea from, you know, I guess a number of different angles, so it occasionally surprises me when I run into the impulse to dance around it, like when we were first putting together the book deal.
So I had had this outline. And I'd written the first few chapters with no idea of any kind of publisher or anything. And then Timber Press reached out to me and said, Hey, have you ever thought about doing a nonfiction book? And it's like, okay, well, funny you should ask, here's this. So it was just, it was kind of a lovely set of circumstances coming together.
But one of the first things the editor said to me in kind of an early meeting was like, I think you're going to have to talk about suicide in this. Like, are you going to be okay with this? And it's just like, Yeah. What an interesting question. And there have been a few other versions of that where it's like, okay, yeah, right.
People who don't think about this topic a lot can find this, this jarring and that is sometimes news to me as, as somebody who has a lifelong struggle with chronic depression.
Yeah, because you don't just like, your story isn't one of just like, encountering it or living with people, you know, living with the loss of people who have taken their lives, but you say really clearly, like, there were times in your life, and this comes back for you in Waves, where you were thinking about taking your own life many times.
Many times a minute. And like, I don't bring that up to be whatever ghoulish, but I hadn't experienced the kinds of depression anywhere near what I got close to when I was. This is a poorly formed sentence, but during chemo, like I was, and I'm still in it, but like I'm, I'm in a better place now, but there's parts of the chemo wave where you're like very clinically depressed.
And I read your book first before, and then after, and it was a completely different experience. Like I related, I felt like you had written the philosophy of the suicide. subject in a way that I couldn't relate to as clearly, but I appreciated before. And then when I read it after I was like, everybody has to read this.
Insert question.
Well, I'm yeah, I'm trying to parse for myself. It's like suicide is obviously like an intrinsically dark or grim thought. Objectively subjectively. There's a kind of pervasive misery that can make it seem like a very reasonable and almost hopeful option. I, I once heard it kind of darkly described as it's like, well, people commit suicide because like they're in a burning building and they're jumping out the window because the fall seems like a lesser evil to the burning.
And that's been my experience with it at some of my low points in depression. And it's like, It makes perfect sense at the time, and Mark, you know, the, the therapist I talk about in the book, I think at one point, he framed it in an interesting way, which was like, there is a way to view suicidal ideation as hopeful, because It is a kind of claiming of agency.
He was good at that sort of reframe where it was like, all right, but if you feel like you can take bold action and claim the agency to do that, like there are other ways to take bold action and claim agency for change that may seem equally kind of like entering the unknown, sort of like marrying death and change.
It's kind of like, well, there are other ways to kill this version of me that claim power and agency, but, you know, don't close the book on everything else you might become.
Yeah. Trying to find, cause I had pulled out the quote, but you describe it in the book as like, not, not trampling the flowers on the way to getting to that change.
Yeah. Yeah. That's in a part where I think I'm talking about the inevitability of death. It's like, we all know death. And thinking of it as a curtain of rain, rain sweeping toward you, you can see it across a meadow full of flowers and seeing it and acknowledging it is one thing, whereas the impulse for suicide is trampling through all those flowers to get to the rain and that I got to a point of peace where it's like, all right, I can see, I can see death over there.
I can see the curtain of rain, but no, no, I don't have to trample the flowers to get to it.
Yeah, I really appreciate that image and that reframe, especially now, if you are listening to this at some point in the future, we are recording this on the day that the United States is inaugurating their rapist, and it is hard.
This is hard weather days. To borrow a metaphor from your book, these are bad brain weather days. Oh, how are you? I mean, I know winter is hard for you. How are you coping with this particular heaviness?
It depends. Jared's doing
a head wobble. Yeah, I was trying to
figure out how to answer that, like, it would depend on when you asked me.
Yeah. You know, part of the skill of dealing with depression, for me, is the whole classic, Acknowledging what I can and can't control stuff. And so there's a lot of anger in me. And then sometimes I have to kind of return to things that I've known before and written down before and tend to forget every day.
And that's the making space for the good stuff. It's the acknowledging what I do and don't control the idea that the good and the evil in the world are happening concurrently and always are. And so. Choosing what to see and what to focus on and what to invest my energy and really is a choice and sometimes, you know, I I have to think about being small and being kind of realistic about what I am as a person on a planet with eight billion people and That can be a little terrifying but It does I think sometimes put it all in the proper context when I feel kind of a Rage and a panic that there's something I should do right now to fix it all.
Yes
You know, yeah, but like like like so many things in nature There's a balance because there's also all kinds of good I can do in the world And a lot of it is good that is very much in my control and it's good that nobody gets a vote on and so You You know, it's, it's not feeling steamrolled and powerless because of the, the evil in the world I can't control.
Not letting it rob me of the good I can do through despair or the kind of anger that is. Paralyzing, you know,
yeah, don't let it rob me of the good. I can do is a good one. Yeah,
because it can, you know, there's a lot, there's a lot to be upset about or to despair about, but in kind of a weirdly practical way, it's like, all right, but what good does that do?
And sometimes I have to come back to kind of the same thought I use on depression, which is that as a part of nature. Yeah. With the same dignity and worth as an oak tree in a river valley, like, all right, I do deserve moments of happiness, or I do deserve peace and contentment, and sometimes, sometimes I have to give myself kind of grudging permission to grant those things to myself, but it's not always comfortable.
You know, everything from conversations I've had in the last year about genocide and Palestine to Trump and authoritarianism and global fascism. And, you know, it's, it's, it's that, is there any moment for rest, but, you know, I also have a five year old that I look at and think like, okay, but part of my job is to teach and experience with him the good in the world and the stuff that is the reason we're upset.
All the, all the good things and things we cherish that are at the heart of why we are so upset about injustice and pain and evil in the world and making time for, for that good is important too. Sometimes I think I have stuff to say about it as somebody who has major depression too, because it almost doesn't matter what year it is.
I can find reasons to give up hope and have total despair and I could have said the same thing in 1996.
This is a pro of your depression. Yeah. You always have access to this incredible insight just like all the pros of my cancer.
Well, yeah. Because like sometimes if you have to build. A viewpoint where there's still good in the world from scratch, that's a skill I have had to do over and over again, and I kind of know that it is independent of what's going on in the world, and it teaches me how subjective reality is sometimes, and the idea that meaning is a crafted thing, and stepping from the idea of meaning is a crafted thing to, and I can participate in it, it's not something that I just have to accept,
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm struggling with parts of that these days, you know, like, I don't think I've ever been so often have I had come into my mind, the feeling of hate, just the thought, you know, like, they're, they're letting women die, rather than me.
Save their lives when the baby inside them is dying. I hate them. You know, they're fighting for the right to marry Children. I hate them. They're making it illegal to feed the homeless. I hate them like they're making it illegal for women to hear each other's voices. You know, I hate them. And I feel that feeling building up in me.
But I'm literally fighting cancer. I can't carry all that hate. Yeah. And it's so hard to find A way back to a different kind of meaning and you know, the title of your book, really, it moves me a lot because when I'm in that place, I have a hard time believing that something in the woods, like that the woods aren't just really pissed at us.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean. The woods don't need stories to understand reality the way we do. You know, I don't know that the woods have a goal in mind. I think something in the woods loves you because. The kind of effortless knowing there and experiencing of life resonates with the part of us that is effortless in our living and being a part of nature and being animals and, you know, being kind of a part of the big mystery of, of life.
And that resonance isn't judging anything about us. That's kind of, I think, anchored to our intrinsic worth in terms of like the work we have to do in the world that is about crafted, meaning I think, you know, I, I do, I do get drawn to despair about it, but sometimes, sometimes the numbers help me. I mean, I forget the exact numbers, but it was like 32% of the electorate voted for Trump and 31 for Kamala and 30, whatever it was, it was.
It was 30 something just didn't vote and it's like, okay, this isn't like some huge groundswell of evil and of the percentage that voted for Trump. A lot of that is, you know, beer, ignorance, propaganda working. Like propaganda works, especially if you, you know, aren't educated against it. And if you're desperate and if you're scared and, you know, if you're not sure how you're going to take care of your family and you don't know how the world is changing, like there's a lot of humanity to.
observe, I think, even as we understand all of the things that we need to fight and fighting it through education and resistance. And, but sometimes those numbers help me when I start to think like, all right, well, the heart wood of the world is rotting. I think it is more complicated than that. That doesn't change the work that needs done.
It does help me not be angry at all of humanity or the human character in the same way, if that makes sense.
It does. It does. A beautiful thing that your book, Something in the Woods Loves You, does is it sort of lets different animals and plants. Participate in that making of meaning with you, or, or you let yourself make meaning with them.
And as a side note, I'll say, I was so happy that you got to see a loon. Messaged each other about loons for a while after the last time we spoke, I want to hear all about you getting to see a loon. And also I want to know like, what kinds of animals and plants are, nudging their way into your attention these days, or like
Oh, yeah.
So The Loon was Kate Nirenberger, a poet, nature poet, has some, some cool books on, on witchcraft and poetry. She teaches at the University of Minnesota, and she posted a thing for a writing retreat she was doing with a biology professor up in northern Minnesota at, um, Itasca, which was like a biology research station up at the headwaters of the Mississippi, one of the head, there's a lot of headwaters of the Mississippi, um, but it was at this place called Lake Itasca, and so I drove I don't know, 18 hours or something to get up there for this writing retreat.
And it was just great. It was just adult summer camp. It was this cluster of cabins and there was one that was sort of the mess hall and they would ring this school bell when it was time to eat and, you know, they just had a collection of like ceramic mugs you can just take with you and return whenever it's just great.
But I went hoping to see a loon and I got there hours early. And I was just sitting inside this, this cabin, the little gathering cabin, hours before our first class was going to start and I heard one. And yeah, and I just got choked up and I'm getting choked up just thinking about it. Yeah, I ran outside and, uh, this one of my classmates, cool lady who writes about a history of wild rice came up and was just like, Oh, are they talking to each other out there?
And I was kind of like,
yeah,
and I went out on the lake later that day or the next day with her and a few other women from the, from the college. And we saw a loon and they knew that I had never. And they were kind enough to say like, go ahead, Jer. Like, and so they sent me ahead and they were like, it'll dive when you get close.
And it didn't. So I just came up right next to it and got to kind of make eye contact with it. Yeah, it's just very cool. Yeah. There's so much,
there's so much bigger than you think, or I, I, I'm, I'm always surprised at how big they are. You know, they look like ducks and then you get real close.
So I knew they were big because I worked at a wildlife rescue in Ohio.
And their logo was a loon, and they had a stuffed loon on a shelf above the desk where I worked, which was so weird, and at the time, I said, are loons in Ohio? And they were kind of like, no,
not really, and I was like,
okay, I was gonna say, I spend a lot of time in the woods, and I've never seen a loon here.
Yeah, so, I guess they've kinda loomed large loomed, loomed, loon large for me for a long time. And you know, I had read a lot about kind of mythology attached to loons and a lot of their kind of fascinating physiology about the density of their bones and how eye color helps them see underwater and stuff.
So yeah, they were just kind of, it was a big celebrity encounter for me. I
feel that every, every time I see them, there's no, it never gets old, you know, you're never like, you're never too cool for lewds. No,
it's the sound too. I mean, the sound really just, just does it for me. I don't know. Uh, yeah, I don't think I, I would ever get over it.
I mean, there are birds that live near me that I feel the same way. I mean, morning dubs were close to making it into the book and pileated woodpeckers and yeah. Yeah. There are, there are lots of creatures that are, that are celebrities to me still.
Well, let's go back to that second part of my two part question then, because maybe the answer is affiliated woodpeckers.
Um, what animals or plants are shaping how you think these days or poking at you?
Yeah. Hmm.
I'm thinking a lot about oak trees lately. I've been reading. Doug Tallamy's books about oak trees because I, I have a little space for more trees. I've planted, I don't know, 20 trees in my yard in the last handful of years, and I don't have that much space, but there, since I have a little bit of yard. And I really want to be in the woods, something kind of occurred to me that there was no reason for me not to start converting this yard to a patch of woods and doing research on what native trees kind of have the most, I mean, this is a slippery thing to try to define, but have a lot of kind of local impact.
I did a deep dive into oak species and acorns are just one of my favorite objects in the world.
With tiny hats.
Yeah, I just love them. Acorns and pinecones are just, I just think they're so beautiful. But so I've, I've planted a red oak and a white oak, and I've found some volunteer kind of little babies out in my parents woods and brought them home.
I think one's a swamp oak. I planted a bur oak. And It's just another one of those moments of, okay, there's, there's more that I can learn in a lifetime for any given species, just watching any of these little. young oaks and saplings grow and finding a single like bump, a gall on a leaf and trying to identify what insect made it.
Because you know, these galls are like an insect comes along and injects essentially venom, but it could be all kinds of compounds into the leaf. And that gives the leaf instructions to grow a gall that they'll then plant eggs in and just seeing all of them and realizing all these little nurseries on these oak trees and that it's more than I can know and they're all unique and all of these different relationships with these insects developed over just, you know, millions and billions of years and.
It's just another one of those like, it's like a grownup experience of turning over a rock in the woods and being like, okay, yeah, there's just infinite, hidden, fascinating, beautiful things here. They're not necessarily visible when you first take a look, but there's always a deeper way of seeing and more to know.
And I find that very helpful, just sort of as I get older and. There's always a pull to a kind of cynicism or things fade from familiarity. So all those wonders keep trying to hide in plain sight. And so reminding myself that, that there's always more, I can't know it all. And I can't remember it all. And the point isn't mastery in some way, but.
But enthusiasm, I've just more and more realized that like, I don't want to be an expert. I want to be an enthusiast. And so finding more fuel for that fire really does it for me. So oak trees at the moment.
Yeah, thanks. That sort of feels like in some ways, like the story of the book. Can you talk about, I guess that part, you know, like when it gets, you know, You can talk about it in the context of, of the story in the book, like when it got so hard to leave the house, how you tricked yourself into doing it.
Yeah, I had to do that yesterday. Hmm. It's, it's almost a kind of faith, which is not a word I reach for very often. Yeah. Um, but it is a kind of faith because, I don't believe it will help on the days that it's hard. I really don't like there's no part of me that is like, ah, I have like a deep inherent wisdom that knows this is the right thing to do.
No, it is just a mechanical one foot in front of the other thing. I will rely on that, that, that sense of faith. Mixed with a little bit of identity helps like in so much is that my identity is kind of a system of beliefs that have like accreted over, over years. Sometimes that will help to have like, all right, I am someone who goes out.
Into the woods when I don't feel well, like that's part of where my, my medicine is, or that's a thing I do that mixed with faith that even though I can't feel it, I know that it has helped me in the past will get me to not necessarily shower, not necessarily like. Put an outfit that makes sense together, but, but like put on shoes and go.
And then like yesterday it helped, you know, I was having a really rough day with, yeah, the inauguration and everything. The ground was frozen. There were all these sort of peaks of ice and footprints where I went. So you couldn't walk on any of the paths. It was too, too slippery and craggy, but I just got out in the woods and sure enough, like I walked two or three miles.
And by the time I got back to my car, I, I absolutely felt better. And sometimes it's like, ah, and sometimes it's almost like, ugh, fine, all right, fine, I feel better because I, I still am a little bit of a grump about it. And that's part of what I have learned. It's like the big ones, it's not like I ever feel like I have, Totally fixed or defeated depression.
I never feel like that, but I do feel like I have found some tricks to get rid of shame and the big one for me is it's possible to have a miserable successful day, like I think. I can change the criteria for, for victory or success on a day. Like I had a rough, rough depression day yesterday, and it was like, all right, yeah, but you still hung out with your family.
You still played with your son. You went for a walk, like did the things. So at the end of the day, it's like, yeah, that was a hard depression day, but like that was a successful day and that, that seems to matter to me. Like if, if I can have those. And string together days that feel like wins, even if they're hard, that's so much better than what I used to do, where I would have a bad day, I would hold on to it as some kind of loss or failure that was on my permanent record, and like, then I would feel them stacking up.
And then, that has its own kind of inertia, so then it felt harder to escape, where, whereas now, I can be a lot kinder to myself, and without shame, I can be like, alright, this sadness is a symptom. It's not who I am. And yeah, this day was tough, but, I did some things I could be proud of, just be proud of, but things that mean I'm, I'm honoring my own worth that, that I think I deserve to feel better, like the fact that I did the trudge and put on the boots and went out means like I'm voting for myself, that I'm on my own team a little bit more.
My mom used to say, put, put verbs in your sentences. And so sometimes I think about that. Whereas if, if I can find any way to exercise any kind of agency, it, it can help because then it takes me a little bit out of the passive mode. Like I'm at least in the fight, you know?
Yeah. I'm going to read this piece you wrote.
You wrote, we seldom admit this seductive comfort of hopelessness. Yes. It saves us from ambiguity. It has an answer for every question. There's just no point. It's just not worth the effort. Hope on the other hand is messy. If a good outcome is possible, then we have things to do. We must weather the possibility of happiness.
We must hush shame and doubt and participate in the art of living because we are needed to usher good into the world for others and ourselves. When you say we are needed to usher good into the world, can you talk about who you mean and what you need from them?
I mean all of us and It goes back to that meaning is a crafted thing.
Sure. But so is culture and show it. So is civilization. And so are shared values of any human family. So sometimes it, it feels like it's the most sensitive or empathetic among us that get trampled the hardest by self doubt or hopelessness. And. And yet these are the people I want with me crafting meaning and defining the narrative.
And so, you know, I want the empathetic people, the sensitive people, the creative and imaginative and loving people to, to weather the, the, the burden of hope. And that framework is really familiar to me because part of what depression has done to me historically is. Is really emphasize that idea that hope is costly because, you know, I say in the book that depression is a liar and depression defends itself and for me, part of that was always there's no point in doing things to try to get better and more than just there's no point.
It'll be another failure on that. On that imaginary permanent record because it's like you're going to put out energy. You don't have to try. And when it doesn't work, that disappointment will be worse than if you hadn't tried it all. And so that that ties into what I think of as the burden of of hope.
Yeah, it's it's sort of paradoxical. It's like the people I find that are so confident, um, That they always know the right stuff are often people I think of as least suited to to lead us. Yeah, and so it's like, all right, no, I want my, I want my thoughtful, sensitive, self reflective community to, to learn the, the skill of, of weathering hope and to, to keep on keeping on.
Yeah, and I, I want the stories from chronically ill people and I want cancer stories and suicidal ideation stories, you know, cause I think they're probably the most honest about what our economy has wrought upon us, what pieces of our diluted culture have wrought. And where we find other pieces of hope, how we, how we find each other, how we support each other.
Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's this, there's this pervasive taboo against stories that make people uncomfortable. And I think, you know, we fight that by Biting it telling those stories. I also think that's the cure for why they make people uncomfortable There's so so much Struggle that is invisible and then when it surfaces People think it's like aberrant that it's kind of rare and and to be shunned But you know, it's like my experience with with depression in speaking up.
I I Have gotten so much correspondence from people. They're like, oh, yeah, that's me. Or I see my, you know, messages that talk about people seeing themselves in, in, in my book. We know these things aren't rare from, from just the stats. I remember the first time I talked to my family doctor about depression and that was hard and scary.
And I thought it was going to be, I didn't know what I thought, I don't, and I don't know why I didn't research it, but I was like, am I going to get put in some kind of mandatory inpatient facility for bringing this up? And she was like, she talked to me like it was the most typical thing in the world. I think she even said to me like, oh, I've, I've talked about this three times today or something.
It's like, okay, I don't hear these sorts of stories. in, in public forums. So it augments the feeling of isolation and hopelessness because it feels like I'm an unmapped territory. So I think the stories are so important and I don't know who making them invisible serves.
I mean, I guess I know, but, but fuck those people.
Yeah. Fuck those people. Yeah. And I, I know what you mean. I want to read another piece that I had pulled up that I want to talk about. One thing that is so great about this book, about suicide and depression. is that it's really funny, like unexpectedly, like I laughed out loud many times reading it, which is really endearing.
And one of the twists I love early on in the book is you're talking about Your wife, Leslie, and falling in love and what an incredible strong person she is and you sort of set it up so that you, the reader, especially if you're, you know, accustomed to a certain shape of narrative for women is expecting, you know, that Leslie's going to save the day.
And, and I'm sort of cringy waiting for that, that part in the book, but, but knowing you well enough and the little I know you to suspect that's not where we're going. And then, then we get this, Leslie was there as an ambassador of kindness. An undeniable example that the world was not all hurt, isolation, and abandonment.
Perhaps they, the horses, sensed in her someone who knew pain and loneliness. She endured the mean horses, bites and kicks, and being tossed into walls. She soothed the neglected horses, vacant, shattered things, impatient for an ending. She understood how to be there for broken, hopeless animals. Yes, I know.
Here, we pause a moment. I understand the parallel I'm approaching, and it's time to swerve aside. I'm writing a story about my chronic mental illness and have now introduced my wife as an expert in healing wounded creatures. So let me get out in front of this and state outright. I'm not building to a metaphor.
I am not a horse. Leslie is not my doctor, my keeper, or my deus ex machina. She did not appear in my life as if by magic to rescue me. She didn't find me starving in an empty lot behind a Walmart. Behind a Walmart near Lansing. That would be simplistic, dishonest, manic pixie dream garbage. Leslie's virtues are real, but neither romance nor friendship solves mental illness, nor can we shore up the cracks in our foundations with other people's lives.
The story of seeking mental health is rarely a story about saviors, teamwork, certainly. Saviors, no. Thank you so much for that. And also I, I want to. Attach it to a question about finding a team, you know, especially if we're alone or we think, yeah,
yeah, that was hard for me in some context. I did not mention in the book was that I had been married.
Once before, I think I mentioned that, but it was kind of an abusive relationship. You know, a friend of mine in grad school, once took me aside, this friend was pretty drunk at the time and she said, Jared, she's mean to you. And I hadn't really, really figured that out yet, but. First, I just want to
pause to shout out those friends and, and like, have the courage to say if someone is mean to someone.
Yeah. Thanks. Thanks friend.
It was a big help. It was that. And at the time I was, I was in grad school for English and my then wife was, was going to school for nursing and she told me she hated it. But she had to do it because one of us needed a real job and so she was like a martyr because of my bad choices and so that those things together like let me let me free you let me let me let me help you out but I didn't really have the skill of having a team is is what I'm saying so then eventually when when I met Leslie and we started dating and it was a developing skill to figure out how to have a team.
Yeah. Um, And it's really useful because there are serious holes in my memory, especially as As it relates to depression, whereas Leslie will have a position outside to say like, Hey, I think you're kind of rough right now and, you know, there are things we can do or, Hey, you're doing a lot better. I know this is rough, but you're doing a lot better than other years.
She reminded me not long ago that when we first got together, if I had really bad, Depression, a thing I would do is lay face down on the floor and ask her not to talk to me or touch me. I don't do that anymore. So, you know, would I know that I don't do that anymore if she didn't tell me? Nope, probably not.
So, Yeah, the team is so huge and so vital, but it's also a skill. It really is. It's, it's, it's that idea of constructive vulnerability, which I think is a huge strength of the human animal, but I think it's a cultural failing that. That we and I'm gonna say, especially men are terrible at it and, you know, you can't benefit from the wonderful diversity of of humans and all our different experiences and expertise is and talents.
If if you don't find ways to embrace that, that authentic vulnerable self and put it out in the world because. You know, people aren't going to read your mind. Yeah. And the whole manic pixie dream girl thing that I was very aware of going into that chapter. So I was trying to figure out how to deal with it.
And it occurred to me, it's just like, I'm just going to hang a lantern on it. Like, yeah, I know it's the same thing of, you know, going into this, writing this book, I wanted to be very careful not to say not to have it be a book that's like, go touch a tree and you'll feel better, you know, cause those books exist and kind of thing.
toxic positivity version. And so yeah, that was, that was on the short list of fears I had going in, going into the book. So I love that. I love that you zeroed in on that. Nobody else has mentioned that part to me, but.
Oh yeah, I loved that. I also, just to go back to this, you know, how hard it is to find a team and the way that that is also like kind of financially so unavailable, like therapy is so.
Not fetishized, but it sort of held up as like, are you in therapy? I'm in therapy. And like, I love therapy, really, really thankful that being a cancer patient got me access to free therapy, put it on the list of pros, but it's not accessible. You know, it's so expensive and waiting lists are so long. My favorite comedian, Maria Bamford has this amazing piece where she talks about calling a car rental place.
I'm sure you've seen this place, this piece go around or if you haven't go look it up after, but she talks about calling a car rental place when she was contemplating suicide and she called it and told the rental person. The person was like, I can sort of only rent you a car, but I do believe every life has value.
And Maria was like, yes, tricks you into helping me.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, it, it's a conversation. I remember where I would argue that I don't think we could afford it even when I was going to Mark, because I feel like even with insurance, it was, I don't know, it was maybe like $75 a visit or something.
Yeah. Then, yeah.
Yeah. Which was too much for us. Yeah. And. And then the place just stopped taking our insurance. And so I was going to stop going, and then Mark was kind of like, we can just do a side deal. And I was like, we can? Like, weird. And what a, it's just such a terrible system. Yeah. And I remember how daunting it was.
When I finally started looking for a counselor too, because it's expensive, it's hard to access, and then you have to essentially shop around. It's almost, you know, like dating because there have been all these studies and it's like the best outcomes with, with counseling come if you really like feel like you click with your counselor and you feel like they're an ally and they get you Oh, is that all?
You know, like, okay, so You're at your lowest, you're at a low point, and you want a counselor, they're expensive, you know, around me, they're hard to find, and then you have to go see if you hit it off by, how? By hashing out your most painful stuff. Again and again and again! Yeah, right, so, and I talk about in the book, the first person I went to, You know, said things like, well, maybe as a writer, maybe you need your pain.
It's like, wow. Like, did you get your, your counseling degree from a series of bumper stickers or something? Like, why, why do you think I'm here? What terrible thing to say? And what a toxic myth.
Yeah. I mean, I, it reminds me of, there's a woman in my cancer yoga who went to see a naturopath who told her that her diagnosis was just her body getting ready to die.
And so she should just start preparing to die. She's like, I have stage two cancer. Like I, I have other shit I can do besides prepare to die. I can do chemo, naturopath. Like, there's medicine.
That feels criminal. I mean, like, how many times has, has she said that to someone? You know, like, what a horrifying thing.
I'm pretty sure there is a criminal case against that naturopath's office right now.
That would make sense.
Yeah. That's not to keep bringing up cancer. I mean, I, something about it is that it makes me very selfish or self centered, you know, I bring everything back to it. Cause it's like where I'm at.
Uh, of course that's on your mind.
It's perfectly,
perfectly good. Don't worry about it.
I mean, there's also ways in which I think it relates, like it feels so related to so many conversations about. chronic illness and chronic mental health. There were so many parts of the book that I felt so seen by, even though it's such a totally different thing, you know, like thinking about shame, you know, I think you make the point in the book that we assign shame to mental illness in a way that we don't to physical illness, but there is a weird way in which you do feel shame when you have.
Cancer or chronic illness or the things where you're like, oh, what the fuck did I do? Like what what secret thing did I do in my life that brought this upon me and now and so dealing with shame it is Related.
Yeah. I yeah that makes total sense to me. I think I I mentioned in the book too I think it's I I love That we are storytellers as people.
I love it. I love that we understand the world through stories. But a side effect of that, because of the way we've been taught, stories are structured. And kind of, kind of mainstream culture, how the narratives work. We're always looking for a bad guy. And so, when something goes wrong, If there isn't an obvious bad guy, I think we slot ourselves into that, into that position.
Like, Oh, am I the bad, I'm probably the bad guy of this story. Something has gone wrong and this has to be somebody's fault and I don't see anybody else around, so it's me. Yeah. I mean, I, I will feel shame if I get a flat tire or something. Yeah. It's anything, any mishap, like, well, did I have to go to the store?
Maybe this is my fault. Yeah. I think that's. Very natural, and I think all we can do is catch it and kind of back our way out of it because, you know, our brains are kind of neural connections are formed by the stories were raised on and at some point. I think the best thing we can do is, is try to notice when we're defaulting to sort of harmful narratives of shame, because obviously they don't make any sense to be ashamed about cancer, like that doesn't make any sense, isn't the stopping point, because that never helps.
It's like, it's like, it's like saying cheer up to somebody with depression. Oh,
let me,
let me write that down.
Oh, exercise. You say, Oh, well,
how do you spell that? What
is that?
What's that word mean? Yeah.
I want to read this piece you wrote about magic. It's early on in the book and I, I cried when I read it. I love it so much. We've quoted it. I've seen other people quote it. I want to read it one time and then talk about magic. The heron, the creek, the trees, it's not dead and gone. It's not locked away in the past.
It's not a phantom of childhood or a metaphor for a bygone age, it's still here. A hundred thousand little rivers, a million secret sites, beneath fallen logs and riverbank rocks. It was all still here. I had gone away, not nature, but of course that's not quite right either. I hadn't gone anywhere, I had just stopped noticing.
There are two paths to magic, imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water's surface. Paying attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning, to lend new weight to our world. An acorn, the geometry of a beehive, the complexity of whale song, the perfect slowness of a heron.
Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize, of course it does. The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shallows to entrance the blue gills, not unless you do your part. You must choose to meet her halfway, and when you do, you may find that magic isn't a dismissal of what is real.
It's a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.
And then I want to read this one other piece about magic. It's from a little bit later in the book. You write, Change is always on the way to meet us, with or without our participation. But there is magic in intentional change, in the audacious act of inviting change. And walking to meet it. What do you think about magic these days?
I think I'm a lot better at giving myself permission to reach for that word. As somebody who's sort of been science minded for a lot of my life. The concept of magic is important to me. It's related to that idea that I'm partly in control of meaning making in collaboration with the natural world and I often reach for the idea of magic kind of in the, in the same breath with the sacred, the idea that that when I go to nature, it isn't just because it's pretty.
You know, or it isn't just because it feels a certain way or because it feels a certain way and feels like home and feels like it's connecting with me and sort of a unique way that needs a word. Yeah, I've gotten a lot less shy about about the idea of magic and kind of personal magic and the sacred.
Yeah, I talked about in the book, you know, I was raised by two. But we did nature walks every day, and it was clear to me that Morel season was a holiday, sort of a religious holiday. And I never met my maternal grandmother, but all of the stories about her and her wildflower gardens and the way she taught, you know, my mom, how, you know.
Jewel weed could soothe an itch, and then my mom taught me. Yeah, all of that sort of is interwoven into what I think of as magic these days.
I love that light thread running through the book. It's really, I don't know, it, it, it plays with magic in the way that I, I often write about it and play with it too, you know, that, and why we play with the word witchcraft or, or feel really at home there, you know, it's like thinking about it in a way that, um, has a lot of love for those grandmothers and their wildflower gardens.
Yeah. Thank you so much. Just one last piece. Jared, do you feel comfortable reading the last little piece in the book? Do you know the piece I mean?
The
closing sort of wish. Paragraph? Yeah, yeah. A spell, you could say.
Kindness won't make you rich, but it will make you whole. Kindness for each other, for ourselves, for our world.
I know there is hurt in your life. I know there are tough times behind and tough times ahead. These pains stick to us like burrs. They tell us to lash out, to stop feeling, to turn away and turn inward. But these impulses do not control us. They don't write our stories. And each time you hear them and answer, No, not today.
You have given a gift to the world. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for trying. Thank you for choosing kindness. Thank you for sharing yourself. The world will give back to you in kind, but receiving those gifts can take a little practice. Nature is out there, and she is in you. Meet her halfway.
As I write these words, the sun is shining, and an image of a woodland path winding out of sight keeps tapping me on the shoulder. It's a simple lesson that has taken me years to relearn. When peace and wonder call, I go. When the trees call, I go. I believe something in the woods loves you. One of those things is me.
great day everybody.
Blessed fucking be you guys.
Be a witch. You must be a witch.
