Rebecca
Hey Nat.

Natalie
Hey Bec.

Rebecca
Well, took a lot to get here tonight.

Natalie
Yeah, this one felt like an adventure.

Rebecca
I had to send the family to Best Buy to get them out of here.

Natalie
I had to leave my family behind to get rid of the smell of cat pee in the car. I can’t handle it. I said, “Clifford, I need you to make this not be.”

Rebecca
Cat pee in the car is awful.

Natalie
Yeah, it was really horrible. I felt bad for Marsh, but I felt more badly for myself because I’m the one that has to drive to work in that car tomorrow morning. Anyways, by the time I get home, I hope it’s magically shampooed away. That’s the plan in my head. Serious cat mom fail, but that actually links to what today’s episode is about. It’s all about failing up.

Rebecca
What is that expression again? I love talking about failure. That’s my jam. But what is this failing up, again?

Natalie
Well, I would like us to channel the energy of a privileged white man who, even when cancelled, like Piers Morgan last week, still somehow walks away rich and famous. That is the failing energy that I think that we both need to manifest — our own kind of inside-out way to disrupt the white patriarchal system. I want this to be all about the opposite of regret.

Rebecca
Ok. I will try.

Natalie
That’s a goal. Hashtag goals.

Rebecca
Hashtag no regrets?

Natalie
Hashtag no regrets. I like it.

Rebecca
We don’t want regrets, but why has failure come up in our musings? I will answer that: because I think our culture is obsessed with success. We are a celebrity-obsessed culture, and we like instant success, that’s for sure. So we see it, and we want it.

Natalie
And social media doesn’t help, because we see it really visibly.

Rebecca
And then we compare ourselves to whatever we think success is. So it’s something we have to grapple with. We all grapple with it.

Natalie
Yeah, because it probably connects back to comparison. When we see pictures on Instagram, it’s hard not to make a comparison to that picture that you see, to your own life — and maybe what you think then is missing. That’s inevitably connected to failure, for me.

Rebecca
I think that everyone does it. I think it is a fairly universal thing. There are the people who choose to not be on social media, which if you are really are trying to control that comparison… but it’s a hard one.

Natalie
Right, because I want to see my friend’s kids. I want to see pictures of people now that I have access to them through these platforms. I want to be able to see the people that I don’t get to be close to anymore, right? To remove myself from social media completely would be to take that away. And yet, for every single food blogger that I follow, I’m like, “Darn you, I can’t make this many recipes happen in my life.” You know that I love to cook, so it’s a comparison game all the way around.

Rebecca
So even with cooking a little bit? Does it feel like a failure that you can’t cook all those recipes?

Natalie
That I can’t keep the notes the way that they would, to be able to to actually come back and cook the thing that I want to cook again. Like I make something amazing, because I do like to cook, and it turns out really wonderfully one time. Clifford teases me that he’s going to enjoy every bite, because he knows he’s never going to get this again — because it will never happen the same way again, because I don’t tend to write down my recipes. So yeah, I could channel that as a hard fail.

Rebecca
So then you have just a slight amount of envy or comparison when you see the food bloggers who are successfully recording their recipes?

Natalie
Because they have so much time to make that happen. Albeit if somebody was listening to me saying this and doing that work, they might be like, “Curse you women, you have no idea what my life is like.” So there you go, the comparison / failure piece probably doesn’t work in real time. But it happens in our brains for sure.

Rebecca
Yeah. I feel like I just learned something new about you.

Natalie
Well, there it is. Ok, so I would like to know if you have one big success story in your mind that you would look back on. I’m looking at you and thinking I know your life, so I don’t know that that’s how you would frame it. I certainly have somebody in my mind that I know would say, for themselves, that their big success story is the thing that they wear like an albatross — it’s this thing that hangs on their neck because it happened when they were at the end of university. That was their big rise to fame. And then all of a sudden, that’s it, and every other piece that they’ve done since that time (because they’re an artist) has become a comparison point backwards to that thing that they did back then. I ask you that, but I think I’m saying it to myself: have I ever had that moment of a big success?

Rebecca
That becomes a weight on you?

Natalie
Yeah, and I think I’m free of that weight.

Rebecca
I don’t know if I’ve had that huge, monstrous success that weighs me down.

Natalie
You know what, I think we’ve just answered another big question for ourselves. Nope, we are pretty comfortable with some good old fashioned, you know…

Rebecca
Chugging along?

Natalie
Chugging along moments.

Rebecca
Yeah. I don’t feel I’ve had that one mega thing that I’m always comparing myself against. You know, I’m also thinking about failure — this is a funny one. It’s definitely not failure, and as I say it out loud it feels ridiculous. But I just had a birthday, I just turned 41. I’m feeling this impending invisibility in my life. I know as a woman, you start to feel… talking to mom, she’s like, “Oh yeah, when you turn 60, you’re definitely invisible. People don’t see you on the street anymore.” I’ve heard other women say that, and I’m like, when is it going to start?

Natalie
Well, according to mom — I’m 42, and these are supposed to be my power years.

Rebecca
Ok, so these are our power years.

Natalie
Right now, yeah.

Rebecca
And some people have had a mega-success already.

Natalie
So if you’re feeling invisible now, then we may need to have this talk hardcore and do some serious reframing.

Rebecca
I guess I’m ready for it. I don’t know why I think of that as failure. Is it societal failure that women don’t get to be visible their whole — I don’t know. It’s a big one, right?

Natalie
Yeah, totally.

Rebecca
Failure’s on the brain.

Natalie
Totally, and in a good way, actually, now that you say that out loud. Maybe it’s ok, that this isn’t my power year feeling — like when mom’s saying, “These are your power years,” and I’m like, “How on earth?!” Maybe my power years will be in my 50s, so maybe I could actually look ahead to that as opposed to feeling somehow a failure for not feeling powerful in what mom has deemed to be a powerful time for me.

Rebecca
Yeah. And what’s power, anyway? Frankly, I don’t know. What’s power?

Natalie
What’s regret? Well, that actually is where I want to start. I want us to start by thinking about whether regret (because that’s where I went when we first started talking here) — are regret and failure inherently connected, and how do you process regret?

Rebecca
Well, right off, I don’t have anything to teach you, Nat.

Natalie
Yes you do, I know you do.

Rebecca
But I think I feel regret and failure hard. I feel them both, and they feel quite interconnected for me, so I’m curious how you would answer that. I think something I’ve struggled with is that I’m very quick to call something failure, or I have been. This is something I’ve observed in myself. I can call something a wash — something hard happens and I’m tempted to call the night a write-off. It’s something I have struggled with. I feel like I’m starting to wake up to this thing I do — and also by observing Violet. The other night at 11pm, she’s exhausted, her and Elsie got into some little spat, and then all of a sudden she’s freaking out and running out of the room and saying, “My whole day is ruined, everything is ruined, everything’s done and messed up.” It’s actually so sweet to see her have those big feelings, and it’s just such an irrational thing coming out of her mouth. But yet I think she must have heard me say that at some point. I’m going to own that, but then have compassion on both of us. I am trying to acknowledge: why do I wash something with negativity, or call it a failure? The day isn’t ruined. It’s cute to see it come out of her mouth, because of course it’s not ruined.

All to say, I do think I have tended to feel things really hard, feel it really big, and to blanket something with failure — even to the point that (I think this is kind of funny) I have resisted failure so much, I think I do have this strong perfectionistic streak in me. When I was in grade 11, I was doing this art project. You’ve probably heard me talk about this. You know Ira Glass, he says that we can have really good taste but we’re not capable of performing or executing to that taste yet. You have to keep practicing. So let’s just say in grade 11, I had great taste for what good art should look like. I so didn’t want to fail at achieving this greatness that I could see. I got my friend to do this elaborate art project for me — so I didn’t do it. I got her to do it all. She was this older friend (sort of mentor) in my life, and she did the art project. It was so good, a really excellent art project. So good that I got invited into this special art class the next year — the art teacher came by and was so bedazzled by my work that he was like, “Please, who are you? Why have I not known you in this school? Please come join this special class.” I think back on that — it was humiliating of course, deep down. But also, I think I took the glory. Thank you. Thank you. But I just see that as a desperate fear of failure.

Natalie
Ok, I need to know, because I knew the first part of the story, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard the follow-up. Did you take the invite and go to that class?

Rebecca
No, I didn’t.

Natalie
Oh my gosh, Rebecca. So that would have been a perfect moment of channeling that energy, that fail up energy that I’m telling you all those old white men are doing, and you could have gone into that class and just been there, and turned your humiliation into something amazing.

Rebecca
Yeah. Maybe I could have made anything. The guy had already seen me one way, so maybe he just would have told me I was amazing and kept telling me that no matter what I did.

Natalie
And those guys believe it, so why can’t you believe it?

Rebecca
Yeah. That could have been a turning point. Then I would have had that mega-success.

Natalie
That’s beautiful, though, to really think about that. I’ve never known the second part of that story, so I just learned something there — that we fall prey to feelings of self-critique. There’s a critique there, there was an unwillingness to see your own awareness of this other person’s aesthetic strength as something to benefit you and then go forward with. Instead you immediately diminished yourself. Imposter syndrome I would connect back to regret. If I’m really looking at my life in relation to some of the stories you’ve just shared there — like in academia, certainly, but even in teaching — if you’re constantly comparing yourself against other people’s gifts, the tendency to go to the Star Wars kind of dark side idea is to say, “Well, if they’re amazing, I’m not.” Or, “If they’ve written this piece and published here, and that’s not the place I published, then I’m not as good, or I shouldn’t even bother now.” I think that a regret would be not beating that feeling down — the persistence to push through it. I’m looking at you saying this, but I wish I had a mirror to say it to myself right now, that I deserve to have my words read in those same spaces. That would be something that I regret not having told myself earlier.

Rebecca
That I’m…

Natalie
I deserve to be in that art class.

Rebecca
Yeah, I’m as valid as…

Natalie
Yeah. I mean, we’re saying it to our kids. If part of life is to be the good model for the youth coming up, then I think that we are giving them the right mantras to keep saying to themselves, to beat down those painful, hurtful, self-flagellatory sentences that young people can start to say to themselves a little bit too early. Like, “The day is ruined.”

Rebecca
I know, everything’s ruined! It’s so adorable to hear a seven-year-old say that, or an eight-year-old. Does Frankie say stuff like that?

Natalie
Yeah. Not quite like that…

Rebecca
Would he say something like, “This is ruined. Everything’s ruined.”

Natalie
Well, at the end of the day, if something had gone wrong at the end of the day, he’d be quite honest. If I said, “This was a good day,” thinking that we’d gotten over it, and he’d look at me like I’m crazy. Like, “No, we just had this happen, and that was sad, and now we’re still getting over being sad.” In that time is a bit amorphous for him as a seven-year-old, then to go back to the beginning of the day which was wonderful, it’s a big hurdle to jump over the last moment which he’s still recovering from — even though I want him to make that jump with me. Perhaps less about, “A swathe of day is gone,” but he’s very good at focusing on something small, which can get in his own way. We definitely have some work to do. I’m hoping we have a few more years to work on that.

Rebecca
I feel confident that you do.

Natalie
Oh, man.

Rebecca
Well what failures stand out for you in your life?

Natalie
When we started talking about all this, I had written down in my notes for myself eras of failure in my life.

Rebecca
Where to pick from?

Natalie
Yeah, I was like, “Do I pick from my 20s? Do I pick from my 30s?” I think you wrote down the word ‘areas,’ and so then I was wondering, “Ok, so maybe that’s a good way for me to look at this question.” So what areas were you thinking about?

Rebecca
I don’t think in eras, but the areas I think the most potent for me are certainly writing — so my career writing. Mothering is a big one, constantly butting up against my failures. That one’s such a big one, because you kind of screw up all the time, that’s a real one where you get to see yourself…

Natalie
Really up close in person. Yeah.

Rebecca
And then relationships of course, with Simon and friends, that’s a big one. I’m even thinking of little mundane things. On the weekend, Clifford was talking about — I guess he had tried to practice the piano with Frankie.

Natalie
Yeah, because I was out of the house, so he thought, “Let’s give this a go.”

Rebecca
And that was usually your area to do that, so you figured out a system. It was just funny to listen to Clifford because he repeated a couple times just how hard it was. Then we had to hug for a long time after, and then we just laid on the couch and just hugged. Then I just said, “Never again,” and then I got him some colouring and we colouring and we found their power. I don’t know, whatever. I have had so many traumatic piano lessons with the girls where I’ve tried to help them. But the funny thing was, it was interesting to listen to Clifford because he’s just like, “This is clearly not a good place for us,” I get obviously upset, and I’m making Frankie upset. He didn’t actually even get into it. We just hugged, we needed to hug afterwards. I don’t know what happened. I can’t imagine Clifford yelled at all or anything. I have yelled at the piano. But I have this masochistic thing where I just keep going. I’ll just try again and again.

Natalie
I call it persistence.

Rebecca
Persistence? I mean, there’s something so wise about Clifford to say, “Maybe we don’t need this.” Of course, you are the one that’s going to keep doing it. The piano is kind of a mundane one, but where I really see my failure.

Natalie
That’s interesting to hear you describe that moment, because obviously I heard more of the details when I came home that day. He did describe it not that differently from how you described it. It was really big for him. This was a fail. This was a big dad piano fail. That’s how he really felt it. I think what was wise in his description of the moment was that he didn’t fully understand what Frankie’s skills were with the piano, because he assumed (because he’s always listening from upstairs) the type of knowledge Frankie would have of the keys, of the notes, when there’s a different practice the Frankie and I have. What was wise, I believe, was that Clifford recognized his limitations.

Rebecca
So he was thinking he could do more than he could do, and he was frustrated not realizing all the… I mean, he did keep saying, “Wow, piano’s hard.”

Natalie
That’s the thing though. For you, I would probably want you to reframe and not call them failures. You have all the piano skills. You are a piano teacher, you have that on your CV. You can do that with the girls, it’s not quite the same fail experience, but it’s interesting that you’re butting up against your own desires for perfection. That, perhaps, is something different to navigate.

Rebecca
Just thinking I could sit back and let it be what it is, but I want it to be something or I want them to push through harder. I guess it’s all about expectation, too. I think I get emotional. That’s funny, that’s just such a drop. “I get emotional.” It’s another place where I could call it failure, or I could call it a place where I encounter a lot of growth opportunity.

Natalie
Ooh, I like how you did that.

Rebecca
Thank you. With Simon though, I’ll just get into big emotional places and do all the opposite. You know the Gottman? You’re not going to know, because we’ve talked about this already — you don’t know these cultural touchstones.

Natalie
But teach me, go for it.

Rebecca
It’s the Gottman husband and wife and they do know all this marriage counselling. But I’m doing all the opposite of the things. You’re not supposed to say, “You do this.”

Natalie
Yeah. It’s all, “I.”

Rebecca
And I’m getting heated, getting loud, I’m waving my hands. Simon’s literally following my hands, I’m like, “Why are you looking at my hands?”

Natalie
That happens in my house, also. You’re not alone.

Rebecca
Oh, really? He’s like, “Because it’s so large, what you’re doing.”

Natalie
I put my hands in my pockets. That’s my way of countering myself, because it’s the only way. I don’t know what culture I’ve become. I feel very stereotypically… maybe if our friend Karen ever listened to this, I feel very stereotypically Italian, the way that my hands slap about.

Rebecca
That’s nice to know that you do that too, because I feel like such a freak sometimes when I’m doing all these things. Anyway, intellectually I know these are the wrong things to do in an argument, but yet I’m going for them. I’m going right at them, I can’t stop.

Natalie
It’s so reckless, I love it. It’s like diving into a big wave.

Rebecca
It is, kind of.

Natalie
I wade in.

Rebecca
Actually at the farm, we had a little moment on the road. We had to sit down on the road and process something.

Natalie
Oh, wow. Way to be in nature.

Rebecca
One time I ripped off my shirt. Seriously. I was so upset.

Natalie
I’m not laughing at your upsetness — it was so beautiful that you said…

Rebecca
And it was a silk shirt. I ripped it off my body like the Incredible Hulk. I’m not kidding. Why am I even sharing this?

Natalie
Well, you guys are still together. It took till my divorce to actually yell at my first spouse — just to say.

Rebecca
You guys didn’t yell?

Natalie
No, there was no fighting. I just didn’t know how, I’d never learned. I’m telling you, Rebecca, I was so shut off. So many emotions buried, which I don’t blame on anybody but just not knowing myself. That could be a big failure. Oh my gosh, we started with regret. I do regret that a bit. I regret not having been more in touch with my feelings — to have yelled a little bit louder. It took me time to yell.

Rebecca
Right, because remember it was the last podcast I was saying I wanted to be able to yell with you. Well, I thought I wanted that. But see, that’s the thing I’m realizing in my own relationship — I don’t want to yell and be so big. I want to be able to…

Natalie
Calmly maneuver through challenging moments?

Rebecca
I think so. I really appreciate that about your relationship now with Clifford, where you guys do seem to process. It’s something I’m gleaning from that relationship now, that I can more calmly process and talk, I don’t have to get so big and worked up.

Natalie
But of course, you’re learning from two people who have also had these other maneuverings — other marriages, they fell apart for reasons, right. So you’re learning from the after effects of all that.

Rebecca
I guess, so thank you for what you’ve been through.

Natalie
Did it for you.

Rebecca
Well, do you have any of these mundane failures that come up for you?

Natalie
I mean, as a teacher, oh my gosh. I feel all sorts of daily mundane failures all the time. I can still pick back in my brain to the moments where I went too hard at a student and didn’t even mean to, or one kid who was really whip smart recognized that perhaps my way of responding to what I didn’t like of his behaviour was actually passive aggressive, and he was like, “Miss, just say it if you’re going to say it.” I was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s so direct.” Like, you should be the one married now, not me — it was that kind of thing. It was really interesting how clued in he was. I’m snapping my fingers as if somebody could see me right now, it was that kind of sharp. So I have these moments where I can go back to those failures. That was very mundane, right? These are the day-to-day experiences of a teacher in a classroom.

Rebecca
Although as you say that, I think that’s crazy to be a teacher. You’re a parent and a teacher, you’re confronting students as we confront our children. I mean, you must get mirrors into yourself.

Natalie
Oh my gosh, all the time — and you know what, any teacher who’s listening right now would be probably nodding with you on that one. It’s one of the biggest challenges. There’s no doubting that the humans in front of you are full people, and they’re going to bring out in you feelings. So you can’t go too big with your feelings, just like you shouldn’t with your seven-year-old. But at the same time, there’s striving to be the authentic self with the students so that they connect with you. That’s the whole idea of being a teacher who can connect with her students, his students, is because you are able to show who you are as a real person. It’s such a tightrope walk, so failures abound in that space. But you know what, the one that I am still in an ongoing state of navigation with is my failure, if we’re going to call it that, with my dissertation-turned-book. So you’re the writer, right?

Rebecca
So you did a PhD in three years, wrote a dissertation. You could call that your big crazy success, if you need one. (Why do we need one?)

Natalie
You know what, I probably d need one because that was kind of a big deal that I was able to get it done fast when a lot of people take like six years — which is totally fair.

Rebecca
That’s something remarkable about you, so let’s just name it.

Natalie
Thank you, Bec. But I think that where I go in my head is I never thought I wanted to be some book writer, like an author per se. I had always enjoyed writing, but I really enjoyed reading more, but then somebody planted — it was my supervisor, when I was right in the midst of my dissertation work. Again, I think I’ve gestured to this before in former podcasts, but I started my teaching career 20 years ago, teaching in a youth prison. A detention facility for youth between the ages of 12 to 17. It was at the time central booking for Ontario, so it was kids who were arrested being pulled in from all over the province.

Rebecca
And then sent to different facilities?

Natalie
Depending on what happened with their pre-trial. So I would have students with me for a very short period of time, but then I’d have a few — like when one young person was in there for a really intense crime that couldn’t get sorted quickly, he was actually with me for two years. In a very small building with really small classrooms, it was supposed to be a very transitional space. But for him, it was a lifetime in that space. Anyways, I only taught there for two years. I was a literacy teacher there. It wasn’t a full English classroom per se, it was literacy teaching whether the student was with you for 48 hours or three months. You’re supposed to somehow keep their learning going, that was the idea.

I left, and I went on to teach in more mainstream classrooms. In that time that I was gone, that detention centre was closed, and they built a larger (and I’m putting quote marks around it) ‘superjail’ outside of the city. There were lots of really problematic things about that. Now all of a sudden young people who are criminalized and in trouble with the law from the urban centre who maybe don’t have the money to have family members visit if they’re stuck there for a while, now you’ve somehow made those family members have to get out of the city to go see their kid. So now it’s less possible. It’s just a hugely demoralizing, dehumanizing kind of space. When I learned that the downtown centre had closed, I was now teaching. I was sad, but I had no one to talk about it with. When I ended up going back to grad school, I knew this is what I wanted to make my project. I was like, “I am now ten years out of this place, and yet why is it still a part of my body?” It’s like Written on the Body. Who wrote that book? That idea of it still being in me…

Rebecca
Dionne something?

Natalie
Really?

Rebecca
Dionne Brand?

Natalie
Is it? Oh man, it’s going to be another one of those ones where we have to go look it up. So I knew I needed to unpack this again. During my PhD process, that was what I did. I found people who had been with me in that place and interviewed them. I was able to also create an art piece with found objects that randomly I had found when I was moving house — when I had moved from where I lived down by the lake to The Junction to be near you and Simon. In one of my drawers, I found letters that some of my students from the jail had written to me. I now wanted to kind of create a fragment-based found art project as part of my dissertation work.

Rebecca
See? We’re visual artists.

Natalie
So I wanted to do this piece. Anyways, my supervisor — super, super, super kind and very encouraging human — was like, “Natalie, this kind of piece is really thoughtful and thought-provoking, and you’re going to want to turn this into a book.” So I blame him for having planted this little seed in my brain. When I graduated, I’m like, “Ok, I’ll write a couple papers, whatever, I’ll do some stuff. But eventually, I’m going to come back to this as a book.” Anyways, the great failure is that every single university press that gets interested in me — and that’s been three, we’re talking the biggies — I get the letter that says, “This sounds amazing, we want this so much. We’ll give you our firstborn to have this project,” it’s that kind of amazing response. Then I get the reviews. So when they send it out for reviews, it’s supposed to be peer-reviewed, which I respect the process, but the interesting gatekeeping that exists in university presses is that the reviewers are not all equal. Even though I’m getting great reviews from say three, if I have two reviewers who are hesitant — even if I make the changes that those reviewers have asked for — now the editor is fearful about taking it forward to their board, because they don’t want to be the one to bring forward the project that’s at all risky. One could delve into the realities of academic presses, and those are perhaps less interesting details.

Rebecca
But you are experiencing this as a…

Natalie
Yeah. It’s been three times, Rebecca.

Rebecca
Although Nat, I’m sorry. When you say, “Three,” I think probably everyone listening, we’re all going to be like, “Three?”

Natalie
Three is really hard.

Rebecca
And I’m hearing that. I think you were also set up to think it was going to be easier. I don’t actually know how many university presses there are, but I did see some woman on Twitter finally having a success and she said she had submitted her book 699 times or something.

Natalie
It’s not the same.

Rebecca
I swear it was 699 times before she got her agent or her publisher. So three…

Natalie
Ok, three’s hard.

Rebecca
Seems like you can keep going though.

Natalie
Ok.

Rebecca
Can you?

Natalie
I think maybe, but I think maybe in a new way. I think what I’m navigating is that the ‘yes’s are not as weighty in these people’s minds as the ‘no’s. And I’m wondering, as I sit with that reality, that that is something that I probably have to reckon with in myself. I can get like 800 students saying, “Yes, yes, yes, Miss Davey, this has been an amazing lesson.” And I get that one, “No, no, you’re a jerk, you’re mean, you don’t love me,” any of the thing that butts up against how I want to be seen in the world, and then that no becomes the failure — as opposed to reveling in the good that I’ve done. That’s something that probably just hits at the core of me wanting to offer something to the world. I just imagine that there are other people who feel like what I’ve experienced in this. I’ve got good things to share. I want to share — and yet the ‘no’s really silence me. I mean, not silent enough that we’re not doing the podcast, but again, I blame you because you’re the one that wooed me into this interesting space.

Rebecca
I think the ‘no’s in any context are super powerful. We’re even saying, with our children, if they sense a ‘no’ from us, their day is ruined. So of course we experience these things as really powerful. I think yours is hard because you have to reshape it every time for each press. I’m also trying to get my YA book published, and I’m amazed at all the different ways they come up with to say ‘no.’ “This doesn’t meet our needs,” I find that an interesting one. You want to be like, “Why not? What would you like me to do for it to meet your needs?” Or this one was a good one, “I expected to connect more with the characters.” Ouch.

Natalie
It’s like a little dig. Even if it’s not — whatever, opinions. But yeah, that’s creative.

Rebecca
I don’t know if that’s a generic one. Does she send that to a lot of people and that’s her good line — or if it was personal for my characters. I don’t know.

Natalie
I’m really connected to your characters, so I of course want you to keep going.

Rebecca
So you want me to go past three?

Natalie
I want you to go past three, so I will also go past three. We’ll keep encouraging each other. So everybody, find your encourager, because that’s the thing that’s going to get you past three — of whatever it is, because there are obviously going to be more than three or four or five hurdles to jump.

Rebecca
To keep overcoming, yeah. I mean, the arts in general, it’s so subjective, so challenging.

Natalie
Yeah, and so taste-driven — and people’s tastes change, too. I think that’s probably the thing that I’m sitting with is. Maybe when I started writing my doctoral work, jails were…

Rebecca
Cool? It was like a cool space? Reform, and…

Natalie
Yeah, this thing that we all want to learn about — and I don’t want to be that person who co-opts on a fad. It’s not about that. I mean, these are real people that I was talking about and talking with.

Rebecca
But it’s hard, because there are moments for things and people care about a certain issue. So I don’t mean to say, “Jail is cool,” but you know what I mean.

Natalie
No, I know exactly what you’re saying.

Rebecca
This is the moment that everyone is invested in it.

Natalie
And how to do something authentically and honestly, without it just becoming a co-opting of something. Ok, those are some big fails, so when it comes to failure, how do we know when the right… or even a hopeful thing? Is it hopeful of me to let go of the original text and try and shape it so new that it’s not actually the thing that I thought it was going to be? What does it actually mean to persist, but yet give up? Do you see what I’m saying? I’m persisting with the process of writing, per se, but I’m giving up on thinking it was going to be what it was.

Rebecca
Well, I think that’s very healthy. You’re pivoting. I would say that is excellent pivoting. When you were talking about that earlier, just the idea of when to persist and when to give up, I was thinking of it as: when do you need to give up your regret? Or when do you need to let it all go? Are you allowed to sit with your trauma or your failure? Do you know what I mean? That’s where my head was going. That’s a place that therapy has been really good for me, because I have beaten myself up over, you know, Violet’s heart surgery, and not being like, “Why has it taken me eight years, and I can still cry about it? Why am I still feeling sad my pregnancy didn’t go the way I had wanted it? Why do I feel things so deeply?” Surely there are people — I mean, even Simon, he’s so much calmer and rational about things. If I compare myself to him, I think I’m like a nutbar, and he’s calmly navigating these waters. But sometimes it’s good to pay people to listen to you, because they’re not going to tell you that you’re a nutbar. My therapist did help me see that it’s like, “Why do you have these expectations for how fast or slow one should proceed through this? This is your experience.” But she is like, “Find a container to put it in.”

Natalie
Oh, that’s a good one.

Rebecca
So it doesn’t have to be wading in this ocean of grief all the time. But you might encounter it — you know, eight years later, you might have a moment again, and then put it in a container. Like, “I’m having this feeling again. It doesn’t mean I’m a crazy person that can’t process grief. It just means I’m butting up against it again, and that’s ok.” Probably Simon has his moments, too. He might not articulate them to me as often as I articulate everything.

Natalie
And the word ‘crazy’ is something that actually I want to grab hold of and carefully turn it around in my hand and cup it — we know, as women, the word ‘hysterical’ has been so attached to femininity as something negative. That’s one thing.

Rebecca
I know, I need to get rid of that word.

Natalie
Well, it’s a funny one to have to get rid of, or to change it so that it’s a beautiful thing. When they talk about madness studies, in academia for example, it’s a whole area of study. And think of some of the most beautiful art that has come out of these deep, deep emotions that are felt without containers — and the dangers of what happens to the artists. It could make me weepy as I say it out loud, thinking of people we have loved and lost because of their deep feelings that were not able to be… they had no container in place. I want to change that word for you because I think that there is no crazy in this, but they are big feelings. I trust your therapist, if that’s what your person has said to you. I think that’s a really wonderful thing to have suggested to you, to find that vase. The vase for your grief.

Rebecca
Yeah. Also interesting, I was listening to an Ezra Klein podcast the other day and he was interviewing the author Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote The Body Keeps the Score. He’s a psychotherapist or psychologist, and his whole book is about how the body remembers anyway. This is how I’m paraphrasing it, but there’s no point in denying it. You know, I could call myself whatever I want to call myself, but the body’s going to remember — so why deny it? When you’re talking about you push down a lot of feelings, so that’s…

Natalie
Maybe that’s my leg.

Rebecca
Yeah, maybe it came out in a different way. The body will remember that trauma, whatever you’ve experienced. He’s saying, so better to process it, so even if you think you’re shutting it out of your brain.

Natalie
Oh my gosh Rebecca, talk about containers. My compression sock’s my container.

Rebecca
Oh my goodness.

Natalie
I’m containing my whole life in my leg. That’s big. You can just hit on something really big.

Rebecca
You’re containing your life in your leg, and I just want to rub it…

Natalie
With my sock. Oh, that’s really interesting. That’s new.

Rebecca
But ok, with all that I want to just say that I do want to keep thinking about how I can do things lighter. I don’t know how you can pick that up for yourself. I mean, you’re saying you’re now carrying around the weight of your leg. You know, we’re not going to deny, but is it sometimes ok to say, “Not right now,” or, “I’m dropping this.” You know, the suitcases that you drop to the ground and refuse to carry them anymore. I think there’s a time for that, too.

Natalie
Totally. As much as I was being flippant at the beginning about harnessing that failing up energy — folks who are not kind and not generous, and they shouldn’t be winning, but yet somehow keep doing it — I would like to own some of that freedom to drop the bags.

Rebecca
Yeah, and freedom to just change. Like, something is done now.

Natalie
And we can move forward. We’re allowed to move forward.

Rebecca
I would high five you, if it didn’t make a slapping sound.

Natalie
An annoying sound in the mic. No, that’s really good.

Rebecca
Ok, as we close, do we have any hopeful metaphors or lines we could offer each other? I don’t know, to support us through these failures, or into new times of freedom.

Natalie
Personal, emotional, freedom to fail up.

Rebecca
To fail up. That actually is such a great line.

Natalie
I think that for me, because I like to know the name of the person I’m going to quote, I did go and look this up earlier because I wanted to make sure I got it right. I almost attributed this line to a philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, who I love. I read in a piece that she had a conversation with another author who I love, it’s actually that person, Ralph Ellison, who wrote Invisible Man, which is a really, really famous novel. It’s important that I say the word ‘novel,’ because this isn’t a philosophy piece. This is a novel piece that this line comes from, and he talks about fiction as a raft of hope, to move us through the murky waters of life. As a black man in the States in the 1950s, he’s navigating a very different set of murky waters than I am as a privileged white woman sitting in the middle of The Junction. The reality, though, is that I can learn from that line and say that I can use art and fiction and the stories of my seven-year-old and your eight-year-old as we eavesdrop and listen to everything they make up — I can use all of this story-making and narration as a raft of hope to build upon, if I’m going to move forward without these feelings of failure. I want so badly for words to work, but I got to hook on to something else maybe.

Rebecca
So jumping on these rafts of hope. That’s beautiful. I was thinking about mushrooms.

Natalie
Tell me more, I like that.

Rebecca
I’m writing a new piece, and I’m thinking about mushrooms and watching some movies about them. They’re so interesting, because they can be the end of the life cycle, or they can be the beginning.

Natalie
Oh my gosh, that’s beautiful.

Rebecca
Simon these days has really been encouraging me to think of things in seasons. Sometimes I can get really anxious if I’m not doing enough writing, and he’ll be like, “Well, is this your season? Is this a producing season? Is this a promotional season? Like what season is it?” which I think is a really nice way to reframe and to let some of the anxiety go. I can’t do everything all the time. I think that’s a nice way to look at relationships, and even I think what we’re saying — maybe this is my season for letting go of some of that trauma I’ve carried around the heart surgery. Maybe I can drop it. I might bump up against it again, but maybe I can allow myself. I don’t have to feel disloyal to Violet if I don’t have to keep grieving that. You know what I mean?

Natalie
Yeah.

Rebecca
So I’m thinking mushrooms, and then I’m also just thinking of the joy of our children and how we see their mistakes. You know when Elsie made a painting the other day and then she did too much, she went too far with it — you know when sometimes you don’t know when to stop with a piece of art? I would really know about this, the visual artist that I am.

Natalie
Like me.

Rebecca
So you would understand perfectly when you decide to add black somewhere and you hate it. She was crying. Just how much I loved her through it, and just was excited that she was experimenting. You’re trying something, you’re pushing some boundary, and how I really genuinely feel that for her. So why can I not feel that for myself? And you can feel that too for yourself? Some of the periods that we look back on our lives, and we didn’t like what we did or we regret — but just like, “I was in a period of experimentation, which I learned from.” Or whatever. We don’t have to be so harsh on ourselves, because we aren’t most of the time on our kids. We really see it as beautiful dabbling, learning that they’re doing.

Natalie
I like the word you chose, ‘dabbling,’ because that’s what it is, right? As you said, it’s experimenting.

Rebecca
Yeah.

Natalie
Stretching.

Rebecca
Yeah, it’s stretching. So we should be able to stretch too, and have loving arms around ourselves as we stretch.

Natalie
Totally. I love you, Bec.

Rebecca
I love you too. Thanks for chatting.

Natalie
Thanks for teaching me.

Rebecca
Bye.