Rebecca
Hey Nat.

Natalie
Hey Bec.

Rebecca
By the way, I wanted to tell you — you know how last episode I was talking about how I haven’t found the perfect mentor?

Natalie
Yeah.

Rebecca
And then I realized you’re the perfect mentor!

Natalie
I’m your mentor?

Rebecca
You’re totally my mentor. I can’t believe I didn’t just say, “You’re my mentor.”

Natalie
But I’ve made so many mistakes.

Rebecca
You’re my mentor, Nat.

Natalie
That’s really generous. I appreciate it.

Rebecca
You sent me a video of you testing out some eyeliner, and I was watching it avidly this morning when I should have been working. I was like, “I want to watch my sister put on eyeliner.”

Natalie
Did it help?

Rebecca
It did help. It was a private tutorial.

Natalie
I was trying to channel the energy of all the makeup artists that I watch who do the exact same thing. They do it into their phone. But then they all have those ring lights, which make the lighting amazing for what they’re trying to produce. But this was the bathroom light, and we don’t have a light bulb for the top light, so things were just really off. So the fact that it worked and that you got anything out of it.

Rebecca
And you were so casj about it. I really liked that actually you had not one single comment about how you looked or felt doing it. It was just about the makeup.

Natalie
“I just gotta do this.”

Rebecca
Just a competent mentor moment.

Natalie
For my sister. Well, I’m glad.

Rebecca
Also that was making me think how, you know when we were at mom’s for dinner and Clifford came up to us and was like, “What are you guys talking about?”

Natalie
He’s always so excited to know what the hot goss is.

Rebecca
And in that moment, we were just talking about eyeliner.

Natalie
I know, and he was so bummed — and actually didn’t believe us. Like, “No, what’s it really about? Now for real, man?” It’s eyeliner.

Rebecca
But I thought that was funny, that we can sort of dupe him because we talk about eyeliner with the same intensity that we talk about mentorship.

Natalie
And religion.

Rebecca
All of it. All of it gets 100%.

Natalie
It’s true, you know. We aren’t ones to just be a half-assed 50%. We’re all in or nothing.

Rebecca
You know what though? That also tells me why sometimes we’re maybe so damn tired. Even of each other — we’re just like, “No more. No more talking, because it’s going to be intense.”

Natalie
“Now I’m done.”

Rebecca
“And now we need to go watch TV.”

Natalie
I get that. Absolutely.

Rebecca
Yeah. Also, I’ve been hearing that maybe people are getting to know me a little faster than you.

Natalie
Sorry, just to say, are we getting feedback? Feedback is pouring in?

Rebecca
Feedback is pouring in, yeah. It’s pretty exciting. So this is one of the things I learned from my feedback.

Natalie
Is that people don’t know me as well as they know you.

Rebecca
So I thought maybe I could just ask you a few quick questions, and you could give an opening into your soul.

Natalie
Or I could throw my walls up really high.

Rebecca
Or you can throw your walls up higher.

Natalie
But let’s see how this goes.

Rebecca
It’s your choice.

Natalie
This is my choice, and I am my own person. Ok, go for it. Ask me a question.

Rebecca
So my question to start: what’s your favourite food, Nat?

Natalie
Sushi, definitely, because it’s the one type of food I don’t make.

Rebecca
Clifford makes it. Clifford is a genius at making sushi.

Natalie
Yes, he’s really brilliant. He’s got his rice down to a finely honed art. I love that I have no part of any of that. Frankie said actually the other night, “Mommy, do you want to learn with me?” I went, “No, no I do not.” I love just being served. So that’s my favourite food.

Rebecca
Ok. What about your worst date? Anything?

Natalie
I would say there were definitely a few bad ones.

Rebecca
Post-divorce?

Natalie
Post-divorce I did a whole slew of attempts to get myself back out there using various online dating apps to help me.

Rebecca
Did you ever do one of the Christian dating apps?

Natalie
I did for a very, very short stint, but those guys are nuts, so I learned very quickly that that was not the right place for me.

Rebecca
More nuts than regular nuts?

Natalie
Oh yeah, yeah yeah yeah, like hardcore weird. I did meet that one guy on the Christian app who then cried at our Crema date and that’s when I said, “You know, this is not going to be for me.”

Rebecca
I’d just like to see you going, “I don’t do this.”

Natalie
This is not me. Even though I’m all about the cries, but not on a first or second date, oh my gosh. I would say that my worst date, it was a pleasant enough hangout at a little pub right around here in The Junction, and then we went for a walk. That should be quite pleasant — the bar is set low in terms of ease and risk. But this guy was obviously really nervous, and I think nerves sometimes do make people need to use the bathroom. So we’re walking around the corner and we end up walking past a park where I just earlier that day had been babysitting and playing with Elsie (when she was just little) and this guy looks at me with desperation in his eyes, and he goes, “I gotta pee.” He runs off into the park, Elsie’s park, and pees right there — and we’re midday, and then he wants to come back and hold my hand. None of us carried hand sanitizer at that time. Everything was so not ok, so I literally walked him back to his car and then I walked back to my loft — just thought this was the end.

Rebecca
What did you do, did you let him take your hand?

Natalie
No. I’m not even a germaphobe, but at the time, everything about this was wrong. Anyways, there was the pee guy.

Rebecca
That’s pretty bad.

Natalie
Yeah. There was one other that was a bit nuts. This guy was really thrown by me not wanting to proceed to a second date. Our date was — and you know what, it was the same pub, so probably this was connected to this very specific pub on Dundas. He was an arborist and so he wanted to talk about trees, which was very cool. Inherently that’s a cool thing for me to learn about nature. So he was talking about tree wars and how they fight for sunlight, and he got really into this piece of information that he was going to unpack or whatever, and it was cool, but I recognized pretty quickly that I wasn’t into it.

Rebecca
So you weren’t into the info he was sharing?

Natalie
No, I wasn’t into the date. So I was like, I’ll take this info and I’ll learn from it, but then I’m going to just say at the end, “Thanks, it was nice to meet you,” and then assume he could pick up the signal. But he called a couple times after, really thrown because our date had gone so well because he had shared so much info with me, and wasn’t this info enough to build a life on? So no. I need more than the trees. That was a hard one — and yet I have used that information since.

Rebecca
Yeah, you told me, and I have found that information useful. I didn’t know trees were at war — although now apparently they’re not at war, I feel like they’ve learned something new about trees, that it’s actually more harmonious than we originally thought.

Natalie
Well, so then the guy gave me faulty info, so that says a lot right there. You know what, that was a red flag that I picked up on. So that was that one, worst date.

Rebecca
What about — those are good, Nat, by the way. Very nice remembering. Ok, what about your hardest moment? I didn’t pick easy ones.

Natalie
No, you didn’t. I guess there have been a few, right, that I have shared with our dedicated listener base — that I’ve had these issues with my leg, and I would say that my hardest moment was lying there in the emerg, hooked up to all these wires, and them not knowing what was wrong with me. This emerg doctor, talking more to himself than even to me or Clifford, him saying, “I think we’re going to have to cut it off.” I remember sharing that earlier, but it was such a nut bars moment. What am I supposed to do with that, because you’re not even really saying it to me? It was like he was navigating in his head all of the potential next steps, but yet it’s my body. It felt really surreal and almost out-of-body, but yet it was very much my body. I don’t know, I might have done something.

Rebecca
That’s a hard one.

Natalie
That was a hard one. It was definitely a hard one.

Rebecca
Ok, what about: how can you accept such a male-centric faith that we have grown up in, and still believe in?

Natalie
I don’t think I do accept it, though. I would call myself a Christian, absolutely, and I believe in God, and I believe in Jesus —these key components of the faith — but I call God mother, like when I’m talking about God to Frankie, because I think it’s really important that as a young kid he’s hearing a different version of God that maybe I didn’t hear enough of when I was a young girl — just because of the time that we were growing up in church. Even though, again, mom and dad have been really good about over the years highlighting all those aspects, I’ve been much more definitive about it. I think Jesus was a full-on feminist, so I’m ok with that. I think that that was who he was and is — the idea of how I navigate faith in real time, I wouldn’t be able to get behind a faith that didn’t have a feminist underpinning. The way that the message is presented about equality for all, and the screwed-upness of the world and the way that it has messed with that faith is no different in so many ways than so many other faiths that have been completely messed with by other folks who take the ideas of religion and then abuse them. Maybe that makes me empathetic to other people of faith who have had the world muddy the waters from inside their faith and from outside. That’s how I can get behind it. God is mother, Jesus is feminist.

Rebecca
I like that. My last question in our ‘get to know you Natalie,’ is it true that you used to mow your lawn in a bikini? Because if that’s true, I love it.

Natalie
Yes, Rebecca.

Rebecca
Is that lore true?

Natalie
That lore is true. But you know what, I didn’t even know that was a thing. When my divorce happened and I bought the house out, I was alone. I now had to care for this whole property. It was not a big property, it was a little house with a backyard and a front yard, and there was a little patch of lawn in both sections to mow. Not only that, there were gardening elements, and I had to get rid of wasp’s nests. I remember I had to fix a toilet, for fucksakes. It was just so many things. I would say that when I went to mow the lawn in the middle of the summer and it was really hot, I put on very logical lawn mowing attire, which was a bikini, because it was hot. I only found out later from people who stayed in the neighbourhood that that was an issue for some — but they didn’t come over and offer to help me mow my lawn.

Rebecca
Or tell you that they had a problem with it. You just heard about it?

Natalie
Yeah, and if they had told me, we probably would have had to have some words about that. Just like Jesus is a feminist, so am I. I should be able to wear what I need to get my lawn mowed. Anyways, that’s my response to that.

Rebecca
Right, so it’s true, and I love it so much, Nat. It’s one of my favourite things and I’m so glad it’s true. So now that we know you a little bit better, what did we want to talk about today?

Natalie
Well, you’ve been talking a little bit of late about the challenges of starting new things, and so I think I said, “Oh well, then let’s try and reframe that. Let’s reframe how new things are hard.”

Rebecca
Well, I think in art-making, generally I was thinking about this, how it feels new every day. I was having this discussion with Simon, I was like, “Isn’t your life better because you get to be an expert in your field, so you get that high, the endorphin rush of rambling on expertly to your clients.” He was like, “What are you talking about? You get to be an expert in your things, in writing or whatever, and help me in my writing.” So he doesn’t buy what I’m saying, but I do think in art there’s so much new… I use the word ‘generative,’ and I don’t think that’s right. Is art generative? I mean, it is, but I don’t know that that’s what I mean.

Natalie
Ok, I don’t know what you mean by it.

Rebecca
I mean that you keep making new. What’s the word for that? You keep coming up with something.

Natalie
Ok, well I could get behind ‘generative’ with that.

Rebecca
Ok, let’s call it generative. Is it the opposite of ‘expert,’ generative? No, I don’t think so.

Natalie
No, definitely not.

Rebecca
But I want it to be.

Natalie
Because you’re feeling that, you’re all in your feelings about this.

Rebecca
I’m all in my feelings about wanting my work to be generative, and that makes it harder.

Natalie
Because you really want to be making new things.

Rebecca
Yeah, and I think that was with my old business. We were making art, but we also had this solidity of this business. There was very businessy steps to do each day, that felt…

Natalie
Like a pattern?

Rebecca
Yeah, there were patterns. Like “I know how to do that spreadsheet,” which was satisfying. Now I’m in a space of starting again, in some senses. I mean, I have learned some things that I can apply, but it just feels newer and feels like there’s less moments of surety, like where I can be like, “Yes, I know exactly what I’m doing. I can feel great about doing that perfectly.”

Natalie
Right. Yeah, I empathize. These days, my job is weirdly new. I’ve been teaching for 20 years, as I’ve said before, but I have not been teaching in a mainstream school for the last eight years. I’ve returned to a building that I used to teach in, and yet it feels new to me. Even though time stood still in terms of the physical space, there’s so many new people — it’s a completely new set of kids, obviously, because that’s two sets of graduates long gone of a four-year set of kids. That’s really new, but it’s also a sense of it’s a new year in terms of the craziness of COVID. What’s happening for those of us in secondary specifically is crazy-making. We really are not functioning at our best, because everybody’s just navigating so much newness — like not having time to prepare, and seeing new kids every other week. All that newness, it certainly doesn’t feel generative. I don’t feel much in the way of energy. I would say that I would really empathize with your wanting something to solidly reach back to that would have been familiar, because the familiar would give me something that I could cling to and say, “Ok, I know that I can do that, and that will give me this result.” That’s definitely missing right now.

Rebecca
Yeah. I have no one in my life that I can mansplain (womansplain) to about something. You know, “Just come and I will tell you.”

Natalie
“All these things that I know.”

Rebecca
“How to do.”

Natalie
Well, you’re not alone. I should feel like an expert at this point in my career. I really should, this many years in. But no, I don’t have any of that feeling right now. Right now I feel as new as my newest colleagues. That takes a lot of energy. And this podcast is super new.

Rebecca
Yeah, I know. Which is fun, it’s really fun to be doing it with you because I feel secure knowing I’m doing it with you.

Natalie
I’m glad.

Rebecca
Because I’m doing it with my mentor.

Natalie
Exactly, and I’m doing it with the person who drags me to things. You keep me trying new things, which is really good.

Rebecca
Yeah, there’s lots of newness. Imagine being a child.

Natalie
Yeah, I feel like that a lot.

Rebecca
Yeah. All the crazy stuff they encounter, just because the world is fresh for them.

Natalie
Yeah. Oh, my goodness.

Rebecca
We’re like children.

Natalie
Well, like babies searching for that face in those early, early, early days where they’re looking for something just to secure their little world on. It’s usually a parent, but that idea of the face — I’m looking for the face right now, and the face is yours that I’m staring at, which is really handy. It’s actually why podcasting is kind of interesting. I’m so grateful that you and Si did all this research off the top in terms of how to find a program where we could have faces. I was trying to imagine what this would have been like just having a phone conversation — back in the day when we all just had phone conversations, I don’t know how we would all even go back to that, right? Because now we’re so used to Zoom calls, at some level the Zoom offers a face to hold on to. That’s what this podcast stuff you guys did allows for.

Rebecca
We did that.

Natalie
Well, I came along for the ride.

Rebecca
Do you have a nugget for me? About newness?

Natalie
I think if the title we’ve come up with is ‘New Things Are Hard,’ there’s a necessity to dive into it, because we’re never going to get to expertise if we don’t embrace the new. If I actually followed what my body wants to do right now, which is just to quit everything and go take a nap, I will never get to the other side of this fatigue when I get to feel smart and capable again — which I have to believe is on the other side of this new time. I would be saying to you (if you were asking me this outside of this podcast), “Embrace the feelings of excitement that come with newness,” but right now I’m not feeling that excitement. Maybe I need to harness that by sharing things with you. If I’m sharing with someone about my new feelings, maybe I can grab hold of their excitement to energize, like a battery boost. We all need a battery boost these days, I think, but definitely those of us who are navigating newness.

Rebecca
And there’s so many quotes about fear. I think there’s some Rilke quote — I’m going to find it, put it in the show notes. Something about, “Fear is the beginning…” or, “Newness is…”

Natalie
We’re missing a bunch of it there.

Rebecca
You can kind of get where you’re going with it. You know, it’s the beginning of something. Something good. But said better. Ok, so we also wanted to try something new on our podcast, because we put a call out for people to send us a problem to reframe. This is a new experience for us — once again Nat, something new — and we did have a response. So we would like to play you this message from our friend Nicole who sent us a problem she wants us to reframe.

Natalie
Ok, here we go.

Nicole
Can we reframe two things: the term ‘essential employee,’ and the term, ‘unskilled labour,’ or ‘semi-skilled.’ The pandemic has forced us to acknowledge that ‘essential’ means more than just your fire, your police, your ambulance, and doctors and nurses. Obviously, those are essential. But what about our grocery employees, those that work in grocery stores to make sure that everyone is fed and diapers are available? If they’re essential, should they not be paid as essential workers? If they’re essential, then why do we accept just minimum wage? If they’re essential, why do we not treat them the same? But that also goes with the second question, “Can we reframe unskilled or semi-skilled labour?” The reason I’m asking this is because as someone who’s worked in a variety of fields — education, administration, and retail — we currently classify most employees at grocery stores as either unskilled or semi-skilled employees, and yet if you were to go in there you would notice that they have to have customer service ability to cold-call customers, the ability to understand multiple operating systems, money sense, there are so many things. Even the janitors have to be able to understand the chemical reaction between two things, and how stores are set up, and how to use various equipment. So can we reframe those two — especially now that we’ve gone through the majority of this pandemic, is it about time to reframe those to better go forward?

Natalie
So that was Nicole.

Rebecca
Thanks, Nicole. I just want to say one thing, talking about how grocery workers might have money sense. When I worked in a convenience store, when I was 14 or 15 and I was ringing up a lottery ticket, let’s just say I didn’t have any sense of what was happening and they were supposed to give me money, but I ended up giving them money.

Natalie
Oh, that’s so nice of you. “Here’s your winnings.”

Rebecca
And they took it.

Natalie
But that’s maybe different because you were a kid.

Rebecca
There’s not always sense involved. Ok. Thank you, Nicole. That’s actually a pretty challenging one to reframe because it’s not obvious. It’s such big problems that she’s brought up that we’ve seen through this pandemic.

Natalie
Yeah. Not immediately solvable — which I would say is probably about most of our problems, though. Most of the stuff we’ve brought forward, thus far, have been reframable at some level, but not necessarily solvable. So for that, maybe she’s right in line with where we’re going.

Rebecca
Although we do like to solve things, or feel like we have. We’ll try to put a button at the end of it, somehow.

Natalie
Or tie a bow on something potential — some sort of hope, right. I thought it was really interesting that when Nicole sent me the voice note, she had also written a text. She said she had just finished working 40 hours this week as an essential employee, and I could just hear in the text tone how fatigued she was, and so I was empathizing. We’re all tired, but there has got to be a different kind of fatigue that comes from basically what she’s saying there, a lack of value being placed on your work. I don’t know, right there at the end I was really struck because it immediately reminded me of grandpa. Our dad’s father was a caretaker for the same board that I work with for 40 years. He prided himself on never missing a day, that was his whole thing. He also got a Rolex as his retirement gift from his colleagues — that’s crazy too, unto itself. It wasn’t a gift from the board per se, it was a gift from his team.

Rebecca
Which meant he was valued by his team.

Natalie
100%, so there was something in that. He used to call it ‘living on the pig’s back,’ I’m still not fully sure what that means, but it’s something Irish.

Rebecca
But it meant he was living the life.

Natalie
Yeah, and I think what he was living was a life that was secure because he had a job — he knew his hours, he knew where he was going, and that was coming from a life where that had not been his reality beforehand. Landing that job with the board was something he took great pride in and honoured. It’s interesting that that was the job that Nicole mentioned at the end, because I also remember that what grandpa did was he was specifically tasked with the job of looking after the TDSB pools in a certain set of schools, and that would have been almost like an engineering job, because we were talking about massive bodies of water that you somehow have to keep operational, with like lots of pipes.

Rebecca
Which we know firsthand, because we were both lifeguards. We would go down to… what did they call that room?

Natalie
The boiler room. We had to put on our hazmat suits and play with acid, oh my gosh. Why were they doing that? Why were they letting us go to those things?

Rebecca
Because we were expendable.

Natalie
You know what, right there. I had no idea what I was doing down there, and no one gave me appropriate training. Barb, out there, who was our supervisor…

Rebecca
No, she definitely didn’t.

Natalie
We need to have some words, because that was not an ok thing.

Rebecca
I kind of love that about Barb.

Natalie
But grandpa 100% knew his stuff. So I just think that there’s something interesting, because when I’m thinking essential workers and I have someone like grandpa in my mind, then I’m thinking of the lack of value placed on them, as she named, but it also reminds me of that song.

Rebecca
But wait, before you tell me about that song, if you don’t have an essential worker in your life, I would say…

Natalie
Like someone given that label, you mean?

Rebecca
Yeah. I mean someone like grandpa. We have some touchpoint, a story for that kind of labour. But is that also some of the problem in this question, is not everyone does. So the people who have a story that they know and can connect to are feeling more empathetic than people who don’t?

Natalie
Yeah, and you know what? You just highlighted a piece that I know I can see at the end of the tunnel that is my mind that is something I’m going to want to go back to. So somehow we’re going to have to pin this moment, because yes, I think you’re right.

Rebecca
Ok, pin that. I think it’s important that we have a story of people. If we just see it as a news item that we can’t relate to…

Natalie
It makes it harder to empathize. Yeah, for sure.

Rebecca
But tell me about your song.

Natalie
Well, I think… “Why you always in the mood, acting brand new.” That’s for you, Katie, if you can catch it with my singing. This 24kGoldn song called Mood, there’s a line in there which says, “Why you always effing around, acting brand new?” I thought of that line when I was thinking of this podcast (when we were getting ready for this podcast) and then connecting it to Nicole’s thing, because I think it’s a very different iteration of the word ‘new.’

Rebecca
So we’re talking about acting brand new. Because I asked you about that and you had to tell me what that means in this context. We opened the Urban Dictionary.

Natalie
Yeah. I full-on opened up the Urban Dictionary on the phone.

Rebecca
Clifford says he just keeps it open all the time. Did you know that? I love that? He keeps the Urban Dictionary just ready. Did you not hear him say that?

Natalie
No, that’s adorable.

Rebecca
So he can talk to his financial people, because he says they’re all younger. He has these discussions, so he needs to know…

Natalie
What they’re talking about. I had no idea. That’s brilliant. I have so many things to say when I go home tonight, that’s so great. But anyways, I think that in the song, ‘brand new’ is meaning to treat people indifferently, even though you have history. Pretending that you don’t know all the things that have actually passed with you. That really makes me think about essential workers, because barely a year ago, at 7pm every evening, we were all going out and standing on our balconies or on our porches or whatever our home allowed, for and banging pots and pans at 7pm, and celebrating all of these workers who were making our lives possible in the midst of lockdowns.

Rebecca
And taking care of us.

Natalie
Yeah, and risking their lives, right? Before vaccines. And how are those same people who are in the service industry, and service injury writ large, how are they now getting yelled at? These people are just doing their job, the job that society has tasked them with, based on whatever job they’re now in, and people are so mad.

Rebecca
They’ve gone from being…

Natalie
Heroes to…

Rebecca
Being the objects of our wrath and frustration.

Natalie
And so they become easy targets, and I think that idea of ‘new’ is something we need to trouble. We need to think of that line, “How soon we forget.”

Rebecca
Yeah. Which is really interesting, because at the beginning we were talking about how hard it is for something to be new, and now we’re saying: isn’t it important for something to be new so we can revere it, so we can honour it? There’s something about newness, it keeps us awake. We die so quickly, we lose all of our energy and our ability to really see something, see someone. I mean, that certainly happened here.

Natalie
Well, and art is one of those things that allows us to stay awake, right? To stay awake to the newness, because it’s one of the reasons why there are so many memorial statues to honour the memory of things that we would really quickly forget because life just keeps chugging forward.

Rebecca
We will come back to Nicole’s specific question, but could we call art essential work?

Natalie
I think that that is something that we need to navigate here, the language. I think we need to question a little bit why we forget so soon. ‘How soon we forget’ is a really depressing trope that says something about our society. It’s such a dismissiveness of history.

Rebecca
Why do we forget? I think we forget because we’re such a hugely individualistic culture, that we are concerned with our own selves, our own wellbeing, our own family’s well being. I read something interesting online: some researcher was talking about we have been calling workers essential, but it’s actually just the work that is essential, not the people. If we meant the people, we would treat them differently. So let’s not use that term. Why do we call them essential workers if we don’t actually think they’re... we think it’s essential work. We know we need groceries. I want my groceries when I want my groceries. But are we going to as a society rise up and pay them like…

Natalie
Yeah, to actually honour the work, if we’re truly viewing it as essential. Well, and we’ve seen recently that that pay promise went completely by the way, and there was some sort of ridiculous 10 cent tack-on right. It wasn’t what it was supposed to be. So absolutely, people are no doubt feeling undervalued inherently.

Rebecca
Is that because we go back to being tired and we don’t write our MPPs? We stop rising up?

Natalie
But there is so much rise up right now. This is maybe a hopeful reframe of something that’s sort of come up in Nicole’s comment there, the beauty of this worker’s movement that is all of a sudden becoming real, in real time right now. There’s the John Deere strike that’s happening right now. It’s not just about tractors, right? We’re talking about people who are saying, “You can’t do this without us, so we’re just not going to do it until you honour what we do.” And there’s something in your industry, isn’t there?

Rebecca
Yeah, there’s been a film strike in the US, for such basic things that these people want, the production side. We want rest on the weekends, we want 10 hours of rest at night — as opposed to these ridiculous hours that you can’t survive, where you’re maybe shooting a 16 hour day, and then you have to show up six hours later or something.

Natalie
Seems so logical.

Rebecca
That’s really the same thing. You can’t make a film without people holding the lights, et cetera et cetera. So they would be essential workers for the film industry. I think they did succeed at some level.

Natalie
Well, that’s amazing. I think what we’re learning (and certainly Clifford and I have talked about this recently) is that the notion of a worker’s movement is very present right now, because of the fact that the pandemic has potentially offered people the space to ask questions of their value. “I’ve got to be worth more than this,” is a question that people are feeling more free to say of themselves. Capitalism wins most of the time, but maybe for like a really tiny little moment in history — it happens every once in a while, but maybe right now is a moment for potential change. So in the meantime, as we wait for that worker movement to really come through…

Rebecca
And we figure out ways to contribute…

Natalie
Right, can we also reframe our idea of work? We really do have a very work-obsessed culture. So what does it mean to value ourselves outside of work?

Rebecca
I’d be curious, Nicole, what you think of that. How do you find value outside of your own work? That’s what we’re asking.

Natalie
I mean, as a teacher — I’m speaking from my own position, where I do not feel terribly valued these days, certainly in the face of who is our government right now, and the education minister is ridiculous. I don’t feel valued in my gig, per se. I think that I really empathize with Nicole’s ideas of what it means to feel so undervalued and question: why don’t I feel valued for the work that I do, but also the work that I love? Because that was really key to her point, she’s like, “I love my job. So why don’t people honour the fact that the work that I do is important, but also that it’s something I could just love?” I love serving in this way. I’ve had to sit with that and go, “Ok, I really do still love teaching. I don’t love how I’m being treated. So how do I find the beauty again in my interactions with my students, in my teaching?” That’s where I’m sitting right now.

Rebecca
Violet’s teacher was saying to me this morning, “I’m just so tired of repeating the same things to them.”

Natalie
Oh, that’s funny.

Rebecca
It was kind of funny, because I was like, “Well, I think that’s part of the job.” But I was trying to listen deeper. I think she was just saying, “I’m tired, and I don’t feel valued.” I think that’s what fundamentally she was getting at. “I just need someone to listen to me, because my job’s really hard. It might be coming out a little funny, what I’m saying, but I’m feeling undervalued.”

Natalie
And actually really amazing that she said it and shared it with you, because that’s a very risky, vulnerable thing to do as a teacher — to share those feelings with a parent.

Rebecca
Is to be real, and because I did judge her for a second, because I was like, “I don’t know that you should be being that real with me.” But then I’m like, “No, that’s…”

Natalie
“Actually really fair.”

Rebecca
“You are a human.” You need to share, you need to be able to express yourself. Nicole needs to be able to ask these questions.

Natalie
Well, and it goes back to that idea of what I said I wanted us to pin. This long tunnel that I’m staring through is: I think that there have to be — along the journey of moving from the capitalist underpinnings that define our society to the potential for worker’s uprising, and the good that can come from that — along that path, can be some…

Rebecca
And will we get there, and how can we get there?

Natalie
And how do we sustain that even when we get there, right? There have been blips in time, but not necessarily sustained progress. Can we find some self-care strategies to put in place to feel value — to not just value the work, but to feel valued in general?

Rebecca
You thought of one?

Natalie
I thought of a couple. I remembered you mentioned this in the mentorship episode that Simon had some thinker I don’t remember the name of, but that he was pretty pumped about, who had said that 200 books could be a mentor.

Rebecca
Oh, James Altucher.

Natalie
Ok. Thank you, James Altucher.

Rebecca
I like how that was on the tip of my tongue, because then I’m making up for my Rilke disaster.

Natalie
I think that was brilliant. There have been studies just recently — I mean, this has been going on for a while, but a recent study that I just read actually showed fiction to be good for one’s mental health. It’s not just reading, but reading fiction. I think the idea behind that study is that there’s learning to be gleaned from the reading process, but there’s real learning and empathy-building when we’re reading fiction, because we are putting our own lives, our very myopic sense of self, on pause for a short stint and investing our energies into this character, or multiple characters, in a book. The value that we might place on the characters we read about perhaps can mirror back to us about ourselves. If I can feel so deeply for this character on the page to the point of weeping, then can I not weep and love myself and value my work and who I am as Natalie as much as I can value that character? So I think there’s not just empathy-building for the world at large — like when you said at the beginning, “Not everybody has a story to connect to some quote unquote ‘essential worker’ in their own family and their own circle,” but we would have characters. If we spend time and invest in those characters, then that might spill out into that kind of empathetic society that we want to build.

I also think there’s something about reading as resistance. I think that we don’t need to say, “Oh, this capitalistic patriarchal society within which we live — and white supremacist, and all the things that are working against positive movement forward for a really broken humanity,” I think we can resist that brokenness by our reading. I think that the work that we’re reading — like indigenous futures as a concept, as a style of reading, as a genre, is actually about imagining a world anew outside of the stranglehold of colonialism. That is literally creating new worlds apart from the now. So could we be doing that sort of resistance work with our reading for the greater good, but also for the good of now?

Rebecca
In the good of our hearts?

Natalie
Mm-hmm.

Rebecca
Reading also brings me back to the writing or to the creating, and there’s this beautiful quote from Toni Morrison: “There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity. No need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. This is how civilizations heal.”

Natalie
Oh my gosh. So I mean, right there.

Rebecca
It’s just, you know, rise up. Rise up with your words, rise up with your reading.

Natalie
Yeah, and maybe we need new language. Maybe what she’s calling us to is new language. So maybe it isn’t, it goes back to that first quote that you shared — maybe it’s not about essential workers, but essential people. So can we reframe the value we place on the people who are doing that work?

Rebecca
Essential people, yeah. ‘Essential workers’ has become almost meaningless now.

Natalie
Yes. It’s lost its newness.

Rebecca
So it’s like we need to get rid of that term altogether, because we clearly have lost any connection to what that means.

Natalie
Yes, we need something new.

Rebecca
But essential people…

Natalie
Yeah. Well, it humanizes, literally, what we’re trying to say. So I don’t know, Nicole. Did we reframe, at some level, some of what you’ve been pondering? It means so much that you shared, just to say. That was a really risky, vulnerable thing to do, to be the first person to respond to the call and actually participate, so thank you so much. That’s amazing. And you certainly gave us some pretty big prompts for thought, which is pretty awesome.

Rebecca
Yeah, it’s a hard one. For me, where I always want to go is to emotions, and to think about psychology. Thinking about this issue is a good challenge for me and kind of wakes me right up.

Natalie
I love you, Bec. This was fun.

Rebecca
I love you too. That’s all for now.

Natalie
That’s all for now. Keep the calls coming.

Rebecca
Indeed.

Natalie
We’ll keep growing.

Rebecca
Maybe something about shame next.

Natalie
Oh my gosh. Here we go.

Rebecca
Love you.

Natalie
Love you.