BAD AT KEEPING SECRETS

What would it mean to think outside of your brain? I am fascinated by the idea that we can think with our bodies, our surroundings, and our relationships—and that thought is so much more interconnected than we might think. It defies an individualism that we often rely on, and recalls the intelligence of the body and how our thought processes vibrate against one another, shaping new thought.

Today, I’m sharing my conversation with Annie Murphy Paul, who is the author of the brilliant work The Extended Mind, a book that challenges our understanding of where thinking occurs and how it happens. In this interview, she also tells us a secret that has to do with imposter syndrome. So, if you have ever thought to yourself “I am a fraud!”, you should give it a watch. Thank you so much, Annie!

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Annie Murphy Paul is an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Scientific American, Slate, Time magazine, and The Best American Science Writing, among many other publications. She is the author of Origins, reviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review and selected by that publication as a "Notable Book," and The Cult of Personality, hailed by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker as a “fascinating new book.” Paul has spoken to audiences around the world about learning and cognition; her TED Talk has been viewed by more than 2.6 million people. A graduate of Yale University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she has served as a lecturer at Yale University and as a senior advisor at the Yale University Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning.

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This week I am talking to Aamina Ahmad, author of The Return of Faraz Ali. Her book is about a murder, but it is like no other “murder mystery” I have ever read. It is quietly human, compassionate, deeply observed. Under the layers of the crime are layers of generational trauma, power, and psychological distress.

Pain and love are riddled with grief for the characters in Aamina’s book, a brilliant work of noir fiction. Their grief is ordinary, and yet, all grief is extraordinary to some degree, isn’t it?

Aamina holds her characters’ psyches in her two hands with such care—they are vivid, feeling, and complex. As we all are. Above all, this book made me rethink what love is, at its core. Is the freedom to love a performance of privilege, or is it an essential part of being human? I was staying up late to read this book. I hope you will run and grab a copy at your local bookstore. Thank you for the wonderful chat, Aamina!

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Take good care, Carissa

Hi friends, hi,

I hope this week treated you gently and with care. And if it didn’t, well, then I am extra glad for us that it is the weekend.

I have SUCH A TREAT for us today. I got to chat with Julie Menanno of The Secure Relationship and it was exactly what I needed. Maybe you will too. I just think it’s such a hard time to be a human in relationships. Romantic or otherwise. Everyone is feeling a little extra something—hurt, wounded, tired, daunted—in their relationships right now because of the pandemic. It is just a hard time.

Julie helps us make sense of what a “secure” relationship even means, how to turn on our inner felt experience, and why secure attachment is so foundational. If you’re not familiar with her work, go check it out here. She has a book out now!!

Now, I hope you enjoy this juicy secret that somehow manages to include Las Vegas, Sir Mix-A-Lot, her mentor, and the joy of kids laughing. At the end, we attempt to rap together. You will love it. Or hate it. In any case, I hope you laugh at us.

Sending you lots of love,

Carissa

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make sense of this world that we live in - holding multiple truths, reconciling feeling like we know nothing and everything all at the same time. So does my guest this week, Simran Jeet Singh, the Executive Director of the Aspen Institute’s Religion & Society Program.

We are talking about his book The Light We Give - How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life. The Light We Give is a memoir of lived experience with the connective thread of Sikh teaching.

The Light We Give is a story of the evolution of faith and of using love as a guiding principle. It is often hard to ignore the disconnect between what we believe and what we do, and through the teaching of Sikh gurus, Simran looks at his life and how he wants to be in the world. And using the wisdom to help bridge the gap between the two.

He describes his memoir as a time to “reflect on all of the mistakes I made.” Super relatable. Anyone who has made no mistakes in life has a certain delusion that I am not sure is healthy. Or at least not for me. Laughing at himself is not a weakness, but a tool for being self-aware and becoming a better human. As well as to connect and empathize with other people.

This is a beautiful, generous read for anyone who has experienced otherness before. It is also a guide of sorts for breaking cycles of anger and injustice. The Light We Give recognizes the humanity in all of us, reminding us that we are all worthy of love. I very much enjoyed this read. I don’t always get through the books, but this one made me want to be a better person, and also made me believe it was possible.

As always, thanks for being curious about stuff with me. I am so lucky to do this with you.

Sending love and care, Carissa

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Emma Straub’s paperback release of her NY Times Bestseller This Time Tomorrow is coming to us soon on May 16! She kicks off her book tour very soon too, and today I want to celebrate by revisiting my conversation with Emma from last year.

I wore red lipstick the entire week leading up to talking to Emma Straub about the full mess of life. The interview is long and fragmented and also the audio cuts in and out. But I have to share it anyway because, and I am completely embarrassed to say, I am in love with Emma.

Emma Straub is an American author and bookstore owner. She and her husband run the store Books Are Magic (an amazing name for a store and totally true statement). Her fourth bestselling novel, This Time Tomorrow is a semi-autobiographical novel involving time travel. For Emma, she doesn’t choose to do anything differently in the past or visit the big sort of moments we all imagine shaped us. This Time Tomorrow revisits the small moments, that often go underrepresented that also make up a big part of who we are as people. It is also a tale of longing for normalcy and comfort.

My favorite parts of the interview are talking about perfectionism. I don’t know if I meet as many people like her who are as ok with openly talking about how perfectionism is not their thing. As you might have guessed, I totally relate to this. “I have never edited anything before I sent it.” She talks about running forward without fear (I am sure she has fear, it just seems to be tempered by the foundation of her friends and family). It is so interesting how all of my life, I have been told that the real creative process is in the editing and refining. And for my friend Nina LaCour, that is where the magic happens. It is nice to know that whatever works for you, go with that.

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Perfection is the death of all good things, perfection is the death of pleasure, it’s the death of productivity, it’s the death of efficiency, it’s the death of joy.

-Elizabeth Gilbert

We also explore the topic of having kids, and Emma talks about having kids as being an enriching experience for her. By having access to diverse relationships her understanding of everything expands. Although, she does have time envy, she admits, about her friends without kids. There is really no clear answer on the topic, but for me, having kids is an experience, even when it is hard (and oh it is SOOOOO hard) that I am glad I did. I crave intense feelings and meaning, and having a child for me highlights the fragile, precious nature of being alive. Not to mention the lack of control and uncertainty. If you want to have control and be certain about things, I would not recommend it.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I do. I have never interviewed someone who I felt like my life had paralleled, whose outlook could have been my own, who I couldn’t find a single thing to contradict. I know I know, I only talked to her for an hour, and I know that I am a fan. But you will see there is something about the way she talks in circles and how she is open and honest and present but also somewhere else.

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Regrets… I have some experience in this area because: a) I am a highly sensitive person, and b) I am always looking backwards. Always. I am a person who lives in the past tense. It is not something I am proud of. I have this annoying habit of ending the day by lying in bed thinking about all of the things that I said to people that day and wondering what the heck I was thinking.

But I also look back farther. I wonder about people I used to love and the choices I made, and I more or less languish in the past. Some people call this melancholic. Or nostalgic. Most of the terms associated with this kind of regret-filled thinking are negative. But then there’s Daniel Pink. He gives us a new way to think about “regret” that reframes our regrets as information that can actually help us…

If I regret something, what can that help me know about myself? Or what I value? Or what will constitute a good life?

I am fascinated by this, because I agree with him that feelings are information. Sometimes we feel things before we “know” them with any conscious certainty. Humans are so complicated. Dan Pink talked to 21,000 people around the world and found that there are basically four different kinds of regrets, which is helpful to me in making sense of what I’ve felt when I say “I regret” something. Plus, he has some notes for us about kindness (the type that we can send inward, to ourselves).

What an honor to talk to one of the authors I most admire writing today. Thank you, Dan!

Share this post with someone you know who may be navigating feelings of regret.

Have you ever considered yourself a lazy person? I would say I do, when I walk past the sink of dirty dishes, telling myself I will do it later when it’s already been a bunch of laters already. Or when I jump into bed with a to-do list still left unfinished, wracked with the guilt that I could have done more if I just tried harder. But according to Dr. Devon Price maybe that’s not the case. Maybe I’m not actually lazy?

Last year, I had the chance to chat with Devon on his book Laziness Does Not Exist, where he explains how we may be victims of “the Laziness Lie,” something that teaches us from a young age to associate hard work with moral goodness. Devon breaks down what he’s coined as the “laziness lie” and the three main tenets that put us in this perpetual trap of feeling like we’re not doing enough.

It was truly illuminating for me, and I’m just in awe of his research. And holy smokes, Devon also shared SUCH a juicy story with us for this secret conversation, that basically left me feeling like they are a total badass.

Today’s episode is a shorter one, and the audio is a little funky, but it’s a really good one. I promise.

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Have you ever felt unconditionally loved? I guess I should start by defining what I mean when I say, Unconditional Love.

I grew up with the understanding that this term meant that no matter what I did, or who I was, I was loved by my parents. Both of them made my sister and me aware of this fact by telling us and by showing up for us. Of course, they still got mad at our actions and praised us when we met their expectations, however, the underlying understanding was that we were loved for who we were and not what we did. This form of love, parental, I feel like is the best illustration of the type of love I am talking about.

Today, I am revisiting my conversation with Alfie Kohn on intrinsic motivation. Alfie is an author and lecturer, and he writes and speaks widely on human behavior, education, and parenting. He has been described in Time magazine as “perhaps the country’s most outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades [and] test scores.”

I don’t know about you, but I was raised on positive feedback. And I feel really grateful for it. I do things so that I will get praise. I have no way to evaluate if something is good or bad beyond what other people tell me it is. This was the trend when I was young - we got gold stars for sharing, we got graded on a curve for us to evaluate ourselves within our peers, and prizes were held in condition for good behavior.

Alfie Kohn argues that these things are not good for fostering intrinsic motivation. They only offer temporary compliance and overtime doesn’t create the things we really value - like care, compassion, and genuine interest.

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If you are interested in why you feel that feeling of meaninglessness when you don’t have external benchmarks to compare yourself to, Mr. Kohn’s research will break down why that might be. In addition, he offers suggestions on how to create your own path - in your workplace, with your children, and with yourself.

If you want to find out more, he has dozens of free articles on his website. A personal favorite of mine is Can Everyone Be Excellent?

I am personally super fascinated by how our relationships with tech have changed the course of human friendships, romance, and family. How the community is evolving with and around our phones and the internet and everything else.

In the zeitgeist of this moment, I feel like we are often using the term “alignment” to describe when situations, and interests are fueled by the same motivation. When I was complaining about not having enough sex, my therapist told me that she sees that sex rates all around are going down, we are just not talking about it. I asked her why she thought that was, she replied, “phones.” The following day I picked up, Out of Touch by Michelle Drouin and was met by an in-depth exploration echoing the exact words said to me the previous day.

Dr. Michelle Drouin is a psychology professor, forensic consultant, expert witness, and internationally-recognized researcher and speaker on issues related to technology, relationships, couples, and sexuality, and the author of Out of Touch: How to Survive an Intimacy Famine - a detailed account of the state of human loneliness. How can we cultivate meaningful connections and intimacy in a world where technology lets us have physical distance? Michelle fearlessly takes the complexities of this question on.

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It was an honor to get to interview her for this book, which is totally reflective of my lived experience with technology and human relationships. She talks about how having more choices doesn’t always make us happy, the chemicals that make us feel close to each other in our brains, and how texting has changed the depth of our close relationships (making relationships disposable in some instances). She also will make a SUPER compelling argument for 20-second hugs with other mammals (there is research on how this helps us even have stronger immune systems). Does she see a future where AI can serve as a proxy for human-to-human/animal connections? Yes. It is not here yet, but maybe soon… I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

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Can you accept yourself as you are? Do you ever feeling like shame is running the show?

Today, we revisit my conversation with Lisa Olivera, a writer and therapist who shares work centered around radical acceptance, cultivating compassion, and integrating our stories and full humanity.

“…Listening to ourselves and noticing some of those fears that come up, and asking if the fears that we have are worth holding for the outcome we’ll receive by moving through it.”

In her book, Already Enough, Lisa writes about how to identify the stories we’ve been telling ourselves—so often based on shame or fear and so often necessary to our survival—and to maybe start telling ourselves some new ones. From her own experience being adopted (and learning later in life that she was abandoned at birth), Lisa’s book helps us unravel the unhelpful narratives that we build, and gives us the courage to practice constructing new ones. Already Enough is the kind of book that you clutch tight to your chest. If you’ve ever questioned your own worth or struggled to believe in yourself (and I think most humans have at one point or another), this book will give you some strength and guidance to rewrite the story.

Lisa also shares a secret! And inside it is buried a question: How do you let go of a part of yourself that has mattered to you? Thank you, Lisa. xo

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