Help Existing

How do you figure out what your boundaries are? How should you go about communicating boundaries in a way that is both firm and compassionate? How can you remain flexible and open to change without having porous boundaries? Do the same strategies apply to both familial and romantic relationships?

I knew just who to ask: Dedeker Winston, relationship coach, host of the Multiamory podcast, and author of The Smart Girl's Guide to Polyamory, along with the excellent forthcoming communication guide Multiamory: Essential Tools for Modern Relationships. Dedeker is one of the smartest, most articulate people I know, and this conversation was incredibly helpful to me on a practical, nitty-gritty-communication-tips level. I hope you find it useful as well!

How is technology changing our minds and existential experience? What do phones have to do with shame, power, narcissism, and death? How can we think about the difference between virtuality and reality? Is there really even a difference? Why are we not more comforted by our phones when we're addicted to them?

In this AP-level episode of Help Existing, we delve into these questions and more, thinking about technology on both a philosophical and psychoanalytic level. My guests are philosopher Victor Krebs and psychologist Richard Frankel, authors of the new book Human Virtuality and Digital Life: Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Investigations. Krebs is a professor of philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and a philosophical curator. Frankel is a faculty member and supervisor at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and a teaching associate and supervisor at Harvard Medical School.

This was a fascinating conversation I studied up for and wanted to bring my A-game to. I hope you learn as much as I did, and that maybe after this conversation, you'll have some different lenses to think from a psychoanalytic and philosophical perspective about your relationship with technology.

"Bisexual" is a label that, at the age of 34, I've only recently become comfortable using. Much of that is thanks to my guest for this episode: Jen Winston, author of Greedy: Notes From a Bisexual Who Wants Too Much. Their memoir, and our conversations since, have helped me understand what "bisexuality" actually means, my internalized bisexual imposter syndrome, bi-phobia, and so much more.

I wanted to have a conversation with Jen this Pride Month to delve into these topics further so that listeners, whether they're bisexual themselves, questioning, or simply want to be better allies to bisexual friends, walk away with more understanding and compassion.

In this very personal episode, I got help thinking about the nuances of consent. This isn't a directly therapeutic episode so much as a theoretical one: how might we express our ambivalence about sexual experiences that we're not sure constitute assault, but were harmful nonetheless? What are the pressures to come forward with your story in a "post-MeToo world"-- to put a clear label on your experience, or to assign blame?

To delve into these and many other questions, I spoke with a writer and thinker I really admire: Katherine Angel, author of the fantastic book Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent.

I use a scene for my memoir Open to talk about these themes with Katherine, so a warning that if you haven't read the book yet, this interview will contain spoilers of a pretty pivotal scene. And of course, also a content warning that this episode discusses sexual assault, both in the abstract and in personal detail.

I know this conversation really helped me put some different lenses on what happened to me that night, and also around how I think about consent and telling my story moving forward. I hope it is useful to you in some way as well.

What makes for a good listener? Is it simply making yourself into a blank canvas that absorbs whatever is splattered onto it? Or is it more active than that? We know that meditation teachers and therapists are often good listeners, but how can we laypeople hone the art of listening in conversation?

These were some of the questions I had for Brad Listi, who's conducted over 800 interviews with authors over the years on his wonderfully deep OtherPpl podcast. When I had the honor of being a guest on Brad's show to promote my book Open, I noticed that he was particularly skilled at both making me feel deeply heard and steering the conversation in a deep direction.

That talent for listening to others — and the world around him — comes through in his deeply insightful new novel, Be Brief and Tell Them Everything.

I wanted to get his advice on how to be a better listener, particularly as a host. This episode will be particularly helpful for those looking to hone the craft of interviewing but was largely broad and relatable to honing the skill of any sort of listening.

Conversations about how to suck less — aka how to be actively anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, anti-transphobic (and so much more!) — can sometimes be tricky to navigate. People in marginalized groups are often asked to do a lot of unpaid labor to explain these issues to their friends, schools, and colleagues. So I figured one thing I could do with various guests on Help Existing is to delve into the specifics of a wide array of questions.

This week's topic — how to appreciate Black music when you're not Black, without in any way appropriating it — seemed like a good place to start.

I spoke with Evette Dionne, author of Lifting As We Climb, and a pop culture critic who often writes about Black music. Together, we delved into the central question of whether a person who is not Black can listen to, twerk, or otherwise dance to Black music in any way that's not somehow problematic.

If your reaction to this topic is like, Ugh, the premise of this even annoys me, that might be a sign of some white fragility or some other form of exceptionalism you're applying yourself to not think about this. So maybe this is especially for you.

I hope this has been helpful. And please, if you have any suggestions of your own, please slide into my DMs on Twitter and Instagram to let me know. We're all in this together. And please subscribe!

The world is a lot. It seems that everyone I talk to feels some sense of despair over the state of the world, an anxiety and general overwhelm that often bleeds into their feelings about their own lives as well. I think about the millennial saying of "can't even" — and I get it. But I also don't want to identify with it. I want to be someone who can even. So I decided to start Help Existing for accountability and help with just that.

I don't need to tell you how many things there are to worry about. Whether it's the assault on reproductive rights, climate change, institutionalized racism, war….the list of things to despair over goes on and on and on. First, a disclaimer: what follows are not suggestions about solving those problems on a structural scale. This is about how we, on a personal level, can deal with the very specific feeling of overwhelm over the fact that we can't fix everything — and never will. How can you hold that feeling without devolving into nihilism and hopelessness, overwhelming anxiety and despair? How can you be realistic while also taking care of yourself and being helpful?

I knew exactly who to ask. Monk Tashi Nyima, an ordained Buddhist monk who's worked as an activist with some of the world's most vulnerable populations for decades, and who, as far as I can tell, never gets lost in despair. Tashi's someone who's helped me on a personal level incredibly since I met him. (If you read my memoir, Open, you'll recognize him as the monk from the end who I talk about non-monogamy and non-attachment with.)

What follows are Tashi's warm and practical suggestions about what we can do to cultivate a sense of calm and generosity within ourselves. They are aimed at helping us think about our interconnectedness, our gratitude, and our skills in a way that gives us hope and energy to be helpful in the best way we can.

And please, if you have any suggestions of your own, please slide into my DMs on Twitter and Instagram to let me know. We're all in this together (in fact, that's kind of the whole point of this advice).

A quick explanation of the premise of the new podcast "Help Existing" with host Rachel Krantz. The world is a lot, and we could all use some help existing in it. Each week, award-winning journalist and author of OPEN Rachel Krantz will interview different experts, authors, teachers, and friends, all of whom can offer various pieces of advice on specific aspects of existing. This is going to be a show where highbrow and lowbrow topics happily co-exist, or really where we don't even believe in the concept of high and low brow.

You could have one week talking about how to confront your fear of death and existential despair, and the next week might be about how to have your first conversation with a partner about kink or non-monogamy. No topic is too taboo, specific, or abstract -- but each conversation must be, well, helpful!