“Talk about your dead kid. It will get people’s attention, make them relate to you, it’s a compelling story.”

I’m a relatively unknown author promoting a new book from a small publisher in London. The topic of the book, spiritual tools for decision making, isn’t enough of a hook, I’m told. The PR consultant who I paid to advise me gives me some useful advice, but I don’t like this suggestion.

Talk about your dead kid. Because apparently a dead kid is a good hook.

There is a chapter in my book, The Saint and the Drunk, about making decisions in a season of grief in which I discuss the death of my father when I was 19 and the death of my son, when he was 19. I have told the story of my son’s death on multiple stages and in various books and magazines. I’m working on a new book about grief.

I took the PR consultant’s advice, and got press coverage in major publications with dead kid stories and maybe that’s sold some books. The journalists who interviewed me were respectful, kind, and thoughtful. I hope the resulting articles are helpful.

It's not the topic that disturbs me, it’s the hunger for it, the fact that content about my dead kid drives engagement. People click and share and comment more.

It is painful to see pictures of my dead son served up next to advertisements for shoes and beauty products. But I wonder if my discomfort is more than just the pain of remembering, the visceral reaction to seeing his beautiful face. What if I’m uncomfortable because I am participating in a practice that is distorting grief and loss?

When does sharing a story become grief porn?

Grief porn takes a real, complex subject and highlights the drama until it becomes almost unrecognizable. It is meant to titillate, excite, induce that sense of relief that my life may suck but at least I didn’t have to go through that.

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Since the presidential election, I have seen many exhortations to lean into community. I agree, I have tried to do that myself. But what the often anodyne exhortations fail to explain is that community is challenging.

It’s hard to be with a disparate group of people trying to do a thing together while hewing to norms and standards that can be very different from what we encounter at work or in our algorithm driven online interactions.

Community can be found anywhere; from a group of parents whose children play team sports together to an open water swimming club. They are all good. I am primarily thinking about what I call intentional communities.

The phrase “intentional community” is often used to describe a residential arrangement where people volunteer to live in communities organized around specific principles and/or shared tasks or spaces.

My definition is broader. I mean any group of people who work together to do something positive in the world. They gather with shared values and goals.

The neighborhood group that clears invasive plants from a nearby forest. Volunteers who run a food pantry. A community theater group. A church or synagogue is often host to a number of intentional communities gathered around shared interests like a men’s scripture study or a jail ministry. Animal rescue groups, environmental justice coalitions, support groups, recovery groups. You get the picture.

I have been a member of groups like these for most of my adult life. And getting that kind of group to make decisions and work together effectively requires almost the opposite skills that we learn in the corporate world. Some of my communities are pretty countercultural, so there’s the added interest of working against capitalism, patriarchy and exploitation of the earth.

It's interesting to watch people move from a corporate world driven by a capitalist mindset into an intentional community. I’ve done it, and I’ve watched other people do it, and we often struggle with some of the same things. It can be like watching a bull plow through the proverbial china shop, snorting and tossing his big head and wondering why everything is so complicated.

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My book, The Saint and the Drunk A Guide to Making the Big Decisions in Your Life is available online at Barnes & Noble and Amazon. If you want me to do a reading or workshop in your town, get in touch. More at speirolo.com

I’m in recovery, and have been for a long time, and I’ve started to call it the Recovery Mindfuck. It happens in recovery and outside of it, when people use concepts and phrases meant to highlight and help, admonitions intended for instruction and illumination, to weaponized and pathologize ordinary human behaviors.

“You’re so controlling.”

Have you ever heard the word controlling used in a way that isn’t pejorative?

I haven’t.

When someone says “controlling” we know what they mean. Controlling behavior at work means micromanaging, trying to exert influence over something not in one’s purview or job description. In the personal arena, a controlling individual trys to dictate the behavior, choices and responses of the people around them, often in ways that limit the autonomy or independence of those people.

Bad. Right?

How did that word, and others like it, become honed into weapons, lobbed into conversations at work, home, media?

Our cultural conversation is full of therapy speak. People without any training in psychology label the behavior of others as narcissistic, borderline, PTSD. I get it, those terms are juicy with the authority of science; deep and definitive. We know this.

What I hear less about is the way that recovery speak has also become braided with therapy speak. Words like enabling, controlling, denial are tossed about, in and out of recovery, until they, too, have saturated the cultural conversation.

Recovery speak, like therapy speak, is often used against someone. “You’re controlling” is a phrase wielded as a cudgel. If you protest, you can be accused of being in denial. We all know the disease model of addiction, it is a common scene in television or film – you are incapacitated, not responsible, enmeshed in denial which needs to be smashed.

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Recently, I was watching a tiktok where a young woman spoke quite passionately about a flare of controversy shooting up from the flaming heap of online cultural conversation. It wasn’t about politics, it was about how a woman chose to portray herself in a work of art.

This young woman had opinions.

I had a reaction, a swift flash of judgement that mirrored the passion of the woman on the small screen.

I tried to figure out why this video irked me. Maybe because I’m still figuring out how to use social media effectively and this woman clearly knows how to do that. Her intense conviction, rapid fire delivery, artfully torn jeans (which we could see because her knee was drawn up to her chin, which struck me as a mannered posture), was tiktok ready, and it’s clear why she has a large following.

I noticed my judgement at a conventionally attractive young, thin, white woman with long hair and very heavy make-up questioning norms around female appearance and sexual expression.

My internal judgement is a warning sign to me, and I got curious about it. Surely we all get to show up as we want in the world, whether we choose to conform to accepted norms or not. Don’t we? It got me thinking about ways in which we judge ourselves and others, ways in which we all, male and female, subtly or overtly critique the ways in which other people move through the world.

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I’m not sure why we like to trace the origin of our sick and ask who gave it to us. It’s often phrased as active, the dank gift pressed upon us, or something we brought upon ourselves “she gave me the flu” or “I picked up a cold” rather than the reality of a random connection between germ and body in any open space.

I picked up my three-year-old grandson from day care the other day and thought I am walking into a miasma of germs right now, all those small, adorable Petri dishes with their Disney movie t shirts and runny noses. I was sick a few days later.

I’m a Car Seat Grandmother, one of those lucky grandparents who spend enough time with her grandkids to warrant car seats in the back of my car. It’s not a full-time gig by any means, just the odd pick up or evening, but it’s joyful for all involved. But it does mean signing up for more head colds. The shadow side of the gift.

Which brings me, to segue with the lyrical grace of a gear-grinding downshift, to what I wanted to talk about – shame. Specifically, the shame spiral that can come with achieving some modicum of success or acclaim. The shadow side of the gift.

Like many of us, I was taught shame early. We learn it from our parents or family, our culture or church. Appropriate socialization of children says, “this behavior is not acceptable, we don’t hit, bite, or poop on the kitchen floor.” In a shame-based system the message is that we ourselves, innately, are wrong, a mistake, bad, unlovable.

If we are taught shame early we are more susceptible to the cultural messages that are quick to point out how we are wrong. Social media is full of shame-based hectoring. I am regularly told how my older body is all wrong, I don’t support the right causes in the right ways, etc etc. It’s a great way to get me to spend money, to engage in the content, to read and buy and learn my way to not being a mistake.

A shame spiral is a wave of shame that doesn’t stop, that continues to gain momentum, like an avalanche. It is not connected to reality, it’s not guilt over a bad act, it’s shame at full volume. You fall down the spiral, like a psychic black hole. I experience a shame spiral with the somatic intensity of a panic attack – my stomach feels the drop as if my body were actually losing altitude precipitously. My chest gets tight, and my lungs clamor as if they are deprived of oxygen.

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My favorite audiences for the corporate trainings I do are people in their twenties and early thirties. They want to learn, so they are usually interested and engaged. They are curious. Often they start asking me questions about difficult work situations, even if they aren’t connected specifically to the training topic.

The women ask me more questions, because I am not shy about talking about my experiences as a woman in corporate America. Some of the questions that arose in a recent training made me think about the other side of ageism.

I have written many words about the unskillful ways I and other people over 40 are treated in the workplace. Which is true. And ageism is a frequent topic served up to me by the Almighty Algorithm that is predicting subjects that interest me.

What I hear less about, possibly because of the Almighty Algorithm, are the ways in which people in their twenties are treated badly in the workplace because of their age. It may also be because the posters of words on LinkedIn and various trade publications don’t talk to many people early in their career.

(Yes, I said posters of words as opposed to writers of words because we know many of these people are using AI to aggregate the words of actual writers like me and pretend they are their own. But I digress.)

Two examples that came up in this recent training were younger women being repeatedly and consistently interrupted by men in work meetings and younger people of any gender being questioned about their age in a demeaning way.

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I was picking up my granddaughter Ruby from her house, and my son in law mentioned reading my recent substack in which I quoted Ruby. As I am wont to do. And Ruby looked up from putting on her shoes.

“Wait. You write about me?” she said.

She is six. She knows I write about her because she made me open the advanced reading copy of my new book and read her the part she’s in and she was delighted. But on this day she wasn’t delighted. I could see her thinking it through. Nana having a box of books that mention her is different than Nana writing something that her father reads on a screen. While it pleases me no end that my son in law reads what I write, this doesn’t please her.

I wonder for a moment if she thought publishing my new book meant only the copies in the box in my house, as if getting the box is the end of it. She is in kindergarten.

A while later, as we were driving, she said very seriously, “You should ask me before you write about me.”

“I will,” I said, “I will ask you if it’s ok before I write about you.”

“I might say it’s ok. I might not,” she said.

“I will ask you,” I said.

Writers are often portrayed as plunderers of the lives around them, stealing the experiences and emotions of their family and friends like so many items on a grocery store shelf, tossing them into the cart of their art with little regard for the consequences.

Writers have always been hard up for content, and more so since social media, always looking for something to throw onto the hungry page. When do you have to stop and ask permission? What should you not write? I have always tried to protect my friends and family, keep their secrets, to only write the good stuff, to ask permission if I’m not sure how something would land. It feels like the kind of courtesy where you don’t post picture of your nieces and nephews on social media until you check with their parents.

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Tomorrow is the launch of my book. And I’ve had mixed feelings about it. But as I was talking about it with my friend Juliette she stopped me.

“Revel,” she said. “You’ve been working towards this for years. And now it’s happened. Revel in it.”

Our culture has so many narratives about success or dreams achieved. It’s going to be wonderful. Or it’s not. I’ve seen clips on social media of very rich and famous people talking about how being rich and famous did not fulfill them, even at their richest and most celebrated.

We are told “be careful what you wish for” as if we are all little children reaching for shards of broken glass because they are shiny and we want to grasp them in our little hands. But what if what we are reaching for is, indeed, what we are here for? What we are built to do? What if we are reaching for our destiny, not a shiny object?

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“I should develop thicker skin.”

I heard that phrase again this week and it got me thinking. I don’t think our job is to change our skin, or our personality or to file off the sensitive tender parts of our psyche. For one, it’s painful. Two, it’s often not productive, moving away from being who we truly are to some version of ourselves that is more palatable to the dominant cultural norms.

Because that’s where this phrase comes from, right? We’re told to “toughen up” not to “be so sensitive.” As if the superpower of having access to your emotions, being connected to and concerned about the beings about you, were a weakness rather than a strength.

So, no, don’t toughen up or develop thicker skin.

Instead, garb appropriately.

I don’t ride motorcycles anymore, but when I did, I wouldn’t wear a t-shirt on a bike on the highway. The experienced motorcycle enthusiasts I know wear heavy leather even in the warmest weather in case they crash.

Don’t change your skin. Change your outfit. Determine the level of threat you are under and dress accordingly.

First, you have to understand the danger you are in. You need to accurately assess the level of threat, the likelihood in any situation that your vehicle will slip out from beneath you and you will come in contact with the road.

This is hard. For many of us we’ve been told for most of our lives that our accurate assessment of threat is wrong or overblown. You’re not actually feeling pain, physical or emotional, you’re exaggerating, you’re being dramatic. This is just how the world is, get over yourself. You’re too sensitive. So, we stop feeling, we tune out those internal alarms that signal threat or danger. And then we wonder why we can’t sleep, or our stomach hurts, or we keep having headaches.

The Safety Scale

Try this. You will be in a number of situations over the next 24 hours. On a scale of 1-10, how much psychological safety will you have in each setting? 1 being little to no safety, 75 miles an hour on a rainy night on an old motorcycle. 10 being perfectly safe, driving up your driveway on a sunny summer evening in your SUV listening to your favorite song.

Dress accordingly. T-shirt and shorts for the 10 situation, full on Kevlar jumpsuit and helmet for the 1 scenario.

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I’m putting together a sales training for a client, and I’ve been thinking about the best way to teach people how to persuade others. Last weekend, I was driving my grandkids to church, and I heard the following exchange – for real, I’m not making this up.

For context, my six-year-old granddaughter and I go to church together most Sundays, but her three-year-old brother was, until quite recently, a bit overwhelmed by the people, the music, all the other kids. So, he has just started joining us.

During the service, the children are invited to another room to what I used to call Sunday School, what the Episcopalians call “Godly Play” and what my granddaughter calls “kid church.”

I asked my grandson if he wanted to go to kid church or stay with me through the service.

“I want to stay with Nana,” he said firmly.

My granddaughter, who likes him to go to kid church with her, got stern with me.

“Nana, you can’t just say kid church. You need to describe it.” She turned to her little brother. “Do you want to go with me and listen to a story, have a yummy snack, and then play with all the fun toys? That’s what kid church is.”

“I want to go to kid church,” he said.

“See, Nana, you have to describe it.”

Of course, she’s right. The messaging is key. But to tailor your message to your audience you have to understand your audience. My granddaughter knows her brother; story time, snack, play, and hanging out with her are some of his favorite things.

Persuasion isn’t just a sales tool. If you are motivating a team, setting a vision, doing political or social advocacy you are persuading. Advertising and marketing is all persuasion. But so is every stump speech, homily and sermon. Often when I do trainings on sales or negotiations, people think it doesn’t apply to their job if they are not in a specific sales role. Until they realize that in their day to day they are often persuading people.

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