BAD AT KEEPING SECRETS

Hi, it's Carissa, and this is Bad at Keeping Secrets . Before I had a kid, my garden was my holy place. Still is, just things are a little more wild now. This week, I talk with Debbie Millman from Design Matters about her book Love Letter to a Garden —a quiet, beautiful reflection on what it means to grow something, and to be changed by it. That gardening offers us relief and connection in the fac...

Hey everyone, it is Carissa and this is Bad at Keeping Secrets. What to do when you get dumped? There is no real guide, telling you how to actually just be. Today I am talking to mother/daughter collaborators Suzy Hopkins and Hallie Bateman about finding meaning and connection in difficult experiences. There is something so universal in our heartbreak that connects us all, this is truly a guide in...

I am what they call a runner. I felt a connection with Julia Roberts in Runaway Bride —the idea that if you don’t like your situation in life, you can just leave. If you get fired from a job, there’s always a better one out there. If you’re not in love with your partner, you’re doing them a favor by calling it quits. Are you unhappy now? There’s something better out there—you’re just missing out…...

We can control whether we merely endure our days or experience and enjoy them. We can control whether we arrive on our deathbeds feeling like we've wasted our time or end up satisfied with how we've spent our brief moment in the sun. -Catherine Price During my darkest moments in the pandemic, my therapist told me that I had to find joy to keep going. These days, I feel deeply hollow inside. I am n...

Hi, it’s Carissa, and welcome to Bad at Keeping Secrets ! Today, I’m chatting with Liana Finck, an amazing cartoonist, author, and regular contributor to The New Yorker . Liana’s known for her sharp, thoughtful work, including her graphic memoir Passing for Human , and I found her on instagram ages ago - her work is SO relatable, and funny, and just real. BAD AT KEEPING SECRETS is a newsletter tha...

What is your stress telling you? Just curious… Mine is that I need to change my expectations for myself… Before we got sick, and then my business shapeshifted, and the globe felt increasingly less safe, I recorded this podcast with Dr. Aditi Nerukar, stress expert and author of The Five Resets: Rewire Your Brain and Body for Less Stress and More Resilience. I swear I was not always this way, so st...

“Inside our words and actions, the people we love live on through us.” -Lissa Soep, Other People’s Words What makes us… well us? What makes our ideas our own? I learned when I grew up that I was a unique person and the origins of my ideas were somewhere in my mind. They came from a “soul” of sorts. These ideas and words were ownable by me. Whatever I did and said it came from this place, this soul...

Recently, I read something somewhere that admitting you were lonely was one of the most shameful things someone could do. And yet, I do it all the time. Without shame. I am lonely. Yes. What is weird is that I also crave alone time. Which I don’t have and seems so luxurious after having a kid. What does feeling lonely mean then? I thought it was a longing to be around people but really, it is not...

We are in this amazing moment where we are trying to make a more equitable future by the ways that we structure our time and resources. We have never had more freedom to create meaning and systems that serve us. But cis women in hetero-relationships are still doing more of the work and feeling burnt out as the default parent even when they are also the breadwinners. I became a fan of Eve Rodsky wh...

“To witness one life's miserable devastation and see her reach, instead, for joy . Let your life rest on what is already good. It's just another day in the good-bad, bad-good earth machine.” Kate Baer is a poet who I love. I found out about her work when What Kind of Woman her first collection of poems came out. It was raw and true and I loved every moment in it - not because it was perfect - but...

I grew up thinking that addiction was not something that ran in my family. So I didn’t have to worry about it. My parents were both not really into drinking. My grandparents had been raised in the Depression and had seen the damage that alcohol could do on families and were so scared of it that they didn’t drink. When I came of age, I was not interested in it. I tried it. I have been drunk. I thin...

I have known Ashley Neese for years. We met when we gave a talk together in the winter of 2019. I have been obsessed with her ever since. Her new book, Permission to Rest insists that we need rest for ourselves, for healing, for repair, and yes, for our communities. And then, Permission to Rest shows you how to do the work of resting. “There are a million reasons not to rest,” says our culture. Pr...

“It's startling to realize how narrowly we avoid, or miss, living radically different lives.” - Rachel Aviv Have you ever wondered why your life worked out the way it did? Yes. You have. We all have. Why are some people a success? Other’s not so much? Why do some people with similar diagnoses, DNA, and environments have such different life outcomes? I have wondered this throughout my life. It come...

In celebration of darkness, this week I want to revisit my chat with Katherine May, a best-selling author and podcast host, of whom I adore in so many ways. I first heard about her with her book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times during the height of the lockdown in 2020. In so many ways, this book helped me let go of control and step back. That there is comfort in restin...

“...sometimes, when something is such an integral part of your life, it's hard to see where the raw material ends, and the inspiration begins.” Sarah Viren , author of To Name the Bigger Lie , tackles big questions such as the location of truth, the value/curse of doubt, the pliability of personal narratives, and the allure of conspiracy theories. I first read about her story “The Accusations Were...

We can control whether we merely endure our days or experience and enjoy them. We can control whether we arrive on our deathbeds feeling like we've wasted our time or end up satisfied with how we've spent our brief moment in the sun. -Catherine Price During my darkest moments in the pandemic, my therapist told me that I had to find joy to keep going. These days, I feel deeply hollow inside. I am n...

This week, I’m revisiting a topic that is a little scary but also extremely hopeful. A few months ago, I had the pleasure of talking with Grace Chang – she is the co-founder and CEO of Kintsugi , a tech start-up developing ways that AI can recognize biomarkers to help clinicians in diagnosing mental health issues. I met Grace last summer at the SF Art Book Fair, and when I asked her what she spent...

Lately I have been feeling under the weather without actually being sick with a fever - does that ever happen to you? I have a sneaking suspicion it is from the fluctuating weather we’ve been having. And I am not a doctor, but as a person who has a hard time with transitions and seems to get sick every time the weather changes, I am interested in alternative ways of healing/being in addition to my...

The idea that the universe is ultimately meaningless is something that I have been sifting through all of my life. Meaning is super sexy, offering an understanding for suffering, and a way to connect. Today I want to revisit my conversation with Wendy Syfret , and the comfort meaningless can provide. Nihilism gets a bad rep. For sure. The problem I think people run up against is the question – if...

The older I get the more dubious I am of how much control we actually have over our lives. And question if the systems of knowledge familiar to us are actually serving us. This is depressing on some level because feeling a sense of agency and control is somewhat equivocal to having hope. I think the reason I am drawn to behavioral psychology is because it offers some form of science-backed underst...

This week, I am super excited to revisit and share Whitney Goodman’s work with you. As someone who is drawn to the beauty inherent in sadness, I have been on a crusade against silver linings since the pandemic started. It is not that I want to deny that we can and do learn from things, but do they always have to make us stronger/better? People tend to have strong reactions when I say that I am not...

So, you came here for help. I am guessing. You want to know if you should leave your partner, quit your job, unfriend someone, leave the city you grew up in, etc. This feels like a transitional moment for everyone right now. I feel it. This week, I am revisiting a very exciting conversation I had with Annie Duke last year on quitting. I was so excited when I heard about Annie Duke’s new book, Quit...

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” ― André Gide I’ve been spending time thinking about originality lately. Is anything that we create really original? Or maybe as Austin Kleon writes in Steal Like An Artist, a good artist understands that nothing just comes from nowhere. All art is a remix. Even we are a remix, a...

A few months ago, I wrote about resources for people who were on the fence about if they wanted to have kids or not. Perhaps it is something that you are ruminating on? In this weird age of perceived expansion of choice, the question itself seems daunting. We are told that we can do everything, and have it all, but can we? I reached out to Sheila Heti a while back with zero expectations on if she...

Where do we draw the line between inspiration and copying someone else’s original idea? Do any of us ever have original ideas? I had the chance to speak with Danielle Krysa (aka The Jealous Curator ) about all of the grey area in the concept of the “original idea.” About 11 or so years ago, someone accused me of copying them. It was a performance artwork where I stood in front of San Francisco Cit...