Come As You Are Podcast

Saturday I went to a No Kings event with one of my closest friends. She’s more my sister than my friend, we’ve been making good trouble together since the 80s. I am so fortunate to have a few people in my life I’ve known since childhood, or maybe it isn’t good fortune, maybe it’s that I hate goodbyes and hold on hard to the people I love. I’m a lifer unless you’re an asshat. It’s such a wonderful...

If you’re new, hi and welcome. I’m so glad you’re here. You might be wondering what’s happening. I don’t mean in this country - I wonder what’s happening in this country every day - I mean with this podcast. Every week I write an essay, and then a couple of days later I record a talk about the topics I wrote about - after I’ve had a chance to read the responses and be in conversations with people...

I would imagine most of us have at least one childhood memory that has to do with cruelty - and feeling unsure about what to make of it. Being little in a big world is not always easy, especially if the situation at home is chaotic and uncertain. Sometimes kids are dealing with things that are hard to talk about, and the feelings come out sideways and twisted. Sometimes, heartbreaking as it is, ki...

Hello friends. I write to you from my couch, in my pajamas at 2 p.m. on a Saturday, under a blanket, with a migraine. It’s a beast - so far it has blasted through my daily medication Topamax, and the Rizatriptan I took yesterday because I could tell I had one breaking through - and even the Benadryl I took before bed because I could feel I still wasn’t okay. I was in agony all night and did the ba...

Friends, this week’s podcast episode is not for kids - meaning please don’t listen if you have kids within earshot. I want to give you a content warning because I talked about SA and all kinds of current events that aren’t easy for any of us, so if you need to pass on this one, please take care of yourself. There’s nothing you can’t read below, however. I feel like I am in a world that is becoming...

There are things you can control, and things you can’t. About 98% of things go in the second column. As someone who used to try to manage or predict how other people were going to feel, and as someone who believed I could keep myself safe if I continuously scanned the environment for danger - I’ve given this a lot of thought. There are really only two things you can control - the way you respond t...

If you are a newer subscriber, you may be wondering what this is. I’m so happy you’re here, and I hope you’re going to love this as much as I do. Once in a while I do a Come As You Are Conversation where I go “off the page” with a writer I love. So far I have had absolutely incredible conversations with the fantastic Paul Crenshaw , my beloved soul sister Dani Shapiro and the phenomenal Kate Mapot...

Of all the things that break my heart in this country - and there are many - our unwillingness to pass sane gun control legislation and keep our children safe at school is at the very top of the list. It is hard to describe how awful it is as a mother to get texts from your kids during lockdowns - a thing I have experienced with both of my children - and feel panicked and powerless and have nothin...

This week’s essay (and therefore this podcast episode) is about things that are a matter of opinion - like whether scrambled eggs with ketchup on the side is the way to go - (I vote yes and so does Matthew McConaughey, apparently, while President Obama has very strong feelings that ketchup is for kids ) - and things that are not a matter of opinion, like whether the Smithsonian should focus less o...

Sometimes I feel like I’m in one of those action movies where there are those six random people who somehow know the world is ending - you know the ones. They have eleven hours to get the word out, and the grid is down and the freeways are jammed with abandoned cars because people had to take off running from the aliens or the asteroids or the zombies - or whatever it is that’s causing the threat....

There are so many things in life that can be debilitating. We really aren’t built for sustained stress, we’re built for short bursts of it - and I’m talking physiologically here. We’re meant to be able to run from the oft-referenced saber-toothed tiger, to race our asses off like our life depends on it because it does, and then to dive into a cave and collapse, catching our breath and waiting unti...

Friends, you cannot talk about Epstein without talking about depravity. If you are a survivor of abuse, please decide whether this is an episode that makes sense for you. This was a rough week for those of us who have been assaulted, and I want you to be gentle with yourself. This conversation is about the system underneath a culture that produces a predatory worldview. People who treat the vulner...

This is a conversation about love and loss, about death and dying, about family cycles and family secrets. It’s about the power of coming together to honor someone’s life, the way it helps to mourn with a group of people who also loved the person you love. It’s about the way a place can elicit so many feelings inside you, just the way a certain smell can take you somewhere, instantly. It’s about p...

This is a talk about losing people we love with our entire hearts. It’s so painful, but we don’t last forever, and neither does anyone else. When we lose people who have loved us unconditionally, the way my Aunt Louise loved me, it really hurts. If you’re someone who has lost a number of important people in a short amount of time (this can happen when you hit the “middle years”) one loss can open...

This week’s episode is about the things we can protect our children against and the things we cannot. I want to tell you that I cried more in this episode than any other, there was nothing I could do about it, and I think that’s appropriate so I left it in. Our new rescue dog Rufus was in the room with me because he was not okay with any other scenario. You will hear him tearing around in the back...

This week’s essay and this podcast episode are about the Reconciliation Budget Bill that was just signed into law by the president, and all the painful repercussions we’ll be dealing with as a result. Since every single Democrat and Independent fought against this bill, I think it’s important we call it the Trump MAGA Republican Reconciliation Budget Bill. I think they need to own the bill they we...

There are so many unfathomable events happening in the United States every week, no one news story receives the attention it deserves. I genuinely wonder how historians will look back on this time, and what conclusions they’ll draw from a world gone absolutely off its rocker. Catch and Release is about the disease of hatred. The thing that happens when we loathe a certain segment of our neighbors...

I decided to break this podcast into two episodes because I talked about two essays - last week’s, I Know What the Riot Is , and this week’s, Catch and Release. They’re inter-related essays about all the different things we’re going through in the states, so it made sense to talk about them together, but I split the talk into two 45-minute episodes because I thought that would be easier to digest....

Dear Friends, If you’re a new subscriber, welcome! There are a lot of you this week, and I’m so happy you’re here. It truly means the world to me. You might be wondering what this Come As You Are Conversation is all about. Once a month or so I go live with a writer whose writing I love, respect, appreciate, and admire - to talk about - you guessed it, writing. Inevitably, the conversation turns to...

This week’s episode is about uncertainty, the one thing we can all count on. We never know what will happen next - all of our careful plans can be turned upside down on a regular Tuesday without notice - and we, ourselves, may be unsure of how we feel about what’s happening around us unless we pause, tune in, and give ourselves some space to breathe. We don’t know how long we have, or what happens...

This is a talk about grief in all its forms. It's a talk about losing my mom, and feeling like I failed her in the moments after her death. It's about finding three expensive, very similar black sweaters hanging in her closet, and why that broke my heart. It’s about being at war within yourself, and why it’s so important to try to find some peace and forgiveness - not just for your own wellbeing,...

Thank you Paul Crenshaw , Ellen Sue Stern , and many others for tuning into our live conversation, that was such fun! And a huge thank you to Dani for sharing so generously. You can find Dani’s books, stories, essays, workshops, news, all things Family Secrets , and all of her upcoming events at danishapiro.com I think you should know I did not fix the first few minutes where we are sideways on th...

“Flooding the zone” is a strategy used to overwhelm opponents in politics or media. You throw so much information into the mix that it is nearly impossible for your critics to respond to everything, and eventually people stop responding to anything - they give up, they turn away, they can’t take it anymore. That’s the strategy being used, openly, by the administration in power in the United States...

This is a talk about impermanence and vulnerability. It’s about losing people you don’t know how to live without, and this feeling we have that things are more solid than they are - that our feet planted here and we can count on that. There are two ways to ride the ride - you can embrace change and open to the uncertainty, love your heart out, keep your eyes open and your mind, too - or you can re...

A talk about the nervous system and what happens when you get used to chaos and danger as a way of life. There’s fight or flight, fawn, freeze or flop, but there’s also a “sixth gear” for people who grew up scanning the environment for signs that they might be in jeopardy at any moment, because that often proved to be the case. It’s a bit like cruise control or autopilot - this still and quiet pla...