124. 9 Things

Today’s episode is a snippet of an episode called “9 Things” from our sister show Terrible, Thanks for Asking. You can access the episode in full by subscribing to the TTFA Patreon or becoming an Apple+ member. 

You can read more of Laura McKowen’s work on her Substack, Love Story. Her books, We Are The Luckiest and Push Off From Here, can be found on her website or wherever books are sold.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

INTRO MUSIC

Everyone has a thing.

A thing they do that isn’t very good for them, or is even bad for them. A thing they’ve struggled with, and maybe are ashamed of.

And maybe that thing isn’t a big deal for everyone, maybe it’s just a minor interruption to their daily life but for a lot of us, that thing can swallow up our whole life. Maybe that thing is a drug and maybe it’s constantly chasing the attention of someone who doesn’t love us, maybe it’s binge eating, or starving yourself, or cutting, or perfection…being LIKED. Being GOOD. 

Maybe it’s something I didn’t even think to list because there are just so many ways to be awful to ourselves, and so many of them are easier to disguise than others.

Laura McKowen’s thing, for a long time, was alcohol, and in 2013, she stopped drinking

and eventually started to talk and write about her sobriety, and she heard from a lot of people who were struggling with a lot of things and needed a place to feel heard. One day, she got an email from a woman…

Laura: And her sister was really struggling with drinking and she’d had a lot of consequences. And the family had been trying to help for a while. And the sister was just so upset and frustrated and angry and sad. And she didn’t know what to say to her sister. She was afraid of saying anything because, which is very common. You know, you don’t want to scare them off. You don’t want to..just like, what do I say? And I wrote her this long letter back that this list of 9 things was what I said at the end, like since this can be hard, I’m going to give you a list. And I gave her this list.

The list appears in the very beginning of Laura’s book, We Are the Luckiest: The surprising magic of a sober life. The first time I encountered the list was on instagram, and not knowing any context around who Laura was or why she’d written it, it STILL resonated with me. 

The list is 9 items long, and is a list of the things Laura needed to hear herself as she quit her thing. 

And even if your thing is not drinking, these can still apply to you. Are you ready?

• It is not your fault 

• It is your responsibility.

• It’s unfair that this is your thing.

• But it is your thing.

• It will never STOP being your thing until you face it.

• And you can’t do it alone.

• But only you can do it.

• I love you.

• And very last… #9

Laura: I will never stop reminding you of these things. And the reason I said that last, was because one, we need to hear, we don’t get things right on the first try, or the second try or the ever try? Like we’re never, we’re never… it’s never done, y’know? Um in someone — specifically when it comes to overcoming something like addiction, it’s so rare that you wake up one day after a bad night and you say, I’m never doing that again and it sticks, right? It just doesn’t work that way. And when it comes to our behaviors and the things that might be pulling us down, relationships, habits, um… where we live, what we’re doing for our work — we tend to ask — the normal question that we ask is it just bad enough that I have to change? Like, has it gotten bad enough, you know? But the question that we should be asking… Or I want people to ask is, is this good enough to stay the same? Like, is this good enough? Is it really good enough? And then the question underneath all of it is, am I free? Are you free in your life or does this thing own you in some way that like smashes your spirit? Does this thing own you, are you able to move through your world and think freely and act freely and behave freely? People almost always have a visceral response like, ooof no, I’m not. Or, yes, I am. So those — that’s what I want people to ask. And, I, I have, again, number nine, I will never stop reminding you of these things because sometimes you have to ask yourself this again and again and again and again to get to the truth of it.

I’m Nora McInerny, it’s going to be okay, and that was Laura McKowen. There’s a full interview with her in the archives of Terrible, Thanks for Asking. It came out in March 2020, you can get it on our patreon or our Apple+ subscription. Laura writes a great substack called Love Story, which we’ll link in our show description, and has written two books – We are The Luckiest: the Surprising Magic of a sober life, and push off from here. We’ll link those too.

We’re a production of feelings & co, a company that runs on feelings. Not vibes, feelings.

This episode was produced by Megan Palmer and mixed by Amanda Romani.

The team at F&CO is Me, Marcel, Claire and Megan.

If you have an okay thing you want to share…call us at 65125684441 or email us!