Nobody tells you that being an adult is just figuring out what to

eat over and over until you die. I need you to stop

apologizing for being amazing at things. Cause that's

ridiculous. I would like you to show me

what modesty has gotten you in your career. All right, here we

go. I'm gonna pretend I'm pushing record. Cause that feels right. Okay, I'm pressing

record. Boop. Hi, everybody.

I'm Lauren Howard. Welcome to Different Not

Broken, which is our PODC on exactly that. That

there are a lot of people in this world walking around feeling broken. And the

reality is you're just different. And that's fine. This holiday

season, you want to get something for the

overwhelmed person in your life. I'm going to

describe what I want. I think it's pretty

universal. I don't know that that's true. This could

just be me being wildly egotistical, which is a thing that happens,

and I will own that. But I'm going to describe what you could

get me and make me the happiest person in the world for, like, five minutes

before I found something new to complain about. So what I want,

and this isn't actually even for the holidays, this is just

a thing that I regular, fairly regularly want. If

you are trying to do something nice for me. And just know that my husband

does not listen to this, so it's not getting back to him. And I'm just

saying if somebody wants to let him know, that'd be great. I

want a nice hotel

room with a giant bed

with just shy of 10,000

pillows on it. I'll know if you're short, but I'm not gonna count.

I want to be able to fall on so many pillows

that I don't even know where the bed is. Feather pillows are

preferred, but I will not make that request for anybody else. Cause I know there's

allergy issues there. I have a kid that's allergic to feather pillows. I get it.

I want to fall on a feather pillow and have it catch me and then

have it slowly deflate. That's like supreme happiness to me is when it goes.

It just, like, slowly becomes flat.

Love it. That's like, my thing. Okay, So I want that room.

I just want the stark white bed stuff

that all looks hyper clean with a pile of pillows so

high that it dwarfs me, which is not that hard because

I'm not tall. And I want there to be

two rooms. Actually, this is. This part is negotiable. I don't actually care. Like a

suite with, like, A couch area and a bed area. But I don't. That's actually

totally negotiable. I want the TV remote to be

readily accessible. I want to push the button

when I'm ready. And the only voice I want to hear.

There's two options for voices. One, Keith Morrison.

Two, Benson and Stabler. Outside of those two, I don't

want to hear any voices. I should hear no noise except for

those people or the people who are addressing them now.

You might replace those people with your own. That's totally fine. That part is completely

negotiable. Whoever I want to go on vacation with only Keith

Morrison. And he does not have to be there. I'm just saying

I want silence. Other than

that, I want there to

be a steady stream of food that I like that I did not have to

pick. Okay, L2 is in her bed.

Ready? Start the conveyor belt of

snacks. I just

wanted to show up. I don't want to have to look at a

menu. I don't want to have to make a choice. I

don't have to think about anything. I want it to be a no decision

zone. I walk in the room, I shut the door.

There is going to be a steady stream of random bags of shit

that I like that's just going to show up at some point and I'm going

to open the door and I'll be like, woo, French fries. And I will make

the decision to get the door when I freaking feel like it. Just leave it.

You don't need to hand it to me if somebody steals it. That's the cost

of doing business. I don't want to get up until I'm damn ready to get

up. I want to be able to open the sliding door or the door, the

window, the balcony, whatever of the room that I'm in and hear water. But I

don't want to go to the water. I just want to be able to hear

it, maybe smell it. But I don't want to go to

the water. There's no. I have no tolerance for sand. We're not doing that.

But I want it to be nearby and I want to know it's there.

I maybe want to be able to like sit on a porch that is

also very quiet or like a balcony where I can hear the

water but not actually go to the water.

I want nobody, including housekeeping, to

darken the doorway of my room. I

want to talk to no one. I want my phone

to only be accessible for

dog videos. Maybe to talk to my kids,

probably to talk to My kids, I would miss them pretty quickly. Maybe to

text with my husband, but I don't want anything else.

And I want maybe like

72 hours of mostly

silence. Again, with the exception of Keith Morrison, who is

allowed to talk whenever he wants.

No decisions. I don't have to make any decisions, including food.

The only decision I want to make is if I feel

like getting up right now, if I'd rather just roll over,

and if I need to go to the bathroom. Other than that,

I want to turn off. I want to make absolutely zero

decisions. If you give me an option, I'm going to stare at

you blankly. I don't want to know that other people exist for three days, except

for my kids, because I like them, but everybody else. I'll get back

to you in three days. That's what I want. And to be

very clear, this has almost nothing to do with the setting, though the setting makes

it very nice. And I will be very happy with that setting. It has everything

to do with not having to make a single goddamn decision,

including food. Because nobody tells you this

when you're young and all you can think about is how cool it's going to

be to be an adult. Nobody tells you that being an adult

is just figuring out what to eat over and over until you die.

And then they give you kids, and they're like, by the way,

figure it out for these ones, too. And

also, they're not going to like a bunch of the stuff that you put in

front of them. And also, if you give them things out of the bag, the

rest of the world will make you feel bad for it. I am

so tired of thinking about what to feed people. My husband

will come into the office and be like, hey, what do you want for dinner?

And I'll be like, I don't care. And he's gonna be like, but I need

your help. And I'm like, if I have to choose, I don't want to eat.

Cause that's how tired I am, making decisions. Not that I

don't want to participate in our family, because I do. But I cannot

make any more decisions. I've done all of it. There are no more decisions

to be made until five minutes from now when a new decision pops up and

I have to make that one. And I'll be very, very spicy about it. If

you are unsure what to get someone

who does all the things for all the people and works

really, really hard, is probably overwhelmed, but is probably not

telling you that, go for the gift of nothing.

And that doesn't mean you get them nothing. It means you give them the

chance to do nothing outside of exactly what they want to

do. And if they're a person who picking fancy meals is,

like, something they enjoy, then they probably don't need

the just food showing up at the door thing. But I almost

guarantee you, especially women, especially

women who are expected to be the

primary logistics officers for their families,

which does not necessarily mean children, by the way. I was the

primary logistics officer for my family long before I had children, and

that does not necessarily apply to the person I married. I

have three brothers. They're functionally useless, and I say that to their

faces all the time. Give them the gift of nothing. I promise they will

appreciate it. You might have to do a little bit of homework to figure out

what their actual nothing is. This is my version of nothing. My

version of nothing absolutely includes not talking to people, but most of

my versions of everything include not talking to people. So that might be

negotiable, but I bet it's less negotiable than you think it is.

So I was talking to one of my team members today. She's relatively new to

the team. I was talking about something that was unrelated to her job. It was

just something that we were kind of shooting the breeze about. And

I sent it to her, and she came up with this amazing

solution for it. It wasn't even really a problem that needed to be solved. It

was just something that I was talking about. And she was like, oh, well, the

way that you fix that is. And I was, like,

completely blown away by it. I was like, okay, I didn't even know that this

was in your skill set. Amazing. It was an incredible

answer. And then as soon as it came out of her mouth, she

immediately apologized for overstepping, which, like,

what? So I said, I need you to stop

apologizing for being amazing at things, because that's

ridiculous. But she was like, oh, I was just really worried that I. I

was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We don't do

that. No. You are not only encouraged to be good at things, you are

allowed to be good at things. And I need you to be good at things.

I pay you for things to be good at things, and that does not mean

that you should only be good at the thing I specifically pay you for. Maybe

I need to be paying you for more things. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe I'm

not paying you for enough things. It got my brain working. I

want to start encouraging Dear

Listener to be more Willing to brag about yourself

because you do good things every day and you have been conditioned to believe that

you should keep them quiet for seeming like you're impressed with

yourself. Be impressed with yourself. You are

impressive. We need to know about the amazing, kick

ass things that you are doing and I want to know about them all the

time. And it can be little stuff, it can be tiny stuff. I remember to

take out the garbage because I'll be honest, in the amount of years

I've been married, which is a lot of times, there are a handful of times

that I have been responsible for the garbage and not fully outsourced that to my

husband, who is very reliable when it comes to the garbage. In the times that

I have been responsible for the garbage, I've maybe gotten it done twice

and it might be more than twice, but I'm including getting it

done, like remembering to do it and getting it in the can the

night before like grownups are supposed to do. As opposed to what I

do, which is hear the truck going down the street and go,

oh shit and run outside with

bags full of trash trying to get there before the.

No. My husband, who is very good at this type

of stuff, remembers to like sweep the whole house for garbage on a

Wednesday night because our trash truck comes on Thursday morning. I can probably count

on one hand the number of times he's completely forgotten to put the trash out,

which is not catastrophic, but because the trash truck just comes the

next time. But when you're me and you forget like four or five weeks

in a row, that's kind of gross. That gets weird. That's why we have a

husband who does these things and remembers these things. So it could be that or

it could be I got a new job, or it could be I told my

toxic boss to shove it up his ass. There

are so many things it could be. But I want you to brag on yourself

and I want you to do it for all of us to hear. So we

are setting up a line that you can call into. You can find it

at different not broken podcast.com brag.

You can leave a message there that we might play on air to say what

cool things you've been up to, what things you're proud of yourself. Leave your first

name, your last initial, please don't leave any information

that will get you in trouble or fired, which, let's put it this

way, if I'm concerned about that, I'm going to redact it anyway, so you're probably

safe. But do yourself a favor and don't send it if you can avoid it

because we should be bragging on ourselves more and

women and femmes will do really, really amazing stuff and then sweep it under a

rug because we have this idea that nobody's going to like us if we're not

modest. I would like you to show me what modesty has gotten you in your

career. And I'm not saying to be a self impressed, braggadocious

douchebag. I'm saying you are allowed to be completely proud of yourself for the

things that you've done and we want to celebrate it. So the end of every

episode we will remind you that you can send over your brags

and we might play them on an episode, we might read them on an episode,

and we might share them on an episode.

And now we'll go to Alison, who has this week's

small talk. All right, so this question is about family and

holidays. What to do? I have several dogs

and cats and every year I hear how having X number of

pets is illegal in a lot of places and even though it's

legal here and they are taken care of, you don't even have

kids. Why choose pets over children? How do

I answer that? Especially because it gets asked every year at least

once or twice. I have many, many responses for

this. The first one is

fuck those.

The second one is it's none of their goddamn business.

The third one is you could just stare blankly

when they ask that. Don't justify it with a

response. Stare blankly and blink hard. I promise they will never

ask it again. The subtext of that. Actually no, I don't

even think that's subtext. I think it's just text. Is that

somehow having pets or having animals

is a less valid decision than having a family.

Which is not flippin true. I have two children

who I love more than anything and given my druthers I would have 10 more

because I love having kids that much. And I say that as somebody who

has a busted ass uterus that doesn't work correctly. So I can't

have this 7,000 kids that I want. Even though I'll be honest, I'm not sure

I would ever be pregnant again because being pregnant is the worst thing in the

whole entire world. Even though you get a really cute kid out of it. Anyway,

I say this with all of that

very widely documented I have kids. I love them. I would never trade them for

anything. They're the most important people in the world to me. I love every minute

that I have with them, even the minutes That I don't. And also, you can

love sleep and money as much as you can any smell human

there is. It is a completely valid decision to decide that you don't

want children. And that is not worth judgment

or derision or to be treated as if you

are making some decision that they have any business

passing judgment on. It's not their goddamn business. We

had trouble having kids. We struggled for four years before we got pregnant

with our first. We were married for six years before we had our first kid.

And it was devastating

and awful. And people would ask us all the time

when we were gonna have kids. And I started looking them square in the face

and saying that we have dogs instead of kids. Because you can put dogs in

boxes and leave the house. And people get really mad when you do that with

kids. They would stop asking after that.

Now that wasn't true. The reality was every

time somebody asked me that question, it was like a knife to the friggin heart.

Because we went through this horrible process of years and years of

fertility treatments that took every ounce of my

soul, crushed it up and spit it out. But you don't have to be

going through something hard for it to be a question that people

shouldn't freaking ask you. It's not their goddamn business.

So we actually did an entire episode on not asking people

why they don't have children. It was episode number 21. You can find it at

differentnotbrokenpodcast.com 21 if you want to

go back and listen to it. But we did a whole episode on

leaving people in their fertility choices and not choices

out of friendly conversation and how it should not be part of it. So

go back and listen to that for more on this. If your pets are well

taken care of, if they are, how you choose to spend your time

and money. And again, I say this as a person with children, but also

a person with lots and lots of pets. Technically we only have two, but

they're very large. My pets are as well taken care of as my

children are. They are as integrated into the family as my children

are. Some would argue that Bruno's attempts to

be inside my skin all the time means he gets more

attention than my children do. And

there's nothing wrong with not even. You're not

even choosing pets over children. It sounds like you just have pets. That's

not a mutually exclusive existence. So the

reality is, whoever those people are,

please tell them I told them to bite me. I wouldn't even

answer the question or I would come up with some way to make them

deeply uncomfortable for asking it. That's the way that I deal with conflict. That's

actually not true. I deal with conflict very directly. But I would

absolutely. I mean, I really like the blink hard option, but you aren't

responsible for asking that question. And maybe it's time to find somebody else to hang

out with if that's the question that you get asked every year. As if your

personal choices have to change year over year for you to be a valid member

of their family or their circle. Get bent. You're allowed

to not have kids. You're encouraged to not have kids. The world outside is a

toxic hellscape. You don't need to bring kids into this nonsense. Thanks for being

here guys. Have a good day. Love you. Mean it.

I love saying the word, but I think I like saying get bent more.

It's really satisfying. It's really deeply

satisfying.