If somebody thinks something of me that is not true, I
don't care. I ignore it. Someone who thinks something of me
that is not true is completely irrelevant to me. You have an idea
that is contrary to the way I want this to go, and you're
being vocal about it because you found a problem that I don't want to address,
and so that makes you difficult. Not me.
Rigid and stubborn. There is one single micro
action you can begin taking. It's really easy,
doesn't require any particular talent, skills, whatever. It is the one micro
action that will change your life and your work for
the better immediately. And it's very simply
this. All right, here we go. I'm gonna pretend
I'm pushing record, because 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.
Hey, guys. I'm very excited about today and
a number of things that are about to happen. As you are listening along, it
hasn't been no secret, especially if you've been listening for a while, that the last
year has been borderline impossible. Not just for me. I feel like
maybe that's been everybody in the whole entire world, and
especially lots of people within the U.S. but my world
specifically has been exceptionally difficult.
I am very fortunate that there are a handful of other
people who are always on the other end of the phone, so that
when whatever shit hits whatever fan, I
have a reliable network of people who have
unfailingly been there. And I consider myself so
fortunate. Despite the fact that the last year has been nearly impossible, despite the
fact that there have been days that I'm like, what the am I doing? I
have never done it alone. Even on the days where it felt completely
isolating, I have never done it alone. If I look back on the last year,
as much as it's been horrifically difficult, that is
something that I can count as maybe the greatest blessing in my life.
And the reason I say that now, specifically, is because I happen
to be fortunate enough to have one of those people who is always on the
other end of the phone here with me today. If you have
not followed Cindy Gallup on LinkedIn, please go do it
for a number of reasons. One, we're all being throttled, and so extra followers helps.
And you should very intentionally go find her content because it's excellent, but also
because everything she says is correct. Everything she says
is right. Everything about women in business, about
funding female founders, about standing up to the
patriarchy, about, I don't know, probably soup. I would imagine
your perspectives on soup are also correct. We probably agree.
Also she like posts like really like swanky photos from the
Virgin Atlantic Lounge with drinks. I just really want to drink. Airplanes aren't my
thing so I probably I might figure out have to figure out how to make
one at home. So very, very, very fortunate to have the
wonderful and magical Cindy Gallop with us today.
We are going to get into both some very tough topics
and just some funny topics. So, Cindy, thank you so much
for being here. I am delighted to have you. I would love for
you to give a brief background of myself to everybody
who's listening along and then we'll get into some trouble as we always
do. My background is 40 years working in
brand building, marketing and advertising, which is actually very good experience.
What I do now because I've effectively spent 40 years working in
the business of getting people to do things that they originally had no intention of
doing, which is advertising. And these days I'm the
founder and CEO of Make Love Not Corn. We are pro sex,
pro porn, pro. Knowing the difference, we've just launched
MakeLoveNotPorn Academy, which is an extension of our
brand, which is a global sex education
aggregator hub to make it easy for parents, teachers,
children, young people, adults to find the open, healthy sex
education resources that they need at a time when those are being blocked,
censored and deplatformed. And alongside that,
I work as a personal coach, a consultant, and a public
speaker. I was very new to LinkedIn and I was like, who is this woman
and can she be my best friend? And what I will say is,
you have a giant LinkedIn following. And I say this as somebody who has a
big LinkedIn following. You dwarf me. Which is not a complaint. You should.
But you are maybe the most approachable,
authentic person on LinkedIn.
I don't think I've ever commented on something and not gotten a
response. You answer your emails, you'll tell people to shut up when they need to,
which I very much appreciate. It wasn't like, it
wasn't like some big thing where I
literally just reached out to you on LinkedIn one day and I was like, I
think I need to learn from you. And you were like, cool, awesome,
let's do it. That was the whole of it. When I say
this is not an exaggeration. When I say I would not have made it through
the last year of my life without you. That is not an exaggeration. You
have been a force within my brain
when you're there and when you're not, because you're really good at leaving
little Easter eggs that dive into the brain, wrinkles that will pop up and
I'll be like, that's Cindy talking to me right now. I do hear voices, and
occasionally it's you. You saw me on some of my worst days in the last
year. This sounds very self aggrandizing and it's not meant that
way. But usually when I talk to people about business, it's people who want to
pick my brain about business. It's people who are struggling in their
own right, which is fine. I love having those conversations and I will have them
forever. But no matter the age of the person, they're usually coming to
me looking for advice, which again, I love and I will do
forever. But that gets very, very isolating
because I'm great at business, but there are still days where I'm like,
shit, I have no idea what I'm doing. Who do I ask? Who do I
talk to? So having somebody who I can realistically
say, I bet this person has been through this before. I bet this person has
a perspective on it that I can trust. That has been transformational
in my career. Because the shit that I'm coming to in
my career, you figured out and that that matters a ton.
Anyway, so I give that prologue because I like to hear my
own voice, but also because I think I might need my ass kicked.
We had planned to talk about some stuff which we will maybe get to at
the end, but if I feel like I need my ass kicked, I'm gonna guess
that most of the people who are listening need their ass kicked or
need to hear what I can only anticipate is going to be the brilliance that
you respond with. We done a lot of the hard things. We survived the
impossible. We have survived really tough family
stuff. We sold the business. We are
figuring out what's next. We built up our consulting side a lot,
which has been amazing. But I have not found the part where
I feel like myself publicly again, which is a strange place to
be after five years where I have made literally a whole podcast on being myself
publicly. And it is making me think maybe this voice
isn't needed. Maybe the reason that I don't feel drawn to it
right now is because there are other people who need to be saying the things
that I say, and maybe it's not me. And I know that Every time I've
said that, you have all but threatened to end me in loving
ways, in the lovingest ways. I feel like my brain
or my soul maybe has not caught up to the reality of where we actually
are right now as we progress through and improve.
And I can't figure out where that is. And we
have conversations every week about, like, do we need to keep doing
this? Do we need to keep doing things publicly? What are we
saying that matters? And so I would love the good old stindy
ass kicking. I know you're not going to tell me how to fix it
necessarily, but you will tell me what the path is
to getting to the other side and figuring out the right thing. And
that's, I think, what I need right now. So what I would say,
Lauren, is, first of all, I was very pleased to hear,
as we kicked off this podcast, that you have a
vacation coming up, because I think that is a very good thing.
And you know that I've spoken to you about that before. And so I'm
delighted to hear that you have, as I understand it,
rented a lovely house with a pool somewhere lovely. And you are going to
go and lie by that pool and do nothing. And so, first
and foremost, I would say go and do that because you need to
do that. And honestly, first of all, I just think
you're gonna find taking that break really
helpful in resetting and
getting back in the game, as it were. And secondly, Lauren, I will just say
to you, we are at a time in history where
we need everybody to speak their truth
who is willing to. And I say that because there are a ton of people
out there who will not, who really need the rest of us to do so.
And, you know, I say that about the times we're going through now. We especially
need role models for women who are willing to speak
truth to power, to say what they really think, to
stand up for what they believe in, to live the lives that they want
to live, to encourage other women, especially,
to do the same. So there is no scenario
in which your voice should not be heard. Does the
confidence in that? Does that come with
time, with experience? Is that just innate that
you popped up one day and knew that these are the
voices we needed to hear. And being louder than other people
is important when you want to be heard. In my case, I think it's a
combination of two things. The first is the realization
that honesty does come with time and getting older, which is, I don't give a
damn what anybody else thinks, which is the only way to
Live your life as you undoubtedly have heard me say before. Fear of
what other people will think is the single most
paralyzing dynamic in business and in life.
You will never own the future if you care what other people think. And then
the second thing is, and I've been saying this to people for a very
long time now, for anyone who's never done this exercise, take a
long, hard look inside yourself and identify what you stand
for, what you believe in, what you value, what
you're all about. In the first instance, doing
that makes life so much simpler because life
still throws you all the shit. It always will. But you know exactly how to
respond to that shit in any given situation in a way that is true to
you, and that honesty is the secret of happiness. Living your
life and working your work in a way that is true to you. But that's
also what gives you confidence. Because when you know that
you are living and working your value, that's the only thing
that matters. You don't need to care what anyone else thinks. You can have the
complete confidence to do what you know is the right thing for you to
do. I'm the one who says to people all the time, what other people think
about you is not your business. And I believe that. I do. But I
do find that the current climate feels so toxic. I'm thinking
about it a lot more than I ever did before. And that is not like
me at all. So where do you get to the point
where if what you know about you and
what someone believes about you are not the same thing, that that doesn't
affect you? Is that just a matter of showing them different? And if they don't
want to believe it, it's fine. There's like a gap there that I can't figure
out how to bridge right now. And this is very unlike me. I have never
been like this before in my life. Honestly, Lauren, if
somebody thinks something of me that is not true, I don't
care. I ignore it. Someone who thinks something of me that is
not true is completely irrelevant to me. You know, there is no universe
in which I need to take account of that, because it's just. It's ridiculous.
Is there a trick for building that armor? I've never been this person,
and I find myself in the last year being this person a whole lot more
than I thought possible. I've been saying this to people for a long time.
Stay away from people and places and things that make you feel bad about
yourself. Okay. I may occasionally come across something
online where somebody is saying Something ridiculous about me. The moment I realize that's what
it is, I absolutely close the page.
I do not read any further because I don't need to
see that. I remember years ago, there was somebody, a
white man, and I say that deliberately because that's where this came from.
I think this is somebody in my industry, advertising, who
basically kept writing blog posts about me and how awful I
was in all sorts of ways. But he was fixated. I did this much
more back in the day when I was running an ad agency and
needing to monitor my coverage. And also I did this back in the
day, by the way, when Google was a lot more effective than it is
currently. But every so often, I would Google myself to check
what coverage had come out, et cetera. Whenever I Googled myself,
one of the things that would come up was this gentleman had written yet another
nasty blog post about me. And I would see the first line, which made it
very clear. And I never, ever clicked
through to any of those posts. I have no idea how they
continued beyond the first line, because I did not need to read them.
So that's what I mean when I say, stay away from people and places and
things that make you feel bad about yourself. The moment you see something in the
corner of your eye, ignore it. Shut it down. So
have you had experiences in your career where maybe you have
done the wrong thing or wished you had handled something differently
and that impacted maybe somebody's perspective of you?
How do you address from that perspective? Yes, I absolutely have. And
first of all, you know, I would just say to that, Lauren, something
that I've had occasion to say to all
my employees in different companies over the years. It's more important
to be respected and not necessarily liked than
liked and not necessarily respected. And I say that because
you're asking about decisions I've made in a business
context which were not always popular, but were the right
decisions for the business. Okay. And
the reason I make that point is because too many
people in business want desperately to be liked.
And that can come actually at the expense of
respect. And again, when I was explaining this point to people who worked with me,
I would say the reason it's better to be respected, not necessarily liked,
is because you can absolutely be that boss that everyone loves
going for a drink with on Friday evening. Real love at the holiday
party. But when times are tough and the
trips are down, your people want to know that they have a leader
who will get them through those tough times no matter
what. And that's not the person who desperately Wants to be liked down the park.
So we all do things that may not land well with
some people, but we're doing what we do because it's the right thing to do.
Yeah, let's say we have somebody who maybe does not
have the track record that you and I do of having a
big mouth on the Internet. And they want to find their footing, they want
to find their way in, but they're not sure where to start.
And it's really scary. The first time I ever posted on LinkedIn, I was so
scared about making an idiot of myself that I had five
people read it before I post. Now I just post the fuck word all the
time. I don't care. Nobody reads my stuff before I post it unless it's like
a partnership thing that I have to get approval on. But other than that, nobody
reads my stuff. But at the time I was so scared.
Silencing myself doesn't do anything for anybody. But also
being loud and not encouraging other people to do it also does
not get us the diversity of voices that we need. Maybe the world needs my
voice, but it doesn't need only my voice. So how do you get
somebody from teetering on the edge of
maybe I would like to say something unpopular, which by the way, I've never actually
heard an unpopular opinion that was unpopular, unless it's just
a bad, misogynistic, shitty white man thing, which happens. But I've
almost never heard an unpopular opinion that was actually unpopular. I just hear opinions that
nobody else wants to say. And so how do you
encourage somebody to get from that? I'm not ready yet to
actually diving in. So my
startup before Make Love Not Porn was called if
We Ran the World and I had to back burner
if We Round the World when Make Loved One Porn blew up because even I,
superhuman as I am, cannot run two startups simultaneously. You know, I had to
pick and Make Love Not Porn is literally the startup the world asked for.
So I back Bernard if We Ran the World, although I would love to reactivate
it one of these days because it's still badly needed,
if We Ran the World was a co action platform
that enabled brands and their consumers to come together
around shared values in order to walk
the talk together, to co act and
collaboratively and collectively co act on those values in a way that
would make good things happen for the brand, for the business, for the
consumers and for society in general. And the atomic unit of
if We Round the World was the micro action. I
designed my business as I do with Make Love not porn around my own beliefs
and philosophies. And I believe that change happens from the
bottom up, not the top down. Every single one
of us, every day, taking micro actions.
Small, simple, easy to do actions, so easy to do well when you do them.
Taking micro actions to change what we want to see change
cumulatively adds up at scale to enormous impact. And I'm telling you this because
when I talked about if we ran the world, and I still to this day
talk about for the concept of micro actions, what I
would say to people was, there is one
single micro action that you can begin taking
today. It's really easy, doesn't require any
particular talent, skills, whatever. It is the one micro action
that will change your life and your work for the better
immediately. And it's very simply this.
Say what you think. No, really say what you
really think, because nobody does. I explain to
people that when you begin saying what you think,
that is a fantastic filter. So, for example,
at work, in a meeting about whatever,
say what you really think because that is why that
business hired you. They hired you because they wanted your unique
perspective, insights, thoughts, contributions.
And if you give them that and they do not respond,
welcoming them, then you know you need to get the fuck out. You
do not want to work anywhere where you cannot bring your
unique perspectives and insights and contributions to the table and
have that be welcomed and well received equally. Say
what you think on social, be yourself on social. That's what I
always advise. Because you will attract to you the people who
completely concur and you'll repel the ones who
don't. And you want to repel the ones who don't because who the hell wants
to have anything to do with them? I say this to people all the time.
The greatest joy of finding your authentic self or figuring out who
your authentic self is in a public setting is letting people self select
out. Exactly. Again, that's something I've always been good with. I think as
visibility grew, people got louder about it, which
didn't used to bother me before the last year. And that is, that
is where I think I expected that was going to be a quiet
action, that people were just going to be like unfollow or block,
like please hit the block button. I love it when you hit the block button.
I don't want you to see me either block. And sometimes it just
wasn't quiet. And that was a shock to the system. And I
don't know why, because it's not like I didn't know that those things happened. Now
it happened in ways that were very scary and that maybe that was the
difference, that it stopped being necessarily things that were happening on a screen and in
some cases became things that were happening on my front porch by people who were
not invited. But every reaction is information.
You will find out quickly if that is a person you want in your
ecosystem or not. And being able to assess
this isn't right. I'm gonna bounce out. Even if that's not a
fast timeline, making the decision that you are not going
to continue to invest in where you are, even if it's going to take you
a year to find the next thing, just knowing that is power.
And I think probably where I'm struggling is the fact that
intellectually I know all of this. I still say it to people all the time.
I almost never tell people things I don't practice myself.
And I feel like I'm not practicing some of those things right now.
That leads me to another question that popped into my head while you were explaining
that. How many times in your career have you been called difficult?
I'm sure I've been called difficult a lot behind my
back. Once people get to know me after being terrified by
me, they will tell me that they were scared of me when they first met
me. I don't know why. It's probably the resting bitch face, which is fine.
That's just the way my face is. Anybody who says it's resting bitch face, it's
actually resting thinking face. You are punishing people for having things going on behind their
eyes. But that's neither here nor there. But that gets hurled at women
all the time. Obviously, that's not new information, but I ran
a mental health practice in person for 10 years, and people would come in
and they would hassle the doctor for things. They would
hassle the therapists for things. They would hassle the front desk for things. Things that
everybody unequivocally said no about. We're not doing that. We don't do that. We don't
do that paperwork. We can't prescribe that medication. No.
And finally, somebody would be like, hey, can you come deal with this person? And
I would just very politely walk up from the back of my office and say,
hey, is there something I can help you with? And 100% of the time they
would go, no, I'm fine, thank you, and leave. There were doctors in our office
that had 40 years worth of credentials and all sorts of
plaques and things on their walls that are very impressive. And I'm just
the office manager in the back. And for whatever reason,
people find that to be intimidating. But
that's fine. People don't say it when they want to problem solve. They say it
when they want to write you off as somebody who you can't work with. And
that is never the case. In fact, I find the quote unquote
difficult women who end up in my career trajectory to be the ones who are
the most dynamic, the ones who are the most collaborative.
Are there women that I haven't gelled with in the workplace? Absolutely.
I can think of a couple who. We just had very different
philosophies on how you treat your co workers. But
by and large, the ones who get the reputation that I'm sure you
and I carry around with some people are the ones who want to
work the most with us or have the best ideas or need to
be heard. And usually the difficult thing means you
have an idea that is contrary to the way I want this to
go and you're being vocal about it because you found a problem that I
don't want to address. And so that makes you
difficult, not me. Rigid and stubborn. I think
the fact that nobody has ever said it to you probably speaks to just your
presence in any room. You run a company that people either love
or hate. There probably are not a lot of people
who are indifferent towards your mission. What is it like to be the
figurehead of that and to navigate all of the challenges
that come with people who make decisions about what you do? Not
even because they don't understand, because they aren't even trying to understand. They
don't care to understand. Make Love, Not Porn has been
universally well received by people at
large for 17 years. Okay. My only
challenges have been financial,
tech, and business ones. And they have not been
about what people think of what I'm doing. They've been about the
no adult content, knee jerk compliance reaction
to give you an idea. Some years ago, a friend of mine, a female
journalist, wrote to me and she said, cindy, I'm writing
a book on how women aren't welcome on the Internet. And she said,
so what I'm doing is I'm reaching out to prominent feminists like you.
I'm asking them to share with me the hate mail they receive
and to talk to me about how they deal with it. And I said to
her, I think that sounds like a terrific idea. I'm really sorry I can't help
because I do not get hate mail. And I really don't. In
17 years of make Love Not Porn, I have never
had anybody send Hate mail about it.
And I think that's because when you
understand what we're doing at Make Love Not Porn and why we're doing
it, nobody can argue with it. People occasionally ask
me, Cindy, how do you have the boldness to give talks to
very corporate audiences and talk about Make Love Not Porn within the talk,
which I readily do, because Make Love Not Porn is designed
around my own business principles and philosophies. And so it's a business case study of
my own business thinking. But my response to that is
because it doesn't matter how corporate the environment is
a large the audience is. I know perfectly well that when I talk about
Make Love Not Porn, everybody in that audience knows exactly what I'm talking about.
And that's why I have no issue with bringing it up. It's an interesting business
in that context. Now that I think about it, in the context of
the conversations we have had. It's always been funding. It's always been,
you know, funding banking, highly regulated
industries who are scared about compliance risk. In hindsight,
yeah, I don't think you've ever said that any human takes
specific issue with it. Like maybe we won't run it through
the Bible Belt entirely. Or maybe we will, I don't know. Many
years ago I was booked to come and give a talk to the students
at the University of Missouri about Make Love Not Horn specifically. So I gave a
talk, I was talking about our revenue share business model and I light
heartedly said to the audience, it's a great way to pay off your student
loans. Now sitting in the audience was a local reporter
who instantly wrote a piece about, you know, woman recommends students
prostitute themselves. And that shot out across a syndicated
network of local papers. And so I was contacted by a local
Christian radio station, was shocked and horrified and asked
me to come on and explain myself. And I absolutely accepted any invitation like
that. I went on this radio station and I explained what Make Love
Porn was actually about what I was doing. And by the end of the
show they were going, this is wonderful, everybody. Check out Make Love Not
Porn. I probably haven't said this on the show before. I
am definitely Jewish, but I grew up in an evangelical Christian
cult. Very like basically a cult that has
to this day has their own radio station. And
I'm imagining you going into these studios and it is
the greatest image that I can possibly conjure in my head.
But also I would love to see the reactions of the
Pearl clutchers that I grew up with. I have a friend
who has a somewhat problematic mother in law. And we
were at a thing together and her mother in law was there and she says
to me, okay, that's my mother in law. Stay away from her.
She's super intrusive. She doesn't like anybody. She will grill
you and make you uncomfortable. Just stay away from her. And
I looked at her and I said, introduce me. I
was like, let's go. I want to go. So I would
walk into that very happily because it's an opportunity to educate, but it's also
an opportunity to show. I mean, you have nothing to be ashamed of. You have
nothing to be shy about. You are building what you're building. And it's for
them, too. It's not to their exclusion. It's for them too.
I love that we both lean that way because there are situations that you're
supposed to run from that are going to be confrontational. And I'm like, let's go.
I'm ready. Let's do it. So as we round out,
first off, would love for everybody to know where they can find
you, how they can engage with you, what ways you make yourself available.
But also if there is someone listening that just needs
to hear why the world needs that needs their voice, needs, needs their
skill, needs, whatever. As a departure, what do you say to them? The
world needs your voice. Whatever you want to say, the world needs
to hear it because there are so many people
silencing themselves for all the wrong reasons. So the
world needs to hear your voice. Whatever you want to put out there, trust me,
the world wants it in terms of finding me. And this may also be
helpful. So, first of all, I have a substack. It's called Dear
Cindy. I started that because people write to me and ask me
things. And so I thought, let's formalize this and you can write
and ask me anything. And each week I answer one question from
the ones that have been sent to me. You can absolutely follow me on LinkedIn.
I am Indy Gallop on Instagram. If you're curious about my work,
do check us out@makeloveknotborn.com do support
my work by signing up and subscribing. Subscriptions start at $10 a month.
And also do check us out at MakeLoveNotPorn
Academy, which is the sex education extension
we've just taken live in very early stage beta. We're still
loading educators and content on the platform, but we welcome real world testing
and we also welcome people who believe in our mission
of bringing lifelong sex education to the world.
And so we'd love you to become a paid member of the academy.
It's free for everyone to access, but you can pay just $100 a year
to help fund our operations. You can absolutely find me on Facebook
as well. And I have a website, cindygallup.com where you can find out more
about my personal coaching services and speaking. You will get
more out of an hour with Cindy than you will get out of an
mba. That's not me being grandiose at all.
You will get more with an hour with Cindy about you, about your
needs, about the ways that we torture ourselves, that she will cut
right through Cindy. Thank you so much. I adored having you here. You
are welcome back anytime. Everybody. Please go check out all of the different ways
Cindy advised that you can find her. I love the substack. I
personally tend to gravitate toward LinkedIn just because that's where I am
most of the time. But all of the content is great and there are very
good alcohol drinks there occasionally that you can partake in by
proxy.
And now we'll go to Allison, who has this week's small
talk. I have a small talk question from Jenna in
New York. My family has always leaned on me,
youngest of four kids. But somehow I became the one people call the
one who shows up, the one who knows what to do when things go sideways.
And for a long time, that role felt like a gift. It made me
feel capable, needed, and worthy.
Last spring, my dad was in the hospital for three weeks, and I organized everything.
The visits, the insurance calls, the meals for my mom. And
about halfway through, I realized nobody asked me
how I was doing. Not once. I'm not sure if I
train people to not ask or if people just assume the strong one
doesn't need checking on, but either way, I'm sitting here
wondering how you start letting people take care of you when that's never
been the dynamic. Why are you asking questions about my life?
Jenna from New York? Rude. Why? Why you do this?
I'm proud of you for taking on the responsibility and doing all the
things right by your dad, but also very sorry that
you had to shoulder that all by yourself. I'm also one of
four children, and I am also the only
girl. And I am going to hazard a guess that you
might also be the only girl. In your case, you're the youngest,
so you would have to be the only girl. I'm not the youngest.
Even though I'm the only daughter. I'm also the eldest daughter, so there's like
a whole thing there. I once like asked the Internet if being the eldest daughter
meant the eldest of all children and also a
daughter, or if it meant any place in the birth order but the first
girl. And it was clarified to me that it meant the second
thing, which I guess being the only one also makes me the eldest. So.
Okay. And that is very typical
of the eldest star. I don't know
why it works out that way. I only have my lived experience on this, and
I can tell you that that's been a thing my whole life
where the siblings will reach out to me and ask me
what we are doing for one of our parents for whatever
day it is, they do not come to me with a plan for whatever
day it is. Not often, at least. My mom was recently in the
hospital and they all texted me. Not a single one of them reached out to
her. And they did text me, but it was to find out
what I was doing, how I was handling her. And like,
my mom wanted to talk to them. She didn't want that. And I didn't really.
Honestly, I didn't think about it. I just am so used to that dynamic. I
didn't even think about it until I was sitting in the hospital with her on
like day six or seven. And of course, I'm running back and forth multiple times
a day and bringing her whatever she needs. And there's. There's a little
bit of. I don't want to call it an advantage, but there's like a home
field advantage there. She lives very close to me and one of my other siblings.
I am the one who is better with planning and
logistics and decision making and nuance. And my other sibling is very good for
show up at this place at this time. And so when I need that, he's
great. When I need flexibility and
somebody to make decisions and somebody with critical thinking, that's not the role that he
fulfills in this dynamic. Right. And so we were probably like five
or six days in, and I'm sitting in my mom's room because I think we
were waiting for one of the doctors to come in, and she says, you
know, have you heard from your brothers? And I said, oh, yeah, because they had
texted me a couple of times to check in on her. And
she said, well, none of them have called me at all. And I was like,
really? That's weird, because, like, they know what's happening. I keep them
informed. She was like, no, nobody's called me. And then I
realized that I was the information conduit. They were coming to me if the
information was coming to them. For me, they were satisfied with it, and they weren't.
They weren't putting any more emotional or physical labor into it at
all. And that's because I was doing all of that labor. And I have historically
done all of that labor. Now, that's. That. That's the emotional
labor part. There have been many other types of labor that
my siblings have participated in at other parts of our journey, in taking
care of both of our parents. And so I don't want to make it seem
like I'm the only one ever, because that's not the case.
But I'm the only one a lot of times,
and I'm so used to it that sometimes I don't even
realize until it all gets to be too much. It's all
piled on top of me, and I'm going to. Why is this so difficult?
And I realize I feel like I'm the only when I'm not the only, you
know, running back and forth multiple times a day, being the one who has to
take her to the emergency room, being the one who has to know where the
med list is, where her surgery list is, where she keeps her computer,
where she keeps all of her. The things that she needs to pack a bag,
who her doctors are, how often they communicate with each other.
It's a lot. And when you are the one who has always handled it,
people don't realize how much it is. And if you're anything like I am,
nobody knows how much you're shouldering until it's so much that you bray,
and then you're angry at everybody and firing back at everybody because you feel so
isolated and alone. And the reality is that
as grownups, they should know that this is not all on
you. If you are not complaining, people don't jump in.
People in general are not going to fix a problem that
has not been verbalized to them as a problem. And so
should all of the boys in your life know that
you're doing too much and you're overwhelmed and that you need help. But if you're
not saying it to them, they are not going to pick up on what you're
thinking. They're not mind readers, and you have to tell them. And I think
that's probably what's missing. And
in a lot of cases is received a whole lot better than
you anticipate that it will be for a couple of reasons. One, it's devastating to
go to somebody and say, this is too much and I can't do it. And
as somebody who's had to do that a lot in the last six months. More
than I ever have in my life. The ways that it has made me feel
like an epic piece of shit and very small and very ineffective and
like a failure in all ways. So, so, so many ways. But that was something
I did to myself. It was never something that was on the other side of
that equation. There was never anybody else making me feel that way. That was always
what I put on myself because I wasn't reaching this
insurmountable level of management.
That was just never gonna happen. And historically, there are kind
of two responses. Well, I guess there's technically three responses. There's
the response of somebody saying, okay, that thing you just said, I can handle
that. Don't do that anymore. I will take that off your plate.
That's the best of all the responses, right? There's the
intermediate response of what can I
help with? Which is better than a bad response.
But they're still putting the onus on you, the emotional energy
on you to sort through this thing,
and that's still work. And when you're overwhelmed and you feel like you're out
of resources, putting that work back on you to figure
out what of these 700 things they can help you with
can feel just as overwhelming as the 700 things.
And so it's not the worst response. But
I wish that we could somehow train people in their
good intentions to help, which they should be rewarded for
that. A blanket offer to help is sometimes not at all
helpful. But if you come up with three things, you
know, you call a sibling and say, I've been at the hospital with dad for
three weeks. I'm burned out. I can't do it anymore. And they say,
okay, well, I can either come for the weekend or I can
come in one week. We have a family member. Let me call them
and see if they can come and relieve you for a bit, and then I'll
be there next week. Like, options, Concrete, tangible
options, great. But, oh, I'm. Listen, I didn't know you
were struggling. That's good. I really want to help. Also good.
What can I do for somebody that's drowning?
That's not always the right answer, but it's a better answer than the
last option, which is, well, if you didn't want to handle it all, maybe
you shouldn't act like you have all your stuff together. Blah, blah. Okay? If anybody
reacts to you that way, and the only way I bring it up is because
I've seen that before, thankfully not directed toward me, but I'VE seen that before. Tell
that person to fuck off. Get bent. You don't want their help, they
will make things worse and find another solution. There's another solution out there. But
somebody who will make your stress and your
overwhelm about them and become defensive
about it is not somebody who's helping you. Okay. But it starts
with a very simple conversation. I'm really overwhelmed by what's
happening and I. I can't be the one who's responsible for
everything. What can you take off my plate? I know
historically I've done this. It is not working for me right now. What can you
take off my plate? And the response to that will be positive more times
than not. Especially if this is a close family and they love you and they
just don't realize that if you haven't complained before, they don't have any
reason to believe that this time is any different. But it's different. And
that's okay. Things change. People change. The amount
of stress and burden that you can handle changes. And
this is one of those times to ask for help. And odds are
the people around you are so impressed with your ability to handle so much
that it has never occurred to them that you might need help too.
And that's because you do a really, really good job of being a
badass all the time. And it's one of the reasons why I always tell people
to check on your strong friends because they are not going to tell
you when the sky is falling in. And the number of times that I have
found that somebody who I thought had all of their shit together was
as big a disaster as I am and needed help and
was just too scared to tell anybody is more times than I could
easily recollect. It happens all the time. You are the
strong friend in this case. You're the strong family member. You're the one they don't
worry about. They don't need to worry about you, but they do need to help
you. But they will not know to start that until you make it
clear. And you have to give them the opportunity to give you the
answer that you don't want. You have to get over your own ego
that says you can do it all because you always do it all. And you
have to be willing for. Willing to experience some sort of rejection. But I
would bet dollars to donuts that it's not going to happen.
Also, I know I now want donuts.
Thanks for being here, guys. Have a good day. Love you. Mina
And I thought now that we're on the other. Nope I
don't want to say that. Nope. Not going to tempt the wrath of whatever.