And so I got my phone out, and I was like, can I Venmo you
the money for my meal? Because I gotta go.
And that's the first time I've ever done that, probably because I'm usually always
paying for the meal. I usually go out with a bunch of mooches, is really
what it is. I was like, man, it's been a long time since I've been
in a room of strangers, small enough that everybody could hear the
stupid shit that goes on in my head. And then it sometimes accidentally comes out
of my mouth. It's fondue, but it's all sorts of dipping of meat and
cheese in different patterns, which is my
happy place.
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 podcast 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.
I have made no secret of the
general trial and tribulation of my existence right now. There is
so much. It is always a lot. Every morning I wake up and I'm like,
really? Again? And every morning, the answer is yes
again. And we get up and we do it again. But I was thinking about
it this morning, and I realized that life right now feels like
putting on a pair of jeans immediately out of the shower. We're gonna get
through it, but it's gonna be difficult, and it's probably
gonna feel sticky and like, I can't think. More apt description. And I don't think
it's just me. I think that's a universal experience, at least in the US Right
now. So get your pants on or don't. Don't put jeans
on. That's awful. But I would imagine we have the same problem with leggings, Right?
But jeans, specifically. Put your pants on or don't, but just
know that if it feels like a struggle, it's not just
you. And I am undoubtedly gonna get my foot
stuck in the leg of one of them and fall over relatively soon. So
you can come join me. It's such a universal feeling. Have you seen the
newsroom? There's an episode where he says that the pants are cut
wrong because he can't put them on right. And he makes a
comment about how he's so smart, and somebody's like, really? Because you just told us
that you can't put your pants on, and then later that episode, he
has to rush to get the pants on, and you see him falling out from
behind a curtain because he couldn't get his leg in. That's what it feels
like. I was about to say, yeah, but skinny jeans are trendy now.
And then I realized that skinny jeans were trendy literally 20 years ago.
Last Sunday. I did so much peopling that I still
have not recovered so much that I'm just
realizing that it wasn't even last Sunday. It was the Sunday before.
That's how bad I burned out my social battery. That's how much
out of the house I did. That's how much logistics
I did. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Orlando, but in Orlando, our, like,
swanky area, I guess one of them, the oldest swanky area is
Winter Park. There's an area in Winter park, it's called Park Avenue, that has
all of the upscale stores, the restaurants
that charge $30 for an omelette and charge you
more to deconstruct things so that you have to put them together
instead of just giving you a plate of food you can eat. They're like, here's
a deconstructed gazpacho. And you're like, why did you just bring me
tomato soup with cilantro on the side? That doesn't make sense. Anyway, they're very
impressed with themselves, and to their credit, I have eaten at a number
of them and all of them were very good. But I am a person
who will happily eat a gas station hot dog. I'm not their
target demo. I will very happily go to them. I will find something
to eat there. I will put. Probably really enjoy it 100%. Well,
they look at me and they're like, oh, she might have showered in the last
week. This is interesting, but there's this. It's lovely. I really like
the area. I like. It's well manicured.
There's green space. The nightmare is the parking. But we went very early
one day, so there wasn't really a parking issue. But Natasha, who's a dear friend
of mine, got a makeup class or something in a silent auction, and so
she asked me if I wanted to go. And I was like, you want to
play with makeup for two hours? Yes, Absolute G. We went
and there were a bunch of people there, and I
forget how much of a jackass I am
around a bunch of new people until I'm around a bunch of new
people being a jackass. So there were all of the people who were
there, and then there were the people who worked at the store
because it was like a class that was held at a makeup store. And
there was me, and we were there for several hours. And
I could not stop making smart ass comments to
the group, which everybody laughed at. I don't think I was actually annoying people. Now
in hindsight, I'm like, oh, God, was I annoying people? But I don't think I
was. I think we were cool. I was like, man, it's been a long time
since I've been in a room of strangers small enough that everybody could
hear the stupid shit that goes on in my head and then it sometimes
accidentally comes out of my mouth. But they all could. They did laugh, which
is really bad. If you want me to stop, don't laugh. I'm like a toddler
who said the F word. I'm going to keep saying the F word now because
you laughed. First off, being a full nerd, I think they thought that they
were dealing with a bunch of, like, makeup novices, which most people were, which is
totally cool. But I am not a makeup
novice. And I have a whole chest of drawers next to my desk that
has makeup in it that I play with every day and I try new stuff
all the time and I spend way more money on makeup than I should, considering
how much makeup I have, but I don't care. And
so they were like, okay, so this is
a primer. And you put this on your face before. And
so the woman came over and was like, what would you say that your makeup
understanding is? And I was like, I have 18 different foundations that I
choose from each day. And she was like, so, some experience,
okay. And so then they, like, wanted to bring me all the products, hoping I
would buy all of the products. So she was like, well, I'm gonna bring you
over this one because this is a brand you can't get anywhere else or very
few other places. So I know you haven't tried this yet. Anyway, she was very
cute. She was very sweet. And then I was sitting at the same table as
Natasha's mother, who is a fucking delight, a lovely, wonderful person
who I wanted to take home in my pocket. Her mom doesn't wear a ton
of makeup, and so I couldn't not do my makeup like I always do.
And so I'm sitting there and I've got, like, all the tools in front of
me and I'm putting it on my face and I'm doing, like, all the things
that you do for. I don't know, I feel like a full nerd. And
she's watching me the whole time, and she keeps going, wow, you're really good at
this. Wow. No, you really know what you're doing.
How did you make that look like that? And I'm like, first off, I can
show you. I'm happy to show you. But also, like, these professional makeup artists who
actually know what they're doing will show you too. Like, that's why they're standing by.
So anyway, I became, like, the spectacle, which pretty on brand did several
hours there. And then we went to brunch, and I had
a wonderful waspy brunch. I don't even know how to
describe it, but it was supposed to be Mediterranean fusion or something.
I don't know. I saw eggs Benedict on the menu, and I was like, that,
please. But it's one of those places where you order food and
you get food. The food doesn't come with a side
because you're fancy and you have to order a separate side.
Not that I needed the side, but it was still like, that's the kind of
place it was. Everything's a la carte except for the cheeseburger. And
riddle me this. They have a menu, full love,
really expensive, really, like, the type of food you cannot get
anywhere else. Specialized stuff, all sorts of fancy
ingredients, stuff that even somebody like me was like, this
feels like I'm not going to have any other opportunity to try this. So I
want to try it, even though I'm probably going to hate it. One of the
people who was with us looked at the server and was like,
I'm between this and the cheeseburger. Which should I get? And he was like, oh,
definitely the cheeseburger. Our cheeseburger's really good. And I'm like, good for you.
I support you. But also, I don't feel like you're supposed to come here and
get a cheeseburger. And why is your cheeseburger that good? Why would you have a
stellar cheeseburger at this crazy, fusiony,
very expensive place? And you're like, Nope, get the $16 cheeseburger. It's
better. That doesn't make sense to me. That feels like there's a failure somewhere else.
I didn't get the cheeseburger, and I was a little regretful because it did look
really good. We did brunch, and I
stepped into 2026 because I had to leave a little bit
early from brunch before they had settled everything out. And so I got my
phone out, and I was like, can I venmo you the Money for my meal
because I gotta go. And that's the first time I've ever done that.
Probably because I'm usually always paying for the meal. I usually go out with a
bunch of mooches is really what it is. So I felt very like Gen Z.
Like I was with the times, which those times are actually five years ago, I
literally got into my car, drove the
40ish minutes home, changed my clothes. My kids came home,
they had been out. We jumped right back in the car. I literally
just left a meal, just got back in the
car, drove over to my mom's house, picked her up, took
her out to early dinner for her birthday. For the record, not because
she wanted to go to early dinner, but because I am
exceptionally old and I don't want to be out past
bedtime. So my mother, who was turning an
age, that I will be immediately struck down
from heaven if I say on a live microphone, I will not
say, but on that day was turning that age and should be
the one who cares about early bird specials, was
like, why do you want to go eat so early? And I was like, why
do you want to go eat so late? She's like, I want to go eat
at 7. And I was like, no. So we went
very early, but we took her to a very nice restaurant. We took her to
the Melting Pot, which is a nice restaurant. It's just like meat and
things you put on meat. It's like basically just repetitive meat and cheese, which is
not a problem for me at all. It's all sorts of dipping. It's fondue, but
it's all sorts of dipping of meat and cheese in different
patterns, which is my happy place. But then we did that and then we
were there for several hours and then we did birthday and then I finally got
home. It was probably only like 6:30 when we got home.
And I was like, I'm spent. I talked to so many people today.
I did so many things. And I remembered to get the balloon
bouquet for the table, which I should get some sort of award for.
And by remembered I mean I checked the box when I made the reservation.
But it did feel like I remembered to do something. And then we got to
the table and my mom reminded me that she hates balloons. And I was
like, oh, that is a thing that you've said for literally my entire life. I
forgot. I forgot. Awesome. But man, I can't think of
a day in the recent past outside of when we were
at a conference and I knew that it was
going to be like, morning to night peopleing. And I still
escaped momentarily throughout the day to
recharge and get a soda and find some
solace and put my AirPods in and noise cancel the whole world. Like, I can't
think of a day that I have peopled that hard in a very
long time. There were two meals, there was a whole
class where a bunch of people were touching me.
I didn't karate chop anyone. There were people looking
at me while I was doing stuff and I didn't freak
out. And nobody said that I was being weird.
And that is probably the biggest
victory. So all I'm saying is, if
you need me for anything in the next six weeks,
know you don't.
And now we'll go to Allison, who has this week's small
talk. We have a small talk question from
Alejandro in New Mexico. I got my
Bachelor's degree at 37, finished last
May, and everyone around me was very kind about it, saying
it's never too late, all of that. But the ceremony was full of
22 year olds, and I spent a lot of it in my head doing
the math on all the years I consider lost. I
know intellectually that comparing timelines is pointless.
My path is my path, et cetera. But there's this voice that occasionally
whispers that I'm permanently behind in my career,
in my life, in some imaginary race I didn't sign up for.
I'm curious if you have ever had to actively grieve an earlier
version of your life, what you thought it would look like and
how you stopped measuring yourself against a timeline that was
never really real. Okay, so first off, the thing I want to say
and the thing you need to get out of your brain is that there
is no finish line. Life does not have
a checkered line on the ground that you run through.
Break the tape and you win at some race. There's no race.
There's no race. You're not running against anybody else. You're not
running against yourself. There's no finish line. There's a
clinician who works for me. I've worked with him a long time. He's a great
doctor. And he was a corporate, like, retail
manager for 20 years. And then he went back to medical school
and left his career, lived the
medical student life like full time medical student in
his 30s, I want to say, did residency in his late
30s and became like an
independent trained doctor. Like, I think he was like in his 40s by the time
he was done. And he might be the best doctor that I work
with. He might be the Most caring, the most compassionate, the most
understanding. When I get to see the way he interacts with
individuals or, you know, see his notes or things like that, he approaches
it with a level of insight and compassion
that I can only assume comes from the fact that he
understood humans before he understood the human body. He
had life experience behind him before
putting all the science into his brain. And I
just get a sense that he is a better doctor
because he did life first than he would be
if he had started fresh out of college. And that's not
a criticism of people who start fresh out of college. Like, we need doctors to
start whenever you start. But his career is different. I
actually had a teacher like that in high school. He was a
military pilot. He was Top Gun three times. He was a
Navy pilot. And on his desk in his classroom
was a Top Gun award, and he actually was
Top Gun four times. But he didn't count the fourth time because it was in
combat, and he didn't feel like that was appropriate. He taught
the hardest subject that I ever took in school, which was calculus,
and kicked my ass. Left, right, BA,
select, start. It was so hard, and yet I loved
his class every time. And it was because he
loved what he was teaching. This was his choice. He
chose to do this thing. He wanted to come to school
every day. He didn't need to work. He did 30 years in the
military. He had a sweet pension and all
these things. I'm sure he had a great bank account and did not need to
make $40,000 a year as a teacher in Florida. But he
chose that. He wanted to do that. He loved his students. He loved teaching
math. He told me once that his favorite thing was working with people
who insisted they were bad at math because he could show them that
they could be good at math and that they were just in their head about
it and then also getting to work. I mean, he worked with really
complex subjects. And he would invite students
who had been struggling in, like, remedial math classes because
he wanted to show them that they could do this. He just liked math.
He just liked math. All math, including calculus, which is
evil. Absolutely evil. So evil. But he
probably would have been a good teacher straight out of college, but I don't know
that he came at it with a different understanding about what
teaching was and also what high school was to us. And
it made him a different kind of teacher. And so there is no
finish line. You are going to get where you're going
when you get there. And are you allowed to grieve
the version of life that you thought you would have. Absolutely. But I don't know
what you're grieving because that doesn't mean you can't have it. You can have whatever
version of life you still think is possible and it's probably
going to be better for the things that you have behind you that are informing
your decisions. Now you're older, your prefrontal cortex is
developed, you're not making stupid decisions now that you would have
made with a bachelor's degree at 22, when you still have three,
four more years of brain development that need to happen before you're actually
a grown adult. We treat people like they're an adult at 18 and then again
at 21. And the reality is most men are pushing 30.
Don't say that critically, it just is. There's no finish line. And
then beyond that, you can't measure yourself against a
timeline that doesn't exist. If you stop thinking that there's a path that you need
to be on, there's no path that you need to be on. There's nothing linear
happening in your life whatsoever. You are probably better at
the things that you are good at now than you would have been at 20
because you have life experience behind you. There is nothing
about starting a career at 22 that you
would not be better at starting that career at 42.
You're a more confident human, you're a more experienced
human, you're a more successful human. There's probably a lot that you would say to
22 year old you about life and these aspirations that you had.
And I'll give you another kind of example. My husband and I think I was
24 when we got married, maybe around there. And to me
we were going to turn around and we were going to have kids five minutes
later. Now, he didn't want to have kids right away, he wanted to wait a
little bit of time. And we did sort of wait before we started actively trying.
I think we waited about a year. But to me any time before
that would have been a happy, not happy accident, but
just like we were preventing it, let's put it that way. So in the way
that 24 year olds are, we should have been pregnant on month two, even though
we weren't trying, that was what happened to my brain. And then we got a
year in and I thought, well, it's because we haven't actually been trying. So now
we'll actually start trying and I'll learn about some things and we'll figure out how
to do this and then Another year went by, Then we went to some doctors
and another year went by. We tried for four years. We had our first
child just before our fifth anniversary with fertility
treatments and a whole lot of outside intervention and a whole lot of doctors and
a whole lot of heartbreak. It changed me molecularly. It was the
hardest thing I ever went through. Then we had our second two years later, also
through fertility treatments. My oldest turned one and I was like,
I want this part of my life to be over. Let's get the second one
done. And at that time, I would have had 100 kids if it was
possible. And I. I didn't necessarily think we were going to stop it too.
But not only does my reproductive system suck and make it impossible
to get pregnant, but then I undercooked them and they kept coming out authentic.
And so after two, we were like, if we're going to do this again, we're
going to need to rent a uterus. And I say all that, you know, it
was almost. My husband and I were together almost seven years by the time we
had our second kid and technically completed our family. Which, by the way, I hate
being pregnant. Being pregnant is the worst thing in the world, but I would do
it. I love having kids. I want to have 50 more kids. But also, like,
we got two kids when we really thought we would have no kids. And so
the point of that being, I could have had the kid
two months into our marriage. I could have gotten
pregnant that fast and we could have an almost 15 year old now.
But I got these two kids who are perfect. I wouldn't change anything
about them ever. And as much as it
destroyed me and it was the most
difficult thing I have ever been through, it changed the way I
relate to people forever. It was that hard. It was that
difficult. As much as all of that, I
like these too. They're good. They're funny, they're
smart, they're sassy. They make me laugh
every day, they make me smile every day. They
have the tenderest hearts that are wrapped up in. In the
sassiest, smartassiest bodies. And if you
had to tell me now that I could
undo all of the damage that did to me in every possible way,
but I wouldn't have these kids. I would say, no, no way.
I like these kids. I don't want any other kids. I like these kids. I
mean, I would have more kids, but I want to keep these kids. And that
doesn't mean that I didn't still grieve the experience.
It doesn't mean that I didn't still struggle with the scars of
infertility for a long time. It doesn't mean that I didn't have medical
complications from it. It doesn't mean that I don't have
just residual baggage from it. All of
that's still true. But at the end of the day, I got the kids
that I don't know if I was supposed to have them, but I'm so glad
that I do. And I wouldn't change the journey, even though the journey
sucked, but the outcome was kind of great. And
so you are where you are supposed to be.
And that doesn't mean you can't grieve and process
through what got you here. But you can't be behind on
a race that doesn't exist. You are doing
the best you can with the situation that is in front of
you. And there is nothing else that anybody could ask of
you. So I'm proud of you. Congratulations. Big
fucking congratulations. Getting your degree is a big deal. And you know
what they call the person who graduates from medical school
at 45? A fucking doctor. You did the
thing. I'm proud of you. Thanks for being here, guys. Have a good day. Love
you. Meaning.
One of my favorite things that floats around the Internet occasionally
is life is short. So tell people you love them,
but shout it in German because life is also terrifying. The German
language, like, actually has really good words. Like, they have words
in German that you cannot find in any other language that you have to
explain with multiple words in any other language. And they are like,
perfect. I tell people that my love language
is schadenfreude.