As I'm writing this, I honestly don't know if my mother is alive or dead.

And I’m not sure what answer is better.

(For context, I had surgery a few days ago. This is the first time I’ve told her ahead of time, rather than after the fact*. She lives in a residential care home 6,000 miles away in America.)

I come home from my operation and send a quick email to say it's all gone well, I’m home and going to sleep.

I wake up to nothing.

I wait a day. Nothing.

I start to feel a familiar mix of worry and anger.

Another day goes by.

Is there no reply because she doesn’t care enough to? Or is there no reply because something has happened to her? Twice now, she’s been taken to the hospital and her facility never contacted me so it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

But many more times than that, she has deliberately ignored emails, “forgotten” arranged chats, and deliberately let her phone battery die. She has no friends or family, so I have to call the facility, request wellness checks, pull people from their jobs to go knock down her door. She has the power to instigate a wild goose chase from across the Atlantic just so I can verify she’s alive, in her apartment, and safe. And then she feigns surprise at all the fuss. There’s a pattern to when it happens, but you’d have to be me to see it.

So there I am in bed, bruised, sore, four wounds severing my abdominal muscles, a body adjusting to the loss of yet another organ. And all I can wonder is…

Does she really care so little about me?

Or is she dead?

Which is better? Which answer do I want to be true?

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Why share this?

Partially to purge it from my body. It’s taken me nearly a decade of therapy to recognize the abuse in my upbringing for what it is, and only in the last few years am I able to actually use that word. Abuse. It’s always been so subtle, easy to deny by design. A covert narcissist, an enabler, and me.

But I also want to use my raw emotion as it exists today to get this message to whomever needs to hear it.

If you have a difficult relationship with someone, don’t expect a miracle change in behavior in the face of mortality. Yours or theirs.

Life limiting and terminal illnesses will likely not change who they are. Their brush with mortality will not stain them with a kind wisdom that makes up for the decades before. Most likely, they will double down on their bullshit, in whatever form it manifests. People usually die how they lived.

Hollywood sets us up to fail when it comes to death and grief in so many ways, but this one is a doozy. Very, very rarely do people have a sudden shift in personality, an awakening to all the ways they’ve wronged. I have seen this in my work. I have seen this with friends. I have felt it personally. Consider this fair warning and prepare yourself accordingly.

Also.

There is little room in this world for grief at all, not to mention the grief that comes with aging parents. And within that limited sympathy there's rarely room for those of us who have complicated and conflicting relationships. I take every opportunity I have to validate that complex experience because I know it to be true yet rarely see it mentioned.

It's hard enough sitting in groups where people wax lyrical about their wonderful, special, amazing families… their angelic mothers and supportive siblings, feeling alone in grief and alone in whatever this muck is.

so… is she actually…?

No. She’s not. She’s very much alive. (I’m now 3 weeks post-op writing here)

*I’ve had the shitty luck to require a few surgeries over the last few years and every time before I’ve kept it from my parents until after the fact. It was always easier to hide it than have to manage their emotions and reactions on top of… you know. Surgery.

In fact, I’ve had two cancer scares and only ever told them after the fact when I’ve received the all clear. It was easier. Our roles have always been flipped so instead of the parent offering comfort, protection, safety, advice, reassurance… it’s me.

But this time I ended up telling her ahead of time, mostly because she actually asked about my life (for once) and I don’t know. I had a moment of weakness. I wanted a mom. She was mom-shaped.

So four days after my surgery, I sent another email asking if her internet was working? As simple as that. No wild goose chase. No panic or anger or blame for not replying or asking about me.

Within two hours I had a reply back that it was fine. That’s all. No question about my health. No wishes for a speedy recovery. Not even the smallest amount of human kindness you’d show an acquaintance, let alone your child. And there was my answer.

She’s not dead. She just doesn’t give a shit.

You may brush this aside as normal forgetful old lady behavior. Unless you’ve grown up with a narcissistic mother, you won’t recognize it for what it is: bids to keep all the attention on them at any cost, and the absolute hatred of anyone else pulling that away.

I could point to the fact that during this time she was able to Doordash groceries and food. That she has a phone charger right next to her recliner and bed. That she spends 4-5 hours on her computer every day. That she has a carer come in twice a week, so even if there was a tech issues, she could’ve gotten help with it. As I said, the abuse and neglect has always had plausible deniability baked right in.

My mother has even weaponized her will and power of attorney when angry with me over something or other, many times. I am her only relative, the only person left to make these decisions if she can’t, and she wields that power like the emotional dagger she knows it to be. She uses my compassion for her against me, because at the end of the day, she’s my mother and I do want what is best for her.

Her approach has changed as her health deteriorates, but the mental disorder that drives it is still there. That won’t change.

This was a reminder, a lesson, and I’m passing it along to you.

as for me

I’ve had a couple bumps along the healing journey, it’s been more complicated than I thought, but I’m feeling more and more like myself. It’s given me so much time to sit and think and be. Despite the tenor of this article, I am filled with gratitude for the care I’ve received, the support and love I’ve been given from friends and chosen family, and consider myself very lucky.

Life is a precious, precarious experience. I’m glad I’m still riding that ride.

Onwards.

What happens when two death workers sit down to talk shop? A whole lot of laughter, believe it or not! Emma from Dying to Help shared some amazing anecdotes of her time as a celebrant and end of life doula, as well as a few projects she has cooking on the horizon.

Talking with Mortals is a show about the conversations we don't always make time for (but probably should). Real people, real conversations, sometimes about death and grief, always about what really matters.

🎵 Music by Kylie Dailey

📲 Follow us: @goodmourningsociety and @talkingwithmortals

Follow @dying2help on Instagram.

I adore the synchronistic way the world works sometimes. I have thoughts bouncing around in my head, undercooked and not ready to be shared, and then someone articulates them in a way I never could. That’s exactly what happened the other day with Jade Adgate’s article “When Deathwork Becomes a Product.”

Jade Adgate

When Deathwork Becomes a Product

There is an uncomfortable question moving quietly through the death doula world right now, and most people are skirting around it rather than naming it directly…

Read more

2 months ago · 24 likes · 1 comment · Jade Adgate

I commented on the Instagram post, but wanted to expand my thoughts here in a fuller response. Hopefully this continues the conversation and others are welcome to carry it further. It’s certainly something I often think on and want to more openly talk about!

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Smut, gold pans, and shovels

I think my experience brings a different perspective, so I’d like to share a little background. Before becoming a doula, I was a writer. A self published author. A pretty successful one, actually. I hopped on the coattails of Fifty Shades and carved a little pen name for myself. Writing is in my blood, I have a degree that claims I know how to do it creatively, so it wasn’t that much of a jump to give “romance” a try.

For the life of me I can’t remember how, but pretty quickly I came across a small group of opportunists who had not one iota of creative writing experience OR desire to learn. They were businesspeople and saw an economy booming. They wanted money. They lived in private groups, invite only and highly selective, where they would share money making tactics and tricks. They liked me because I was an actual writer and could offer my wisdom in that way. In return, I learned how to market online, create Facebook ads that drove sales, build newsletters, etc.

One person in particular really knew how to make money, and genuinely, he was pulling in high six-figures every month. How? He paid dozens of ghostwriters pennies to write rough drafts based on ideas he had, stole, or tweaked from bestselling books. Hired a half dozen editors to polish them up. He paid everyone to do everything, covers, formatting, advertising, you name it. And to top it all off, he then used the faces and personas of women in his family to be the “authors” across myriad pen names.

The bulk of his income came from selling “shovels.” This gave him the time to create courses he sold to hopeful writers, genuine writers, on how to make it big. He never revealed the truth of his actual success and he never, ever gave them enough information that they could be truly competitive to his business. These hopeful writers would gobble up all his tips, maybe have a blip or two of success, but ultimately end up buying his next course, his next workshop, his next manual. They internalized the “failure” and saw him as as a person always trying to help.

I learned a lot about the world from watching this process work. (And this is all well before the rise of AI. I’ve been out of the business for a long time, but just imagine what these people are like now?) It paints my view of what it’s like to be a doula right now, too.

The death doula industry

From what I’ve seen, this sort of vulture-ism isn’t happening. Yet. You can see industries on the periphery are taking on a real Silicon Valley, tech-bro-disrupting-the-system vibe. The ones that promise to safely hold your advance care plans for this low annual subscription. Or the legacy products that remove the need to actually speak to your family. OR the AI chatbots that mimic them after they’re gone.

I don’t see genuine death doulas creating these soulless products and services.

I do see some of y’all making partnership money by promoting them though… 👀 👀

I think this sort of growth is more from entrepreneurs who’ve looked at the aging demographics of the Boomer generation and realized there’s the potential for money to be made. But trust, the great eye of Capitalism will fall on doulas soon enough.

The way it shakes out depends on how the doula enters the system.

The three types of death doulas I see

Entered the field through care or medical work. They were doctors, nurses, psychologists, paramedics, celebrants, funeral workers, caregivers, worked in nursing homes, etc. They saw a gap between what is possible and what is happening and want to bridge it.

Entered to serve their own community. They have aging family, friends, a church community, a hospice they care about, etc. They train so they can be of service to a specific group, usually voluntarily, and aren’t much bothered by the movement on a macro scale.

Entered completely fresh. A life shift, a career change, a sudden desire to do something meaningful with their time. It feels like a calling. This group splits further into two subgroups.

• Entrepreneurial. These doulas have a background in business, marketing, self-employment, or they just have the inclination.

• Organic. These doulas are drawn to the training and work, but have no interest in the business side of things.

From Jade’s post:

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The types in action

Those who trained to be a doula to serve their community end up doing it quite well. Because it’s not a business to them, because it’s something they already have an audience for, they quietly get to work doulaing those close. From what I’ve seen, these doulas can do quite well when they form collectives! It’s a holistic way of actually carving out a niche, establishing a name for yourself, and ironically can lead to some genuine financial security.

The former care and medical workers already know how to navigate the system. They’re the doulas with connections and relationships built over decades. From what I can observe, they also do quite well independently because they have their complementing work to support doulaing.

That leaves the rest of us, whom I believe fall into what Jade described above. We quickly realize they haven’t been shown the complete picture and come out the other side a bit dazed. The demand, awareness, financial forecast… it’s not exactly what we were led to believe. I know many of us finish training with more than a little anger.

The entrepreneurs (like myself) immediately start looking for ways to earn a living while still trying to establish ourselves as death doulas. Part time jobs? Creating training for other doulas? Products? Services?

The organic doulas, the ones who simply want to serve and not have to learn about advertising on Meta… they’re the ones who quietly stall out. Maybe they internalize it like those hopeful writers I spoke about above. Maybe they take another course, attend another workshop, host a Death Cafe and wonder why attendees aren’t converting into clients. And when none of that works and the bills are still demanding to be paid, they quietly move on.

The curse of capitalism

If we didn’t live in this current system, under this increasingly oppressive way of life, this conversation would be vastly different.

But we do live in a capitalist nightmare and we are asked to grow a movement within a culture that needs us but doesn’t want to look at us. At the same time, we must all walk a knife’s edge of legitimacy and discreditation as we make room for this certification yet reject another.

I want to be clear. I don’t think anyone is outright selling courses that are designed to deliberately keep a money-making machine running. From what I have seen, when they are offered by other trained doulas, they are done so in good faith. They are trying to earn a living doing something they feel passionate about, they have knowledge in, that can help the world. Nothing wrong with that.

However, there are businesspeople, like the man I told you about earlier, who are churning out AI produced courses as a way to tap into the market. We are not regulated. They can do what they like. That is blood in the water to sharks like him. They have no interest in truly changing the world of death and grief or even helping a single individual person, but they are more than happy to help you part with your money if you are!

To keep this conversation going

Here’s a thought I throw to the next person to ponder.

An uncomfortable conversation I don’t see happening enough is about the demographic makeup of who is training to be a doula. I say this as a middle-aged, privileged, educated white woman.

Why do most doulas also sit in my demographic? What are we doing to change that? How can we claim to embrace diversity of culture, religion, background, etc if we aren’t actively working to create an environment where anyone can sustainably do this work? The socio-economics of this work aren’t just applicable to our clients, but also our potential colleagues.

Musician, artist, and modern-day philosopher Nick Cave knows grief. To trace his understanding of the topic solely to the personal losses he’s experience feels reductive. If you spend more than a minute with his work, you can sense the depth and breadth of time he’s dedicated to pondering it. Moreso, the space he allows others to share theirs is quite remarkable.

What sets him apart from most others speaking about grief is the beauty he finds within, the connection loss offers to us, and these glimmers deeply resonate with me.

The following quotes are pulled from The Red Hand Files #363. I don’t normally do this, but I want to pick pieces out and respond individually. This is his reply to a reader complaining that his Red Hand Files have recently become too griefy for their taste.

What does it mean to be fully alive?

Grief demands to be heard. Actually.

Grief demands to be shared.

One of the cruelest aspects of experiencing grief in this day and age is that we don’t have the capacity, outlets, or language to receive it. We’re forced to shout it into the void of social media, looking for comfort as much as reassurance that this is truly how it’s meant to feel. Is it really meant to hurt this much? Am I doing this wrong, because people. I’m not doing okay! Why did nobody tell me this is what it actually feels like…

Notice this in social spaces. When someone publicly shares a loss, maybe that of their loved dog or a grandparent, a significant portion of the responses will be others replying with their own grief. Sure, there’s a part of them that’s trying to empathize and say, “You aren’t alone.” But a larger part is subconsciously picking up their own burden, hoping someone can show them how to carry it.

Grief is magnetized. It attracts and repels in equal measures.

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Grief’s outrageous beauty

Ooof. The man knows how to use words, doesn’t he?

What he’s beautifully describing is something I (clunkily) call “The Existential Slap.” Anyone who has experienced the death of someone they care about, or been faced with their own mortality, knows exactly what this feeling is. It’s a terrifying, clarifying moment. It doesn’t last forever. It can be quickly consumed by the business of living.

You are on the brink of life and death, looking at the world around you with unclouded vision. You see “the essence of things” and suddenly, what’s important glows and what’s bullshit dims. For a short, fleeting time you can see the truth of your life. It’s a lesson that loss offers you, and if you aren’t expecting the gift, you probably won’t recognize it.

Grief laid bare

When you fall in love, suddenly all the love songs make sense! Poetry, romance movies, cheesy cards - how do they capture exactly what you’re feeling?! To you, it feels like the most novel, unique, special time. It’s almost impossible to believe this is what other people have felt.

The same could be said for loss, grief, and bereavement.

In our self-centered culture, we no longer look to our elders for wisdom. We don’t read the thoughts of philosophers and thinkers who have built their knowledge on those who came before them. We act as though wisdom is ours to discover alone, as though we live in a vacuum and our human experience is carving a path that’s swallowed up behind us.

Grief demands to be heard, to be shared. Just as we spill our hearts in love and in grief, I believe the compulsion to share these huge human emotions is nature’s push to teach one another. Learn from me. Teach me. We aren’t in this alone! People have walked this path before.

And just as in love, the words won’t fully make sense to us until the time is right. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from them in preparation.

Fight against the half-lived life

I suppose at the root of all I do, the death work, the grief work, the rituals and mortality awareness… it’s this. A protest against a half-lived life. These things help me remember to live as fully as I can, when I can, for as long as I can. It’s my wisdom to shout out and share with the world. I’m glad to have people like Nick Cave sharing his own, and other’s, experiences so I won’t feel so isolated in mine.

I’d love to know how these words landed for you, what wisdom you’ve garnered from others that you share.

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Are we drawn to death work because of our illnesses?

I’ve got a bunch, many of which (I’ve recently learned) commonly cluster together. Mast Cell Activation Disorder, ADHD, endometriosis and adenomyosis, gluten intolerance, POTS/IST, probably a bit of hypermobility and I suspect lipedema. Allergic to a bunch of random stuff and just randomly live waiting for the next system to go haywire. Some of these things I’ve had my whole life. Others I’ve developed, or they’ve worsened, over the years.

What they all have in common is the ability to remind me that I (and all of us) experience life through a fragile, unpredictable body. I may not know what it’s like to receive a cancer diagnosis, but I do know how it feels for my body to suddenly feel foreign, like its betraying me. I do know what it’s like for life to completely shift, for the ground to disappear, while everyone else just gets to keep on living LIKE THE WORLD DIDN’T JUST COLLAPSE.

In a practical sense, I don’t know if I can actually do the 9-5, sit in an office 5 days a week thing anymore. My body won’t keep up. Death work allows me to be flexible with my time and my energy.

BTW, this is not a cause and effect type situation

Several studies have shown that 4-12% of CEOs and business leaders exhibit clinical psychopathic tendencies. Compare that to the general population, which is roughly 1%, and we’re all left to wonder: Do psychopaths become CEOs? Or do CEOs become psychopaths?

I’m not remotely saying that’s the case here. Death work, when practiced with good boundaries and support, is uplifting and life affirming. I will say it till the cows come home, the happiest people I’ve ever met are those who work with the dying.

Are we more common than we realize?

Am I happy I have these conditions? Um, no. Lost more than a few tries at the genetic lottery there… But I am grateful for the lessons they’ve taught me. I’d love to hear from anyone this resonates with!

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Rural, agricultural, undereducated and built on hard, manual labor. Caring, neighborly, insular in many ways yes, but would always stop to help you change a tire. Perched on top of a little mountain, nestled in a rolling sea of little mountains.

No one locked their front doors or cars. The small amount of crime the town experienced was domestic abuse or drunk and disorderlies, and both rare enough to rip through the gossip mill like a hay bale fire. The town diner, The Stables, was part place to go to eat when no one felt like cooking and part social gathering point. A simple dinner could take 2 hours with all the people you’d run into and catch up with.

The 4th of July caused the town to swell to ridiculous numbers. People from all over would travel for the holiday, many shaping whole summer vacations around it. The parade could take 3 hours to finish it was so jam packed with floats from Rotary, Kiwanis, local softball teams, brass bands, marching bands! Newly crowned dairy queens waving from the back of pickup trucks. Kids diving for candy. A craft fair in the town square at the end of the route. Chicken BBQ and free fireworks over the lake.

Halloween was something out of a movie, a whole town transformed into a playground for groups of costumed kids to wander about freely and safely. My mother was a popular elementary school teacher. One year we had over 500 kids stop by for trick or treating… we spent over $200 on candy and ran out.

Christmas had horse drawn carriage rides around the snowy town square. Santa in the courthouse sitting for free pictures. Food drives for the needy. Gift collections for the needy. Lights strung across the main avenue and fixed to the light poles around town. Snow fell by the foot and kids would trek around with shovels looking to earn a little money.

Hopefully you get a small picture. But this isn’t a love letter to my hometown.

And then the fracking came.

A town a few miles down the road suddenly had flammable water gushing from their taps. Rumors flew around at the gas and mineral right deals that were quietly offered to land owners. Offered and signed. Signed and deposited into the bank. This farm got this, but that farm got more because they held out a little longer or had more acres to lease. Rusted 15 year old cars were replaced by brand new, jacked pickup trucks. People who once could afford a little bit of skunky weed and cheap beer now had money for meth and more…

My sweet hometown was founded on top of one of the biggest natural gas formations in the world. And companies were offering big money to get to it.

The Norman Rockwell bubble popped. That’s to say, the landscape and substance of my charming hometown changed forever.

But this isn’t an article about the evils of fracking.

golden memories

When you fall in love, you want to show your person all the wonderful facets that make you sparkle. You want them to meet your friends, your family, to see where you grew up and understand you on new levels.

So when I fell in love with Courtney, a man from England who’d never seen my neck of the woods, I wanted to take him back to my roots. We planned a whole roadtrip up the East Coast, hitting fun spots along the way before taking a sweeping detour into Pennsylvania. Reaching my hometown, I suddenly felt defensive. Embarrassed even.

The rolling Endless Mountains were scarred by concrete derricks. Swathes of forest leveled so the gas companies could gain access to the best point to drill into the shale. Huge dump trucks and fracking water tankers rumbled along roads barely big enough for them. Their constant traffic had broken the edges of the tarmac and dug out potholes, one of which was in front of my parents house. When they hit it just right, which was pretty much every time, the windows shook.

Courtney couldn’t see my memory of the place. He saw reality, now with no frame of reference, which in turn opened my eyes to it as well. When you introduce a person to a place you’re familiar with, you can’t help but see it through their eyes.

Yes, the town was still quaint and much of it remained the same. But it was fundamentally changed.

I found myself pointing out places and saying, “This used to be…” “Before all this happened…” “I know it looks terrible now, but…”

I was trying to familiarize him with a ghost.

pitted realities

When I sit with people in their grief, I have heard similar feelings expressed.

“I know it might be hard to believe right now, but I’m actually pretty easy going.”

“Before he died, I actually put a lot of effort into my outfits.”

“I don’t want to be the ‘sad friend’ or the ‘her wife died’ friend. There’s more to me than that, but I also don’t want to hide it either!”

Grief shakes the bedrock of who we are. It scars us in ways we may not fully appreciate until we see it through another’s eyes. On top of the pain and disorientation of loss, we suddenly realize the picture of who we are inside doesn’t match the person others perceive. Especially people who meet us after the loss.

We want to drive them through the town of our lives, point to the pretty places holding pretty memories. And while they might ride along nodding at our anecdotes, their eyes catch on parts we don’t expect. The abandoned buildings. The scars we aren’t used to seeing yet, or gloss over because we know up over this rise is a beautiful spot.

Those parts exist now, whether we like them or not.

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so what now?

Eventually, through work or time or both, we integrate the different versions of before and after. Enough space stretches between what was and what now is. I hold the golden memories of my hometown close, just as I hold the memories of who I was before grief changed me. Both are dead.

The metaphor ends here, however. Grief is a natural part of life, an expected part of living with people and creatures who will die. Stripping the land for natural gas, contaminating water supplies, upending local economies… that’s all a choice.

Riding the ups and downs of life really comes down to how we carry ourselves (and others) through. You may choose to hide your grief, ashamed of who it has made you. You may be consumed by it, opting to hide yourself for fear of what you are in other people’s eyes. Or you may work to map it into the landscape of your being, acknowledging the scars that run like veins through it all.

This was a half-formed thought shared in a grief group that I wanted to fully explore here, so thank you for reading. I hope a part of this resonates with you, and maybe you can identify the fracking grief in your life.

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A mother and son, Lois and Toby. One afternoon. The result is a conversation most families never get around to; an honest conversation about life, death, mental health, and what living a "good life" looks like for them.

The full, unabridged conversation can be found on our YouTube channel.

Talking with Mortals is a show about the conversations we don’t always make time for (but probably should). Real people, real conversations, sometimes about death and grief, always about what really matters.

🃏 The Memento conversation cards used in this episode are available at goodmourningsociety.com. Use code MORTAL10 for 10% off your order.

🎵 Music by Kylie Dailey

📲 Follow us: @goodmourningsociety and @talkingwithmortals

And then the astronauts requested that a relatively new, bright crater on our moon be named Carroll in honor of Reid Wiseman’s late wife.

That sent me right over the edge. Full on ugly crying, scrambling for tissues, blurry eyes watching four weightless people hug each other.

What’s also giving me life right now is how invested the public is in this journey, and of course I wasn’t the only one touched by that historic yet human moment. Soon my social media was filled with reposts and comments, and a familiar pet peeve began to appear.

So at the risk of sounding like a complete heartless, pedantic prick… here we go.

love is not grief. grief is not love.

These are two separate emotions and I believe it does us a disservice by not acknowledging that. The love you feel for that person does not end when they die.

You know what? I’ve already talked about this. So here is my take on this very idea, recorded a few months back. I stand by it all and now I can go back to swooning over these incredibly smart, capable, emotionally competent humans.

For the last two months I’ve thrown myself into creating a show, Talking with Mortals. I’ve never done anything like this before. The only filming and editing experience I had two months ago came from social media content, which is to say… not much at all.

In the past two months I have learned:

• set staging and lighting

• videography basics

• lighting, recording, data management

• scheduling

• creating a space where people can hopefully feel safe to speak and open up while also being recorded

• post production, including audio and color adjusting

• 1,309,784 other things big and little

As you can imagine, this has been a lot. Luckily, I LOVE learning new things and get a real kick out of going from zero to semi-good. I’m also a bit of a TV and film nerd, so in the tiniest of ways I’ve gained a real appreciation for the process.

I’m now neck deep in editing the content of the episodes and one thing has been the most eye-opening…

Editors cannot be trusted

Well. I’ll put it another way.

Editors must earn trust

Anyone who has watched reality TV knows how storylines are shaped and built through editing. How else do you take dozens of hours of footage to form a 30-60min episode that isn’t just random rambling or people trying to catch popcorn flung from across the room? How else do you build drama and conflict and story arcs? Even the most desperate housewife needs a good editor or two.

I’ve always been aware of this, but now that I’m on the other side of the equation the power an editor wields is amazing to me. The participants in the Talking with Mortals episodes had perfectly normal, flowing conversations. If I wanted to however, I could manipulate the mood of those moments, or how the viewer might feel about one person compared to the other.

I’m obviously not doing that.

But I’m also so acutely aware of how easy it would be and I’m not even a novice at this shit!

The good news is

You can see exactly what I mean, if you’re so inclined. Every conversation will have two versions published on YouTube.

• One that is the shorter, edited podcast version.

• And the full conversation as it happened, with all the pauses and coughs and realness left in.

This decision to release two isn’t from some urge to create transparency for the edited version, or to cover my ass in some way!

It’s so viewers who are interested can watch real, complex human communication as it happens. Watch what feels right, what doesn’t, learn from others. If you then want to have these kinds of conversations with people you care about, you’ve seen examples of how it looks.

The happy coincidence is you also get to peek behind the curtain of editing for yourself!

Here’s a little more background into the project. I’ll also share episodes here, but if you’re more of a Spotify or YouTube person, you can find them there as well.

Anyway, back to editing for me, byeeeeeee!