Friday, Nov 5, 2021 • 51min
Listen Again: Nora McInerny: Life's Rough Edges
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When experiencing grief or hardship, how can we move forward? This hour, writer Nora McInerny shares ideas on navigating the most difficult parts of life... and living life fully in the face of loss.
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Nora McInerny
Manoush Zomorodi
Maysoon Zayid
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Break
Manoush Zomorodi
00:16
Hey, it's
Manoush
, and the holidays are nearly here. Time for eating good food and getting together with the people we love. But this time of year can also be a painful reminder of the loved ones that we have lost. And so this week we're going back to a special episode with author, speaker, and podcaster, Nora McInerny
. She's written extensively about grief and hardship and her own crazy story. Nora
is also so darn funny.Share
00:49
I got to spend an hour with her as she guided us through some of her favorite
TED
talks and she also shared her insights into how to deal with grief and maybe even laugh about it. I know it seems impossible. This episode originally aired in April. Thank you so much for listening again, or I hope you enjoy it for the first time. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Talk to you then.Share
01:16
This is the
TED
Radio Hour
. Each week, groundbreaking TED
talks.Share
01:22
Our job now is to dream big.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
01:24
Delivered at
TED
conferences-Share
01:25
To bring about the future we want to see.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
01:27
Around the world
Share
01:28
To understand who we are.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
01:30
From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.
Share
01:36
You just don't know what you're gonna find.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
01:37
Challenge you.
Share
01:38
We have to ask ourselves why is it noteworthy?
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
01:41
And even change you.
Share
01:42
I literally feel like I'm a different person.
Share
01:44
Yes.
Share
01:45
Do you feel that way?
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
01:47
Ideas worth spreading. From
TED
and NPR,
I'm Manoush Zomorodi.
Today on the show: Life's rough edges and how we deal with them.Share
02:01
Writer
Nora McInerny
has faced a lot of tragedy and hardship in her life, and she hates it when people try to make her feel better by suggesting that maybe everything happens for a reason.Share
Nora McInerny
02:15
It's the worst. To me, there will never be a reason, and not a reason good enough for my husband to die painfully and brutally at the age of 35. That will never be. I will never look at my life and say, you know, everything happens for a reason, and Aaron died so that I could be on the
TED
Radio Hour
with Manoush Zomorodi
.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
02:38
So
Nora
is the host of the podcast, Terrible, Thanks for Asking. Which shares stories from people going through some of the worst times in their lives.Share
02:50
She has been on the show before talking about her own worst moment: when her husband, Aaron, died from brain cancer, which he documented in a book and a
TED
talk called "We Don't Move on From Grief, We Move Forward with it".Share
03:05
And today, she is our guide to a series of
TED
talks about difficult and uncomfortable topics like death, and pain, disability, and even debt. What do you think Nora
? Sounds like a super fun episode right?Share
Nora McInerny
03:20
This is my ideal way to spend time,
Manoush
. This is- I was made for this conversation.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
03:26
And just for folks who maybe aren't familiar with your story or your
TED
talk, can you share it briefly just to sort of fill people in?Share
Nora McInerny
03:34
Yeah, the career that I have truly comes from my most popular piece of writing,
Manoush
, is not a single book that I've ever written. OK. It is the obituary that Aaron and I wrote together.Share
03:47
Per morte, Aaron Joseph, age 35, died peacefully at home on November 25th after complications from a radioactive spider bite. That led to years of crime-fighting and a years long battle with the nefarious criminal named cancer who has plagued our society for far too long.
Share
04:07
We wrote before he died, which was unusual. And we wrote it not knowing that it would be published. Truly, we thought, "Oh sure someone will check this", but an obituary is an ad for your death. They'll publish anything you pay for. And we did not know that. We were so delighted by that. And so many other people were too.
Share
04:24
And I got so many emails. So many messages from complete strangers after that obituary came out that I could not unsee just how unspecial I was. Just how clear it was that this thing that I felt isolated me, set me apart from all of my peers, everybody. Nobody knows how I feel.
Share
04:44
Is really- that's just what made me a part of the world. That all these people had gone through something, not the exact same thing, but they had gone through something and that, that knowing that I was not special, that was everything to me. It's that inbox, all those messages, that became the podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
05:03
What does make you different though, I would say, is that you are very good at articulating a lot of things that people might feel, but just don't know how to possibly put into words. And I think at this point, I'd love to play a clip of your
TED
talk, if that's OK.Share
Nora McInerny
05:22
I'll listen to it. I'll cringe at the sound of my own voice, like any human would.
Share
05:29
Grief is kind of one of those things like falling in love, or having a baby, or watching The Wire on HBO where you don't get it until you get it, until you do it. And once you do it, once it's your love, or your baby. Once it's your grief and your front row at the funeral, you get it.
Share
05:52
You understand what you're experiencing is not a moment in time, it's not a bone that will reset, but that you've been touched by something chronic. Something incurable. It's not fatal, but sometimes grief feels like it could be.
Share
06:08
And if we can't prevent it in one another, what can we do? What can we do other than try to remind one another that some things can't be fixed, and not all wounds are meant to heal. We need each other to remember, to help each other remember, that grief is this multitasking emotion that you can and will be sad and happy. You'll be grieving and able to love in the same year or week, the same breath.
Share
06:44
We need to remember that a grieving person is going to laugh again and smile again. If they're lucky, they'll even find love again. But yes, absolutely, they're going to move forward. But that doesn't mean that they've moved on.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
07:06
Can you talk some more about that? That last idea that moving on is not the same as moving forward because it's different, right?
Share
Nora McInerny
07:17
Oh, it's so different. And I want to note that my best work is really truly an active passive-aggression and that's what this
TED
talk was.Share
07:27
This
TED
talk was a way of, you know, saying the things that I felt like I could not say when I was really in the depths of it, and creating something that people who are in the- it really just knee-deep, neck-deep in hardship, in sorrow. Had something they could put on their Facebook
page that they could forward to somebody and say, "It feels like this. Please try to understand".Share
07:56
Because I could feel the clock ticking. I could feel the clock ticking once the funeral was over, when fewer people started checking in, or showing up when what was still an emergency situation for me — raising a very small child on my own. I still had a mortgage, I still had so much to figure out, I could feel that, you know, as people were rightfully so getting pulled back into the normalcy of their own lives, that I couldn't get there.
Share
08:27
And that part of my discomfort was making it very very uncomfortable for other people. And a few times I did hear that explicitly, right? Like, "You will move on", and all I could think of was like, "I will not. I will not", and it's words, but what those words mean is- and what they imply, and what they feel like is saying, "Someday this won't matter. Someday Aaron won't matter. Someday the father of your firstborn child, it won't matter".
Share
08:58
And it will always matter, he will always matter. And it does feel like a particularly Western. particularly American thing to to push people to move on, right? To get over it. And the minute, you know, we see somebody appearing to be normal, we assume that it's over for them.
Share
09:27
So all those people who I mentioned,
Manoush
, who had reached out to me, they were sharing stories some of these things that had happened decades before, years before, some of them were also very fresh in it like me, and they were telling me about it because the people around them hadn't asked, or assumed that it was over.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
09:47
Yeah, I guess one way that we often try to make each other — or make ourselves — feel better, is to try and rationalize like, maybe it was meant to be. Because it is kind of terrifying that bad things could happen to any of us at any moment.
Share
Nora McInerny
10:04
Yeah, I think it feels better when you're on the outside to say, "Well God, there had to be a reason, right"? It feels like you're sort of- to me that has always felt like a protective measure when you are on the outside. Like, there are certain things that just happen to other people and it's for reasons- it could be God, could be, you know, fated in some way.
Share
10:24
But when you're in it and you hear that, for me — not for everybody. Some people I think truly do find comfort and everything happens for a reason — But most of the people, if not all that I've ever spoken to, really cite that as one of the most painful things.
Share
10:40
You know, I have a friend who lost her son to suicide and there was another person in her parish whose son had fallen into a river and she had run, she had scooped him up. She'd saved him and everybody was rushing to say like, "Oh, that's- you know, God had a plan for him".
Share
10:57
And what does that say to the people who who lost their sons, or their mothers, or their children, or their jobs, or their sense of security? I can't love or believe in a God who says like, "Well you get a Tesla, and you get a tumor". I can't roll with the God, who's, who's that crappy of a planner. That just does not feel, does not feel good to me.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
11:22
So you were getting all this somewhat lousy advice when you were grieving the loss of your husband. And is that why your podcast tries to do kind of the exact opposite? Like, you bring people on who have been through all sorts of hardship, and you just let them tell their stories. I want to share a clip from a recent episode. I'm thinking of the show called "A Simple Choice" with a guy named Mark. Can you tell us a little bit about Mark First?
Share
Nora McInerny
11:49
Mark is one of those stories where if you were writing it as a piece of fiction, if you were writing this as a screenplay, everybody who read it would say, "I'm sorry, this- no one's going to believe this. It's just too much too much".
Share
12:04
Mark's story is that he lost his mother to cancer when he was very young. So he sort of postponed college to stay home with her, and then he married his high school sweetheart. And was always afraid always sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it did because his worst nightmare happened. His wife died too.
Share
12:30
I wasn't even in the room the moment she took her last breath. It was- I just spent a bunch of time with her on my own in there and then just kind of like I had no idea what to do with myself. I ran out into the hallway and just walked around.
Share
12:48
I don't even know- like I can't pinpoint what I actually was doing or thinking at that time. It was just all a blur. After the memorial, I pretty much just took off and traveled by myself off and on for like five months. Just here and there.
Share
Nora McInerny
13:13
And who could blame him? Who would blame him? There's a very famous book by the rabbi
Harold S. Kushner
called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Because Kushner
is a religious leader, you kind of expect him to say, "Hey, it's God's plan".Share
13:30
But he kind of says the opposite, which is probably why people love this book. He says, and this is a quote, "Why do we have to insist on everything being reasonable? Why must everything happen for a specific reason? Why can't we let the universe have a few rough edges?"
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
13:49
On the show today: Life's Rough Edges. In a minute, we'll return with writer
Nora McInerny
as she guides us through her favorite TED
talks that have helped her get through tough moments. It is an absolute delight in the most brutal way.Share
14:09
I'm
Manoush Zomorodi
and you're listening to the TED
Radio Hour
from NPR.
Stay with us.Share
Break
Manoush Zomorodi
16:00
It's the
TED
Radio Hour
from NPR
. I'm Manoush Zomorodi
. on the show today we are talking about life's rough edges with writer Nora McInerny
. She's sharing a selection of her favorite talks, ones that deal with grief and people's hardest moments, sort of Nora's
specialty.Share
16:19
You know, the premise of your podcast is in the very title: Terrible, Thanks for Asking. The idea that you don't always have to be super positive, which really kicks us off. It brings us to the first talk you chose to share with us from psychologist
Susan David,
and it's called the Gift and Power of Emotional Courage. OK, so why this one?Share
Nora McInerny
16:41
I think that
Susan-
I'm just going to give Susan
a little hype here. I think that Susan
was ahead of all of the times. I think that Susan
has been a one woman drumbeat against toxic positivity for far longer than people have been willing to acknowledge that phrase.Share
17:00
She has this very, very powerful notion of not categorizing feelings as good or bad. Because people love to- we love labels, we love categorizing. But it also makes some feelings less appealing, and therefore quote unquote "less valuable" than others.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
17:17
And that is exactly she explains in her upbringing, that before she became a psychologist she was a teenager growing up in
South Africa,
and she had a very sick father. And she tells the story of how she handled it.Share
Susan David
17:33
My father died on a Friday. He was 42 years old, and I was 15. My mother whispered to me to go and say goodbye to my father before I went to school. So I put my backpack down and walked the passage that ran through to where the heart of our home, my father lay dying of cancer.
Share
17:50
I told him I loved him, said goodbye and headed off for my day. At school, I drifted from science to mathematics, to history, to biology as my father slipped from the world.
Share
18:03
From May to July to September to November, I went about with my usual smile. I didn't drop a single braid. When asked how I was doing, I would shrug and say "OK". I was praised for being strong. I was the master of being OK, refusing to accept the full weight of my grief. No one knew, and in a culture that values relentless positivity, I thought that no one wanted to know.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
18:33
So
Susan,
as a teenager, showed her stiff upper lip, you just got on with it. I have to say that that is definitely the culture I grew up with. How about you, Nora
?Share
Nora McInerny
18:46
I mean, I grew up in the midwest and for me, especially with grief, it ended at a funeral. And that's something that I see in a lot of these conversations I have with people, which is if you have not seen grief, if it has not been explained to you as a long term chronic condition, you won't know how to do it, and you will think that something is wrong with you when you are just having a very human reaction to a human situation.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
19:14
You touched on it a little bit, but she even goes as far as to call it toxic optimism, as you said. And this idea that literally you're poisoning yourself by not having- acknowledging your own darker feelings. And she actually shares her research and other studies that suggest that not confronting your uncomfortable feelings can manifest in ways, in physical ways like the eating disorder that she mentions, or depression, anxiety. Let's play that clip.
Share
Susan David
19:48
In a survey I recently conducted with over 70,000 people, I found that a third of us, a third, either judge ourselves for having so-called bad emotions like sadness, anger, or even grief, or actively try to push aside to these feelings.
Share
20:11
We do this not only to ourselves, but also to people we love, like our children. We may inadvertently shame them out of emotions seen as negative, jump to solution, and fail to help them to see these emotions as inherently valuable. Normal, natural emotions are now seen as good or bad, and being positive has become a new form of moral correctness.
Share
20:41
People with cancer are automatically told to "Just stay positive". Women to "stop being so angry", and the list goes on. It's a tyranny. It's a tyranny of positivity and it's cruel, unkind, and ineffective. And we do it ourselves and we do it to others.
Share
21:09
Research on emotional suppression shows that when emotions are pushed aside or ignored, they get stronger. Internal pain always comes out. Always. And who pays the price? We do. Our children, our colleagues, our communities.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
21:32
Oof, that one just hit me in the gut. I was thinking of one of my kids, you know, being down in the dumps because
Covid
and stuck at home, and can't see friends, and me being like, "Come on, it's fine. We have to do all these amazing things today. It's OK, let's go for a walk". And you know, I feel bad when my kid feels bad, so I push it away, but that clearly is not always terribly helpful.Share
Nora McInerny
22:00
I mean, it's also a very human thing,
Manoush
. Like, what do we want to do? We want to be able to fix things. We want to be able to fix things, especially for the people we love, especially when the people we love are adorable, wonderful children who also, you know, are like slightly and greatly you're like, "Well, do you like having a house?" You know, like "Could be worse".Share
22:24
I mean, you know, like I remember telling my dad something like, I don't know, I was like criticizing him about something and he was like, "Oh I'm sorry, I didn't realize that, you know, keeping you alive for 18 years wasn't enough".
Share
22:38
And I was like, "Oh geez, OK. You know, when you say it that way, pretty good point. Pretty good point dad."
Share
22:42
But you know what I hear from
Susan
is that hurt people hurt people. And guess what? We do. If you are not given the space to process your feelings, like when she said "it comes out", like oh it comes out. Think about all of the experiences that you've had with a person, you know, where you're like, "I'm sorry, why are you- Ma'am? This is a Wendy's", like why are you losing your mind?Share
23:09
And there's some unmet need there, right? Like there's something. It's not about the Frosty, it's just not.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
23:18
Can I just ask you, like, I wonder how much- do we need institutions in some way to change our culture of dealing with loss? Like, I found it so interesting that I think just a couple weeks ago,
New Zealand's
parliament unanimously passed a law enabling parents who have a miscarriage or a stillbirth to take paid bereavement leave.Share
23:44
I mean, a lot of people just get on with it,
Nora
, because they have to. They have to, as you say like, pay the mortgage. They gotta go to work and just- there's no time to grieve.Share
Nora McInerny
23:54
We need much better systems, at least in the US where you know the standard bereavement leave is 3-5 business days. Which meant that my dad was- you know, I was back at work Monday after his funeral, you know, making powerpoints, doing the business stuff that I needed to do.
Share
24:12
And I was also not fully there, not fully present, not OK, and definitely also needed a job and needed to work. And it will always be struck at how that was a privilege because that was something I had because I had a full time job with benefits.
Share
24:32
But my friend who cuts hair for a living, our husbands died very close together. She was back in the chair after her husband's suicide 7 days after, because you don't cut hair, you don't get paid. You don't get paid, how do you pay your mortgage? And that to me is atrocious.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
24:48
Just to go back to
Susan,
she continues her story about the one person in her life who really does get her to face just how sad she is as a child. Let's play that clip.Share
Susan David
25:03
My 8th grade English teacher fixed me with burning blue eyes as she handed out blank notebooks. She said, "Write what you're feeling. Tell the truth, write like nobody's reading", and just like that, I was invited to show up authentically to my grief and pain.
Share
25:24
It was a simple act, but nothing short of a revolution for me. It was this revolution that started in this blank notebook 30 years ago that shaped my life's work. The secret silent correspondence with myself. Like a gymnast, I started to move beyond the rigidity of denial into what I've now come to call "emotional agility". Tough emotions are part of our contract with life.
Share
25:58
You don't get to have a meaningful career, or raise a family, or leave the world a better place without stress and discomfort. Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
26:14
Nora
, emotional agility. Do you interpret that phrase as having the language to talk about your grief or your problems? I know you're a big believer in using language to really pinpoint particular feelings, but do you think it's more than that?Share
Nora McInerny
26:31
I think it's the language piece, and it's the ability to sit with and feel and experience all of your emotions. And I think
Susan
called it, you know, a form of self-gaslighting that she describes of saying like, "Oh well I shouldn't feel that feeling" Right? "I shouldn't feel jealous. Oh I shouldn't feel upset",Share
26:55
When really, if you can identify your emotions as data which is something that she says "Your emotions are telling you what's important to you. It's telling you what you value".
Share
27:04
So she and I had this conversation where she was obviously reading my soul. Deeply attacking me, where she's like, "Well, if you feel guilty, right, about not about not spending enough time with your kids, that tells me and tells you you value- one of your values is spending time with your children. Like, what is wrong with that?"
Share
27:26
It is not just language, but also like, the permission to give yourself the space to feel things and to trace that feeling back to something.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
27:38
Yeah, we talked about toxic optimism as
Susan
puts it, but you know, I was thinking, I recently read about something called tragic optimism, which really struck me. Yeah, it's not good, it was it's from an Austrian psychologist who is a holocaust survivor who- this idea that there is space to have good and bad feelings, that life is hard, as she puts it, and you can be hopeful and also feel painShare
28:10
Yes, all of it, all of it, you can and you will, it's the But wait, there's more. My dad was an infomercial writer, it's- you know, "Wait, there's more" for you know, for very difficult payments for the rest of your life, you will feel all this and more. And you will put it in this quiet blender and shake it up, and there's your life.
Share
28:34
Okay, so continuing with this idea of life-containing multitudes. The next talk is from
Maysoon Zayid
, she's a writer, an actor, a comedian, she's a co-founder of the New York Arab-American comedy festival, which is pretty cool.Share
28:53
She also has cerebral palsy and
Maysoon
is very frank about her disability. Her talk is called "I got 99 problems, palsy is just one".Share
Maysoon Zayid
29:04
My name is
Maysoon Zayid
and I am not drunk, but the doctor who delivered me was. He cut my mom six different times in six different directions.Share
29:19
Suffocating poor little me in the process. As a result, I have cerebral palsy which means I shake all the time. Look, it's exhausting. I'm like Shakira, Shakira meets
Muhammad Ali
. Now, I must warn you, I'm not inspirational. I don't want anyone in this room to feel bad for me. Because at some point in your life, you have dreamt of being disabled.Share
29:52
Come on a journey with me. It's Christmas Eve. You're at the mall, you're driving around in circles looking for parking and what do you see? 16 empty handicapped spaces. And you're like, "God, can't I just be a little disabled?"
Share
30:14
Also I got to tell you: I got 99 problems, and palsy is just one. If there was an oppression olympics, I would win the gold medal. I'm Palestinian, muslim, I'm female, I'm disabled, and I live in
New Jersey
. If you don't feel better about yourself, maybe you should.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
30:39
All right. She's one of a kind.
Share
Nora McInerny
30:43
She really is, she is so good.
Share
Manoush Zomorodi
30:45
I mean, this is a very different way of using humor to talk about pain that she felt. What are your thoughts as you're listening to this,
Nora
?Share
Nora McInerny
30:55
I mean, I always now I am concerned about, you know, is somebody trimming away the dark parts just for entertainment? But what I think
Maysoon
does so well is use the light parts to pull people in to the pain. And she does that so deftly.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
31:14
Yeah, she talks about winning the oppression olympics and I mean, it's funny, but also it's on the nose because we do often turn hardship kind of into a competition like comparing the terrible things that have happened to us, almost ranking them.
Share
Nora McInerny
31:30
Brilliant, right? That's what we're talking about. Like, she completely identified that. And I think there is a sliding scale of empathy. So if you feel like empathy is a finite resource and you didn't get enough of it when you were struggling, to watch somebody else get it can be very, very difficult. I remember right after Aaron died making the huge mistake of reading the comments on a
Facebook
post about his obituary.Share
31:59
And so many of the comments were like, "Well my husband died. No one gave a crap", you know and "Well, who cares? You know, people die every day". And I was so injured and also I understood. I understood because I was getting a lot of attention, and most people their suffering is quiet and invisible and I experienced this with- I mentioned my friend earlier whose husband died by suicide.
Share
32:32
My husband died by brain cancer. And we have- our children are very similar ages, and you know, we took a trip together with our young children and people would ask right, like, we get to talking, "Oh well our husbands are dead." Oh, how did they die? Well, when I say brain cancer, the response is always the same. You know. "Oh, that's horrible".
Share
32:55
Oh, that's horrible. My friend whose husband died of suicide experiences "Oh, he's horrible. What he did is horrible" or you know,
Edith Eger
? she's a holocaust survivor and and a psychotherapist, or maybe a psychologist. I don't remember, she's a therapist of some kind.Share
33:14
And when people would come to see her, they'd say like, "Oh, I can't complain about my marriage. Like, you survived the holocaust". And she's like, "One, it's my job. And two, it's not a comparison, right?"
Share
33:26
Like, it's not- these things don't have to- we don't have to weigh them against each other. I don't have like, a yardstick for what is worse, but we do, back to that categorization thing — We don't just want to categorize our feelings as good or bad. We want to categorize our experiences and then rank them, right?
Share
33:45
And you can rank your own experiences for sure. I can tell you that, you know, my husband dying was way, way worse than when I fell down the stairs in the gym in high school and my backpack spilled open, and in ninth grade, that was the worst day of my life. Now, not so much. But we can't do it to each other. No one wins that game, and who would want to?
Share
34:10
In just a minute, we continue the conversation with writer
Nora McInerny
about comedian Maysoon Zayid's
talk. On the show today: Life's rough edges. I'm Manoush Zomorodi
and you're listening to the TED
Radio Hour
from NPR
. Stay with us.Share
Break
Manoush Zomorodi
36:14
It's the
TED
Radio Hour
from NPR,
I'm Manoush Zomorodi
. Today on the show: Life's rough edges.Share
36:21
We were just talking to writer
Nora McInerny
about comedian Maysoon Zayid's
TED
talk, "I got 99 problems and palsy is just one". Maysoon
speaks very bluntly about her disability and how it's been a long struggle to prove that she's talented.Share
Maysoon Zayid
36:38
I was like the pet lemur of the theater department. Everybody loved me. I did all the less than intelligent kids' homework. I got As in all of my classes, As in all of their classes.
Share
36:52
Every time I did a scene from
The Glass Menagerie
, my professors would weep. But I never got cast. Finally, my senior year, ASU decided to do a show called They Dance Real Slow in Jackson. It's a play about a girl with CP
, I was a girl with CP.
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37:12
So I start shouting from the rooftops, "I'm finally going to get part, I have cerebral palsy. Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I am free at last."
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37:24
I didn't get the part.
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37:27
Sherry Brown got the part. I went racing to the head of the theater department crying hysterically like someone shot my cat to ask her why, and she said it was because they didn't think I could do the stunt. I said "Excuse me, if I can't do the stunt, neither can the character."
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37:47
This was a part that I was literally born to play, and they gave it to a non-palsy actress. College was imitating life. Hollywood has a sordid history of casting able-bodied actors to play disabled on screen.
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38:08
People with disabilities are the largest minority in the world, and we are the most underrepresented in entertainment.
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Nora McInerny
38:17
I imagine her having this experience with people who knew her, who worked with her, learned alongside of her, wept at her performances, and you see them also not see her in so many ways. I cringe and I think about where have I done that? And where am I doing this? Like, what deep harm are we doing when we can't see what someone is going through?
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Manoush Zomorodi
38:45
That is a very good point because obviously it
Maysoon
is very visible. And in fact, she starts her talk by standing up and showing the audience how her body shakes which kind of shocked me at first.Share
38:60
But I thought also that is so generous. Because I think we- many of us are very uneducated about this particular disability, about so many disabilities. But you make a very good point that you know, there are so many disabilities that are not visible, whether that is mental illness or depression, PTSD, I mean it goes back to your empathy scale, right? Like, how much empathy do we have for people or for hardship that is not visible?
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Nora McInerny
39:32
Well not much. Not much.
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39:35
It's obviously like much easier to address and talk about and acknowledge and empathize with the things that we can see. And I don't know what the answer is to cure this, you know, the world of being dummies. Which is like, when I hear
Maysoon's
talk again, I think like "What dumb harmful stuff have I done or perpetuated without knowing, based on not being able to like, be humble enough to ask a question or give people space to tell me what they need?"Share
40:13
By the way, and questions are like, why are you asking the question? Are you asking for that person, or are you asking for yourself? That's how I think about it, you know? And so what questions have I asked only for myself and not for that person, and where do I lack humility?
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Manoush Zomorodi
40:32
I wanna go back to this idea of the things that are not visible that are causing people grief, pain, or loss, and I think the last talk that you've chosen is actually- might surprise people. But it is perfectly on topic because it's about the things we don't talk about, which is people's financial situation.
Share
40:54
The talk is called "How college loans exploit students for profit" and it's from
Penn State
Professor Sajay Samuel. You have a college student in your life, I believe, Nora
?Share
Nora McInerny
41:08
Yes, yes, we've got a college freshman here.
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Manoush Zomorodi
41:11
So college is expensive.
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Nora McInerny
41:14
College is expensive. College is expensive and you know, like many students, there was not money to save for him to go to college. So we are helping with the expenses that we can, but he chose his college based on affordability, based on the absolute lowest price point.
Share
41:32
And we are talking him through these really big life decisions, which is You're 19, you can go live on campus but you will be taking out a pretty big loan to pay for, you know, $14,000 worth of room and board. Would you like to do that, or would you like to live at home with us and your little brothers and your little sister?
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Manoush Zomorodi
41:56
All right, let's hear from Professor Samuel about the effects of people, you know 18 years old taking on debt.
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Sajay Samuel
42:05
Of 100 people who enroll in any form of post-secondary education, 45 do not complete it in a timely fashion, for a number of reasons, including financial. Of the 55 that do graduate, 2 will remain unemployed, and another 18 are underemployed. So college grads earn more than high school grads, but does it pay for the exorbitant tuition and the lost wages while at college?
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42:34
Now, even economists admit going to college pays off for only those who are completed, but that's only because high school wages have been cut to the bone for decades now. For decades, workers with a high school degree have been denied a fair share of what they have been, what they have produced, and had they received as they should have, then going to college would have been a bad investment for many.
Share
43:06
College premium? Ah, I think it's a high school discount.
Share
43:11
2 out of 3 people who enroll are not going to find an adequate job. And the future for them doesn't look particularly promising. In fact, downright bleak. And it is they who are going to suffer the most punishing forms of student debt.
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Manoush Zomorodi
43:29
Do you hear from a lot of listeners about debt, and particularly college debt?
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Nora McInerny
43:35
Oh yeah, millennials, gen x. I mean, we are all sold the same dream that Professor Samuel said or mentioned, which is the way to get on that upward escalator in life is college, college, college. Since we were in kindergarten, everyone's talking about going to college and you have to go to a good college, and what does that even mean?
Share
43:56
But
Manoush
, I picked this talk because I know so many people, so many brilliant, wonderful people who will- it feels like never be out from under their college debt.Share
44:08
People who were marketed to, from a very young age, told that this is the way to like, get up in the world, get ahead in the world, who took on immense debt without truly understanding what it means, and what the impacts would be, believing that this would be the ticket to something else. When really what it's the ticket to is like a crushing load of debt.
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44:34
And these are my peers, these are my friends, this is my husband, both my husbands. It does not have to be like this, but it is. And what it does is it makes you feel like a loser. It makes you feel like something is wrong with you, and there's nothing wrong with you. You participated in the great mirage of American ideals.
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Manoush Zomorodi
44:54
So we have talked about shame, or the shame that comes with having debt on the show before and it's not just college debt, it's having a mortgage, it's health insurance, medical costs, which is something else that you've had to deal with a lot, right?
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Nora McInerny
45:09
Oh, all of it. When my husband died, he was 35 years old. And it is so expensive to die. It is so expensive to be sick. We worked up until the very end, and I'm not kidding. And I- we had nothing. What we had was an online fundraiser. This is 2014. To help pay for bills, to help pay for a funeral. A funeral is so expensive.
Share
45:37
I didn't even feed people, I did like, beer and wine and like, light desserts. And then I get hammered. And it was a huge safety net, Manoush. A safety net made by like friends and family, but mostly strangers. And I was so ashamed of it. I was so ashamed of knowing and having other people know that I couldn't do this. And there's nothing fair about that. Nothing.
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Manoush Zomorodi
46:06
Oh, you know, I think money is so sensitive. So sensitive and taboo to people. So what would your advice be to someone who is going through a huge financial crisis in addition to dealing with other sorts of pain and trauma? Like, what do you tell people?
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Nora McInerny
46:27
I tell them that there's no timeline. That there's no rush. That there's no good way to do it or no right way to do it and that, you know, I often hear from people who are like, "You know, my dad died 3 days ago, but I think I'm doing pretty well."
Share
46:43
Like, great. Just wait. You know, like today you're doing well and that's fine, and also, and wait for it, because there's going to be more.
Share
46:57
And you know, Terrible, Thanks for Asking is 100% just wish-fulfillment from the year after Aaron's death when I was like, "I'm good, I'm fine. Never been better. Look at me go, I'm wearing lipstick. I'm, you know, I'm running a half marathon, you'd never know". My husband's death made me better. And what I really wish that I would have told people is that I was awful.
Share
47:18
I was terrible. It was horrible. It was the most numbing and the most excruciating pain I'd ever been in. And not everybody deserves the truth, but some people do. And the people who truly care about you, who want to be there for you, when they ask, you got to tell them the truth, you have to tell them the truth. So that they can give you whatever they're capable of giving you.
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Manoush Zomorodi
47:41
So that's like a big question. I think over the past year, a lot of us have had loss. But also a lot of us want to express our condolences to other people and really mean it, but it can be so hard. It can be awkward. Like, what is the best way to say "I'm sorry for your loss" Or show that you care, and like have it count,
Nora
.Share
Nora McInerny
48:02
Have it count. Have it count. First of all, you never know. You never know because we are unknowable creatures. And so the thing that you are like, you know what? This helped me so much, I'll do it for somebody else.
Share
48:14
Somebody can receive that in a completely different way, and what you have to remember is that has nothing to do with you, and that's OK, right? And I tell people like, to do what you can do and what you will do. With the caveat that that has to be consistently if you can, competently always, and humbly.
Share
48:35
So I woke up after Aaron's funeral and it was
Minnesota
in December, so much snow. And I heard footsteps on my roof and I was not alarmed because I often looked out my window and saw my neighbor Mark on his roof. He would sweep off the extra snow.Share
48:53
You know, he was trying to prevent ice dams on his own house and now he was on my roof, sweeping snow off so that I wouldn't have an ice dam. I would never volunteer to do that for somebody. But that's what Mark could do, right? That was like, that was in his like, in his expertise. It's what he was willing to do.
Share
49:13
What I'm saying is like when you do something, it's not generous if you're counting the cost. If you're counting your time, if you're counting your money. So make it a thing that you just will do and that you can do. And then you just keep doing it without expectation from the person who's receiving it.
Share
49:33
And also with the openness that they could say, I really actually, I hate carrot cake, don't you ever bring a carrot cake to my house again. And you say, "Oh yeah, no problem, no problem."
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Manoush Zomorodi
49:43
So I think that brings me to my last question, which is what do you say to the person who's listening right now, who is grieving? Whether I mean, I feel like inevitably that is potentially anyone who's listening because of the last year, whether it's because they lost someone or they lost their job or they feel like they just lost out, because life changed so radically. What would you say to them? Like, you must have gotten some good advice during your grieving process. What would you share?
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Nora McInerny
50:19
Oh, I got such beautiful advice, I got such beautiful advice because it wasn't advice. The best advice I got was not people telling me what to do. Was not people telling me a platitude or something that they thought would cure or fix it. It was people who could recognize and contextualize the loss.
Share
50:44
In the aftermath of losing Aaron, I got an email from my friend Mary Balcombe who really is my mom's friend but you know, my friend too now. Now that I'm now that I'm widowed, I can be friends with any older woman. And Mary is, you know, she had lost her husband and she lost her son in very, very close succession much like I lost my husband and my father died right before Aaron did.
Share
51:12
And she wrote me an email truly dashed off from her work email and it said, "Norah, I believe we have a sacred responsibility to live fully in the face of our losses period return return. It's a bitch though."
Share
51:29
I just signed her name, sent it off and I thought like, "Wow, isn't it? Isn't that just the best summary that you have heard about about moving forward?"
Share
51:44
Just like, it is a sacred responsibility to live fully in the face of our losses right to, to wake up to, you know, appreciate what we have alongside the longing for what we have lost. And it is sacred, and it's a bitch. It sucks. Don't let anybody tell you it doesn't suck to wake up in a bed where the person who loved you more than anybody else used to sleep.
Share
52:14
Don't let anybody tell you that it doesn't suck to have to like, you know, look- walk through
Target
through a whole Mother's Day section and realize like, "I won't be a mother". Whatever the loss that you are carrying, like, you can hold those two things. That you have this sacred responsibility and it's so hard. But it doesn't make you anything other than a person who is experiencing life.Share
Manoush Zomorodi
52:43
That's
Nora McInerny
. She's an author and host of the podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking. You can see her full talk and all of the talks from this hour at TED. com.Share
52:58
Many thanks to
Nora
and to you for being with us for this hour about life's rough edges. To learn more about the talks on today's show, go to TED. npr. org, and to see Nora's
talk, along with hundreds more TED
talks, check out TED
. com or the TED
app.Share
53:17
Our
TED
radio production staff at NPR
includes Jeff Rogers, Sanaz Meshkinpour, Rachel Faulkner, Deba Motisham, James Delahoussaye, JC Howard, Katie Monteleone, Maria Pazgutierrez, Christina Cala, and Matthew Cloutier, with help from Daniel Shuqin.Share
53:34
Our intern is Janet Eugene Lee. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at
TED
are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Phelan, and Michelle Quint. I'm Manoush Zomorodi
, and you've been listening to the TED
Radio Hour
from NPR
.Share
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Manoush Zomorodi
Nora McInerny
Susan David
Maysoon Zayid
Sajay Samuel