We Can Do Hard Things

Kate Bowler is the only one we can trust to tell us the truth.

What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger.

What doesn't kill you, we'll try again tomorrow.

But imagine how strong you'd be if you hadn't been abused.

Failing to love what is present and deciding to love what is possible instead.

And because I was like, I need to, for instance, I was like, I need to stop this war right now. Like we need to do something big. They're like, but small is all. And you know that that's how change happens is relationships. And you know that you have to create more possibilities.

They're just like, we're going to use it. And I'm like, I'm going to use it. And then I'm like, I'm going to use it. And then I'm like, I'm going to use it. And I'm like, you're like, that sounds really smart. No, this is really helpful idea.

It's really helpful. This is great. And then bringing that into family where it's like my sister, you know, you talk about fugitivity and I'm just like, oh yeah, we are living in a family of people living in the South with white family. They're still struggling with race, struggling with what it actually means to be a white person.

And freaking The Case for Christ, I'll never forget opening.

roomy and hafiz and neruda and ekkertol and freaking The Case for Christ

So I went to this place and I went into a bookstore and I picked up this book called The Untethered Soul.

And the message of this book just took hold for the first time, which I realized and we'll talk through how throughout this unfolding of the book.

But what I realized through reading this book and it took kind of this true mental rock bottom to grasp the message that was, I don't have a crazy voice that I have to ignore and the sane voice that I have to listen to in my head. All the voices in my head are crazy. And I have to listen to none of them.

To me, what Michael Singer in The Untethered Soul, and everybody talks about this, right? This is just the one way he presented it in that moment spoke to me, but people have been talking about this for millennia, right?

So Singer calls it the inner roommate.

I started reading everything, you know, untethered soul again. I read it a decade ago and was like, okay, now it's blowing my mind.

I read My Grandmother's Hands a long time ago and it blew my mind, which is I think was your point to be getting people out of their minds.

And now I understand it completely differently because I have been in and out of recovery for 30 years.

So I just keep thinking, okay, I got it now. I know how I'm thinking about this. It's just patriarchy. It's diet culture. It's big pharma. It's wine culture. I've got it. And then I keep not getting cured.

This last round of recovery, I have finally through tons of therapy and whatever allowed it to drop into my body, the recovery and understand that. I don't even know if it's an understanding feel that my problem is just in my past and my parents and their parents in their parents, in the culture.

And it's like all living in my body. So your work to me, it's like our world has all of these terrible symptoms, whack-a-mole symptoms, just what we see the violence, the racism, the wars, the genocides.

I read in My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Manakkem where he says something like they think they're coming to me for answers, but they really come to sit with someone who has a settled nervous system.

And their new book is called What It Takes to Heal and it is so good and so beautiful and so important.

The new book especially feels like a gift to everyone who might be what you call in the book a transitional character.

It's about the person that breaks generational cycles. It's like, I'm not allowing this to go forward.

I think a lot of the people who listen to this podcast are transitional characters.

It's the kind of journey. It's the arc of transformation as we call it. It's practical. Yeah. It's practical.

And their new book is called What It Takes to Heal, and I would not be exaggerating to say that maybe 10 of the people that I respect the most have sent me screenshots saying you have read this, right? You have read this.

I feel like you gave us permission to be small in the book.

And I was thinking about that because it wasn't until I allowed the possibility that I was small, that I was vulnerable, all of these concepts, it wasn't until I allowed that to be a part of how I understood myself that I actually felt like I could tap into my actual power in the world.

Their work and writing have appeared in the New York Times, Huffington Post, You Are Your Best Thing, edited by Tarana Burke and Brene Brown and Holding Change by Adrienne Marie Brown, who you all know, pod squad.

And this wild thing happened, which is that I started opening a huge box of books and it was full of Rumi and Hafiz and Neruda and Eckhart Tolle and freaking The Case for Christ, I'll never forget opening.

For me it's a it's poetry so like Walt Whitman does it for me Emily Dickinson does it for me Mary Oliver does it for me Rumi and Hafiz do it for me I feel like they they were directly channeling the divine like they were mystics who were directly channeling the divine and they were generous enough to leave the door open behind them so you're almost drafting in on them so you prime yourself into that state of being by reading something that feels to you like it comes from that place

I will help you and you and I made this appointment there's this beautiful poem by Hafiz the great Persian mystic who said long ago before the earth's crust cooled is how long I think it was long long ago God circled this place on the map where you are standing right now you are just exactly where you're supposed to be and and people want you to do this they're calling for you they're like we want sister um because they identify with you because so many people out there are sisters they're like I can't relax I can't trust they want to see how love comes to you so they can believe that it could come to them I think that you're gonna find it a lot easier than you think Lizzie

My mom, Marion Robinson said we are here as parents to raise individuals and we have to be thinking along those lines.

We will always like you here.

I knew she always would have my back.

And we had no money. My parents didn't go to college. They didn't have networks. They didn't have any of that, but they had that enoughness, that enoughness in themselves to be confident that what was going on at 74, 36 South Euclid was just as powerful as what might have been going on in the White House or somebody else's nicer house. That our world was secure because we had love and respect for each other.

To me, that's a better tool than being hurt or being afraid or shying away from the negative things in the world inevitably has waiting for our kids out there in the world.

Well, that's a beautiful way to start because I introduced my dad in Becoming. But this book allowed me to really dive into the lessons that both he and my mom have taught me that keep me upright.

I talk in Becoming about the decision I made to walk away from a very lucrative corporate law career to work in the city and then nonprofits.

And as I said in Becoming, we are always evolving. The journey, that evolutionary process never ends.

What I'm asking people to do is to author their own version of womanhood, their own version of manhood, their own version of gender. And so it's less to me about the destination as much as it is about the practice of questioning.

I don't think that I want people to have faith in the gender binary when I'm saying is being a man or being a woman does not mean replicating the binary structure. I'm saying that it is possible to actually come to your own definition of womanhood outside of a binary structure and I think if cis folks are interested in that look at the testimonies of trans people, trans people who are in many ways very literate about what's wrong with the gender binary, what's wrong with assigned the course of gender who's some still identify as man and woman. I don't think that those people are replicating the gender binary for being that. I think that they've actually done this work to actually say where I feel most beautiful is in this place.

I just got word that the Texas state legislature where I'm from has included a politician, there's included my book, 'Beyond the Gender Binary', and a list of 850 books to ban in Texas public education.

Dr. Ford's memoir which I absolutely loved and finished in one day, it's called One Way Back and it's available now.

Thank you for changing the world that way for us and thank you for One Way Back. It was so beautiful.

And then afterward, I started getting a lot of correspondence from people particularly survivors. And then I started to identify as a survivor and feel connected to this huge community. It's an epidemic. I think 25% of the people who wrote to me wrote their story in a letter and shared it and many of them were sharing it for the first time and had never told anyone.

Reading your book, Glemmon, was actually really helpful when I was getting over a lot of these things in the aftermath that you knew you were going to have to do something difficult and you don't exactly know how it's going to play out and what you're going to do and how it's going to work and so I really resonated when I was listening to your book and it seemed like your story was almost my story right even though there weren't anything alike in the context but that idea that you know something has happened that's going to change your life forever and it's going to affect other people around you but and it's going to happen but you just don't know yet exactly how.

I talk about this because the same words were said by my therapist and by my boss like you don't owe anyone anything and many people said they're going to ruin your life and things like that but they're going to ruin your life as a little abstract so I didn't really get that I just thought oh well that's okay you know I'm not gonna see the people and if they call me the B word or whatever it'll just be like a tree falling in some forest and I won't know about it so I kind of underestimated what that was gonna look like but the we don't owe anyone anything it just never resonated with me I couldn't quite get it so I never really internalize that and maybe I should internalize it a little more but if we don't owe anyone anything we don't owe each other anything it just seems then we're not a community I think a community is we do owe each other something but also if I was younger I don't know that I would have felt that way I'm an adult and I feel like why you know I've had a great life and I'm only one life so if they ruin one life then and it helps a bunch of other people then yeah I just couldn't really make sense of the you don't owe anyone anything.

Dr. Ford's memoir, which I absolutely loved and finished in one day, it's called One Way Back, and it's available now.

Thank you for changing the world that way for us, and thank you from One Way Back. It was so beautiful.

Reading your book, Glennon, was actually really helpful when I was getting over a lot of these things in the aftermath.

And it seemed like your story was almost my story, right? Even though they weren't anything alike in the context.

I'm pretty honest in the book about, well, if this had happened in my workplace, I don't even know what I would have done.

She is the author of three novels: Stern Men, THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS, and CITY OF GIRLS.

She is the author of three novels, Stern Men, The Signature of All Things and City of Girls.