How To Talk To Yourself When Things Suck | Sam Sanders

Summary

**Podcast Summary: "How To Talk To Yourself When Things Suck | Sam Sanders"
10% Happier with Dan Harris
Release Date: December 11, 2024

In this deeply moving episode of "10% Happier with Dan Harris," host Dan Harris engages in a profound conversation with award-winning reporter and podcaster Sam Sanders, who brings along his wife, Bianca Harris, to discuss navigating the tumultuous waters of grief. Titled "How To Talk To Yourself When Things Suck," the episode delves into personal loss, self-compassion, and the transformative power of internal dialogue.

Introduction to the Conversation

Dan Harris sets the stage by highlighting the significant impact that our internal conversations have on our happiness and relationships. He emphasizes the possibility of retraining our inner critic to foster a healthier self-dialogue, supported by research from experts like Kristen Neff and Ethan Cross.

Dan Harris [00:04]:
"For me, one of the most powerful and game-changing insights in recent years has been that the way I talk to myself has a massive impact on my happiness and also on how I talk to other people."

Sam Sanders introduces the episode as part of a three-part series on grief, focusing on personal narratives rather than expert opinions.

Personal Journeys Through Grief

Bianca Harris shares her “job year,” a period marked by profound loss, including the death of her mother, the end of a long-term relationship, and losing a significant job. She discusses how these overlapping tragedies influenced her coping mechanisms and internal dialogues.

Bianca Harris [10:14]:
"Sharing your story around grief allows others to share theirs. There’s an abundance in that sharing and there’s healing in it."

Techniques for Managing Grief

The conversation explores various strategies Bianca employed to manage her grief:

1. Personifying Grief:
   Bianca explains how she began to personify her grief, attributing it to different forms like a cloud, a tree, or even a person. This practice helped her externalize her emotions, making them more manageable.

   Bianca Harris [24:51]:
   "I allow my grief to take on forms that I can look at or speak to, which helps me grapple with it in a better way."

2. Internal Family Systems (IFS):
   Sam introduces the concept of IFS, where individuals identify and interact with different parts of themselves, such as grief, anger, or joy, to achieve emotional balance.

   Sam Sanders [27:10]:
   "You form a relationship with it and enter into a dialogue with it, and that helps you manage it more effectively."

3. Self-Compassion:
   They discuss Kristen Neff’s work on self-compassion, emphasizing the importance of treating oneself with the same kindness one would offer a friend.

   Bianca Harris [22:58]:
   "I let myself talk to myself in supportive ways, acknowledging that whatever I’m feeling is valid and shared by many others."

The Evolving Nature of Grief

Bianca describes how her perception of grief transformed over time—from a consuming presence to a source of abundance and connection. She recounts a pivotal moment during a solo trip to San Diego, where she experienced a profound sense of beauty intertwined with her sorrow.

Bianca Harris [33:04]:
"This combination of blue water, a reflective podcast conversation, and a poignant album felt really just beautiful... My grief was a gift."

Maintaining Relationships with Deceased Loved Ones

The discussion also touches on how maintaining an internal relationship with deceased loved ones can provide comfort and continuity. Bianca shares her practice of imagining conversations with her late parents, helping her navigate life’s challenges.

Bianca Harris [51:33]:
"My memory of my father has beautifully shapeshifted over time to comfort and console me. It’s become its own being with its own plot arc."

Balancing Grief and Joy

Bianca emphasizes the importance of allowing oneself to experience joy and engage with life even while grieving. She stresses that grief should not overshadow one's ability to find happiness and play.

Bianca Harris [54:21]:
"Joy is not a trivial endeavor. Play, laugh, dance—they’re required to be the best versions of ourselves, even when you’re grieving."

Final Reflections and Takeaways

The episode concludes with heartfelt acknowledgments of the resilience of the human spirit. Bianca expresses gratitude for the ability to find meaning and beauty amidst loss, celebrating the human capacity for creativity and connection.

Bianca Harris [67:49]:
"They live on. What a gift that our minds and our hearts are able to conjure deeper meaning and appreciation even in the midst of tragedy and loss."

Notable Quotes

• Dan Harris [00:04]:
  "The way I talk to myself has a massive impact on my happiness and... it's possible to counterprogram against my inner critic."

• Bianca Harris [10:14]:
  "Sharing your story around grief allows others to share theirs. There’s healing in it."

• Sam Sanders [27:10]:
  "Enter into a dialogue with it, and that helps you manage it more effectively."

• Bianca Harris [24:51]:
  "I allow my grief to take on forms that I can look at or speak to, which helps me grapple with it in a better way."

• Bianca Harris [33:04]:
  "My grief was a gift... It made my life richer."

• Bianca Harris [54:21]:
  "Joy is not a trivial endeavor. Play, laugh, dance—they’re required to be the best versions of ourselves."

Conclusion

This episode offers a compassionate exploration of grief, emphasizing the importance of self-talk, self-compassion, and the willingness to share one's experiences. Bianca and Sam provide insightful personal narratives that illustrate how embracing and understanding grief can lead to profound personal growth and deeper connections with others. Listeners are encouraged to reflect on their own internal dialogues and consider how reshaping these conversations can enhance their overall well-being.

For those interested in further exploring the themes discussed, Bianca recommends her own podcasts:

• Vibe Check: A trio-hosted show where Bianca, along with Zach Stafford and Saeed Jones, discuss news and culture with a focus on diverse perspectives.

• The Sam Sanders Show: An interview-based podcast focusing on creativity and pop culture, featuring conversations with notable creatives like Joel Kim, Sashir Zamada, and Monet X Change.

Listeners are invited to support Bianca’s work by tuning into her podcasts on various platforms, including YouTube and KCRW.

Tune in to "10% Happier with Dan Harris" on the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or your preferred podcast platform every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for more insightful conversations on happiness, mindfulness, and personal growth.

Transcript

[Dan Harris]

Wondery subscribers can listen to 10% Happier.

[Sam Sanders]

Early and ad free right now.

[Dan Harris]

Join Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. It's the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, how we doing? For me, one of the most powerful and game changing insights in recent years has been that the way I talk to myself has a massive impact on my happiness and also on how I talk to other people. And moreover, and this is the key part, it is possible to counter program against my inner critic to rewire my interior dialogue in really interesting and really effective ways. And this is not just me making shit up. And in case you're suspicious, there is a ton of evidence from researchers like Kristen Neff and Ethan Cross strongly suggesting that you can both change the way you talk to yourself and that those changes impact your happiness and your relationships with other people, which of course are intertwined. I say all of this because my guest today went through what he calls a job year, as in the book of Job from the Bible. During this time he lost his mother, he lost a long term relationship, and he lost a really important job. And and even though this guest is not a happiness expert per se, he developed some really interesting coping strategies in the midst of his grief over these losses. And one of the main techniques, and you'll hear him discuss this, was to learn how to be his own mentor, which I love. Sam Sanders is an award winning reporter, radio host and podcaster. He currently co hosts two podcasts, Vibe Check with Zach Stafford and Saeed Jones and the Sam Sanders Show. Earlier in his career he was with NPR and he has a Master's degree in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. This is part two in a three part series we're running this week on grief, a phenomenon that can be especially acute and painful during the holidays. What makes this series interesting to me is that we're not focusing on experts, although I will drop some episodes that we've done with experts in the show notes, but instead we're focusing on real people who have navigated this stuff on.

[Sam Sanders]

Their own and they're going to tell.

[Dan Harris]

Us what they learned. And just to say we're not just focused on grief over people who have died, although of course we do cover that. But instead we're going to approach grief in a more capacious way with a broad understanding that loss is perennial and non negotiable for all of us who live in this universe that is characterized by perpetual flux. On Monday I talked to the journalist Cody Delostradi about whether there's a cure for grief. And coming up on Friday, my wife Bianca and I talk to the writer Sloan Crossley. Today, though, it's the delightful Sam Sanders. We talk about the fact that there's.

[Sam Sanders]

No right way to do grief, the.

[Dan Harris]

Value of feeling your feelings even though it sucks, why it can be helpful to take breaks from your grief without feeling guilty about it, the importance of play and joy, the changing nature of grief, what it means to be anointed by grief, and what it looks like to have a relationship with somebody even after they have died. Sam Sanders, coming up. But first, I want to say this. I want to let you know about something we're doing later this week [e-mail] coming up on Thursday, December 12th at 3:30 Eastern, I'm going to do a live AMA or ask me anything for my paid substack subscribers. That means you can send me a question about pretty much anything. My meditation practice, what I'm reading or.

[Sam Sanders]

Listening to, what's going on with my.

[Dan Harris]

Fledgling business, what I'm doing on New Year's Eve. And I will answer you. I will answer as many questions as I can live on camera. If you're not a paid subscriber but.

[Sam Sanders]

You want to join us, you can.

[Dan Harris]

Head over to danharris.com right now and sign up. If you sign up, you'll also get cheat sheets for every new podcast episode, regular emails from me, the ability to comment on my posts and chat with.

[Sam Sanders]

Me directly about what I'm posting and.

[Dan Harris]

What'S on our podcasts all the time.

[Sam Sanders]

There's a lot going on over there. I would love to have you.

[Dan Harris]

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to.

[Sam Sanders]

Hanging out with all of you on.

[Dan Harris]

Thursday at 3:30 Eastern. Hey prime members, have you heard you can listen to your favorite podcasts ad free.

[Sam Sanders]

Good news.

[Dan Harris]

With Amazon Music, you can have access to the largest catalog of ad free top podcasts included with your prime membership.

[Sam Sanders]

We are regular consumers around my house of Amazon Music. Often we're listening through our Alexa. My son has a very intimate relationship with his Alexa, who he talks to all the time. He learns about amazing new music through Alexa and then shares it with his parents. To start listening to either music or.

[Dan Harris]

Podcasts, download the Amazon Music app for free or go to Amazon.com adfreepodcasts that's Amazon.com ad free podcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads.

[Sam Sanders]

My son, who's 9, loves Pokemon. Loves it.

[Dan Harris]

If you want to win that dude over, get him Some Pokemon cards. In fact, some friends of mine have.

[Sam Sanders]

Done that in the past. And he still remembers it. My son does. He still remembers when people give him that gift.

[Dan Harris]

So imagine my surprise and delight when.

[Sam Sanders]

I received in the mail a huge box filled with Pokemon trading cards, which I then, of course, gave to my son. It was one of those rare moments where he thought I was cool.

[Dan Harris]

Why did I receive said box? Because they're sponsoring the show. Specifically, the Pokemon trading card game is.

[Sam Sanders]

What I want to tell you about.

[Dan Harris]

It's a gift sure to delight gamers, collectors, and Pokemon fans. Each Pokemon set has dozens of new cards in different styles by different artists, ranging from cute to stunning. You can learn to play in minutes. Enjoy the TCG and new cards for years to come. Find gift ideas for all ages and at every price [e-mail] holiday Sam Sanders.

[Sam Sanders]

Welcome to the show.

[Bianca Harris]

Hi. You're leaning on a pool table. I love it.

[Dan Harris]

Yes. You give me away.

[Sam Sanders]

So, yeah, I'm. I'm recording this from Las Vegas, where I'm giving a talk, or I was giving a talk, and we're in a crazy suite at Caesar's palace where they have a pool table. And so I'm leaning on that while I talk to you. And it's so interesting to hear your voice actually directly addressing me after having listened to you in a parasocial way talking to other people for so many years. So I'm just gonna kind of get ease into the surreality of that.

[Bianca Harris]

Okay. I always like it when people say, oh, you sound just like you sound. And I'm like, yeah, that was a goal. I think there was a point in my career where my radio voice, I was trying to not sound like myself. And now I'm like, if I meet people and they say, oh, I could tell you by your voice. Cause you sound just the same. It's like, I've succeeded. Yeah, you're doing natural audio.

[Sam Sanders]

You know, I don't know if this lands for you, and this certainly wasn't something I was planning to talk about. But for me, a big goal in my career is to erase the line between my public and private presentation.

[Bianca Harris]

Totally. And you know what? That is the opposite of what they teach us in legacy newsrooms. It is, like, almost polar opposite. I remember when I was starting out in public radio, I worked at NPR for 13 years. They would tell us when we were scripting to never use the word I or me. You're supposed to be, like, invisible in the story. Which is wild, because I'm Reading and saying the story, but like, yeah, unlearning that and knowing that I can be a person and a journalist and perform journalism as a fully formed human. Yeah, it took some work.

[Sam Sanders]

Is there a role, though, in journalism for the kind of. I mean, omniscient narrator is probably not the right term, but, you know, an impersonal deliverer of facts as opposed to. I won't characterize your work because I don't know how. That's dangerous territory. But I'll characterize my own work where I'm smearing myself all over the place, which can be useful but isn't always helpful.

[Bianca Harris]

Let's assess the question. You say, is there a need for journalists who are impersonal and just do the facts? Is the news ever impersonal and just the facts? The news is more than facts. It's also people and their feelings and money and power and sex and all of these things. And the actors making the news and creating these things that are newsworthy are people with feelings and emotions. So if you can't talk about that, you're not covering a story holistically. Why would I want to hear a political reporter talk to me about politics without talking about the feeling behind it? It's not just facts. It's not just logic. Right. So I think we're able to have more comprehensive conversations about world events when we address the humanity present in all of these actors and in ourselves and understand that, like, inherently, humans aren't logical, they're emotional. So you must talk about emotion.

[Sam Sanders]

Yeah, I think it makes complete sense to talk about emotion. The question is when and whether and where it's appropriate for the journalists to talk about their emotion.

[Bianca Harris]

Yeah. 1. I think there's space for both. I just need to know what you're doing and when and where.

[Sam Sanders]

Yes. So full disclosure.

[Bianca Harris]

Full disclosure. And also, like, knowing the role, like, when you hear the top of the hour newscast, you actually just want the facts.

[Sam Sanders]

Yes.

[Bianca Harris]

But when you're digging into a podcast episode of, say, Ezra Klein interviewing Jake, I would love for Ezra Klein to be a person in that conversation.

[Sam Sanders]

Yeah.

[Bianca Harris]

It's better that way. So as long as I know what I'm expecting, I think. What do you think? I'm curious.

[Sam Sanders]

No, I agree with you. I don't actually come into this with a hard and fast opinion. And like I said, I wasn't even planning to talk about this. I think you're right. And Ezra is a good example. I'm a big admirer of his work, and he's been on this show before.

[Bianca Harris]

I know he has kids. I know he's concerned about being a good father and a good citizen building. So that informs his work. And I'm glad that he talks about that in the midst of his work. It makes it more holistic and whole for me.

[Sam Sanders]

Agreed. Well, let's talk about your work, because on an excellent episode of your excellent show, Vibe Check recently, you did a very brave thing, which is you talked about your grief. And so to the extent to which you're comfortable talking about it here, I'd be interested in hearing just the basics of what you've been grieving recently, because I know it's multileveled.

[Bianca Harris]

Yeah. So for starters, Vibe Check is a podcast I've been making for almost three years with two dear friends of mine, Said Jones, the poet, and Zach Stafford, producer and journalist. And we call the show you Favorite Group Chat come to life. In the midst of making this show and publishing episodes every Wednesday, my mother died. And she died a year and a few months ago. And I remember going home to Texas in the midst of her body collapsing and failing for the last time, and I was supposed to maybe make it up to New York for a live show Vibe Check had. But then that did not happen. But I remember in the week after the funeral, I remember feeling specifically, indistinctly, one, that I wanted to talk about my mother and two, that I wanted to talk about it with my friends Zach and Saeed. But that would also mean that it would be recorded and become a podcast episode for our listeners to hear. And I don't think I ever had any pause about it because I knew it would be rich in a good conversation. And a thing that I've discovered about grief is that sharing your story around griefs, grief allows others to share theirs. And there's an abundance in that sharing and there's a healing in it. And so much of our culture tells us to keep grief inside and bottled up and just for us, especially after the period that we deem appropriate in which to grieve. But I found that talking about my grief with people I love and trust was healing not just for me, but for other people. So to be able to have that conversation on our show and hear from people still to this day a year about how it helped them, that is an honor and that is the best tribute I can think of to my mother.

[Sam Sanders]

There's a lot in what you just said. One thing that's coming to mind is one of the slogans that I use a lot for myself and just in my public pronouncements to the extent that anybody's listening, One of the slogans that I use, which I did not invent, I stolen from somebody else, is never worry alone. We live in an individualistic culture where we make our struggles individual pursuits, as opposed to team sports. And what you did on Vibe Check and what you guys, you know, not infrequently do is model the benefit of the carpool lane.

[Bianca Harris]

Oh, yeah.

[Dan Harris]

Well.

[Bianca Harris]

And then here's the thing. You realize once you start to share what you're going through, none of it's new. My favorite scripture, because I'm a church kid, I always loved the short scriptures because you could recite them quickly when you were forced to recite scriptures at church. But there's one in the Old Testament that says there is nothing new under the sun. That's it. And I have to remind myself of this when I'm going through things that I think are hard, you know. So after my mother died a month later, there was a breakup of a romantic relationship that had been going for two plus years. And then after that there was a layoff. And there was this moment last year where I could have dealt with all those things alone or tried to, but I was like, I'm talking about it. And then as soon as I began to talk about it, turns out I'm not the first person to lose a parent. I'm not the first person to lose a relationship. I'm not the first person in audio to get laid off. And what you find is when you share your grief, when you share your troubles, when you share your hardships, it's not just that you aren't alone. It's that other people can offer you potential roadmaps for survival because they have been through similar things as well. And there is. You're sharing survival tips when you share your stories and get others to share their stories of the same experiences.

[Sam Sanders]

Yeah, a million percent. My mind is going to the work of. There's this brilliant researcher in psychology field, her name is Kristin Neff. Are you familiar with her work at all?

[Bianca Harris]

No. Tell me.

[Sam Sanders]

She's really the godmother of something called self compassion, which can sound a little ooey gooey or vaguely autoerotic or something like that, but it's the skill of learning how to talk to yourself the way you would talk to a good friend or the way a good coach would talk to a player. So not coddling yourself, but. And not overlooking mistakes you might have made, but being supportive nonetheless. And there's all of this data that shows that it can lead to physiological and psychological and behavioral changes to have this inner posture. And Kristen has this move called the self control compassion break, which has three steps. I call this the NEF three step, which she has not endorsed as a terminology. But the first is to just be mindful of whatever's going on for you. The second is to talk to yourself in a supportive way. And the third, which is actually usually the second, but I want to end on this because it's relevant to what you just said is something called common humanity, which just means that whatever you're going through right now is being endured simultaneously by millions of other people. Anger, rage, grief, frustration, anxiety, whatever it is, you are not alone in this, Even if you are physically alone in this moment. So does any of that land for you?

[Bianca Harris]

Oh, yeah. And it's not just there are other humans experience similar things in the same emotional space you are. I'm a student of popular culture and just entertainment. I've been covering that beat for years now. I have a new show that I host that's just focused on that. And also what I love about these moments of grief, of sadness, is that you can actually find a book or a movie or some music that speaks to those feelings as well. Something wild happened to me last year in the midst of my mother's death and my breakup, I discovered an album that spoke to both of those themes perfectly. There's this artist, this indie singer songwriter named Caroline Rose, and they released an album close to two years ago that was all about this horrible, horrible breakup. But interspersed between all these really sad breakup songs were voicemails that Caroline's mother sent to them. Caroline's ailing grandmother sent her all these voicemails, and by the time we get the album, the grandmother has died. And so the voicemails that end up as interludes in this album were this ode to her dead grandmother. And I listened to that album nonstop in my latter part of last year. That portion of grief. And it was just knowing that someone had made an album that spoke so specifically to my moment, even though they didn't know me and I don't know them. That was beautiful. It was so beautiful.

[Sam Sanders]

Yeah. Yeah. There are many sources of solace if we're willing to look for them and take them in for sure. Let's go back to your sources of grief. Tell me about your mom.

[Bianca Harris]

Oh, my goodness, my mother. Just the force of nature she was. She had, like, 18 jobs and lives and careers. She was a middle school principal, and my middle School principal. She was also our Pentecostal church organist and played at every service. And she and my father were small business owners. They both owned, at certain points in my childhood, both a funeral home and a daycare. And she did all of these things while also being an active parent of two crazy boys, my brother and me. And she was perpetually the life of the party and the person you wanted to talk to in the room, she was just. I'm trying to. I'm trying to put her on a scale that people who don't know her could understand her by. But it's like, you know, there are some people and some celebrities where it's like no matter what room they walk into, you're going to be like, oh, damn. Like, whatever room George Clooney walks into, you're going to be like George Clooney. And everyone there's going to be like, wow. On a South Texas scale, my mother, Regina Sanders. Was that never a bad room?

[Sam Sanders]

Yeah, Regina sounds amazing.

[Bianca Harris]

Regina means queen. And she was. She fucking. She ran her shit. Sorry, I'm not supposed to use it.

[Sam Sanders]

No, no, you could. You can let it loose here.

[Dan Harris]

We have no rules.

[Sam Sanders]

I'm not owned by. I'm not owned by any conglomerates.

[Bianca Harris]

There you go. But she and my father, they were both just incredibly charming and very good at connecting with strangers deeply, very quickly. And they liked it. My father loved small talk. My mother loved gabbing with whoever, and I hope and I pray that that has rubbed off on me. But even after my mother got sick, so she. My mother was very active in life until she had a stroke in 2002 that paralyzed her. It paralyzed her left side. So she was bedridden from 2002 until the day she died last year in 2023. So she spent 20 years paralyzed. But even in that, she was the charming, most charismatic person in every room. She spent time at home and I was taking care of her and sibling my brother was and family was. But she was also in and out of a lot of nursing homes and rehabilitation centers and everywhere she went, she just co opted the nursing staff into like her Regina Army. All of the women nurses in the building, she would figure out who could do black hair and would sweet talk to them and convince them to braid her hair after hours and keep it looking fresh. All of the men at whatever nursing home or whatever, she would flirt with them enough until she convinced them to bring her secret Mountain Dews to her bed. In her death nurses she had along the way of her 20 years of being bedridden just showed up at the funeral, at the wake. I had no idea who they were. And they'd come and say, we loved your mom. We loved your mom. And they'd have a story about her. You don't expect that from someone who has suffered a massive stroke, who cannot move half of their body, who was stuck in a bed. But she was that toilet pair. Yeah.

[Sam Sanders]

When you lost her, what was that like for you, both psychologically and physiologically? How did it feel on both levels?

[Bianca Harris]

It was very mentally hard to wrap my mind around at first because, you know, my father died when I was 18 and I was blessed enough to be able to take care of him during those last six months or so of illness. And so by the time he died, we had made peace with everything about our relationship. And the last thing he said to me before he went to the hospital for the last time was, I love you. And I said, I love you too. And like when he died, I was like, we're good. With my mother, I grieved the loss of her twice because she had her stroke in 2002 and became a different person. You know, parts of her brain that used to control how she regulated her emotions were dead now. Parts of her brain that made her a fully functioning adult in the world were gone. So her essence was still there. But in many ways, sometimes you were dealing with emotionally like a really smart and funny 13 year old, you know. And so I had grieved the loss of my mother as I knew her in childhood, but I also still had a version of my mother that was there, just different, very different. Not better or worse, but very different. So when my mother actually physically died, it was a second death. And that took some time to wrap my head around because I don't think we think about death that way. But I lost my mother once and then I lost her again. And I thought that I had been okay with her eventually dying because I knew as soon as she had that stroke, they said to us, it's really big. Every day she's alive after this is a gift. She might live a year or 2. She lived 20. So in my logical brain I'd said, sam, you are ready for whenever she goes. Because you've been thinking about how close she is to death forever for 20 years. But it turns out it hit a lot harder than I expected, that second death, you know.

[Sam Sanders]

Yeah, I really relate to the two deaths. Both my wife and I have, you know, non trivial amount of cognitive decline among our parents. And so I think that's Quite common. And so when you say it hit hard for you, what did that look like? Were you having trouble getting out of bed or were you finding that you were distracted? What was happening?

[Bianca Harris]

I was avoiding a lot. So when they told me she was. When my brother called and said, there's a big seizure, this might be the one. Come home. I went to Texas, where I'm from, San Antonio, and I just kept working. I taped two episodes of my shows that week while she was dying. Then I had to take off the week of the funeral because I was getting that together. But then I came right back and went right to work. And I remember in the run up to the funeral, being in the same coffee shop one day, switching back and forth from writing the script for one of my shows and writing her obituary. And I just did it. What I try to do now is not get mad at myself for what I was doing in that moment. You did it because you thought you needed to do it. But there definitely was a crash. And there was a crash maybe three weeks after the funeral where that's when it got Hardy out of bed. That's when I didn't want to talk to anybody. That's when it was really dark and just, oof. But those first two weeks, I was on an autopilot and I was surrounded by people who loved her and friends and family. And so I just got through it. Got through it and was more social than I had been in the last year before that. But there was a crash that came maybe three weeks after. And what I had to tell myself and allow myself and forgive myself for was both of those versions of me. The Sam who was on autopilot is good. The Sam who had a crash three weeks later is good. And both of those ways in which you process grief in those moments are allowed and permissible. And like, you can't say one of those was the best way to do it. It's just how it happened is how it happened.

[Sam Sanders]

You know, I don't want to pretend to be an expert on grief, but I really co sign on that story you're telling yourself, which is that both of those modes are good. And it seems to me that that first mode of let's get through this is really adaptive. I mean, the mind can only take in so much at once. So there's a certain amount of self protection there. And also that in the aftermath of a death, there's just a lot of logistics you need to deal with. And so this is the thing you don't really.

[Bianca Harris]

It's hard to have time to grieve because what's she going to wear? I got to feed these people after the funeral. We got to get the program together at the church. Who's coming down? Who do I have to get down here to make sure that they can make it? Do we all have suits? Like, even the littlest things I remember, like, having this freak out where we're like, oh, shit, we gotta get her a bra. She'd been sick for a while. She had been in bed for a while. She didn't wear. She didn't wear bras. She didn't have to. And I remember, like, having to go to, like, Macy's with her sister, my Aunt Betty, to, like, shop for bras for a dead lady. You're not sitting in wells of grief when you have the list of things like that to get through. So you're just getting through it. And I remember, yeah, once the list was done, once the people were gone, then it's just like, crash.

[Sam Sanders]

You came up with a lot of really interesting and creative ways to handle that. Crash. I don't want to say get yourself out of it, because one of the myths of grief is that it's like that there is some sort of terminal point that you work through these stages and then you're done. One of the things that you. One of the practices you came up with that I really think is smart or wise might be the better word, is to personify the grief in your mind and have a conversation with it. Can you describe that practice and how you came up with it?

[Bianca Harris]

Yeah, through a lot of conversation with folks who think about this a lot. But I realized after my mother's death, especially compounded by this layoff and this breakup that came soon after, it's like I was feeling grief about the loss of these three things together, primarily my mother's death. And the usual way in which we talk about grief or mention grief in the English language is with a definition that's not at all sticky. Grief is this feeling, but we don't really describe it besides saying it's grief. Grief lives with us, but we don't talk about it as an object. Grief is there and as big as a proper noun, but we don't give it any names. And so what I would just start to do in those months of deep sadness would be to allow my grief to take on forms, just to take on forms. And there'd be some days where I would just be like, I'm sad today. I'm in grief today. What is My grief. And sometimes it was a person that I was talking to or cursing out, or sometimes it was a cloud. Because a dear friend told me once, all feelings and emotions are clouds. When they're over you, that's all you can think about. But eventually, clouds move on. There were some days where my grief was a tree that I was looking at outside of my window. But the action and the activity and the practice was to place my grief into some form that I could look at or speak to. Because as soon as I could do that, I could grapple with the grief in a better way. Because think about it. When you say the word grief, what can you summon? I say grief, I don't know. But, like, if grief is a cloud, I can think of a cloud and a cloud moving. If grief is a person, I can think of Sally and what she's saying to me today and having a conversation with it. If grief is a plant, I can think about it growing and what it means to let grief flowers. But I have to make grief a thing so that I can deal with it. I'm currently reading Ta Nehisi Coates new book, which is not about grief or a different kind of grief. But he says we cannot solve problems or speak to issues until we can see them. And for me, I had to allow my grief to become something that I could see and, like, touch in my mind.

[Sam Sanders]

Two things come to my mind as I listen to you say this. I mean, all lands very well for me. One is there's this school, psychotherapeutic school, called Internal Family Systems. Have you heard of it?

[Bianca Harris]

I have, because who told me about it when I interviewed him years ago. Jonathan Ben S is a student of this mind of Thinking. He told me about it in an interview years ago.

[Sam Sanders]

Yeah, actually, he's come on the show and I believe he and I talked about this.

[Dan Harris]

It's quite powerful.

[Sam Sanders]

I've done a little bit of it, but mostly I sort of get to kind of do a bootleg version. You personify or name the various aspects of your inner repertoire. Grief could be one of them. Anger, jealousy, whatever. And you form a relationship with it and enter into a dialogue with it, and that helps you manage it more effectively.

[Bianca Harris]

You talk to it. Yeah.

[Sam Sanders]

The second thing that came to mind is a kind of inherent contradiction or maybe a paradox in. In what you said that I'm kind of thinking of from a Buddhist perspective. You have a smart friend who said to think about the emotion like a cloud. And then you also talked about the importance of naming a thing because without naming it, it's hard to talk about it. But the cloud reference really lands for me, again, from a Buddhist perspective, because we tend to make our emotions into solid, monolithic things, when in fact they are meteorological patterns and they are passing. Everything's passing. That is a uncontroversial but uncomfortable fact of the universe. And so the cloud reference, as opposed to a thing reference really lands for me. And I'm just curious how any of that goes down with you.

[Bianca Harris]

I feel. Yes, yes. Because it's like grief is the ongoing existence of love for a thing, even after the thing is gone. And all that is all grief is, is a long term acceptance of loss. And life is a series of accepting loss. Everything we love will either leave us or we leave it. You eat the beautiful piece of cake and it's gone. You have the lovely dog and then inevitably it dies before you do. You have the perfect prom dress, and then you outgrow it or that style becomes no longer in and you don't wear it anymore. But all of life is finding a way to make peace with the fact that the things that we love will leave us or we leave them. And so when you think of this, like, cloud metaphor for grief, you're like, oh, yeah, because all clouds are always coming and going at the same time. Every cloud is leaving. Even as it's there, it's always going somewhere else. So, yeah, talking through this now, it's like, I love the cloud metaphor even more.

[Dan Harris]

Coming up, Sam Sanders talks about the changing nature of grief, the unexpected awakenings that can come from grieving, and what it means to be anointed by grief. This podcast is sponsored by Greenlight. We all know the old saying, give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for life. This advice isn't just for folks who fish. It's a lesson for parents who want their kids to learn important skills that will set them up for success. And as we enter the gifting season, now is the perfect time to give your kids money skills that last well beyond the holidays. And that is where Greenlight comes in. Greenlight is a debit card and money app made for families. Parents can send money to their kids and keep an eye on their kids spending and saving while kids and teens build money, confidence and lifelong financial literacy skills. Now is a great time to get.

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[Sam Sanders]

On the episode where you talked about grief on Vibe Check, one of the things you talked about was tuning into the changing nature of grief and how it changes over time. And so I wonder if there's maybe more to say about that here and now.

[Bianca Harris]

Oh yeah. I remember when I reached this turning point with my grief and I began to see my grief as an object or a person or a thing that was giving me multiple things. So I think at first my grief was giving me deep sadness and deep reflection and I was like, okay. But then I got into this headspace and I talk about this on the episode of Vibe Check where my grief was introducing me to abundance. You know, we're taught to think of grief as just the presence of scarcity. This thing I loved is gone. Scarcity. I'm mad it's not there anymore. But talking about my grief opened up this incredible amount of abundance in the conversation I was able to have with other people about their grief. And those conversations felt abundant and expansive because they opened up new feelings and new connections with new people. So there was a moment of my grief in which it felt incredibly abundant because all of a sudden, being in my grief and talking about my grief led to all of these new and intense and deep and loving connections, Right? And I was grateful for it. But I think the third turn for me was probably a few months into my mother's death and then this breakup. And I began to find ways to be grateful for my grief, for the beauty it presented to me. And I want to tell you the exact moment when I, like, had this epiphany. So at this point, I'm just, like, in the throes of it. And anyone who lives in la, you know that, like, LA is constantly asking you to, like, leave LA is constantly saying if you just drive two or three hours, there's something else that you can do. Go to the desert, go up the coast, go here. Like, LA always wants you to, like, take a weekend trip. And I took a weekend trip to San Diego solo, maybe three or four months after my mother had passed. And at this point, I've now had this serious breakup, too. And I was like, I'm just gonna go be sad on a different beach. And so I go to San Diego, and I was like, all right, I'm here. And I ended up, I kid you not, booking a hotel room in a hotel that that weekend had, like, two weddings. So I see all these people getting married while I'm here to be sad, and I'm like, ah. And I'm mad about it. But then I'm like, sam, just do your thing. Just vibe, enjoy the ocean. So I'm walking along the ocean one day looking at the seals, and I'm playing this episode of Vibe Check in which my co host, Zach Stafford, is talking to Jenna Wertham about the beauty of blue spaces and water. And so it was, like, crazy to hear my friends talk about water and healing while I was walking along the water looking at seals. And I was like, this is really beautiful. Then I began to play that album. I mentioned the Caroline Rose breakup album that also had voice notes from her dead grandmother. And I was like, oh, my God, this album is really beautiful. And the combination of this blue water and this blue podcast conversation and this very blue album felt really just beautiful. Right? And I'll never forget after that day of doing that, I wanted to sit and just, like, watch the water at night. So I go to this balcony in the hotel where previously there had been a wedding reception, because I saw them there dancing. And there was this moment where I'm sitting there playing a sad Caroline Rose song, thinking about being blue, seeing the midnight blue water under the moon. And I'm playing this song and I'm crying, and the water, I can, like, hear it and feel it, and the air is crisp and the moon is right there. And as sad as I was, I also said to myself, this is one of the most beautiful moments I'll ever experience. Like, the moon was brighter, the waves were deeper, the music hit harder. The poignancy of being in that space at that time, all of it was heightened because of the grief. Had I not been experiencing deep loss and the deep pain caused by these life events, none of it would have been as beautiful. Do you know what it feels like when you listen to a really sad breakup song when you're happy? Doesn't feel like anything. You can't really feel it until you're sad.

[Sam Sanders]

Yeah.

[Bianca Harris]

And I had that, like, aha moment on that balcony in San Diego at that beach, watching the waves playing Caroline Rose. And I literally out of my mouth. Before I knew it, I was like, I'm thankful to my grief for this moment of beauty. And being able to thank my grief for something, for anything, especially that deep beauty, it immediately made all the grief hurt less because I was grateful for it. And my grief was a gift. It was a gift. So. And that. That. That was this just big light bulb. And I know you're not there and you don't know what it was like, but I think back to that moment, and it was just one of the most beautiful things I've ever experienced. And I wouldn't have experienced it if not for grief. So I'm grateful for it. I'm grateful for it. It's so good. It's a tear jerker.

[Sam Sanders]

Exactly. If I were to sum up, maybe I'll screw this up, and so you'll hopefully feel free to correct me. But if I were to sum up at least one aspect of the amazing set of paragraphs you just uttered there, it's like you're doing this inner jiu jitsu move of turning what I guess maybe objectively could Be called a shitty chapter in your life into a series of awakenings that may sound a little grandiose, but, like, just waking up, literally waking up, being grateful for a moment that would have. If you were not in grief, you probably wouldn't have even been at that hotel. You probably would have been home, you know, watching Netflix or whatever and not awake at all.

[Bianca Harris]

Do you know how many times I go to the beach and don't think about the beach?

[Sam Sanders]

Yeah, exactly.

[Bianca Harris]

I've lived in LA for a decade, and there'll be so many days where I'm, like, in the most beautiful setting and I ignore it because there's traffic, or I ignore it because I'm hungry, or I ignore it because people are annoying. Yeah. I appreciated this beauty in a way that I had not ever before. I cut you off. Sorry, go ahead.

[Sam Sanders]

No, please, cut me off anytime. And the other thing that you woke up to, though that is equally, if not even more important, goes back to, like, the never worry alone aspect that we talked about at the beginning, which is you were enduring an indelible and in many ways, anguishing aspect of the human condition, which is losing. And you used that. And used. Maybe sounds a little too instrumental, but you used that to connect to other people and make your own life richer. So I just hear that as well.

[Bianca Harris]

Yeah. You know, I think back a lot to the things that I was consuming in those moments. So I think I told you earlier, I host a second show besides Vibe Check that is just about the entertainment and pop culture that I love. It's called the Sam Sanders Show. And I interview creatives about what makes them creative, and I talk about the culture. But I've always been obsessed with the ways in which we can find cultural artifacts, music, books, movies, TV or whatever that speak specifically to our current moment. And we can find connection with people we've never met. And so it's another way in which I'm grateful to my grief because it helps me seek out these things that help me find connection with strangers through their work. I don't know Caroline Rose. I do not know Caroline Rose. But I will always think of that album and how it helped me through probably the most difficult year of my adult life. And if I ever got the chance to meet them or interview them, we'd start the conversation as if we'd known each other for years, because we have.

[Sam Sanders]

Right.

[Bianca Harris]

If that makes sense.

[Sam Sanders]

Yeah, it does make sense. I mean, I'm just thinking back to, like, my early life and how callow I was in many ways. And how, you know, as a result of having had it too easy, I think sometimes joke about, I have all that. I have personally, all the advantages, all the privileges that are available, with the possible exception of the fact that I'm short. And I think that pushed me even further into, you know, in hall of Mirrors, in a culture that is always pushing us into individuality, in the most noxious sense of that term, individualism. And when you go through something like grief, at least what I'm hearing from you is that it's this opening up, if you're willing to embrace it, you really did. Opening up where you're connecting with all these other people.

[Bianca Harris]

Connecting, yeah. No, it's. I'm so glad you say this again, because it's. I'm remembering a thing that I talked about on that vibe check episode after my mother died. I was talking about this grief with my co host Zach and Saeed. Saeed said something that just cracked me wide open. He said, sometimes my grief was so heavy, it felt as if I was anointed by my grief. It's like, oh, my God, Saeed, anointed by your grief? And he's like, yeah, I felt anointed by grief. And I said, saeed, I'm a church kid. I grew up in a Pentecostal church. I know Bible, and I know that, like, in the biblical context, the only purpose of an anointing is to share it with other people. If you have an anointing, a special dispensation, the purpose of having that gift, of having that power, is to share it with others. As soon as Saeed said to me, I felt anointed by grief, I understood fully and even more completely that the anointing of grief and the community that it can bring to us is meant to be shared, to be shared. And that is inherently diametrically opposed to what we're taught about grief. It's internal, it's quiet, it's solitude. It's in you. No, your grief is an anointing. So, one, you're meant to share the best of it and meant to share it with others. But two, gosh, it's also a gift. That's like. That shifted my foundation. My grief is a gift and I'm blessed to have it.

[Sam Sanders]

Yeah. And you're to continue with the church language, blessing other people by being so public about it, by using the anointing in the way in which it's supposed to be used.

[Bianca Harris]

And even if we think of it that way, wow. When the grief is even deeper, it's maybe even a bigger gift. Cause it means that you love them that much. When the grief is even deeper and bigger, it's an even bigger gift because you can open up your heart that much more to other folks that have experienced the same thing. Someone close to me said after all this, in that really bad year, I called 2023 my job year. But someone said to me, you know, in all of this, your heart expanded. Your heart expanded. Huh? I'll take it. That's a blessing. That's a gift. And that was only given to me by the grief. It's a blessing.

[Dan Harris]

Coming up, Sam talks about what it looks like to be in a relationship with somebody even though they've died. And we talk about how pop culture.

[Sam Sanders]

Fits into all of this.

[Dan Harris]

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[Sam Sanders]

He's an anchorman at ABC News, but he's got a side hustle. It's not really a hustle.

[Dan Harris]

It's a volunteer gig on the side where he fosters puppies. And he brought a puppy here the other day to our house, and we.

[Sam Sanders]

Almost adopted that puppy, but pudding, that was the dog's name, went to somebody else.

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[Sam Sanders]

One of the other things you talked about in the episode that I think is really important and I'd be interested to hear you say more about it here is and you've kind of hit it on the fact that grief is part of love and the love doesn't have to die when the person dies, but there's this idea of like continuing your relationship with your mom or anybody else you've lost. And so I'd be curious to hear you talk a little bit more about that.

[Bianca Harris]

Yeah, I did it a lot with my dad. So flashback to 2002. I graduate high school in early June. My father ends up in the hospital with what will become end stage kidney failure by that July. So he's in out of the hospital. I'm taking care of him. I've deferred college at this point. And then in September, my mother has her stroke that paralyzes her. By December of that year, my father is dead. My mother is still in nursing homes. But when my father died, we were as close as a closeted gay 18 year old and an emotionally repressed 88 year old former farmer and heterosexual could be. So my father had been always very physically present. He was always there. He took me to all the practices and games, but we were never emotionally connected because he was never a guy who talked about his feelings in the way that many straight men of his era were. He just didn't discuss. I remember telling a friend this years ago. I don't think I ever heard my father ever use a statement or sentence that started with I feel he didn't do that. He cracked jokes. It was fun to be around, a fun conversationalist. But he and I never talked about our emotions together and he wasn't known to do that. And so he died having been a constant in my life, but also someone that I did not have a deep well of emotional connection to draw on. So a thing that I did with my father for years and still do sometimes, whenever he would pop up in my mind, especially when I was going through the typical trials of like young Adulthood. I would just imagine that my father were the character I needed in my life right at that moment. So I'm 22 and trying to figure out how to think about graduate school. And I think of my dad, and I would just, like, imagine my dad as, like, a college counselor. Will we talk about it? Or I have a breakup, and I think of my dad, and I would be like, dad, what if it's just you, me, at the bar talking about this breakup with this man? And I would imagine that. And I allowed myself to imagine my father as different characters for me. That gave me what I needed in and throughout my adulthood. And at first, I thought I was crazy, and then I said, no, it's fine. It's my grief and it's my dad. And I wrote about it a little later. I said, my memory of my father has beautifully shapeshifted over time to comfort and console me. It's become its own being with its own plot arc. And so part of the abundance of that grief over my father is that in his death, my imagination allowed me to have him serve and perform multiple roles. You know, that was cool. That was really cool. Especially after, you know, not being able to have some of those emotional connections with him in his life. So, yeah, I think that, like, the relationship with people we love, once they're gone, I've learned to accept and love that. It's not static. Even if you don't do the thing I'm doing, where you imagine a loved one in different scenarios and different roles, even without that, your memory of them is going to change over time. And what you know them for and love them for and what they mean to you will change over time. And I think it's about embracing that and loving that and not getting mad about it. I got mad at myself for a long time because I never saved my mother's voicemails. And I missed the sound of her voice, and I missed the sound of her voice before her stroke and the sound of her voice after her stroke. And I would beat myself up over that. And then I said, no, Sam, you have this really amazing gif now through that lack. You can imagine her voice however you want. That's cool. What is she gonna sound like today? You let me know, Regina. I'm ready to listen.

[Sam Sanders]

Let me go back to your dad for a second, because I'll tell you what I hear in what you described of your ongoing relationship with him, and then you please tell me if you think I'm, like, wildly off the mark.

[Dan Harris]

But it kind of reminded me of.

[Sam Sanders]

Our discussion earlier about self compassion, where there's this radical option that most of us don't know is available, which is that we can be our own mentor. That we, because we're very good at giving advice and solace to our friends, our kids, but usually just end up treating ourselves like shit. And it seems like you're using an avatar of your dad.

[Bianca Harris]

Yes.

[Sam Sanders]

To do that for yourself.

[Bianca Harris]

Yes. All that I'm doing and all that I've talked about this entire conversation with you is just me finding different ways to talk to myself without thinking I'm crazy. Yeah, I'm just talking to myself. When I'm personifying my grief or making it a plant or a cloud or a person, I'm talking to myself. When I'm imagining what my father might be in this way or that way or whatever, even after his death, I'm talking to myself. When I'm thinking about what my mother's voice would sound like to me today, I'm talking to myself. And I think that I hate that we're taught this as kids. Oh, the people who talk to themselves are crazy. No, they're not. They're getting through it. Right. And so, so much of accepting my emotions and dealing with them and processing them, especially grief, has been the act of embracing an ongoing conversation with myself. Yes, I am talking to myself. You got to. You have to talk to yourself. You're the voice you hear the most. You're the voice you hear the most. Think about the words you're saying to yourself. Think about the conversation you're having with yourself and shape it.

[Sam Sanders]

I just totally agree with you. And this is borne out in research too. You know, not only Kristen's work, but also the work of this guy, Ethan Cross, who has been very influential for me at the University of Michigan. He wrote a book called Chatter. And it's all about the fact that, you know, you're always talking heads are filled with chatter, but you can counter, program against the madness and learn how to talk to yourself in useful ways. And that's what I'm hearing from you.

[Bianca Harris]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I live in my head. You know, my job for over a decade now has been to try to think big thoughts and then once or twice a week ask smart questions about those big thoughts of other people. So I'm always professionally in my mind getting ready to have a conversation. And if I can do that for my professional work, I can think about having a conversation with me for my emotional and mental well being. Yeah, I'm always in Conversation or preparing for a conversation, even with myself?

[Sam Sanders]

Yes. Aren't there a couple of other things before I lose you that I want to talk about?

[Bianca Harris]

Yeah.

[Sam Sanders]

I'm looking at my list of questions here and realizing that two of them are actually kind of interrelated. One of them, and we've already touched on this a little bit, is why strategy you adopted in your grief was to really allow yourself to feel it. I mean, what I'm hearing from you is almost. Not entirely, but almost a kind of journalistic embrace of the story. Like, this is happening. I'm gonna really dive into it. I might have pushed it away for a few weeks in the wake of my mom's death, but, like, once the crash happened, I'm gonna check this out. I'm gonna go to San Diego, and I'm gonna talk about it publicly. And so recognizing that there's no right way to do grief and really allowing yourself to feel your feelings, there's no timetable for grief, and you're just gonn. And simultaneously, another thing you've talked about is giving yourself permission to take breaks from all that and experience joy, distraction without feeling guilty about it. So I just threw a lot at you. Go wherever you want.

[Bianca Harris]

I get it. When I think of, like, the ratio and the balance of, like, emotional health and letting your emotions be emotions and just, like, living a life, I always have to remind myself, it's like, if I'm having a bad week or a good week, what is my, like, checklist of things that need to happen for the week to be in any way successful? And there's, like, a few basic things that I think we all need. And that's like, I need to move my body. So usually that's some kind of exercise. I need to eat enough and eat well. I need to sleep enough and sleep well, and I need to be around other people. And so, like, as long as I'm doing that, I'll let my emotions go where they want to go. But if I'm having a deeply hard and troubling week of grief or sadness or whatever, and I'm not moving my body enough, not eating and sleeping enough, not seeing people enough, then I get to say, all right, emotions, you gotta sit over there until I, like, go for a run. Or, like, tonight we will not be at home. We're going to do something with friends. So it's like, I allow my emotions to go wherever they go as long as I can accomplish the checklist of mandatory action items for Sam to have a day that feels healthy and it's usually those things move your body, eat well, sleep well, be with people. And if I'm doing that, I cannot be mad about where my emotions go.

[Sam Sanders]

One thing you left off the list is just allowing yourself pop culture dopamine hits. Because I know pop culture is a huge part of your life.

[Bianca Harris]

It's all I care about. All I want to do is talk about this fun shit we enjoy in our free times and talk to the folks who make it about why they make it. But, yeah, I usually need something in my life that I am drawing emotional significance from. It can be the book that I'm really chewing on right now, or a TV show or an album, and last year, that Caroline Rose album. But those things also become, not a backseat driver, but, like, they're a passenger in the car that, like, I'm moving through life. But every week or two, I have this co pilot that's bringing me some kind of a lesson on something. Through an album, through a book, through a movie. I just watched some Megalopolis, the new Francis Ford Coppola.

[Sam Sanders]

Oh, isn't that supposed to suck?

[Bianca Harris]

It's horrible. It's so bad. It's good. 20 minutes in, in the theater, we all realize it's bad. So we all start laughing at the movie and, like, talking to the screen. It was like watching Rocky Horror Picture show, those communal viewings. It was great. But I'm holding on to Megalopolis because, like, I was eager to see it. I enjoyed the moment in the theater with those strangers. And I'm thinking about it a lot, because that movie, not for the movie itself, but for the lessons about creativity it teaches. I'm thinking about it a lot in the midst of launching my new show, the Sam Sanders show, which is all about creatives and the pop culture we love. Francis Ford Coppola made this movie that is a flop, a failure, didn't make enough money. Everybody hates it. Everyone knows it's bad. It's a laughing stock. There have been articles about how much this movie is laughed at in theaters. But you know what? We do not think any less of his good stuff. I still love the classic Francis War Coppola movies. I still think they're great. They're not diminished. And so the emotional lesson I'm taking from that movie and watching it and my journey, launching this new show in these last few weeks is one thing, is not your whole career. Even if it flops, it's not your whole career. If it's a success, it's not your whole career. But there's this emotional lesson that I'm getting from this movie that's not just enjoying the movie. And so I want that from every bit of pop culture I consume. Is there some emotion I take from it? Some lesson I take from it?

[Sam Sanders]

Yeah. I mean, on Megalopolis, which I have.

[Bianca Harris]

Not seen, you gotta see it. It's wild. Like, there's moments where you're just like, are you trolling us, Francis? Are you trolling us? And he's not.

[Sam Sanders]

Maybe this is just a different way of saying the same thing you were just trying to say. But one lesson I can take from this movie that I haven't seen is dude tried. He took a big swing. And I mean, there's something beautiful about that.

[Bianca Harris]

Yes. Also, you're not a creative unless you make something that's bad. Someone smarter than me on some podcast once said, just because someone is brilliant doesn't mean everything they make is brilliant.

[Sam Sanders]

Yeah.

[Bianca Harris]

And the brilliance is in continuing to make. So, like, I sure do hope I have a horrible Megalopolis level flop at some point because it will mean that I iterated on every idea I ever had. And that's a blessing. That's a gift.

[Sam Sanders]

Back to grief. I think also what I'm hearing from you vis a vis pop culture and its many pleasures, both superficial and profound. I think what I'm hearing from you is that even when you're in the midst of grief, it's okay to enjoy an Instagram reel or to.

[Bianca Harris]

I hate these people who are performatively sad all the time. And I hate these people who are like, every day there's a three alarm fire because there's so many disasters. So they only live in the wake of these disasters and they're only worried about everything. And they're so anxious all the time about everything. Shut up. It's so performative. No one only feels one emotion. And the people who are always performing doom and gloom and dread and anxiety, it's a performance and they're lying to you and themselves because the human brain and the human heart is not wired to only feel one thing all the time. We go through a range of emotions every single day. And I want to be around people who respect all of those emotions holistically. And the people who are sitting around, you know, concern trolling on Twitter because everything is the biggest real arm fire. And why aren't you sad and upset all day? If you're listening now, you people shut up. You're lying. Shut up. You're lying. I has a little cake as a treat.

[Dan Harris]

Right.

[Bianca Harris]

You don't live. No one lives their entire day in one emotion. No one does. You can't do it.

[Sam Sanders]

I mean, to continue your theme of being churchy. Amen. Absolutely. And we live in a world where that kind of performativity is rewarded because we all live in public now. And the algorithms reward some specific emotions.

[Bianca Harris]

In particular negative ones, more than the positive ones. Yeah, yeah. But that's not how we live. So I have to constantly remind myself, like, there's a thing I say to myself all the time. You cannot set yourself on fire to keep other people warm. It's not good for you. And also, fire doesn't work like that. And I think in this era of performative Interneting, we sometimes think that performing angst and anger and sadness over the state of the world is actually helping fix it, but it's probably not. You were just performing those emotions. And the best way to, like, create the world that you want to live in is to try to become a joyful warrior, you know? So I want to make space to see these things and see these horrors and these atrocities. But I also need to know that, like, you know, you gotta put the fucking mask on your face before you put on the kid next to you in the plane. You must take care of yourself to be prepared to build the world that you wanna build. And part of taking care of yourself is allowing yourself to have joy and to find joy and to, like, seek it out. And, like, joy is not. Joy is not a trivial endeavor. Play is not a trivial endeavor. They're required to be the best versions of ourselves. Even when you're grieving, even when it's sad, even right after that layoff or that breakup or the death of the parent. Play, laugh, dance. People dance all the time. People dance at the end of the world. Whenever that actually happens, they'll be dancing till the very end. You must.

[Sam Sanders]

Well said. One last question I want to ask you is I got an email from my producer via you right before we went on about just another thought you had about something we could talk about. And I want to make sure that I give you the space to do it. The idea of, like, viewing grief as one of many flowers in the garden. I think we've touched on this a little bit, but I just want to make sure that I give you enough space to explore that idea publicly or here at least.

[Bianca Harris]

Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's two things I want to talk about. Grief as a flower, and then grief as a mandated stop of the train. But I was Talking with a friend a few weeks ago because la. We were at the launch party for a new type of noodle. Kid, you not. But noodles. They're good noodles. But my friend is about to possibly lose a parent. One of her father had a fall and there was a lot of neurological damage. And so he's still here, but he might not be here too much longer. And we were talking about grief and me having lost two parents. And I said to her, I was like, yeah, the grief is, like, not gone, but it's like in a different part of the garden now. If every feeling I feel is a plant in the garden of my emotions, sometimes it feels like grief is like the big tree in the middle. And all of the garden is responding to whatever this tree is blossoming and blooming and growing. But now it feels like my grief is this plant that lives on the side of the garden. And I see it and it's there, but I don't have to eat the fruit and I don't have to overwater it. And maybe it's not getting in the way of the other plants all the time, but it's a plant that's there, and I can still nurture it. And even if I don't want it running my garden, I can still see the flower in the corner and say, it's pretty. And, like, enjoy that it's there because it makes my garden so much more well rounded. There'd be less one color in that palette if the grief flower, if the grief plant wasn't there. So it's pretty. So that for one. And then another thing that I was thinking about and I mentioned on the show was appreciating the way big grief, like the laws of a parent or even a breakup can feel like it stops our lives. You know that feeling when you lose a big thing? I see you grabbing the mic. You feel it, right? When it's like a death, a loss, a this, it's like your life stops. You're like, oh, fuck. My train stopped when my mother died. As sad as I was about her dying, I also was like, God damn it, how many podcast recordings will I have to miss? Literally, I thought that. Cause you just do. And I was like, I'm mad. My train has stopped for a bit. The normal movement of my life has stopped by this dramatic grief event. And I think that in adulthood, especially in the kinds of adulthoods that we live, we think the train is always supposed to be moving and that the train should always be moving fast and that if we optimize our lives enough, the train can move even faster. And what grief does, especially an immediate onset of a loss that perpetuates deep grief. It stops the train. That is your life. It stops the train. And you can do. You can choose one of two paths when a train stops. You can be mad the train has stopped and complain about the train being stopped and curse the conductor and the train itself. Or you can say that the train stopping is like maybe a rest stop and a place in which you can go to the bathroom, debrief, think thoughts, figure out what should be on your train and what shouldn't. Figure out if you need all those carry on bags with you on this journey. Figure out if you're on the right train. Switch trains. We can't do those things until our train stops. We can't have a moment to reassess until the train is stopped. When the train is moving, you can't think that big. And so one more thing that I've been grateful to my grief for in the last year was that it stopped my train for a bit. Train stopped. And I asked myself a few questions. Where do I want to go, what I want to take with me and at what speed should I proceed? My mother and her death stopped my life enough for me to ask myself those questions again. In that way, she mothered me. I appreciate it.

[Sam Sanders]

Everything you just said was really beautiful, especially that thing at the end about how she's still mothering you. And it reminds me a little bit of a bedside with my father in law recently as he died and this incredibly wise doctor came into the room and was explaining that because my father in law was so clear about his end of life care instructions, in some way he was parenting us in that moment as he died and was out of it, you know, so. Oh yeah, they live on in that way.

[Bianca Harris]

They live on. What a gift that our minds and our hearts are able to conjure deeper meaning and conjure these feelings and appreciation even in the midst of like tragedy and loss. As grateful as I am to my grief for all that it's given me this last year, I'm so grateful to be human and to be able to think these big ideas about the world. Our consciousness is a gift. The ability to make big meaning from life and loss is beautiful, is poetic. Life gives us words and we get to make prose out of it. That miracle of creativity and of art is one I'm continually finding new ways to be grateful for. I guess what I'm saying is it's, it's great to be human, man. It's pretty fucking awesome.

[Sam Sanders]

Most days. I'm so impressed by how you handled that or your job year. And also very grateful to you for coming on here and just talking about it so openly and so. Well, before I let you go, can you just. You mentioned your two shows.

[Bianca Harris]

Yeah.

[Sam Sanders]

Can you just mention them again? And also anything else that we should know about if we want to, you know.

[Bianca Harris]

Yeah.

[Sam Sanders]

Learn more about your work.

[Bianca Harris]

Yeah. You can hear or see me twice a week. The show I host with my dear friends Zach Stafford and Saeed. We call it your favorite group chat come to life. It's a gabfest on news and culture of the week. It's called Vibe Check, publishes every Wednesday. And our show is one of the few spaces where you can hear a chat about politics led by three men who happen to be journalists and black and also queer. So we have these conversations around politics that others aren't having. So I like it for that a lot. My second show just launched in early October. It is called the Sam Sanders show, and it's an interview show in the spirit of what I've been pursuing professionally for a while. I covered politics for NPR in the 1516 cycle and followed candidates like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton across the country. And once that was done, I've quickly refocused my professional endeavors journalistically into talking with creatives about pop culture and entertainment. So the Sam Sanders show is that exploration. So far, I've talked with Joel Kim, booster of Fire island fame, on how fame changes you and your creativity. I talked to Sashir Zamada, one of the witches in Agatha, all along, about how the queerness of her work has mirrored her life even before she knew it. And I talked with RuPaul's Drag Race winner, Monet X Change, about how every drag performance is kind of like singing in front of a black church. So those kind of conversations are on the Sam Sanders Show. But I think both of my shows will be cool for folks that manage to tolerate me talking in this way for an hour. So Vibe Check on Wednesdays, Sam Sanders Show. On Fridays, Sam Sanders show is on YouTube in podcast feeds. And also if you're in LA, it airs on KCRW Fridays at noon and Saturdays at 11. Yes, that's the spiel.

[Sam Sanders]

It's so cool. You know, I've admired you from a distance for so long, so it's really cool to talk to you directly. So I appreciate your time and admire you even more now.

[Bianca Harris]

I mean, the feeling's mutual. It has been a joy to watch someone think and feel in real time about what it means to be a professional from a quote unquote journalistic background and think about leaving legacy news behind and charting a path for yourself that feels true to you and like actually owning your work. So hearing you talk on this show about the ways that you are owning your career, very intentionally, it's helped me as I've started this latest show because this is the first show that I'm making where I'm the ep, I own the IP and it's coming through a production company that I made myself. So I want to tell you right now, thank you for you talking about your journey because I've used direct lessons from that as I am doing this part of mine. So I appreciate you.

[Sam Sanders]

I appreciate that everybody should go support it because what Sam's trying to do of doing it on his own, or not quite on his own, but really trying to own his own stuff and be disentangled from some of the larger structures is not an easy thing to do.

[Bianca Harris]

So to freedom.

[Sam Sanders]

Yeah.

[Dan Harris]

Thank you again to Sam. During that conversation there were a couple past episodes mentioned and I will drop links to those in the show notes. Those include my conversation with Dick Schwartz, the creator of ifs, my conversation with Kristen Neff, the godmother of Self compassion, my conversation with Ethan Cross on our inner chatter, and my conversation with Jonathan Van Ness. As always, we'll be doing a cheat sheet for subscribers [e-mail], where we sum up the key takeaways and give a full transcript. So if you're a subscriber, you'll be getting that or you will have already received that in your inbox. [e-mail] you get the chance to chat with me in the text and also many of our guests pop into the chats as well, which is super cool. And I'm doing monthly live AMA sessions and much, much more. I personally would love your support and feedback if you care to take the.

[Sam Sanders]

Time to sign up.

[Dan Harris]

Final thing to say, I want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Kashmir is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier and I.

[Sam Sanders]

Hope you do, you can listen early.

[Dan Harris]

And ad free right now by joining Wondery in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short [e-mail] survey.

[Grinch]

Hello ladies and germs, boys and girls. The Grinch is back again to ruin your Christmas season with Tis the Grinch Holiday Podcast. After last year, he's learned a thing or two about hosting, and he's ready to rant against Christmas cheer and roast his celebrity guests like chestnuts on an open fire. You can listen with the whole family as guest stars like Jon Hamm, Brittany Broski, and Danny DeVito try to persuade the mean old Grinch that there's a lot to love about the insufferable holiday season. But that's not all. Somebody stole all the children of Whoville's letters to Santa, and everybody thinks the Grinch is responsible. It's a real Whoville whodunit. Can Cindy Lou and Max help clear the Grinch's name? Grab your hot cocoa and cozy slippers to find out. Follow Tis the Grinch Holiday Podcast on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Unlock weekly Christmas mystery bonus content and listen to every episode ad free by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery app, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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[Dan Harris]

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[Bianca Harris]

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