Grief Club: The Podcast with Addison Brasil
Inspired by his bestselling book, First Year of Grief Club: A Gift From A Friend Who Gets It, Addison Brasil uses the experiments and offerings as a launching point for deeper conversations with friends and experts. Equal parts "honour the journey" and "find the funny," this is for real people navigating real-life grief. You in? Stay tuned for all things mental health, resilience, comedy, mindset, and life after-loss ideas. (mygriefclub.com)
This podcast is for you if you if you have ever searched: How to deal with grief? Where can I get grief support? What are the 5 stages of grief and are they real? How does grief affect mental health?How do I cope with grief and loss? What are some common myths about grief and how can I debunk them? How long does it take to recover from grief What are some healthy ways to deal with grief? How can I support someone who is grieving? What is complicated grief and how is it different from normal grief? What are the physical symptoms of grief and how can I manage them? How can I find a grief support group or counselor? Why does grief hurt so bad?
Grief Club: The Podcast with Addison Brasil
The Grief Olympics: Love and Loss with Laurel Braitman
Do you ever feel like a "grief Olympian," constantly facing the challenges of loss and heartache? Join us as we welcome Laurel BraItman, author of What Looks Like Bravery, to share her profound insights on navigating the complex terrain of grief. Our conversation explores the importance of understanding our motivations behind overachievement and how it may be a hidden form of self-harm. Laurel also shares her story of growing up with a dying father and the lessons she's learned along the way.
As fellow 'grief Olympians', we recognize the value of asking children for their own definition of grief to better understand this complex emotion. Laurel's unique perspective will resonate with anyone who has experienced loss. Together, we discuss finding moments of reflection and ritual that feel effortless, allowing us to grieve in a way that's authentic to us, rather than following societal expectations.
Laurel's journey is both inspiring and relatable, reminding us that despite the pain, we can still find moments of joy and gratitude amidst our grief. Her wisdom teaches us the importance of staying open to love, even when it's frightening. So join us for this enlightening and emotional conversation as we learn valuable lessons from Laurel on love, loss, and finding peace in the midst of grief.
We explore the idea of Flow vs Force in honouring a grief journey, daily life, and everything in between. Spoiler alert we also discuss Season 4 of HBO's Succession. Also, Justin Michael Williams leaves a message on the Grief Club voicemail with some free meditations and resources!
Laurel Braitman PhD is a writer, teacher and secular, clinical chaplain-in-training. She is the author of the brand new memoir What Looks Like Bravery: An epic journey through loss to love (March 13th, Simon & Schuster) and the NYT bestselling book Animal Madness: Inside Their Minds. She received her doctorate in History and Anthropology of Science from MIT and is the director of Writing and Storytelling at the Stanford School of Medicine’s Medical Humanities and the Arts Program where she helps clinical students, staff and physicians communicate more clearly and vulnerably for their own benefit and that of their patients. Laurel is also the founder of Writing Medicine, the global community of writing healthcare professionals. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, Wired, California Sunday, National Geographic, Radiolab, National Public Radio and many other places. She splits her time between rural Alaska, her family’s ranch in Southern California and Northern New Mexico.
Where Can I Find More of Laurel?
www.laurelbraitman.com
@laurel_braitman
Hosted By: Addison Brasil
Author of First Year Of Grief Club: A Gift From A Friend Who Gets It
www.mygriefclub.com
@sharemygriefclub
@addisonbrasil
I'm Addison, brazil. Grief Club The Podcast starts now. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Grief Club The Podcast, where we take the chapters of my book First Year of Grief Club A Gift from a Friend Who Gets It and use the experiments as launching points for deeper conversations with friends and experts. Today I'm very excited to welcome Laurel Brateman to the show, the author of What Looks Like Bravery an epic journey through loss to love. Welcome to the show, laurel.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much And so glad you are here And I'm excited to get to know you sort of live, because everything I can gather, i feel like our listeners will definitely see a lot of similarities. I feel like I'm in the presence of another, what I sometimes call a grief Olympian, someone who's gone through multiple losses, compounded losses, and that can sort of feel like the Olympics when it happens every so often, like every time you sort of trained, you're going back to it, and I really got that sense from your story And I'm just I'm really excited to have you here.
Speaker 2:Thank you, i wish we got a medal. When does the medal come?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and also we'll see right away that you're also not afraid to find the funny, which is what we do here, oh my. God, all our spells right, we didn't get that medal, So that's.
Speaker 2:It's either that or die. Oh, you know, Oh good.
Speaker 1:Oh, and now I'm very excited for this conversation. We're on the same page. Before we go any further, i always just have my guests drop in and do a conscious emotional check-in. So if you'd be down to take a breath, in one word, how are you feeling physically right now? Height, i'm safe, jittery. In one word, how are you feeling mentally right now?
Speaker 2:Excited.
Speaker 1:Excited And in one word, how are you feeling emotionally?
Speaker 2:Oh, maybe that was emotionally. I don't know the difference between mentally and emotionally. My thoughts are my emotions. Oh man, that could be its own podcast, And what?
Speaker 1:So they can just be together. One word Now emotionally I'm feeling giddy. It's switching quite quickly, which is always fun, because in reading your story and getting to know you and starting to read your book over the last two days, there's definitely a rawness And then there's just a feeling of just starting to feel like there's almost that excitement when you get introduced to somebody who gets it. But then there's also this like oh no, they get it.
Speaker 2:It's like makes so much feelings So I can't hide. Yeah, exactly, there's no hiding?
Speaker 1:What is this going to unlock in me? What is my version of each of these chapters? And that just comes up that way. I would love, as I always do, to allow you to just take a few minutes and honor your journey. I'm actually interested as a fellow grief Olympian, how you do such a thing in a few minutes, and maybe I can learn from you when I'm being interviewed, because I find it quite difficult and sometimes it's easier to just kind of get it all out and then get to where we are at today and how we're showing up in the world. But I would love to hear you honor your journey and share what you'd like with the listeners.
Speaker 2:That's a beautiful, generous way to phrase that question, so much better than just can you introduce yourself for listeners? Here I am on the journey, hopefully in the middle of it, hopefully not at the end, hopefully not at the beginning, because that's exhausting. Wouldn't do that again for any amount of money in the world. I grew up with a dying dad, from when I was three and a half to when I was 17, but we never knew how much time we'd have, so loss really was a kind of ever present family member for all of my childhood and adolescence. He died my senior year of high school and I had both a magical and a painful coming of age And then, like it does for all of us, the world just kept offering up, like one of those sushi restaurants on conveyor belt, new opportunities to test my coping skills with loss, which, frankly, for most of my life really just crappy.
Speaker 2:And I lost many other things relationships, other people that I loved, pets, places, my family home, the dreams I had for myself in many ways, and had to come up with new dreams And I'd say where I am in that journey. Oh my God. You know, i feel like every few years, with every new level of self-awareness, you revisit those losses you've had and you may interpret them in different ways. And so I'm 45 now. I hope I'm still in the middle of my life and that I don't know. I'm still learning how to be disappointed by the world and then sort of dust myself off the best that I can and keep going, and how to be open to love even though I hate love because, you can lose what you love, you know.
Speaker 2:That's why I'm at. I'm in the weeds, the weeds of the human experience. I'd say the journey is not over.
Speaker 1:I love that so much and it's so right where I am in my life. I think you know I got through the idea of you know, grief isn't something you can fix, it's something you honor is what led me through writing what I wrote and sort of when I speak. But then there's like this back end, now that I'm in which I'll call the weeds as well too where you're realizing that you weren't fighting or pushing or doing all of this for this result. You were actually just doing it for the opportunity to just get to be available to like bad days and mediocre and like like it's just the availability to feel again is really what the bargain was for.
Speaker 1:And you're like, oh like, because I did all this, i don't just get these things now, like I don't get sale and it's like, no, like, unfortunately, the beauty of life and like getting back to this place, is just that you're available to feel bad days and you're available to have your heart broken and you're available to continue to lose, and and also available to all the good stuff in my well too, which is, you know what makes it all fair. But it is sort of this interesting concept. I think. Somewhere along the way, maybe I thought there was this deal that if I, you know, put on a good face and got through, then I was just going to like sale and like everyone's looking at me being like, oh yeah, you were just going to sale from what? 33 to 70, like because you know, because you're a grief Olympian, you know, and and it's such an innocent thing that subconsciously that that that grows in us, that we think that maybe that's how it will work.
Speaker 1:And you are incredibly modest and I don't do the bio intros on this show. You're in the show notes, but you know, obviously you spent a great deal of time really overachieving and leaning into your academic and intellectual side at Docker, at MIT and New York Times best seller, ted, i mean, you've offered so much to the world and I and I used to think I overachieved until I read your bio and then I was like all right, all right, all right, she really did the damn thing. She really didn't want to feel all that, you know, but it's. It's so interesting And I wonder now, sort of with where you're at now and honoring your journey, how you feel about all those accomplishments and and and where they sort of got you.
Speaker 2:You're so wise. Okay, a couple of thoughts. And you know, the universe, despite our best intentions, is not a vending machine. I'm just so disappointed by that. I feel like I put in all the work. What do you mean? What do you mean I have more lessons to learn around loss and disappointment, Or not even that, just about like having a boring day. Right, It's like, oh, I've done all this work myself And to understand my place and my lack of control over things, And it doesn't just get to be nice now. I think that's still shocking. Almost every day, I even have just like a meth day. I'm like, but wait, I'm so grateful to be alive. So that's one thought.
Speaker 2:And then, secondly, yeah, my coping strategy was when I was rewarded for even though I would say it was a kind of form of self harm like do I regret the PhD? They were the best selling book. Like, no, no, you know, I could have had a coping strategy that really did much more serious harm, as as many people do. But I think, because I chose to bury my negative feelings in overwork or just work, that I, it took me a lot longer to see them for what they were, which was a form of avoidance. And so I think, had I been acting in such a way that other people would have noticed or wouldn't have like padded me on the back for I probably would have figured out that I needed some help earlier.
Speaker 2:And so, while I don't regret you know what, what many people, and you know me too would consider successes, I regret the reason that I did the work, not the work itself. And that's where I am now I'm trying to figure out. You know, I still certainly have a huge drive, But can that drive come from a place of just joy to do the thing, rather than terror or an attempt to prove to myself that I'm okay or that I'm safe or that I'm worthwhile or good inside? You know, that's where I am now is trying to think about new kinds of motivations, even if the work is the same.
Speaker 1:That resonates so much, especially today And as a reminder just this week. For me, i gosh yes, that resonates so much. Okay, I'm getting excited. I want to dive in, but I have to ask you the question that I ask everybody, which is if a child walked up to you on the street and they didn't know what the word grief meant, and they asked you what is grief, how would you explain it to a child?
Speaker 2:Yeah, i love this question. I should have thought about this and it was coming. The feeling you get when you have to admit to yourself that the thing that you wanted or that you loved most of all isn't there. To me it's something about that which you wish not matching up to that which is, and the vast gap between those two things can hurt like hell.
Speaker 1:Wow, i hope this child is at least seven, because that would scare me back into the house, But also so beautifully said and true, and I do think to that point there needs to be a lot more reality and honesty with children about grief and the role it plays, and maybe that's exactly how we should explain it. I think I could have really learned a lot if someone had looked me in the eyes and kind of it's almost like trying to understand space in a way where you just get an idea of it and that it's just this bigger thing that you'll never really fully get. But it's a process And it's like that is such a beautiful way of putting it that vast space really. That hit me for real.
Speaker 2:You know. I think, frankly, what we should be doing is asking kids what grief is Like. I think they know.
Speaker 2:They know, you know I have three nephews under nine and nine and under, and when they're having a tantrum or it's really, it's just disappointment, something that they truly wished that they didn't get. I mean, it could be the crust of their sandwich, it could be that their brother got like a bigger piece of pie, it could be that their Lego tower broke before You know. It doesn't have to be a huge thing, but it's not like kids don't know grief. They absolutely do, and I think often they're able to narrate it much more simply and effectively than we can. And I don't know if you've gotten to the part in the book yet, but I became a volunteer facilitator for kids who have had a recent loss And a lot of the work that the programs did with them that I admired was having them draw the grief, to come up with beautiful metaphors for grief.
Speaker 2:And one boy I remember he just his favorite thing to draw was sneaker waves, which was so profound. You know you're swimming, you expect waves, but not these big ones that sort of just come out of nowhere and knock you sideways for a little while I love that, i would love to do actually listeners.
Speaker 1:Put on your voice memos and ask your kids what grief are and start sending me the clips. That would be such a cool whole episode of just what kids say, especially at different ages. I would love to do that. I'm going to start to personally also ask, i guess and it's so I'm curious when sort of they would even get you know what that word is, where they wouldn't be the kid walking up to you on the street but but able to like sort of form what they think it is. Also, there might be a lot of find the funny if they choose to know and they have no idea.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly. Sort of food or something.
Speaker 1:You never know what they'll think it is.
Speaker 3:You've reached Grief Club, leave a message after the beep. Hey, grief Club, it's Justin Michael Williams, and for those of you who wanted to meditate or learn to meditate, i just wanted to leave you this message to let you know that I have a free meditation album out that you can access on Spotify, apple Music and anywhere. There are 10 tracks for you to enjoy about feeling your feelings, getting shit done and taking action in your life. You can find it at MeditationForThePeoplecom. I love you. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:So the theme of today's episode in the book this is the week where I get the readers to experiment with the idea of noticing where they're approaching life and grief with flow, what feels like flow and what feels like force, And that I think that's a very quiet, honest process. I know when I did that experiment originally I felt like I may hurt some feelings. I felt disconnected from myself when I admitted what felt like force. Things I used to find joy from now felt like force And it's just a very quiet, interesting experiment that I think does open up a whole new approach from where you are, and one that we can do sort of over and over again as we continue to change and grow. I'd love just to hear from you on that idea, with your experiences where you might have noticed like force was showing up and how you flow within your grief or even coping and healing.
Speaker 2:And I think this is such an important thing to talk about because it's a source of so much shame for people, like when they feel like they're maybe not doing it right because some sort of ritual or something that society is telling them they're supposed to feel. In the moment they don't feel, either they're too sad or not sad enough, or on the anniversary of the death of someone they love, they don't feel how they think they're supposed to feel And I think so much needless and additional suffering comes from that. So I'd say for me I almost never feel like particularly meditative on, say, mothers or Father's Day I've lost both my parents or sometimes even on like the anniversary, even on their birthdays or days where I think I'm supposed to feel a certain thing. Or I see a lot of other people kind of publicly grieving or publicly venerating the people or places that they've lost. And for me, part of getting a little older is setting myself free around those things, like if you don't feel like posting a Mother's Day thing, laurel, like you don't have to do it, it doesn't mean you didn't care or whatever.
Speaker 2:And similarly I'd say I don't think we necessarily bury people or ritualize people when we do it, when we're not, i think, emotionally ready to let go, in the moments that society is telling us to let go, or when the service is, or the memorial, or maybe even the year out, like I've spread a many an ash, when I'm just like not ready to let a damn thing go and find that it's like maybe 14 years later, or it's 11 years later, it's 22 years later, like I'm finally ready to have a kind of ritual to bury someone or something, and I don't think we talk about that enough, and that's why a lot of our rituals can feel forced, because they're not coming from within.
Speaker 2:We're being told how we're supposed to feel in a given situation, and maybe I'm just a contrarian, but the more someone tells me I'm supposed to do a certain thing, also, the more likely I am to be like I don't know about that. So for me, i feel most in flow when it's kind of natural or an authentic moment to reflect on someone or something, or I'm doing a ritual that just feels effortless, rather than I've been told to show up at 8 AM because my spiritual leader tells me to, or because it's Mother's Day or what have you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Oh gosh, i love everything that you just touched on And bringing up flow versus force.
Speaker 1:I think the anniversaries and the expectation of when grief is supposed to show up is such a great example of flow versus force, because every time this happens, without a doubt that every day leading up to one of those days I'm supposed to feel something, i feel that force, that like it's coming and I'm supposed to feel a certain way and I dread the day coming, and then, nine times out of 10, on the actual day, i feel complete release and actual a sense of flow of just it is what it is, because this day doesn't really create anything more than if we didn't know what day it was at all, and there's so much force for me in the leading up to that, and so people can really notice that and just like, where is there that opportunity to let go of forcing yourself to the way you should feel around certain dates?
Speaker 1:I think that those are landmines for sure. And then I love what you brought up. I've been hoping somebody would say exactly what you just said, because I don't know if you watch succession or if you're watching this season.
Speaker 3:Does anyone not Spoiler?
Speaker 1:alert, hopefully, and if you don't go, do that and don't come back to this podcast till you do. But I have never seen such real people to the point that it's cringey portrayed. But then when we added this season, this grief, it was the first time in my life especially as like a storyteller and a screenwriter, where I just felt so seen from the episode when they found out that Logan was dead, the way you know. It was exactly like that for me on those nights where everyone's looking to me to see how I feel and take a lead And I'm just repeating like okay, well, yeah, well, yeah, he's gone, okay, okay. And they're just like you know, and I've never seen that. It's always this, like you know, funeral, get the veils out, grief, cry, and it's not like that And they did that so well. But then to your point that you were just making in the funeral episode. I've never been more affected, i don't think, by anything on TV in my life than the funeral episode And because it put into clarity for me this idea that we never talk about.
Speaker 1:There's the moment when you're informed about someone passing, like physically, maybe it's a doctor, maybe you see it yourself, but you are aware that death has occurred. And then there's the other moment when you realize that you now live in a world without that person. And those are two very different moments and they don't happen right beside each other And they don't make sense to anyone else. And I would argue that that second moment can happen in waves, continually for years and years and years, where the floor just drops out. And it was so odd because it wasn't the writing, it wasn't the story, it wasn't anything but the pitch Kieran Colkin's character made when he was trying to give his eulogy. I had to send it a text immediately to close friends and family members, but he does the exact pitch that I made at both my brother and my father's funeral. It's sort of like when you're singing and you're matching tone. It pierced my soul. It took two days of like. I just couldn't. I didn't even remember that being a thing.
Speaker 1:But when there's no way you can say or deal with anything, the noise that comes out. I'm a man's body even at that moment And it's just so perfectly and beautifully like that second moment of oh no, he, now he gets it. And that happened exactly to me, almost at my brother's viewings And because of the way I fell. I sort of fell into my mother's lap and she went over top of me. So everybody there's like 300 or 400 people in this hall and everyone thought she was the one making the noise because we were sort of she had her body over top of my body to protect me. And then, like, when she finally went out, everyone was like, oh, it's Addison, and it was. I've never heard that noise in my life And it's just, i just use it because it was so beautifully highlighted in succession. And then it's so real that I have.
Speaker 1:The reason I haven't put words around it is because sometimes it's it's not words, it's like it's literally a sound of the recognition of. You know, sort of like when you hear whales cry or animals when they've been separated from you know it's. It's something that sort of surpasses language and have art and screenwriting really show that and do us all a favor. You know we're writing whole books trying to describe things like this And it's just like in one moment you go oh, somebody gets it, somebody really really gets it. And so sorry, i went a little nerdy there, but I just you just hit that And I think that's such a beautiful reminder for this flow versus forced thing, because there's this forceful part of us that's like no, i already know that, i already know they're gone, and I already know they're gone.
Speaker 1:And if you go back to our episode with Mary Francis O'Connor, we know that, neuro science wise, it takes a while anyways. But just being able to find flow and like the floor might come out from under you again and again and again, it's just something that I have just been ruminating on since that episode of succession and just you know so beautifully the way we all split and then split into different parts within ourselves. I've just never seen it done so well, even with cringy people who like to come to their own flaws every moment, you know. But it's perfect because it's so illustrated and so exaggerated that we get it. You know we can really see ourselves in each of it.
Speaker 2:I totally agree with you. I loved that scene And I think it's true And frankly I think because they're so real and despicable, that helps you know. It's even sort of less performative in a way. It gives us even more license, i agree with you, and you never know when those realizations are going to hit you which is both wonderful and terrible. You know, Absolutely Never know.
Speaker 1:It's speaking of fathers. I see so much parallel in reading your memoir so far And for the listeners, pick up your copy because you'll be reading it with me then, because I've just started. I wanted to ask you specifically because I get the sense that you had a father like mine that took up a lot of space and was a very big personality And sometimes the literal real estate of that at home I had. my father and my brother were like that. people often attributed, with no knowing of what would eventually happen, my father's personality to very much like Robin Williams from what they perceived of Robin Williams. So that type of energy, just the life of the party. everywhere we went, everything was funny.
Speaker 1:first went to dance And it was a lot of my childhood with both of them sort of saying their names under my breath like an embarrassment of like why do you have to talk to everybody? And it was just like this constant thing which, on the back end, has been the greatest gift they ever gave me, because I needed the intense training, because I didn't know they weren't going to be around forever. But I wanted to ask you how you find the flow or don't find flow, or just how you navigate that literal space Because it's like literal, like grief, real estate, almost. you know. you got so accustomed to someone having that much space in your life And then you're sort of navigating this back end without that energy And I just wanted to hear how you might talk to someone about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a great question. In my case it is quite indeed literal, like I wish you could. You know, see this, but I am inside my grief real estate. So both of my parents were actually pretty larger than life in a lot of ways. You know, they rescued donkeys. My father was a ranching cardiovascular surgeon. They were small plane pilots. They led like a very big and weird life And they also taught themselves how to be ranchers. And I grew up on a commercial avocado and citrus ranch. We call it ranching, even though it's not cattle. Everyone in this area you don't farm avocados. I don't really know why you ranch them, but that's where I live now.
Speaker 2:The trees around me, a few feet away from where you're talking, are trees my parents planted that my brother and I now take care of. Both. my parents chose to end their own lives via medical aid and dying. My dad did it before it was legal. My mom did it more recently as it became legal, and that was, you know, i help my mom die a few feet from where I'm talking to you And I think that is a weird and magical and painful.
Speaker 2:Sorry, i turned my alerts off. That is a weird and magical and painful experience. I live with their very opinionated ghosts around me constantly, and I think, like you, it is a gift to love and be loved by people who take up that much space. It's also hard, you know. I think it took me the better part of my adult life to hear my adult life, to hear my own voice inside my head, not that of my parents.
Speaker 2:A lot of the book is about my own journey to hear myself, because I did love them and I wanted to do right by them, and also I had a sort of mistaken belief that I could achieve or excel my way out of pain, and so that meant that it was real hard for me as an adult to understand what I wanted and untangle that from what people wanted for me, who loved me. And so you know, now I live in the physical space that they built. We lost our home in a wildfire, so the home itself has been rebuilt, but all of the trees, the landscape, the smell, you know they're with me constantly.
Speaker 2:And it's wonderful because it's a kind of end to existential loneliness And also, you know, because I know exactly what they would say in any given situation. I have to do some work to quiet those voices and to figure out what I want and be who I want to be, Because I spent far too long of my life trying to live in someone else's mold and had to break it.
Speaker 1:So in a way that space becomes space for you and that really resonates. I mean, my comedy brain is like I'll often joke with friends that they literally had to die for me to get a word in. You know, and it's like that, exactly After a lot of healing, you feel comfortable making jokes like that. I mean, i felt comfortable two days after because that's my family and that's the way we grew up. There is that weird thing of you know, same thing where I'm a performer, i was probably the most celebrated like performer, which is weird that they were like took up so much space and I was literally going to an arts high school and on stages and competing around the world and all this stuff. But I did that where it was appropriate and when I was on stage and where it was supposed to happen.
Speaker 1:And there was this thing of me never being able to understand why they could do that everywhere without the invitation to do so, and it's honestly trying to learn what they were doing has led to the most wealth and love in my adult life, like sort of trying to inherit that back, because really everything and the only reason I'm here today is you know the deep connections And I'm going, okay. What were they really doing, though? and in a way, they were kind of just connecting, being kind to everybody and not asking for anything, and I can't tell you how noticeable and rare that is in a city like Los Angeles, when, for a decade, i you know that's what I've really been trying to do and how I show up in the world and it's so much of them me going back and being like but what were they really doing? like, why did they have so many friends? and I'm finally at 34 and my brother's eulogy I literally wrote the words. You know, he had friends from age two to 72. Like it didn't matter to him either way. He was this wise old soul And I just recently thought about that and was like talking to one of my oldest friends, who's truly my friend. It's not a family figure, it's my friend and I'm best friends with my godson since the day he was born like he truly is like one of my besties, and I'm going, oh my god, like this isn't one of the big successes that we overachieve in grief and other people applaud us for, but it's the most meaningful to me that I hope that you know.
Speaker 1:People say that he took the time to connect and find the funny with everybody he met. you know, that's like that's becoming what's so important to me as I move away from. Oh well, you know, i helped create an app. Oh, i had the book. Oh, i was on this extraordinary, this visa. Oh, i competed at the world. Like you know, there's this list of things and and it's odd because it's this quiet flow where clearly before I was trying to forcefully be like well, look at this, we'll look at this, you know, we'll look at this and and I can make it into something and I can raise a lot of money around this and I can help other people. But for me that's been a very quiet journey and you just helped me like really sort of digest that and understand that said, thank you for being so honest, man, you're gold mine.
Speaker 3:I knew this is going to be.
Speaker 1:I knew this is going to be instant friendship because you just get the. You know the real friends who get it. I feel like I want to ask just generally. I want to go back a little bit to where you said you hate love. I think that's a big flow versus force. You know, grief teaches us that love equals grief.
Speaker 1:I say my book, the return on the return on investment of connection is grief. You know that is the only promised return in a sense in some way, whether it's through death loss or, you know, just moving our separate ways in life, and we experience it on so many micro macro levels over and over and over again. And if I'm being really honest, i do think going through the grief Olympics taught the very logical side of my brain that it might be best not to love or risk falling in love. Or, you know, really, depending on anyone, especially men, when it comes to family, because you know that, you know loss of so much so quickly. But I just, with everything you said today, i can't not ask for me and the people listening how you've come along on that and and sort of that.
Speaker 2:Grief, love, intersection well again, i'd say I'm mid journey, like I did get married again, which I thought I would never do, and you'll get to that part in the book.
Speaker 2:A lot of the book is about me and my sort of questionable dating choices my brother actually called it my wife my YMCA period, which was quite fun it was like the village people song, but it lasted like 10 years, you know, and I think had you asked me at the time, i would have told you oh yeah, i'm open to a relationship, i'd love a relationship. But if you actually looked at the, the choices I was making, everything had a very, very low ceiling and I really was only going out with people that I knew subconsciously were going to disappoint me or I was going to disappoint them in some fundamental way, and that's who I was attracted to listening not watching my face and I'm bright red.
Speaker 2:I mean listen.
Speaker 1:I'm 10.
Speaker 2:I'm 11 years older than you and this was my entire 30s, like from 29 to 30 until 39. I, that is what I was doing and it was like a full-time job and I gotta say it was also terribly fun at times. It was so much fun because chaos can be fun. You never know what you're gonna get. You know, and if you were a storyteller and a performer by trade, which you are like it's fun right, like you don't know what's gonna happen next, like that's the TV we like that's everything.
Speaker 2:So of course there is allure in those kinds of relationships. You know where you're like. Well, i don't know, will they, won't they? I just felt like I was, i was living inside a will they want they romantic comedy for the better part of 10 years and I love watching those. But it got tiring, you know. I wanted to get to know someone and I realized, as you said, you know, that the price of doing that is a loss. Of course I mean best-case scenario when you dies, like what is that? like that's crazy, you know. But I'd say I got a little tired of just hanging out with people who didn't know me very well, who I didn't know very well, and the big up and downs just got a little tiring and I was also dating as a, as a light form of self-harm, sometimes too you know, and I just hit a wall, and that coincided with me being on assignment in Alaska.
Speaker 2:I was in the Bering Sea in February and winter, which is nowhere I would tell someone to go meet someone to love, and I was coming off a really messy period of time with which I write in the book, and that's when I met my now husband, partner.
Speaker 2:And I think that old adage is kind of true You know, you do find someone when you're not looking, but you have to be existentially open, you have to have your kind of taxi light on or I think you're just not even attracted to the person that's gonna be good for you.
Speaker 2:Like I think for the better part of 10 years, if someone had walked by that was really gonna love me, that was stable, that I would find funny and smart and challenging and all the right ways, like I would not have seen that man or woman, like I just wouldn't have, i wouldn't have noticed them, i wouldn't have smelled them, it just nope, they would have been like the background and a cartoon, you know.
Speaker 2:And so it wasn't until I actually was ready in some subconscious way. That I think I could even be attracted to somebody that I could build a life with is the truth, and part of that was realizing that I was ready to pay the price, because I truly don't think you are open to any kind of deeply meaningful connection unless you have made peace with the fact that it is going to end in one way, shape or form. And I don't like it, i hate it. As I was falling in love with him, i told him all the time like I don't wanna love you, i don't like this. I just only recently we've been together six years I only recently put him into my frequent contacts in my phone because I am that crazy and I felt like, oh my God, if I admit to the world, i really love this guy. This is after marrying him, by the way.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like something will happen to him. I mean, this is the entity with which we must live, so somehow marrying him was okay, but putting him in my immediate phone contacts was not.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's almost like a succession thing where that says it all in a way. That's a very visual, honest thing that I think many people will really resonate with. I totally So. today, in this moment, for us all listening, is it still like every day, a little twinge of like there's risk here, but I'm moving forward and I'm stepping into the flow of this versus the force, or is it all flow now, like what's the real life grief on this?
Speaker 2:It depends on the day and it's triggered by all kinds of things. So he runs a salmon cannery in remote Alaska off the road system. So he has to take tiny planes too and from work a few times the summer. And a lot of people say in Alaska, like you haven't lived there long enough if you haven't been in a plane accident or hit a moose on the highway, that eventually one of those things will come for you.
Speaker 2:And I worry and I make him text me before he takes off and before he lands and no one flies with instruments up there, and I mean, odds are he's way more likely to die here, right Like on the way to LAX, or of a heart attack. but still, there's something about the small plane crash that brings up fear for me even though I haven't lost anyone immediately close to me in that way.
Speaker 2:So I see it in things like that. or if he normally sends me a good night text and it's like a few hours late, i don't immediately go to like oh he's has some side person. No, i immediately go to he is dead in a ditch somewhere, and it's always a ditch, and for my mom was a ditch too. I don't know why I was always teasing her about the ditch. But I think if we have been marked by loss or our grief Olympians, as you say, i think we so can quickly go to that place. It's not conscious, i have to work against it, and love brings that up for me, like of my friends too. all my good friends know to like text me when they get home or just things like that.
Speaker 2:I'm just more likely to panic, or if I have a pain in the night, it's bone cancer, until proven otherwise even though I know it must not be right, like all of those things, i'm just so quick to go to those places and that's the experience of love for me And I just try to not shame myself about it is the truth And just know I'm a bit of a trauma pop in this way. And then I need the assurances and maybe I'm someone that, like, is gonna have to pay for the MRI even though she knows it's nothing, because it buys me a few years of peace.
Speaker 1:I totally resonate with that and I think a lot of people will too. And I think normalizing these associations and I think we're like a decade apart but we're in the same generation of like the words, the Kennedy curse being used all the time, and I remember people used to sort of say that in relation to my life And that's something that I actively have like combated of like there's no curse. But as soon as you said small plane like I mean all those associations are there and the only other examples of grief Olympians are these like very public things where it seemed like every time they try to do something, they got shot or killed or you know that's what people were comparing it to. So it is that very odd thing And I think what we're really grappling is like with is it's a daily relationship to both know that your healing requires you to accept that you also one day die and that your loved ones you will lose them, whether it's by your death of theirs or you know another circumstance, to be able to acknowledge that daily and then also live within. That is really sort of before the flow versus force I'm gonna say F around you know, of life It really is.
Speaker 1:I mean, everyone has sworn on this show. I don't know why I just censored myself, but, like you know, it is, and I think, just really finding ease in those moments and trying to be kind with ourselves, it's just really what I'm taking away today because, again, it's not about getting to this fix or this process or this result. I think we've both proven that there's no end point, there's no metal, although I do think that we should get together and have a metal ceremony, i do You can have the gold.
Speaker 1:Can you please do that? I'll stand sober.
Speaker 2:I don't want the gold. Let's find other people.
Speaker 1:Or just they'll be all participation medals, maybe like that.
Speaker 2:Everyone gets a trophy, we just all get bronzes. You know Great.
Speaker 1:We'll just leave the top of the podium open. We're not interested in any of that.
Speaker 2:Exactly Made. no one have to stand here.
Speaker 1:There's nothing better than when we naturally segue into the find the funny portion of the show, which I always do as a promise to myself, because we dive deep here and honor the journey. I just always like to bring it back to this opportunity to find the funny, which we've been doing throughout, and I've sort of been laughing to myself the whole time. Thank you so much for clarifying My. Find the funny is that we are speaking on the Friday morning of West Hollywood Pride and there's an entire weekend plan of events. I now have to take this wisdom and pretend not to be Mart, when you've just imparted so much about obvious patterns, and that I'm interested to see where that wisdom goes as I flow out into the weekend.
Speaker 1:I truly think that I live, like you said, in multiple worlds, and it is funny. The contrast is hilarious of what I'm doing privately. Yeah, a lot of the people I see this weekend none of them are taking time to talk about death for two hours. I love that contrast and I love going out with all my friends who know nothing about this and the ones that say like I'm sorry, i've never listened to your podcast. I'm like I'm so glad you don't feel like you need it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you never need it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, let the audience find you kind of thing. But God, i have loved laughing with you through this. Do you have any find the funny in the sense of like a go to or where do you find the funny these days mostly, oh.
Speaker 2:God, that is just the lens through which I feel like. That's going to say quite naturally Right like everything to me about life is just a different shade of ridiculous. Truly, i mean the fact that, like people we love can just up and disappear and are then just nowhere is the most insane thing that we live with all the time and we all just walk around pretending as normal, like that's insane to me. So I think I just sort of see the world like you know the best stand up right.
Speaker 2:It's just pointing out the ridiculous in that which we take for granted. So but hey, can I, can I be really bossy as a guest and give you just a tiny bit of advice for this weekend.
Speaker 1:Yes. I know I just told you and you're thinking about your own day, because I know nobody else see this weekend will ever listen to this, because that's the truth.
Speaker 2:I just I think you should just go have fucking fun That is written on a post.
Speaker 1:It though That is friends and fun, you know, thank God, and that's flow, just do it, yes, and honestly.
Speaker 2:The right person, or the right people or the right religion, like they will come to you when you run into that wall yourself and you will get there. Whenever you get there and no amount of self awareness is going to get you there Faster is for where I really believe, because you're already on this journey. You're already so smart, you're already seeking wisdom from yourself and others. Like, just go have fun. If I could do that 10 years again, like that's what I don't regret. I don't regret one second of the fun and the chasing of the pleasure. And so what if there was a heartbreak on the other side? that comes for us anyway, as we have discussed. Just go do what you want to do. I promise like I don't think you can mess it up And I really do think the way to honor the people that we've lost is to like go seek the fun and the pleasure they can't access. I do. I think just run it fun. Run it fun. This weekend.
Speaker 1:I accept that And I have to say I'm excited And, again, this conversation could have been more perfect. But when it finally feels like our achievements like I always call myself a master of vices, it can go either way what you're using to avoid But it does finally feel like the fun is for fun and it's taken 14 years And like. So I do get kind of excited about weekends like this because, like we were saying early, all of this work wasn't for some result.
Speaker 1:It was just to be available to the moments that are fun, to be available to the heartbreak, to be available to the passion and all the good stuff too, But it really does feel, and your conversation today I feel like I'm sort of like behind you in the track, where that wall that you're talking about hitting, where it's not pleasurable and it's not funny anymore because you really are seeking partnership.
Speaker 1:I feel like that wall is like kind of at my chest right now and I can jump the wall if I want. I can jump it if I need to, but it's there and it's beautiful to live in that moment of like oh crap, maybe I have done the right work finally not the overachieving, but the right work that I could be available again to heartbreak And I think this is the seat of my memoir, like you know that they're just coming to that moment where it's not like I didn't meet someone and live happily ever after. I just got to a point where I was available to being heard again And I think, if you're willing, that's can be one of the most beautiful things.
Speaker 1:So, what's funny is that we just turned the find the funny into like the most heartfelt part of this episode.
Speaker 2:Sorry, All right.
Speaker 1:Where can people find you? Because they're going to want to and where can you find the book?
Speaker 2:I feel like the only social media I really do is Instagram. I'm on. there is Laurel underscore Brayman, and they can find me online LaurelBraymanorg or, excuse me, LaurelBraymancom. And yeah, the book is called What Looks Like Bravery. Everywhere Books Are Sold And I'm just loving hearing from people about their their own losses and their own epic journeys. We're all on one.
Speaker 1:So, friends, you get it And I truly hope that you'll be back with us again. I feel like this is the beginning of something really cool And I'm just, i'm really grateful to have spent this time for you today. As we check out with one word and the music plays us out, i'm going to use that one word. I just said grateful and I'll let you have the last word.
Speaker 2:Excited, still even more so than I was an hour ago. So thank you so much, thank you Have a good one.
Speaker 1:Well, grief club. That's the show. If you enjoyed it, please let us know by liking and leaving review. This will help as many people who may need what we're talking about find it the fastest. Remember to honor the journey And when that gets tough, find the funny.
