Telling Harsh Stories to Yourself About Yourself? How To Rewrite the Narrative. | Allison Sweet Grant

Nobody makes it out of childhood unscathed. Here's a guide to letting go of the past. Allison Sweet Grant, https://www.allisonsweetgrant.com/ graduate with dual master's degrees from the University of Michigan, is a psychiatric nurse practitioner, turned author. She has been published in The New York Times and The Atlantic. She is the author of two children's picture books, The Gift Inside the Box and Leif and the Fall, co-authored with her husband Adam Grant. I Am the Cage https://www.amazon.com/Am-Cage-Allison-Sweet-Grant/dp/059361691X is her debut novel. In this episode we talk about: The impact of your childhood trauma on your adult relationships The concept of the "junk drawer" (a metaphor for all the pain, self-doubt, and anxiety you might try to compartmentalize) Writing as a tool for self-acceptance and self-compassion How to re-write your own story and where to start Practical meditation tools to quiet the mind The role of cathartic visualization Dealing with imposter syndrome And more Join Dan's online community here http://www.danharris.com/ Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Get ready for another Meditation Party at Omega Institute! This in-person workshop brings together Dan with his friends and meditation teachers, Sebene Selassie, Jeff Warren, and for the first time, Ofosu Jones-Quartey. The event runs October 24th-26th. Sign up and learn more here http://eomega.org/workshops/meditation-party-2025! Tickets are now on sale for a special live taping of the 10% Happier Podcast with guest Pete Holmes! Join us on November 18th in NYC for this benefit show, with all proceeds supporting the New York Insight Meditation Center. Grab your tickets here https://www.nyimc.org/event/great-cosmic-joke/! To advertise on the show, contact [email protected] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris. Thanks to our sponsors: Bumble: Thinking about dating again? Take this as your sign and start your love story on Bumble http://bumble.com/. Airbnb: Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com/host http://airbnb.com/host.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:19Dan Harris?

  Hello, everybody. How we doing? I suspect we all have brutal stories that we tell about ourselves to ourselves. Mine has often been that I'm incredibly selfish, maybe even irredeemably rotten. But for you, the story might be that you're a fraud, an impostor, a failure, unworthy, not smart enough, not outgoing enough, unlovable. Maybe you're haunted by shame or by addiction. I could go on. The menu is vast. Today, I'm going to talk to a living example of the possibility of rewriting your narrative. Allison Sweet Grant is a psychiatric nurse practitioner turned author. Her newish novel is called "I Am the Cage." It's loosely based on her own childhood experiences, which were quite brutal

• 1:03Dan Harris?

  and which she will describe for you. In this conversation, we talk about the impact of your childhood trauma on your adult relationships, the concept of a junk drawer. That's a metaphor for all of the pain and self-doubt and anxiety that you might try to compartmentalize in a junk drawer. We talk about writing as a tool for self-acceptance, how to rewrite your own story and where to start, practical meditation tools to quiet the mind, the role of cathartic visualization, dealing with impostor syndrome, and much more. Just a quick mention before we dive in that our next live meditation and Q&A session will be this Tuesday, October 21st, at 4:00 Eastern. We do these every Tuesday at the same time. Sign up at danharris.com.

• 1:47Dan Harris?

  And if you want to meditate with me in person, I am co-leading a weekend retreat very soon, October 24th through 26th, at the Omega Institute in upstate New York. It's going to be me, Sabine Selassie, Jeff Warren, and Afosu Jones-Cortez. It'll be super fun. We do a session Friday night, two sessions on Saturday, and then a final one on Sunday morning. In between, lots of free time to hike, play tennis, get a massage, do yoga, whatever. The sessions mix meditation, discussion among the teachers, discussion among the audience members. The idea is really to mix serious meditation practice with socializing, and that's why we call it Meditation Party. I'll put a link in the show notes if you want to sign up. Okay, we'll get started with Allison Sweet Grant right after this.

• 2:30Speaker 01

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• 3:31Dan Harris?

  Allison Sweet Grant, welcome to the show.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  Thank you. So nice to be here, Dan.

• 3:36Dan Harris?

  Yeah, it's nice to meet you after having heard tell of you for a while, but not actually having been able to put a face to the name. So it's great to finally be with you.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  Thank you. Well, I feel the same. I've watched you on television for a long time and read a lot of your work and seen your TED Talk. And it feels great to talk with you in person.

• 3:56Dan Harris?

  Thank you. Appreciate that. All right, well, I don't know if you're comfortable starting this way, but I would be curious to hear a little bit of your personal story. I guess this is kind of me diving right into the tough stuff. So feel free to deflect if you want. But I know at the heart of your new novel is a personal history that is not fictionalized. And I've read that you have argued that this personal story was kind of eating its way out of you over time. And this novel is a manifestation of that. So would you be comfortable walking us through what happened to you as a child?

• 4:30Speaker 03

  Sure. Right from the beginning, I was born with something called a fibular hemimelia and congenital short femur, which essentially translates to having one leg shorter than the other one, one longer than the other one. And in order to correct the discrepancy, I had to undergo a pretty arduous procedure that involves surgically breaking the bones of the affected limb, attaching a metal external fixator, which is essentially something that looks sort of like a birdcage from hip to toe,

• 5:12Speaker 03

  and stretching the bones over an extended period of time so that new bone fills in the spaces. Essentially, the aim of the procedure is so that both legs at the end are the same length. It started when I was 11 years old. The entire procedure took approximately two years. And the book that I wrote, it's not a memoir, but it is heavily inspired by this experience in my adolescence.

• 5:45Dan Harris?

  I don't know if this is me being overly dramatic, but that procedure sounds barbaric.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  I wouldn't say it's overly dramatic. There were certainly times while I was going through it that it felt barbaric. In actuality, it's kind of amazing, right, that this can be done. And it's a procedure that's still used today for different diagnoses, for different complications. But certainly, as a child, not fully understanding the extent of what was involved, it felt horrific at times. And it led to a lot of emotional trauma that I carried with me for decades. And that really was the catalyst for this book.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  As you said, it absolutely felt like something was inside of me that was bursting to get out that I hadn't talked about for so long. And it was just sort of like stewing. Writing this book was a part of my healing process.

• 6:55Dan Harris?

  The trauma was the result of the physical pain only? Or was it also? I understand from the research I've done coming into this interview that it was also the fact that there were social costs. You know, this was happening for you at the formative ages of 11, 12, 13, when everybody's in junior high and mean. And also, there was some stuff about like your parents and the doctors not always giving you full information. So if I understand correctly, this is kind of a multi-dimensional trauma.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would definitely agree with you. I think there were a lot of layers to it. Yes, the procedure itself was incredibly physically painful. I was not only the actual surgical procedure to put the apparatus on, but then the process of stretching the bone over a period of time and lugging around this very heavy brace that was a permanent fixture on my body. It was something I couldn't take off. It was painful. It was physically painful. But the toll that it took on me psychologically, like you said, at those formative stages in middle school, where everybody is in a fishbowl essentially,

• 8:13Speaker 03

  and there's no escaping it. You know, this was also 30 years ago. I think that the way that children are treated in medical settings, you know, it was very different back then. I wasn't given a lot of information. Oftentimes, I was sitting in the room and people were talking about me, but they weren't talking to me. There was no trauma-informed care, no patient-centered care. I never spoke with a social worker. I never went to a support group. I was just sort of expected to handle it on my own. And I had trouble handling it on my own. So yeah, there was a lot going on.

• 8:56Dan Harris?

  As I listen to the story, and I'm obviously projecting here, but the experience sounds, and you'll tell me if I'm correct, the experience sounds lonely.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  It was very lonely. It was very isolating. For a long period of time, I was out of school because it was complicated and there were resources that I needed during the day that a school at that time couldn't provide. And so I was home in a hospital bed, pretty much by myself. And so, yes, it was both physically and psychologically lonely. It wasn't something that was very well known as a problem and as a procedure. So to be out in the world with this very visible and scary looking device, you know, attached to my physical body, there were a lot of questions. There were a lot of stares. People

• 9:51Speaker 03

  didn't understand what was happening to me. And in a way, I didn't really either. And so it was a very lonely experience.

• 9:59Dan Harris?

  You said it went from 11 to 13. Was it the type of situation where it ended and everybody just expected you to resume your life as if nothing had happened?

• 10:09Speaker 03

  Yes, pretty much. When I had the fixator removed, there's a very short period after where I wore like a cast, a fiberglass cast, and then had physical therapy to regain my gait and things like that. But after that short period, yeah, there was very little follow up. I was pretty much just expected to forget it, which was really hard to do. And instead of forgetting it, and instead of talking about it, I just held it all inside. And it sort of festered.

• 10:43Dan Harris?

  You have a concept that you talk about in the novel, I'm the Cage. The concept is the junk drawer. Does that seem relevant to our current discussion?

• 10:55Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 10:57Dan Harris?

  Can you explain it?

• 10:59Speaker 03

  The junk drawer is really just a metaphor for all of the

• 11:06Speaker 03

  things that I struggled with and didn't have anywhere to put them. It was just a place inside of me where I kept all of the negative things that I thought about myself. All of the negative things that other people, whether intentionally or unintentionally, gave to me. All of the self doubt, all of the loneliness, all of the anxiety, all of the pain. It was sort of just like a collection basket for all of those anxieties. And it's a place that that I referred back to. It was sort of like a filing system, you know? Is that something that? Do you have a junk drawer?

• 11:47Dan Harris?

  I would venture to argue that there's nobody without a junk drawer. Another metaphor that gets used, and I'm forgetting the poet's name, maybe Robert Bly. I apologize if I'm mangling that, but he has this idea of a black bag. Everybody carries a black bag full of shit that we're lugging around with us all the time. It's our history. And one way to cultivate empathy and compassion is just to imagine everybody you encounter during the course of your day lugging that black bag or their junk drawer. They may have worked with it, they may have not, but it is, in either case, going to inform the way they show up in the world now.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I think you're right. I think everybody has a black bag or a junk drawer. I didn't even really know until I started writing that I had it. Right? It becomes like a part of you and you don't even realize that it's like this separate entity. But yeah, once I started opening it up and going through it, looking at all these memories that I had filed away, I was sort of able to process them a lot easier.

• 13:02Dan Harris?

  So before that point, as you'd built a career as a psychiatric nurse practitioner and a robust personal life as a wife and a mom, you kind of had this junk drawer that was acting upon you in ways that were often subconscious?

• 13:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. A lot of the weight of the experiences that I had, I think I didn't even realize they were weighing me down. I knew that I was sort of an anxious person. I knew that I was a paranoid person, but I always kind of just attributed it to me, like my oddities, kind of being like a strange kid. And I never really realized, hey, like you went through these really difficult situations that anybody would have residual weirdness from, right? Maybe residual like anxiety or residual trust issues. And

• 13:58Speaker 03

  I never really gave myself that grace to say anybody would feel this way. I always just blame myself for being not able to handle it. Writing this book was a huge part of allowing myself to, I don't know, to cut myself some slack, giving myself permission to be the way that I am and say it's okay.

• 14:22Dan Harris?

  I mean, that makes complete sense. What was the mechanism by which it produced that outcome? How did writing a fictionalized version of your childhood trauma allow you to cut yourself some slack?

• 14:41Speaker 03

  I think writing for me is one of the only ways that I can be clear about the things that I'm thinking and feeling. And putting it down on paper was really important. Some people are really great at expressing themselves in words and other people are more physical. And there's so many different ways of like putting the real you out there. And that's something I struggled with for a long time because there was a lot of shame in what I thought was the real me. But putting it down in a book, putting it down in words.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  I was able to say exactly what I wanted to say and examine things in ways that I had never been able to before. I don't know, it just gave me permission to be honest and to not feel like I was being judged by anyone else, to not feel like I had to perform for anyone else, to look or act a certain way. It was like the opportunity to be the most honest, you know, that I had been in a really long time. Once I started doing that, it kind of just kept coming, if that makes sense. Once I started, I didn't want to stop. And that's where the book came from.

• 16:04Dan Harris?

  Tell me if you think this is an accurate description of how this works. So you have the junk drawer, I'm going to stay with that analogy, and it's like, for most of your life, several decades, it was everything, all the junk in the drawer was locked up in said drawer. You were not thinking about it, you were actively suppressing it or compartmentalizing it, or actually, not even actively, subconsciously suppressing it even deeper into your subconscious. And then you make the conscious decision to open the junk drawer and put it all on the table. Okay, here's a, like, a used paper clip, here's a coaster that's stained, here's that horrible shit that happened in seventh grade, here's that thing the doctor said in front of me as if I wasn't there, here's some old currency from a foreign country.

• 16:49Dan Harris?

  All the random shit that's in the drawer is on the table and therefore becomes much more workable. You can see it all pretty clearly. And then you can rearrange it in a way that gives you a ton of agency. Would that be a rough description of how the process worked for you?

• 17:06Speaker 03

  I think that's a great description of how the process worked. You've talked before about this downward spiral, right? The toilet spiral, is that the right?

• 17:15Dan Harris?

  Yeah, it comes from Evelyn Tribbley, who's a friend of mine and has been on this show at least once. She calls it the toilet vortex, and it's a phrase that she got from the novelist Nabokov.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  Okay. I felt like I was in the vortex, like there was all of this stuff spinning around with me, like I was trying to grab at things. And I didn't even know what these things were as they were like spinning around beside me. You know what I mean? Down the vortex. Laying them all out on the table was the first step for me in reversing the vortex and going up the upward spiral, right? And making a conscious effort to examine what happened and not, again, not worry about being judged by anyone else, but just really examining what happened, how I felt about

• 18:12Speaker 03

  it, what my life was like because of it, and then making a conscious choice to not let it define me anymore.

• 18:21Dan Harris?

  Yeah. Just to fill in some of the blanks here about the vortex, the toilet vortex and the upward spiral. I talked about this in a TED Talk I gave that your husband was very helpful with. He was one of the first people that I practiced it with. The toilet vortex is when you're kicking your own ass in any number of ways, and then that shows up in your relationships with other people, and then that makes you unhappy because relationships are so important to human flourishing, and then you're even harder on yourself, and then the relationships get worse, and then down you go. The opposite is where your inner weather, through any number of means, in this case, creative self-expression, turning toward trauma instead of trying to run away from

• 19:02Dan Harris?

  it, your inner weather improves, and then your relationships improve, and then you get happier because, again, relationships are probably the most important variable in human flourishing, and then your relationships improve even further, and up you go. And I don't think we're on one of these perpetually, we toggle back and forth, but you can make yourself more prone to one or the other. I'll stop talking and see if any of that resonates with you.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  It definitely resonates. I mean, like you said, I think my trauma came out in the way I interacted with everybody. And once you start looking at things through a different lens, you can interact with people in a different way, and your relationships change. That's something that I absolutely saw happen over the course of writing this book. I think I'm a better person having written it. I think I'm a better wife having written it. I think I'm a better mother having written it. It only gets better from there, hopefully.

• 19:59Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  So, yeah.

• 20:01Dan Harris?

  What I would want for you is some grace to go into the toilet vortex if you haven't slept enough, or if a nasty memory surfaces and you don't have full awareness of it. Perfection is not, is not on offer.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. Don't you think though, it's hard to note, like when you're in the toilet vortex? Like, for a long time, I didn't even really know. You're suffering, but it's so like normalized, you don't realize it's suffering.

• 20:26Dan Harris?

  A hundred percent. That's why it's so important to name that. That's why when I heard from Evelyn, this idea of the toilet vortex, I was like, that's great. I'm gonna use that because part of my job, and I think actually now part of your job as a, I think this is your third book, as an author, you know, one of the services you can provide is to name things that people are kind of ambiently vaguely aware of, but have never crystallized or fully articulated, so that they have like, what's the fancy word for this, like a heuristic, a way to understand it when it happens to them.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. I'm still working on it, for sure. My experience is only my experience, and I hope that there are people out there who read it and can connect to it and say, oh yeah, I know exactly what she was feeling when she said this. I mean, that's amazing and all that I can hope for. But I'm still working on it, too. There are still those thoughts and feelings that I haven't figured out how to turn them into a heuristic yet, how to turn them into words. It takes time.

• 21:26Dan Harris?

  Yes.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:27Dan Harris?

  No, it absolutely takes time. The words that I find myself uttering a lot, because people will say to me, yeah, you're pretty anxious for a meditation evangelist or whatever. Well, first of all, I say, well, you have the causality wrong. I'm a meditation evangelist because I'm anxious. But I also say something that my friend Sam Harris, I'm not related to, but who's a good friend of mine and who has also interviewed your husband on his podcast, on Sam's podcast. I was asking him many years ago, hey, you've been meditating for decades. What do you like? And he said, well, I retain the capacity to be a schmuck. And I really like that. If we create perfection as a goal, especially in this realm of whatever you want to call it, self-improvement, self-understanding.

• 22:13Dan Harris?

  Yeah, well, nobody's gonna get there, so it's not constructive.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know, I have an interesting relationship with meditation, which is that like I try it repeatedly. And the hardest part for me is like clearing everything else out and focusing on the nothing, right? And I know like for a lot of people, it's not nothing that they try to focus on. It's something very specific and poignant. I have a hard time with that. I just wonder, how do you yourself work through that when you're meditating?

• 22:47Dan Harris?

  One of the most helpful insights for me, and the thing that I try to say as loudly and frequently as possible. So thank you for giving me another opportunity to say it, is that the whole notion of clearing, clearing the mind or like, there's a healthy version of clearing, and then there's an unhealthy version of clearing. And the unhealthy version is unhealthy because it's just impossible. Like if you tell yourself that you're gonna stop thinking, well, even that is a thought. So that's not gonna happen. There is a healthy version of clearing where over time, if you do this practice, where you focus your mind for just a few nanoseconds on your breath,

• 23:28Dan Harris?

  on the feeling of your full body sitting in the chair, on loving kindness phrases, on sounds in the environment, you just pick something to focus on. And then every time you get distracted, start again and again and again. Over time, the mind does cough up less nonsense. And when it does, you're more aware of it. And that's a kind of gentle clearing away of old habit patterns and neuroses. But first of all, you can't do it with a hostile attitude. And second, it's not gonna be a thorough cleaning. Like even the Buddha, after he got enlightened, you can see in the ancient texts, in his mind, he's still seeing old unhelpful stuff coming up.

• 24:13Dan Harris?

  He's just no longer fooled by it. Yeah, so for me, just to take it back down to earth for a second, I'm not surprised or dismayed. When I notice that I'm planning a homicide or whatever it is during my meditation session, it's just, it's what the mind does. And my goal is just to notice when I've gotten carried away and start again. One little phrase that I sometimes use, I literally use this when I'm meditating, when I wake up from distraction, whether it's been a second or 10 minutes, is great job, welcome back.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  And that's something you say to yourself.

• 24:46Dan Harris?

  To myself, yes.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:48Dan Harris?

  I did it, I was doing some walking meditation last night where you kind of walk slowly, or this helps me fall asleep, walk slowly around the house a little bit and feel my body moving. And then you get distracted and you start again. I was on some big jag of some dunking I was gonna do on an enemy or something like that. And I was just like, yeah, great job, welcome back. Here's the world again. As my friend Jeff Warren says, it was like I'd been swallowed by a whale. You know, everything was gone, reality was gone. I was in my revenge fantasy and it's just like, oh, well, I'm back. Here's the world again, you know, great job.

• 25:22Speaker 03

  It seems like you have a lot of revenge fantasies. This is.

• 25:28Dan Harris?

  Well, I would say.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  No judgment.

• 25:31Dan Harris?

  I don't feel judged. Partly I use those for comedic effect.

• 25:38Dan Harris?

  And it does speak to, I think there are two modes that I fall back into as a default. Greed or self-centeredness or hatred, anger, which can be directed outwardly or inwardly.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  Right.

• 25:53Dan Harris?

  You know, again, to be Buddhist about this, the Buddha talked about these three

• 25:58Dan Harris?

  poisons of the mind, greed, hatred and delusion, which is just being confused, often confused that you're in the grips of greed or hatred. I don't really take it personally too much. It's just, this is the nature of the mind. And so, over time, learning to get a little bit friendly with these aspects of the mind, so they don't have their hands on the steering wheel so frequently. Anyway, does it answer your question at all about how to meditate?

• 26:23Speaker 03

  I'll have to get back to you on that, I think. I mean, I think it's something that I try to do often. I find it hard to carve out time during the day to sit down and meditate. But I do find it easy when I have a few spare minutes in the middle of an activity that I'm consciously doing to pause and like, take a few minutes to meditate. But that's also when it's hardest to focus. I do that like, in the car when I'm waiting to pick up my kids from school, where I'm parked and there's nothing to do other than look out the window or listen to the radio. That's a time when I feel like, oh, I can take two minutes to try to center myself, to meditate, to repeat a mantra.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  And almost always, I find myself looking out the window at the birds or whatever. I don't know. I haven't yet found a way to always call myself back.

• 27:21Dan Harris?

  Well, I gotta say, what I'm hearing is actually pretty good.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 27:26Dan Harris?

  Part of why I wanted to, before I went off into Buddhist esoterica, part of what I was really trying to say to you is, and this is something I hear from people all the time, I think you may have a story that you're a bad meditator, but actually, what you're describing is good meditation, which is you try to focus on one thing, you get distracted, you start again. That's it.

• 27:46Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 27:47Dan Harris?

  There are rarified states at the deep end of the pool, but it's not relevant for most of us. And my practice, after having done this for 16 years, which by the way is nothing compared to the many, many masters I know, really is like, try to focus on one thing, get distracted, start again. I may be a little bit better at staying undistracted, but not that much better. That's not the point. The point is not to get better at meditation, although that can happen and it can be beautiful. But the point really is to get better at life, to be less owned by all of your thoughts. And so if you're finding a couple of minutes most days to try to focus on your breath or something like that, and then you get distracted, you're staring out the window or whatever it is,

• 28:32Dan Harris?

  and then you wake up from that and you start again, like, great.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I'll take it. Thank you.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  If you say I'm good at it, I'm good. I appreciate that.

• 28:44Dan Harris?

  Good.

• 28:45Speaker 03

  I'm gonna go with that.

• 28:46Dan Harris?

  I was interested when I was reading up on you that you had mentioned meditation is something that was helpful for you, given your husband's very public and longstanding history of hostility toward meditation. How does it go down when you guys are talking about this?

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Well, we actually don't really talk about it that often because he is, like you said, pretty averse to meditation. But really, personally, I think it just comes down to time. I mean, you have to set aside time to do this, and he doesn't have a lot of time. It's pretty simple, right? We're lucky he sets aside time to brush his teeth and meditation takes a backseat to that, I guess.

• 29:27Dan Harris?

  Fair enough.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:32Dan Harris?

  Much more with Allison's Week, Grant, after this.

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• 31:11Dan Harris?

  You have done this really cool and brave thing of rewriting your own story. And as I've read about you, when you're asked, like, what do you want people to take away from this book? Your answer is often, like, that rewriting your own story is possible. So I just wonder whether you can talk about how any of us can even contemplate beginning this kind of process.

• 31:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. Something that I spoke with Eleanor about last week was about how, for most people, it's unlikely that they'll make it out of childhood unscathed. Then you sort of like add the trauma, the specific trauma that I went through on top of it. And very few people make it, I think, to adulthood without something that they're holding on to. For me, you know, writing this book was a relief in a lot of ways because I didn't know how else to deal with all of the hurt that I was holding on to.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  Something that I've said before is, I think it's okay to be grateful and grieving at the same time. I feel incredibly grateful for the opportunities that I was given, for this procedure that I went through, which was, in many ways, miraculous. But not everything went right. And it's okay to also be grieving for the things that didn't go right and to need to work on working through them. If I had one nugget of advice, it would be to realize that it's okay to hold both of those things, both the gratefulness and the grief, and

• 33:03Speaker 03

  move forward in a way that recognizes them both and allows you to deal with them in a way that feels right to you.

• 33:10Dan Harris?

  I like that, the simultaneity of gratitude and grief, that we can hold seemingly competing ideas in our mind at the same time, and they can actually inform one another. I should also say that the Eleanor you referenced is the mighty Eleanor Vassili, who's one of the producers on this show, who was in conversation with you before the recording of this podcast, and her job, Eleanor's job, or part of her job is to prepare both the guest and her annoying host for every episode. But just to get back to this idea of rewriting your own story, like, I think inherent in what, inherent in your project, is not that everybody needs to go write a fictionalized version of their own lives. It's just that

• 33:50Dan Harris?

  we can reassess and reframe the contents of our own junk drawer in whatever way works for us, by talking to a therapist, by talking to our friends and family, by doing creative work. We just don't have to be stuck with the ancient story we're telling to ourselves and to the world about ourselves.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that was one of the best parts of writing a piece of fiction, was that I could change the things that I wanted to change. I could give a different ending to this character than the one that I got, right? Or I could sensationalize things that I wanted to and minimize things that I didn't. And there's just so much freedom there.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  And I was able to create the story that I wanted to share with the world, even when that differed from my own personal story, which actually kind of makes it hard to talk about sometimes because when I'm sitting here with you and you're asking me questions about my own experience, questions about the book, some of those lines are a little bit blurry. And that makes it hard, right? Because I don't know if I'm necessarily answering something from the perspective of a character that I created or from my own life. That contributes a little bit to my anxiety about these interviews because sometimes it's hard and I don't know which side to land on. It's not always clear.

• 35:15Dan Harris?

  But isn't it all you? I mean, any character you've created is, the raw materials are mined and excavated from your mind.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. It all comes from me, for sure. But the details are not all the same. It's not a memoir. I didn't write a memoir. I didn't want to write a memoir. I wanted to tell my story in a way that felt safe to me. This is how that happened.

• 35:41Dan Harris?

  Couple of other questions, just to pull back the curtain on what motivates me in these interviews is wanting to always like serve the listener in terms of getting people to think about things they can do in their own life based on where they are and what their aptitudes are and what their resources are to, you know, improve their circumstances. And I think there's a lot in your story that's incredibly useful. One of the other strands that I think might be worth spending some time on is the loneliness piece or the isolation piece like, and the fact that you did have the junk drawer kind of locked up in some sub-basement of your mind. There is this like tempting mirage of isolation that we can just

• 36:26Dan Harris?

  keep this shit locked down, compartmentalized to ourselves. When in fact, I mean, it's not easy to do, but the the easier life can result from.

• 36:40Dan Harris?

  Not only doing what you've done where you take the junk out of the drawer and rearrange it on a table, but also talking to other people about the stuff that you've been trying to keep as a secret. It seems to me like that's been really helpful for you and could be really helpful for other people.

• 36:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's been incredibly helpful. I've heard from so many people who have not gone through, of course, the exact same thing, but who have their own junk drawer, who have their own trauma, who have their own stuff that they're just trying to stuff down. And just how it's nice to read somebody else's words when they feel like they came from your own heart. I know that's how I feel often when I'm reading. I love that feeling of going back and looking at a sentence again because it felt so real or it touched you in a deep way. And it's incredibly meaningful to me when I hear from somebody who said that there was something in this book that touched them. There's no greater feeling.

• 37:41Dan Harris?

  One of the terms that I talk about a lot on the show, so I apologize to regular listeners who may be tired of me bringing this out of my junk drawer yet again, but one of the terms that I love, and I don't know who said this or who coined it, but it's cathartic normalization, that either in fiction or in just self-disclosure, when an author or anybody can talk about stuff they've gone through and the beholder, the listener, the viewer, even if the details are not familiar, can feel a kind of catharsis and liberation in just admitting the stuff that's true for all of us, but that we try

• 38:26Dan Harris?

  through our, you know, constructed personas to hide.

• 38:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I agree with you completely. It is part of the human experience, right, to connect with other people. It's amazing when you can do that with, you know, a book sitting in front of you that somebody wrote in a totally different time, in a totally different place, and didn't know exactly how they were feeling in that moment. It's really special and rewarding.

• 38:52Dan Harris?

  It seems to me that the sine qua non is doing what you did, which is before you can come up with something that is useful to other people, like you have to look at the stuff that you didn't want to look at. That just feels... Foundational internally.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  That's very kind of you to say. And I, while I was writing, I often went back to this sort of thing that I told myself, which was, just be honest. When I didn't know what I wanted to say, when I thought maybe I wrote something that I didn't like, or it didn't come out perfectly, or, you know, this is a mess. Nobody's going to want to read this. I always just went back to this place where I tried to pull apart what it was I was trying to get across and be as honest and plain about it as possible. So that other people who didn't know my history,

• 39:47Speaker 03

  who didn't know my experience, would be able to connect it to their own. And if I just put it out there simply, somebody else would be able to grab on to it as well.

• 39:58Dan Harris?

  Yeah, yes. That reminds me of something I've heard Sharon Salzberg, who's an eminent meditation teacher, who's written many, many books, 12 or 13 of them, including some memoir stuff, that one of the pieces of advice she got when she was writing her memoir, Faith, which by the way, is not about blind belief, but about, you know, confidence or trust. But she was writing this book, and one of the pieces of advice she got was, be honest, which sounds rote or basic, but is actually, and I've really meditated on this to be a little cute, in my own writings. Like, if you're at a juncture, and writing is all about junctures, constantly having to make decisions, just revert to what's true, even if it's in fiction,

• 40:43Dan Harris?

  that's what's going to work.

• 40:46Speaker 03

  I agree. It's not always easy to do, right?

• 40:50Dan Harris?

  No. As we head toward the end of this, I have deliberately not asked you too many questions about the plot of the book, because I want people to read the book. But are there Aspects of the fictional narrative as opposed to the biographical narrative that you've already shared that you want to talk about?

• 41:08Speaker 03

  Well, really, the plot of the book is really about a young woman who's running away, running away from everything in life that she knows and everything that she knows about herself. It's about the choices that she makes as an adult as a result of these things that she experienced in her past. The fictional part is very fictional. I never ran away, you know, to a cabin in the woods, but I wanted to. Part of it was allowing me to play out the scenario in my head that I never allowed myself to know, but wondered, how could things be different?

• 41:51Speaker 03

  It is fiction, but it's also still sort of a little bit true, right? Because it's a desire that I had that never came to fulfillment. There's a lot of fiction. There's a lot of truth. It's interwoven and I don't know what else to say about that. I like to think that I know where that line is because I wrote it, but it's a bit blurry for me as well.

• 42:16Dan Harris?

  That actually makes sense to me, not having written any fiction personally. Before we started the formal interview, you mentioned that you were a little nervous to do the interview. We're nearing completion now. How are you doing? Because I have not seen many outward manifestations of anxiety.

• 42:35Speaker 03

  That's very kind of you to say. I don't know. I'm just not at that place yet where I'm 100% confident in not so much talking about the book, but talking about me and making sure that I...

• 42:51Speaker 03

  Communicate the things that I want to communicate in the right way, making sure they come out in the right way. I often feel like, oh, when people meet me, they might think, how did you write this book? Because you sound like a completely different person in real life than you do on paper. And I think that's true. And that's one of the things I love about writing is that I can take my time. I can say exactly what it is that I want to say. There's very little pressure. I can get things perfect. And it's a little bit nerve wracking wanting to be perfect for you in front of you and knowing that that is most likely not going to happen.

• 43:28Dan Harris?

  You did great. And I actually think perfection is the wrong goal. Because when you see people deliver a TED Talk or a book or an interview and it's perfect, it's also often like soulless and as if it was created by AI. It's actually the imperfections that make the thing work. This may be projection on my part, but I'm wondering if there's a decent comp to be made between your marriage and mine. Like, my wife is a very private person. And she will occasionally come here on the podcast and co-interview somebody with me, but she kinda hates it, kinda likes it at the same time. And she feels much more confident in writing than she does extemporizing. So she shares that in common with you. And she also shares in common with you that she's married to somebody who's constantly

• 44:13Dan Harris?

  talking in public and working their ideas out in public and seemingly confident as they do it. Yes, I'm wondering if any of that lands for you.

• 44:22Speaker 03

  Oh, for sure. It's a nice screen to be able to hide behind, right? When you have somebody who's so public and out there, it makes it easier for me to be a private person. But yeah, even without that, I would struggle, I think, just because it's not where I'm comfortable. And that's why I wrote a book as opposed to, you know, giving a TED Talk. But hopefully I did okay.

• 44:49Dan Harris?

  You did great. It was part of, honestly, why I was interested in doing this, aside from the fact that your book hits on many of the themes that we explore on the show, is thinking about my own wife, who is writing her own book, which I don't know when it's going to come out, but. I really think there are a lot of similarities here. And also, the aforementioned Sam Harris is married to a brilliant woman who's been on my show a couple of times and has written a beautiful book about consciousness, which is a really tough subject to capture. And she does it beautifully, but is also, you know, super, super introverted and shy. And I don't think this is a gendered thing. I think there are many couples, I know many couples where the, the wife is the out there,

• 45:32Dan Harris?

  extroverted, outwardly facing person, and it's the husband who's shy. So I don't want to make this a gendered thing per se, but yeah, I think forward to my wife eventually publishing her book. Like, I want to be in the audience at TED clapping. I want to be listening to her on podcasts.

• 45:48Speaker 03

  That's amazing. Your wife talks a lot about imposter syndrome. Is that?

• 45:53Dan Harris?

  Yes, that's what the book is about, yes.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have that too.

• 45:58Dan Harris?

  Every, it's, this is a gendered thing, because you just said, "don't we all," but this is a really gendered thing, because my wife and I are at social situations all the time where people will say, you know, "what are you up to?" And she used to be a physician, she, so like you, also worked in the medical field. And she'll often say, or I'll say for her, if she's feeling shy, she's writing a book about imposter syndrome. And basically, 100% of the women say, "I want to read that book, because I need it, I have it." And 75% of the men give a blank bovine stare, as if they have no idea what the term means.

• 46:31Speaker 03

  That's pretty interesting. I think we definitely have a lot to talk about. It's something that I didn't even realize that I had until you're sort of put in the spotlight, then it's right there for everybody to see.

• 46:46Dan Harris?

  Well, the spotlight on this show did not reveal an imposter.

• 46:49Speaker 03

  Well, thank you.

• 46:50Dan Harris?

  Thanks for doing this. Before I let you go, can you just, I have a suspicion this will make you slightly uncomfortable, but can you just plug not only this book, but your previous books and anything else you're working on that we should know about?

• 47:02Speaker 03

  Well, sure. The previous books were actually children's books, picture books that Adam and I co-authored together. The first one was called The Gift Inside the Box, and the second one is called Leave in the Fall. And this book is called I Am the Cage. You can find information about all of them at AllisonSweetGrant.com.

• 47:25Dan Harris?

  Yes, and the children's books explore themes that Adam and I have explored on this show, like generosity and perfection.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  Perseverance.

• 47:34Dan Harris?

  Perseverance.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:36Dan Harris?

  OK, well, I recommend everybody go check all this stuff out. Allison Sweet Grant, thank you very much for your time.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

• 47:47Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Allison Sweet Grant. Don't forget, the next live meditation and Q and A session is coming up this Tuesday, October 21st at 4:00 Eastern. We do them same time, same place every week, 4:00 Eastern, Tuesday afternoons. I'm doing this next one solo. Sometimes the teacher of the month does it. Speaking of the teacher of the month, who is Sabine Selassie, she and I are doing an in-person meditation retreat that I mentioned earlier. Few tickets left if you want to join, October 24th, so coming up soon. Sab will be there, Jeff Warren, Afosse Jones-Cortez. It'll be awesome. There's a link in the show notes. Finally, thank you to everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.

• 48:31Dan Harris?

  Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.