Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris How To Talk To Yourself When Things Suck | Sam Sanders About this episode New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers.
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Smart strategies that emerged from a brutal year.
Sam Sanders https://www.instagram.com/samsanders/?hl=en is an award-winning reporter, radio host and podcaster. He co-hosts the podcast Vibe Check https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/vibe-check/id1637476174 with Zach Stafford and Saeed Jones. He also currently hosts The Sam Sanders Show https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/the-sam-sanders-show from KCRW. Check out the album he mentioned in the episode, Caroline Rose's The Art of Forgetting https://carolinerosemusic.bandcamp.com/album/the-art-of-forgetting.
This is part 2 in a 3-part series we're running on grief.
In this episode we talk about:
The fact that there is no right way to deal with grief The value of feeling your feelings — even though it sucks Why it can be helpful to take breaks from your grief without guilt The importance of joy and play The changing nature of grief What it means to be "anointed" by grief And what it looks like to maintain a relationship with someone even after they've died
Related Episodes:
How (and Why) to Hug Your Inner Dragons | Richard Schwartz https://happierapp.com/podcast/tph/richard-schwartz-323 Kryptonite for the Inner Critic | Kristin Neff https://happierapp.com/podcast/tph/kristin-neff The Voice in Your Head | Ethan Kross https://www.happierapp.com/podcast/tph/ethan-kross-365 Jonathan Van Ness on Shame, Shopping, Bodies, and Hope https://happierapp.com/podcast/tph/jonathan-van-ness-447
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Transcript 13,531 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Dan Harris? It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:19 Dan Harris? Hey, gang. How we doing? For me, one of the most powerful and game-changing insights in recent years has been that the way I talk to myself has a massive impact on my happiness and also on how I talk to other people. And moreover, and this is the key part, it is possible to counterprogram against my inner critic, to rewire my interior dialogue in really interesting and really effective ways. And this is not just me making shit up, in case you're suspicious. There is a ton of evidence from researchers like Kristin Neff and Ethan Kross strongly suggesting that you can both change the way you talk to yourself and that those changes impact your happiness and your relationships with other people, which, of course, are intertwined.
1:03 Dan Harris? I say all of this because my guest today went through what he calls a Job year, as in the Book of Job from the Bible. During this time, he lost his mother, he lost a long-term relationship, and he lost a really important job. And even though this guest is not a happiness expert, per se, he developed some really interesting coping strategies in the midst of his grief over these losses. And one of the main techniques, and you'll hear him discuss this, was to learn how to be his own mentor, which I love. Sam Sanders is an award-winning reporter, radio host, and podcaster. He currently co-hosts two podcasts, Vibe Check with Zach Stafford and Saeed Jones, and The Sam Sanders Show. Earlier in his career, he was with NPR, and he has a master's degree in public policy
1:48 Dan Harris? from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. This is part two in a three-part series we're running this week on grief, a phenomenon that can be especially acute and painful during the holidays. What makes this series interesting to me is that we're not focusing on experts, although I will drop some episodes that we've done with experts in the show notes. But instead, we're focusing on real people who have navigated This stuff on their own and they're going to tell us what they learned. And just to say, we're not just focused on grief over people who have died, although of course we do cover that. But instead, we're going to approach grief in a more capacious way with a broad understanding that loss is perennial and non-negotiable for all of us who live in this universe that is characterized by perpetual flux.
2:32 Dan Harris? On Monday, I talked to the journalist Cody Delastrati about whether there's a cure for grief and coming up on Friday, my wife Bianca and I talked to the writer Sloane Crossley. Today, though, it's the delightful Sam Sanders. We talk about the fact that there's no right way to do grief, the value of feeling your feelings, even though it sucks, why it can be helpful to take breaks from your grief without feeling guilty about it, the importance of play and joy, the changing nature of grief, what it means to be anointed by grief, and what it looks like to have a relationship with somebody even after they have died. Sam Sanders, coming up. If you care about supporting independent media and if you care about being a node of
3:14 Dan Harris? sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com.
3:59 Dan Harris? It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. If you care about supporting independent media and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up. For my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow.
4:42 Dan Harris? And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission. And I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. Real progress starts with action. As the executive director of the Honold Foundation, Emily Tietzworth works to expand access to solar energy in communities around the world, supporting locally led projects that bring reliable power, greater independence and opportunity where it is needed most. On the podcast Planet Visionaries, professional climber and Honold Foundation founder Alex
5:23 Dan Harris? Honold goes beyond the headlines with Emily to explore practical solutions for a more equitable future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.
5:40 Dan Harris? Sam Sanders, welcome to the show.
5:41 Speaker 01 Hi. You're leaning on a pool table. I love it.
5:45 Dan Harris? Yes. You're giving me away. So yeah, I'm, I'm recording this from Las Vegas where I'm giving a talk or I was giving a talk and we're in a crazy suite at Caesar's Palace where they have a pool table. And so I'm leaning on that while I talk to you. And it's so interesting to hear your voice actually directly addressing me after having listened to you in a parasocial way, talking to other people for so many years. So I'm just going to kind of get ease into the surreality of that.
6:11 Speaker 01 Okay. I always like when people say, oh, you sound just like you sound. And I'm like, yeah, I was like, oh. I think there was a point in my career where my radio voice, I was trying to not sound like myself. And I'm like, if I meet people and they say, oh, I could tell you by your voice because you sound just the same. It's like, I've succeeded.
6:29 Dan Harris? Yeah.
6:29 Speaker 01 Doing natural audio, you know?
6:32 Dan Harris? I don't know if this lands for you, and this certainly wasn't something I was planning to talk about. But for me, a big goal in my career is to erase the line between my public and private presentation.
6:43 Speaker 01 Totally. And you know what? That is the opposite of what they teach us in legacy newsrooms. It is like almost polar opposite. I remember when I was starting out in public radio, I worked at NPR for 13 years. They would tell us when we were scripting, to never use the word I or me. You're supposed to be like invisible in the story, which is wild because I'm reading and saying the story. But like, yeah, I'm learning that and knowing that I can be a person and a journalist and perform journalism as a fully formed human. Yeah, it took some work.
7:11 Dan Harris? Is there a role, though, in journalism for the kind of, I mean, omniscient narrator is probably not the right term, but, you know, an impersonal deliverer of facts as opposed to, I won't characterize your work because I don't know how, that's, that's dangerous territory, but I'll characterize my own work where I'm smearing myself all over the place, which can be useful, but isn't always helpful.
7:34 Speaker 01 Let's, let's assess the question. You say, is there a need for journalists who are impersonal and just do the facts? Is the news ever impersonal and just the facts? The news is more than facts. It's also people and their feelings and money and power and sex and all of these things. And the actors making the news and creating these things that are newsworthy are people with feelings and emotions. So if you can't talk about that, you're not covering a story holistically. Why would I want to hear a political reporter talk to me about politics without talking about the feeling behind it? It's not just facts. It's not just logic, right? So I think we're able to have more comprehensive conversations about world events when we address the humanity present in all of these actors and in ourselves.
8:19 Speaker 01 And understand that like inherently, humans aren't logical, they're emotional. So you must talk about emotion.
8:25 Dan Harris? Yeah, I think it makes complete sense to talk about emotion. The question is when and whether and where it's appropriate for the journalist to talk about their emotion.
8:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, one, I think there's space for both. I just need to know what you're doing and when and where.
8:42 Dan Harris? Yes, so full disclosure.
8:43 Speaker 01 Full disclosure and also like knowing the role. Like when you hear the top of the hour newscast, you actually just want the facts.
8:49 Dan Harris? Yes.
8:50 Speaker 01 But when you're digging into a podcast episode of, say, Ezra Klein interviewing J D Vance, I would love for Ezra Klein to be a person in that conversation.
9:01 Dan Harris? Yeah.
9:01 Speaker 01 It's better that way. So as long as I know what I'm expecting, I think, what do you think? I'm curious.
9:06 Dan Harris? No, I agree with you. I don't actually come into this with a hard and fast opinion. And like I said, I wasn't even planning to talk about this. I think you're right and Ezra is a good example. I'm a big admirer of his work and he's been on the show before.
9:18 Speaker 01 I know he has kids. I know he's concerned about being a good father and a good to this and both things like so like that. That informs his work and I'm glad that he talks about that in the midst of his work, you know? It makes it more holistic and whole for me.
9:28 Dan Harris? Agreed. Well, let's talk about your work because on an excellent episode of your excellent show, Vibe Check recently, you did a very brave thing, which is you talked about your grief. And so to the extent to which you're comfortable talking about it here, I'd be interested in hearing just the basics of what you've been grieving recently because I know it's multi leveled.
9:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, so for starters, Vibe Check is a podcast I've been making for almost three years with two dear friends of mine, Saeed Jones, the poet, and Zach Stafford, producer and journalist. And we call the show Your Favorite Group Chat Come to Life. In the midst of making this show and publishing episodes every Wednesday, my mother died. And she died a year and a few months ago. And I remember going home to Texas in the midst of her body collapsing and failing for the last time. And I was supposed to maybe make it up to New York for a live show Vibe Check had, but then that did not happen. But I remember in the week after the funeral, I remember feeling specifically and distinctly,
10:33 Speaker 01 one that I wanted to talk. About my mother and two that I wanted to talk about it with my friends Zach and Said. But that would also mean that it would be recorded and become a podcast episode for our listeners to hear. And I don't think I ever had any pause about it because I knew it would be rich in a good conversation. And the thing that I've discovered about grief is that sharing your story around griefs, grief allows others to share theirs and there's an abundance in that sharing and there's a healing in it. And so much of our culture tells us to keep grief inside and bottled up and just for us, especially after the period that we deem appropriate in which to grieve. But I found that talking about my grief with people I love and trust was healing, not just for me, but for other people.
11:18 Speaker 01 So to be able to have that conversation on our show and hear from people still to this day, a year later about how it helped them, that is an honor and that is the best tribute I can think of to my mother.
11:30 Dan Harris? There's a lot in what you just said. One thing that's coming to mind is one of the slogans that I use a lot for myself and just in my public pronouncements, to the extent that anybody's listening. One of the slogans that I use, which I did not invent, I stolen from somebody else, is never worry alone. We live in an individualistic culture where we make our struggles individual pursuits as opposed to team sports. And what you did on vibe check and what you guys, you know, not infrequently do is model the benefit of the carpool lane.
12:03 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. Well, and then here's the thing you realize once you start to share what you're going through. None of it's new. My favorite scripture, because I'm a church kid, I always loved the short scriptures because you could recite them quickly when you were forced to recite scriptures at church. But there's one in the Old Testament that says, there is nothing new under the sun. That's it. And I have to remind myself of this when I'm going through things that I think are hard. You know, so after my mother died, a month later, there was a breakup of a romantic relationship that had been going for two plus years. And then after that, there was a layoff and there was this moment last year where I could have dealt with all those things alone or tried to, but I was like, I'm talking about it. And then as soon as I began to talk about it, turns out I'm not the first person to lose a parent. I'm not the first person to lose a relationship. I'm not the first person in audio. To get laid off.
12:46 Speaker 01 And what you find is when you share your grief, when you share your troubles, when you share your hardships, it's not just that you aren't alone, it's that other people can offer you potential roadmaps for survival. Because they have been through similar things as well. And there is, you're sharing survival tips when you share your stories and get others to share their stories of the same experiences.
13:09 Dan Harris? Yeah, a million percent. My mind is going to the work of this brilliant researcher in psychology field. Her name is Kristin Neff. Are you familiar with her work at all?
13:17 Speaker 01 No, don't.
13:18 Dan Harris? She's really the godmother of something called self compassion, which can sound a little ooey gooey or vaguely auto erotic or something like that, but it's the skill of learning how to talk to yourself, the way you would talk to a good friend or the way a good coach would talk to a player. So not coddling yourself, but and not overlooking mistakes you might have made, but being supportive nonetheless. And there's all of this data that shows that it can lead to physiological and psychological and behavioral changes to have this inner posture. And Kristin has this move called the self compassion break, which has three steps. I call this the Neff three step, which she has not endorsed as a terminology, but the first is to just be mindful of whatever's going on for you.
14:01 Dan Harris? The second is to talk to yourself in a supportive way. And the third, which is actually usually the second, but I want to end on this because it's relevant to what you just said, is something called common humanity, which just means that whatever you're going through right now is being endured simultaneously by millions of other people, anger, rage, grief, frustration, anxiety, whatever it is. You are not alone in this, even if you are physically alone in this moment. So does any of that land for you?
14:27 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. And it's not just there are other humans experiencing similar things in the same emotional space you are. I'm a student of popular culture and just entertainment. I've been covering that beat for years now. I have a new show that I host that's just focused on that. And also what I love about these moments of grief, of sadness, is that you can actually find a book or a movie or some music that speaks to those feelings as well. Something wild happened to me last. Last year, in the midst of my mother's death and my breakup, I discovered an album that spoke to both of those themes perfectly. There's this artist, this indie singer songwriter named Caroline Rose, and they released an album close to two years ago
15:11 Speaker 01 that was all about this horrible, horrible breakup. But interspersed between all these really sad breakup songs were voicemails that Caroline's mother sent to them. Caroline's ailing grandmother sent her all these voicemails. And by the time we get the album, the grandmother has died. And so the voicemails that end up as interludes in this album were this ode to her dead grandmother. And I listened to that album nonstop in my latter part of last year, that portion of grief. And it was just knowing that someone had made an album that spoke so specifically to my moment, even though they didn't know me and I don't know them. That was beautiful. It was so beautiful.
15:51 Dan Harris? Yeah. Yeah, there are many sources of solace if we're willing to look for them and take them in.
15:55 Speaker 01 For sure.
15:56 Dan Harris? Let's go back to your sources of grief. Tell me about your mom.
16:00 Speaker 01 Oh, my goodness. My mother, she was just a force of nature. She was, she had like 18 jobs and lives and careers. She was a middle school principal, and my middle school principal. She was also our Pentecostal church organist and played at every service. And she and my father were small business owners. They both owned at certain points in my childhood, both a funeral home and a daycare. And she did all of these things while also being an active parent of two crazy boys, my brother and me. And she was perpetually the life of the party and the person you wanted to talk to in the room. So she was just, I'm trying to, I'm trying to put her on a scale
16:44 Speaker 01 that people who don't know her could understand her by. But it's like, you know, there are some people and some celebrities where it's like, no matter what room they walk into, you're gonna be like, oh, damn. Like, whatever room George Clooney walks into, you're gonna be like, George Clooney. And everyone there is gonna be like, wow. On a South Texas scale, my mother, Regina Sanders, was that. Never a bad room. Yeah.
17:04 Dan Harris? Regina sounds amazing.
17:05 Speaker 01 Regina means queen. And she was. She fucking, she ran her shit. Sorry. I'm not supposed to use.
17:11 Dan Harris? No, no, you could, you can let it loose here. We have no rules. I'm not owned by, I'm not owned by any conglomerate.
17:19 Speaker 01 But she and my father, they were both just incredibly charming and very good at connecting with strangers deeply, very quickly.
17:28 Dan Harris? Hmm.
17:29 Speaker 01 And they liked it. My father loved small talk. My mother loved gabbing with whoever. And I hope and I pray that that has rubbed off on me, but even after my mother got sick. So my mother was very active in life until she had a stroke in 2002 that paralyzed her. It paralyzed her left side. So she was bedridden from 2002 until the day she died last year in 2023. So she spent 20 years paralyzed. But even in that, she was the charming, most charismatic person in every room. She spent time at home and I was taking care of her and similarly my brother was and family was, but she was also in and out of a lot of nursing homes and rehabilitation centers.
18:09 Speaker 01 And everywhere she went, she just co-opted the nursing staff into like her Regina Army. All of the women nurses in the building, she would figure out who could do black hair and would sweet talk to them and convince them to braid her hair after hours and keep it looking fresh. All of the men at whatever nursing home or whatever, she would flirt with them enough until she convinced them to bring her secret Mountain Dews to her bed. In her death, nurses she had along the way of her 20 years of being bedridden just showed up at the funeral, at the wake. I had no idea who they were and they'd come and say, "We loved your mom. We loved your mom." And they'd have a story about her. You don't expect that from someone who has suffered a massive stroke, who cannot move
18:54 Speaker 01 half of their body, who was stuck in a bed. But she was that till the very end.
18:58 Dan Harris? When you lost her, what was that like for you, both psychologically and physiologically? How did it feel on both levels?
19:06 Speaker 01 It was very mentally hard to wrap my mind around it first because, you know, my father died when I was 18 and I was blessed enough to be able to take care of him during those last six months or so of illness. And so by the time he died, we had made peace with everything about our relationship. And the last thing he said to me before he went to the hospital for the last time was, "I love you." And I said, "I love you too." And like when he died, I was like, "We're good." With my mother, I grieved the loss of her twice because she had her stroke in 2002 and became a different person, you know? It- Parts of her brain that used to control how she regulated her emotions were dead now.
19:50 Speaker 01 Parts of her brain that made her a fully functioning adult in the world were gone. So her essence was still there, but in many ways, sometimes you were dealing with emotionally, like a really smart and funny 13 year old, you know? And so I had grieved the loss of my mother as I knew her in childhood, but I also still had a version of my mother that was there, just different, very different, not better or worse, but very different. So when my mother actually physically died, it was a second death? And that took some time to wrap my head around because I don't think we think about death that way. But I lost my mother once and then I lost her again. And I thought that I had been okay with her eventually dying because I knew as soon
20:35 Speaker 01 as she had that stroke, they said to us, it's really big. Every day she's alive after this is a gift. She might live a year or two. She lived 20. So in my logical brain, I'd said, Sam, you are ready for whenever she goes because you've been thinking about how close she is to death forever, for 20 years. But it turns out it hit a lot harder than I expected, that second death, you know?
20:55 Dan Harris? Yeah, I really relate to the two deaths. Both my wife and I have, you know, non trivial amount of cognitive decline among our parents. And so I think that's quite common. And so when you say it hit hard for you, what did that look like? Were you having trouble getting out of bed or were you finding that you were distracted? What was happening?
21:12 Speaker 01 I was avoiding a lot. So when they told me she was, when my brother called and said, there's a big seizure, this might be the one, come home. I went to Texas, where I'm from, San Antonio, and I just kept working. I taped two episodes of my shows that week while she was dying. Then I had to take off the week of the funeral because I was getting that together. But then I came right back and went right to work. And I remember in the run up to the funeral, being in the same coffee shop one day, switching back and forth from writing the script for one of my shows and writing her obituary.
21:47 Speaker 01 And I just did it. What I try to do now is not get mad at myself for what I was doing in that moment. You did it because you thought you needed to do it. But it definitely was a crash. And there was a crash, maybe three weeks after the funeral, where that's when it got hearty out of bed. That's when I didn't want to talk to anybody. That's when it was really dark and just, oof. But those first two weeks, I was on autopilot, and I was surrounded by people who loved her and friends and family. And so I just got through it, got through it, and was more social than I had been in the last year before that. But there was a crash that came maybe three weeks after. And what I had to tell myself,
22:28 Speaker 01 and allow myself, and forgive myself for, was both of those versions of me. The Sam who was on autopilot is good. The Sam who had a crash three weeks later is good. And both of those ways in which you process grief in those moments are allowed and permissible. And like, you can't say one of those was the best way to do it. This is how it happened. This is how it happened, you know?
22:51 Dan Harris? I don't want to pretend to be an expert on grief, but I really cosign on that story you're telling yourself, which is that both of those modes are good. And it seems to me that that first mode of let's get through this is really adaptive. I mean, the mind can only take in so much at once, so there's a certain amount of self-protection there. And also, in the aftermath of a death, there's just a lot of logistics you need to deal with. And so-
23:12 Speaker 01 This is the thing. You don't really, it's hard to have time to grieve, because what's she gonna wear? I gotta feed these people after the funeral. We gotta get the program together at the church. Who's coming down? Who don't have to get down here to make sure that they can make it? Do we all have suits? Like, even the littlest things. I remember, like, having this freak out where we're like, oh shit, we gotta get her a bra. She'd been sick for a while. She'd been in bed for a while. She didn't wear bras. She didn't have to. And I remember, like, having to go to, like, Macy's with her sister, my Aunt Betty, to, like, shop for bras for a dead lady. You're not sitting in wells of grief when you have the list of things like that to get through. So you're just getting through it. And I remember, yeah, once the list was done, once the people were
23:57 Speaker 01 gone, then it's just like, Crash.
24:00 Dan Harris? You came up with a lot of really interesting and creative ways to handle that crash. I don't want to say get yourself out of it because one of the myths of grief is that it's like that there is some sort of terminal point that you you work through these stages and then you're done. One of the things that you, one of the practices you came up with that I really think is smart or wise might be the better word is to personify the grief in your mind and have a conversation with it. Can you describe that practice and how you came up with it?
24:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, through a lot of conversation with folks who think about this a lot, but I realized after my mother's death, especially compounded by this layoff and this breakup that came soon after, it's like I was feeling grief about the loss of these three things together, primarily my mother's death. And the usual way in which we talk about grief or mention grief in the English language is with a definition that's not at all sticky. Grief is this feeling, but we don't really describe it besides saying it's grief. Grief lives with us, but we don't talk about it as an object. Grief is there and as big as a proper noun, but we don't give it any names.
25:06 Speaker 01 And so what I would just start to do in those months of deep sadness would be to allow my grief to take on forms, just to take on forms. And there'd be some days where I would just be like, I'm sad today, I'm in grief today. What is my grief? And sometimes it was a person that I was talking to or cursing out, or sometimes it was a cloud because a dear friend told me once, all feelings and emotions are clouds. When they're over you, that's all you can think about, but eventually clouds move on. There were some days where my grief was a tree that I was looking at outside of my window, but the action and the activity and the practice was to place my grief into some
25:49 Speaker 01 form that I could look at or speak to. Because as soon as I could do that, I could grapple with the grief in a better way. Because think about it, when you say the word grief, what can you summon? That's ah, grief, I don't know. But like, if grief is a cloud, I can think of a cloud and a cloud moving. If grief was a person, I can think of Sally and what she's saying to me today and having a conversation with it. If grief is a plant, I can think about it growing and what it means to let grief flower. But I have to make grief a thing so that I can deal with it.
26:19 Dan Harris? Mm-hmm.
26:20 Speaker 01 I'm currently reading Ta-Nehisi Coates's new book, which is not about grief, or a different kind of grief. But he says, "We cannot solve problems or speak to issues until we can see them." And for me, I had to allow my grief to become something that I could see and like, touch in my mind.
26:34 Dan Harris? Two things come to my mind as I listen to you say this. I mean, all lands very well for me. One is, there's this school, psychotherapeutic school called Internal Family Systems. Have you heard of it?
26:45 Speaker 01 I have, because who told me about it when I interviewed him years ago? Jonathan Van Ness is a student of this mind of thinking. He told me about it in an interview years ago.
26:53 Dan Harris? Yeah, actually, he's come on the show and I believe he and I talked about this. It's quite powerful. I've done a little bit of it, but mostly I sort of got to kind of do a bootleg version. You personify or name the various aspects of your inner repertoire. Grief could be one of them, anger, jealousy, whatever. And you form a relationship with it and enter into a dialogue with it. And that helps you manage it more effectively.
27:17 Speaker 01 You talk to it, yeah.
27:18 Dan Harris? The second thing that came to mind is a kind of inherent contradiction, or maybe a paradox in, in what you said, that, that I'm kind of thinking of from a Buddhist perspective. You have a smart friend who said to think about the emotion like a cloud. And then you also talked about the importance of naming a thing, because without naming it, it's hard to talk about it. But the cloud reference really lands for me, again, from a Buddhist perspective, because we tend to make our emotions into solid, monolithic things, when in fact, they are meteorological patterns and they are passing. Everything's passing. That is a uncontroversial but uncomfortable fact of the universe.
28:00 Dan Harris? And so the cloud reference, as opposed to a thing reference, really lands for me. And I'm just curious how that, any of that goes down with you.
28:10 Speaker 01 I feel, yes, yes, because it's like...
28:15 Speaker 01 Grief is
28:19 Speaker 01 the ongoing existence of love for a thing even after the thing is gone.
28:25 Speaker 01 And all that is, all grief is, is a long-term acceptance of loss. And life is a series
28:33 Speaker 01 of accepting loss. Everything we love will either leave us or we leave it. You eat the beautiful piece of cake and it's gone. You have the lovely dog and then inevitably it dies before you do. You have the perfect prom dress and then you outgrow it or that style becomes no longer in and you don't wear it anymore. But all of life is finding a way to make peace with the fact that the things that we love will leave us or we leave them. And so when you think of this like cloud metaphor for grief, you're like, oh yeah, because all clouds are always coming and going at the same time. Every cloud is leaving even as it's there.
29:18 Speaker 01 It's always going somewhere else. So yeah, talking through this now, it's like I love the cloud metaphor even more.
29:27 Dan Harris? Coming up, Sam Sanders talks about the changing nature of grief, the unexpected awakenings that can come from grieving, and what it means to be anointed by grief.
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31:15 Dan Harris? On the episode where you talked about grief on Vibe Check, one of the things you talked about was tuning into the changing nature of grief and how it changes over time. And so I wonder if there's maybe more to say about that here now?
31:29 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. I remember when I reached this turning point with my grief and I began to see my grief as an object or a person or a thing that was giving me multiple things. So I think at first, my grief was giving me deep sadness and deep reflection. And I was like, okay. But then I got into this headspace, and I talk about this on the episode of Vibe Check, where my grief was introducing me to abundance. You know, we're taught to think of grief as just the presence of scarcity. This thing I loved is gone. Scarcity, I'm mad it's not there anymore.
32:11 Speaker 01 But talking about my grief opened up this incredible amount of abundance in the conversations I was able to have with other people about their grief. And those conversations felt abundant and expansive because they opened up new feelings and new connections with new people. So there was a moment of my grief in which it felt incredibly abundant. Because all of a sudden, being in my grief and talking about my grief led to all of these new and intense and deep and loving connections, right? And I was grateful for it. But I think the third turn for me was probably a few months into my mother's death and then this breakup. And I began to find ways to be grateful for my grief, for the beauty it presented to me.
32:56 Speaker 01 And I want to tell you the exact moment when I like had this epiphany. So at this point, I'm just like in the throes of it and... Anyone who lives in LA, you know that like LA is constantly asking you to like leave. LA is constantly saying, if you just drive two or three hours, there's something else that you can do. Go to the desert, go up the coast, go here. Like LA always wants you to like, take a weekend trip. And I took a weekend trip to San Diego solo, maybe three or four months after my mother had passed. And at this point, I've now had this serious breakup too. And I was like, I'm just gonna go be sad on a different beach.
33:39 Speaker 01 And so I go to San Diego and I was like, alright, I'm here. And I ended up, I kid you not, booking a hotel room in a hotel that that weekend had like two weddings. So I see all these people getting married while I'm here to be sad and I'm like, ah, and I'm mad about it. But then I'm like, Sam, just do your thing, just vibe, enjoy the ocean. So I'm walking along the ocean one day, looking at the seals. And I'm playing this episode of Vibe Check in which my co-host Zach Stafford is talking to Jenna Wortham about the beauty of blue spaces and water.
34:17 Speaker 01 And so it was like crazy to hear my friends talk about water and healing while I was walking along the water, looking at seals. And I was like, this is really beautiful. Then I began to play that album I mentioned, the Caroline Rose breakup album that also had voice notes from her dead grandmother. And I was like, oh my God, this is, this album is really beautiful. And the combination of this blue water and this blue podcast conversation and this very blue album felt really just beautiful, right? And I'll never forget after that day of doing that, I wanted to sit and just like watch the water at night. So I go to this balcony in the hotel where previously there had been a wedding reception because I saw them there dancing.
35:01 Speaker 01 And there was this moment where I'm sitting there playing a sad Caroline Rose song, thinking about being blue, seeing the midnight blue water under the moon. And I'm playing this song and I'm crying and the water, I can like hear it and feel it and the air is crisp and the moon is right there. And as sad as I was, I also said to myself, this is one of the most beautiful moments I'll ever experience. Like, the moon was brighter.
35:29 Speaker 01 The waves were deeper. The music hit harder. The poignancy of being in that space at that time. All of it was heightened. Because of the grief. Had I not been experiencing deep loss and the deep pain caused by these life events. None of it would have been as beautiful. Do you know what it feels like when you listen to a really sad breakup song when you're happy? Doesn't feel like anything. You can't really feel it until you're sad.
36:01 Dan Harris? Yeah.
36:01 Speaker 01 And I had that like aha moment. On that balcony in San Diego, at that beach, watching the waves, playing Caroline Rose. And I literally, out of my mouth before I knew it, I was like, I'm thankful to my grief for this moment of beauty.
36:17 Dan Harris? Yeah.
36:17 Speaker 01 And being able to thank my grief for something, for anything, especially that deep beauty. It immediately made all the grief hurt less. Because I was grateful for it. And my grief was a gift. It was a gift. So, and that was just big light bulb. And I know you're not there and you don't know what it was like, but I think back to that moment and it was just one of the most beautiful things I've ever experienced and I wouldn't have experienced it if not for grief. So I'm grateful for it. I'm grateful for it.
36:52 Dan Harris? It's so good.
36:53 Speaker 01 It's a tearjerker.
36:54 Dan Harris? Exactly. If I were to sum up, maybe I'll screw this up and so you'll hopefully feel free to correct me. But if I were to sum up at least one aspect of the amazing set of paragraphs you just uttered there. It's like you're doing this inner jujitsu move of turning, what I guess maybe objectively could be called a shitty chapter in your life into a series of awakenings. That may sound a little grandiose, but like just waking up. Really literally waking up. Being grateful for a moment that would have, if you were not in grief, you probably wouldn't have even been at that hotel. You probably would have been home, you know, watching Netflix or whatever and not awake at all.
37:33 Speaker 01 Do you know how many times I go to the beach and don't think about the beach?
37:36 Dan Harris? Yeah, exactly.
37:37 Speaker 01 I have lived in LA for a decade and there'll be so many days where I'm like in the most beautiful setting and I ignore it because there's traffic or I ignore it because I'm hungry or I ignore it because people are annoying. Yeah, I appreciated this beauty in a way that I had not ever before. I cut you off. Sorry, go ahead.
37:53 Dan Harris? No, please cut me off anytime. And the other thing that you woke up to, though, that is equally, if not even more important, goes back to like the never worry alone aspect that we talked about at the beginning, which is you were enduring an indelible and in many ways, anguishing aspect of the human condition, which is losing. And you used that, and use maybe sounds a little too instrumental, but you use that to connect to other people and make your own life richer. So I just hear that as well.
38:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know, I think back a lot to the things that I was consuming in those moments. So I think I told you earlier, I host a second show besides Vibe Check that is just about the entertainment and pop culture that I love. It's called The Sam Sanders Show, and I interview creatives about what makes them creative. And I talk about the culture. But I've always been obsessed with the ways in which we can find cultural artifacts, music, books, movies, TV, or whatever, that speaks specifically to our current moment. And we can find connection with people we've never met. And so it's another way in which I'm grateful to my grief because it helped me seek out these things that helped me find connection with strangers through their, through their
39:09 Speaker 01 work. I don't know Caroline Rose. I do not know Caroline Rose. But I will always think of that album and how it helped me through probably the most difficult year of my adult life. And if I ever got the chance to meet them or interview them, we'd start the conversation as if we'd known each other for years because we have.
39:28 Dan Harris? Right.
39:29 Speaker 01 If that makes sense.
39:30 Dan Harris? Yeah, it does make sense. I mean, I'm just thinking back to like my early life and how callow I was in many ways and how, you know, as a result of having had it too easy, I think sometimes joke about I have all that. I have personally, all the advantages, all the privileges that are available with the possible exception of the fact that I'm short. And I think that pushed me even further into, you know, in the hall of mirrors in a culture that is always pushing us into individuality in the most Noxious sense of that term individualism. And when you go through something like grief, at least what I'm hearing from you is that it's this opening up. If you're willing to embrace it, you really did.
40:10 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
40:10 Dan Harris? Opening up where you're connecting with all these other people.
40:12 Speaker 01 Connecting. Yeah, no, it's I'm so glad you'd say this again, because it's I'm remembering a thing that I talked about on that vibe check episode after my mother died. I was talking about this grief with my co-host Zach and Said. Said said something that just cracked me wide open. He said, sometimes my grief was so heavy, it felt as if I was anointed by my grief. And I was like, oh, my God, Said, anointed by your grief. And he's like, yeah, I felt anointed by grief. And I said, Said, I'm a church kid. I grew up in a Pentecostal church and know Bible. And I know that, like, in the biblical context, the only purpose of an anointing is to share it with other people.
40:53 Speaker 01 If you have an anointing, a special dispensation, the purpose of having that gift, of having that power, is to share it with others. As soon as Said said to me, I felt anointed by grief. I understood fully and even more completely that the anointing of grief and the community that it can bring to us is meant to be shared.
41:16 Speaker 01 To be shared, and that is inherently
41:20 Speaker 01 diametrically opposed to what we're taught about grief. It's internal, it's quiet, it's solitude, it's in you. No, your grief is an anointing. So, one, you're meant to share the best of it and meant to share it with others. But, two, gosh, it's also a gift.
41:40 Speaker 01 That's like, that shifted my foundation. My grief is a gift and I'm blessed to have it.
41:46 Dan Harris? Yeah, and you're, to continue with the church language, blessing other people by being so public about it, by using the anointing in the way in which it's supposed to be used.
41:54 Speaker 01 And even if we think of it that way, wow, when the grief is even deeper, it's maybe even a bigger gift because it means that you loved them that much. When the grief is even deeper and bigger, it's an even bigger gift because you can open up your heart that much more to other folks that have experienced the same thing. Someone close to me said after all this, in that really bad year, I called 2023 my job year. But someone says to me, you know, in all of this, your heart expanded. Your heart expanded. Huh. I'll take it. That's a blessing. That's a gift. And that was only given to me by the grief. It's a blessing.
42:35 Dan Harris? Coming up, Sam talks about what it looks like to be in a relationship with somebody even though they've died. And we talk about how pop culture fits into all of this.
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44:18 Dan Harris? One of the other things you talked about in the episode that I think is really important, and I'd be interested to hear you say more about it here is, and you've kind of hit it on the fact that grief is part of love and the love doesn't have to die when the person dies. But there's this idea of like continuing your relationship with your mom or anybody else you've lost. And so I'd be curious to hear you talk a little bit more about that.
44:38 Speaker 01 Yeah. I did it a lot with my dad. So flashback to 2002. I graduate high school in early June. My father ends up in the hospital with what will become end-stage kidney failure by that July. So he's in and out of the hospital. I'm taking care of him. I've deferred college at this point. And then in September, my mother has her stroke that paralyzes her. By December of that year, my father is dead. My mother is still in nursing homes. But when my father died, we were as close as a closeted gay 18-year-old and an emotionally
45:20 Speaker 01 repressed 88-year-old former farmer and heterosexual could be. So my father had been always very physically present. He was always there. He took me to all the practices and games, but we were never emotionally connected because he was never a guy who talked about his feelings in the way that many straight men of his era were. He just didn't discuss. I remember telling a friend this years ago. I don't think I ever heard my father ever use a statement or sentence that started with "I feel." He didn't do that. He cracked jokes. He was fun to be around, a fun conversationalist, but he and I never talked about our emotions together, and he wasn't known to do that.
46:04 Speaker 01 And so he died, having been a constant in my life, but also someone that I did not have a deep well of emotional connection to draw on. So a thing that I did with my father for years, and still do sometimes, whenever he would pop up in my mind, especially when I was going through the typical trials of like young adulthood, I would just imagine that my father were the character I needed in my life right at that moment.
46:34 Speaker 01 So I'm 22 and trying to figure out how to think about graduate school. And I think of my dad and I would just like imagine my dad as like a college counselor. Will we talk about it? Or I have a breakup and I think of my dad and I would be like, Dad, what if it's just you and me at the bar talking about this breakup with this man? And I would imagine that. And I allowed myself to imagine my father as different characters for me that gave me what I needed in and throughout my adulthood. And at first I thought it was crazy. And then I said, no, it's fine. It's my grief and it's my dad. And I wrote about it a little later. I said, my memory of my father
47:18 Speaker 01 has beautifully shape shifted over time to comfort and console me. It's become its own being with its own plot arc. And so part of the abundance of that grief over my father is that in his death, my imagination allowed me to have him serve and perform multiple roles. You know? That was cool. That was really cool. Especially after, you know, not being able to have some of those emotional connections with him in his life. So yeah, I think that like the relationship with people we love once they're gone, I've learned to accept and love that it's not static.
48:02 Speaker 01 Even if you don't do the thing I'm doing, where you imagine a loved one in different scenarios and different roles, even without that, your memory of them is going to change over time. And what you know them for and love them for and what they mean to you will change over time. And I think it's about embracing that and loving that and not getting mad about it. I got mad at myself for a long time because I never saved my mother's voicemails. And I missed the sound of her voice. And I missed the sound of her voice before her stroke and the sound of her voice after her stroke. And I would beat myself up over that. And then I said, no, Sam. You have this really amazing gift now through that lack.
48:46 Speaker 01 You can imagine her voice however you want. That's cool. What, what is she gonna sound like today? You let me know, Regina. I'm ready to listen.
48:54 Dan Harris? Let me go back to your dad for a second because I'll tell you what I hear and what you described of your ongoing relationship with him. And then you please tell me if you think I'm wildly off the mark, but it kind of reminded me of our discussion earlier about self compassion where there's this radical option that most of us don't know is available, which is that we can be our own mentor.
49:15 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
49:16 Dan Harris? That we, because we're very good at giving advice and solace to our friends, our kids, but usually just end up treating ourselves like shit. And it seems like you're using an avatar of your dad.
49:27 Speaker 01 Yes.
49:28 Dan Harris? To do that for yourself.
49:29 Speaker 01 Yes. All that I'm doing and all that I've talked about this entire conversation with you is just me finding different ways to talk to myself without thinking I'm crazy.
49:40 Dan Harris? Yeah.
49:41 Speaker 01 I'm just talking to myself. When I'm personifying my grief or making it a plant or a cloud or a person, I'm talking to myself. When I'm imagining what my father might be in this way or that way, or whatever, even after his death, I'm talking to myself. When I'm thinking about what my mother's voice would sound like to me today, I'm talking to myself. And I think that, I hate that we're taught this as kids. Oh, the people who talk to themselves are crazy. No, they're not. They're getting through it, right? And so, so much of accepting my emotions and dealing with them and processing them, especially grief, has been the act of embracing an ongoing conversation with myself. Yes, I am talking to myself. You got to.
50:26 Speaker 01 You have to talk to yourself. You're the voice you hear the most.
50:33 Speaker 01 You're the voice you hear the most. Think about the words you're saying to yourself. Think about the conversation you're having with yourself and shape it.
50:41 Dan Harris? I just totally agree with you. And this is borne out in research, too. You know, not only Kristin's work, but also the work of this guy, Ethan Kross, who has been very influential for me at the University of Michigan. He wrote a book called Chatter and it's all about the fact that, you know, our heads are filled with chatter, but you can counterprogram against the madness and learn how to talk to yourself in useful ways. And that's what I'm hearing from you.
51:04 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I live in my head. You know, my job for over a decade now has been to try to think big thoughts and then once or twice a week, ask smart questions about those big thoughts of other people. So I'm always professionally in my mind, getting ready to have a conversation. And if I can do that for my professional work, I can think about having a conversation with me for my emotional and mental wellbeing.
51:31 Dan Harris? Yeah.
51:31 Speaker 01 I'm always in conversation and preparing for a conversation, even with myself.
51:37 Dan Harris? Yes. All right, there are a couple of other things before I lose you that I want to talk about.
51:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
51:42 Dan Harris? I'm looking at my list of questions here and realizing that two of them are actually kind of interrelated. One of them, and we've already touched on this a little bit, is a wise strategy you adopted in your grief was to really allow yourself to feel it. I mean, what I'm hearing from you is almost, not entirely, but almost a kind of journalistic embrace of the story. Like, this is happening. I'm gonna really dive into it. I might have pushed it away for a few weeks in the wake of my mom's death, but like, once the crash happened, I'm gonna check this out. I'm gonna go to San Diego and I'm gonna talk about it publicly. And so recognizing that there's no right way to do grief and really allowing yourself to feel your feelings. There's no timetable for grief and you're just gonna let it play out. And simultaneously, another thing you've talked about is giving yourself permission
52:27 Dan Harris? to take breaks from all that and experience joy, distraction, without feeling guilty about it. So I just throw a lot at you. Go wherever you want.
52:36 Speaker 01 I get it. When I think of like, the ratio and the balance of like emotional health and letting your emotions be emotions and just like living a life, I always have to remind myself, it's like, if I'm having a bad week or a good week, what is my like checklist of things that need to happen for the week to be in any way successful? And there's like a few basic things that I think we all need. And that's like, I need to move my body. So usually that's some kind of exercise. I need to eat enough and eat well. I need to sleep enough and sleep well, and I need to be around other people. And so like, as long as I'm doing that, I'll let my emotions go where they want to go. But if I'm having a deeply hard and troubling week of grief or sadness or whatever,
53:19 Speaker 01 and I'm not moving my body enough, not eating and sleeping enough, not seeing people enough, then I get to say, all right, emotions, you got to sit over there until I like go for a run. Or like, tonight, we will not be at home. We're going to do something with friends. So it's like, it's like, I allow my emotions to go wherever they go as long as I can accomplish the like checklist of mandatory action items for Sam to have a day that feels healthy. And it's usually those things. Move your body, eat well, sleep well, be with people. And if I'm doing that, I cannot be mad about where my emotions go.
53:59 Dan Harris? One thing you left off the list is just allowing yourself pop culture dopamine hits, because I know pop culture is a huge part of your life.
54:06 Speaker 01 It's all I care about. All I want to do is talk about this fun shit we enjoy in our free times and talk to the folks who make it about why they make it. But yeah, I usually need something in my life that I'm drawing emotional significance from. It can be the book that I'm really chewing on right now, or a TV show, or an album. And last year, that Caroline Rose album. But those things also become not a backseat driver, but like they're a passenger in the car. That like, I'm moving through life, but every week or two, I have this co-pilot that's bringing me some kind of a lesson on something through an album,
54:46 Speaker 01 through a book, through a movie. I just watched Sunday evening Megalopolis, the new Francis Ford Coppola movie.
54:53 Dan Harris? Oh, isn't that supposed to suck?
54:55 Speaker 01 It's horrible. It's so bad, it's good. Twenty minutes in, in the theater, we all realize it's bad, so we all start laughing at the movie and like talking to the screen. It was like watching Rocky Horror Picture Show, those communal viewings. It was great. But I'm holding on to Megalopolis because like I was eager to see it. I enjoyed the moment in the theater with those strangers. And I'm thinking about a lot because that movie, not for the movie itself, but for the lessons about creativity it teaches, I'm thinking about a lot in the midst of launching my new show, The Sam Sanders Show, which is all about creatives and the pop culture we love. Francis Ford Coppola made this movie that is a flop, a failure. Didn't make enough
55:40 Speaker 01 money. Everybody hates it. Everyone knows it's bad. It's a laughing stock. There have been articles about how much this movie is laughed at in theaters. But you know what? We do not think any less of his good stuff. I still love the classic Francis Ford Coppola movies. I still think they're great. They're not diminished. And so the emotional lesson I'm taking from that movie and watching it in my journey launching this new show in these last few weeks is one thing is not your whole career. Even if it flops, it's not your whole career. If it's a success, it's not your whole career. But there's this emotional lesson that I'm getting from this movie that's not just enjoying the movie.
56:21 Speaker 01 And so I want that from every bit of pop culture I consume. Is there some emotion I take from it? Some lesson I take from it?
56:29 Dan Harris? Yeah, I mean, on Megalopolis, which I have not seen.
56:31 Speaker 01 You gotta see it. It's wild. Like, there's moments where you're just like, are you trolling us, Francis? Are you trolling us? And he's not.
56:40 Dan Harris? Maybe this is just a different way of saying the same thing you were just trying to say, but one lesson I can take from this movie that I haven't seen is dude tried. He took a big swing. And I mean, there's something beautiful about that.
56:54 Speaker 01 Yes.
56:56 Speaker 01 Also, you're not a creative unless you make something that's bad. Someone smarter than me on some podcast once said, "Just because someone is brilliant doesn't mean everything they make is brilliant."
57:07 Dan Harris? Yeah.
57:08 Speaker 01 And the brilliance isn't continuing to make. So like, I sure do hope I have a horrible Megalopolis level flop at some point, because it will mean that I iterated on every idea I ever had. And that's a blessing, that's a gift.
57:22 Dan Harris? Back to grief, I think also what I'm hearing from you vis a vis pop culture and its many pleasures, both superficial and profound. I think what I'm hearing from you is that even when you're in the midst of grief, it's okay to, you know, enjoy an Instagram reel or to...
57:38 Speaker 01 I hate these people who are performatively sad all the time. And I hate these people who are like, you know, every day there's a three alarm fire because there's so many disasters. So they only live in the wake of these disasters and they're only worried about everything. And they're so anxious all the time about everything. Shut up.
57:58 Speaker 01 It's so performative. No one only feels one emotion. And the people who are always performing doom and gloom and dread and anxiety, it's a performance and they're lying to you and themselves. Because the human brain and the human heart is not wired to only feel one thing all the time. We go through a range of emotions every single day. And I want to be around people who respect all of those emotions holistically. And the people who are sitting around, you know, concerned trolling on Twitter because everything is the biggest three alarm fire. And why aren't you sad and upset all day? If you're listening now, you people, shut up, you're lying. Shut up, you're lying. I have a little cake as a treat. Right?
58:41 Speaker 01 You don't live, no one lives their entire day on one emotion. No one does. You can't do it.
58:47 Dan Harris? I mean, to continue your theme of being churchy, amen, absolutely. And, and we live in a world where that kind of performativity is rewarded because we all live in public now.
58:57 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
58:57 Dan Harris? And the algorithms rewards some specific emotions in particular.
59:01 Speaker 01 It awards the quote unquote negative ones more than the positive ones.
59:04 Dan Harris? Yeah.
59:04 Speaker 01 Yeah. But that's not how we live. So I have to constantly remind myself, like, there's a thing I say to myself all the time. You cannot set yourself on fire to keep other people warm. It's not good for you, and also, fire doesn't work like that. And I think in this era of performative interneting, we sometimes think that performing angst and anger and sadness over the state of the world is actually helping fix it. But it's probably not. You were just performing those emotions. And the best way to like, create the world that you want to live in is to try to become a joyful warrior, you know? So I want to make space to see these things and see these horrors and these atrocities.
59:46 Speaker 01 But I also need to know that like, you know, you gotta put the fucking mask on your face before you put on the kid next to you in the plane. You must take care of yourself to be prepared to build the world that you want to build. And part of taking care of yourself is allowing yourself to have joy.
1:00:02 Speaker 01 And to find joy and to like, seek it out. And like, joy is not, joy is not a trivial endeavor. Play is not a trivial endeavor. They're required to be the best versions of ourselves. Even when you're grieving, even when it's sad, even right after that layoff or that breakup or the death of the parent. Play, laugh, dance. People dance all the time. People that, at the end of the world, whenever that actually happens, they'll be dancing till the very end. You must.
1:00:34 Dan Harris? Well said. One last question I want to ask you is, I got an email from my producer via you, right before we went on, about, just another thought you had about something we could talk about. And I want to make sure that I give you the
1:00:45 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:00:45 Dan Harris? space to do it. The idea of like, viewing grief as one of many flowers in the garden. Oh, I think we've touched on this a little bit, but I just want to make sure that I give you enough space to explore that idea publicly or, or here at least.
1:00:57 Speaker 01 Oh, my God, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's two things I want to talk about. Grief as a flower and then grief as a mandated stop of the train. But I was talking with a friend a few weeks ago because LA, we were at the launch party for a new type of noodle. Kid you not. But noodles, they're good noodles. But my friend is about to possibly lose a parent. Um, one of her father had a fall and there was a lot of neurological damage. And so he's still here, but he might not be here too much longer. And we were talking about grief and me having lost two parents. And I said to her, I was like, yeah, the grief is like not gone, but it's like in
1:01:41 Speaker 01 a different part of the garden now. If every feeling I feel is a plant in the garden of my emotions, sometimes it feels like grief is like the big tree in the middle and all of the garden is responding to whatever this tree is blossoming and blooming and growing. But now it feels like my grief is this plant that lives on the side of the garden and I see it and it's there. But I don't have to eat the fruit and I don't have to overwater it. And maybe it's not getting in the way of the other plants all the time. But it's a plant that's there and I can still nurture it. And even if I don't want it running my garden, I can still see the flower in the corner and say it's pretty and like enjoy
1:02:23 Speaker 01 that it's there because it makes my garden so much more well-rounded. There'd be less one color in that palette if the grief flower, if the grief plant wasn't there. So it's pretty. So that for one. And then another thing that I was thinking about and I mentioned on the show, um, was appreciating the way big grief, like the loss of a parent or even a breakup, can feel like it stops our lives. You know that feeling when you lose a big thing? I see you grabbing the mic. You feel it, right? When it's like a death, a loss, a this, it's like your life stops. You're like, oh, fuck. My train stopped. When my
1:03:05 Speaker 01 mother died, as sad as I was about her dying, I also was like, God damn it, how many podcast recordings will I have to miss? Literally, I thought that, because you just do. And I was like, I'm mad? My train has stopped for a bit. The normal movement of my life has stopped by this dramatic grief event. And I think that in adulthood, especially in the kinds of adulthoods that we live, we think the train is always supposed to be moving and that the train should always be moving fast. And that if we optimize our lives enough, the train can move even faster.
1:03:46 Speaker 01 And what grief does, especially an immediate onset of a loss that perpetuates deep grief, it stops the train that is your life. It stops the train. And you can do, you can choose one of two paths when a train stops. You can be mad the train has stopped and complain about the train being stopped and curse the conductor and the train itself. Or you can say that the train stopping is like maybe a rest stop and a place in which you can go to the bathroom, debrief, think thoughts, figure out what should be on your train and what shouldn't. Figure out if you need all those carry-on bags with you on this journey.
1:04:31 Speaker 01 Figure out if you're on the right train. Switch trains. We can't do those things until our train stops. We can't have a moment to reassess until the train has stopped. When the train is moving, you can't think that big. And so, one more thing that I've been grateful to my grief for in the last year was that it stopped my train for a bit. Train stopped and I asked myself a few questions. Where do I want to go? What do I want to take with me? And at what speed should I proceed? My mother and her death stopped my life enough for me to ask myself those questions again. In that way, she mothered me. I appreciate it.
1:05:10 Dan Harris? Everything you just said was really beautiful, especially that thing at the end about how she's still mothering you. And it reminds me a little bit of a bedside with my father-in-law recently as he died. And this incredibly wise doctor came into the room and was explaining that because my father-in-law was so clear about his end-of-life care instructions, in some way, he was parenting us in that moment as he died and was out of it, you know?
1:05:36 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
1:05:37 Dan Harris? They live on in that way.
1:05:38 Speaker 01 They live on. What a gift that our minds and our hearts are able to conjure deeper meaning and conjure these feelings and appreciation, even in the midst of like tragedy and loss. As grateful as I am to my grief for all that has given me this last year, I'm so grateful to be human and to be able to think these big ideas about the world. Our consciousness is a gift. The ability to make big meaning from life and loss is beautiful, is poetic.
1:06:16 Speaker 01 Life gives us words and we get to make prose out of it. That miracle of creativity and of art is one I'm continually finding new ways to be grateful for. I guess what I'm saying is it's, it's great to be human, man. It's pretty fucking awesome.
1:06:36 Dan Harris? Most days. I'm so impressed by how you handled that, or your job year, and also very grateful to you for coming on here and just talking about it so openly and so well. Before I let you go, can you just, you mentioned your two shows.
1:06:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:06:51 Dan Harris? Can you just mention them again? And also, anything else that we should know about if we want to, you know?
1:06:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:06:55 Dan Harris? Learn more about your work?
1:06:56 Speaker 01 Yeah. You can hear or see me twice a week. The show I host with my dear friends, Zach Stafford and Saeed Jones. We call it Your Favorite Group Chat Come to Life. It's a gab fest on news and culture of the week. It's called Vibe Check, publishes every Wednesday. And our show is one of the few spaces where you can hear a chat about politics led by three men who happen to be journalists and black and also queer. So we have these conversations around politics that others aren't having. So I like it for that a lot. My second show just launched in early October. It is called The Sam Sanders Show, and it's an interview show in the spirit of what I've been pursuing professionally for a while.
1:07:41 Speaker 01 I covered politics for NPR in the 1516 cycle and followed candidates like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton across the country. And once that was done, I've quickly refocused my professional endeavors journalistically into talking with creatives about pop culture and entertainment. So The Sam Sanders Show is that exploration. So far, I've talked with Joel Kim Booster of Fire Island fame on how fame changes you and your creativity. I talked to Sasheer Zamata, one of the witches in Agatha All Along, about how the queerness of her work has mirrored her life even before she knew it. And I talked with RuPaul's Drag Race winner, Monet Exchange, about how every drag performance
1:08:26 Speaker 01 is kind of like singing in front of a black church. So those kind of conversations are on The Sam Sanders Show. But I think both of my shows will be cool for folks that manage to tolerate me talking in this way for an hour. So vibe check on Wednesdays. Sam Sanders Show on Fridays. Sam Sanders Show is on YouTube, in podcast feeds, and also if you're in LA, it airs on KC RW. Fridays at noon and Saturdays at 11. Yes, that's the spiel.
1:08:54 Dan Harris? It's so cool. I've admired you from a distance for so long, so it's really cool to talk to you directly. So I appreciate your time and admire you even more now.
1:09:04 Speaker 01 I mean, the feeling's mutual. It has been a joy to watch someone think and feel in real time about what it means to be a professional from a quote unquote journalistic background and think about leaving legacy news behind and charting a path for yourself that feels true to you and like actually owning your work. So hearing you talk on this show about the ways that you are owning your career very intentionally, it's helped me as I've started this latest show, because this is the first show that I'm making where I'm the EP. I own the IP, and it's coming through a production company that I made myself. So I want to tell you right now, thank you for you talking about your journey, because
1:09:46 Speaker 01 I've used direct lessons from that as I am doing this part of mine. So I appreciate you.
1:09:52 Dan Harris? I appreciate that. Everybody should go support it because what Sam's trying to do of doing it on his own, or not quite on his own, but really trying to own his own stuff and be disentangled from some of the larger structures is not an easy thing to do. So.
1:10:06 Speaker 01 To freedom.
1:10:08 Dan Harris? Yeah.
1:10:12 Dan Harris? Thank you again to Sam. During that conversation, there were a couple of past episodes mentioned, and I will drop links to those in the show notes. Those include my conversation with Dick Schwartz, the creator of IFS, a conversation with Kristin Neff, the godmother of self compassion, a conversation with Ethan Kross on our inner chatter, and my conversation with Jonathan Van Ness. As always, we'll be doing a cheat sheet for subscribers over at DanHarris.com where we sum up the key takeaways and give a full transcript. So if you're a subscriber, you'll be getting that, or you will have already received that in your inbox. Also at DanHarris.com, you get the chance to chat with me in the text, and also many of our guests pop into the chats as well, which is super cool. And
1:10:54 Dan Harris? I'm doing monthly live AMA sessions and much, much more. I personally would love your support and feedback if you care to take the time to sign up. Final thing to say, I want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kazimir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our beat.
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Previous The Science Of Grief: What Helps, What Doesn't, And Why We Don't Talk About It Enough | Cody Delistraty Next Tricky Questions About Grief: Is There A Right Way To Do It? What To Say To People In Grief? And Can You Grieve For Things? | Sloane Crosley Page updated November 6, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
