How To Rewrite Your Story, Make Peace with the Past, and Break Old Patterns | Melissa Febos

26:04And it just forces me to be like, all right, what do I actually want to do about this? Do I want to talk to them? Do I want to end the relationship? Do I want to get over it? What can I do here that has a little more integrity than just avoiding? Because avoiding is one of my old behaviors that has caused a lot of problems in my past. Yeah, but it is so seductive. I mean, I find myself sliding into the warm bath of avoidance all the time. Oh my God. So tempting. It's really my go-to. Like, oh, could I just not do anything and deal with it that way. Yum. But it just causes more problems down the road.

26:39I've seen it in my own life over and over again. Okay. Now, as promised, we're going to get into Melissa's five steps for rewriting your story. We have covered some of these, but my experience, I suspect you would share this view when it comes to personal development. Repetition is your friend. And so first step from what I'm seeing, easier said than done, but it is to become aware of the story you're telling about yourself. Yeah, that's right. I think the first step is just looking. Like, stop acting. I am like a person who is very busy. I like to be in action. I've been told that I'm a human doing, not a human being.

27:21And so for me, the key is like, stop. Stop doing and just look. Right? And for me, because I'm a writer, I like to write it out. And this is not writing a memoir. This is like just writing in my journal, which I think is a good tool for this. Not required. Talking through it with another person can be really helpful. I think externalizing it is useful because then we actually can like look at it. But in any case, the main sort of meat of this step is just sort of telling ourself what we've been telling ourself, but with awareness. so here's the way I see this part of my life where I see this area whether it's work or it's dating or it's my relationship with the parent or with a child this or for me with exercise was a big one for me what is the story what is my relationship to this and what's been happening and just sort of lay it out and then actually look at it and think okay can I just look at this as a person who's divested a bit from it being true and just kind of critically read it maybe for the first time.

28:34So I think that's pretty much step one. And thank you for saying this. I should have said it earlier. This process of, you know, becoming aware of your stories does not require writing a memoir, which is a titanic pain in the ass, as you and I both know. You know, it could be journaling. It could be, you didn't say it here, but I believe you've said in the past, it could be voice notes, voice memos. It could be talking to a friend. It's just trying to get some sort of the best of your ability journalistic take on what your inner tales are. I think that's the key, the journalistic take to just be like, can I look at this sort of coldly without my emotional attachment to it and just see what is the narrative that I'm holding here and let me take a look at it.

29:18Okay. So step number two is conducting an audit. What does that mean? So this is basically the inventory, right? This is sort of what actually happened, whether it's in the past or it's ongoing. Can I actually describe what happened in a way that is separate from that narrative? Like slow down and try to fill in the pieces that have been missing. And we might need some questions for this. Like, that's why then the inventory that I use in my 12-step work has questions. Because if I just ask myself, like, did I do anything today that I should think about? I'm very happy to be like, I don't think so.

30:02But if I ask myself, did you tell any lies today? That's very specific, right? And I'll be like, oh, you know what? I actually gave some false praise to a bunch of people today because I was just schmoozing or whatever. You know what I mean? And like, maybe that's okay, but I don't love it. So this is good to come up with some questions maybe ahead of time. Some good questions are, how was I complicit in my experience? What are the choices that I made here? How have I been making them? Am I letting anyone else off the hook who is accountable for their own behaviors? What am I avoiding? Maybe what is the lie I've been telling myself?

30:43In my inventories, it's always what is the lie? What is the truth? Those are the last questions I answer for myself. What is the lie I've been telling myself? Which sounds presumptuous, right? But I will say that almost every time I've asked myself that question, I already know. Like, I already know there's something I'm leaving out. Because it's always the same kind of thing. It's like I'm blaming other people when I am the person who keeps volunteering or choosing something. I'm acting like something has been compulsory when actually I'm choosing it. That's usually the thing for me, right? or I'm telling myself I'm doing something for one reason when actually it's another.

31:22Like I have this past experience I referred to earlier where I told myself for years that I exercised a lot because I was a really healthy person. Like I was exercising for my health and I wasn't. I was exercising because of the way it made me feel psychologically, right? And I actually compromised my body in many ways by doing that. So sometimes you have to dig a little bit to get to this, but sometimes you don't. Sometimes it's right there and it's really obvious. And the key here, I think, is to like think about yourself like another person. Sometimes when I'm trying to see something I'm missing in my own behavior or experience, I think, what if one of my students or a friend of mine or my younger sibling came to me with this problem and described it as I've described it to myself?

32:10what would I see that they can't see? And sometimes that little mind trick works for me because it pops me out of my emotional attachment to how I've been framing things. I have found very useful. You have a question in here. How was I complicit in my own experience? My executive coach, Jerry Colonna, often phrases it, how am I complicit in the conditions I claim I don't want? Yes, that is good. It's really good. Having said that, what if you are somebody with, I don't know if I'm using the terminology correctly here, but low self-esteem or you have a tendency to blame yourself to a catastrophic extent.

32:49Are questions like this perhaps not for you? No, I think the same questions actually apply because I think that's a story, right? I'm the worst. It's all my fault. I am unlovable. Those things are almost never true. I would even say that they're probably never true. Like what happens between people intrapersonally is always a collaboration between the people. It's never just one person's fault or very, very rarely, if ever so. Right. And so I think the ways that someone with low self-esteem or a negative story about themselves is complicit is that they are heaping all the blame onto themselves.

33:30It's not all their fault. Sometimes they have to admit to themselves that other people are also playing a part in it. And maybe some work needs to be done in those relationships. Maybe the job needs to be changed. Maybe the lack of confidence is the problem here. Whether it's a positive story or a negative story, it's still a same problem of sort of scale and grandiosity, right? It's this black and white kind of thinking that is almost never sort of what actually holds the truth of a situation. A friend of mine, her dad was in having some struggles and really down on himself and she baked him a cake and put the words fuck everyone on it, which I think helped get him out of it's all my fault.

34:16It's really true. I mean, it's so painful, but there is a way that it's convenient to blame yourself. I've actually had this in the past. There were a few situations, both when I was kid and then also when I was early in my teaching career where I just didn't like the idea of being a victim. It felt vulnerable and scary to me. I didn't like the idea of someone else having control or power mistreating me. And so I had a story that it was my fault when that happened. I had a colleague who was kind of a bully early in my career, and she would make these kind of like passive aggressive digs at me and do weird undermining competitive things.

35:00And for six months, maybe I would say, I don't know, the energy is kind of weird between us, but maybe I'm not communicating myself clearly or maybe I did something. And I had a therapist at the time that was like, I can see that you're really reluctant to admit that this person is mistreating you. But until you face up to that fact, you're not going to be able to change it or demand better behavior. It really comes out of experience that I say this because only when we sort of put everyone's behavior where it actually goes and hold other people, everyone, all the adults in the room responsible for their own behavior, that's when we can really change the situation.

35:39Can we sidebar for a second on something you said a couple of minutes ago about how you notice giving out a lot of false praise? I find that terrifying, not only because I do it, But because how do you as an individual know what to believe about your work or your place in the world when people are giving out false praise as a kind of currency all the time? I know. It's really, really tough. I mean, it's really also the kind of plasma that we're all swimming in. I've had this conversation with other writers because the people who review books are mostly writers. And so we're all kind of in the mix, getting reviewed, reviewing each other's books.

36:17And it's really obvious that it sort of behooves everyone to just be nice all the time, right? But then you can't really trust anyone. I don't have a perfect answer for this, but what I do know is that the people I give false praise to or the people who I suspect of giving it to me, they're like three rings out in terms of like my spheres of intimacy, right? They're not my close people. My close people who I talk to on the phone and spend actual time with and go to when I have a real question, these are people that I have cultivated real honesty with and where I know that they know that they can trust me not to punish them if they say something to me that's hard for me to hear.

37:00cultivating at least that small cohort of people who are willing to tell you the thing that's going to hurt you know and usually those are people I would say I love where we have mutual intimacy and we love each other right where the relationship can weather saying I think you can do better or like you know what you weren't being your best self in that moment and like I love you and I want you to be your best self the people who I can sort of communicate with like that As long as I have them, then I feel like the world isn't constructed of lies. But I still don't love the feeling of going out and being like, oh, my God, I loved your book, which I haven't actually read.

37:38Like, you know, everybody does it at least a little bit and doesn't contribute to my self-esteem. I will say that. No, it's a great thing to monitor. I'm glad you brought it up. Okay, so step one, become aware of the story. Step two, conduct an audit. Step three, revise your story to integrate new information. Yeah. Basically, in this part, we're filling in the holes of the things we've missed. We've done our inventory. We've asked ourselves the questions. Almost certainly, we've come up with some things that we've left out. some part like I'm blaming myself all of the time when actually someone else at work has been mistreating me or I'm blaming my partners for being controlling, but actually I'm being overly accommodating before they're even asking me to do so.

38:27And I update that story. And so in my recent book, The Dry Season, I went through this process in a pretty explicit way during that year of celibacy. This was way before I was writing a memoir about it. When I went and did the inventory, I thought, oh, wow, I've been pursuing and seducing people that aren't actually great matches for me because I like how it feels. I like the psychological high. And then once I'm in relationships, I'm doing a lot of over-functioning, people-pleasing kind of codependent behaviors. And then I'm feeling suffocated and miserable and like the other person's trying to control me.

39:05And I have no choice but to break up with them and run away from them. and the story I've been telling myself, if you remember, was that I was a great partner and I worked so hard in my relationships and I had this huge emotional vocabulary like, what was wrong with these people? So I fill in the holes and I think, you know what, I do work really hard at relationships, but I work really hard at jobs that no one is asking me to do and that actually compromise who I am and hide what I actually need in order to have a sustainable, happy relationship. And so I had to really update this story, which was pretty aggrandizing.

39:41And the news story was that I was actually quite codependent. I was sort of capitulating and manipulating people, trying to avoid conflict and appear perfect. And it was totally sinking my relationships. And there was good stuff in there, too. I was a thoughtful partner. I did work hard, but the sort of toiling at the center of my dynamic was actually preventing real intimacy from happening. And so I had this very new story, which was much less flattering, but showed a lot of room for improvement, which was good news. Yes. Which brings us to the to-do list. We'll talk about that in a second, but I do want to reference something you say or that I'm reading about you in my notes in front of me, which is actually, this is where, even though I can't stress strongly enough, nobody has to write a memoir if they don't want to, treating yourself as a character in your own book can be really helpful.

40:40Yeah. I don't know if you've had this experience. I'm interested to hear if you have, but I think it's like when we're walking around and telling ourselves the narrative of our lives, we're totally blended with that character. But when I'm writing a memoir, I want it to make sense to other people. I don't want my readers to see things that I don't see about myself, which means I have to get to like a higher level of self-awareness than maybe I hold myself to in my daily life. And so I really have to look at it as if I was reading someone else's story and thinking, what does this person not see?

41:15What is this person missing? And what could she do differently to have a different experience? And it's pretty surprising because there is always something. Like our friends come to us and they complain about the same things and we tell them what we see, but it's careful and loving, you know, but you can see them really clearly. You can be like, well, if they just stopped picking these unavailable people or if they just stopped volunteering to pick up extra shifts, they wouldn't be so tired all the time. You know, it's usually pretty obvious. And I think the tricky part isn't recognizing the thing that we're not seeing.

41:49The tricky part is looking at objectifying ourselves, Like looking at ourselves like a character, looking at ourselves as if we were someone else who was not sort of wed to the story we're telling ourselves about it. You can't just flip a switch, right? I think it really is sort of like you kind of have to go through the process that we're talking about here, right? And I do think for me externalizing it is really helpful because when I'm reading my notes, I'm literally looking at something else. It's not me. I'm over here reading. So it's something I've gotten better at over the years of writing.

42:23But I don't know, when you're writing, do you ever have moments where you're like, oh, man, Dan really messed up here? Or like, wow, he really could have handled that one differently or something as you're writing the story? Yeah, I can't emphasize enough. I'm actually a pretty inexperienced writer, and I didn't write my first book until my early 40s. And I'm in my mid-50s now. So I'm pretty new to this. And I've spent eight years on my memoir, which hopefully fucking comes out sometime in the next 18 months. It's been a nightmare. And what has allowed me to have some scintilla of optimism about the fact that it might come out is a very good friend of mine.

43:05I've been writing these like drafts that are crazily long and boring and stupid and no structure. And a friend of mine, Jonathan Glick, came in and really helped me clean it up. And he will often I was talking to him yesterday because he'll just check in on me. I'll send him a chapter and he'll often say, like, what is your character thinking in this moment? And just those words, what is your character thinking is really helpful and I think could be scalable from writing a memoir to. Totally. Journaling and thinking about how to do life better, your own life. That is such a good tip. Yeah, I feel like, you know, the meat of a memoir class and any creative writing class is sort of everyone reading one person's work and commenting on it.

43:48And in my classes, I'm very strict about everyone has to refer to the narrator as the character and never by the writer's name or you. We're always talking about the character, the mother character, the brother character, the partner, you know. And it's been such great conditioning for me because then when I go to my own work, and I know this happens for my students too, then I'm thinking the character, right? And it's actually worked sort of in this amazing, almost like a kind of crystal ball in a way. I remember I was writing my second book once. I was in this horrible relationship, but I was like really trying to make it work.

44:26And I was writing the story of it in a memoir. And I was trying to write it into a happy ending. And I was trying to live it into a happy ending, too. It was terrible. It was never going to work out. But I did not know that yet. And as I was writing, I was just fully in the process, you know, like really forgot about sitting in the chair, was just working the way that people imagine writing always feels, but how it almost never feels. And I had this moment where I was like, oh, my God, this character really needs to end this relationship. This is never going to work out. And then I stopped and I was like, weird.

44:59That's so funny, because I am clearly going to ride this thing into the sunset. And I went back to trying to force it, but it got in there like a little seed of it. And of course, when it didn't work out, I was like, oh, interesting. The writer brain could see the truth while the person living it wasn't ready yet. Yep. Funny how that works.

45:20Coming up, Melissa Fibos talks about the last two steps for rewriting your story. Plus, we get into some examples of how she applied all five steps in her own life.

45:36Okay, step number four. So once you've revised your story, you need to decide how you want to be different. So this is the aforementioned to-do list. Yeah, this is where the rubber really sort of meets the road. When we've sort of filled in the blanks, we understand where we have agency, what we are actually doing that's participating in creating our own experience. We are an active player now. We're not a victim. Things haven't just been happening to us. We've been collaborating in them in some way, whether it's the story we've been telling ourselves that it's all our fault or a behavior that we're doing that is contributing to whatever outcome we want to change.

46:21I think the key here is that we can't just stop doing something. I think this is a mistake. A lot of people sort of get to this point kind of intuitively or through their self-help books or whatever, and they think, all right, I just need to stop doing this thing. But I have never been able to just stop doing something, especially not when it's wedged into my life in a really integral way. I have to replace it with something like immediately. The vacuum will just suck the old behavior right back into its place. And so I think some strategies that I've used for changing behavior and replacing one behavior with another are having little index cards, making a list of index cards with the behaviors I want to change on one side and what I want to replace them with on the other side.

47:07And like choosing one every morning and choosing to just try to cultivate awareness of when I'm doing one and then try to replace it with the other. It's very simple, but it's really, really worked for me. The other thing is to think ahead and really look at sort of our days, like who am I going to interact with at work? When are the opportunities for me to do things the old way going to crop up and to not leave myself in a position where I'm going to have to react in the moment because I'm going to do the old thing in the moment. That's just how it works. You know, my neural pathways are all arranged for me to do the old thing.

47:46So for me, it's really helpful to think ahead, even write out a little script for myself if It's a communicative sort of interactive thing. I've done this with family things that I wanted to change where there was a particular dynamic or a kind of interaction that I was always having in my family that left me feeling miserable afterwards. And I have written out a little script of the new thing I want to say is like, I need to take some alone time from the family so that I can enjoy the time we spend together or something like that. Right. And I think of very simple, very straightforward. I memorize it.

48:20I bring it into the situation and I just say it as many times as I need to. And really sort of setting myself up for success and not just flinging myself into a situation hoping I'm just going to do it differently, but to really plan ahead. And I think, you know, I hate doing this, but it's really helpful doing role plays with people. I was terrible at breaking up with people for most of my life. The people I was breaking up with would always talk me out of it. And somehow I would end up still in the relationships I wanted to end like it was a nightmare. I would hurt people way more doing it my way, which was avoidant.

48:54Once I started doing role plays with this one friend of mine, figuring out exactly what I was going to say, I would go into the conversation and I would actually have the outcome that I wanted, right? And role playing is so cringy. It's really uncomfortable, but it actually does work because it builds a frame of reference that we can draw upon when we're in the actual situation. You know, they say in recovery, people, places, and things are the things that sort of trigger you when it comes to addictive behaviors. And the way that sober people deal with that is they plan ahead. They bring, even now I'm like 21 years sober, I still always bring a six-pack of seltzer to the party because I want something to drink.

49:35And now it's not because I think I'm going to drink if I don't have it. It's just because I want something yummy. But when I was first getting sober, I just needed something in my hand, right? so that I wouldn't pick up something else, right? And just planning ahead, bringing a friend, writing a script, having your little index cards, whatever works. People can come up with their own strategies, but sort of having a little system in place for how we're going to replace the old behavior with a new behavior. All of that makes complete sense. I was just going to say that, and I've mentioned this many times on the show, so some listeners will have heard me say this, but I've been working for six or seven years with communications coaches, which should be a much more common thing than it is because communication is the main unit of exchange in human affairs and nobody really teaches us how to do it.

50:21I hate doing it too, but they force me to practice conversations. And then when I get into them, I can execute them much more skillfully. It's really amazing. I mean, I couldn't agree more. I feel like I wish I could just assign people communication coach. It's like all the English professors that But I work, you know, it's like people just don't, we don't learn. We just communicate the way we learned in our families, you know. And we all have these very different ways of communicating. So it's no wonder that it goes sideways so often. But yeah, that's really interesting. Good for you. I didn't do it because of a saintly impulse.

51:00I did it because I got feedback that I was being a schmuck. So we almost never do. But still, a lot of people don't take action. Sometimes people hear you're being a schmuck and they're like, no, you're a schmuck. Yeah, exactly. They don't do anything. So I think it takes a lot of character to hear people and take action. Just to be clear, my initial response was, no, you're a schmuck. Everything came slowly. Also very common, I think. Okay, so the fifth step, and you say this is a step that people often leave out, but is crucial, is to share with trusted others. I think that's the thing. It's almost like our national ethos in many ways.

51:39We want to do things alone. We want to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and change. I understand it. I relate to that. I was religiously self-sufficient for a really long time. time change this whole process, admitting that something's wrong, admitting that you need to change, trying and failing. These are incredibly vulnerable experiences, right? I would very, very much like to do them in total privacy and have no one witnessing me making mistakes or admitting to making mistakes or trying and failing or resorting to my old ways and then having to recover. Like, it's so embarrassing to have someone see you in that kind of space.

52:24We're not really taught how to manage that. But it is so hard to do this alone. We're really not meant to. And it just doesn't work. Every single course of change I have tried to take in my life, I tried to do it alone first and failed. Every single thing I have ever needed to change about myself, truly tried to do it alone, failed miserably, usually a bunch of times. I was like, I'll figure it out and just failing over and over again. And now finally, I think I've been humbled enough by my experience that I know to bring other people into the process with me. And hopefully I have people in my life that I trust enough to be like, hey, I'm really struggling with something and I think I want to change it and I need to talk to somebody about that.

53:11Are you available? Maybe it's a therapist. It's kind of ideal if you can pay someone to be that person. But I've also found it's really, really so much easier to create lasting change in yourself, in your life, inside of a community. It is community work. And the beautiful thing is that it's mostly been my experience that when I share these kinds of struggles with other people, they identify with me. I mean, look at this conversation we've been having. Like there's been so much identification. And these are all things I couldn't even say out loud for a really long time because I was so mortified about them.

53:46I felt like such a failure. I felt like it might just be me. So there's just very rarely going to be something that we're alone in or that other people aren't going to relate to. And when I let other people into my process of change, I develop community. It binds me closer to those people. It deepens those relationships. Like, it really only does good. It's just sort of surmounting that initial resistance to it because I just want to, when I failed or I'm scared, I just want to go hide and lick my wounds. I don't want anybody looking at me at all, but I really have never been able to do this alone.

54:26So whether it's like a group, like a formal group, like a 12-step group, trust me, there's a program for everyone. or it could just be a group of friends or just one friend or a therapist, a partner and a friend. The more the merrier for sure, but at least letting one other person into the process who we can really be honest with about it has been absolutely the like deciding factor for me in a lot of situations. I think you've answered this question, but a lot of people may be at home wondering, you know, what do you do if you don't have trusted others? And I think your answer is you can pay a shrink.

55:03Or if that's too expensive, 12-step is free. And they have a program for everything and they're all over the place. They really do. And there are all sorts of, we're social animals, right? Even if we're people who have a tendency towards isolation, as I do, when I'm struggling, I want to isolate from other people. But we are instinctively drawn to move together, right? We are stronger together. And so whether it's 12-step or some other kind There are so many different kinds of support groups. My dad is struggling with a degenerative memory disorder right now. He has like three different groups, a creativity group, a support group, another kind of activity group.

55:45Whatever it is that we're struggling with, there are so many other people who are struggling with it. We just have to find them. You know, the internet is such an incredible resource for this. There are so many chat rooms and Zoom groups and whatever it is you're struggling with, there is a group. But I would also just encourage people, if you don't have folks that you have this kind of intimate relationship with, the only thing you have to do is initiate it. You have people in your life. Start the conversation. The worst thing that can happen is it doesn't take off. And, like, that's disappointing, but it's not the end of the world.

56:20And I think the odds of success are much greater than we think. All we have to do is share a part of ourselves that is vulnerable, and that invites the other person to do so. creating intimacy is just something we do by communicating, by sharing ourselves with others. I completely agree. I had an interviewee recently, Dr. Ingrid Clayton, I believe her name was, she said something that's been rattling around in my brain, which is that wounding happens in relationships. Healing also happens in relationships. And you just made a strong case for it. Yeah. Okay. So given what a skilled storyteller you are, you've actually planted several narrative threads throughout the course of this conversation, which I now want to follow up on as we draw or vector toward our conclusion here.

57:11you've talked about the stories you were telling yourself at work and in your family and in relation to exercise and in relation to your relationships. And I'm curious, where's all of that sit or stand? What's the right verb there now? I am in multiple places of recovery. I often like to joke that I get rid of my compulsions in the order that they're going to kill me, like in their order of lethality, right? And so I had to deal with like the heroin and cocaine first. And then I moved on to like disordered eating issues. And then I've moved through relationship issues, money issues, chronic pain, obsessive exercise, workaholism.

57:58I mean, it really just goes on and on. Honestly, I don't quite know what comes next, because I have just come off of a period of huge change in my relationship to my body and chronic pain kind of over the pandemic and since then. But what I will say is that I have been at such a low point in all of these experiences in terms of my health, in terms of my romantic relationships, in terms of my work life, and in terms of like multiple kinds of addiction, where it really felt helpless, where I really thought I will die of this. I will never get out of this. I will be unhappy for the rest of my life.

58:37I don't know what to do. And I went through some version of what we've talked about here. I've often ended up writing books about it afterwards, but usually I went through the process of change. And then I went through the process again, writing a memoir about it. And I am on the other side of every single one of those experiences. I don't struggle with any of the things that I have struggled with in the past, things that plagued me for years and years and years. So I am like living proof that this actually works. You hear sometimes when you're out there, people say the phrase, like, people don't change.

59:12People say that all the time. And nothing has been less true in my experience. Like, sometimes people don't change for a long time. Sometimes people never change. But if people want to change, they absolutely can. They can change almost any aspect of themselves or their lives. I really, truly believe that. I used to be an obsessive record shopper back when records and CDs were, you know, before. I was going to ask because I see the records behind you. Yes. Yes. These are all from the nineties back when I was a young person and back when records and CDs were like things you had to buy before streaming services.

59:46And there was a sign at Newberry Comics, my favorite record store in Boston, Massachusetts. Oh, are you from Massachusetts? Yeah, I'm from Newton, Massachusetts. Are you? Oh, interesting. I know Newton really well. I grew up on the Cape, but my mom used to split her time between the Cape and Newton. So I know it really will i was at jp licks last summer so yeah the ice cream store so where on the cape uh falmouth yeah sure sorry you were saying newberry comic yeah yeah yeah new and that was fun to learn newberry comics they had a sign over the door that would listed uh upcoming releases and then the some clever clerk wrote all dates can change so can you that always stuck with me i love that I love that.

1:00:30Okay. So you, you, I just want to drill down just one click on your various personal narratives. So in dry seasons, about a year of celibacy, but you did mention a wife. So you have gotten married. So there seems like a happy-ish ending there at least. Yeah, there is a happy ending there. I, um, I was a serial monogamist for many years, but none of my relationships lasted longer than like two at the very outside three years. And that was sort of my whole adult life. And then I spent this year basically doing what I've described here, and I developed a new sort of blueprint for relationships. I was like, this is actually the person I want to be in relationships.

1:01:10I want to take accountability for what I actually want and need and not be following some script that I didn't choose that doesn't really have anything to do with me. And at the end of that year, I met my future wife. And of course, like the hard work of actually being a different person happened in the context of that relationship and was really messy and scary and difficult at times. But we've been together for almost nine years now and married for five. And it's a really happy relationship. And I plan to be with her forever. So it really is. I mean, it was almost like too tidy in the book. In the first version of the book, I told my editor, look, I'm not going to write about my marriage.

1:01:51I'm not going to put my wife at the end. It's like a tidy little bow. And she was like, what are you talking about? That's literally what happened. Like, you have to put it in there. So I ended up doing that, but I didn't want that to be the point because I really did want it to be about the process of change of like hitting this kind of reckoning point and deciding to do something different and really taking the time to sort of learn how to live differently and be honest with myself about who I was. Like that was really the focus. It wasn't on the outcome, but you know, the outcome was also amazing.

1:02:22Like I kind of can't believe that it worked out the way it did, but it has. Awesome. Thank you. And then I'm just curious. So you had this period of time where your back pain was overwhelming and then you realized it's because you were over exercising. So where are you? What's your exercise habit look like now? Yeah, so I was a long distance runner for a really long time, probably from 16 until I was almost 40. I would run 10 miles at a shot and it got really bad in the sort of early pandemic. I was running upwards of 50 miles a week and kind of training for a marathon that was never happening, you know.

1:03:04And then I got a horrible sciatica and it took me a while to figure it out. But I had really violently ruptured one of my spinal discs from running. And I just had chronic pain for months and couldn't figure it out and was still running through it early on. I really missed having surgery just, just barely. and anyway it's a long story but I just sort of came to the conclusion that it wasn't just that I was like a healthy oriented person it was that my main mode of dealing with stress was running and I was doing it to such an extent that I was really abusing my body I don't run anymore I don't run at all anymore and I had to go through a kind of grieving period about that but also I definitely ran a lifetime's worth by the time I was 40.

1:03:51Like I got my mileage in and now I do like much more sort of balanced like middle-aged lady things like Pilates and walking briskly uphill and weight training. So I still do get my like endorphins flowing but I actually am oriented towards exercising for my health now. And it's okay. I'm into it. I get my thrills elsewhere or maybe I don't get thrills anymore but I'm actually happy and it's worth it. Well, this has been great. Is there anything that you were hoping we would get to that we didn't? No, this felt really comprehensive and fun and went really fast. I feel like we got it all in there.

1:04:28How about you? I feel great about it. Yeah, you've done awesome here. Can I get you, though, to you've referenced the dry season, but can you just give us the full bibliography before we let you go? Yeah, sure. So my first book was a memoir called Whip Smart, which was about the three and a half years that I spent working as a professional dominatrix and a time during which I also recovered from heroin addiction. Then I wrote a book called Abandon Me, which was about a lot of things, but it included an emotionally abusive relationship and having a sea captain for a father. And my third book was Girlhood, a collection of linked essays that look at adolescence and sort of use my experience of adolescence as a kind of touchstone to look at how experiences that we have during that time sort of play out over the rest of our lives.

1:05:19And then I wrote a book called Body Work, The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, which is all about writing memoir. If you are someone who is interested in memoir and do want to conduct this process through that form, this is definitely the book for you. And then finally, I wrote about the dry season, which was my year of celibacy that led to my marriage. Amazing. How did you lose your Boston accent? Oh, I never had a super strong Boston accent. Neither of my parents are from Massachusetts. They're both from Jersey. So I'll have like random words that I say in a Boston way. And then I'll have random words that I say in a Jersey way.

1:05:56Although the other day, my wife, I always claim I don't have a Boston accent. And then my wife was like, I don't know, I'm going to point it out the next time I hear something. And she got me the other day and it was extraordinary. That's an extraordinary book. And she was like, I'm pretty sure that's a Massachusetts way of saying it. How about you? I was a news anchor for 30 years, so it's all gone. And my dad was from Jersey. My mother was a kind of upper crusty North Shore Boston lady who didn't have much of an accent. So yeah, but all the guys I grew up with, all the people I grew up with have ridiculous accents.

1:06:33Yeah, I don't know if you have it too, but like when I was growing up, I didn't want it. And I sort of had like a now kind of embarrassing like superiority, like I don't really have it, but all these other people do. But now I absolutely love and borderline fetishize like I love watching movies with Boston accent, any movie that takes place in New England. I'm on it. There is something like super comforting and delightful about it to me now. So yes yes but most of them fuck it up it's unless it's matt damon or ben affleck like it's horrible to watch oh yeah i know they're so good at it because it's it's real yes i know i know it's true well this has been a pleasure thank you very much for doing it oh the pleasure is all mine and thank you i am a big fan of the podcast for actual real praise not false praise i actually really do I love it.

1:07:22Like my wife and I actually discovered you over the pandemic. You had this like meditation teacher come on and do this meditation that life was so stressful at that time. We listened to it every single day for like a year and a half. So, yeah, actually a fan. And yeah, it's been an honor. So thank you.

1:07:47Thanks again to Melissa Fibos. Really enjoyed talking to her. Don't forget, it's not too late to get involved with our free New Year's Meditation Challenge, seven progressive guided meditations led by my friend Joseph Goldstein, really a masterclass in Buddhist meditation, which is good for beginners and experienced meditators alike. You can sign up over at danharris.com. There you will find instructions for downloading my new app, 10 % with Dan Harris. Head on over to danharris.com and get the app and join the Meditation Challenge. It's free. And if you sign up, you'll get a 30 day free trial to check out everything we're doing on the app.

1:08:25Finally, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on the show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

1:08:49Thank you.