Stuff I'm Listening To (8/9/23)

Rich Roll was talking to Baratunde Thurston about his podcast called How To Citizen. Thurston said this beautiful thing about his mom who left the earth several years ago. He was actually talking about patriotism and used a metaphor about his relationship with his mom to describe true love, or true patriotism. He said, roughly:

My mom wasn’t perfect and I’m realizing things about her and her impact on how I developed that are not great…

I’m resentful with this perfect mom who I have been so publicly grateful toward and told everybody, she’s the best, and she is — ALSO, she messed up in a couple of very significant ways that I’ve had to wrestle with…

But this opens up a relationship with my dead mother that wasn’t possible when she was here. I’m still getting to know this person…When you know someone, that’s love. If you don’t know the dark stuff, you can’t love the whole person.

I’m blogging about this quote because I want to wave it around like a flag. I want to wear it like armor. I want to coat by body with it like Axe Body Spray so you can smell me coming a mile away.

I just wrote a story about being a little kid and how I got so good at dissociating. I love this story and I’m really proud of it. It’s a little upsetting. But I’m energized to write about growing up and why my brain is wired the way it is.

And I’m terrified of upsetting people. I’m scared that someone will charge into my DMs to tell me, “That’s not how it was! That’s not true! You’re awful!”

I intend to be brave about it. But like, later. In a minute.

In the meantime, I’m going to wrap myself in this quote and also in Fresh Air interviews with David Sedaris (E5636), Richard E. Grant (E5651), Andre Dubus III (E5653) and Shane McCrea (E5658).