Stop Carrying Other People’s Pain with Chloé Cooper Jones
September 26, 2023
Glennon Doyle:
Hi, everybody. Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. I am already excited to hear what you are going to say to us after you listen to this episode with Chloe Cooper Jones. Lots of talk about being present and being mindful in all of this in the world. Not a lot of talk about why we don’t do that, about why we disassociate from the moment of our lives for good reasons, and how we can rearrange our minds so that sometimes we can be brave enough to try to be present. For me, this conversation was life changing. Chloe’s brilliance has helped me figure out why I dissociate and how to bring myself back to my people in my life. Listen, tell us what you think. Enjoy.
Glennon Doyle:
I actually just ordered another one if I could just show you. There’s just so many notes in writing in it, and then I wanted to have one that’s pure for other people to read. It’s really, really beautiful. Well, let me just introduce the pod squad.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, let’s start.
Glennon Doyle:
This is Chloe Cooper Jones. Chloe is a professor, a journalist, and the author of the memoir Easy Beauty, which was named a best book of 2022 by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Time Magazine, and was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in memoir. Babe, that’s like an espy. That’s like a FIFA World Player of the Year. That’s the best you can get.
Abby Wambach:
That’s my jam.
Glennon Doyle:
She was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing in 2020. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Chloe, what I’d like to start with is your idea of the neutral room. In reading your book, I recognized that I have spent much of my life in the neutral room. So, can you explain to us how you learned about the neutral room, and what it has been for you in your life?
Chloe Cooper Jones:
Absolutely. First, I just have to say thank you so much for having me. It’s a total honor to be here. It’s very meaningful to me that within the framing of your question about the neutral room that you immediately say, “I feel like I’ve been in the neutral room,” because I feel like the most important thing for me with this book is that while it is a very, very specific story about one person’s life, that it was my goal to make sure that there was many entry points or moments of resonance with readers. I don’t think that it serves any of us to write books that are just so insular that they become objects of voyeurism, inviting people into voyeurism.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
I know you know this maybe better than most, the incredible importance of writing things that leave themselves open for other people to enter. So in talking about the neutral room, I am really curious to hear what your versions of the neutral room are, because I think everybody has their own neutral room. So, the way that I encountered mine is I have a physical disability and a pain disorder, and the pain disorder when I was very young, I didn’t have a good sense of how to manage it. A pediatrician told me that the anticipation of pain in the mind was its own form of very, very real pain. So, I could learn to manage pain a little bit or get a better handle on pain if I could first just figure out a way to cut that anticipatory pain out of my mental process.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
I’d be very interested to hear what Abby has to say about this, because the thing that I have learned since is that athletes have to do this a lot, have to go into a place where they’re not imagining the pain that they’ll feel hours later, even days later, but just focus on the moment. I know cross country runners do a version of this neutral room, and so the core of it is just you find a place in your mind, and the world doesn’t come into that place. For me, it’s like a highly visual place of white walls. On these walls, flash, I count to eight, so the numbers one, two, three, to eight. Then all that I’m thinking is I’m in pain for eight seconds, not anything past that.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
So, I just stay in that present space of the eight seconds, and then the eight seconds can repeat, and it’s a way of just not thinking about or panicking or spiraling about the pain to come. So, that’s the bare mechanism of the neutral room. Then the book looks at the ways in which that neutral room, which is a very powerful place of agency and peace in my life and pain management and control in a really positive way can, if a threshold is crossed, become also a place of abs, absenting myself from responsibilities, a way of managing social pain when I should actually be facing social pain. So, it’s both a physical place of remove, but it also can become a mental place of remove.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
I think the book really begins at just a moment in which I’m recognizing for the very first time that I’m not particularly good at locating the threshold between where… That place of remove is a choice that aids my agency, and when the threshold is crossed when it becomes a place of complicity or absentia in a very negative way. That’s in some ways one of the core struggles of the book.
Abby Wambach:
I think this is so fascinating because as an athlete, and of course I retired long ago, all I would do is count. I would get into the hundreds of long runs or sprints, and for whatever reason to be in the counting of the seconds allows me to escape the physical pain that I was enduring. That is really something.
Glennon Doyle:
One of the many reasons why I resonate with your work so much and this discussion in particular is that my version of the neutral room has always been escape. I’m not comfortable in this situation, the social situation, whatever it is, and so I’m gone. So, my family will call that underwater. It’s a joke in our family. Mom’s underwater, because they’ll ask me a question. I’m looking at them, but I’m not there, because that’s not true. I don’t feel unsafe with my family. It’s like a thing you can get addicted to is being gone. So, this idea that you discuss is like, at what point is this survival strategy keeping me from the moment and from connection with other people, which is where I most find joy?
Glennon Doyle:
Can you talk to us about the Beyonce concert and how that did or did not relate to the neutral room?
Chloe Cooper Jones:
Absolutely. First, I just have to say to Abby, I’m so grateful that you shared this thing about counting. I think that… This relates to the Beyonce story, and it relates to what you’re saying too, Glennon, like, “This fear that I have about being fully present in the moment, and being fully with others is that I will not be understood.” I think everybody is always caught up in the act of translation between our disparate and mysterious minds. That’s not unique to disability, but I do think something that has followed me around a lot as a very visually disabled woman is that people write on a lot of ideas and assumptions about who I am or who I could possibly be, or how my life could unfold, or what things I do or don’t have access to.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
So, what builds up over time is this defensiveness of like, “We will have nothing in common. You will not find any bridge to really see me or understand me.” I think, of course, with an athlete, that feels in my mind like a deeper chasm, or we’re coming from two separate planets. We couldn’t possibly find a bridge, because your life has been in part about physical power and prowess and kinesthetic intelligence. Mine, in terms of the way that people read my body, is about lack or absence or inability. That’s the perception. It’s not necessarily the truth, but it’s the perception, and it’s one in this book that extends even to the ability to become a parent, right? It’s just assumed that I won’t be, because how could a body like mine reproduce and make a child, let alone this beautiful child that I made, this miracle child that I made?
Chloe Cooper Jones:
So, to just have these moments where I can be speaking to you, a body that seems so foreign from mine, and find this moment of deep connection, it’s a reminder of how those acts of translation, how we ourselves or I myself can make it harder with my own preconceived notions. I don’t know. I just wanted to acknowledge that. I know I’m not answering your question yet, but it just feels really powerful to me to be able to see those moments, and to recognize them. So, I really appreciate you telling me that. I think, Glennon, your point about this being present and not being present, it’s like the question of the neutral room in some ways comes from a line in a letter from my father. My father says, “Where do you go to escape the pain of reality?”
Chloe Cooper Jones:
That’s a question for everybody. We all have that answer, whether the pain of reality is the physical epic run that you’re on, or the difficulty feeling fully embodied in your present moment even with or maybe even especially with the people that you love the most. There’s also a joke in our house. My son will also often point out that I won’t finish a sentence, that I’ll start a sentence and then get lost in my head, and he’ll wait.
Glennon Doyle:
Neutral room mid-sentence. Here I am, gone.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
He’ll just wait. Then he’ll go, “Mom, you’re doing that thing again. Do you want to tell me the end of that sentence?”
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, I love it.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
But something along the way told us that we were safest within our own minds. The thing I think that’s so tricky about that is that look at what our minds have accomplished. Look at that social conditioning. We’ve done so… I don’t want to lose all the things my mind has accomplished. I’m so proud of those things, but then it’s like that threshold. Can I also find joy in the present moment? So very simply, with the Beyonce concert, I didn’t want to go. I ended up in Italy. I had to scam my way a little bit into a section of the stadium where I could actually see Beyonce. The huge lesson that happens there is being able to see in real time the unbelievable palpable joy that people feel when they are given radical presence.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
I think people can be a Beyonce fan or not, doesn’t really matter, but a great performer or a great… Even sporting event or film or anything, we sometimes are in the presence of people who are giving us all of themselves. No part of them is split. They are radically present with us. They’re not thinking about their grocery list. They’re not retreating. They’re not hiding. You know it when you’re in this space, and a really brilliant performer, which of course Beyonce is, she really understands how to translate from the stage this feeling of just being there with us in that moment, and being nowhere else. No part of her is split.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
What I saw was, one, just the radical generosity of that, the gift and the courage and the strength that it takes to really be present, but then also the unbelievable amount of joy that is generated in this stadium with San Siro in Milan. It’s 80,000 people. The joy was… It was just this ocean of human joy. I looked at this massive example of it, and I thought, “Maybe I can’t do it on this scale, but I could try to do it with my son.” So, taking the kernel of this huge call and response of presence and joy and saying, “How do I scale that down to just be radically present and generously present with my child”, because that’s what matters most. That’s where the stakes are the highest.
Glennon Doyle:
I find it fascinating that you were taught, we are all taught. Our parents try to teach us to stay safe in one way or another. Your mom, who I love her, tell us what your mom taught you, and how they may have aided you in residing in the neutral room.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
There are so many things in this book that… Maybe this’ll be unsatisfying for some readers, or I hope it’s the opposite. I hope it feels, I don’t know, weighty and complex in a positive way-
Glennon Doyle:
It does. It does.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
But there’s a lot in this book where it’s like, “Well, on one hand this thing is good, but on the other side of the threshold, it’s bad.”
Glennon Doyle:
That’s why it’s so brilliant. That’s why it’s so brilliant, because everybody’s like, “Be present.” The secret of life is presence. I’m like, “It’s so much more nuanced than that.” I think your story brings it into sharp focus throughout this story. It is very clear that being fully present with other people is not always the right thing, because people are jackasses often, right?
Chloe Cooper Jones:
Yeah. So, this thing of my mother’s advice is one of those things that has an either or edge to it. The more that I think about it in the book, the more complex it is, which is just she loves me. I’m her only child. Her priority is to protect me, and so one of the pieces of advice that she gives me very young, and this is good advice on some levels, is be aware of the fact that most people are going to give you one thought, one cursory thought. That thought is going to be informed by what they’ve been told about you or your body or what you represent to them. It’s going to be a lot of social narratives. It’s going to be a lot of prejudice. It’s going to be a lot of preconceived notions. She said, “The vast majority of the world is not going to give you a second or third or fourth or fifth thought.”
Chloe Cooper Jones:
So, if you’re aware of what that first thought is, then you can use that to your advantage. She would say, “Just learn how to play your card.” So sometimes, what that meant was having a recognition that the way that a disabled body, especially a body like mine and that I am very short, I walk with a very precarious side to side gait. So, there’s a lot about me that presents to other people as childlike, fragile, weak, precarious. In general, I think disability is often narrativized as inherently tragic, as weakness, as something to be pitied, as unlucky, as sexless, as a person whose agency has been removed. These are the stories that have been told about what we perceive to be fragile bodies or disabled bodies.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
My mother actually, she’s the hero of the book for sure. She’s been this very powerful person, very healthy, very powerful. This year, she got cancer. It was the first time in which she really could understand how I felt, because when she got sick and when she was doing chemo, people in her life started removing her agency, and stopped listening to her, and stopped believing that she was fully capable of making her own decisions. So, so many years into being my mother, it was the first time in which that thing in my life really clicked. So, this thing of playing your card, she taught me that as a defensive thing, “Be ready for people’s negative assumptions about you so that you have a plan for it,” and so in that Beyonce chapter, I bring that up, and I use my card, which is I allow a security guard to believe that I am weak and confused.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
I really play up a certain ambiguity about my mental acuity, my physical acuity. I lean really far into this assumption that I am deeply unable, and it works out really well.
Glennon Doyle:
It sure does.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
It works out great, and I get what I want, but I also have this other-edged moment where I’m no longer thinking about myself or my mother, but I think forward to my son. I say, “He can never see me do this,” because I recognize that playing that card where that advice comes from a really beautiful and considered and protective space from my mother is also an act of complicity with people’s worst ideas about me and about disability. So, I ethically feel like I can’t do things. I don’t want Wolfgang to see me doing things that add to or perpetuate that complicity. The last thing I’ll say about this is I make that decision in Milan, and then I just double down. I do it again in Salt Lake City.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
I had this moment later in the book, I just manipulated another security guard to get what I want. I had this moment where I thought, “Oh, I should cut that piece of the book because people will be like, “Oh, she just made this decision not to do this, and then a month later, she’s doing it.” But I left it in the book, because I think that’s just much more authentic to how change can actually happen for us is in fits and starts and beginnings and failures. That doesn’t mean that I wasn’t really working toward being a better self or a better model for my son. It just means that recognizing I need to change doesn’t instantly make it so.
Glennon Doyle:
Of course. Your mom was teaching you that people weren’t going to get it. They weren’t going to get you. Was there a superiority in your brain? You are so effing brilliant. So, was there a protection mode that was like, “We aren’t going to get each other person to person, so I’m going to fix your thinking that I’m below you by being above you.” Then you have these moments, because the neutral room is that too, right? It’s like a judgment. “You’re going to judge me. I’m going to judge you intellectually. So, I’m up here.” Then with the experiences you have at the Beyonce concert, it’s like I think you say, “If I must exist at a distance, let it be from above.” But then at the Beyonce show, you have this not above but within or withness other people. Is that the most joyful place for you, even though it is unsafe, the withness?
Chloe Cooper Jones:
Absolutely. I think that there are a lot of stages to recognizing your place in the world, your identity, the way that people are going to treat you, the way that people are going to reduce you. I mean, being dehumanized or reduced through the eyes of other people, whether they be strangers or the people who love you, I think that’s the most painful experience, the feeling that your interiority is impossible for anyone to see. That’s not specific disability. That’s something every single one of us are dealing with. There’s not a single listener of this podcast who hasn’t had a moment where they thought, “Oh wow, my exterior self is being read in a way that is so dehumanizing to my interior self.”
Chloe Cooper Jones:
That is one of the core mysteries but also complexities of being a human, and it’s where a lot of great art has come from or a lot of great thought, but it’s also of course where a lot of pain has come from. Maybe our most profound pain comes from that disconnect. I think when you’re really trying to deal with that disconnect in an authentic way, you might go through several steps just like a grieving process. I think one of those steps is defensiveness and maybe even disgust or a longing for some way to place other people who’ve been unkind to you or who haven’t even been unkind, but you perceive they might be below you. I certainly felt that way, especially because the thing that was valued so much for me in my life was my mind.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
So, I thought, “Okay, well, I’m not a body. Nobody values my body. I won’t be a body. I’ll only be a mind, but let me tell you, I’m going to be the best possible mind. I’m going to be the best mind in the world,” but there was a part of that accumulation of the mind’s power or knowledge that was less about doing it for the sake of those things, but was more about setting myself apart, but in a way that I controlled, and not in a way that other people were choosing to marginalize me. It was also, on the flip side of it, this plea to be like, “If I just get enough degrees, if I just get enough awards, if I just write a good enough essay, if I just am a nice enough person, won’t that be enough to see me as real and valuable?”
Chloe Cooper Jones:
I’m thinking a lot about this sort of discuss desire matrix, how those things are really in a deep relation. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, because I just experienced this dancer and choreographer. His name is Matty Davis, M-A-T-T-Y Davis. I saw his work for about five seconds, and it was so physical, and it was so visceral. I saw it on my computer that I slammed my computer screen down. I was like, “I hate this. I hate that.” Then I kept coming back to it and coming back to it and coming back to it. The thing that I realized is that he’s doing a dance that’s very physical and a choreography that’s very intense, but he always includes a really wide variety of bodies.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
So, it was the first time in which I could imagine a dance universe where my body would be valued, and that was so threatening to me on one level, because it asked me a question. That question was, “Do you want to do this? Are you up for this?” On the other side was this desire like, “Yes, I do want to be up for this,” but those two things lived very close to me in relation, and I recognize that immediately is this thing that’s popped up in my life over and over. So, to live a life with others, that’s my greatest desire, to be very present, to be loved by the people that I love, to make my son feel like I am endlessly present with him. That’s my greatest desire.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
But if the thing that I’ve been taught, or the thing that’s been reinforced over and over again is, “There’s no space for you. We don’t make space for disabled bodies. We don’t make accessibility important in the world that you move around. We don’t put bodies like yours on the cover of magazines. You are not ever going to be a romantic lead, and you’re not going to see a body like yours in a romantic comedy. We would rather actually imagine that you don’t exist at all, and not think about you. You’re excluded even from conceptions of what diversity even is.” If that’s the message, that’s the drumbeat over and over and over again, then this desire that I have of being one with other people and connected to other people seems very far away.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
So, what do I do in the early stages of trying to grapple with this pain? Disgust, dismissal, rejection, I will put myself above, but I think becoming a parent, certainly for me, and I would imagine… I would ask if this resonates with you. It’s one of those things that forces you to imagine moving past the pain of dismissal, and moving past the pain of trying to cling to moral superiority is a life raft, and rather move into a space in which you’re living a life that’s worthy of modeling for your child. When I imagine the life that I think is worthy of Wolfgang, it’s one in which he has a mother that’s brave enough to try.
Abby Wambach:
Wow. I think a lot about gayness and religion with this conversation, and how early on I had to rebel, and rebellion is still a part of the same system. As soon as I stopped rebelling so hardcore to the Catholic Church, I realized, “Oh, now I’m in my body. Now, I am in my own authenticity and making decisions for myself.” Because if you’re rebelling so hard against something, you’re still a part of that system.
Glennon Doyle:
You’re controlled by it, and your disgust was desire-
Abby Wambach:
Exactly.
Glennon Doyle:
Disgust by the church, you wanted acceptance, really, when we get down to it, when we’re really super honest-
Abby Wambach:
Truth.
Glennon Doyle:
Your description of all of this is absolutely universal.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
I’m so grateful that you’re talking to me about this. It’s something that I write about in Easy Beauty, but it’s this thing I’m really writing about now as I’m thinking about this artist, Matty Davis, and this project of embodiment. I think part of what’s so intense about that experience looking at his work is it shows me just how far I have to go, how many things I’m still afraid of, and how even after writing one book, there’s a lot more work to be done. It’s not over. So, I’m just seeing this big road ahead of me, and I think part of what I want to say is that disgust, that rebellion, that rejection, I think that’s a really necessary part of the process.
Abby Wambach:
Absolutely.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
I want to be really clear. I place no moral judgment. I try to be very forgiving and kind to myself about the mistakes that I made, because I just don’t know how any real change happens without pain and struggle and even some regret about decisions or things you wish you could do differently. So, I think it’s a really important part of this process, but I think you’re both saying there’s a point in that rebellion or that struggle where you realize that while a fine first stage, you’re still defining yourself in relation to that thing.
Abby Wambach:
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
So, you’re not free.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
Then the second, or I don’t know how many stages there are, maybe it’s the 100, but a stage that comes up is, “Okay, I needed to reject this. I needed to define myself temporarily in a oppositional relationship to this thing, but now how do I get free?”
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Yes, because obedience is a cage, but rebellion is an equal and opposite cage.
Abby Wambach:
That’s my question. I love what you said earlier about the perception of future pain, and that anticipation of that future pain. I think that that’s what we’re talking about.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Abby Wambach:
That’s the little crux right here. I think my rebellion was in anticipation of future pain and going, “Nope, I’m just going to turn my back on it, and I can avoid all of this pain.” But I think what we’re trying to say here is maybe don’t just throw yourself in a pile of pain, but turn towards it, and step into it, and figure out how to be able to go and however you deal with that pain.
Glennon Doyle:
How do you do it now, Chloe? When do you find yourself, “Oh, I don’t want to be in the neutral room right now?” Do you have an answer to that question that we’re asking?
Chloe Cooper Jones:
I do.
Glennon Doyle:
When is it painful? When is it keeping you from connection, and when is it keeping you safe in a way that’s good for you?
Chloe Cooper Jones:
I do. To be clear, I think locating that threshold between how the neutral room or removal or any of these things are separating yourself from pain, locating that threshold between where it’s an active agency, because as you said, there are reasons to not engage with people that are great.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
There are reasons to avoid pain and suffering. Not all pain is productive pain. So, I would say first that locating that threshold between the kind of productive pain you need to move through in order to grow and the kind of pain that you can leave for others, that’s a lifelong project. There’s no way to locate that threshold once, and then have it. In fact, I love that, because that threshold shifts as I shift and as I become hopefully wiser and more experienced. So, that threshold is growing alongside me, but I do think that one really important thing for me when I’m thinking about this desire-disgust matrix or the things that I’m rejecting, and the pain that I need, and when it’s all mixed up in a way that is very important and productive, but I’m afraid of it, and that’s where the disgust or dismissal comes from, is I just had to really think, “Sincerely at the core of my life, what is the thing that has caused me the most pain, that has caused so much of my actions to unfold in both positive and negative ways?”
Chloe Cooper Jones:
I think that it is very simply that it is hard for a lot of people in this world to see the disabled life as whole. What I mean by that is there are so many bad notions and so many bad narratives around disability that it is very hard for people to see me as a real person. That’s the story that begins the book is a friend of mine saying disability is such an inherent tragedy, such a huge flaw that it negates the value of any other thing in your life so much so that he argues that I should not have been born and nobody like mine should have been born. So, there’s no shock in that argument. That’s the basis of eugenics. That’s the basis of a lot of prejudice against a lot of bodies that one single aspect of us reduces our entire human value, or allows people to dismiss our human dignity.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
So, that belief and how that has operated in my life in both really minor ways in the grocery store and really major ways within my family or within my relationship to my father, all of that is tied to that one thing. So, the thing that I want for myself more than anything is to be seen as having inherent human dignity, and to be seen as whole. Well, what’s the problem with that? If I want that for myself, I have to figure out how to give it to other people.
Glennon Doyle:
Say it isn’t so, Chloe. Anything else.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
What a drag, right?
Glennon Doyle:
Wait, say more about that. Shit, I forgot that’s where we were going.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
It’s such a track. It’s the same thing with raising a kid. It’s like you can’t just tell them how to be. You have to model it. I find that so rude and annoying.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s terrible. It’s terrible.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
I mean, how can I really demand this for myself and from the world if I have no ability to give it, if I have no ability to try my hardest to seek the fullness, the wholeness, and the humanity of other people, and to remember that even in moments of great pain, people are not reducible down to the worst thing that they have said? People are not reducible down to their worst action. My mother has this really brilliant line in the book. I mean, it’s so devastating in my life. I’m having a conversation with her about ways in which I feel that pain has come to me, and the way that I perceived it from other people. She says, “You’re always looking at the wrong hurt.”
Chloe Cooper Jones:
What she means by that is I’m often in a situation where somebody is saying a cruel thing to me or a dismissive thing, and I’m taking on that hurt as that they’ve located some visible flaw in me and my character when in fact, of course, they’re only speaking from their own hurt. That doesn’t mean that I have to forgive them, or be complicit in what they’ve said, or it doesn’t mean that I don’t hold them accountable. But it also is if you really think about it that way, one, you don’t have to dismiss them as an entire person, but also, you just don’t have to take their pain on. You don’t have to. The book ends as a very purposeful book end. It begins with these men in a bar telling me my life is not worth living.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
I take all that pain on, and I allow it to isolate me from my life. It ends in a bar with another man asking me, “How is it possible that your husband manages the burden of your body?” It’s important to me that those moments book end this story, because the world is not magically better. Those men are always going to exist or women or anybody. I’m always going to have to be navigating that, but the arc is I just get a little bit better from the beginning to the end at not carrying that pain, or at not looking at the wrong hurt. So, this man who says, “How do people deal with the burden of your body,” at the end of the book, I can just see that he’s speaking from his own limitations.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
He’s speaking from his own ignorance. He’s speaking from his own pain and intoxication, and it really has nothing to do with me. I can say goodnight to him, and then go on and enjoy the rest of my life, my evening.
Glennon Doyle:
The way it ties for me to the anticipatory pain is I see it in myself and when I’m in a space with a man who I perceive to have any sort of maleness.
Abby Wambach:
Any kind of toxic masculinity.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s anticipatory pain removal. I will retreat in anticipation of something you might do, which it felt like it’s almost a self-trust too that I don’t have to retreat, because it’s not that these people aren’t going to be jackasses. It’s not that these people aren’t going to say the wrong thing. It’s that no matter what they say, I will be able to handle it. So, I don’t have to remove myself beforehand. It’s like removing yourself in case somebody doesn’t see your humanity is denying that person’s possible humanity, preempting it, right?
Abby Wambach:
Correct. In some way, it’s almost proving that they’re right.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
When you enter into their crazy and their drama, that is a proving of their point in some way. So, it’s like you’re trying to quit the job before you get fired. You’re always like, “You’ll leave the relationship before somebody leaves you.” That’s the kind of energy in terms of this toxic… You’re like, “I’m out. Not even going to see you.”
Chloe Cooper Jones:
Just to respond though to this great thing that I feel like we’re collaboratively drilling down on is that feeling of disgust or dismissal in these spaces and preemptive defensiveness of pain. I think it’s really important in those moments to look at oneself, and be like, “How much… Am I latching my psyche to these assholes? Am I allowing them to control my behavior or how I might navigate this room or this space?” Because then all the worst things have already come true, and it’s actually not because they were assholes. It’s because you collaborated with them in that moment to make it so.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
It’s back to that question of like, “Okay, that rejection is a good first step, but the next step is how do I just get free?” There’s a question throughout the book of sometimes these men say things to me at bars or whatever, and I’m like, “Can I just enjoy a Friday night? Can I just put on a little dress and have a beer?” It’s like at the beginning, I can’t, and at the end, I can. I can just go, “Okay, you’re gone. I’m not going to latch my psyche to you. I’m not going to let you move me geographically around this bar. I’m not going to let you drive me out of the bar. I’m not going to let you taint my night.” That feels like a much deeper freedom.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
I’m somebody who feels my emotions extremely deeply. So before this attempt at freedom… Which by the way, I don’t succeed at this all the time. It’s just something I’m aiming for. But before I was really working and aiming toward this, it wouldn’t just be a retreat in the moment. I would hold on to frustration or anger, or I would revisit these moments, and I would let the negativity of it haunt me for sometimes for weeks. I mean, there’s still things I think about with decades sort of talks like, “What a waste of my energy.” I do recognize all these things are much easier said than done, so there’s no part of my book in which I go, “Wow, I’ve got this all figured out.” It’s just a little bit of traction toward awareness or something. That’s it.
Glennon Doyle:
In terms of your disgust-desire thing, while you were talking, I’m thinking about, “What disgusts me?” I swear, Chloe, I’m thinking about… For me, I’m in anorexia recovery, and I’m in it. I’m doing it. I’m eating all the food, and it was food. It was eating. It disgusted me. Now, I understand that I was fucking starving for 15 years. I desired more than anything or rest. Anyone resting disgusted me. These things I was desperate for.
Abby Wambach:
That’s really interesting. Wow.
Glennon Doyle:
So Chloe, keep going with that.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
Oh good. I’m writing about this right now.
Glennon Doyle:
Please do it. I can’t wait.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
You guys are very encouraging. I’m writing very explicitly about this disgust-desire thing, but I had the same thing. I mean, one of the biggest voices in my mind is that my self-worth is found only in work ethic, and my work ethic or my ability to produce, and that if I can’t produce, then I have no value. Part of this, I think, just comes from my poor mother. She’s so great, but she just works. She lives on a farm, was a third grade school teacher, just is constantly in motion.
Glennon Doyle:
Amazing.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
There’s a great sense in… Especially for me as a disabled woman, maybe my power wouldn’t come any other way. Nobody was going to give it to me for my beauty or my connections or any other marker that allows us to access sort of power in our lives, but I could maybe access it through work. So, if I saw my friends being what I perceived problematically as being lazy or resting or enjoying their lives or something, I’d be like, “What a shame.”
Glennon Doyle:
Losers.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
“What a guy. Look at that person enjoying their life on a Sunday. They don’t know what living…” It’s like it’s so… But of course it’s because I wanted… I mean< I want my work ethic. I love my work ethic. I love being able to produce. I also want to rest.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
I also want joy, but something… There’s that drumbeat in one’s mind that certain things are not acceptable for them. So when we see them projected in the real world, I think there is that disgust-desire. I’m curious if anything’s coming to Abby.
Abby Wambach:
I think the things that disgusts me are the things that I feel most insecure about myself. I’m not an extremely judgmental person, because I am pretty aware of all of the ways that I have fucked up in my life and the faults. So, I’m pretty generous when it comes to-
Glennon Doyle:
Truth.
Abby Wambach:
In your mind, I do think that you think I’m overly generous, that I give people too much of the benefit of the doubt, but what I do think is interesting about this, the paradox between disgust and… What was the word you used?
Glennon Doyle:
Desire.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
Desire.
Abby Wambach:
I think that they are intrinsically linked. I think that you can’t have one without the other. We’ve been talking to some friends recently about our daughter and her musical possible career that she wants to go down. These folks we keep talking to is, “Go towards what’s making you jealous in other musicians.” What can be brought up in jealousy and disgust is actually a really nice path and a guide for you to figure out, “Maybe you got to work on that or go towards that.” I don’t know. I don’t know.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, because disgust is like, “I can’t even look at that.” Why? Why can you not even look at it? Because you want it.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
Because you want it. I love this. Jealousy is like a cool on-ramp to disgust.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
Maybe it’s like… Because sometimes I have light jealousy where I’m like, “Oh, that meal looks good. I wish I had eaten that.” It’s not gaining traction in my psyche, but it’s like if I keep following jealousy to the point where it turns into disgust, it’s like, “Ah, now I’ve really gotten somewhere.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
Just that deep dismissal of something or that profound judgment of something, that’s maybe actually a voice that’s really telling you you want that, and you’re afraid of it.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Abby Wambach:
Or it’s just something you got to look towards to work through.
Glennon Doyle:
When we talk about jealousy, I want to end with, just tell us about what your husband… First, I’m as obsessed with your husband as I am with your mom and Wolfgang, this whole family.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you talk to us about what he said about school dances?
Chloe Cooper Jones:
We went to a magic show in our neighborhood in Brooklyn in Prospect Park, and my son… There were kids from his school there, and he chose not to sit with them. He was sitting back with us, and sitting very close to me and away from the crowd, very separated from his peers. As the magic show went on, he kept ruining all the tricks. He kept figuring it out. He actually still does this. We just watched this show on Netflix, Magic for Humans, which we love. But the whole time we would watch it, he’d be like, “He’s palming that. It’s this thing.” I loved this, because I was like, “His intellect, he is so critical.”
Glennon Doyle:
Of course.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
“He is crushing what these other kids are just dazzled by.” So, I was being very encouraging of this dismissal response to magic. I kept being like, “Yeah, tell her she’s wrong, or ruin the trick or something.” Of course what I was prioritizing in that moment was, one, what I perceived as, again, that moral superiority that comes from the intellect that I have sought and found a lot of value in, of course very destructively in my life, but here I am, even at the end of the book, still very seduced or tantalized by it. But also, I loved the feeling of my son and I against the world.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
If I have to be separate in this separate little bubble of marginalization, doesn’t it feel so tempting to bring him into that bubble with me, and then it’s us, we’re together, and the rest of the world’s against us? Of course, that’s not what I want for him, but I’m being honest in this moment of being seduced by it or leaning into old habits. My husband keeps saying like, “Please stop doing that.” Then he says, “I went to high school dances, and I never danced.” I immediately was like, “Oh yes, I did this too.” He said, “Sometimes, standing apart from the crowd is really important and is an act of bravery, and sometimes it’s cowardice.”
Chloe Cooper Jones:
He said, “I look at our son, and I think that he is both sensitive, and confident, and smart enough to know the difference between that bravery and cowardice if we just get out of his way.” That was right. That was very correct. It’s really hard as parents to get out of the way, but I think it goes back to that thing you said a while ago of like, “Can you trust the self?” Of course, one of the amazing things about being a parent and raising a child that I think is so exceptional and so brilliant is I also have to trust him, and get out of his way, and that he is wise enough and beautiful and sensitive enough that he could possibly live a life with others a little bit more seamlessly than mine, especially if I can model it and get my own shit out of his way. So hard to do. So easy to say, so hard to do.
Abby Wambach:
It’s so hard.
Glennon Doyle:
But you’re offering him the withness like teaching him he doesn’t have to be above-
Chloe Cooper Jones:
Absolutely.
Glennon Doyle:
… to prove he’s not below. He can be with.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
Absolutely.
Abby Wambach:
Damn, to prove he’s not below. That’s good.
Glennon Doyle:
Chloe, you are a freaking philosopher for our time. I am so grateful for you and your work. It really is world shifting for me. Please come back a million times.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
I will. Anytime you invite me, I’m here. I just have to say quickly, I have loved how this has felt like such a collaborative, generative conversation. It’s such a gift to me. So, thank you for having me, and just thank you for your time.
Abby Wambach:
You’re the best.
Glennon Doyle:
I can’t wait for the the desire-disgust book. If you could just hurry that up, that would be great.
Abby Wambach:
Seriously, can you quickly like… Let’s go.
Glennon Doyle:
If you need to chat again, we’re here. I’m disgusted by almost everything, so I’m a good reference.
Chloe Cooper Jones:
Well, thank you. Thanks for the encouragement. It makes me want to write for the rest of the day.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Pod Squad, we love you. Go out there and be with. We’ll see you next time. Bye.
Glennon Doyle:
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