The One Question to Finally Let Go of Control with ALOK
March 26, 2024
Glennon Doyle:
Hello, Pod Squad. Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. Today, you are really in for a treat, because we are joined today by our dear friend, ALOK. ALOK is an internationally acclaimed author, poet, comedian, and public speaker. As a mixed media artist, their work explores themes of trauma, belonging, and the human condition. They’re the author of Femme in Public, Beyond the Gender Binary, and Your Wound, My Garden, and the creator of #degenderfashion, an initiative to degender fashion in beauty industries. ALOK is the subject of the documentary short film, ALOK, which kicked off this year’s Sundance Film Festival short film program, and was directed by filmmaker, Alex Hedison, and executive produced by Jody Foster. Welcome, ALOK.
ALOK:
Hi.
Glennon Doyle:
Our friend. Hello. I am so glad to see your face. Tell us, as we start, first of all, have you met sister?
ALOK:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, you have?
Amanda Doyle:
The legendary episode 74, 75, which all God’s children have listened to.
ALOK:
Yeah, that’s true, actually.
Amanda Doyle:
That is where we met. Hello, hello.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. So Pod Squad, this is the podcast, Alex Hedison, the Alex Hedison, one of Abby and I’s BFFs, she called me and she said, “Glennon, I have ALOK in the car.” And that for us was the beginning of this creative adventure that you two have set out on together, which culminated in this film, ALOK, which effing opened Sundance this year. And I’ve been trying to keep up, ALOK, on Instagram with you three, you and Alex and Jody. Are you okay? It feels like there’s so much going on. It took Sundance by storm. Are you feeling overwhelmed? How are you feeling about all of it and why did you even decide to do it?
ALOK:
I did three outfit changes a day.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh my God.
ALOK:
I managed to not fall on my ass once, even when I was in five inch heels in the snow. And if that’s not a metaphor for community support, I was just holding on to people, strangers like, “Hey, can you be my perch?” I scheduled this accordingly because I was like, “There’s no one else in the world I’d rather speak to about what ensued than you all.” It was just truly so meaningful for me to be loved out loud. I did all of this press with Alex and Jody and it was so strange for me because they would just be like, “Pivot, look over there, talk to this person.” I’d be like, “I don’t really know.” And it just felt really magnificent to have so many people say thank you, running into people on the street.
I guess I had some reservations about video because what I like about performance is that you had to have been there. It’s ephemeral. It only exists once, but video is there forever and I’ve always had commitment issues with permanence and actually what I was able to do through this project is heal that part of me to be like, “It’s important to leave evidence.” And what feels so spectacular about this film is its evidence of so many things, but among them, my relationship with Alex. And so when we were doing press, they started to say this thing of this is a profile of a look, which is a profile of me, which is a profile of us.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, shit. Oh, that’s so beautiful. Well, okay, Jesus only wrote in the sand, so there you go with ephemeral, but we have plenty of things recorded, but it was by other people who loved him. So you’re just doing the same thing. Alex is recording it and she loves you and the love is so apparent in the film and watching you two go through this, it’s just been such a beautiful thing for us to be able to be in the background throughout the whole thing and to watch it explode in joy and beauty this weekend has been so wonderful. I want to ask you, I just read this article and you said, “When people look at a life like mine, they think that it’s a life marked fundamentally by violence and aggression. I want to remind people that the everyday lives that people like me are carving on this earth are not abject. They’re actually pretty awesome.” What do you mean when you say people like me?
ALOK:
Thank you for clarifying that question because on a superficial read, it would mean trans people, but that’s not actually what I mean. What I mean is people who are choreographing the rhythm of their life to the cadence of love, whose metronome is beauty, not normativity, people who color outside the lines because they don’t exist, people who often get asked questions to try to root them back into the status quo like, “Well, are you really going to be able to make a job out of that?” or, “Why are you so dressed up?” Those are all modes of policing people back into what we think it means to be stable. And I feel like especially the more that I mature, the more I realize that what’s being policed is not gender. What’s being policed is creativity. So what I mean is people who live creative lives.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, and if you’re living a creative life, you’re going to keep changing because that’s what creativity is. So whenever you talk about, or people talk about you really, and they’re talking about everything in terms of being transgender, to me it’s trans everything. Are people just afraid of the capacity of change? Because if we confront the capacity to change, then that might mean we have the responsibility to constantly be transforming ourselves. And is that what freaks people out? Because I feel like I never experienced more anger from people then when I change. I was a fundamentalist Christian and now I don’t think I am anymore or I was living as a straight woman and I actually am not anymore. It’s the change that freaks people out. So are we all afraid of change?
ALOK:
From the perspective of death, all living is standup comedy. The truth is that we waste so much of our time on profoundly absurd fictions when the only true absolutely know is that we’re going to die. So rather than accepting that, that everything we’re experiencing is impermanent, we create entire architectures and landscapes that pretend in the myth of immortality. We say, “Well, there’s this thing called a man and a woman.” We say, “There’s this thing called nature. There’s this thing called biology.” And we hold all of these things still because actually to truly embrace that fundamental currency of change would instigate us to have to speak frankly about death. That’s what I’ve come to is that the fear is actually the fear of death and the fear that what we have right now is impermanent.
And so in order to heal a culture of transphobia, but a culture of policing, more generally, what we need is to actually remind people everything is constantly changing, including our lives. And that’s a beautiful thing. It’s a fundamentally different relationship with dying. Dying not as descending into despair, into debility, but actually ascending, aging as an actual beautiful practice of becoming, getting closer and closer to something that is transcendent. So I’ve really, I think, shift the way that I’ve started to speak about these things because I have so much mercy when I remember that everyone is afraid of every friendship becoming a funeral. Everyone is afraid of everyone that they love no longer being there and staying in that fear is too scary. So they construct all these absolutes, all these fictions of control to make them feel rooted.
Amanda Doyle:
Is our fiction of control overlapping with our fiction of safety? So in other words, is this why all of the bigoted legislation, all of it is about this threatens your safety, the safety of your children. We can keep our children safe by maintaining these lines of control that prevent the chaos, when in actuality chaos is the only reality that we’re living in, but is control safety and safety control?
ALOK:
Yeah, but the truth is the only way that we can actually have meaningful control and true safety is through community. So all of these efforts to establish safety and control are the antithesis of community. Control is the antithesis of community. And I think, Glennon, what we’ve had this conversation over the past few years is often the versions of love that we were sold and our families and our societies was that love was compatible with control. People were controlling us because they loved us and actually what we’ve had to learn is no, love means that I get to change and I don’t have to be your preconceived idea of who I should be. And that’s where my basis of community comes from. What I’m fighting for is not just affirmation of my gender. Once again, that’s just the surface, but it’s the creation of a sense of belonging and community that holds perpetual change.
And that’s a version of love that I feel like I didn’t learn from our culture and from our family where I had to be my parents’ child. I had to be other people’s idea of what it meant to be a triumphant leader. And I get to change constantly. And now what I look for love in people is people who allow me to change, who don’t use that awful and crude word contradictory because I actually believe that contradiction is a synonym for being alive. We are always navigating polarity and finding harmony in it. It’s just that when we speak, we pretend as if there’s consistency when there never was.
Glennon Doyle:
So what does safety mean to you? I love when you talk about how afraid the people that love you can be for you knowing that when you’re out in the world and basically what I think you’re saying is you are a reminder to people that one day they will die and that is unacceptable to most people. So they will yell at you, threaten you, that worries your family because they worry that you’re not safe. But what does safety mean to you?
ALOK:
Safety, and this relates to version one, so everyone go back and listen to it, safety is beauty. Safety is being able to be the freest version of myself. I genuinely believe that if I was to experience violence while I am being beautiful, ultimately I’m not willing to compromise that beauty anymore. I think for a long time I was. I was willing to say, “Okay, I have to contour my beauty, shape it to fit in, to be disciplined in order to be safe.” But I was like, “This isn’t safety because I hate myself.”
And the truth is that street harassment becomes my anxious thoughts before I’m falling asleep and then I can’t fall asleep. That street harassment becomes diffused into me editing and policing myself. In the most quiet and leisureful moments, leisure doesn’t exist. So actually when I’m able to be beautiful, I have an internal resiliency, resourcefulness, sense of potency, imagination, rambunctiousness that makes that crucial distinction between living and surviving. And so oftentimes when people speak about safety, they’re just meaning physical safety and they’re not actually meaning the emotional, mental, spiritual safety that actually sticks with us even when we’re not with other people.
Glennon Doyle:
This might be my favorite thing I’ve heard you say recently, but you’re talking about when people respond to you angrily, whether it’s on the internet or wherever, and you said, “I respond to hate with love, not because I want to be the bigger person, but I want to win.” I just sat and giggled about that one for a little while. Tell me when someone says something to you online about why you shouldn’t be wearing the dress or whatever they say, what might you write back and what is the goal? What are you winning? What are you trying to win?
ALOK:
We exist in a culture that elevates clap backs as if they are going to make change, but people have been clapping back at each other for centuries and nothing’s changed. What I’m interested in doing is clapping back, by which I mean embracing someone and patting them on the back saying, “Hey, I love you.” There’s a way in which fury, indignation and retribution have been elevated as the most sophisticated and resistant forms of action. But I question that because if those things worked, we would not have what’s happening right now.
People call me naive and idealistic for in compassion, but I think what’s naive and idealistic is believing that violence can never stop violence. I think what’s naive and idealistic is believing that if we respond with the same frequency as those aggressing us, then we’ll somehow transform or interrupt a circuitry of violence. I don’t think that’s how it works. I notice that when I make the choice, which is a daily choice to respond from compassion, to operate from a higher frequency, to see and insist on the humanity and the complexity of the people who are in pain and weaponizing that pain against me, I noticed that something shifts materially.
So I had a conversation the other day where someone was saying, “Well, there are certain people that just deserve to be shamed because they’re so awful.” They brought up Anita Bryant, who was a notorious anti-gay activist who got pied in the face. You might’ve heard of it. And they said, “Well, someone like her is just so deplorable and what would you say to her?” And I said, I would say, “Hi, Anita, I love you very much and I’m so sorry that you don’t love you very much. And that’s evident because you’re wasting your precious and finite time on earth hating me when you could be living this precious and finite thing, life. And so your hatred of me is a tell that you don’t think that your life is that special, but I think your life is that special.” What happens then? There’s nothing for them to sink their teeth in.
And I think where we get it wrong is we mistake the resistance as what we say, but I believe the resistance is how we are. Compassion is not what I’m saying, it’s how I am. To be and to embody compassion is to notice and recognize I’m just caught in the crossfires of your internal war. This has nothing to do with me. So the reason that it’s effective is because it puts the onus back on the aggressor, not on me. It says, “This is your pain, I need you to deal with it.” But what we’ve done is we’ve misdiagnosed the solution to be us shape-shifting, us responding rather than those people who are transmitting their pain working on it.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s like deep codependence, I will keep changing so that you’re not mad at me, instead of, I will not change, I hope eventually you will not be mad at you.
What are all of us when we see something that we are afraid of or that we are resisting, explain to us what you believe is happening of the person or what’s happened in their past that is making them react that way. Explain it to us like you’re explaining it to a kid. When someone’s saying, “You can’t do that,” calling you names, what may have happened in their past that led them to that place?
ALOK:
I have so much sadness that there’s a moment when we’re no longer allowed to imagine. We’re told, “Okay, time to grow up.” And we’re taught that maturity means entering in this realm of misery and things are what they are. They can’t be changed. This is just reality, grow up. And that is such a profoundly grief inducing process to sever people from their capacity to wonder. I believe a more mature definition of maturity is maintaining an intimate relationship with wonder and creativity as you age. The most mature people are the people who maintain curiosity as a necessity. And so what happens when people encounter someone like me that is coloring outside of the lines, that makes them recall a past version of themselves that got punished for doing precisely that. And this is the way that abuse culture works, is that the control becomes so ritualized, the coercion becomes so rigid that we end up reenacting that on other people. We transmit it to other people.
So they just do and repeat and parrot the very things that were said to them to me because if they didn’t, then they would have to confront how the people who said that they love them were actually trying their best to destroy them and call that love. And that is a way too painful place to go. So it’s easier to default into aggression against me and I want to thank being trans for helping me open up to this matrix. These are things that I had read and foundational scholars like bell hooks and so much feminism helped me come to these conclusions intellectually. But it was only when I went outside and I had other people throw their shame on me like a snowball fight and I had to sit in it, sit in other people’s shame and I had to actually go home and look at myself in the mirror and being like, “Am I what other people see me as?” And I had to say, “No, I am beautiful.”
And so transness gave me the opportunity, the luxury, the privilege, the power of having to do that sacred human practice of self birth because just like maturity, birth is a definition that we need to re-clarify. Birth is something that we can always do. We can decide to give birth to a different version of ourselves. And what transness demanded I did is if you are going to live this life, you’re going to have to give birth to a version of yourself that’s able to realize that all of this other stuff is projection. What is so true and is so real is your beauty.
Glennon Doyle:
And your beauty is who you are on the inside. All of this makes so much sense to me because having come from a fundamentalist religion, you and I have talked about this so much, a lot of people are fundamentalist about gender. That is a religion, that is something that’s been given to us that has said, “I know the world is chaos and life is scary and this is something that I can promise you that it’s a rule and you live inside of it and if you live inside of it, you’ll be safe,” which is what fundamentalist Christianity is as well.
When people who have said, “Okay, I believe you,” and given up who they are on the inside to stay inside that safe religion, see somebody who then leaves the religion and looks to be full of joy, that is rage inducing to the people that are still in it, not only because they’re thinking back to somebody who hurt them, but because if they admit that that could be true, then they’re going to live with the regret they’ve lived their whole life following these rules when they could have had that joy and they’re not seeing that person be struck down. They’d have to admit that they’ve given up their life.
Amanda Doyle:
That they were wrong.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, that they could have lived differently. And it’s easier to say, “Nope, I’m going to stick with my belief that you’re going to go straight to hell that you’ll get years later,” than to `say, “Oh my God, I could have had mine now.”
ALOK:
But let me expand that to say, what if we created a culture where being wrong wasn’t the worst thing? What if we created a culture where you could say, “Yikes, I thought this, but now I’ve gotten new information and now I’m changing my mind.” But the issue is that our culture is one that structures belonging on purity, and so we require people to have this performance of consistency. I’ve always known, I’ve always been, and this is also something we as trans people have to do, is the only way that our genders get seen as real is if I narrate that prenatally I played with dolls. That’s absurd that I have to perform this unshakable foundational conviction. I actually believe that the most human response is, I don’t know, therefore I am, or perhaps even more honestly, I feel, therefore I am. That feeling and sensation are perhaps the most foundational practices of presence that we can ever have.
So what I want to do is to create a world where people actually de-stigmatize coming together and saying, “I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know who I am because I was told that I was this thing and I don’t really know if that’s what I want to be.” I want to create a space where people can live ambiguity and still be loved. I think the reason that people hold on to certainty is they believe that they’ll only be loved and only have access to community if they can navigate saying before and after, one or the other, those kinds of binary grits.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes, because half the reason people don’t leave is not so that they don’t have to admit that they have wasted their life, but also when they leave that religion, they are leaving the love and belonging and therefore the safety of the community that is contingent upon them staying pure here and not leaving there. So as soon as you tie those things together and you have to choose the binary of me and my uncertainty versus staying here and receiving love and pretending to be certain, people are always going to choose love and pretending.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s not love either. It’s not real love.
Abby Wambach:
It’s a pretend belonging.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s the faux safety and the faux love, which is there and can touch as opposed to the imaginary love and safety that I’ve never actually touched, that I don’t know if it’s even true.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
ALOK:
It shows that this is all in the consciousness, it’s just that the culprit is wrong. So notice what they say about trans people like me. You are pretending to be something that you’re not. You’re an imposter. Wow, what you’re saying in there is that you realize that pretend is happening. It’s not that trans people are pretending, it’s that all of us have to pretend to be these gender binaries. It’s actually a confession. It’s an awareness when they say, “Okay, well these trans people, they have this mythological power.”
I was just in Utah and it felt very strange to be there in Sundance when one of the worst anti-trans bills is about to be approved in Utah, that it would make it a criminal offense for people like me to use the facilities of our choice. So there’s an acknowledgement there that violence is real, but the culprit is not trans people. The culprit is patriarchy. So often, the very things that people accuse trans people of being, it’s just misdirected rage that should be directed to the gender binary, the system. So that’s why I’ve shifted because I began to realize that most of the anti-trans animus actually is a confession of people’s own pain from the gender binary. They’re just attributing it to me when, in fact, I just need to move like a laser beam, the focus into the gender binary system.
And what I continually remind myself every day is I could have been every one of those people. What are the moments in my life where I saw people living freer versions of myself that I wasn’t willing to confront? And so I responded to judgment as an armor to protect me from having to do that self exploratory work. I have continually used judgment in my life. I have continually looked at people and been like, “Oh, that’s disgusting. That’s gross. Why would you look like that?” I am just as bad when I’m saying against purity, I’m not even saying that I also am outside of these things. I have been contaminated in them too. But this work of grace, which is, for me, the work of God, grace, is to be able to look at my even judgmental sides, to look at the ways in which I have replicated the things I’m trying to interrupt and to contextualize, of course I did that, of course I did that when the only grammar I had to speak my name was hate, not love.
Glennon Doyle:
What is God to you?
ALOK:
I think since we last were on this podcast, I have really been saying God so much more. I have really been saying faith so much more and spirituality so much more. And some of my most profound leaders now are people who are religious. And that is so confusing because in my comment section, all these people are like, “Find God.” And I’m like, “I did,” plot twist. I did, and now all of my radical friends are some of the most pious and devout religious people I know. It’s just that you don’t see their godliness because you think God is what you look like, not how you treat other people. God is here now and you and me in this conversation. If we take the time and if we have the love to notice it, God is not a realm outside of humanity. God is here in its fleshiness and its self-hatred and its idiosyncrasies and its deepest insecurities. God is in the places we hate ourselves most. God is in the places we have the most trepidation, anxiety, nervousness, and skittishness.
I grew up understanding heaven as a destination on the other side. What my life has had to help me realize is that it’s actually here and I have to act accordingly. I have to build it here in every interaction. And so from one point of view, you could look at it as a compassion practice as irrational. I often hear from people, “People won’t change. Why do you try?” And I’m like, “Okay, that’s one paradigm, but in another paradigm of grace, it actually makes so much logical sense.” So what a God practice is, is to treat every person as if they were God, to treat everything as if it was God, to relate to every single thing in the world as a teacher and an invitation. And when I began to see pain as a teacher, shame as a teacher, not as something that I need to eliminate, detonate, destroy, but rather something I have to integrate a deep profound cosmological awareness that every single thing plays a part, that’s when I began to find happiness, this thing I didn’t think was possible for someone like me. So God got me to happiness.
Glennon Doyle:
It makes me so sad when you are talking about how God is now and God is not out there and God is not just after death and all of that because it makes me sad for people who are raised to believe that you can only live later. What I think a lot of people are taught is that you can be as beautiful as you are now, ALOK. You can be as free. You can have this eventually, but not now. Now you follow the rules, now you suck it up, now you hide your beauty, but later.
Abby Wambach:
It’s a good way for religions to keep people “in line.” The thing that makes me the most sad that I actually only learned when I met you is I didn’t think God was for me because I was a believer that heaven was after and also hell was after. And you have made me understand that God is in all of us. We are all God. And to live a life not ever knowing that is the real loss. The reason why people can’t see some people as fully human is because they don’t believe that they themselves have God in themselves. And that is, I think, maybe the saddest thing.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s beautiful. It’s also amazing that it’s all Jesus said over and over again. It’s all Jesus said was like, “It’s now, it’s now, the kingdom of heaven is not out there. It’s in us, it’s in you, it’s in me. It’s in all of us.” I think Jesus was like, “I’m God, also so are you.”
More and more of my friends are coming to me saying, “Oh my God, my kid just came out as non-binary.” This is a thing now that is just constantly happening, but amazing thing what happens when people start having language to explain their experience. Suddenly everybody’s, “Oh my God, it’s out of control. Everyone is non-binary. I wonder why that’s happening.” It’s just that people see more freedom around them and freedom is contagious and they can attach language to it, but if the gender binary isn’t real, which I think everyone who’s on this conversation believes it is not, it is a structure that we do not have faith in, isn’t everyone non-binary? When someone says to me, “My kid came out as non-binary,” I just hear, “Oh, that person’s kid is wise enough to have seen that the emperor has no clothes.” It’s like figuring out that there’s no Santa. I don’t think like, “Oh, that kid has discovered something inside of themselves that’s different than other people.” I just think, “Oh, that kid has discovered that this thing isn’t real.” Aren’t we all non-binary?
ALOK:
I worry that we run the risk of replicating the coercion that we’re protesting when we say that being non-binary is somehow more aware, more ethical, more resistant. What I’m interested in is actually saying that being a woman and being man don’t have to mean believing in the gender binary. What I’m asking people to do is to author their own version of womanhood, their own version of manhood, their own version of gender. And so it’s less to me about the destination as much as it is about the practice of questioning. And I think it’s still possible to do that practice of questioning and maybe not end up as non-binary. I have many trans women and many trans men in my life who have done that difficult journey of embracing manhood and womanhood, and it’s their choice, and that’s what’s beautiful to me. They’re not defaulting into it because they’ve been told this is what you have to be, but they made a series of deep introspective gestures to actually say, “This is what’s most resonant to me.”
The violence of the gender binary is not about how we identify, it’s about how we police. So what people get wrong is they think that when I’m saying, “I want to end the gender binary, I want people to stop being men or women,” I could care less how you describe yourself. What I want you to stop doing is to stop standardizing one singular definition of manhood and womanhood for everyone. I want you to recognize that there is many ways to be a man as there are men. There are many ways to be women as there are women, just in the same way that every Sarah is not the same. We give each Sarah their own particularity, but we don’t say, “Abolish Sarah.” That’s how I want us to relate to gender is, “Okay, you’re a woman, interesting, what does that mean to you?” “Okay, you’re non-binary, interesting, what does that mean to you?”
Because what I’ve seen happen right now is non-binary has become a catchall for putting genders chaos, and in that way it stabilizes the gender binary because it’s like man, woman, other. But the goal I’m trying to make is it’s not about this container non-binary, it’s about a different relationship with gender that’s more playful, that’s more introspective, that’s more self definitional.
Glennon Doyle:
So you’re okay even if people want to have faith in a gender binary, you are against gender binary evangelism.
ALOK:
Well, I don’t think that I want people to have faith in the gender binary. What I’m saying is being a man or being a woman does not mean replicating the binary structure. I’m saying that it is possible to actually come to your own definition of womanhood outside of a binary structure. And I think if cis folks are interested in that, look at the testimonies of trans people. Trans people who are in many ways very literate about what’s wrong with the gender binary, what’s wrong with assigned course of gender, who some still identify as man and woman. I don’t think that those people are replicating the gender binary for being that. I think that they’ve actually done this work to actually say, “Where I feel most beautiful is in this place.”
And so I’m not interested in telling those people you’re replicating the gender binary, and the same way I’m not interested in telling people who are cis that they’re replicating the gender binary. Where replicating the gender binary comes in as how you jurisdict the parameters of my gender. It’s more about how you’re relating to other people versus how you’re relating to yourself. Does that make sense?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, absolutely.
Abby Wambach:
Do you think it’s important for every person to figure out what their situation might be? What about people who just don’t want to even think about it for themselves because the culture has just told us what to do, and, of course, I live in a binary world anyway, but also I’m just tired, and do you think it’s important for every person to figure out where they might fall on that spectrum?
ALOK:
Yes, but I don’t frame it in terms of figuring out your gender. I frame it in terms of healing. When we heal, we will inevitably figure out our gender. So I’ve actually been quite agnostic to an approach that’s like, “Here, read this gender literacy guide. What resonates with you?” That’s not my approach. My approach is, “Who do you want to become and what is preventing you from doing that?” Those portals that are larger, I think, are where actually we can heal this gender crisis.
I’ve been so inspired, Glennon, by you sharing your healing journey publicly, because in many ways that is transition work. It’s actually such a beautiful transition to say who you believed I was and who I believed I was is no longer I’m becoming something else. And that’s why transition is a grief ritual. It’s about saying goodbye to a previous version of ourselves and introducing and maybe even reacquainting with a future version of ourself and transition is something all of us need to do. As Thomas Merton and Richard Rohr would say, From a false self to a true self, that’s the ultimate transition.” Gender is just one part of that. So Abby, in your question of I feel tired, I think that’s, in some ways, a confession of a deeper pain. I feel scared, maybe might be more honest. I’m not sure.
Abby Wambach:
No, for sure.
ALOK:
I feel nervous.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, I think that one of the things that I’m delving in right now in my therapy is ultimately my big fear of death. And I think that that’s going to provide, when I keep going deeper and deeper into that, I think what you’ve said has been transformative to me because if I work in reverse and to create the most beautiful life, having gotten comfortable enough with the death idea, the death truth, that I will start living more fully, freely, and maybe some other expression of myself will come forward.
Glennon Doyle:
Cool.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
ALOK:
Can we talk about fear of death?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, please.
Abby Wambach:
Yes, please.
ALOK:
I feel so called in this moment now to talk about death with unflinching clarity. I truly believe that if we lived our lives with the awareness that everything is precious because it could be gone, we could make hatred, prejudice, and violence obsolete because we could see each person as capable of such profound despair and grief. Every single one of us is going to/is right now going to lose the very pillars of our lives. That is so fundamentally destabilizing, but that offers me so much grace because I’m like, “We all have that in common.” Our humanity comes from our mortality. It actually comes from our very ability to die, gives us constitutive empathy for one another. I don’t need to know anything else about you other than the fact that you two are going to die. And once I remember that, then all of the bigots just seem like broken kids who are afraid of death, no matter how many wars they instigate, no matter how many laws they passed, no matter how many controlling projects that they catalyze, that’s not going to stave off death.
And so then their actions become, actually, so understandable to me because then I zoom into myself and I say, “What have I done because I’ve been afraid of dying? I pretended to be really smart. I thought that intellect would cheat death out. I pretended that I could joke my way out, sardonic or ironic distance from it.” And then the people I love died and it undid me. And I had to confront that every single time I make connection, it’s going to end. And then I had to make the choice to make connection anyways again and again and again. So what I’ve learned in foregrounding death is actually surrender. I think I began my campaign against the gender binary through the framework of resistance. And where I’m at now is through the framework of surrender, just showing up fully and having faith that it’s going to be okay in the end.
That’s the only advice you can give people when they’re dealing with death is I genuinely don’t know, I don’t know what’s going to happen, I don’t know if you’re going to see this person again, but what I do know is that I’m here and surrendering to unknowability is the common denominator. And what I’m asking for with gender and with grief is the unknowability of grief and the unknowability of gender is yes, a version of me could come up and explain and demystify and say, “This is what gender is.” But I think a more honest version is to say, “I don’t know, I don’t know. We don’t know any of this. All this is made up.” And that’s where the beauty is. The beauty is actually in being able to develop a relationship with unknowability where we’re just situated in it, not needing to define or control it.
Glennon Doyle:
God, I’m having such a moment of understanding and compassion, too, when you’re talking, because I’m thinking the people who I get so mad at who are making the laws, that’s all I’ve done my whole life. Anorexia is just surrounding myself with rules and laws to stay safe. Going into every cult that offers me a space, like fundamental Christianity or whatever, it’s just finding fake stability, trying to hold up pillars.
The only way I can understand any of this is I have to resist deciding anything. I’m not going to take a freaking BuzzFeed quiz or read a book and land somewhere. It’s just never landing. The only way I can understand gender is to be like, “How do I feel right now? How do I want to feel right now?” And then I try to match my outsides with how my inside feels in that moment, but it’s never a landing. That’s why I change six times a day. I understand, though, when you’re talking, I feel great compassion for people who are holding onto pillars, even when those pillars look and feel so mean, I too have been desperate for pillars my whole life.
Abby Wambach:
It’s safety.
Amanda Doyle:
And the idea of I don’t know, that gift of uncertainty that then begs the million other questions that, granted, it has given you a lot of trauma in your life as well, but the impoverishment of someone like me who there were no questions that I asked myself, there was not an uncertainty. There was not an I don’t know. And therefore, the implicit corollary is you do know and you know everything you need to know. And then there were no further questions with my gender, with my sexuality. It was, those questions are for other people for whom uncertainty is present. And so I don’t know those things about myself because I did not view that set of inquiries as relevant to me. And therefore, my life has been less internally known and interesting and creative than it could have been. And so this is why I think these questions that you are offering into this world and this invitation of I don’t know to all of us, is so beautiful because we can all participate in the creativity of building and understanding who we are and what we want and what we can bring.
ALOK:
I just believe that expansiveness is so initially destabilizing, but once you get through that initial aversion to it, expansiveness is the most exciting place to be because now when my scale is the universe, my anxiety is just one drop in that universe. My grief is just one drop in that universe. When I lose people I love now, I surrender to that expansiveness and it’s not as massive. It reminds me of when I was younger and I used to watch NOVA documentaries about the galaxy. There was something so profoundly thrilling and knowing how tiny I was in the scale of all of it. And part of the fiction of control is also a question of scale because you can’t control the entire cosmology. It’s too big. So what they try to do is make us small because that’s controllable. What the gender binary tries to do is make us man or woman, and this is what man means and this is what woman means because that’s controllable. It’s all about control. And when we move beyond control to actually realizing I am universe, then we can’t be contained in that way.
Glennon Doyle:
I feel so scared when you’re saying… I just think my whole thing in life is trying to let go of control. It’s just the whole-
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, but don’t you hear what they’re saying? That’s everybody’s thing.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, that’s comforting.
Abby Wambach:
All of us, that’s the affliction here. Sorry, I didn’t mean to-
Glennon Doyle:
No, I’m really grateful for that. Thank you.
Abby Wambach:
I feel it too.
ALOK:
That’s the affliction and that’s the standup comedy. It’s just silly when you really think about it. When we are all going to die, we’re going to hopefully be on a deathbed and we’re going to look back at so many of the things that we thought that would give us stability and be like, “That was so silly. That was so naive. It was ludicrous that we thought that degrees or that we thought that distinctions or that we thought that hierarchies made us better than other people, when in fact, those other people are just going to die just like me.” There’s a democracy in death, and that’s what I’m speaking about when I speak about compassion, unity, the pronoun we, all of us together is once I realized that democracy of death, and I found it when I began to speak about my own suicidality, when I began to say, “I think about dying, and then I realized everyone thinks about dying, and then we could speak about it.”
When I lost people in my own life and I didn’t know where to go because there’s no rehabilitation centers for heartbreak, you’re just supposed to figure out how to do it yourself. DIY heart break recovery is obscene. Where do you go? So I began to speak it, and then I met other people who were dealing with that grief, and then I realized, I don’t know anything about you, but someone you love died and that gives us so much in common. And then I began to extract that and expand that. And I had so much common because I was like, “All of us are going to die.” And from that point of view, that’s where I feel this urgency to come together in this moment because in this moment, we keep on thinking we can cheat death, call that racism. That’s what white supremacy is, is white people thinking they can cheat their own mortality, call that patriarchy, men thinking they can cheat their own mortality.
There’s been a lot of discourse around vulnerability, but what I’m trying to push us to is that ultimate vulnerability is the admission of our death. And once we live a life that is death forward, actually that’s where freedom comes from. I am going to die, so therefore I am going to live my best life. And it is only when we come to that place of acceptance that, okay, this is finite. So like you said, Abby, working backwards, how do I build a life such that if I was to die right now, it would be dignified?
Glennon Doyle:
You found something. If we’re thinking about being on our deathbed and all of the things that are going to feel ridiculous that we thought would shore us up, so many of them will seem insane at that point. But when you lost your beloved aunt who was a revolutionary, a teacher, a wayfinder for all of us, you did notice something that surrounded her in her death that she had invested in, that actually did shore her up and actually did carry her from this side through the great transition, something that we are not told to invest in, which is friendship. Can you talk to us about that?
ALOK:
Yeah. At Sundance, I did this interview where they asked me, “Who are three people I wish could see my standup show?” And me being me, I listed three dead people and one of them was her because her breast cancer came back right when I started touring the show. And she couldn’t make the date that I had in New York. And I talked to her about it, but she never got to see it. And I feel so much despair that she didn’t get to see it because it’s taken me a long time to come to comedy. I only could come to comedy when I had worked on healing myself, realize this absurdity, and I was so proud of it, and I wanted to share that with her because her laugh was always the loudest in the room. It was my favorite soundtrack. She laughed with so much vigor and rigor as if she had been practicing and rehearsing it her entire life.
And she laughed until the very end. Even she would make self-deprecating comments about the sores in her mouth and then laugh. And it taught me what I truly believe, the only way forward once we accept that we are going to die is comedy. Comedy is truly the way, the practice to hold the fact that all of this is a sham and all of this is an attempt to say about death. It’s just so funny. And what I saw in her final moments were her and her friends laughing in the face of death. And that’s what queerness is.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, shit.
ALOK:
It’s actually being able to have other people around you when you’re having terminal cancer and finding the camp and circumstance of twirling around in a hospital gown. That’s a metaphor for everything I’m trying to say about beauty is that despite everything around us, we have the ability to laugh, to crack a joke, to see how silly it is. And that’s where the forgiveness and compassion comes in as well, is, “Oh, it’s so silly that you wasted all your time doing that.” So what this version of myself is so invested in is realizing that comedy has been the medicine I was seeking for so long because seriousness didn’t deliver the promise in the same way rules didn’t deliver the promise of stability. What comedy allows me to constantly do, what self-deprecation allows me to do is to just be like, “Oh, I’m human.” It’s the micro abrasion of humanity. I’m human, I’m human, I’m human, I’m human.
And Urvashi has really been on my mind recently because I’m writing a poem right now to my niece. Urvashi was about the same age I am now when I was born. So God works in really intense ways. And now my little niece calls me mausi, which is Hindi for aunt. And every time she runs around screaming mausi, I just start crying. I run into another room and I’m freaking out because I’m like, “I can’t be her. I can’t do what she did for me.” And it’s so weird to have the baby look at you as an adult when you look at the baby and you’re like, “I’m baby too, but I have to be adult for you.” And it’s terrifying. And it makes me feel her terror and her love because then the question becomes, how do I become that mausi so that I can be what she was for me?
And what I’m really starting to realize is there’s all those narratives about the people we lose. They’re not gone. They’re just here. But it’s so obvious to me now. It’s so obvious to me now that she was preparing me to do this role. There are ways in which she didn’t clue me into the work she was doing, she just did it. But I knew that she was doing that work so that I could be free, freer. And now I feel this deep conviction to create a world outside the gender binary because there’s a young person who I don’t want to experience that. It’s so immediate for me in a way that it wasn’t before. And I feel the immediacy of what she was doing in a different way. And it makes me, I think, profoundly grateful that death is the ultimate teacher. It reconfirms for me over and over again, what are the stakes?
I don’t think we ask ourselves that question enough. Why am I doing this? What are the stakes? And what I heard in what you were doing, Glennon, talking about your healing was another way of saying, “What are the stakes?” Because in so many ways, success, number of book sales, followers, it doesn’t fucking matter when you die. What matters when you die is not an audience of people giving you a standing ovation, but you giving yourself a lie down ovation, which is a dignified death. And once I started to recalibrate to there of like, “Okay, that’s all nice, and I’m grateful for it, but my healing is to truly look at the face and death and integrate it into life.”
Glennon Doyle:
Amen.
ALOK:
That’s the ultimate binary that undergirds every other binary of man, woman, is life, death. And once you actually de-stigmatize conversations, practices, rituals around death, then you give yourself permission to live.
Abby Wambach:
I don’t think that more needs to be said.
Glennon Doyle:
I have 30 more questions, which I’ll ask you next time. What else do you want to say right now before we go? If there’s nothing, you’ve already said more beautiful things than I can imagine, but I just don’t want to not ask that in case there’s anything.
ALOK:
What feels important to say now is that we have to become fluent in everything that makes us want to live. I’m seeing so many people, rightfully so, detail everything that’s wrong about the world right now, get apocalyptic about the future of our government, about the future of the world, and I am here with you. And that’s not how you continue going. It’s just not. The way that you continue going is you notice the beautiful things, the small gestures of kindness, those are the things that give you stamina. And what I’ve started to do now is to create a playlist, not just of music, but of everything I find beautiful so that when I’m feeling despair and loneliness and alienation, I can go to my beauty playlist and remember someone on the earth once created this movie that moved me in such a profound way, there’s no doubt that we’re going to win because something this spectacularly beautiful could not exist otherwise. Art has been and will forever be my healthcare because it allows me to keep going.
I feel so much despair all the time. I thought that the work I was doing in the world would change it quicker. And yet it’s still very scary out here for me. And I’m having to deal with very real threats to my life and my safety. But the beauty is what is keeping me going, not the courage. I hate it when people say, “Oh, it’s your courage.” No, it’s my beauty playlist. It’s all of us dissenting, by which I mean being beautiful. So I suppose that the thing I’d want to end on is find your beauty and become a publicist for it. Represent it everywhere you go, say, “I saw this thing. I listened to this podcast. I had something that touched me, made me feel human.” And preserve that humanity, preserve that empathy, preserve that ability to feel everyone’s grief and pain, that’s what’s going to protect us long form.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s like feeding each other right now.
Abby Wambach:
Bringing heaven to earth because it’s like, “Oh, there was this little bit of God I saw. I saw God. Do you want to know about it?”
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. ALOK, I love you so much. I just love you, and I’m so grateful for you.
ALOK:
It was funny because I was like, “I’m doing this podcast, I have to prepare it.” And Alex was like, “Do you really need to prepare?” And I was like, “You’re so right.” It’s Glennon, I don’t need to prepare. I was like, “I’m not coming in with my talking points. I’m just going to show up as I am and see what happens.” And here we are talking about death, so it sounds like we did a good job.
Glennon Doyle:
We like to keep it light, as you do, ALOK. Well, we’re just going to keep watching every little thing. Everything you do feels like a bit of a God sighting to me.
Abby Wambach:
How and when can people see the short doc, ALOK?
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, yeah.
ALOK:
Well, we’re hoping that some distributor buys it and makes it more publicly available, so hopefully news on that soon.
Glennon Doyle:
I’m pretty sure that’s going to happen any minute now.
Abby Wambach:
Well, and if that changes before this airs, we’ll include it.
Glennon Doyle:
We’ll update it. Okay, come to my couch soon, please, the next time you’re in LA.
ALOK:
Absolutely. There’s Molly’s big comfy couch, and then there’s Glennon’s big comfy couch.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right. It’s where you belong. And thanks for reminding us that we can do hard things just beautifully, softly, and with big love. All right, Pod Squad, we’ll see you next time, but it’s not going to be as good as this.
ALOK:
See you soon.
Glennon Doyle:
So Pod Squad, at some point during this conversation with ALOK, they got kicked off their internet. We are convinced that we just came too close to deciphering the secrets of the universe and the matrix glitched. So ALOK got kicked off their internet. While they were trying to get back on, the three of us just kept riffing on what ALOK was saying, so here it is. You have the behind the scenes.
Abby Wambach:
Oh, I think maybe ALOK is frozen.
Glennon Doyle:
We’ll get them back.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, they’re going to come back, I’m sure right now.
Glennon Doyle:
Great. Yeah, I’m not worried about it at all.
Abby Wambach:
I’ve never thought of it, if you can figure out the death part, you’ll be able to live.
Glennon Doyle:
That we’re all just trying to avoid death.
Abby Wambach:
It’s just got to be the biggest truth.
Glennon Doyle:
I think that’s right.
Abby Wambach:
It’s the truth. And I think what’s interesting about this is I think that I’m trying to understand what happens after death isn’t the question.
Glennon Doyle:
No. It’s just like, “Am I going to accept that I’m going to die?”
Abby Wambach:
It’s accepting that it’s happening. And then reverse engineering a more beautiful, freer life for yourself after that acceptance.
Glennon Doyle:
Because we don’t even know what’s going on now.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
We sure as hell, knowing what’s going to go on next is not going to fix us. We literally don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on right now in our life that we are living right now.
Abby Wambach:
It’s like the great procrastination is this idea. I’m just going to deal with it later.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, if somebody just tells me what happens after death, I’ll be fine. No, that’s not it.
Abby Wambach:
It’s not it. It doesn’t matter.
Amanda Doyle:
We’re riffing on the fear of death, ALOK. We’re spinning.
Glennon Doyle:
We’re going down.
ALOK:
I’m glad. I think that it was such a real conversation that it actually broke my internet.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right. That’s right.
ALOK:
And so now I’m going to try to hotspot myself on back to my laptop.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, God love you.
ALOK:
It’s just really incredible. God works in mysterious ways because this has never happened, ever. But of course it happens when we’re talking about the realest shit in the world.
Glennon Doyle:
Just take your time. We’re completely-
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, exactly. We’re just pondering our fear of death.
Glennon Doyle:
Jesus.
ALOK:
I’m going to go try to restart my internet. I’ll be right back.
Amanda Doyle:
Okay.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, great.
Abby Wambach:
Maybe that’s what I’ve been telling my therapist, I don’t have an issue with the after because I think that that’ll be fine.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s good, that’s good.
Abby Wambach:
Because I was fine before the now. I was fine before then. I think what I’m so afraid of is not fully living.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s good. That’s good, babe. Well, when you think about a term for death is the great transition. That’s the ultimate transition. So if you are deeply afraid of the ultimate transition, then you might be someone who’s terrified of every small transition.
Amanda Doyle:
Or if you think that’s the great transition, you may not feel a need to transition at any point prior to that.
Glennon Doyle:
Right. And by the way, P.S., they tell you that. Don’t worry about it now, you’ll get to transition later during the big transition when we all get to wear flowy robes and sing and be beautiful together.
Amanda Doyle:
So you don’t have to imagine a world in which you never transition and this is it, because any reservation or hesitation or feeling like you’re not doing the fullness of life be taken care of in the great transition of death.
Glennon Doyle:
Right, even though Jesus is like, “I have come so that you can live fully.”
Abby Wambach:
I think that that’s why it’s so important to have. I’m thinking of the 40-year-old lesbian.
Glennon Doyle:
You always are.
Abby Wambach:
Always, always am, but I know a lot of them are listening and we had to go through this inquiry when we were in our late teens, early 20s. You did yours later in life.
Glennon Doyle:
I sure did.
Abby Wambach:
And the only option that we really could see that was semi acceptable, it wasn’t accepted culturally, but that there was a little faction was just being a lesbian and now there’s so many more options. I find myself thinking, “Had there been the other option then,” I say this to you a lot, “I’m sure that I would be non-binary.” Of course, I’m non-binary, but I’m not like, “I’m non-binary.” I say I’m more lesbian, but I wonder if there’s just more inquiry to be done around that.
Glennon Doyle: Well, that’s why queer is just such a great fucking word and I’m so grateful for it.