How to Make Loving Corrections with adrienne maree brown
October 15, 2024
Glennon Doyle:
Adrienne Maree Brown. Her work is informed by 25 years of social and environmental justice facilitation, primarily supporting Black liberation. She is the author and editor of Emergent Strategy, Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Grievers and Maroons, and Adrienne’s latest book, which I just absolutely loved, is called Loving Corrections, and it’s available now. Pod Squad, this is what we’re talking about today. Adrienne Maree Brown is the only person who can help us with the debacle that we are in, which is that we are in a place where so many of us are trying to move us towards progress, move us towards kindness, move us towards inclusivity and justice. And how we do that is we just tear each other’s faces off. We just exclude each other. We ostracize each other. We want to be more loving, and so we screw each other over constantly. We want police reform, so we police each other online. We’re in a bit of a quandary, Adrienne Maree Brown, and those are the people that we like.
Abby Wambach:
And those are the people we like.
Glennon Doyle:
Those aren’t even the people that we don’t like.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Those are the homies.
Glennon Doyle:
No, it’s so true. Those are the people we like. The rest, we call it accountability, and we say, “Well, we’re just holding each other accountable, because the other side, we’re not accountable for them, so we leave them alone. These are the people we love, and that is why we are horrific to each other,” so enter Adrienne Maree Brown, who is not new to this, okay? She does have a new book, which is incredible and all about this, called Loving Corrections, and the reason why you should read and trust it is because she has been doing this work, in a loving, inclusive way, for a very long time, which is why I trust her so much. It is because I know a lot of people in movement work, though I trust their vision, but I don’t want to be like them, and Adrienne is someone whose vision I trust. Like Maya Angelou used to say, “I like what she does, and I like how she does it,” okay? Adrienne, I don’t want you to feel too much pressure, but I just need you to fix-
Abby Wambach:
Everything.
Glennon Doyle:
… Everything in the next 45 minutes, and can we start by talking to us about how sometimes when we are thinking that we’re engaging in making the world a better place, we learn something new, and then we pretend like we’ve known it forever and everyone who hasn’t known it forever is a complete moron who must be chastised.
Abby Wambach:
Oh my God. I hate this people.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, but we do it. I do it.
Abby Wambach:
I don’t do that.
Amanda Doyle:
Isn’t that’s so sad though?
Abby Wambach:
I do not do that.
Glennon Doyle:
I know because you’re a good person. Yadi, yadi, yada. Adrienne, help the rest of us.
Abby Wambach:
That is not right.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Yes. Be like Abby. Well, first of all, it’s nice to see y’all.
Abby Wambach:
Hi.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
And I’m really excited to talk about this book with y’all, because I actually feel like you’re a living model of this all the time with each other. Y’all are living, loving corrections. Every time you sit down and talk, you’re always catching each other and being like, “Well, wait, but hold on. But I see this, and I love you,” and you report back on the love and corrections you’re making with each other. We need models of what it looks like to be in relationships where we each get to be very different, and we’re navigating space and love and time and wellness and sickness and all the things together, so good job. I want to start just by saying thank you for doing that for the pod squad and in your lives in general. I came up in the somatics lineage, where we learned that what humans all want and need is safety, dignity, and belonging. That everybody, that’s the universal set of things that most people are trying to figure out, “How do I protect and balance these three things?”
Amanda Doyle:
That’s safety. Can you say it one more time? Safety.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Safety, dignity.
Amanda Doyle:
Dignity.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
And belonging.
Amanda Doyle:
Belonging. Safety, dignity, belonging.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
And often, we’re trading between them. We’re trading between them, so a lot of times if you’re a child and you abuse child sexual trauma, things like that are happening in your childhood, you make these moves towards safety, right? That you’re like, “I have to give up belonging maybe to my family, and I have to run away. I have to go find safety,” or you make the other move. “Okay. Well, safety’s not possible. I have to let that one go because I want to belong to this family, and this family is an abusive space, but I want to belong. I’m going to stay in it,” and then dignity is kind of that in the middle bridge, where you’re like, “I might not be unsafe, but this person really doesn’t see me and my wholeness. They don’t see me shine. They’re constantly shrinking me. They’re shaming me. I get small, small, small, but I’m going to belong.” I think about the high school lunchroom. “I’m going to sit over in the corner of the cool people’s table, but at least I’m at a fricking table, okay?”
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
But if you think about that, right? That safety, dignity, and belonging piece, then what happens when we learn something new, where it’s like, “Oh, I was wrong about trans people. I was transphobic, and I learned something new and I had to be a little unsafe often to learn it, right? It’s like I had to take some risks. Maybe I put my foot in my mouth, and someone comes and they’re like, “I see you and what you’re saying, you don’t belong to the future. You say you belong to. You don’t belong to the vision of the world you say you believe in by the way you’re acting, so you see that. You’re like, “Okay. Well, let me get myself together and get on the right side of this.” Then, all of a sudden we feel that unsafety and lack of belonging constantly at our backs, right? Like, someone’s sent some dogs after us to grab us and to be like, “I see that you’re secretly still,” whatever it is, not belonging, not thoroughly educated. “You’re not standing up for the right legislation,” whatever it is we’re looking for.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Where is the gap in your solidarity? Where is the weak spot? Where is your achilles’ heel as a human? The easiest way to take the light off of ourselves is to turn and look at someone else and be like, “Well, that person, you’re really transphobic. I can see that,” and it’s a way to assert dominance. It’s a way to assert like, “I belong, okay? I’m with the good.” I think so much of loving corrections, for me, is being like, “None of us actually just get to be with the good. There’s not some little island of good and we all just land on that island, and then we just get to stay there.” Every single person is actually floating in the same systems of harm, right? If that’s the water that’s all around us, we’re all in it and we’re bobbing, we’re weaving, and what we get to learn in this life is actually all about who we choose to be in relationship with.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
So if we choose to be in relationship with people who hold a set of limited worldviews, then we’re going to stay in that limited place and we’re going to learn what that limitation allows us to learn. So when I think about growing up, my dad was in the military, so I grew up in a patriotic worldview, and I could have chosen to stay in that. Instead, I was like, “I have questions. I have doubts. I don’t know that we’re supposed to be occupying the entire world with guns. Something doesn’t feel right about it for me.” And so, then I put myself in relationship to other kinds of people. I also got politicized before the internet, so I put myself in relationship with people who were questioning me, but lovingly being like, “Girl, have you heard about feminism? Girl, do you understand what imperialism is? Can we sit down and talk about Malcolm X?”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
People would just gather me and be like, “Do you know anything?”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
I was like, “No, I don’t. I was trained by the Department of Defense Schools to be a cog in a system of believing in patriotism. If I’m going to do something else, I have to put myself into other relationships.”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Then, we get in those relationships and start tearing each other apart. So what I’m trying to do right now is figure out how to be part of something that knows how to hold on to each other. Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, we were in a conversation about this election period, and she said, “act like you need each other. Move like you need each other. Talk to each other like you need each other.” That feels like a lot of the essence of this is instead of turning back and being like, “Let me chastise you for what you don’t know yet that I just learned,” instead, how can I be like, “Oh. Someone needed me to liberate myself from those systems, and I need other people to liberate themselves from those systems, because we all live on this earth and we need as many of us as possible to get free.”
Glennon Doyle:
I think that’s so interesting, because I don’t think we do this consciously, and so I’m not saying this in an accusatory way. I felt this in myself a million times, but there is a thing that happens where even if you believe that you are part of a movement of moving the world towards a more beautiful version of itself, of the future, as you say. In the moment, ego can that movement. So now I’m looking at a situation, and I can choose one of two things. I can choose to do what you’re saying.
Glennon Doyle:
Instead of ostracizing or accusing, I can gather you. I can bring you closer. I can approach with love and gentleness, which means I am prioritizing the movement, because that’s what moves people, or I can choose ego, which is a little bit of glee inside me that I feel sometimes. It’s like a gleeful like, “Oh, I got you. I am going to prove my goodness. I know more than that. I can separate myself from you in this way,” which is so interesting because every time somebody does that to someone else and I see it, to me it’s proof that they are prioritizing their own ego above the movement.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s what you say, Adrienne, when you say wisdom used as a sword by identifying and humiliating those who don’t know, who don’t yet have the wisdom that you do, that you got five minutes ago,
Adrienne Maree Brown:
So you got five minutes, you just received it. Octavia Butler is one of the people I reference a lot, and I think about. I learned a lot from her, and she said that our human fatal flaw is that we have intelligence and we always use it for hierarchy, that we take this beautiful, big brain that is unique, as far as we understand on earth and maybe in the universe. We have this beautiful brain, where we can be so self-aware, we can verbally process, we can understand the world, and we can philosophize, and we use it to be like, “How can I be just a little better than you? Over and over again, and we take that to the furthest extent, where some people really are like, “The whole earth is for me. I’m the best, and I deserve it all.”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Then, if you’re not someone who’s been in that track, you weren’t born into that privileged location, and no one ever gave you that idea, then you’re in the rest of the world where you’re like, “It’s not all for me. I’m not supposed to have it all. I’m just going to eke by. I’m going to try to get my little piece of it,” but that hierarchy is killing us, that form of hierarchy where it’s like, “I’m better than you. I’m gooder than you.” Mariame Kaba talks about what happens if you let go of that idea of good, of being good, and what happens if you pick up instead, this idea of being human. Almost every faith I’ve ever come across, it’s asking this question of, “Can you relinquish this idea that you are going to be good or perfect, and can you surrender that you need a higher power? You need something larger than yourself that you can belong to, that you can account to, that you can pray to, that you can surrender to, in some ways?”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately, that for me, loving corrections is a way that we get to be holy with each other, right? It’s like, “Oh. You’re not good. I’m not good, but we are really trying to figure out how to be human with each other and how to make room for all of you and all of me.” Then, if we are intentional, could we do less harm to each other? And if we do harm, could we repair that harm, and maybe in the repair become more beautiful and more holy, looking at it and saying, “Oh. White supremacy, yeah, that’s not good for you as a white person, and it’s not good for me as a Black person, so let’s adapt together, and it’s going to be messy. It’s going to be clunky, but it’s time to adapt, because that system, that hierarchy, it makes you isolated, and it makes me oppressed, and then we’re battling with each other instead of enjoying the abundance of this earth.”
Glennon Doyle:
I want to get the image of a dinner table, and I’m going to call myself out here. Glennon’s like, “Oh, geez.”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Okay.
Glennon Doyle:
There are so many times around our dinner table, because Adrienne, like you, even though I didn’t come from a military background, I grew up in a patriotic world, the world of the United States, and I was representing it. So because of that, I had formed so many opinions and belief systems around affirming what I was doing every day. It was a kind of important thing for me to believe in order to do it for a lifestyle, and so sometimes when we’re sitting around the dinner table, Abby says inappropriate things or says something that’s off a little bit, whether it’s because I grew up in a big family that lots of people, boys, energy, and also in locker rooms where everything was kind of on the table. One of the things that I notice is our children, the cringe that happens in them because they’re budding philanthropists, social workers, and what’s the word?
Abby Wambach:
Activist.
Glennon Doyle:
An activist. That’s the word I’m looking for.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Plus, they’re kids. So they are differentiating by saying, “Whatever you are is wrong, and whatever I am is better than that, because-“
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, totally.
Glennon Doyle:
Adrienne, yes, they are.
Abby Wambach:
And when the corrections come, I have this enormous amount of humility, and I think what is interesting, because one of our kids is really big time and activism right now, and I love that for them, and I think it’s really important, and I think it’s this identity, this intellectual hierarchy and this identity thing, and I think that that’s beautiful, but I just want to shout out to all the parents who sit around a table and get ick, cringed at. And the truth is, I am the kind of person who believes in progress and wants the world to be better, and also knows that I’m not fully there yet and I never will be. I am fucked from my childhood and my time. I’m working on it.
Glennon Doyle:
No, you’re just moving forward.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
But you’re doing a fantastic job. I mean, you are. I see it in you, but I will say I was the one, when I got politicized by all these loving people in college, I came home and was not in a loving correction tone with my parents. I came home, and I was like, “What is the military, and why would you do this, and how could you make me complicit?” I mean, I really was just like, “You’re the problem. It’s you.”
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
And sometimes that still comes out in me, right? Sometimes I’ll be around my parents and my dad or my mom, someone will say something, I’ll cringe like a teenager, and I will be like, “I’ve got to fix them,” and what I have learned over years and years of them, they’re like, “Oh, yeah. I am the shell that you have to break out of to be yourself,” and I also am a person who is breaking out of a shell, right? Also, those things coexist, and the contradiction exists that the ideas that my parents have, the worldviews that they came up with were the ones they needed to survive the times in which they grew up.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
They were steeped in even deeper waters. In some ways, I’m like, “Oh. It was not legal for y’all to even get married until a little bit before you got married. That’s the worldview you were in.” If I go back to my grandmother’s age and I try to think about what my grandmother would think about who I am now, if I met her when she was in her 40s or 20s or something, it’s wild to imagine her worldview didn’t have any way of comprehending what matters to me right now, but there’s a through line, which is every generation was trying to be as safe and dignified and to belong as much as they could in their time, and that’s what’s happening too with your kids.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
I think the best sign, I’m like, “I know that I am loved, because when I come to my parents and I’m like, ‘Your whole worldview is wrong,’ they’re like, ‘Tell me what you’re talking about. Tell me what you mean. I’m curious. I would like your tone to be [inaudible 00:16:35]. We could work on that.'” It took about a decade to get the tone together, right? And it was a hard decade. It was a decade of a lot of, we had gaps. We had times when we weren’t talking, but the whole time I knew I was unconditionally loved by them, and I could come back.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
I could come back over and over and over, and I brought them a lot of stuff. I was like, “Hey, I’m tripping on acid.”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
“Okay, well that sounds different.”
Amanda Doyle:
“Tell me more, Adrienne.”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
“Maybe you should take a nap. Tell me more.”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
“I slept with a girl.”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
“Well, did you like that? Was that fun?”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
“I am going through a massive breakup, and I think I’m having a breakdown.”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
“Okay. Well, do you need to come home? You always have a place here.” So there’s something about that fundamental curiosity. My parents are like, “Whatever you become in this life, we’re not going to let go of you. We’re going to hold onto you.”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
I see them do that with their own families as well, right? My mom has a bunch of family who were Trump’s voters, and coming home into that space has been fraught for us, because we’re like, “Wow. Do you notice that you have black and brown family? Does that matter?”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
My mom continues to go into that space lovingly and be like, “I want to talk to you, and I want to know you, and I want you to know me.”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
It takes rigor. There’s a rigor to being a parent, but I think there’s a short story. I always want to write about a whole world that’s driven by mothering, because I think there’s something about that sacred act of parenting, that unconditional love that’s at the root of loving corrections. It’s like, “I love you, and I’m going to hold your hand, and we’re going to change together. I’m going to tell you everything I know about these systems,” and what you’re calling cringe, that thing evolves, right? Where now I’ll feel it as like, “Oh. There’s dissonance.”
Amanda Doyle:
Dissonance.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
So instead of feeling it as like, “Ugh, something’s wrong with you,” I’m like, “Oh, there’s a dissonance. You came from a different place than I’m coming from, or you have a different worldview than I have. I’m trying to create more space in myself for those things, and curiosity is my way. Curiosity is always the path.” When I look at your career, Abby, and I look at your life, I’m like, “What you have done for women in the world is so important, that I can overlook your USA, that that was the box that you were in to do that,” because it was like, that’s the box that all athletes have to get into in order to compete at these scales.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
That’s how the world is structured, but I see what you were doing is still doing liberating work inside the structure that you were given, and now you still have life ahead of you to be like, “Well, how do I feel about the American experiment?” Right? There’s still room to grow. There’s still room to say, “I want to understand more about who we’ve been and what’s possible, and we can have a conversation. We can be curious, right? And we can believe that the other person can change. That’s the other part. Your kids may not believe you can change, but if you keep changing with them, they’ll learn that you can change and that’s going to be delicious.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s so beautiful, and it requires we think about this constantly, because all I feel like, Adrienne, and we’ve talked about this, but I feel like I am in the middle, I call it between coasts. I’m looking back at my parents and so mad at them, just for being from a different time, truly, and then looking at my children and hoping they don’t think the same way about me that I do about my parents, but it’s like this binary. It’s like, do I say right and wrong? If I look, am I right or are you wrong? Everything goes bad, but if I get curious about just being on this continuum and of time, it’s like the Khalil Gibran idea of, “Our children belong to the future, and we can’t go there even in our dreams,” but we can go there when we’re curious, when we’re not defensive or fragile, when we say, “Tell me about your world.”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Well, and the thing that I was going to say to you, that I think the thing that I hope people take away from this book is what you’re angry at is the systems, not the people, right? And I keep trying to do this reframe, because I have to have it. I’m like, “Oh. You got trapped in this bad idea. You were born into the bad idea, and you never saw anything other than that, and you really got it steeped into you, and now you are a defender of that bad idea,” whatever it is, patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, something that makes you feel just a little better, and it makes you feel secure in your place in society, but you got trapped in that idea, and I’m so angry at that idea. That idea is causing so much harm. That idea is not compatible with the future. I’m biased that I really like my side of things, but I’m like, “History really agrees with me.”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Empires always fall systems of power over, where there’s never an equalizing. There’s never a balancing. That always falls apart. People always rise up. People always want freedom. That’s just history. I didn’t make that up. Direct action, protest, social justice, and all that, people always do those things. That’s humans. That’s how we do it, right? That’s how we move. That’s what I’ve been thinking with my parents. I’m like, “Oh. My job is to hold on to you and help you keep coming forward,” and also grab onto that generation that’s out ahead and be like, “Oh, and you pull me, right? You help me not to fall too far to the right as I start to think that I can’t take the risk of changing anymore.” I have to uplift Grace Lee Boggs here, because when I met her, she was a mentor of mine. She was 92. She was still curious. She was still changing.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
She was still like, “Tell me about this Skype, and what does this make possible?” She was really excited about, “I can talk to anyone in the world about these ideas of mine. Who knew? I never thought I’d see the day.” If you can orient that way of, “I’m going to keep going, and until the day I die, I hope to have curiosity and I hope to still be changeable.” I also don’t have to push anybody, right? Everyone’s not on the same trajectory as me. Everyone’s not moving at the same pace. Some people are really interested in going backwards, so I’m like, “Oh. I’m going to pass you in the road, but I’m going the other way,” and the boundaries help. I’m like, “Oh. You’re living your life. You’ve got your lessons. I’m living mine. In the places where we’re supposed to push up against each other, let’s do that really well. Let’s do that with as much dignity as we can.” If you sit down and you’re fighting and you take that person’s hand, it will change your fight
Glennon Doyle:
Because policing people, it’s like not using the tools of the master’s hat. You can’t point towards or move towards a more beautiful world while using the tools of the old world.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Exactly.
Glennon Doyle:
The shaming and the ostracizing and the anger. I want to ask you when you have been lovingly corrected, because while reading your book, I was thinking about a moment in my life where I was in big trouble on the interwebs, which happens to me every once in a while, because I had spoken about my dissonance with the “Born this way” narrative. This was years ago, and I still can’t feel that in my body. It’s not true to me, and I feel like it’s kind of an old idea that we had to use to prove our…
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Existence.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, yes.
Abby Wambach:
Clarify what “Born this way” is. Not everybody knows.
Glennon Doyle:
The idea that we have to, in order to have equality, say, “Well, we can’t help it. We were born this way,” as if it’s like an apology almost or an excuse.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Yes. It’s like, “Sorry, gay.”
Glennon Doyle:
As opposed to, “I can be gay. I want all my equality, whether I decided this two weeks ago or,” anyway. At the time, it caused a bit of a hubbub.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
I can imagine.
Glennon Doyle:
And I was dealing with all of the pushback on the interwebs. Brandi Carlile called me, and now she’s one of our dearest friends in the entire world, which is what tends to happen after a loving correction that turns beautiful.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Exactly, exactly.
Glennon Doyle:
And I was like, “What’s happening? Oh, now I’m in fucking trouble. Now Brandi Carlile is calling me? Now the queer eye? It’s over for me,” right?
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s what happens when you do something against the gays. A drone just drops Brandi Carlile on your porch.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Listen, now it makes me kind of want to put my gay foot in my gay mouth in some way. I’m like, “Brandi could call me out of the bloom?”
Glennon Doyle:
She said, “Hey, it’s me. I love you. I’ve read all of your stuff. My wife and I talk about you constantly. I just watched this video, and Catherine’s trying to explain to me what you meant, and I don’t understand it, but I think there’s something true in there, but it’s still making me really scared and nervous, and I trust you and I want to hear everything that you have to say about this.” It started a four-hour conversation, and then a friendship that is probably one of the closest friendships in our family’s life.
Amanda Doyle:
And you understood from that, she was bringing to you a perspective that you didn’t have-
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
… Which is people like me, who grew up when I grew up, where I grew up, needed that to protect our lives from our family members.
Glennon Doyle:
Right.
Amanda Doyle:
And you dismissing it is-
Glennon Doyle:
Dangerous.
Amanda Doyle:
… It feels dangerous to me for those people. And so, you were able to really share how dangerous it felt to you, how dangerous felt to her. It was a beautiful-
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, it was a beautiful-
Amanda Doyle:
… Beautiful [inaudible 00:25:59].
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Well, and it’s also interesting, right? Because you’re advocating for your own experience in a way. You’re trying to say, “I just want to make sure that I fit into the gay-“
Amanda Doyle:
Belonging.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
… Because I didn’t feel like I was born this way. I didn’t figure it out. It took me a while. I didn’t understand. I didn’t know. I was trained to not think this was a way, but I think a loving correction that I’ve experienced that happened very recently, I had my feelings get hurt and I went to tell a friend about it. I was like, “Someone just hurt my feelings. I feel so rejected by this and misunderstood, and I feel like a little kid. I just feel like, “Oh my gosh. Dissed.” And I tell my friend, and I made the mistake of trying to do this all through text, right? I was flying through the airport. I was like, “Someone hurt my feelings,” and I need this friend to just be like, “You’re so right, and no one should ever hurt your feelings, and I’m never going to hurt your feelings, and I love you, and you didn’t do anything wrong, and you’re perfect.” That’s all.
Amanda Doyle:
And eff that person.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
That’s the only right answer. Fuck everybody else. You’re perfect, right? So what I get back from my friend was a text that was like, “I really understand why that person did that. I understand why they drew the boundary,” and the way they said it made me think, it was just like, “Oh, you’re on that side?”
Amanda Doyle:
Yes, yes.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
“You’re over there?” And I spun all the way out. I was like, “How can we even be friends? I’m all alone in the world. There is no God.” That’s where I go.
Glennon Doyle:
I do know.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
I’m like, “There’s no belonging possible for someone like me. My heart is just broken, and I’m going to live the rest of the life by myself,” and it took me a while to even say. I’m like, “my feelings are so hurt that you are taking their side,” right?
Adrienne Maree Brown:
My friend’s like, “You just really misunderstood. I missed a comma, but you took that all the way.” They like, “What is going on with you?” And my friend is like, “You’re wrong, and I could take it personally, but I’m not going to, but I am going to say I’m a little worried about you, because you’re wrong in a way that is not like you. What’s going on?”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
I was like, “It’s because my therapist stopped being a therapist for me in July, and I don’t have a new therapist,” like all this. It was a whole different journey, right? I was like, “Oh. The thing that hurt my feelings would not have mattered if I had my therapy situation,” right?
Glennon Doyle:
Totally.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
I was like, “I don’t have anywhere to process this weird thing that I need to process somewhere. Part of what happens for me, the loving correction I often need is for people to call me into presence. I’ll get going so fast, and I’m using shorthand, and I’m using emotional shorthand, and I’m using text shorthand, and I’m just like, “Can everyone just understand me? I just have too much to do. I can’t really do the verbal processing, but I do need you to know you fucking hurt me.” That’s not fair.
Glennon Doyle:
Right.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Right? My friends know to be like, “Adrienne, slow down. Take a breath. Have you put your feet on the ground? What’s actually going on?” And I think you and I have talked about this a number of times, Glennon, that I’ve been in this eating disorder journey that is uncovering so much trauma in my life that is reshaping how all of my relationships work, and I need loving correction right now, more than ever actually, in my life, because so many of the ways that I’ve thought were me were actually shaped by this control system. The system was trying to control and create safety for me.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
I became the person who could be the safest person. I became that version of myself, and now I can’t stay in that. I can feel like all the ways that that’s crowding in on me. I’m like, “No, I got to be much bigger than that, which means I got to be messy. I got to bust out this way and bust out that way,” and I need people around me who are like, “Yeah. Bust out, make mess and get bigger.” Already this week that friend and I are like, we’re 20,000 leagues deeper, and I was like, “How could we even go deeper everything about me?” But now we’re even deeper, right? Because I fucked up, and then she got curious, asked me the question, and we talked.
Amanda Doyle:
And it risked a conflict.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
It was a conflict.
Amanda Doyle:
Right.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
It was a conflict. And I used to be so scared of conflict too.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
I think that’s the other thing that loving corrections is inviting is I quote my sister often with this, from consensus model, that if we can’t meaningfully disagree, we can’t meaningfully agree. I feel like so much of this is saying, “We have to learn to be uncomfortable, to have tension in our bodies and between us, and then, like what you said to say, here’s what I feel. Here’s what I feel. Is there room for that here?” Right? I think so often when people are moving on the internet, they’re trying to just say, “Here’s what I know, and to pull it away from the feelings of being a human being.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
And so much of what I’m trying to do is intervene on this social media world we live on, where I’m like, the real world, when you’re walking around and you’re at each other’s dinner table, you’re not sitting there with a bunch of bots, trolls, comic farmers, and other people throwing stuff in. You’re with real people who have whole, complex stories, and they have a reason for everything that they think they’re doing. I hold that space, because even the people, I’m like, “I don’t understand how MAGA is so big. I don’t understand why people listen to Trump. I don’t understand why people listen to Netanyahu. I don’t understand it. It is befuddling to me, but I do know that each person who feels that way, they have a story behind it, and that story is full of shaping that story is full of, “This is where I felt belonging. These people accept me as I am. These people want to protect whatever thing I think is my power.”
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly, because we don’t have to understand why some people listen to Trump or Netanyahu, but you and I do understand wanting a strong man in our life, whether it’s an eating disorder or a dogma or religion. We all understand running from the complexity and nuance and pain of being a human being by just believing some horrible, strong man who will say, “I will protect you,” whether that’s anorexia or binge-eating or Netanyahu or Trump or Christianity for me, or a wellness program or whatever. It’s all the same, because we don’t want to live in the mushy-gushy, terrifying nuance of, “I don’t know. You don’t know. Can we not know together but move lovingly towards a better idea?”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
That’s right. That’s right. It’s messy. It’s not tone policing. It’s not just like, “I really hate how you just said that.”
Glennon Doyle:
No.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
It’s not being nice, it’s not being polite. It’s not about that. It’s really like sometimes love is the most ferocious activity you can engage in. Sometimes you’re like, “I’m going to fight for you.” My mom calls this a love ambush. “I’m going to ambush you with love. You’re not getting away from what I’ve got to give you.” Sometimes it looks like millions of people protesting in the street and feeling hopeless, but feeling it together, and sometimes it looks like sitting with a grandmother who you know is homophobic, and saying, “I’m going to tell you about my girlfriend, because I just want you to know that I have love in my life, and I know it makes you uncomfortable, and I’m just going to be okay with that, and I’m not going to ask you to accept her. I don’t need you to ever meet her, but I need you to know that I’m very happy.”
Amanda Doyle:
Adrienne, could you help us understand? Because this was really fascinating to me. As important to know what is a loving correction as what is not, and you-
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
… Contrast it. So far as I can tell, it’s like relationship required in loving correction. If it’s not based on relationship and wanting to get closer, as opposed to wanting to get farther away, it’s not a loving correction.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a big piece of it.
Amanda Doyle:
And then you contrast it with this policing, which you say the last damn place that a loving correction is going to happen is on the internet where it’s policing, surveilling, punishing. Tell us your theory on that, because a lot of people would think like, “Oh. Well, it’s all loving corrections.” You probably take the feedback on the internet and you’re like, “Oh, I will take it to my heart.” Explain what happens with the surveilling, how you handle it, why it has not to do with what we’re talking about.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
If we don’t have any relationship to each other, and parasocial relationships, we might need to do a whole nother conversation around that, because a lot of times what I experience is that people are like, “I think I have a relationship with you. I listen to your podcast. I read your book. I follow your memes, and so I think I know who you are and what you stand for, and what you just did, I am so disappointed because that doesn’t fit with the idea that I came up with about who you are.” I feel like I had to learn this.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
I’m like, “Oh, I don’t have a relationship with this person. I don’t know them. It’s not mutual. I don’t know anything about you. I don’t know what you stand for. I don’t know if you’re showing up in good faith, I don’t know if you believe that I can change. I don’t know if you have the same vision of the world that I have,” and I’m always tracking for the punitive, right? So I’m always tracking for when someone starts with, “I’m so disappointed in you,” right? To me, that’s like the first step of the punitive, where I’m like, “Oh, you want to make me feel bad about this, whatever this is,” and we grew up in a punitive world. We started in our homes, where it’s like you’re going to get spanked, put on timeout, or something punishing that moves you away from belonging. Then, you go to school, and it’s like you did something bad. You’re going to detention, you’re getting suspended, you’re getting expelled, away from belonging.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Then, we get it to juvenile detention, juvenile stuff, and then it’s prison. It is punishment. “We’re going to move you away from everybody. Belonging is the first thing we’re going to take from you.” Right? That’s the punishment. So I’m always tracking that. I’m like, “If you want to follow me. If you want to be here, be here. If you don’t, don’t. You have agency to be here and not be here. But if you came to police me, those are the people that I restrict, because it doesn’t create change.” For me, being shamed has never created the kind of change that I want. It makes me feel small. Instead of making the idea, I’m like, “Help me shrink the bad idea, but make me grow. Let me expand.” That happens in relationship.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
The policing piece, and the way that surveillance is happening online right now, I’m also like, “Where are you putting your attention?” If I take it back to emergent strategy, one of the biggest pieces of it is what you pay attention to grows. So you’re spending all your time online, trying to find the place where I’m out of alignment with something that you have decided is my value system, or you are spending all your time being like, “I’m going to intentionally misunderstand the purpose of what you’re doing here, and I’m going to try to draw you into writing a whole book in my comment thread,” or whatever. So I think that that’s the piece for me, where I’m like, “Oh, you’re not paying attention in the way that I’m trying to pay attention. I’m trying to pay attention to, where can I grow? What can I learn? How can I be authentic and in right relationship, and where can I love more?” I’m trying to bring my attention to the people who are embodying love.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Doing love, growing love, and if I pick up my attention and come meet you where you’re at, right? I move into this defensive mode, where I’m like, “I’m actually a really good person, and if you look at my history, I’m good.” I’m like, “No, I’m not. I probably fucked up, and I might’ve disappointed you now, but I don’t know you.” If a lot of people say something, I will take it to my team, my community, my circle. Often, when I check with my friends, most of my friends are not online very much. I think that’s probably intentional, but a lot of my friends are like, “Do you know any of these people? Do you think that your values are slipping away? Are you out of alignment?” and they’ll just ask me to self-assess a little bit.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
That helps me slow down and be like, “Oh,” just like with a gentle parenting with a kid. You’re like, “What’s going on right now, buddy? You got ice cream all over your shirt. What’s happening?” Right? I talk to myself like that too. I will catch myself and be like, “You really are doing your best right now, and you may have made a mistake. You can trust yourself. You repair.” Whenever repair is needed, I’m very trustworthy. I’m great at repairing. I know how to apologize well. I know how to not repeat something I’ve done. I’ve been practicing. So the online space for me, I really had to pull my ego out of that space. My ego, that sense of the part of me I want to protect, I let my friends and family hold that part of me. They’re the ones who I trust to hold me. The online space I use for mobilizing people, I use to move people, educate people, but I’m not trying to deepen relationship, if that makes sense.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. I mean, I’ve gotten to the point where I actually feel really proud of people who, like us, honestly, I feel proud that we have somehow made it and continued to be speaking in these spots, because I think 10, 20 years from now, people are going to look back on this time and wonder how any of us survived the toxicity, shame, and horrificness of the way we have allowed online discourse to happen. For 15 years, Adrienne, I was like, “I am going to be the comments’ whisperer to every single person. My sister will tell you.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
I spent 15 years.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, yes.
Glennon Doyle:
And I’m not regretting it. I guess it’s what I needed to do for that time. It was right for me then. I have such a different feeling of it right now. I think a lot of it came from shame. I think I thought, “I’m a bad person, and so what I’m trying to do is pretend I’m good,” so anytime anybody says, “You’re not good, I have to, real quick, just be so [inaudible 00:40:03],” and I think through years of loving correction, not online, but in therapy and with my family-
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
… I have stopped thinking that I’m bad or good, and I have started thinking, “Oh. I’m just a person who shows up, and so I no longer have to defend my goodness,” but what I do know about every single person who really tries, and who shows up and shows their heart, is that you don’t have to be good or bad to deserve respect and kindness, and you get to block every single person that you think has a whiff or a spice of policing you or not liking you. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye forever. You get to create the environment that you need to flourish and bloom, and if that place needs to be full of gentleness and kindness, then you just block the fuck out of anybody who brings you anything but love.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
Can we have a moment of silence? Can we just have a moment of silence that Glennon just said something that’s a big deal?
Glennon Doyle:
For me, because I’ve never said that before in my life, and I’m sweating, defending my little self.
Abby Wambach:
Her eyes are getting glossy, a little watery right now, that she doesn’t believe that…
Glennon Doyle:
Because Adrienne, you’ll know this, because it always takes seeing your kid, because now my kid-
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
… I never was able to do it for myself, but now I’m watching my kid try to grow a creative presence online, and the second somebody shows up with a surveillance energy, who I know just hates watching her, I went to her last night and said, “You do not have to deal with this shit. Block, block, block, block, block forever.”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
That’s right. I love this, because your protector is activated, right? For me, when my protector self, that part of me is activated, what I’m learning through therapy is that’s me protecting some part of myself. I’m like, “I will shield all the everybody’s from all,” that’s me being like, “I need shield.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, yes.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
“I need shield. I need protection,” right? And since no one has done this for me, I’m going to become a protector, and I will shield us all. I’ll take it all.
Amanda Doyle:
So you’re saying, when you are acting as a protector to others, it is always an activation of something that needs to be protected in you?
Adrienne Maree Brown:
It’s almost always an activation of something in you that’s like, “I need to protect this,” right? So when you move to protect your kid, that’s very literal, right? You’re like, “This is someone that came from me, and I’m going to protect them. This is a part of me, and I’m going to protect them.” But if you’re like, I see this a lot online too, people are like, “I’m trying to advocate for this person. I’m going to try to protect them.”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
I’m like, “You think that person isn’t seen, and you don’t feel seen, and you’re like, ‘I know what that’s like. I’m going to protect that. I’m going to show up for that.'”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
What I do, I tend to restrict a lot more than I block, so I’m like, “I am not going to allow you to just willy-nilly run ram-shot all over my page, but I don’t want you to not have access to the medicine that I have to offer, and at some point, maybe it’ll be of use to you.” So I love this status, Glennon, naming, because I fight very much to be authentic. It took me a long time. It has taken me a long time to get as authentic as I am now, and I don’t think I’m done yet, but I have worked hard to stay whole. I think one of the things that we have to also notice is social media and the internet, what it means has changed drastically, so when we first came on, you were only connecting with people you knew. You were making networks of people. You were like, “I went to high school with that guy. We don’t really get along, but I know that person.”
Amanda Doyle:
It’s a relationship.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
It’s a relationship. Even then, when it started to expand, it was like, “Okay. I might not know them directly, but I know someone who knows them,” and there was still some sense of like, “Ah. Now we’re really playing with fire. We’re trying to continue to build community and connection in a space that we know is being surveilled. We know people are flooding it with misinformation. We know people are flooding it, trying to build antagonization, and we know that it is monetized based on how much conflict happens there.” I mean, all my friends who are like, “Girl, get off the social media,” I’m like, “You’re all correct. You’re all correct. You’re all correct, but I have not yet found another way to reach as many people as quickly when things are happening.”
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
When things are in motion. We haven’t figured that out. I think in the next 10 to 20 years, whatever, we will find these ways of creating something that nourishes the part of us that wants a town square, but not in the stocks, right?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
And I feel like that’s what happens, is I was just trying to come, go to the market, and I was just trying to get some [inaudible 00:44:44] or something, and all of a sudden someone’s just like, “You’re the ugliest person.”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
And I’m just like, “Okay, okay. I know you don’t love me. I know you don’t love me, so everything else you have to say, I can just turn down the volume of that.”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
I think that I’m supposed to listen to the people who love me in this life and keep moving towards that love. I also think there’s something in here about staying curious about yourself, and so for me, I have had to really limit my time online, because I need more time to just be curious about myself. I need more time to journal. I need more time to read. Maybe loving corrections, in a way, is trying to get people to gather their energy back and really get more precise about how they’re going to spend it for the rest of their lives.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Right? I am like, you can keep pouring it into things that you don’t love and that don’t love you back, and I don’t think you’ll ever find satisfying change there, and I don’t think you’ll necessarily become a better person. You might not change at all, or you can pour your energy into places that love you, and that you love, and that you want to be there. You want to fight for the relationship, you want to fight for the connection, and then you’ll change so much, an infinite amount. I’m such a different person than I was last week. You know what I mean?
Adrienne Maree Brown:
I feel that way all the time, that I’m like, “Is anyone keeping up with this? This is outstanding. I’m, again, totally, totally different.”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
My friends who know me are like, “Girl, it is you, but it’s more you. You’re more you.”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
I’m like, “Yeah, but it feels like wildly different.” It’s all because of loving correction.
Amanda Doyle:
Is anyone tracking this?
Glennon Doyle:
Adrienne, that’s your next book title, please. Is anyone keeping up with this? And then just all your growth.
Amanda Doyle:
Is anyone keeping up with this? Just give me a fucking ribbon.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. I want to end with this. We’ve talked about the internet and how to handle creating and only allowing the kind of feedback that allows us to grow, and I think we’ve landed on restrict or block whatever you’re feeling that day, but-
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Yeah. I think restrict or block, but also take yourself out of that space, right?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Artists existed before social media. We will exist after social media. People have fans and followers, and they spread word of mouth, and if you make good art, people will want your good art.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
I know tons of artists who are never online, who have no social media presence whatsoever, and somehow they still have amazing careers of making music, making art, or whatever it is. So I also keep reminding, I need that reminder too, that I’m like, even if I got off the internet tomorrow, I would still be a writer, people would still write my books, they would still want to hear what I had to say, and I would find a way to say it.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
We can’t be reliant on something that doesn’t love us.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. I want to end with a real life story, because I just think it’s so important and simple and beautiful, but people, we all struggle with it, because when we talk about love, it is interesting-
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
… Because love sounds like just a, is it love or is it not? However, we all know that, especially when we’re talking generationally, you’re in a family where the generation before, some people in that generation, think of love differently. You come out as queer. You have sisters.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Yes,
Glennon Doyle:
Thanks be to God. You have sisters.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Thank God.
Glennon Doyle:
Please just leave us with the model of solidarity that your sisters helped you achieve with your family and how that went down, because there’s something in here that is just how it’s done.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Yeah. Thank you. I ride hard for my sisters, and they ride hard for me, but I’d always had the sense of, “I’m the oldest sister, and I’m the one who protects them, and I don’t need that protection necessarily from them.” Then, when I came out to my grandparents, which again, I didn’t go about it in the most elegant way. I wrote them a letter while I was tripping on acid, that was like, “I date both men and women, and I think that God still loves me,” and I mailed it before I came down. There was no going back, right? So they wrote me back-
Amanda Doyle:
I mean, that sounds like a very sober thought to me.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
The thought was sober and the identity was sober, but if I could do it over again, I don’t know if I would ever do it differently, actually. Anyway, don’t tell my mom that. She thinks I would do it differently. Okay, so I tell my grandparents. They send me back a letter, basically full of scripture, and it’s clear that I’m not welcome to come visit. I’m not welcome to come be around them until I get right with God and let go of these demonish ways, right? My sisters, both younger, one of them who had started having kids were like, “If Adrienne is not welcome, none of us are coming. None of us will be visiting. None of us will be maintaining the relationship as if that’s something we can do when Adrienne’s not here. She’s our sister,” and that meant, if we are not coming, the grandkids aren’t coming. So then, now you’re getting into real territory. I am like, “Y’all can throw me away, but the two-year-old, perfect kid. Really?” So that lasted for almost a decade.
Amanda Doyle:
I didn’t know that.
Glennon Doyle:
No, I didn’t know it was a decade.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Yeah. I just realized it, because we, over this past year, have been reuniting, have been going back. My parents moved back down south, and my mom was in relationship the entire time, in ways that made sense to me and that I felt honored by. I never felt like she was shrinking me in order to stay in relationship there, but eventually the time came where there was a shift, there was an opening. There was a, “I want the relationship. I understand things a little differently now. I’m ready, and I want to see you guys. I want to see my grandkids,” and we were able to come home.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
It felt like coming home, and it felt like it’s still tender, right? There’s still things that I’m like, “I’ll have to bring this up.” We were actually visiting, I think, one of Donald Trump’s first indictments, and it came up on my phone, and I was like, “I don’t have to cheer. I don’t have to say anything about it. I don’t have to do anything about that right now. We can just focus on being here and playing a round of cards with someone who is really trying to make a major step on her homophobia, and here I am holding her hand, and we’re taking a step.
Glennon Doyle:
But you held the thing first, so Adrienne, you were able to come back and maintain dignity. So many of us are asked to come back.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Because my sisters flanked my dignity, right?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
My sister stood on either side of me, and they were like, “What you are matters so much to us, and you belong to us, and no one is going to tear us apart. We got you,” and I didn’t know I needed it. It broke me down. It broke me down.
Glennon Doyle:
I bet.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s so fascinating, because I didn’t even think of it as your dignity. I thought of it as their own dignity.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Yeah, it’s both.
Amanda Doyle:
When you told that story, I was like, “They are protecting their own dignity, because they would have to be pretending, going into that place, bringing their kids, and being like, ‘I’m going to disassociate from the fact that I am so offended by this.'”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
But I think this is part of what I think of as American culture and white supremacist culture. There’s a way that going into a place and not speaking about politics and not speaking about religion, that’s what dignity looks like. It looks like dignity not to create a fuss. Don’t ruffle any feathers. That’s dignity. I think what my sister showed me was like, “No. Holding a line, that’s dignity,” and they didn’t think twice. I could feel it, and they didn’t think twice.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
I would’ve never asked for this, but they didn’t think. They were like, “We’re not going.”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
I was like, “What?”
Adrienne Maree Brown:
“We’re not going,” and then the return has been really powerful, because we don’t go alone. We always go together. I don’t go [inaudible 00:52:24]. I’m like, “I still need them, and now I know that, and they know that.” We go, we listen to Stevie Nicks usually as we drive, and we just sing our hearts out, move it all through, and then we go have an afternoon. It amazes me, then, to look at grandmother and to think about when she was born and what she was told to believe in a tiny town in Georgia and where she is now.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
And your mom. I mean, I think about everybody.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
And my mom, for sure.
Glennon Doyle:
Her job-
Adrienne Maree Brown:
But I’ve been thinking about the lineage, right?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Because I’m like, “Oh. How does someone like my mom become as open as she is if there weren’t these small openings in the generation before?”
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
These small openings in the generation? It looks so small. And that helps me now, because right now I’m like, “I want every change to be massive, holistic, total, global,” right? But I’m like, “What’s much more likely is it’s going to be me making changes that feel massive for me and look small to someone else, and that’s going to be the world.”
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, Adrienne.
Abby Wambach:
Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
Thank you.
Abby Wambach:
Always so good to talk to you.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Yeah. Thank you, all.
Glennon Doyle:
Always so beautiful. All of you, go pick up Loving Corrections.
Amanda Doyle:
Loving Corrections. So good. Go get it. Read it.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Go get it and sister somebody.
Glennon Doyle:
Sister somebody.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
Sister somebody. Flank somebody. Reach out to somebody, and especially I really recommend people have practice partners for this. Find practice partners. Find people and be like, “I want to get better at this, at conflict, correction, and being able to shape each other. We’re doing it anyway, but I want to bring it out of any manipulation. I don’t want to be behind the scenes, talking about you. I’m going to get better at just bringing it right here.”
Glennon Doyle:
And Pod Squad, the internet is not your practice partner, okay? You got to find a flesh and practice partner practice.
Adrienne Maree Brown:
The internet is not your practice partner, but you might meet your practice partner on the internet, and then get on the phone, get on Zoom, talk to each other, go for a walk in a park. It’s fall. Get some tea.
Glennon Doyle:
Beautiful. We love you, Pod Squad. See you next time. Bye. If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us If you’d be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things? Following the pod helps you because you’ll never miss an episode, and it helps us because you’ll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Then, just tap the plus sign in the upper, right-hand corner or click on follow. This is the most important thing for the pod. While you’re there, if you’d be willing to give us a five star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful. We appreciate you very much. We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle. In partnership with Odyssey, our executive producer is Jenna Weiss-Berman, and the show is produced by Lauren LoGrasso, Allison Schott, Dina Kleiner, and Bill Schultz.