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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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I m thrilled to welcome the hilarious Kate Kennedy to the podcast today, author of the brilliant romp One in a Millennial.
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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we re here.
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Pulling the Thread is about big questions.
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Why we do what we do, how we can understand our own experiences within a larger spiritual and historical context,
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the ways in which we might begin to understand ourselves and each other better, and what s required to heal ourselves and our world.
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I ll be joined in conversation by luminaries and wise elders, those who have laid tracks in their work and lives to help us bring meaning and understanding to a world that often feels chaotic and overwhelming.
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My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow.
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When I went back and looked at some of these shows that I loved, I noticed that the writers  room was all adult men, with the exception of one or two episodes in Sam for the Bell s case.
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And I just thought, wow, it is so interesting that we talk about diversity and representation.
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Like, yes, of course, who s on the screen matters, but who s in the writers  room and who s telling the stories really matters, too, because that s where stereotypes abound, because those men were not writing Jesse Spano as an example of an actual feminist.
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She was written as a character from an adult male s response to like second wave feminist stereotypes.
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And they found that type of woman irritating.
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So they wrote Jessie as an irritating character.
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And it just was an interesting thing for me to explore the way I internalized themes from pop culture, thinking about who was writing this and when did it contribute to a stereotype versus when did it communicate an authentic experience?
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So says Kate Kennedy, a brilliantly astute historian of millennial culture, which she explores in depth in One in a Millennial, on friendship, feelings, fangirls, and fitting in.
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A best-selling book that s part memoir, but really a love letter and a critique of the culture so many of us grew up in.
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As part of my book tour, I went on Kate s podcast, Be There in Five, where I was immediately smitten with her intelligence and deep, deep knowledge of the programming that shaped our consciousness, from Jesse Spano s Feminism and Saved by the Bell and the laugh track it inspired, to the way so many women and girls were taught that our interests were dumb, shallow, and silly.
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or, to use the parlance of the day, basic.
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In One in a Millennial, Kennedy points to this long tradition of the veneration of action figures, Marvel, and football, and the deprecation of pretty much anything that girls and women value, whether it s romance novels, the Spice Girls, or American Girl dolls.
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While her point is not new and certainly aligned with our summer of the Barbie movie, Taylor Swift, and Beyonce, her exploration of how it shaped her own mind in childhood and the way she experiences herself now as a result of it is revelatory and something we explore in today s conversation.
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It s funny, I m not a millennial.
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Do you use astrological terms?
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How do you describe it, Kate?
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I m on the cusp.
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I m young Gen X. I think it s a zillennial with an X, not a Z. Oh, interesting.
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But is that Gen Z millennial?
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Or what about X zillennial?
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I don t know if the pronunciation is different, but it s technically an Xennial.
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Okay.
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Which, but audibly that just sounds the same as the Gen Z millennial cusp as the millennials.
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So I m not totally sure.
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But yeah, the cusp works.
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The cusp works.
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I m on the cusp.
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So as I was reading your book, I got most of the references.
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And it s funny as being like not an older millennial, but just older than the older millennials, recognizing those moments and wanting to participate in them and doing that to some extent, while at the same time chastising myself for being too old
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Like, I had an American Girl doll, I had Samantha.
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But I feel like I was like, I think I m too old for this.
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Samantha s the dark haired one.
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Yeah, it s such a Samantha.
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With the very fancy clothing.
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Yeah, I am a Samantha, right?
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I m such a Samantha.
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Anyway, I related hard specifically to this, the way that our culture is programmed, which is what your entire book is about, the way that you felt programmed as both a millennial and a woman or a girl, and then the way that we start to feel bad about that, right?
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And or like these interests are sad, pathetic, embarrassing, trite, airheady.
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in a way that men and boys are never.
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Nobody is chastising and shaming boys for their fascination with G.I.
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Joe or Marvel or Star Wars, right?
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And even beyond like interest, I was thinking about your book a lot recently because even the way behavior is coded, like most of my outstanding qualities, like being observational and really curious, for example, that somehow gets brain into like nosy or a busybody.
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or like loving to talk with your friends gets branded as gossip.
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It was kind of interesting writing the book, realizing everything that I kind of enjoy or pride myself on is so easily coded to be something negative when it doesn t have to be.
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No.
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And there s this idea and we talked a bit about this on your podcast, you know, having done things in my career that would be perceived as not, I don t know, anti intellectual.
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Some of the books that I ve ghost written that are part of pop culture mass culture working at a magazine about shopping and working through that in real time through the cultural criticism of it and putting consumerism and the environment aside because that at the time wasn t.
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the complaint.
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Nobody was conscious really about fast fashion and its effects.
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But working through how being at Lucky Magazine and how deprecated it was, it was mocked, even though it was the fastest growing magazine in the history of Condé Nast, women loved it.
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We were like the first blog, we were the first people to profile real women and real women s style and different bodies.
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But it was wild to be there and to be like, I can t be here because I m being shamed for having these, quote unquote, like light, superficial, silly, stupid interests and qualities.
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And this is so persistent, right?
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This is what your entire book is about.
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And you are like a professor of millennial studies.
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Has anyone offered you a...
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teaching position?
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No, in between eras of jobs, I ve applied for some.
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But I think that s kind of the, I guess the fun part about my job as kind of a casual commentator, or as I like to say, a self appointed DIY internet radio host, because I guess that s what a podcast is.
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It s like I can comment and have fun with it without having to be too
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intellectual or to research base.
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I think this book s kind of a balance in like, these are just my experiences and my opinions.
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But I try to underscore it with like, there are broader trends here that a lot of millennials will relate to, but it s not a science.
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But there are similar themes in terms of how our coming of age intersects with social and cultural and economic, you know, circumstances.
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But yeah, I don t know if I have an adequate cross section of all millennials enough to be a professor.
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That d be cool, though.
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No, I mean, I do think you re a historian.
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I don t think you re giving yourself enough credit, but I also recognize like the dance.
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I mean, at the beginning where you write, there are so many ways I wish to preface this book.
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When you have an internet career and become aware of all the eyes and ears, you slowly develop a superpower called the disclaimer.
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Even if it s at the expense of the work speaking for itself, you start to prioritize preventative qualifiers.
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They get lengthier and lengthier, usually as a result of the painful experience of people misunderstanding your intentions or requiring your work to cater to their individual needs to be allowed to exist.
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This is very, very challenging for me, hence this very, very long intro.
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I m just going to cut to it and say that you are a historian, this book won in the millennial, which again, disclaimer in the title, but you are highlighting huge cultural trends that I think even if listeners didn t feel directly influenced by NSYNC or Miley Cyrus, any of the other people that you re speaking about,
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you are a historian of a time in a way that like where there probably aren t academic historians because they would deprecate this as silly.
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And meanwhile, this is like deep in our consciousness, right?
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Which is what your book is exploring as both like a loving embrace of the culture that formed you and also a criticism or an awakening to the ways in which you perceive yourself in the world.
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And it s interesting to hear you disclaimer because it s exactly that, however many years later, right?
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And we all know how to do it.
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a ton and every woman I know is disclaimering, stating their identities and their privilege.
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I mean, I think maybe 2% of men do that.
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It s not an expectation of men, only of girls.
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It s really, really interesting.
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If I could have included a 13th or 14th chapter in the book, because I didn t include a lot about my podcasting career because
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It s newer relative to most of my story.
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There are certain things that I think you need distance from to reflect on adequately.
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And I m in the middle of this career I really like, but I will say the exercise of performing your identity as an entertainer and all that comes with it has fundamentally changed my brain in a way that I don t even know if I fully understand yet where
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I think if I wasn t a podcaster and didn t live in a feedback loop, I would have just written the book and been like, here it is in all its glory.
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But I m so trained and predisposed now to apologize for everything I credit myself for, to disclaim everything.
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And it s an example of how these things are so deeply internalized and a form of conditioning where I can intellectualize these things all I want and explain them, but I still am also actively experiencing them and implementing them in my life in ways that I wish I could separate from.
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Yeah, you know, like you probably I wrote, I don t know, 18 versions of my intro.
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And that seems really extreme, as I say that, but it s true.
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And as I was trying to find different ways, and there was one early version that was essentially just a me
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Explicating to the reader all of the things that I m not I wasn t conscious of it, but I was like, I m not a theologian I m not an academic.
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I don t have a PhD in religious I mean on and on and a friend read it and was like this is kind of perverse Like why don t you say who you are not?
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Wow.
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I mean, I have one of those versions, too.
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And that s so true.
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It s like before I get to who I am, I want to be clear that I m aware of everything you re going to say I m not.
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Yeah.
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I m going to anticipate all of your criticism.
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And I m already on my knees.
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I m already keeping myself small.
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I already know my place.
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I already know that you re going to dismiss this as sort of the ramblings of a millennial about culture.
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And this is the other thing I think you do exceptionally well.
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I don t know if it s a function of podcasting.
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You talked about it as a feedback loop.
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But I think the feedback loop can be quite positive.
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And I think having hosted a show prior to this for a long time and getting a lot of feedback, and a lot of people would say, like, we re the same person.
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Or we have so many of the same stories.
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And I think we re at this moment in culture.
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And I applaud you for this, because your book does this exceptionally well.
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Father Richard Rohr called it the cosmic egg, where he says that, you know, there s the me story, which should exist sort of like a nesting doll inside the we story.
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And then there s the story.
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And right now we re in this period where it s all me story, right?
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It s like my exceptionality.
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This is me.
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This is my story.
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My story matters.
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And some of this is great, but it gets kind of tedious after a while because nobody is connecting it to the we story.
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and theoretically the the story.
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And what I think is so powerful about so many of these essays, whether it s an essay about a day, the day that I loved the day I wanted a day that desperately, or Bed Bath and Beyond, or any of these other cultural moments, American Girl dolls and their backstories.
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It s a wee story.
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It really is a wee story.
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And I can say that as someone who s not even of your generation.
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I love hearing that.
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And honestly, something I thought a lot about was kind of to your point earlier about like, do we have historical record of people like, you know, how they lived in these times?
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And it s like, so many books, so much art, like it s about truly exceptional people who really do something different.
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And I kind of look back on my life and from talking to a lot of listeners over the years, I m kind of like, you know, but what about those of us that were kind of like programmed to stick with the status quo that like avoided being unique at all costs?
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What about those of us that kind of like chased brands and versions of ourselves as a means to get through the world a little bit more easily?
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what are our stories and do they count?
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Not all of us have been a blazing individual since day one.
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And I think there s a lot to be learned from this, my kind of commonplace existence.
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And I, you know, could caveat that term a million times, but even just to the term of, in a sense of being called like literally basic over the years, like there s kind of a type of existence that
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was easily not celebrated for being pretty regular.
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You know, I had average grades, I grew up in the suburbs, like my culture is the cheesecake factory, like I didn t grow up in high art.
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And I just think that I m an example of a person that people would maybe, you know, in some circles label as artless or uninteresting, but it s really cool to be able to write this book.
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And as I like to say verbally, like, man spread the minutia of my existence, because it s like all the things I thought I had to bury.
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that weren t important and me kind of like speaking their validity into existence.
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So we made a new podcast called Wild Card, where a special deck of cards and a whole bunch of fascinating guests help us sort out what makes life meaningful.
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You start to understand, like for example, I didn t have cable, and so I missed a lot of sort of the cultural moments.
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And you write about that, like the kids who would come over whose parents didn t have cable, who would wanna sort of watch 90210.
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But I like, I missed 90210, et cetera.
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And I saw Saved by the Bell, but more I feel like as reruns over time, I certainly remember the Jesse Spano breakdown.
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that you write about.
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It s so interesting to think about Elizabeth Berkley in that character.
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I just remember thinking that she was highly unlikable.
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And then your sort of exegesis on this, and then I think it s really interesting that she went on to do that, you didn t write about this.
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Showgirls.
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Showgirls, almost as like a course correction to the sort of strident, earnest, early feminist, right?
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So can you talk a bit about Saved by the Bell and as you re-examined it and the laugh track, and I just thought that was so,
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fascinating and and insidious.
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Yeah.
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So I have a mini chapter called Saved by the Bell Jar about kind of like my journey with feminism through the lens of millennial culture.
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I think I was calling it like the Spano to C-SPAN pipeline.
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It was like I was experimenting with different ways to talk about feminism.
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But it ended up in this in this essay where I talk about how a lot of the, you know, women I grew up with, we kind of look back now at how we didn t want to call ourselves feminists.
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So we were a lot older, like problematically older.
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and how we had a negative connotation with this term.
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And I was trying to really dig into like, OK, well, there s the bra burning tropes and the kind of Rush Limbaugh coined and calcified terms like feminazi that were pervasive in the 90s.
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There were elements of adult culture that I wasn t privy to, and my parents weren t saying that stuff.
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So like, why was I internalizing this?
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But I realized my first point of entry to a feminist on television, a self-proclaimed feminist on television, was Jessie Spano in Saved by the Bell, which aired in a morning block adjacent to cartoons on, it was called Teen NBC at the time.
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It was Saturday morning, kind of like its Friday night counterpart.
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I remember Jessie also being very unlikable.
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When you rewatch Saved by the Bell, it s actually Jessie making a lot of very salient points about
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her rights, about equal rights, about closing the wage gap, about men and women in domestic labor.
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And she ll say things like, both men and women should be contributing to the household.
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And then Slater will clap back with like, we ll get right back into the kitchen type of comment.
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And when Jessie says something pretty insightful, the audience is completely silent.
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Then Slater or Zack or Screech or whoever makes fun of her, and the audience roars with laughter.
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So when you re a nine year old in short pump Virginia and you re like, oh, when I go to high school, this is what feminists are like.
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And this is how boys are reacting to feminists.
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And even her friends, Kelly and Lisa, didn t support her.
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They made fun of her.
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You re kind of internalizing a message like, oh, OK, well, if I want to be liked, if I want
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boys to like me and to not be a punchline, I need to not behave like Jesse.
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And when I was re-watching it and prepping for this book, I kind of couldn t believe how, A, how manipulated a lot of these shows are by laugh tracks, because there s something called sweetening that can happen where the laugh track is added after the studio audience to punch up what the writers want to emphasize as being the comedy.
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And you quickly notice that
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Jesse is used as an object for comedy, like she s a punchline.
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She s not contributing to it.
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And then I would notice in Boy Meets World, like, you know, Topanga, she started out kind of like hippie and alternative, and she would say these really beautiful, insightful things.
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And then Corey Matthews would be like, oh, you re going to be one of those girls that doesn t shave her legs.
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Audience roars.
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So it s like, OK, what is that telling me of how to be?
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And the second piece is that when I went back and looked at some of these shows that I loved, I noticed that the writers room was all adult men, with the exception of one or two episodes in Saved by the Bell s case.
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And I just thought, wow, it is so interesting.
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interesting that we talk about diversity and representation.
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Like, yes, of course, who s on the screen matters, but who s in the writer s room and who s telling the stories really matters, too, because that s where stereotypes abound.
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Because those men were not writing Jesse Spano as an example of an actual feminist.
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She was written as a character from an adult male s response to, like, second-wave feminist stereotypes.
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And they found that type of woman irritating, so they wrote Jesse as an irritating character.
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And it just was an interesting thing for me to explore the way I internalized themes from pop culture, thinking about who was writing this and when did it contribute to a stereotype versus when did it communicate an authentic experience.
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Yeah.
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No, it s so fascinating.
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Not to put you on the spot, but when you think about culture now, and I don t know if you re as much as a student, I m guessing you are.
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You seem like a very keen observer of culture.
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Is there anything that you think that we ll similarly look back on and think, that s wild?
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I mean, I think that besides soap brows, you mean?
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I m just kidding.
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I m a little worried that the spiked up lamination, I m going to regret, but I m still doing it.
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But I think that in the past couple of years, we ve realized like the girl bossification of the 2010s wasn t the vibe, you know, the leaning of it all.
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I think that following that, we realized that the shape shifting of diet and health related terms where we just stopped saying like skinny and thin or like not eating and then would say things like intermittent fasting when it was kind of not eating.
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You know what I m like?
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Yeah.
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Shifting of things.
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It s like acting like detoxing, cleansing.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Totally.
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I think something that s even newer probably is like skincare.
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I think anti-aging is going to be just as offensive eventually as like diet culture related stuff.
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But we re not quite there yet because it s in the name of self-care.
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No, 100 percent.
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I interviewed Kate Mann recently.
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That episode will come out before this one.
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And her latest book is called Unshrinking.
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And it s about fat phobia.
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And it s just wild.
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I mean, it s wild how rampant anti-fatness is in our culture.
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and how we profess or insist that the science aligns with this, and it just doesn t.
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Not unilaterally, not in a tidy way, but yet it s completely acceptable, if not applauded, in a way that will be, I think, wild to reckon with in 20 years.
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I don t know how long it takes for these feedback cycles now.
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It seems like they re swifter.
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There are so many cultural moments.
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I mean, American Girl dolls.
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I think when I had my doll, I was obsessed from what I recall, as you point out, very expensive outfits.
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But I don t remember if I even read the backstory books.
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But I loved
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that exploration too, because there s a depth to them that I d never appreciated that s sort of under the cover of, like, girls playing with dolls.
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Is there a male corollary?
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No, right?
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Besides these superhero backstories?
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Good question.
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I don t know that there is.
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I mean, they started making, like, girl-boy-twin American girl dolls after my day, but I don t know if there is...
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one, because there s like the Barbie GI Joe parallel, right?
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But I don t know what the American Girl one would be.
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But yeah, that s a topic I love to revisit, because it s one of my earliest and most, I don t know how to explain it, like, my most significant
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memories of consumerism without knowing that s what it was.
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SPEAKER_00
And I just think the sending of these catalogs with this gorgeous furniture and these expensive clothes at this inaccessible price point and being there tearing through the pages at like five years old.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, it s funny for me to think about how it was just like a very early example of like exclusivity marketing.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it just for the comedy of me like jonesing for, you know, a kit to quilt a blanket with a muslin border or
2
SPEAKER_00
you know, wanting a doll that came with a wooden spoon as her key accessory who lived on the Minnesota frontier.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s just funny because I was very much in like the Malibu Barbie era, but those books got me genuinely interested in women s backstories.
2
SPEAKER_00
And what I think is really beautiful about it, if it s done well, is
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, a doll represents something young girls played with because it represented women s limitations in terms of, you know, oh, you can be a caregiver, cosplay this for life.
2
SPEAKER_00
But using that doll to explore the historical backstories of women who were excluded from history, I think is really, really cool.
2
SPEAKER_01
But it is true, like the status, I don t know, like a sense of what s cool, a sense of belonging, wanting to be older, wanting to know.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then you have so much shame about yourself as a child.
2
SPEAKER_01
At least I felt that way.
2
SPEAKER_01
Like I was too old to be playing with Barbies or it was not feminist.
2
SPEAKER_01
Right.
2
SPEAKER_01
When I got to a certain age, I threw away all my Barbies and my neighbor s Barbies.
2
SPEAKER_01
She was pissed.
2
SPEAKER_01
What a statement.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but out of shame, which is sad.
2
SPEAKER_00
It is.
2
SPEAKER_00
I thought about that when I went to see the Barbie movie.
2
SPEAKER_00
I was like, God, it really is crazy how I don t know if you re a boy and you like, you know, tractors and cars and sports and things marketed to little boys like you get to keep those hobbies.
2
SPEAKER_00
But like we had to throw our dolls away.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes, we d be ridiculed
2
SPEAKER_00
And I realized, like, I kind of had a lack of closure with Barbies.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like, you just one day walk away and decide you re over them, but you re kind of not.
2
SPEAKER_00
You just feel like you have to be.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it is an interesting experience being a young woman that I hadn t thought about before, is, like, you re even ashamed of it while it s happening in ways that, like, you don t even recognize as shame at the time because...
2
SPEAKER_00
It s just whatever any authority figure is telling you or anybody you want to impress, like, it s just the truth.
2
SPEAKER_00
You re not putting second thought to if it s valid or not.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s just like, oh, I shouldn t be playing with Barbies.
2
SPEAKER_01
No.
2
SPEAKER_01
And why?
2
SPEAKER_01
Like, what s the shame?
2
SPEAKER_01
What is the programming that we get about all of these interests?
2
SPEAKER_01
Is it specifically age?
2
SPEAKER_01
Like, you should be beyond this?
2
SPEAKER_01
Or is it you should be beyond this coupled with cultural sort of pylon that girls  interests
2
SPEAKER_01
are lowly and pathetic and embarrassing.
2
SPEAKER_01
Whereas as you said, you know, grown men go to monster car rallies and football and obviously there are female fans as well.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they go to, I don t know, Avengers.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, my husband has the worst taste in culture.
2
SPEAKER_01
But there s more energy behind him making fun of me for occasionally watching the Kardashians, you know?
2
SPEAKER_01
Meanwhile, he s like, if there s a, the lower the Rotten Tomato rating, the more inclined he is to watch a horror movie or whatever it may be.
2
SPEAKER_01
But it s acceptable for a man.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s acceptable.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s celebrated.
2
SPEAKER_00
No, it s so true.
2
SPEAKER_00
And when I was kind of talking about the role of male authority in terms of how they perceive taste in the last chapter, Pumpkin Spice Girl, at first I was kind of digging into like more history behind this perception of male authority.
2
SPEAKER_00
But as I was writing it, and I remember my editor saying, too, she s like, you almost don t need to overexplain this sensation of you saying you like a rock band and somebody saying name five songs.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like, if you re a woman, you ve experienced this.
2
SPEAKER_00
You don t need to prove that this is the problem.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like we ve all felt like our interests, you know, weren t sophisticated enough or they were dismissed for being a part of mass culture or whatever.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it was kind of true because when I was trying to dig into more history behind
2
SPEAKER_00
how this works.
2
SPEAKER_00
I was trying to use anecdotes like even with soap operas, like they were incredibly lucrative.
2
SPEAKER_00
They were financing the entire networks, yet they were the only programs that weren t reviewed formally in local newspapers because they were women s shows.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it s like that conundrum of the economic viability of something versus the credit it s given is something that s a tale as old as TV and even time before then.
2
SPEAKER_00
But it is interesting thinking about how, yeah, this year, fortunately, there s been that celebration of, you know, the value of women s interests.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the conversation has changed to the point where that chapter is old and almost seems trite, which is kind of funny.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think it s important regardless because.
2
SPEAKER_00
while we can have these overarching cultural conversations about validating our interests, those things don t usually permeate behind closed doors.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I m still having awkward conversations with uncles and, you know, friends of my husband and people in real life that I have to over explain my book or my podcast or justify Taylor Swift dance parties or whatever the hell it is.
2
SPEAKER_00
The optics of how evolved we are are one thing.
2
SPEAKER_00
But I think behind closed doors, it s often another story.
2
SPEAKER_00
And people do need to, like, be conscious of sticking up for their interests.
2
SPEAKER_01
Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Barbie, like that trifecta and its impact on the economy is absolutely not surprising, and yet was stunning, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
And still perceived as sort of women s stuff, whereas women have been engaged in the stuff that men, again, speaking not to essentialize, but speaking broadly that men are interested in, just thinking as a fellow author.
2
SPEAKER_01
Our whole industry is supported by people like Colleen Hoover, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
She s a romance novelist.
2
SPEAKER_01
I don t know how many books she has in the top 100 on Amazon, but her success is the reason that you and I can get an advance
3
SPEAKER_00
to write a book.
3
SPEAKER_00
And yet we deprecate and disparage and mock and trivialize.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, thank God for Shonda Rhimes and her counter-programming.
3
SPEAKER_00
Bridgerton, again, another, you know, runaway success written by a woman who went to Harvard.
3
SPEAKER_00
And yet it s perceived as like,
3
SPEAKER_00
dross and crap.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s interesting with my book and I feel like your book sort of fits in this corollary.
3
SPEAKER_00
All I wanted to do was write a book for no man s land.
3
SPEAKER_00
And because I feel like there s a market
3
SPEAKER_00
For women, because I still have yet to be interviewed by a single man, because I think that men are just not worried that they re really not interested in women.
3
SPEAKER_00
But this no man s land of sort of approachable, smart, heavily researched, but like accessible language that s not just dressed
3
SPEAKER_00
in highfalutin vocab so that not to sort of appeal to this academic intellectual crowd and to land it in a space where a lot of women read a lot of fiction, but they re like, I ll maybe read a couple of nonfiction books.
3
SPEAKER_00
I ll read this.
3
SPEAKER_00
This is accessible.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s fast.
3
SPEAKER_00
It moves.
3
SPEAKER_00
But it s interesting because like to also be like, oh, well, this isn t going to be reviewed in any newspapers.
3
SPEAKER_00
This isn t intellectual enough.
3
SPEAKER_00
This isn t academic enough to be taken seriously.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m guessing that your book will have a similar thread where people are going to be really excited to talk about it.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re going to highly relate.
3
SPEAKER_00
And yet, like the New York Times book review is probably not going to review your book.
3
SPEAKER_00
I could be wrong.
3
SPEAKER_00
Are they?
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s kind of the dilemma I ve had with my whole career, I think, because I m independent.
3
SPEAKER_01
So things people need, like an accolade or a backing of a network or something that precedes you to kind of qualify you to be an authority on something.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think the subject matter paired with even having millennial in the title and the press is often unfavorable to even millennials.
3
SPEAKER_01
Paired with me, yeah, not having kind of a formal institutional like metric people can associate with me.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s a harder sell.
3
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely.
3
SPEAKER_01
And yeah, I guess we ll see what happens.
3
SPEAKER_01
But like my show has been I ve never ever really gotten any formal nods for my full time job and podcast of six years.
3
SPEAKER_01
But yeah, it survives.
3
SPEAKER_01
It thrives because of people relating to my experience as like a normal person and not like an academic.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it ll be interesting to see if that yeah, how that translates to the book s reception, but I m grateful to try the material on a different channel and see how it resonates.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think that the Taylor, Beyonce, Barbie trifecta, obviously, they got a ton of media.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I do think that it speaks to the disconnect that s only growing wider, between more intellectual media, I guess that s how I would copy it or media that perceives itself in that way.
3
SPEAKER_00
what they re interested in and what people are actually engaging with.
3
SPEAKER_00
That Venn diagram to me is shrinking in a way that s just further underlines like you re not where people are.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I say this because I think your book s brilliant and hilarious and it really made me think
3
SPEAKER_00
and revisit my own childhood, including, and I think this is a rite of passage, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Like, doesn t every generation sort of get the shit end of the stick?
3
SPEAKER_00
Isn t that a rite of passage?
3
SPEAKER_00
Don t we speak badly of every generation?
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh, for sure.
3
SPEAKER_01
And about each other.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think everybody thinks that the people
3
SPEAKER_01
you know, who came before then aren t like relevant to their plight and think that their advice is too old fashioned or whatever.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then the people that come after you, you know, they haven t paid their dues.
3
SPEAKER_01
They don t understand.
3
SPEAKER_01
They ll never get it there.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, you kind of have the same gripes with the ways that they ve changed as older generations do with you.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think
3
SPEAKER_01
With Millennials, I think what s interesting is that with the exception of Gen Z and the Tide Pods, when I was writing it, there hadn t been such an unfavorable, consistent edit.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s the colloquial, like, okay, boomer vibe that s more recent, but like Millennials from tip to tail, ever since I got into the workforce, lazy, entitled, basement dwelling, job hopping,
3
SPEAKER_01
Like, go eat avocado toast and wear Uggs, you loser, like type of vibe.
3
SPEAKER_01
But then in the mid-2010s, it almost became like a caricature of itself where it was just clickbait about millennials killing major industries and economic sectors, ranging from paper napkins to diamonds to low-fat yogurt to the American dream in its entirety.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it was kind of like, what?
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s never, ever been something I was proud to call myself.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, they re largely marketing terms.
3
SPEAKER_01
They re birds of a feather.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s kind of a way to Myers-Briggs our birth year, sure.
3
SPEAKER_01
But there are ways that our environment when we re coming of age really affect a large group of people.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I was kind of like, yeah, well, what about all this other stuff we identify with that you re just not going to get in the headline?
3
SPEAKER_01
I think millennials, when they look back on their lives, we just aren t thinking of ourselves in the way that other people label us on the outside.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let me tell one person s story from the inside, because what you might think is lazy is us having work-life balance.
3
SPEAKER_01
Kind of like the terms nosy and busybody.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like you can label people as these things, but they re
3
SPEAKER_01
When we explore the reason for that maybe being the truth, it completely changes the definition.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now I m trying to think of the sweeping definition of Gen X, but I feel like we were like burners.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s latchkey kids, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Latchkey kids.
3
SPEAKER_00
Isn t that kind of the biggest term?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
Benign neglect, drugs.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m thinking of like sort of the record or the movies that I feel like define our generation.
3
SPEAKER_00
Empire Records.
3
SPEAKER_01
Would you say 90s?
3
SPEAKER_00
90s grunge, Cobain, like, yes, 100%.
3
SPEAKER_00
Which, to be fair, I never felt cool enough for the primary of my generation, or rebellious enough, really.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I don t know why, maybe it s because I didn t have
3
SPEAKER_00
access to that?
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I had a Columbia Records subscription.
3
SPEAKER_00
Did those still exist in your generation?
3
SPEAKER_00
I bankrupted myself on the regular.
3
SPEAKER_00
When you were like, but there s nothing here that I want.
3
SPEAKER_00
I had some really random CDs.
3
SPEAKER_00
And every time my parents were like, you can do this for a penny.
3
SPEAKER_00
Wasn t it a penny?
3
SPEAKER_00
And then they started billing you?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like the magazine subscriptions.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
You ll get charged for an eternity.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s an interesting example.
3
SPEAKER_01
What you said about rebellion is kind of like these microcosms of monoculture, certain generations experience that like are their own form of currency.
3
SPEAKER_01
And at one point, to be cool means to be rebellious.
3
SPEAKER_01
And in another point, to be cool means to be like open and accepting to everyone.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, there s always different things that hold value.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think when I was coming of age in the book, I talk about the difference between popular and cool and popularity was like the word.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m sure it still is like something people chase when they re in school, but how there was like different ways to be popular.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like you either network and know a lot of people and people really like you,
3
SPEAKER_01
Or you can be cool, which means being rebellious or into sex and drugs and rock and roll.
3
SPEAKER_01
Or you can have status symbols in clothes or wealth.
3
SPEAKER_01
Or be mean.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s more fleeting things.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
Or be mean.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes, exactly.
3
SPEAKER_01
And me kind of pathologizing where I could hedge my bets to give you the best chance at social acceptance, which you don t realize you re doing at the time.
3
SPEAKER_01
But in hindsight, I was like, it was a lot of arithmetic of like, OK, if I can get a Lacoste polo,
3
SPEAKER_00
and be friends with this person and I don t know.
3
SPEAKER_00
I desperately wanted a Lacoste polo.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I grew up in a small town where we didn t have, we eventually had catalogs.
3
SPEAKER_00
We had a Le Bon Marche two-story department store, but by two-story, I mean, it was very small.
3
SPEAKER_00
but it had stairs, which was a revelation in my town, which was primarily like a single story town.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we had a Benetton for some reason, but then we would drive to Spokane, Washington.
3
SPEAKER_00
This is my, like, I walked to school in 10 miles in the snow story.
3
SPEAKER_00
But once a year we would drive to Spokane, Washington, where there was a Nordstrom and a Gap and a limited two, which I know is a big theme in your book, to get back to school clothing.
3
SPEAKER_00
there was just nothing, which also is probably its own relief in a way.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t even know what that looks like now.
3
SPEAKER_01
But back to school shopping in person was, yeah, it was the event.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s kind of like, I didn t appreciate while I was literally growing that I had a reason to turn over my wardrobe year after year.
3
SPEAKER_01
But now it s just like bloggers convincing me I needed a new capsule wardrobe every six
3
SPEAKER_01
But yeah, that was such a big deal.
3
SPEAKER_01
And going in all those experiences in dressing rooms or going with friends like the mall, yeah, was just such a third place for me.
3
SPEAKER_01
And even if it wasn t in your town, it was probably an event you looked forward to.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it is kind of interesting to think about retail experiences being so different now.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that is largely why many outlets hypothesize so many kids are hanging out in Sephora.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well, that makes a ton of sense.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I guess the mall was a third place for me to, you know, as you age, and then you have sort of these ongoing backdrops for novels, where that s the place that you imagine, like the Missoula mall.
4
SPEAKER_01
is one of those places where I think about those stores as the backdrop for so many books that I read, like when I am imagining.
4
SPEAKER_01
God, it s formative.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I have little boys, they re inquisitive, but in completely different ways.
4
SPEAKER_01
All they want is Robux.
4
SPEAKER_01
Oh, God.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
I don t even understand that world yet.
4
SPEAKER_00
My kid s five months old, but that s all I hear about from parents of like elementary and middle schoolers.
4
SPEAKER_01
The Roebuck shakedown is so intense and so real and so annoying.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then I am like, well, at least it s digital.
4
SPEAKER_01
At least they re not interested in sort of plastic crap.
4
SPEAKER_01
And our house isn t full of that stuff anymore.
4
SPEAKER_01
But it will be interesting, like the way that Minecraft and
4
SPEAKER_01
Roblox and Fortnite and all of these games shape a generation.
4
SPEAKER_01
When I was growing up, I mean, I guess we had Game Boys.
4
SPEAKER_01
So much of the stuff wasn t that accessible.
4
SPEAKER_00
It wasn t accessible.
4
SPEAKER_00
It wasn t handheld.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I think that s a big part of it, too, is hooking up the giant Nintendo or Sega or N64 or whatever to the TV with the controllers on a tether when you shared a TV.
4
SPEAKER_00
And there were just so many reasons to limit the time or access.
4
SPEAKER_00
in addition to price point of the console itself, that, yeah, I didn t really provide as much ability to get addicted to it, I feel like, because I couldn t have spent all my time doing it if I wanted to.
4
SPEAKER_00
I played Mario Kart and stuff like that, and my brother played a lot of video games, but I felt a little sad wondering if I had had a phone, would I have missed out on all this mental real estate to process my observations, to process the longing, to
4
SPEAKER_00
explore so much about the anticipation of growing up, like you said, like, I don t know, because the second I got a computer, the second that cow box of a gateway 2000 showed up in my driveway, I was on aim.
4
SPEAKER_00
So yeah, like then at that point, that s what I wrote about.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because when I think about a certain period of my life, all I did was try to like,
4
SPEAKER_00
passive aggressively talk to boys in my class via way messages.
4
SPEAKER_00
And like, unfortunately, that s a huge part of millennial lore is our early like addiction to that type of technology.
4
SPEAKER_00
And we couldn t even text or anything.
4
SPEAKER_00
So yeah, I guess that s kind of my, you know, walk miles in the woods to school as AOL dial up or like texting in t nine word.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, I loved that part and this idea of like, what are you telegraphing about your availability to other people as you sit there and like, let the keyboard go idle with the hopes that their curiosity is sparked about where Kate Kennedy is, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
What is she doing right now?
4
SPEAKER_01
But it is true, like that, the crushes, the longing, like that stuff is so essential and formative.
4
SPEAKER_01
And is that still present?
4
SPEAKER_01
It must still be present for younger generations, but there s so much more accessibility.
4
SPEAKER_01
And in a way that s also crushing because to sort of like have the fantasy of what is my crush doing and is my crush thinking about me without being able to sort of track them on TikTok
4
SPEAKER_01
or Snapchat or whatever.
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s wild.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think there s something really funny about, like, we did all that stuff and there were no stakes in terms of, like, being famous or getting a lot of validation elsewhere.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like, it s one thing for kids to, you know, do stuff online now because they want, like, recognition or to become an influencer.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s extra funny to me that, like, all of that horsepower was just simply to get attention.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s just simply for people to think, like, I m doing great.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m super busy.
4
SPEAKER_00
He ll curse the day he left me.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like, the amount of brainpower devoted to just, like, making people jealous, making someone pass aggressively know I was mad at them, or just, like, trying to find a boyfriend via an electronic means is, like, really funny to me.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it just, like, was an early course in online branding that I think I carried with me weirdly to my career.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like, it s a skill in and of itself to figure out how to
4
SPEAKER_00
adequately convey yourself online.
4
SPEAKER_00
And create scarcity, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
And create scarcity, yes.
4
SPEAKER_01
And like a lack of availability.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it is early online branding and in a way that s so insistent now.
4
SPEAKER_01
And you have to wonder like, which generation is going to break that?
4
SPEAKER_01
Or is it so coded in us that it ll only become sort of more monstrous, but
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, now, I mean, my youngest wants to be a YouTube star, a la Mr. Beast.
4
SPEAKER_01
But, and I m just like, okay, I m just gonna watch you hopefully grow out of this.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, at the same time, trying not to disparage his interest or shame or mock him for doing something that I think is insane, or wanting something that I think is like, obviously beneath him.
4
SPEAKER_00
But who am I to say?
4
SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
4
SPEAKER_00
I know.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, I think the problem with influencer careers is we just don t have the data yet for the longevity.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you don t want people to set up their entire lives around a business model that may cease to exist.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like tomorrow.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it gets back to that sort of me, we, thee, like the cosmic egg where, and I have this conversation with friends too who are writers or podcasters.
4
SPEAKER_01
And you see that you can easily trace this throughout culture, but where their story, they are the thing in part because of maybe trauma or an exceptional childhood or a lot of interest in their particular story.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that s very dangerous because
4
SPEAKER_01
when you are the thing and you have to manufacture relevance, newness, and you become sort of addicted to this idea of staying resonant with people in that way, not through connecting to the we or commenting on culture or bigger stories.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think it s very, very dangerous when your identity is sort of the coarse commodity, in a way,
4
SPEAKER_01
And like the deep objectification of yourself where you re like, how am I going to blow up my life again to have more content?
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh, for sure.
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And I think that that s a lot of the tougher stories we see, the tougher arcs in the influencer world, I think, have a lot to do
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where with, you know, at a point you re just mining your life for copy for content.
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And like, it s good to get inspiration from your life.
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But I m very conscious of not overly tapping into that in a way where my relationships would implode.
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I always kind of marvel that even comedians can, you know, joke about their parents or siblings or friends as much as they can, because
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To me, the telling of a story or the piece of copy at somebody else s expense in my real life in favor of my digital one just never feels worth it.
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Even in my book, I talk about myself a lot, but very rarely, actually hardly at all, will I talk about anybody that I know in real life doing certain things.
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I don t know.
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It s just a line I don t really feel comfortable crossing.
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If you even feel like with these family vloggers, that s like so many awful things have happened.
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You know, the family YouTubers like eight passengers and stuff.
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It s just it s so sad to think of these people s childhoods being mined for content in a way that they didn t consent to.
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And yeah, I have no clue where it s going to go, but I feel like we re at least more conscious of it now.
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I tried to do this in my book as well, but the way that you use your own life
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sort of centering it as like a typical suburban teen existence of like a blonde Bible belt or Jesus loving, you know, all the different sort of factors.
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But it s in service to something that s, I think, collective, at least for a pretty wide amount of people.
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And I think when people use their
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story, again, as sort of the scaffolding to make larger cultural points, that has a lot of legs.
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And I think you re hitting a drumbeat for people where they re like, oh, this is my story, too, in a way that I doesn t feel like you re sort of like, well, what shenanigans do I need to spark in order to be interesting?
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Yeah, this book is like kind of shenanigan free because probably why I loved your book so much.
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Like I m just a cooperative gal through and through.
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I don t have a lot of stories of rebellion or crazy things.
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I have stories of me trying on different versions of myself and dabbling in different things.
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that would feel at odds with my gut.
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And then I would be like, well, I certainly I m wrong.
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Everyone else is right until you kind of find your own like inner voice and identity.
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I guess what I m ultimately trying to argue for is that just because something isn t like necessarily objectively unique or exceptional doesn t mean that it s not distinct and doesn t mean that it s not a story worth telling.
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And I think that that even was kind of my own mental gymnastics I had to go through to even feel worthy of writing the book.
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That was a process I went through creatively just being like, just because it s common, just because it s basic or average or this or that does not mean that it doesn t deserve to be on paper.
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And I think in what I tried to do is
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speak to general themes a lot of people could relate to, but with references get specific enough that for every 50 you miss the one you catch excites you or spark something that it makes the specificity worth it.
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So yeah, it was kind of a balance of like how can I relate to a lot of people through my stories.
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throwing anyone specific under the bus, while also being so niche to my experience, you re kind of tapping into that psychology of meme culture where the whole thing is like, oh my god, this is so me.
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I thought nobody else did this.
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But the reason it s popular is because a lot of people do.
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Yeah, because you re hitting these huge cultural tropes and themes.
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You and I don t remember, Janessica.
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Like, honestly, when I tell you I lie in bed, and I m like, Vanessa is gonna know she is and I feel bad about including our aim wars.
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It s just not in my nature to like, say anything inflammatory that that s like the craziest thing I say.
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But yeah, like I ve had some readers say like, Oh my god, the first two chapters, I was texting all my friends saying this is so me.
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But then I got to the church chapter.
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And I was like, Oh, no, it s not.
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And I m like, that was a risk to include that because it is specific, but I don t think it s irrelevant to like the broader situation we have with like Christian nationalism.
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Like I think
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It s good for people to understand the nuts and bolts of evangelical culture.
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And beyond that, what is distinct about millennials is how it seeped into our sex ed and abstinence-only sex education, was how these parent interest groups that were conservative informed things, like dress codes, even.
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There were so many ways purity culture permeated into secular spaces.
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I thought it was worth calling out as something people might not even realize is kind of millennial, that WWJD era.
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No, totally WWJD.
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And it s so interesting, as someone who, you know, had a secular childhood, culturally Jewish, but I wrote a book about the seven deadly sins being at initially being like, these have absolutely nothing to do with me.
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And then but I think religion is culture.
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It s so primary to culture, and it programs all of us.
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And of course, we re influenced directly and indirectly, consciously and unconsciously.
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by so much of this.
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So I m glad you included that.
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And it s funny, because you were talking about how, like, the draw for you was music, dance parties.
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And I had an evangelical Christian neighbor who brought me to Sunday school once or twice, which my mom was just inflamed about, but knew better than to sort of shut it down.
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But I loved it because we crafted.
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We made, like, snowballs.
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I started from angels and stuff.
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It was so fun.
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the best time.
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I mean, don t they say that about the megachurches?
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It s like a party with all the services that you need.
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That s like kind of the joke.
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I guess that s the dichotomy I m expressing in all the chapters is like, it was problematic, but I had a great time.
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Getting somebody to a weekend coed lock in at a laser tag place with extra cheese pizza, it s not very hard to do when you re in middle school and you can t drive yet.
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And in hindsight, I m like, what a sneaky form of evangelizing.
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It looks like good old fashioned fund.
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Most parents, regardless of denomination, aren t really going to contest
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a supervised fun at a church, like how out of hand can it get?
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So a lot of kids would go to these things that had absolutely no religious affiliation and like leave with their soul saved.
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And it s kind of like, wow, that is crazy that you can speak to kids about their souls being damned and their purity and virginity and sexual immorality, like without consent of the parents, them just thinking you re going to water ski.
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I mean, they re pretty intense things to tell a minor who s just learning about their own body, to shame them for the things that make them human before they even have a chance to engage with those parts of themselves.
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And I have friends in therapy to this day from those times.
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And I have friends who are like, oh, I didn t take it that seriously.
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And we all internalize things differently.
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So I want it to be good.
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I want it to be cooperative.
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So if somebody is telling me do X, Y, Z, or else you ll go to the devil s air fryer, like I m going to be pretty scared of that.
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And it s going to.
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be something I think about constantly.
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Well, and I think that you just said it, Afraid.
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So much of our wiring as mammals is around fear, and fear of loss of approval, fear of loss of safety and security, fear of loss of control.
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And so much of what One in a Millennial is about that, like that fear of loss of approval, that intense human desire to belong.
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And within our belonging to find safety, security, approval,
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and control, right?
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To be sort of certain about your place in the world.
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It s so natural.
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And yet for some reason, I think because in that quest for individuality, we all just don t want to accept how programmed we are by culture.
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It s intense.
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Well, in writing, I turned the book in right when I found out I was pregnant and, you know, was editing and doing the audiobook while pregnant.
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And it was also kind of a reflection to me in terms of like going forward, thinking about that with my kid or kids.
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Like, I think we all grow up.
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having a version of us we present to our parents, and then feeling like we have this complex inner world that they ll never understand.
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And I think my mom reading this was like, oh my God, we were always close.
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We always had a good, she had no idea any of this was going on.
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And for me, it was kind of like an example of, there is a point where you can nurture to your liking, but kids are going to be very affected by the several other environments they find themselves in.
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And I think it was just a good exercise for me going into becoming a parent to revisit what ended up mattering, because I think my mom was surprised to hear that like in the least likely of places, like a church camp, that was like so formative for me when to her, I just wanted to water ski, you know?
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So you got to be careful about what figures of authority people are around when they re young.
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Yeah.
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And I think to that point, it s always also surprising as you age and you go back and inventory your life to see what memories stick.
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Oh, yeah.
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And I don t know how predictable it is and what proves to be formative.
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And I always want to tell people, too, because I think sometimes the questions I ll get are like, God, you have a good memory.
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I don t remember stuff like this, almost as if like there s something wrong with them.
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But like I journaled a lot and my mom saved everything I ever made.
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I have like an archive.
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And I also podcast for a living.
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And so if I m, you know, reeling off a plot of a Disney Channel original movie from memory, it s because I looked it up six months ago.
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It s not because I just remember everything I ever did.
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So I always want to caveat that, like, it s not that I have a better memory than anybody else.
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I think that I just, like, I don t know.
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I think some people are more prone to, like, journal and write and log stuff.
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And I felt very determined to log a lot of the mundane aspects of my life in ways I m grateful for now, but I m not sure it was normal.
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It s a public service, because as you recounted so many of those cultural moments, I was like, oh, I had not, I hadn t thought about, well, I had been thinking about the Spice Girls because of the Beckham documentary, but like, I hadn t thought of the Spice Girls.
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And I forgot about their choopa-choops, but thank you for the reminder.
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People really remember those lollipops, I find.
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Yeah.
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Even if nothing else.
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I know this conversation was a little different than what you might expect on Pulling the Thread, but I love Kate and I loved One in a Millennial.
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It s so smart and funny and fun and wise.
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It s just a romp, a nostalgia romp, that then she lands with these moments of cultural analysis.
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and specifically about what it is to be a girl and the way that our culture socializes us to think that our interests are so lame, silly, dumb, trite, embarrassing.
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She writes, a younger version of me, to use her words, would be so pissed if I grew up to be an adult who parroted the thing other adults always said to her, that none of this matters.
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My life experiences mattered to me then, even when I was told they turned out to be insignificant or that I was being too dramatic or emotional.
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And they matter to me now because regardless of something s objective importance, it was important to me and shaped me into the person I became.
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Many of us spent our whole lives shrinking ourselves, our pain, our bodies, and our existence to make other people comfortable, feeling like our job was to make space for others and not to take up space ourselves.
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And turns out, as I ve been writing to you, I m also writing to a future version of me, too, saying, don t you dare forget who you were and tell me to shrink when it s taken me all these years to stand proudly, plain, and tall.
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That last thing is a reference to Sarah Plain and Tall, which she also writes about, which I m sure many of you have read.
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If you liked today s episode, please rate and review and tell a friend.
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You can find show notes and full transcripts of the episodes at EliseLoonan.com.
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While there, please sign up for my sub stack.
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I send a short note every Wednesday about topics that are aligned with this show and a deeper dive most Sundays.
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Or follow me on Instagram at EliseLoonan.
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And finally, if you haven t already, please consider picking up a copy of my New York Times bestselling book, On Our Best Behavior, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good, available wherever you get your books.
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It s an exploration
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I d also like to give a huge thank you to my sponsors who make this show possible.
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Please support them the way they support this podcast.
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This has been a presentation of Cadence 13 Studio.
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If you enjoyed this episode, please listen, rate, review, and follow Pulling the Thread.
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Available now for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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I want to give a shout out to Phil Svitek, Lauren Legroso, Mary-Kate McDonough, Ali Brockman, and the entire Cadence 13 team for producing these episodes.
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And to Valero Duval for my key art.
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Take care of yourselves.
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I ll see you next time.