Bad Vibes Only

The vibes aren't good. They're not even decent. They're bad.

Nora's new book, BAD VIBES ONLY, is available today wherever you buy books!

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TTFA is on tour now! Come see Nora perform LIVE!

Tuesday, October 11 - Los Angeles, CA

Saturday, October 15 - Philadelphia, PA

Sunday, October 16 - Brooklyn, NY

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Wednesday, October 19 - Toronto, ON

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Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

I'm Nora McInerny, and this is “Terrible, Thanks for Asking.”

It should come as no surprise to you if you've listened to this show before that I am so fun at parties. And by that I mean I don't often go to parties, but when I do, when I do, you can count on me having an in-depth conversation, an inappropriately deep conversation with a person I have just met. Within 15 minutes of the last social function that I was invited to, I knew the mental health, history, family dynamic and deepest fears of one of my table mates. We both cried. We forged a bond that could only be broken by the end of the actual event. And I think we both know that if we ever cross paths again, we will pick up right where we left off. The bond we had was unbreakable. 

I also found out afterwards only one of us was on shrooms, and it was not me. 

Did you know that the name of my podcast, this podcast, was a rejected title for my first book, because the publisher was afraid it was a little too negative for a book about my husband dying of brain cancer? That first book was called It's Okay to Laugh, Crying Is Cool Too. And I followed it up with No Happy Endings, The Hot Young Widows Club, Bad Moms, and my fifth book is coming out into the world literally today. Today, rounding out the Nora McInerny collection, is a book of essays titled Bad Vibes Only. 

Is it a joke? Only kind of. Only kind of. Mostly it is a response to a culture that you are also pushing against, one that says, “Well, you know, it could be worse.” Yeah, Brad, we know that. But it's also not great right now! 

This is a culture where simply walking into a HomeGoods requires good vibes, only you can't be good vibes only. What am I doing with all my other vibes? Especially when we know what happens when you walk into a HomeGoods. You immediately need to use the bathroom. The vibes out here, they are mixed bag at best, and it is strange that we pretend otherwise because we all know eventually what it means to not be thriving. 

I love to go through old boxes while I'm procrastinating. I will read old notes. I will sort through old photos. I'll crack open a diary, because I have kept one since second grade. And on one of these procrastination journeys, I opened a diary from 1992. I was in fourth grade. I was nine years old, and my grandpa had just died. It was a stroke. It was very quick. And I remember being very stressed that I didn't have anything to wear to the funeral. I didn't have anything black to wear to the funeral, I should say. I was like, “It's a funeral. You got to wear black.” I wore a denim dress. It was 1992. A denim dress that had a black velvet collar. And I thought, “Wow, this is so tasteless. What will my grandpa think? I'm wearing denim when I really should be dressing in a way that conveys the eternal sadness that I am feeling, this pit of despair opening up inside of me.”

I remember that feeling. I remember that dress. I did not remember this diary entry, this journal entry. It was written a week after the funeral in my weird little kid handwriting. And it says this:

“How can I face this? Does anyone know how to help me? What's going wrong? Why is everyone dying? Several people have been found dead. Committed suicide. And my friend's guinea pig died.”

Damn. Not the guinea pig! Come on. I was nine years old, and that was already a bummer. I was also, as you can tell, sure, that I was alone in my suffering, that nobody else was as sad about grandpa and the general state of the world. The fact that I'd heard about people dying by suicide – I said committed because it was 1992; I was a child; I wrote what I heard; don't cancel me – and the guinea pig?! The guinea pig. 

“What is going wrong? How can I face this? Does anyone know how to help me?”

This was my first experience with loss and I didn't know how I could possibly get through it. And I can tell you right now, I got through it by writing a lot of poems. 

“There is a man that I miss still. 

He can't come back.

His name was Bill.”

I'm sorry. I'm not trying to laugh at my little kid being sad, but that's honestly a good poem. 

“There is a man that I miss still. He can't come back. His name was Bill.”

I also wrote him an obituary myself. 

“My grandpa Bill.” In quotation marks, “A remarkable man.”

“My grandpa Bill was a devoted family man and raised nine wonderful children, which would have been ten. But James Patrick died a few weeks after birth. For other people, this would have been hard, but not for Grandpa.”

What? [laughs]

“He was the kind of person that could strike up a conversation in the middle of a gas station. So he had a lot of friends and was the kind of person everyone liked. My grandpa was also a fighter. Living in the woods.” What? [laughs] “With my grandma and his fight with cancer of the prostate.” [laughs] “And his fight with cancer of the prostate. I always looked up at him.” He was very tall. “He loved to laugh and have a good time with family and friends. And that was my grandpa Bill. R.I.P. November 19th, 1993.”

I guess I had the year wrong, so please forgive me. The year was not 1992. It was 1993. Oh, that is so earnest. I am still in many ways that earnest, which is so embarrassing. All little Nora, you do not know that things will get better, they'll get better, it'll get easier. It'll also get worse. And then better. And then also bad. 

So that was me as a kid. That was my first brush with terrible things. But I, you know, I've always had in general bad vibes and at least as an adult, now that I am responsible for myself and also have the resources available to me. I have been able to go to therapy. I've talked about it a lot on this show. I've talked a lot about it in general, but it took me a long time to seek it. It took me a long time to seek it. I had no mental health support while my husband was dying of cancer. I didn't see a therapist until months after he died, I think seven or eight months after he died, and only because a friend told me that I had to. And I went to a primary care physician who asked if anything had happened in my life lately. And I was like, “Yeah, you know, a couple things, couple things.” And then she gave me those sort of surveys, I guess, those mental health surveys, and I passed or failed, depending on the point of view. And I went and I met my first therapist, really, who did a lot of work with me around grief and around the PTSD that I had. And I, you know, have been in and out of therapy ever since. 

But we moved across the country in May 2020. We moved from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Phoenix, Arizona. And a lot of people always want to know why. Why would you move? Why'd you move? Why'd you move? 

Obviously, I didn't have to move. I work from home, so it's not as if I had to move for work. But it did feel like I kind of had to move. It was very hard to be a depressed person in a climate where it is often very, very gray and very, very cold. 

I will also say that the city of Minneapolis just has felt haunted for me by all of my losses, and maybe I'll feel differently about it someday, and maybe I'll feel different about the climate, but moving to a place where I see a blue sky every day, where I see the sun every day, has helped. And also so has therapy.

When you move across the country, you have to reestablish so many things. You got to find a dentist, you got to find a pediatrician, you got to find a doctor. You gotta find your favorite grocery store. You gotta find the right Walgreens. They're not all the same. You have to find a new therapist. And I put that off for quite a long time, until it was just obvious to myself, and to my husband, to pretty much anyone who came in contact with me, I needed … I needed some help. 

So this chapter of Bad Vibes Only that I am about to share with you – because that's where we started this episode – but the whole point of this is to share a little bit from my book. 

If you've not read any of my books, this is the fifth one. The first three are books that deal very explicitly with my losses and with grief. The fourth one is a novelization of the movie Bad Moms, and this is an essay collection. This is essays and stories that reflect on this oppressively optimistic culture that we are all a part of, this obsession with self-improvement, what it means to live a quote unquote “authentic life” in the era of the personal brand, in the era of self broadcast. It is a reflection on an adolescence and early twenties-hood that took place in what I believe might be the tackiest era, the 2000s, the earliest earlier 2000s, and entering into middle age, and that realization that you are no longer the thing that is shiny and new, but you are something else entirely. 

This chapter is called Who Would You Be? And it takes place in 2020 after we relocated our family, got settled into Arizona, and it was obvious that I needed some more help. And we'll be right back. 

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So what you're about to hear is actually the exact recording from my audio book. I always do my own audiobooks. This is my fifth one. I recorded it in this little room in a recording studio in Phoenix, Arizona on a 112 degree day. There was no air conditioning because that makes noise and you don't want noise when you're recording an audio book. What I'm trying to say is what you are about to hear is the work of a hero. 

Chapter Seven. 

Who Would You Be? 

Choosing a therapist is like dating. It's supposed to be perfectly acceptable to shop around, to ask questions and figure out if it's a mutual fit before you move forward into a relationship. But I never dated that way. I either settle for whoever liked me or, in the case of both my marriages, tripped and fell into the exact right match. Same for therapy. 

I've ghosted plenty of men and therapists after awkward hours spent across from each other, hoping for a spark of energy. And I've fallen into deep and rewarding relationships that have helped me to better understand myself. I've met loves and therapists through friends and online. The website Psychology Today functions just like Match.com, letting you sort by geographic range specialties and accepted insurance for the shallow or among us. You can just choose according to headshots the way nature intended. People will tell you that when it comes to therapists, you might need to date around and find the right fit. But whenever I've needed therapy, it's been just that – a need. There's no time to shop around when you're desperate. 

And by the middle of 2020, I was as desperate for a therapist as I had been for a boyfriend in my early twenties. 

I googled and filled out online forms and left voicemails, and the first person to get back to me was a kind faced and credentialed man named Alan, who could meet with me that week. He fit all my criteria for dating and therapy. He was alive and available. Given that we were a few months away from vaccinations for COVID-19, I was delighted to know that he was willing to meet in person as long as we stayed on opposite ends of his office and wore masks. I've always thought it would be much more efficient to start a relationship with a therapist by saying, “Could you just Google me and tell me your first impressions?” But that's unethical, and it's part of their job to actually get to know you, which means you have to start every therapeutic relationship the same way you start a first date by giving enough information to be considered honest and interesting without being overwhelming. I wasn't sure if I should start right at the beginning and tell him how I was born 14 days past my due date and in respiratory distress, which obviously explains why I cannot be on time and why I hate doing cardio, or if I should just skip to the headlines like when my dad, my husband, died right after I had a miscarriage. Should I start with where I am now and work backward? I spend a lot of my work life interviewing other people, and it was hard to fight the urge to lead the conversation and steer it back to him. But Alan is a professional and he asked me simply, “What brings you in today?”

“Well,” I said, staring at the space above his head. “I think it's mostly that I hate myself and everything about me. My life is objectively good, but nothing makes me happy and everything is either disappointing or overwhelming.” I spent the next 48 minutes crying until my face mask was soaking wet. The next week I arrived with some evidence to support my thesis that I'm a bad person. I'm impatient with my children, and I sometimes speak sharply to people I care about. Compliments slide right off me and are evidence that the complimentary has no idea what they're talking about. When my youngest tells me I'm the best mom ever, I know it's only because he doesn't know that many moms. And if he did, he'd know. I don't play nearly enough with him. A key part of being a therapist is that the sessions are about your clients, not you. 

Therapists, good ones, at least, are skilled at giving as little of themselves to as possible. You won't hear what careless words their mother said to them as a child that forever wounded them. You won't know where they go to the gym or what they want for their birthday. You won't even know they have a birthday. They're meant to be a nearly anonymous and yet deeply intimate figure in your life. A wise person who can listen and reflect back what you told them with a glimmer of insight. And during our third session, that's what Allen did. 

“I've noticed you don't seem to have a lot of compassion for yourself,” he said gently. Compassion for myself. Why would I give myself compassion? I've met myself and I'm a dumb bitch who was at least a sophomore in college when she realized that engineering majors were not in school to learn how to drive trains. Why would I spend my time treating myself with the tenderness I extended to other people? What a waste of time when, after all, we only have 24 hours in a day to produce and create and fill out forms and eat and sleep and parent and make sure that the dog has been walked before she pees on the new dining room rug. When would I possibly have time to have compassion for myself? When there are so many things to do? 

Aaron was sickeningly mentally healthy, even when he was deeply sick with brain cancer. Sure, he experienced the full range of human emotions, but he experienced them all lightly and temporarily. For me, every feeling has always been big and intense and the only feeling I will ever have. You know how some people go through something and learn from it? Not me. And I have immediate emotional amnesia and everything I feel is for the first time and will certainly be permanent. Aaron and I both worked in advertising when we met, and the highs and lows of client work were hell for me. A rejection of my ideas was proof that I was stupid. And luckily many of my colleagues were men who didn't think any ideas but theirs had any merit. I spent every workday walking on a thin tightrope of self-esteem. And by the time I left it, seven or eight at night, I'd plummeted into the depths of despair. Across town, Aaron spent his days working as a graphic designer and art director at a rival agency. He took feedback graciously, even when it was annoying. Most of us in the industry dreaded client feedback, have the noise of input for the representation of the brand for which they were responsible. Could the logo be bigger? The tagline be incorporated into the copy? Most of us would cringe, but Aaron would smile amiably and get back to work. It's not my website. He'd say, “What do I care if they want it to be different?” Meanwhile, the rest of us would spend at least a half hour after client calls, recapping all the ways our client was wrong about what they wanted, and then go home and stew over it some more. 

During the cotton candy days of our early courtship, when everything was sweet and fluffy, I tried to warn him about me. “I just get really sad sometimes,” I minimized, “You know?”

He did not know. “Just, sometimes I think nothing matters. Like, why try?”

He looked at me blankly before his eyes softened with pity. “That sounds horrible,” he whispered back, kissing the top of my head and then shaking it gently. “Stop doing that, brain!”

I've been telling my idiot brain to stop it for decades now, and she just won't listen. Not even to professionals. But there are moments after a particularly good night's sleep or a conversation with a friend or a therapy session where the clouds in my mind part enough for me to think, “Wait. I'm fine. I don't need to explore the deeper recesses of my being in search of a cure for who I am.” 

With my mind's eye set to Panorama, my existence is placed in a wide and blurry context, and for at least a few minutes, I'm good. So good that I'd want to throw open the windows and shout about my fineness to the world. But our windows are old and many of them are painted shut. So by the time I'd get the windows to creak open, the moment would pass, replaced with a constant low grade panic running through my veins where the blood ought to be. This is the kind of frenetic energy that has turned me into the kind of magician whose one trick is pulling the tablecloth out from under a full dining set. Someday, I know it will all clatter to the ground in a heap. Someday we will not be able to do. Someday is probably not even that far away. I was served an ad that proudly stated, “This ad was written by A.I. So robots are coming even for the jobs we told ourselves could only be performed by Ascension, being with a working knowledge of a Cordy keyboard.” 

Someday my own brain may turn to mush. My hands may not be able to type. My voice may not be one anyone wants to listen to. Even motherhood is a basket too small to hold all our eggs. Our children, God willing, will grow up and move out, will establish their own lives and families, our importance in their lives shrinking and shifting so that we are no longer the sun but some outer planet that upon further inspection actually may just be a defunct satellite stuck in their orbit. It's that fear that I'm really just space junk that has seemed to drive every version of myself. I spent years collecting accomplishments and taking little to no joy or satisfaction at any of them. Constantly thirsting like Tantalus, rooted in his pool of water. 

I said something like this to Alan and I was ready for him to lean back in his comfy chair and say, “Wow, what a brilliant insight. I should write that down.”

“I have a question for you,” he said in his calm, measured way instead. “If you didn't do any of these things, if tomorrow you woke up and you didn't have any of these jobs or titles, who would you be?”

I paused, my eyes searching the drop tile ceiling. “I'd probably go back to school, get a bachelor's degree. I guess I can't really go back to advertising since I burned all those bridges, but I might be able to pick up a little freelance copywriting.”

“No, no,” Alan interrupted gently. “I didn't ask what you would do. I asked who you would be.”

I stared at him blankly. “Like I said, I'd probably go back to school.”

Silence. “Who would you be?” he asked again, as if the answer were obvious. “Who would you be?” What a strange and inappropriate question! It reminds me of a think piece from a few years back that suggested new questions to stand in for “What Do You Do?” And while the piece was earnest and well-written, I also found it comically absurd to imagine meeting a stranger at a dinner party and asking, “What makes you feel alive?” Like what? No. “Oh,” they may reply, “Running a yellow light. Maybe the feeling of crushing a baby bird in my hand.”

See? That's too risky. I'd rather know where you spend your weekdays. 

We've been fielding the question, “What do you want to do when you grow up? Since we were old enough to speak.” That the what is a job is implied. No child instinctively says, “I think I'll be interesting and generous.” At four years old, my youngest child told us that he was going to be a DNA scientist. And when he heard the grownups cooing over what a good idea that would be, sounds lucrative, you could see the neural pathways forming in his little brain. Grownups ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, and they ask other grownups what they do. And around and around we go. Defining ourselves in one another. 

I'm floored by Alan's question because I've never been asked such a thing. And the question itself feels like the kind of brainteasers whose answers are obvious. The doctor was a woman! You don't bury survivors of a plane crash! 

I let the silence fill the space between us. “You'd be you, Nora,” he said with a gentle smile. And my confusion was in no way lessened. I'd be who? “You. You’re you, no matter what you do or don't do. You are you.” His face told me that this was a good thing. But my mind knew better. 

I. 

Me. 

Oh. 

How sad. 

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So if you couldn't tell, I wrote that chapter when I was really going through some shit. 

2021 was the worst year of my life since 2014, and I've told everyone what happened in 2014. And I'm not trying to be coy by not spilling all the details about 2021, but a lot of it is just not my story to tell. And even my story sometimes feels like it isn't really my story. 

But a lot changed in 2021. A lot changed. Still Kickin, which I started in honor of Aaron to help people through their own hard things, crashed and burned. Crashed and burned. And had been crashing since 2020, but we'd all been giving it CPR and setting its broken bones and basically hoping to be the kind of organization that could survive a global pandemic and pay people well and give them benefits and give away as much money as possible. And honestly, we just could not. Could not do it. 

My friend Moe and I retired from the Hot Young Widows Club and handed over the operations to another group of widows after six years of also just trying to do our best to be everything to everyone. We added even more episodes of TTFA to our schedule during that pandemic, and we never slowed down the work schedule. And yeah, wah wah wah, cry for me, this little soft-handed podcaster doing nonessential work in a closet while some people lose their homes and put on layers of PPE to literally save lives. Like wah, how does she do it? Like, “Oh, well, she doesn't do it.” Like, she doesn't do it. She doesn't do it. She mostly feels like a failure and a loser who couldn't keep ten different plates spinning while writing a unicycle on top of a balance ball. What an absolute failure. But I realized with the help of my therapist, Alan, and obviously that is not his real name. I'm not insane. His real name is … kidding. 

What I realized was that I'd worked myself into a breakdown, and I was barely treading water and I needed to shed some of my responsibilities if I wanted to stay afloat, if I wanted to actually have a life that I liked, if I wanted to like myself at all. And the thing is, this is not the first time I found myself at the end of a rapidly fraying rope because I didn't feel like I could or should – and we don't “should” here – say it was just too much and I needed to set something down. A decade ago, I was doggedly pursuing career accomplishments in an industry that made me feel like a wrung out paper towel while my husband was going through treatment for stage four cancer, and I was pregnant. I would take conference calls at the hospital and work on PowerPoints in a chemo room. And I would have told you in the moment, “Oh, no, no big deal. I'm just leaning in, because I can do it all. I'm amazing.” And in reality, I had zero self-care. I don't even know if self-care had been invented yet. It's zero mental health support because it was just not a thing yet in my universe. Like, how many tries does it take to learn a life lesson? If you are me, the answer is still TBD because I think I'm still learning it. I think I'm still learning it. 

And I'm kind of making light of it now, but it really was a scary time to be in my brain, to be in my orbit. And while I was in this space, I was also seeing so many other people in my world struggle with the same thing, people I love who have had to rearrange their lives and their dreams around a tragedy, around a choice that someone else had made for them. People I love whose jobs and lives have made it impossible for them to dream. People I love whose jobs have just completely eaten up their lives and their identities. People who have been just chewed up and spit out by an industry and just fully discarded. And so I've spent 2022 trying, trying, trying so hard to separate my being and my doing so that my actual human value does not feel so tied to external forces. Because in 2021, I could only think, “Who am I if I'm not doing these specific things for these specific people?” If I leave behind a dream, an organization, an ambition, an obligation, an opportunity? 

I've gotten several messages recently from people who are at a similar crossroads, people who've spent years of their life in a relationship, in a job, in an identity that doesn't fit them anymore, who are afraid of leaving or changing or starting over. And even when it’s just typed through a screen, I can feel the anxiety and the fear in their words. From the outside, it's just so easy to say, “Okay, well, if you don't want to work there anymore, leave, find another job. If you're not happy in this relationship and you've done all you can to try to save it, go set each other free if you're burned out and it's possible to take time off and just go be a dog walker while you rebuild your nervous system. Do it.” 

But external complications and privileges aside, on the inside, if they aren't this person's partner, if they aren't this job title, then who are they? And like Alan – again, not his real name – said, “You'd be you.” Under it all. Whatever you do or do, not do. Whatever you do or do not accomplish or acquire. You’re you. Tragically. Gloriously. You.