Not The Bummer Olympics

So many people start off their stories by saying their pain and suffering doesn’t compare to what happened to someone else. But this isn’t a game of Who Has It Worse, so why do we act like there is some sort of imaginary yardstick for struggling? Today’s episode tries to convince you that if you’re feeling pain, it’s painful- no caveats.

We are taking a break this summer to produce new stories, so we are sharing some of our favorite episodes while we’re on break. 

This episode was first broadcast in 2017, the year after we launched the show. 

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

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Listener waterfall:  Hey, Nora. Hi, Nora. Hey, Nora. Hi, Nora. Hey, Nora. Hey Nora.

Nora McInerny: Hi. Hi. I'm Nora mcinerney, and this is Terrible, Thanks for Asking.

A few weeks ago, we finished up our first season of the show. That's an important note, because people keep asking, ‘where's the show? What happened to the show?’ 

The first season's over. All those episodes are online. Where? Where we found this one. If you're new to our show because Ari Shapiro or Mandy Moore told you to listen to it, or maybe your mom, or quite possibly my mom- Welcome. And if you've been here since the beginning. Thank you. This is not season two. Just want to be clear about that. We are working on season two, I promise you. Podcasts, it turns out, are a lot of work. So we are talking to a lot of people about their stories. 

These stories came to us through email, through Twitter DMs, through Facebook messages, which is wonderful. So we're talking to so many people and strategizing and writing and exercising three times a week and eating right and all of that stuff. 

So if this isn't season two, what is it? I consider it season 1.5, season two-ish. It's a chance for us to get to know each other a little bit better through interviews, stories and tape from you, our listeners, because that's what you do. You send us your stories and your voices and your thoughts and your hopes and your dreams, and every single thing we get is appreciated so deeply. I can't even tell you, even though I'm a professional communicator. What are the words? I read them. I laugh, I cry. I read them again. 

So that gets us to something I wanted to talk about, something we've been noticing in all of these emails and voicemails and tweets, and it's about how we talk to each other and how we see our struggles and burdens in relationship to the struggles and burdens we hear about from other people or that we see in other people. More on that. We're getting into it after a super quick break. 

BREAK

Nora: We are back. The idea for Terrible, Thanks for Asking started in my inbox. Seriously, ever since I wrote about my husband Aaron, having brain cancer and ever since the obituary that we wrote for him together went viral. Ever since I published my book, which was about Aaron and brain cancer and love, I have had inboxes that are constantly full of stories. Now, if you don't know my story, here is the abridged version:

My husband Aaron, died of brain cancer right after I had a miscarriage and after my dad died of cancer. This was all in the span of a few weeks. So the stories I get are not just stories about brain cancer and dead husbands and miscarriages and dead dads, although I do get a lot of those. But their stories about life and loss and suffering and shame, and stories about old wounds and reopened scars and memories that haunt us at night. 

Listener 1: Hi. I guess the best place to start is I'm 31 years old. And I'm an orphan. 

Listener 2: On June 14th, 2014, I discovered that my husband had been having an affair for the previous ten months. 

Listener 3: The thing I can't let go of is my stepfather's ashes. He died in July, and they've been sitting in a bag in my living room since probably September. I know I need to do something with them, but I'm just not quite ready to let go of the only piece of him I have left. 

Listener 4: I struggle with OCD every day, every hour, every minute. My big fear is that my three kids are going to die all at the same time. And I imagine it in my head graphically happening. Just thinking about it puts me into a panic. 

Listener 1: My father has young onset Alzheimer's. I was a senior in high school, just 17 years old, when he was diagnosed. My sister was 14. My dad was 50. He has no family history of this terrible disease. It just came without warning. We don't know how or why, but it's our reality. I am now 24. My dad is 56 and that disease is in its advanced stages. 

Listener 2: I'm just about to go to work at my service job at a grocery store. And I am depressed. I just want to share. 

Listener 1: Thanks so much for your time. 

Nora: What these stories all have in common is that they're special and unique and also completely universal. These terrible things are what help bind us together in the big, invisible quilt of human experience. We suffer. We struggle. We persevere. 

What they also have in common is this: they arrive in my inbox with a disclaimer. I have a story. You tell me. It doesn't compare to losing a husband, having cancer, stillbirth, rape, what she experienced, what he experienced, what you experienced. It doesn't compare. 

We have all said this, myself included. But why? What do we mean when we say this about the stories we carry, the ones that ache inside of us? The one you send to a total stranger on the Internet. Do we mean, It doesn't matter? As compared to what? And compared by whom, exactly? There is no yardstick for suffering. And if there were, I would not want to use it anyway. The worst thing that happened to you is the worst thing that happened to you. And my suffering can't make yours any easier or any harder. The weight is relative. It's nontransferable. It's not converted from ounces to grams or inches to centimeters,  Celsius to Fahrenheit. 

Also, does anyone know how to compare those two things? To this day, if you give me that temperature in Celsius I’m like…that sounds colder? I don't know. 

If it's heavy for you, it's heavy. If it's big for you, it's big. If it burns you, it's hot. This is a hard thing to wrestle with, especially when things affect us directly. I'm going to give you an example here. 

Recently in Minneapolis, Saint Paul, which is where I live and work. A runner was struck and killed by a driver who seemed to be impaired. That is objectively sad. A man is dead. He was a friend and a brother and a son and he had things to do and things to bring to this world. And boom, it's all gone. 

And I'm a runner. Every time I run, I see distracted drivers and I yell stuff like, “put your phone down while you're operating a death machine!” which they don't like to hear because again, they're looking at their phones. I hold up a finger on my hand. I'm not going to tell you which one is my pointer finger. I wag it like a shaming teacher. It's actually more effective than flipping someone off if you're looking for maximum impact with hand gestures. 

So a man is dead and it's this other man's fault and that other man is bad. The Internet all put him on trial and convict him because he is the worst. And he didn't pass a field sobriety test, even though he also didn't fail a breathalyzer. And then another article comes out. The driver, it turns out, has advanced brain cancer. He has glioblastoma, which is the kind of brain cancer my husband died from in 2014. It's the kind of brain cancer that Aaron thought was gone when he drove a car, had a seizure, and woke up in his car on the side of the road to a cop tapping at the window. Aaron couldn't really talk. He couldn't unlock the door. And if you saw him like that in a car on the side of the road, you would probably think he was drunk. 

Aaron was so ashamed and embarrassed by this incident. He could have killed somebody. He didn't, thank God. But he knew he could have killed somebody. And he knew it because there was a news story about his incident and the Internet made sure to tell him how awful he was, how reckless he was for driving and having brain cancer. He should have been arrested. He was stupid. So I'm reading all of these stories. About that runner who died, about the man who hit him. And I know that where I could have been that runner, Aaron, could have been the man who hit and killed him. 

That man didn't know that he had brain cancer when he was driving. But he knows it now. He knows that he killed someone. He knows that he's going to die. And to me that is fucking sad too. Which confused some people when I posted basically that on Facebook, the comments that upset me were basically saying that because one man is dead, maybe the man who killed him deserves brain cancer. Or maybe it makes his brain cancer less sad in some way. 

But not to me. 

I can be sad for the man who died. And I can be sad for the man who killed him. There's enough suffering to go around. It is boundless, it is bottomless. And that can be staggering, unless we also realize that there's enough compassion to go around. For ourselves and for others. There is no need to be stingy. It is free. You can sprinkle that shit everywhere. 

When we say about our own stories, this doesn't compare. We've already made a comparison. And in that comparison, we lose compassion for ourselves and for other people. You're right in that it doesn't compare. Because it doesn't need to. If you were waiting for a permission slip to feel things, to feel complicated things all at once. Here it is. You're allowed to feel a lot of things, even if they seem to contradict each other. You can be sad about a lot of things. You can be happy about good things, even while you're sad about terrible things. You're allowed to be wounded by arrows and you're allowed to be proud of every mountain you climb. You're not obligated to qualify or justify. You are not obligated to minimize. 

My personal patron saint, Anne Lamott, is a writer who has also been through her share of awful, terrible things. And she has said that we are here to walk each other home. We are here to bear witness for one another to lend a steady arm. When we see someone slipping a hand, when we see them fall. That's what this show aims to be for me and you and all of us. A way for us to walk one another home. This is not the first official Bummer Olympics. This is not a competition to see whose troubles can beat up whose troubles. It's not a game of who has it worse. Nobody really wants to win that game anyway.