Saved as Draft

Why do we hold on to things we no longer need? For many of us, it’s because they remind us of who we were and who we thought we might become.

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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." 

I would like everybody to know right up front that I am not a minimalist at all. No. I like things. In fact, sometimes I love things. I like having them. I like keeping them. When I was little, I had a lot of collections, which to me meant having more than two of something.

I don't know if children still have collections outside of Pokemon cards, which continue to just have a choke hold on kid culture, at least here in this household, and, you know, toys. I had collections of things that were not necessarily fun. I'm talking little tiny porcelain animals. They came sort of glued to a small piece of cardstock.

I could always find them at antique stores. I spent a lot of time in antique stores as a child, probably because, like my grandparents, I love stuff. Okay? So I collected little figurines. I collected Archie comics, Betty and Veronica comics. I collected baseball cards, but I only collected baseball cards of players that I thought were cute. So I had a binder of Ken Griffey Jr cards, and I had a binder of David Justice cards. No other player, no team loyalty, just purely loyal to the most important thing, which is looks. So I kept things for whatever reason, but people tend to keep things for all kinds of reasons. We are sentimental, but we also keep things out of necessity. We keep things out of anxiety. "I might need this someday," or we keep things because they are beautiful to us ,or comfortable for us, or again, just because we like them. There is nothing wrong with having things that you love. And in fact, when I go to somebody's house, I want to see your things. I want to stand in front of a bookcase and see a bunch of little knick-knacks, chotchkies, ephemera. I want photos in and out of frames. I want things tucked behind things. I don't want to walk into what I fear might be an open house that has been staged. I don't want the surfaces clear. I want them cluttered. I want to maybe sort through your mail. Okay? I want to just see the evidence that this house is lived in and loved. And I want to see the blankets you snuggle up under. I want to see the books you're reading. I want to see your stuff. Okay? I want to see your stuff. I believe that life is for living and that living does often involve things, that involves the accumulation of stuff. And not even always in a consumerist way. We get things all kinds of ways. It is okay to keep them. 

Where am I going with this? I moved kind of a lot as a kid. Well, more than some people, less than others.  I moved three times during my childhood. And moving for me was exciting. Okay? Going to a new house felt like a present. But so did the opportunity to go through all my stuff, to look at every piece of clothing I owned,  every book, every little knickknack, and then pack it up lovingly after deciding what would make the cut and what could go. Then, once we arrived at the new house, I got the absolute treat of going into a brand new room that was completely empty and making it my own, deciding where to shove my bed and my dresser. And those were my only two pieces of furniture. And then opening all these boxes and basically feeling like all my belongings were gifts. They were gifts.  It really, really made me love my stuff all over again. 

Now, when I left for college, that was just the beginning. That was the beginning of me moving, well, I tried to count it all up, and I'm sure I missed some, but 15 different moves from age 18, when I left my parents' house, to today. Fifteen different addresses in the past 20 or so years, which means I've hardly stayed anywhere for more than two years at a time. And since my husband Aaron died in 2014, I am on my fourth address. On my fourth. Every single time I move, I believe that I've pared my belongings down to the essentials. And by essentials, I don't mean these are things I need, but these are things that I love that I like that I value emotionally, spiritually, or financially. And yet I still end up on the other end of a mood thinking, "Nora, what the fuck? What is this? Why, in the year 2020, when the internet exists, did you bring three boxes of encyclopedias across the country? They're heavy and you do not have space for them. You didn't have space for them when you lived in a larger home. You certainly don't have space for them now that you live in a much smaller home," but that's a more rare feeling. Because on the other side of these moves, I also still discover treasures that I didn't remember that I owned, things that make me happy, things that I am so glad that I have kept. I found recently a knife that belonged to my dad when he was a little boy. Why would my dad have a knife? He lived in the city of Minneapolis.  I don't think he was much of an outdoors kid. But I remember that when my son, Ralph, was a baby, my father gave him this knife. It sounds, um, irresponsible, and it's not like he handed the knife to an infant, but, you know, he gave the knife to my son via me, and I have that. And I'm so glad I have that. I've found a bunch of pictures that I drew for my mom. Why are they in my possession? Probably because when I moved in with my first husband, when I was 30 years old, she dropped a bunch of boxes off at the house that just said "Nora's Life," and in there were all of the cards and gifts that I had ever made for her when I was growing up. 

I feel like I am in an almost constant state of assessing what I have, of letting go of things that I don't need anymore, of appreciating the things that I do have. You know, since 2020, my body has changed. She has become more bountiful.  She cannot be held by the constraints of a lot of the clothes that I used to own. And so last winter I decided enough was enough, and I packed up a bunch of my nicest clothes. And I folded it. I made sure they were clean. I folded them well, and I dropped them off at the thrift store up the street so that someone can discover my love of pencil skirts, of J crew wool pencil skirts, and business casual outfits and really, really beautiful dresses that just will not fit me anymore. I went through boxes and boxes. Papers. Okay? Papers. Again, we live in a digital world, and yet I have so much paper. Paper that I've dragged from house to house. I went through it. I burned stuff. I shredded stuff. I recycled stuff I didn't need anymore. Like, I don't know, offer letters for jobs I held in the mid-2000s, printed out. I did not need those. A harsh breakup letter from a boy I barely even liked. Why did he feel the need to break up with me? We barely dated. And why did he have to do it in writing? That could go. That went.

And periodically I will do this same thing, this kind of perpetual spring cleaning, of my digital life. So a few years ago, when I had plenty of other things to do, I decided, "You know what? I'm going to delete my Facebook. I have been there since 2004. That is way too much digital clutter for my liking."  Poof, it's gone. At this point, I mean, to stay on something for that long also felt like I was adding digital pollution to the world, to other people's worlds.

This year, in a similar sort of immediate decision-making, it was my birthday. I had COVID. I was unwell. And I realized that I've been on Instagram for 10 years, a full decade. I had a borderline panic attack, and I deleted thousands of photos. Thousands. I got temporary carpal tunnel from tapping and clicking for 10 hours. That's how long it takes. Okay? At some point Instagram stops letting you. It thinks, like, "No, you're making a mistake." No, I'm not. No, I'm not. I just need a clean slate.

But there is one area of my life, one area where I am still a hoarder of the digital variety. And that's Google. I have had my email address since 2005, back when you needed an invitation to join this new thing called Gmail. And before that I used email addresses like tissues. They were single use. I would need to send an email.  I would make up an email address. And I would forget about email. And I remember saying this to my friends: "Who will ever use email? Why? Why would we need this?" And then I would forget the password and I would just move on and make another one. But this email address for whatever reason was different, maybe because I got it right as I graduated, maybe because it was the first email that I had put on my resume right next to my GPA, maybe because it had that invite-only allure, but either way it stuck, which means I've had it for 17 years. At this point, this email address is my longest relationship. 

But it's also not just an email address, because I've also had a Google drive attached to this email address that I've been using since whenever Google drive was introduced, which according to Google itself --  I Googled it -- was 2012. I know, this is a riveting history of Google. And while we're at it, do you remember Google Reader? I really miss that. That was a good tool. I really liked that. Unlike Google plus, which I really tried to make happen. Embarrassingly, I tried to make that happen. But really, the history of this giant company is tied up in my personal history, and maybe yours too.

I have had, at any given point in time, at least four jobs. That is not a flex about how hard I hustle. That is just the reality of life as a creative person in a gig-based economy. On the home front, my husband, Matthew, takes care of 90% of the tasks, possibly 95. He does the laundry. He tidies up. He cooks. He does most of the driving so that I can take care of all my work tasks. That is the division of labor we have agreed upon in our family. He takes care of the home. I will do the work that makes it possible for us to have a home. But Matthew also knows that I'm an adult woman with ADHD. And whenever I get overwhelmed with the number of tasks, or even just one specific task that is not difficult at all, like, I don't know, replying to an email, I will allow my brain to do its thing. 

And what is its thing? Oh, it is hyper focusing on something absolutely unimportant. I will dust the entire house using the special dusting item I bought after being served an ad on TikTok. I will swan dive into a rabbit hole about a stranger I read about online and then spend, I dunno, 40 bucks on a background check website that is absolutely a scam. I think they all are. I will pull everything out of our kitchen cabinets with the expressed purpose of reorganizing. And then I will lose interest halfway through because I found the ingredients for gluten-free bread, and I decided now is the time, now is the time for me to take up baking again. I will pull everything out of my closet, every article of clothing. I will say, "I'm going to color code this, everything." And then I will just get sucked into a box of books that I forgot about. And recently, when I was feeling the pressure of maybe this podcast, maybe, who knows, I looked at my to-do list, which is next to my computer, and I did the only thing that made sense. I opened up my Google drive. To work? To write an episode of this podcast, perhaps? No, no, no, though I did somehow convince myself that this task counted as work. I sorted through every loose Google doc and Google spreadsheet and try to organize them into folders. And I had hundreds, literally hundreds of unnamed documents I had opened and never written a single word in. I deleted those. I had hundreds of unnamed documents where I'd written just a few words that must have been important at the time. I deleted those. I found drafts of my first book. I put those in a folder. I found drafts of several podcast episodes. I put those in the folder they should have already been in -- bad Nora. And this endeavor ended the same way as so many other projects. The project of organizing my Google drive was abandoned. Once I found something shinier.

We'll be right back.

We're back. And I have just taken you on a riveting exploration of my Google drive. And like every other project that I've begun, I got distracted by something shiny. And I do say shiny knowing that it is a subjective term, because much like hearing about somebody else's dreams, looking through someone else's Google drive would not be interesting at all. And so the documents that I found would not be the kind of thing anyone else would be interested in opening. And yet I'm going to tell you about them, because the first one that I saw was labeled Income 2008. And that raised some questions for me before I opened it, because in 2008, I had a full-time job. My income was very predictable. I got paid every two weeks. It was direct deposited into my bank account. And then it just immediately evaporated. It evaporated into concert tickets and rent and utilities and a lot of alcohol. I couldn't figure out why this spreadsheet existed until of course I opened it and I realized that this was a document I had created to help my boyfriend, an adult man, keep track of his own freelance income and calculate the amount of money he would need to save to pay his quarterly taxes. This is a document that, looking at the history of it, he never accessed. Not once. Which means that I was the person entering all of this information. And when I reflected on that time in my life, I thought, "Nora, you codependent nutcase. This man never asked you to make this document. He didn't ask for it at all, whatsoever. He was fine keeping track of his income in an envelope. He was fine. You really wanted him to be somebody that he wasn't. And when he wouldn't comply, you decided to take matters into your own hands." Oh, my gosh.  I literally ...  I could have just let him exist. I could have let him get audited if that is what the government wanted to do, but I don't think the government is auditing people who make what appears to have been $18,000 a year. I could be wrong. 

So aside from that embarrassing little spreadsheet, there were also hundreds, hundreds of copies of my terrible, terrible resumes. All resumes are terrible, I think. But did I need nine bullet points to describe my job in public relations? Apparently, yes I did. And they were filled with words like, " I strategized, I coordinated, I effected." A lot of action verbs, a lot of gerunds. All basically a way of saying, "I don't know what I do all day. I don't know how I fill my time, but God, I am desperate for another job. I don't know how to describe the work I do, because I'm not good at it or interested in it. Would you hire me?" Also on more than one resume, my GPA is on there. My GPA is on there, long after it should have been taken off. And I could be embarrassed by that, but honestly, I was told many, many times growing up that your GPA mattered. And I worked, you know, maybe not the hardest in college, but I got a good GPA, and G-D it, I was going to share that information. I was going to share that irrelevant information with as many people as would listen. That was a 3.9 GPA. 

Apparently I was very into spreadsheets, because I found a spreadsheet that was filled with all the summer activities that my roommates and I wanted to do. There were concerts, a lot of free shows in New York in like, 2008, 2009. Trips to Coney island. That was sweet. There was, in my email circa summer of 2005, a bunch of messages, a bunch of emails that I sent to my friend back in America, my friend Erin, when I was doing, you know, the life-changing work of studying abroad, finding myself, expanding my horizons. Really what I was doing, everyone, is I was nannying for a family in Italy the summer after I graduated. And this was probably one of the best summers of my life -- top five, for sure. I spent the mornings watching these three little girls and quote unquote, "teaching them English." What we did was listen to Britney Spears and Avril Lavigne CDs and then transcribe the lyrics without the liner notes. Because that's cheating. And then we would play the Britney Spears video game on whatever gaming console they had. I couldn't possibly remember. And then their mom would come home from work, and I would read. I just read books and hung out with little girls. And I did not interact with a single person my age, except for one very unfortunate dinner party that I was invited to by, like, a neighbor's nephew, that I did not enjoy. I was the only person not on shrooms. But aside from that, I truly just sat alone and read books and went on long walks and ate food. And it was the best summer ever. But when I used their dial up internet once a week to communicate with my friends back home, I needed to make it sound like I was living the life. Like I was Hillary Duff in the Lizzie McGuire movie. This is what dreams are made of. I am connecting with a brunette version of myself and also falling in love. And I would send an email like this, that I felt made it sound like I was getting a lot of culture over in Europe. It is sent Tuesday, August 16th, 2005, 1:51 AM. So I assume that's afternoon in Italy. "Erin, I don't know if these songs are on the radio, but if not, download them now: "Bad Day," by Michael Powter. "You're Beautiful," by James Blunt. I guess those songs came out in Europe first. They were, you know, the two hits of, I believe 2006. I was an early adopter of "You Had a Bad Day," and "You're Beautiful." And I flexed that on my friends. Was I responsible for the pop success of those songs in America? You can't prove that I wasn't. 

As the 2000s went on, there were so many chats, so many Google chats. We didn't have iMessage on our computers. Texting was like, "Ugh, God, I guess we could do that." Gchat was where it was at. We spent hundreds of hours in our early 20s chatting. We'd get to work at 7:00 AM to prove to our bosses that we were dedicated, we were, we were committed. We deserved to be there. And then we spent, I'm guessing, five straight hours just chatting with friends, with my family, with strangers. They'd be like, what's your Gchat? And we would just chat all day about how hungover we were. 

So, looking through a lot of this, I thought, "Wow, Nora, your 20s were kind of a waste of space." And then I'd open a document and I'd find the evidence that pointed to my desire to do something, something other than my job, where I sat in a cubicle and tried to think of interesting ways to get people to write about sunscreen, that wasn't just like, "Cancer. It'll get ya. The sun! It'll kill ya," or writing up clever tweets for a nationally known discount haircutting chain. I spent hours doing this obviously, and I've lamented before that the generations that follow us will not have boxes of letters their friends wrote to them in college. They won't have inscribed yearbooks and love notes from years ago. They won't have paper journals to burn in their backyard to dispose of the evidence of their cringiest self, or their worst self, but they will have this. What I just described. They will have clouds full of their best and worst moments. They will have search histories. They will have screenshots. They will have a notes app that is filled with drafts of text messages that they did or did not send. They will have voice memos. They will have TikToks. They will have hours of video. I have no video of my 20s. They will have an endless archive of their own existence there to revisit and re-examine at any moment.

And while I've mostly just laughed at my past self so far today, and while there is plenty to cringe at, there's more. And I'll share that when I get back.

So there I was, on a roll, laughing my way through my Google drive, and I saw it. I saw a document dated August 2011, August, 2011, when Google drive apparently did not exist, but Google docs certainly did. And the document was called, "Now." That's it. And I was shocked for a few reasons. Now is a chapter in my first book, "It's Okay to Laugh. Crying Is Cool Too." It is a chapter about, um, I almost said my first tattoo, but the first tattoo that I'm not wanting to remove. It's this tattoo I got on the inside of my wrist. I got it a few days before I married my first husband, Aaron. He had been diagnosed with stage four brain cancer in October, 2011. And I got that tattoo to remind me to not mentally time travel, to stay as much as possible in the present, even though the present was scary and it was painful. The future was so uncertain. And I associate that word not only with this tattoo that I can see every single day, but I associate it so closely with Aaron's sickness that I thought I had to be mistaken about the date of this document.  I thought surely I wrote this after Aaron's diagnosis, not in the two months before, when we were so in love, and this was our first summer together. Why would I have written a document with that title? So I opened it, and I read it, and I'm going to read it to you now. 

Now, now, now. 

There are a lot of places I don't like. Gas stations, for example. The bathroom at my boyfriend's house, where I once faced down a centipede the size of my hand. The locker room at my gym. But of all the places in the world, the present moment is the hardest one for me to be in. Not because there's anything wrong with now, but because I'm the kind of woman who practices near constant mental time travel. It might appear that I'm sitting at my desk engaging in conversation with you, or even just ideally checking Facebook. But I'm not. I'm on a mental journey from the past to what's now. I'm projecting, anticipating, worrying, agitating, obsessing. And that's only on the internet. In real life, I do it all over again, but louder. This is definitely something that is beneficial to my interpersonal relationships. 

Attempts to remedy this have been less than successful. I never opened  “The Power of Now.” Meditation can not stand up to the strength of my insomnia. On the occasions when I snap out of it and get myself to yoga, I'm struck not only by the other yogis' limbs as I tumble out of simple postures onto the floor, but by how an instructor's constant reminder to keep you in the moment can actually keep you in the moment,  even when that moment is your face meeting the floor in what is supposed to be a non-contact sport. 

This summer was peppered with moments that reminded me of the value of the present, moments that snapped me out of my own head and into now. The mist of the Mississippi river on my face on a morning bike ride to work. My new sister walking down the aisle and officially joining my family. My boyfriend's hand joined with his grandfather's atop a pile of hospital sheets. Now is not always pleasant or pretty, but it is profoundly meaningful in a way that I won't be able to articulate once this glass of wine wears off. I keep a Post-it note with this one simple word on it in an effort to try not to waste my nows on tomorrows or yesterdays, but to live by lyrics to a Mason Jennings song that I will deny ever having in my iTunes. 

“Be here now. No other place will do.”

I don't know why I wrote that. But I do know that in two months, I would be laying next to Aaron in a hospital bed and asking him to marry me. Staying present, being in the now, would be easier for me when the other side of now was a future so painful to imagine that the present was, for the first time, the best option for me, even though the present sucked. Also, I don't know why I was pretending that I was too cool to like Mason Jennings, other than this was like the indie sleaze era, and I had to be cool. And what I did not know was that there is nothing less cool than pretending you are too cool for things. I love Mason Jennings. I love that song. I put it on mixes all the time.

But this draft, this piece of writing that I just dashed off and saved, that I didn't open for over a decade, was like a little time capsule, a little portal into a world I used to inhabit, a little glimpse at a version of me that used to exist. I just wanted to tell her, "Ugh, God, you have no idea what is about to happen. That boyfriend you love will be a husband you love, and then a husband you miss for the rest of your life. That new sister will drive you to the hospital when you have a miscarriage. Now will be a word that you need in a way you can't possibly understand in this moment, not during this perfect summer, when you found love and your future stretches before you like an endless horizon." 

But I'm so proud of this version of myself. I am so proud that she knew what she had was special, even before she knew she was in danger of losing it, that she was doing her best to enjoy what she had, even though she had an undiagnosed anxiety disorder and undiagnosed ADHD, and life honestly was really hard. It was hard to live in that brain. I'm so happy that she rode her bike to work, even though that meant sitting at her desk sweating for like two hours to start the day. I'm so happy that she had the best summer of her life before it all took a turn.

I save objects because they remind me of someone or something. I have a photo of my sister and I taken on the morning of my college graduation. And my face is puffy because I'm hungover. Hers is full and glowy because she's pregnant with her first child. And we are both smiling so hard because just before this photo was taken, she whispered her secret to me. I have a piece of my grandmother's pottery in my cabinet, this gorgeous shallow bowl glazed in white. The inside is painted with bright yellow lemons against this bright, gorgeous blue. And when I look at it, I can see my grandma's hands working the clay and making something beautiful out of nothing while I sit across from her, struggling to find the motor skills to make a pinch pot that she will tell me is art. I keep so many things because they remind me of who I am, who I was, or who I thought I might be. I have piles and piles of Post-it notes from Aaron. These little messages that he would hide in our cabinets or in my laptop on my way to work. I have piles of books all over my house purchased by versions of me who thought she would have time to p over the letters that Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to her lover or to brush up on her Catholics saints. 

And so I took that document, the one titled "Now," and I filed it away in a new folder, labeled "Special." This is bad file management. I will never find it again. Someday, I will open my Google drive, find a folder labeled "Special," and think, "What is this supposed to be?" But it felt right at the time. It's going to stay there. I just wanted to keep it. I wanted to keep it tucked away, out in the ether where it has spent its entire life so far, where it can just be a little reminder of who I was for whatever version of me needs it in the future.

In a minute, I'm actually going to talk to my best friend, Dave, who I've known since September 11th, 2001, and who has seen many, many versions of me in the past – and will hopefully see many more.

Nora McInenry: Hello? Hello?

Dave Gilmore: Hey. Hey.

Nora McInerny: Hey, it's me.

Dave Gilmore: Hey. What’s up?

Nora McInerny: You're not working are you?

Dave Gilmore: Of course I am. 

Nora McInerny: Okay. Well, um, this should only take, like, maybe 30-40 minutes. That shouldn't be a big deal. 

Dave Gilmore: Uhhhh, okay.

Nora McInerny: How would you – a light question for the middle of your workday – how would you describe the two of us in our 20s?

Dave Gilmore: Um, if there's a way … I wouldn't say “aimless,” because we had aims, but they were just, um … what's a word for someone who has aims, but they're all so wrong and they have no way of achieving those aims. [laughs] whatever that is.

Nora McInerny: There’s gotta be a word for it. We had aims. I feel like we had interests. We had aspirations. We didn't necessarily work towards them.

Dave Gilmore: We're skipping to the end. Yeah, we were …mentally, we had skipped to the end of a journey that would require a lot of hard work.

Nora McInerny: Right. We're both like, “We should write TV.” Did we at all attempt to write a script?

Dave Gilmore: No, yeah. And I think you have to be, like, a writer's assistant. You have to go- there's a lot of steps. We were not interested.

Nora McInerny: We were not willing to do that. 

Dave Gilmore: We were not interested in steps. No. 

Nora McInerny: No. We were like, “We are watching ‘30 Rock.’ What could bring us closer to that goal?” [both laugh] I think that I thought maybe, because my dad wrote infomercials ... [laughs]

Dave Gilmore: I don't think my dad's ever watched a commercial. Couldn't be farther – yeah, yeah. Your dad was in the industry. Let's be clear. 

Nora McInenry: He was in the industry.

Dave Gilmore: Personal friend of Ja Rule. Personal friend.

Nora McInerny: He met 50 Cent, okay? I won't get into specifics, but, you know, they were doing business together. And I thought at some point, someone will have a task and he'll be like, “Have you thought of my daughter?” And they’ll be like, “What is she doing?” And he'll be like, “Hold on, let me get her on the horn.”

Dave Gilmore: I don't think in our 20s, we were even thinking that clearly, that that might have … it was just like, just us existing was supposed to be enough. We had a lot of ideas. 

Nora McInerny: We had a lot of ideas. You thought you were going to get married. I thought I was going to get married. Not to each other. You almost did get married.

Dave Gilmore: Well to be clear, I am married now. So I was right about that.

Nora McInerny: Yeah, so am I. Twice! Not to brag. One of my presiding memories of this era is getting a phone call in the middle of the night on my flip phone. It was an unknown number. And when an unknown number calls you in the middle of the night, and it's the year 2004, you answer. And on the other end of the phone is your best friend and he's in Mexico. And he went down to propose to his girlfriend. And you said to him, “You know what? Sure. Do it. We're 24. Clock’s ticking, buddy.” And instead, on the other end of the phone, when you're like, “Congratulations!” He's like, “It's over. She dumped me. I was on a donkey.”

Dave Gilmore: It was a very small horse, not a donkey. And it was a pre-proposal. Let's just, you know, since this is being recorded. It was a pre-proposal.

Nora McInerny: It was, like, a promise ring. [laughs]

Dave Gilmore: Listen. It worked out for all parties involved. It worked out for the best. 

Nora McInerny: I was cleaning up my Google Drive because I was procrastinating.

Dave Gilmore: I was gonna say, wow. Are you at work right now? [laughs]

Nora McInerny: Yes. Yes. This is my work. And I found some bang that I'm going to text you because it's evidence that we did, at one point, we made a move towards a thing. So can you open that up and tell me what the document is called? 

Dave Gilmore: All right. BFF Cast. Wow. I don't remember this, but I'm already afraid of where it's going. Okay. Wow. Okay. So this is a, yeah, this looks really official.

Nora McInerny: It looks really official. The last edit was made March 25th, 2011. So you were, at the time, at the time you were married. You had shaken off that, that proposal, that pre-proposal gone wrong. It's a pitch deck for us. It's a pitch deck for the two of us to start a podcast called …

Dave Gilmore: BFF Cast

Nora McInerny: BFF Cast. The format is weekly. It's 30 minutes. What's the logline, baby?

Dave Gilmore: Oh my gosh. Okay. “Each week, Nora and Dave discuss an issue about life. They answer the big questions, like what truly separates men and women in relationships, the working world, and our culture, and the even bigger questions, like when it's all right to pick your nose.” You a hundred percent wrote that last part. A fascination, a topic you bring up so often, because you’re just waiting for people to tell you it’s okay. I’m telling you right now it’s okay.

Nora McInerny: There will never be guests, we indicate, because they get in the way of us talking, which I agree. I have found so many documents like this, Dave.  And so many of them are so much cringier. I found one called Income 2008.

Dave Gilmore: That's the saddest title for a document. That's the Ernest Hemingway baby shoes of Google documents.

Nora McInerny: Do you remember who I was dating in 2008?

Dave Gilmore: I think so. I don't want to, I don't want to put them on blast. 

Nora McInerny: Let's not put him on blast. It was a boyfriend who was a freelancer. I made this document for him to keep track of the money he made, so he could save money for taxes.

Dave Gilmore: Freelancers, famously slammed by taxes, by the way.

Nora McInerny: Famously. So he never once accessed this document, but I made it for him thinking … what? I don't know. 

Dave Gilmore: I mean, again, in this era, if we made a Google doc about something, it made it real. We were 80% of the way having a podcast with no guests.

Nora McInerny: Yeah. Again, he never asked for it. He never asked for it. Ever. It's hard for me to look back at my 20s and not just be like, “Oh God. Oh, good God. Oh good God.” But I saw the BFF cast and I was like, ohhh, I really love us.

Dave Gilmore: You know, this is written with the confidence that this is going to happen. Not in like a, hustle culture … we just really thought like, “Yeah, people will love this. Cuz we love this. We would gladly, you know, talk for 30 minutes without guests. That's pretty normal. Why wouldn't people find it delightful?” I think that's a good way to sum up our friendship through the years, was like, “Why isn't everyone else enjoying us being together as much as we are?” Because we’re loving it.

Nora McInerny: Okay, Dave, you said something really smart the other day when we were talking. Will you repeat it but make it sound spontaneous? You were talking about not healing your inner child.

Dave Gilmore: I think for different people, you can't do everything in therapy all at once, right?Like it's a, it's a very long process. But what I found as a person approaching 39 is that the person that I try to be most empathetic to is this idiot on this Google doc who thinks like, “Oh, just talking with your best friend on the show is a great business idea that requires, you know, a little pitch deck.” There are aspects of it that that's cringy. And I definitely, uh, offline, I'd love to see some of the more cringey documents. But having some empathy for that person, and healing that person, and like, heal your inner 20-something who doesn't know how the world works. Because there's an earnestness to it that I think is kind of sweet, if once you step outside of yourself. And if this person approached you, like, “I have an idea for a podcast. It’s gonna be me and my best friend. It’s gonna be so funny. We have a URL, we have a Twitter account.” You know, showing yourself the kindness you would show to that person. You might have a chuckle, like, “Oh, to be young.” But I think there's something sweet about that. And more and more, I think about that person, and try not to be too hard on them because, you know, we didn't know what we didn't know.

Nora McInerny: I know. And when I look at old pictures, especially old pictures of you, freshman year of college. You were such a cutie. You were so nice.

Dave Gilmore: Just an overgrown earnest baby.

Nora McInerny: So earnest, like the biggest baby I'd ever met. [laughs] I'd never met such a big baby.

Dave Gilmore: And, you know, I have young kids now and I definitely see, like, how inner child stuff develops, and the things you're afraid of and confused by. I think that's important too. You can’t ignore that stuff. But I was always the last, since I feel like I've started to maybe kind of become a little bit of a grownup, I've thought that, you know, I think your, for most people, your early 20s are just a time that is just a fail compilation. It's just one thing after another. And I think we were coming from a good place. This wasn't like get rich quick. We wanted to be like notable podcasters. And, you know, I also try to forgive the ping-ponging. Like, obviously this was our idea like that night. And then we said, “Great, let's record it on Sunday.” And I don't know what happened between when we wrote this and when the day we were supposed to record it was, but it never happened. And that's okay. That's okay. You know, we're not, we're not bad people for that. Hey, we saved the world from one more podcast that’s just people talking. 

Nora McInerny: We really did. We really did. So you're welcome to everybody. Dave, I love you. I love every version of you. I'm glad I still know you.

Dave Gilmore: I love you. I love every version of you. This one is particularly funny. Yeah. And, you know, let me know when you're down to record BFF Cast, I guess.

Nora McInerny: I'm literally buying the URL right now. All right. Smell ya later. Bye.

I kept that document called Income 2008. I kept that podcast document. I kept the email where I told my friend to stop everything and illegally download the hit song, “You Had a Bad Day,” because those are versions of me too. Those are drafts. They are slightly embarrassing drafts, but they're ones that I'm still strangely fond of, because there I was doing the best I could.

And that version of me is still tucked away inside somewhere. 

So, do me a favor. If any of this resonated with you, go look through your old emails. Look at your saved drafts. Look through your drives, look through your files. Even your paper ones. Find something to appreciate about who you were, in how you were. Back when you didn't know what you know now.

And if you find something you want to share with me, you can always email it to me: podcast@noraborealis.com. Or you can call and read it to me in a voicemail: 612-568-4441.

This has been, “Terrible, Thanks for Asking,” although not as terrible as sometimes. This has been somewhat terrible. This has been “Not That Terrible, And You Didn't Ask.”

I'm Nora McInerny. Our production team is Marcel Malekebu, Jeyca Maldonado-Medina, Jordan Turgeon, Megan Palmer, and our executive producer is Beth Pearlman.