Welcome to the Dough. We're Cash is Queen, and we hardly know her, but we're still here figuring her out together because you all, season 2 is here. Hosted every week by me, X Mya. Remember me? I'm going to be talking to all types of people about their relationship to money. I'm talking to reality stars, entrepreneurs, financial experts, and even some of my own friends. Basically, anyone who will get real with me about their dollars, how they make money, how they spend it, and how they save it Because I'm trying to retire early people. Season 2 of The Dough is out now, wherever you get your podcast. Join us on Archetypes, a dynamic podcast hosted by Megan, the Duchess of Sussex, as she digs into the labels that try to hold women back. In each intimate and candid conversation, Megan is joined by guests like Serena Williams, Mariah Carey, Paris Hilton, Issa Rae, and Trevor Noah, as they delve into the roots of countless common descriptors of women like diva, crazy, dumb blonde, and the B-word, and redefine and reclaim each identity along the way. The complete season of Archetypes is out now wherever you get your podcasts.

Love Comenada. On September 27th, 2018, just about everyone I knew was glued to their TV screens. As a woman wearing a blue suit walked into the Senate chamber to testify against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. With a slew of photographers crouched in front of her, she raised her right-hand and swore to tell the truth about what happened to her in the summer of 1982. She believed it was her civic duty to tell Congress that the man they were considering as the next Supreme Court justice had sexually assaulted her at a party when they were both teenagers. I, for one, remember her testimony clear as day. I was stuck in a chair so much that summer, an early fall, nursing my baby, who was born in May of 2018. I vividly recall sitting in this salmon-colored glider in my son's nursery, watching this woman on my little iPhone screen, holding on to him and hanging on to her every word. Well, behind the images on the screen, behind that blue suit, was a real-life human being, a mother of two named Christine, a professor, a California resident, and a big fan of Soundgarden and Metallica. She's someone who historically hasn't gone by the formal three-name moniker we've come to know her by, Christine Blasey Ford.

She's been Dr. Blasey or just Christine, even Chrissy, to a select few. She's now the author of a new memoir called One Way Back, where details the life she lived before that day in the Senate chamber and how she plans to keep living the version of it that she's in now on the other side. It's a very different version of her life, one with security details and a dining room full of letters from tens of thousands of strangers. The underside of her hair is no longer died the vibrant blue she'd worn before her day in the Senate. Many of her relationships have changed, and she's formed new ones, including with some of the most recognizable people in the world. Of course, these huge changes make Christine a perfect person to talk to about Last Days. So without further ado, this is Last Day, a show about the moments that change us. I'm your host, Stephanie Wittelswax. Today, I give you the gift of Christine Blasey Ford. Hi.

Hi.

How are you? Oh, you're wearing a Metallica shirt.

Can you see that? Okay.

I fucking love it.

And pajama pants as well.

Obsessed. I... Yeah? Oh, my God. Yes. I just finished reading your book. I loved it so much. I just enjoyed you, and I'm thrilled to talk to you today.

Yeah. Oh, thank you so much. I'm thrilled to meet you.

I want to start with the before times, actually. It's so funny you say before times, you capitalize it like we do, and you write, I miss the simple determinations I used to make in the before times. I'd love to get a sense of what your life was like in the before times.

Sure. I'm a university professor, and I teach statistics, which is this class that people don't necessarily want to take, but often have to take. I try to make it as fun as possible and as educational as possible. It's a pretty challenging class. I do that from September until May. And in between, I surf as much as I can. Then in the summer, I have the summer off to be with my kids.

I feel like surfing is such a symbol in the book, right? You and the water and what it means to you. And as someone who doesn't surf, but is surfing I'm curious. Could you break down surfing for Dummies crash course? Why you love it and why you love the water and why you love surfing?

Sure. Well, I love being in the water, especially the ocean, and especially the Pacific Ocean with all of the biodiversity and the varying types of waves around every corner. It's just something that when I'm in the ocean, I feel really connected to other people who are in the even people who might be in the ocean far, far away all at the same time.

Yeah, I love that. That connectivity and the bigness of it. A lot of people are afraid of that bigness, but you seem to find a home in it.

Yeah, I think I feel safer in the ocean than anywhere, but it is a place to be mindful. It can be dangerous, so you have to have some skills and some knowledge and make some decisions when you're out there. So it's both beautiful and a little bit scary.

Beautiful and a little bit scary. Is that a place you like to live?

As long as the scary part doesn't get too out of control, then yes, that's okay. When you're in the ocean and it's scary, what's interesting is that you don't really have the opportunity to panic or doubt yourself. You really have to make quick decisions and stay calm. That's one of the things that you're taught for ocean safety is to stay calm. You don't really have the same opportunity to get stressed out and panic and over think everything. That's nice to be a little bit contained in that way just because you're managing oncoming waves, and there's another one behind that. There's other surfers and rocks. There's all kinds of things that you need to be mindful of.

Wow. Surfing was your hobby, obviously, your passion, your pastime still is, it sounds like. But like you said, the thing you did for work was super smart academic work up in Palo Alto. Your teaching and research, I think, is such an interesting backdrop for the events that have unfolded over the last five years. You speculate that you were able to keep the trauma of your assault under the surface for so long because of the objective, statistics-focused way that you'd been trained to look at data. There seems to be a real turning point in the story where you feel like you can't hold this at bay anymore, where this traumatic event can't be kept at this distance any longer. I'm wondering if you could talk about how that felt to have those two different things colliding.

Yeah. It was not as hard at the beginning as it became later on. I think One thing that people don't realize is that the process for me started three months before everyone saw me on TV. When Justice Kennedy retired, I started having some thoughts about who might be the replacement, and saw the news articles that mentioned Brett's name, and was concerned, and was operating on a pretty short timeline because I think it had been announced that the nomination from the shortlist would be selected within a week or something. It was a very short time period. I felt really clear, and I was not anxious or stressed, but I was clear that I needed to say something, not necessarily to the whole world or on television, but that I needed to say something to someone. That was the easier part making that initial contact the first week of July.

And, listeners, I got to tell you, things spiraled out of her control very quickly after that. You really do need to read her book to fully comprehend how nutty it was. But just to give you an idea, Christine says she initially talked with a few close friends about how to report this information. Where to even begin? She contacted her state representative who put her in touch with Senator Diane Feinstein. There was lots of back and forth with their respective staff. At some point, a few people encouraged her to get legal representation. When she got lawyers, those lawyers encouraged her to testify in front of Congress. But by the time she got comfortable enough with that terrifying prospect, her lawyers suddenly advised her against it. Politicians that Christine had been put in touch with kept changing their tune about how involved they wanted to be. And by the time the summer came to a close, she had no idea if anything was actually going to be done. Then, various details about her and her allegation leaked, articles were published, and all of a sudden, a Congressional testimony was back on the table and would need to happen stat.

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Indulge an affordable luxury. Go to quince. Com/lastday for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's quince. Com/lastday to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince. Com/lastday. Hi there. It's Julia Louis-Dreyfus. You may know me from my podcast called Wiser Than Me, where I talk to older women and get their wisdom from the front lines of life. After season one, Eric, I was amazed by how many people told me our show made them look forward to getting older, which is why I'm here to talk about season two of the show. Sally Field, Billy Jean King, Beverly Johnson, Aina Garten, Bonnie Ray, just to name a few, and of course, my 90-year-old mom, Judy. All Hale, Old Women. Wiser Than Me Season 2 is out March 27th from Lemonada Media. I really do appreciate how you drew this boundary in the book, and you said, If you want to read about what happened to me or the testimony, it's all on public record. I don't even want to talk about that. What I would like to ask, though, is I think it's really fascinating, the morning of a life-changing moment. You You don't necessarily know what's coming.

I mean, you did. You were about to be put in front of a metaphorical moving train in the Senate chamber. But you woke up that morning and what was going through your head and what was going on in your body? Anything like that that comes to mind about the before you went in and leading up to it?

Yeah, for sure. The day before is worse than the day of. I think with any stressful thing in life, it's like that with a doctor appointment or anything, or the day before is the worst. So the day of, I woke up incredibly early. I got almost no sleep, and I just felt really ready, ready to get this done and be over. It had been three months of all kinds of wrangling and stress and meetings about going forward and meetings about not going forward. But that morning, I woke up ready for this to come to an end. I remember really clearly walking down the hallway from the holding room to the committee room. So I remember that hallway forever. It was like it was in slow motion. The people standing in their doorways and waving at me and looking at me and then coming into the committee room with my bodyguard and getting to that table and chair, and then all the photographers jumping up and snapping photos. Do you swear that the testimony you're about to give before this committee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

Thank you very much. I mean, the camera is clicking. It's such a visceral image. I'm wondering, as you emerge out of that, what do you remember feeling and thinking immediately after? They're snapping and you've been grilled and there's all this talk between the senators and you walk out. What is your thought?

My thought was that went okay. I'm okay. I'm going to be okay. I'm going to go home and go back to California and hopefully soon be able to move out of the hotel we were living in and go back to our house and go back to work when I could. I came out of the hearing intact. I survived it pretty well. It didn't seem that terrible. It wasn't my preference to have all those cameras or to have it be so public. But I didn't know that it was going to be that public and that everyone was going to be watching it. And in a way, that served me.

I think it's so interesting to think about that identity shift, right? Of Christine, private Christine, and then household name Christine. Yes. That is a A major shift that I don't think a lot of people can speak to. What do you remember about that time?

I remember a lot of people contacting me and wanting to speak with me, media, citizens, famous people. I felt like I just needed a lot of time to come to terms with what was happening, the level of media and the level of coverage, and finding out how many people had watched it, and hearing my very painful story about high school. Yeah, it was very sudden. And people, even in my most inner circle, were responding to me differently.

How so?

Just some people seem to be a little bit in awe of me. I think that's one of the reasons I wrote the book is I heard from a lot of people. I got correspondence from people all over the world, all 50 states, 42 countries. I think, obviously, some people demonized me, but a lot of people I realized me. And part of wanting to write the book was just to share that I'm just a person. And a lot of people saying they could never do what I did, and I wanted to let them know that I could never do what I did either. Right.

And you know, when you're, this is just a quick personal tangent, but when you're nursing, I don't know if you nurse your kids, but you're in that just hole where you're just like a cow. You're just cut off from the world in a different a way. I was nursing my son when you were going through this, and I remember viscerally and vividly sitting in the there watching you. It makes me overwhelmed being so in awe of what you were able to do.

My motivation in coming forward was to be helpful and to provide facts about how Mr. Kavanaugh's actions have damaged my life so that you could take into a serious consideration as you make your decision about how to proceed. It is not my responsibility to determine whether Mr. Kavanaugh deserves to sit on the Supreme Court. My responsibility is to tell you the truth.

I think it was true for so many people who watched you that you suddenly became the symbol, which you talk about in the book. Would you have gone through with this? Had you known I was going to become this thing that people were going to attach meaning to and symbol to? That seems like a lot of pressure for someone who was just trying to do the right thing. Right.

Yeah. I think beforehand when you're wrangling with something like this and people tell you there's going to be backlash, and it's not a concrete thing, backlash. So you're just imagining in your head, what is backlash? Does that mean people, I don't know, are going to say bad things about me? Okay, that's okay. That's just a tree falling in a forest somewhere. I don't need to worry about that. But I didn't really know in a concrete way what the backlash was going to look like. Probably that's good that I didn't know. But even now that I do know what people are capable of and what their intent is, I still don't regret it and still would do it again. It's survivable, and I want people to take that away from my account that, yes, it was extremely difficult, very painful, went through a really long grief cycle. But it's still important that we speak up if we want things to be different and better. Not everyone can speak up. There's a lot of reasons why people can't speak up, and I've heard from so many survivors, so I totally understand. But for those who want to, I hope this gives them some more concrete examples of what that aftermath might be like.

One part of that aftermath is that Brett Kavanaugh did indeed get confirmed to the Supreme Court. Christine's testimony was ignored, downplayed, and doubted. After the confirmation, people in her life tried to reassure her that she'd done the best she could, and at least it was over now. She writes that she felt, quote, misunderstood by everyone on the planet. She also writes poignantly about what this outcome meant for her understanding of the political system in general, a system she had been trying to help. I think what was so heartbreaking in the book, I'd like to quote you to you, if you'll allow me.

Sure.

You say, I was told that even if I had medical records describing the assault and identifying Brett as the attacker, as well as 20 people saying they'd been told about it years earlier. An actual videotape of him doing it would not have made a difference. Even with that video, they could have denied it was Brett on the footage. It's a sentence that takes your breath away. Then you write, Every time more information came to light about Kavanaugh or the way the confirmation was handled, various contacts in DC would tell me the harsh truth. There is zero chance that anything will be done.

That's after months and months and months of grieving and that natural grief part of, Well, someone's going to fix this. Some lawyer or a politician or a journalist is going to get all this information together and expose actually what happened, or maybe there will be an investigation, or there's these things that you go through with grief where you're hoping for things to happen, hoping somebody's going to fix it. Then when people start to say to you things like what you just said, that nothing is going to be done, you really do have to start moving into more of an acceptance phase. It just took me a really long time to get there. I'm a long The term griever takes me a long time to get over things.

Same.

I'm a slow griever, I guess. I take it slow.

I'm a slow griever, too. Yes. I think the thing that's so interesting about that is that you expect, you, the human you, expect that the right thing will happen. I had good intentions. I'm a good person. I did the right thing for the right reasons. Surely.

Yes. I was trying to be helpful, and I thought this is helpful information. All I'm saying is maybe you should take another look at the other people on the list who were possible candidates and maybe take a deeper look into Brett. I was called by a higher duty in civic duty and patriotism, and I assumed that that's how people would treat me. Instead, it felt like the people I was trying to help actually hurt me and did not help me. That was really difficult to come to terms with.

Yeah, I think you write really eloquently about growing up in DC and this being such a fundamental part of your understanding about how the world works. You grew up in the hub of American democracy. The machine was all around you, and you learned to respect government and the system and the process and how it works for the people of which you are one. I'd love to know, what would you say you did learn about this process of the reality of how the system actually works and how much has that shifted your belief in the system, in justice, and all the things that we hold as our core tenets?

Yes. I learned a lot about being an individual and trying to speak to the system and how complex that can be. I think George Washington said it in his Farewell address, something about how patriotism can't override partisan Partisanship. So once we have partisanship, it's really difficult to have patriotism. I hope I'm not butchering that Farewell address.

I think it sounds great.

But he said something like that. So I think that I learned that that might be the state that We were in at the time, and maybe we're still in that, where partisanship is overriding any sense of civic duty patriotism. But nonetheless, we still need to keep trying. I mean, that's important to keep trying.

Perhaps even harder.

Yes.

Can't get enough of your favorite Lemonada Media podcasts? By subscribing to Lemonada Premium today, you'll gain access to fun and inspiring bonus content from all of our podcasts across the Lemonada Media Network. As As a subscriber, you can listen to never before heard interview excerpts, behind the scenes segments, and continue to uncover new ways to make life suck less through all of our exclusive subscriber audio. Check out a free trial of Lemonada Premium today in the Apple podcast app by clicking on our podcast logo and then the subscribe button. Hi, I'm June Diane Raphael. And I'm Jessica St. Claire. And each week we are sitting down to talk all about life's twists, turns, and absurdities on The Deep Dive. From exploring the depths of TikTok, which is our only news source, to navigating the complexities of grief and loss, we are just two best friends behind a mic, processing life together. This podcast is all about finding the silver linings in the madness. So get ready for unfiltered conversations about motherhood, careers, pop culture, and everything in between. Here at The Deep Dive, we're all about community. We believe in the power of sharing experiences and the strength that comes from supporting one another, and we would love to have you with us.

So be sure to join us every Wednesday on The Deep Dive from Lemonada Media, wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. The weeks following Brett's confirmation were devastating. After he was confirmed, Christine was still incredibly anxious and fatigued, yet people were starting to move on. She was told there wasn't much of a need anymore for the security guards she'd come to rely on. Her calendar was suddenly totally empty, which for someone who loves their work and learning and being around students felt like a void of purpose, of social interaction. Everything that she knew and held dear was ripped out from underneath her.

Yeah, those were hard times. We had to reduce the security, but it wasn't safe enough for us to return to our house yet. We were still in hotels for several months, and I think we lived in four different places. We were a little bit busy just because of that relocation and settling in and getting the kids to their schools and to all their activities. I wasn't I just stayed inside. I didn't go to those things, but making sure that they still got to go to school. I didn't want them to have to miss their academic year. I sat out my academic year. It wasn't safe for me to go, and I certainly didn't want to put students at risk. Even if I could figure out a way to protect myself and have security for myself, it was just a little bit too much to try to strategize about how I could be in the classroom teaching. So I sat out for a year. Actually, sat out for two years. But now I'm back teaching.

I'm so glad. I'm so glad to hear that. Yeah. It's interesting. We started talking about the ocean, the bigness of it, and suddenly your world got so small.

Yeah. I just stared out the windows for so many hours and watched very micro-level things happening, like trees and leaves and construction.

Do you think that's part of how you were able to make it through each day? How do you make it through each day?

Well, maybe we all got a taste of it when In the pandemic when we were inside. It's a little bit similar to that, where suddenly you're inside and your regular life is not happening or your job is closed or has moved online. So it in some ways similar to that. And you find ways to pass the time. I would get up in the morning, and after the kids would go to school, I would stay back with the security and just watch the surf channel all day long and stare out the window and hope that we were going to move back home soon.

How did your sons and husband interact with you during this time? I mean, were they worried about you? How were those interactions?

Well, during that after-math period, I think that the kids certainly wanted to be back in their neighborhood hood. But kids are super resilient, so they were doing pretty well, and they were still going to school and seeing their friends. I became a really permissive parent, and I'm not a very permissive parent. I just let them play Xbox however long they wanted and have chocolate Sundays from room service for breakfast or whatever they wanted to do to get through that time. Then they got to see their friends and do middle of the week sleepovers. There were times that we couldn't all stay together. It wasn't a good idea for us all to be in the same place. So they would stay at different friends' houses. But, yeah, they definitely were more motivated to go back home than I was. I was a little bit more concerned about making sure that our house was a safe place and putting in various measures in our home that would help fortify us once we were back here.

Am I making this up? Am I projecting that you would leave your doors open? Yes. Did you think about security in the before times?

I never thought about that. I actually just thought they either are just going to dismiss me and be like, Thanks for this information by or, Thanks for this information. We'll do something about it and keep you posted or something. I didn't know that it was going to be not being able to be at home and needing a security detail for a while. But yeah, in the before times, we definitely had that house that anyone could just come in and come out, and the door opening and shutting all day with people coming in and out and playing basketball out front and coming inside and outside. All were welcome. And now our house is a bit of a fortress, so it's a little bit different now.

Yeah, I have that house. Not the fortress, the in and out, the door slamming constantly all day long. The door slamming, yes. And the footsteps and the running and the stairs. Those are good times.

I know. You got to embrace that because it's not always going to be that way. I know.

You're making me, I'm like, Okay, I need to love this time. This is good info. Yeah. Okay. Start surfing and love the slamming of the door constantly.

The slamming of the door is hard to love. Yeah. But you can get there.

Oh, yes. I think That was the before. Then these tens of thousands of letters. Yes. Yeah. Some were threatening and violent, hence the fortress. But many others, the overwhelming majority, were So deeply supportive.

Beautiful. Yeah, just so incredible. Just an incredible outpouring and so different from the internet. I just wish everyone could have that part of the experience because then you see how loving and wonderful people actually are. But if you go on the internet, you don't see that. It was almost the opposite opposite of what I saw on the internet in terms of proportion of hate and love. And 98% of the letters were incredibly loving. And the 2% that were horrible were very, very horrible, very scary. And of the 98% that were grateful for patriotism in our country and civic duty and Citizenship, 24% of those were from survivors who told me their story. Those were heartwarming and heartbreaking. I read them with a team of my students who are experts in trauma and work at our VA hospitals. We just all kept feeling the same thing. We have to write back to this person. Every letter you would read and be like, I just want to call that person and tell them something Everything. Every letter felt that way. It was just this desire to respond. Still trying to figure out how to do that, but this book is one of the ways to try to honor those people for helping me survive, but also to honor what they've been through, which many of them have been through so much worse.

They're so generous in sharing their supportive words.

What an interesting intersection. You actually had a body of students trained in trauma who could help you sort through them and meticulously catalog in terms of data.

Yes. It was a way to make sense of the volume of letters. When the first batches were coming in, I thought, Oh, I'm going to write everybody back. I still wish I could do that. I did start in on that. I've written back to anyone over the age of 90. We started in on doing that part, but it took so long that we quickly realized that was not a feasible way to respond. But yes, we formed a team, and we really were just wanting to hear everyone the way I was heard. I wanted everyone to be heard.

But that's an amazing... I mean, that's... Wow. They shared with you so that you could hear them, right? I mean, it's beautiful. There's this triumph the human spirit stuff where you're like, holy shit, we are in this together. And it is powerful, isn't it?

Very, very.

Yeah. And it probably helped you, I would assume, on your healing journey, too. I mean, the the acceptance, the grief that you speak about so eloquently, it must have played into your ability to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Definitely, yes. I spent about a year reading the letters and still reading, but I spent a year of full-time reading the letters with my students. We were learning so much from survivors about their experiences in a way that can inform science and can inform clinicians working with trauma survivors. Just all so many different levels, the letters were really helpful, and especially helping me on my psychological process of getting through it all.

Do you think that your work is going to be really tailored to this moving forward?

I don't foresee it becoming a new area of expertise where I would teach on that topic or something. It's more of another type of work that I would want to get involved in in terms of helping other people who are trying to decide how to come forward and how to be safe. I I want to be helpful in that area for sure.

It's so beautiful, Christine, because your goal was to help, and you didn't help in the way that you thought you would, but you are helping in this much bigger way that I'm sure you never could have imagined. I mean, I've heard you say multiple times today, I want to make it better for the next person. I want to make it better for the next person. And you are.

Thank you. It's taken a really long time for me to even see that. The first couple of years, I couldn't see past every minor incorrect thing that was said. I just was drowning in the information and the misinformation and the hate and all of that. But now I can see, and I think it's interesting and ironic how badly I wanted the meeting to be it because I'm afraid of cameras, and I don't really like my picture taken even. I just don't like that camera part of all of it. If I had gotten If I had gotten my way, and I had written a letter to the head of the committee saying, For his family and for my family, I think this really would be a better idea to have a private meeting. It wouldn't have been helpful, I guess. It's true. Yeah, that's interesting.

That's the bummer. That's the bummer.

Or the great thing.

I mean, yeah, not the same story, but lost my brother to a hero in overdose was like, Oh, my God, and then got so deep into addiction work and figuring out, why are we losing so many people? Why is this an epidemic? I did 26 episodes on opioids. How can I understand what happened? People would say, But you're helping so many people. I was like, I don't fucking want to. I want him back. I don't... This sucks. This is a horrible alternative.

I felt that way for a long time. Yeah. I mean, I'm only now able to... It's a long road, as you know. It's just a really long road. And wow, that's amazing. You did all that work. I don't know that I could have done that.

No, you could have. This is the thing. I felt this same. It's that thing of like, I couldn't. Yes, you can. It's like very selfish in the beginning. How can I understand this more? But then it really is like, how can we all do better in this arena? Can I ask you a few more questions? Yes. Okay, great. This Anita Hill quote was so resonant, where you talk about seeing Anita Hill and then meeting her after your testimony and her telling you to give it five years. It It's been five years. Yes.

It's almost six. I mean, it's- Wow, I know. I guess it's five and a half because I think of the start as being June 27th. So, yeah. Yes.

I'm wondering, How would you say that you've been changed by all of this, by the passing of time? You've given it five years. You just spoke to it beautifully about, I didn't use to be able to see the forest for the trees, about the helping all of that. I think it's really helpful for people to hear, time does pass, it does change. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Yeah. I think that in that grieving process where you just get to the point where you just think, I'm never going to be okay again. I will never be okay again. It's unacceptable at first, and you just don't want it to be that way. But as soon as you accept that, but yes, you're never going to be the same again. It's not going to be the same. So once I started really accepting that is when I started to get better. Because before that, I just wanted it to be fixed, whatever that meant. But I think the really great thing is we can all rebuild our lives, and a lot of us have had to rebuild our lives like you've talked about with your own life. We all go through losing people that we love and various grief cycles. But there's something about us that we're wired to only suffer for so long. I was pretty committed to the suffering path. I was on that path and just thought, that's how it's going to be forever. I'm just going to manage my grief and keep going and always be not okay. And then suddenly it starts to abate.

And then you get to say, okay, what do I want my life to look like now? How do I build my life now? It's this terrible thing, and it's this gift. And you also wish you could give that gift to other people without them having to go through the horrible parts, where you get to then decide, who do I want to hang out with? How do I want to spend my time? And it makes everything really clear. So I felt like I was given all this clarity, right? I've changed where I spend my time. I've changed my surf spot. I go to a different place. I've just made all these changes that I'm sure I would not have made. I would have just kept complaining about or something.

Literally.

So I made those changes. And now I live, I think, a much more simple life and a much more minimalist life, and that's working really well for me.

I mean, you just essentially said exactly what I wrote in the epilog of my book, which was when you go through something like this, it's like your house is blown up, torn to bits, and you're just sitting on this pile of rubble. Then you do realize at some point, Okay, I have to rebuild, but what do I want to build now? Intentionally, what do I want it to look like? All that, and it's like you say, Can people do that without going through some trauma? I don't know. There's a clarifying piece of it. That's like, yeah, it's universal. You're talking about the same exact experience.

Right. In our crisis, we have opportunity. Yeah.

And you got to meet Oprah. And you didn't just meet her, Christine. You got to stay at her house.

She's so nice. Oh, my gosh. And she can drive that golf cart so well. I scared. She was driving it so well.

There's even more Last Day with Apple Premium. Subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content, including the juicy parts of my conversations with guests that didn't make it into the final episodes. Subscribe now in Apple Podcasts. Last Day is a production of Lemonada Media. The show is produced by Keegan Zema, Aria Bracci, and Tiffany Bouy. Our engineer is Brian Castillo. Music is by Hannah's Brown. Steve Nelson is our Vice President of Weekly Content and Production. Executive producers are Jessica Cordova-Kramer and me, Stephanie Wittelswax. If you like what you heard today, we have three other seasons that you can check out. Have a story you'd like to share? Head to bit. Ly/lastdaystories or click the link in the show notes to fill out our confidential Google form. This series is presented by the Marguerite Casey Foundation. Follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad-free on Amazon Music with your prime membership. You can find us online at Lemonada Media, and you can find me at Widdle Stephanie. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. Hi, Last Day listeners. We at Lemonada are working on a show about caregiving for an elder loved one.

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