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Comedian Jen Curran thought she was having a normal pregnancy, but then the complications started. Her doctors told her to lose weight, but they were wrong. Weeks after giving birth, she received a diagnosis that turned her dream of motherhood upside down. This week’s practice is about letting go of disappointments and getting mad (and then moving forward).

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Resources from the show:

• Read “When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times” by Pema Chödrön
• Read “Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life” by Jon Kabat Zinn

Learn more about today’s guest:

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Claire, Jen Curran

Claire  00:10

Hi, I’m Claire Bidwell Smith. Welcome to NEW DAY. This is not what I thought my life would look like. Have you ever had that thought? I’ve had it a lot. Because sometimes there are things that happen that make us sit up and realize that life is not what we thought it would be. There are changes that suddenly come out of nowhere and ask us to reevaluate the course we’ve been on. Or maybe make us realize that we’ve been taking a lot for granted. These moments and changes, these things that happen can feel like a slap in the face sometimes. Knock the wind out of us, humble us, drop us to the floor before we can find the strength to stand up again. My mom’s death was like that for me. And our guest today, comedian Jen, Karen’s cancer diagnosis was like that for her. The diagnosis came just weeks after the birth of her first child. And two years later, she’s still sorting through the wreckage. As you’ll hear her tell me in this episode, she’s still mad, mad at the world. Because this wasn’t the plan. This wasn’t who she thought she’d be. This isn’t what motherhood was supposed to look like. What do we do when these kinds of things happen?

Claire

How do we reckon with the fierce disappointment and the anger that comes? How do we forge a new path out of the broken one we were forced to leave behind? I think this conversation will resonate for a lot of you. Because when the pandemic had, all of us had to let go of some version of the life we were living. For some of us, that was a good thing. But for many of us, it wasn’t. In fact, we’re still grieving the loss of expected milestones, the weddings we had to delay, the funerals, we couldn’t have canceled proms and school graduations, just a year plus full of disappointments. I think it’s especially hard when we can still picture the way it was supposed to look if this terrible thing hadn’t happened. What Jen’s experience of motherhood would look like if she didn’t have cancer, what my life would look like if my daughters had their grandmother, what last year was supposed to look like for all of us, as opposed to the fallout we’re still sorting through today? How do we move on from those images that still play out in our heads? How do we let go of disappointment? How do we surrender to what is? We’re going to talk about all of this and more in today’s episode. It’s an emotional conversation for sure. But it’s also very real. Let’s dive in.

Claire  02:45

Hi, Jen. Welcome to NEW DAY. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Jen Curran 

Thank you so much for having me.

Claire

So, I start every episode by asking my guests like how you’re doing, but how are you actually doing like right now, in this moment, today?

Jen Curran 

What a great question. Well, I’m okay, I feel it’s always good to have something like this to do on a pandemic day, because it makes it feel a little bit more normal.

Claire 

That’s true. I hadn’t thought of that that way. What is a normal pandemic day like for you if you don’t have something like this?

Jen Curran 

Well, we’re just here at this house, my husband and I with our two-and-a-half-year-old, all day, baby. And sometimes I’ll you know, even just run to the gas station, it’ll be like, Oh, my god, there’s a world outside of this, these four walls and there’s a world where I’m not like, mad at him and annoyed at her and hate the dog. You know, now I’m thinking about diet coke for 40 seconds. That was what a relief.

Claire 

Yeah, I think having a small child in the house during the pandemic just takes it to a whole different place. You know, if it was just you and the dog and the husband, that’s one thing, but the child, you know, just kind of makes everything more exciting.

Jen Curran  04:04

It does, do you have kids?

Claire 

I have three.

Jen Curran 

Oh, Lord.

Claire 

Yeah. So the pandemic’s been fun over here, too.

Jen Curran 

Oh, my gosh. You are busy.

Claire 

Yeah. Okay, well, I want to start by asking you the story that, you know, you’ve told many times, but I would love to hear your story. I want to go past that story today and kind of dig into some other places. But we got to start with the story. Tell us your story, Jen.

Jen Curran 

What’s my story, Lord, well, I guess I’m so clear. I have so many stories. My most popular however.

Claire

Let’s start with the greatest hits. Yeah, exactly.

Jen Curran 

Yeah, exactly. Let’s start with the headline. So I guess the title of it is that I had a baby. And four months later, I was diagnosed with a cancer, it’s a cancer called multiple myeloma, but it’s just technically bone marrow cancer. It’s kind of like a cancer of your immune system. And it was a harrowing road to get diagnosed, especially just having had a baby. This is my first kid. So those very early weeks and months just kind of fly by, and you’re in a real cocoon. And so it was a strange time to be also dealing with getting a diagnosis.

Claire 

But that’s the really, you know, that’s I such a huge part of this story. Because you had to really pushed to get to the diagnosis, and you had to push past some stuff that really shouldn’t have happened.

Jen Curran

Yeah, so basically, I was having a normal pregnancy until one day I went in to, and I was older I was, I want to say 37, in the first half of my pregnancy, and so that right away, they send you to a high-risk OB, because that’s an elderly person. As far as they’re concerned.

Claire  06:02

I was 40, when the last one was born, I got the elderly treatment, too.

Jen Curran 

Yes, I mean, you might as well be wielded in a wheelchair, they’re very concerned, you’re about to drop dead. And so the high-risk OB, I’m trying to remember what the first problem was. But basically, everything was normal. And then suddenly, she was turning up really small in the measurements, and I had a ton of protein in my pee, which you know, they’re testing. If you’ve never been pregnant, that’s something that you find out very quickly is that they’re constantly testing your urine. Yeah, I guess that’s the roadmap to whatever they need to know. But so they found that I had all this protein in my urine. And the woman who was treating me this amazing doctor said, this is a concerning thing to us. And we really want you to go get checked out, we’re going to treat this pregnancy as a high-risk pregnancy, but then when it’s over, we want you to go get checked out by a kidney doctor, because we think there might be something else going on.

Jen Curran 

And I don’t know if it was how she laid it out. Or if I was just so focused on the pregnancy. Or if I had just never had anything this serious happened to me medically before, but I really didn’t give it a lot of weight. I didn’t think about it that much. I mean, I was obviously concerned for the baby, they diagnosed me with what they consider to be preeclampsia. And so they watched me through that lens. It’s just something that sometimes pregnant women develop. They don’t know a lot about it, needless to say, because they don’t know a lot about most things as it relates to pregnancy. And so after the baby was born, I was thrilled to just get back to like a normal thing, I had to had to be on bed rest for the last three months of the pregnancy. And it was just like a really difficult, challenging experience. I was so thrilled to have her here and to be able to like, eat what I wanted, and not have to take weird medicine, take my blood pressure all the time.

Jen Curran  08:03

And I remember it was probably six weeks after she was born that this high-risk OB, this doctor, a very busy person called me directly, like didn’t have a nurse called me, called me herself. And you know, she’s not doesn’t deal with the delivery. She has nothing to do with that. So ostensibly, once you walk out of her office at 39 weeks, you’ll never see her again. So it was very strange that she called me and she said, I just want to make sure that you are going to go get a follow up. And I had planned to but I said okay, yeah, absolutely. And so I made an appointment with a kidney doctor. That was what she had suggested. I went to this kidney doctor assuming that was going to be like every other doctor’s appointment I’d ever had before I got pregnant, which was just everything’s fine. Take this, it’ll go away and this amount of time or you need a weird pill and you’re fine. Talk to you later. So I went in to see her and she ran the labs and I had to go back and see her a few weeks later, I was starting to feel very concerned about this thing that they were having me check it was this protein level in my urine.

Jen Curran

I guess over the time that had passed, I’d done were googling and started to get like a little bit worried about it. And I remember I said to her, she was looking at the lab work on her computer, and she had her hand over her mouth. And you know, I went to school to be an actor. And so and I’m one of those people who watch us people and I’m like, he moved to the next chair. He’s guilty of one of those. So she had her hand over her mouth and it just felt like body language that was like you are terrified right now. And I said to her did the protein go away? And she said no. And I said okay, and she said there’s more of it. And I got my stomach dropped because I just knew my body and I knew that if this was pregnancy related and worth three and a half months out, this is supposed to have gone down a little bit. Right? If this is just pregnancy, I know my body. It doesn’t take me two years to bounce back from something like this.

Jen Curran  10:18

The doctor kind of like had her own moment of like private shock, and then got herself together. And while she is telling me this next part, there’s a Papa John’s delivery happening in the next room, and I can smell this pizza wafting in and someone from the front desk comes in and says the pizza’s ready and closes the door and I’m just like, oh, that smells great. And she said, she got herself together and she said, I guess what she had decided to tell me which was, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you. And I’m not concerned about this protein. This protein is hanging around. Sometimes it takes our bodies a long time to adjust after pregnancy. And it’s hanging around because you need to lose weight.

Claire 

What went through your head?

Jen Curran 

It was the last thing on planet earth I was expecting her to say. It was just the last thing on the world I was expecting her to say, I had been you know I have been overweight on and off my whole life. I’m someone that has a relationship to my body when it is heavier and when it is lighter. Not everyone has that experience. I know that my body in its slightly overweight state of being post pregnancy doesn’t have some strange lab number happening. That’s just not what the overweight body does.

Claire 

You were three months postpartum. We’re all overweight at that point.

Jen Curran 

Exactly. So she says you need to lose weight and my jaw probably hit the floor I’m staring at her. I’m like what are we doing here? Like what do you, what do you, but because I’m a little weight loss trooper from the diet culture built in the 80s and 90s and you know many years prior to that, but that’s what I experienced the most of it myself. It was like she was telling me here’s what you need to do to get $10 million. I said okay, okay. It was a drug that I had been sober from for so long. The idea that weight loss could cure me of everything. And he or she was saying I have a head of it. And my first reaction was okay, let’s go.

Claire  12:35

Okay, wow. Weight Loss for me is, an acid is for every woman, right? Or anybody an issue so I mean for me, I feel like I would have just felt shame, immediate shame. Like I had fucked up, like my postpartum diet and I didn’t look like I was supposed to or, I would have yeah, I would have probably just gone to a really deep place of shame and said nothing and walked out. Like stole some pizza on the way come for myself in the call.

Jen Curran

You should see me looking at that pizza. I was like bye pizza. But I was just a good little soldier. And I was like, gonna do what she said. And I thought, Okay, well, maybe if I just lost weight in the past. I know it can, you know, make me sleep better and make me feel whatever. And so maybe that’s the case. And then she said, you need to go on a diet. And she said, you know diet and exercise, lose weight. She said take the baby on walks. Oh, is that what I should do?

Claire 

So what did you do? What would happen next?

Jen Curran 

Well, so I went home shocked. She also told me this whole thing about donating anything out of a box. It was very confusing. Had she actually given me some kind of like, go on this plan or drink these shakes, I might have done it. But there was no guidance, don’t eat things out of a box, less sodium, it was all over the map. And as a chronic lifelong dieter. I’ll do your program but your program better makes sense. I better be able to follow your program, whatever it is and so I went home and open the fridge and just felt like I don’t know what I’m doing. I felt back to that place of being 25 years old and trying to figure out how to lose 10 pounds and standing in the cabinets not you know, none of us know what the hell to do to lose five pounds or the gate you know, whatever it is we’re trying to do.

Jen Curran  14:34

And so after a while of like letting that trauma, honestly, her like traumatic. It was very traumatic for me to hear that letting that like sit with me for a little bit. I just was like ranting and raving to my husband about it. I couldn’t believe it. I would just like stop in my tracks and be like lose weight. I just couldn’t believe that that you know that that was the guidance and so I just decided to go get a second opinion, which was a very challenging decision. Because if you’re told to lose weight, what am I going to argue? I’m going to get a second opinion. So someone can tell me how you don’t have to lose weight? Like what am I working toward here? You know, just being able to eat what I want, or it was a very conflicted thing.

Claire 

Did you have some intuition that it wasn’t about weight loss? I mean, it sounds like you had that intuition that, that is why you were going for a second opinion.

Jen Curran 

I knew that it wasn’t, I just knew deep down. So I went to get the second opinion. And I’ll never forget the first thing she said to me, after looking at the lab results and hearing about the first doctor was there is nothing like diet and exercise could do to change this number.

Claire 

And so how did you feel in that moment?

Jen Curran

I was stunned to hear that. I thought she might say, well, it’s probably not that but it would help it… You know, doctors love to be like, lose five pounds. But she said, no, there’s nothing that you could do to change this, we have to get to the bottom of it. And then after, you know, phone calls, and one more tests, and another phone call and an email, and can you come into the office and… this doctor finally called and said, I think you have bone marrow cancer.

Claire  16:40

So, what was your reaction when the doctor told you had bone marrow cancer?

Jen Curran 

This was not the formal diagnosis. But for me, it might as well have been, you know, and how sweet friends and my husband and family being like, well, let’s wait till you talk to the oncologist. But when it’s your body, you know, you know, okay, that’s what this is, that makes perfect sense. checks all the boxes. And I was eating like a frozen enchilada while I was talking to her. And my husband was in the next room with the baby. And I left the plate on the dresser for so long that it made like a stain on the dresser because I had like forgotten how hot this plate was. And I was writing down multiple myeloma, treatment lifelong. And that I fell out of body.

Claire 

Yeah, of course.

Jen Curran 

Yeah.

Claire 

And so you went through treatment? How are you now?

Jen Curran  17:40

So I started on treatment, probably a month later, after all kinds of craziness to get to that place to you know, it’s not like you get a diagnosis, and then the world becomes not misogynistic. And not anti-fat, you’re still battling all that stuff, but got with a doctor who I really loved a couple months later and started treatment. And this is a cancer that does not have, there’s no end to the treatment. This is a lifelong treatment, there’s not a cure for it. And it’s not like breast cancer, where you and I could have the exact same type of breast cancer, that’s really not something that exists in the multiple myeloma world. Every single person has like a slightly different version of it and needs treatment in a slightly different way.

Jen Curran  18:36

And this medicine combined with this could work for you and me, it might not work. And so it’s kind of like a tricky disease because it requires you to treat it and then see how it reacts and then jump to do something a little bit different, blah, blah, blah. And they don’t know that much about it in that way. So I started treatment two years ago, and they do like an induction thing that’s very, like intense treatment. And now I’m on what my doctor calls maintenance. But it’s still, I still go to chemo twice a month and have an IV and get an infusion of steroids and chemotherapy and a bone strengthener. And I have to take steroids at home every other day by mouth, along with all these other pills and different things to keep me going.

Claire

I have so many questions. Who were you before this happened? And who are you now like, who are those two versions of Jen?

Jen Curran 

Yeah, I was an asshole before this happened. I’m still an asshole. But I was a different kind of asshole. And I was just like a busy gal. You know, I was a top comedy and writing and did shows and rode and performed and just had this like very sort of like on the go LA lifestyle. And this was obviously all before getting pregnant too. I never really got to have the experience of having a kid and like getting back to being myself in the world, this cancer experience started really soon after that. And then of course, now we have our pandemic. So, yeah, I was somebody who was busy and moody and self-obsessed and, you know, doing my own thing.

Claire  20:25

Were you aware that you were those things? You say them like..

Jen Curran 

Like, it’s a good thing?

Claire

No, like, maybe you only see them in retrospect or but were you were you conscious of those things, then?

Jen Curran 

I think I was. I didn’t judge those things then. Now I’m like, wow, you really had, you really had it all. And you had no idea that you had it all.

Claire 

I think that’s what I was hearing.

Jen Curran

Yeah, I mean, some people might be like, you weren’t an asshole. But to me, in my heart of hearts. I am and I was no, but I was just someone who was really living for what I wanted next, and next and next. And honestly, probably so you know, I had worked really hard to have a life where I could have what I wanted and create what I wanted. I dealt with a lot of mental health stuff. So I certainly wasn’t like in some great self-actualized state of making all my dreams come true or anything, but I had a vibrant life and wore a lot of vibrant shirts, and a lot of put on a vibrant lip quite often. And now. God now I don’t know. I mean, I’m mad. I’m a mad person now. I was mad before but now I’m like deeply mad.

Claire 

Mad at the doctors, the system, yourself? Like who all are you mad at?

Jen Curran 

Oh, God, I don’t even know that I could identify it. I’m, I’m mad at the world. I at first, I was really mad at my body that had betrayed me in this way. I have really gotten past that, I think, because of how much I have had to put this poor body through. I’ve had to forgive her.

Claire  22:17

And have some compassion for her.

Jen Curran 

Yeah, exactly, exactly. But I think now I’m just, I’m just I don’t know why, Matt, that’s a good question. I should give more thought to that. I’m just disappointed that it turned out like this.

Claire 

This isn’t the life you thought you’d be living?

Jen Curran

No, absolutely not. And you know, I definitely remember that person from before. And I think all the time about who I would be now if the cancer experience hadn’t happened, but I still had this amazing baby and gotten to live that dream of becoming a mom. And I’m really not sure. But I’ll never get to know. And that’s hard to realize that I have to grieve that loss and mourn that loss of not being able to be like a young new mom with like a carefree thing.

Claire

And there’s a lot to be mad about, you know, and I think sometimes it’s easier to be mad about that than to be sad about it, because it hurts, right?

Jen Curran 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and you know, when you have something like this, come into your wheelhouse you go through a level of grief that you may not have dealt with before. And that’s what happened for me. I mean, just like a level of sobbing and weeping. Yeah, that I may not have even experienced that I already had this baby. You know? But when you’re postpartum, you’re a weeper. Anyway. And so it was a lot, it was a lot to process like this new baby and this new news. So I think I have been through a lot of the sadness early on that I just didn’t want to keep going back to, because it starts to feel never ending.

Claire  24:21

Yeah. And you’re the only person who goes through it, like no one else can go through it for you. So you’re the one in your little family going through this.

Jen Curran 

Exactly. And everybody has their own way that they have to deal with it, you know, for themselves.

Claire

How’s that been with your husband?

Jen Curran 

I think he really in the beginning thought that this was going to be something else. And so it wasn’t until we were sitting with the doctor who had the bone marrow biopsy in his hand and he said it is multiple myeloma that my husband really, I think started to process it and take it on.

Claire

How is all this affected your relationship with them?

Jen Curran 

This has been a real challenge for our relationship, especially because it happened at the same time that we had a baby and a several months into it, we entered into lockdown. And I think it’s been really hard for him to become someone who is a dad, but he’s also worried about his wife dying. And now he’s also worried about his whole family getting sick and dying. In the same way that I had never dealt with a level this level of grief before I don’t think he’s dealt with this level of worry, and responsibility and anxiety that I’m sure he must feel, you know, because as you said, it’s, I have to deal with the grief in my own for my own self, but it’s a whole different animal for him, you know, to be someone who’s not the sick person, but is next to the sick person. So it’s been challenging. It’s not like the fun loving laugh a minute time that we were having early on. It’s been really challenging in that way.

Claire  26:06

And how about motherhood? What has it been like, what your daughter’s name is Rose?

Jen Curran

Rose, yeah.

Claire 

How has it been with Rose?

Jen Curran

I know that it’s probably great for the pod when I cry, but I’m gonna try this next part without absolutely bawling. You know, she’s incredible. She’s incredible. I feel really lucky and grateful that I got to have this little girl. And she is a wild animal, and really keeping us on our toes. I and you know, I think a lot about how this will have affected her life, or if it will, and how I’m going to tell her and boy, I’m really crying.

Claire 

That’s okay.

Jen Curran 

You know, I’m sure on some level, she already is affected by it. I try not to talk about it a lot in front of her. That kind of thing, because I don’t want her whole, like, tiny little life to be inundated by cancer. But having her has been such an incredible gift and blessing even when it’s super hard. Even when she’s clearly mad at me for not being home or being sick or whatever it is that she liked kind of intrinsically senses, you know, even when she’s yelling mom go away, which she does a lot. And she’s two and a half.

Claire 

My son says I don’t like you, mom.

Jen Curran 

Oh, the worst. She said to me the other day, Mama, please go away. You smell so bad. Vicious. But having her has been you know and I joke about her being terrible but she really is slightly terrible in some ways. You know, she’s two and a half and despite the times when it’s awful, I am so lucky to have her as a distraction and as something to pour myself into. Because I’m not sure what I would do or have done or be focusing on now if I didn’t have this person to live for, you know, when I have friends who don’t have kids who will be like, What are you talking about? You had cataract surgery? I can’t believe that. That’s terrible. I you know if I couldn’t see this, that the other? How do you do it? It’s like, Well, I have a kid. What do you mean? How do I do it? The appointment is at 10 o’clock, I go get the cataract surgery and then I come home and do lunch. That’s how I do it.

Claire  29:05

Do you feel like in some ways, this experience has made you a better mother?

Jen Curran 

Great question. I’m sure it has. Yeah, yes. It’s definitely made me have to be much more conscious of everything I think than I would have been in the past and it’s given me such a sense of what’s important, you know, and such a sense of the gravity of life and how precious it is and how little time we truly have. And you know, I had a hard time getting pregnant and I think I probably would have ignored the lessons from that because it would have just been easier to move on. But you can’t ignore the lessons from cancer, unfortunately. They are going to be Knock knocking, no matter what.

Claire  30:18

Have you moved through some of these really hard moments, the grief, the anger, the life that isn’t what you imagine, like, what do you do when it’s really hard?

Jen Curran

Well, you know, some of these moments that I have had have been some of the greatest moments of my life, like, what do you do? When someone says you have cancer and you hang up the phone? And it’s two o’clock in the afternoon? Yeah, what happens at seven o’clock, you know, and I’m not someone who like has a built-in thing, where I’m going to, like, call these five people and, you know, paint on my vision board, or whatever the healing would be. I sat in bed with my husband, and the baby crawled around. And I said exactly what I just said to you. I said, I don’t know what to do now. Yeah. I don’t know what to do next. What should we order food, like, I don’t know what to do next. And we actually went to a hotel that night, just like a nearby hotel, we got packed with the dog and the kid. And it was almost just like, let’s completely change the environment and energy and get out of this house and see how it feels to be free for any evening, you know? So strange. We watch reality TV and ate Chinese food.

Claire 

Did it work? Did it help?

Jen Curran 

It did, it really did. It really, really did. And then I slowly started texting friends and posted online in this mom group that I’m in, I’m really close with. And so that stuff really helped to kind of just almost have absolutely nothing matter. But exactly what I needed to do next to feel okay. There’s not a lot of time in life that you do that, that you kind of say, literally no other thing is going to step into these next few moments, just whatever I need to do next. And next. And that was really soothing for me, because I felt like I could create that safe feeling for myself. Yeah. And so in those early days, I texted, you know, other mom friends, and just like, had conversations when I could, and it was a hard time getting through it, for sure. But you as the person dealing with it, I think, go through so much grief and heartache. And then you start to pass that grief and heartache out.

Claire  32:05

What do you mean?

Jen Curran 

You have to tell people that you’re sick. And you know that that means that you are just handing someone a piece of grief, a piece of big bad hard news. Yeah. And also it’s not them. So you’re handing it to them without a way for them to have control over what happens. And it’s not like you have control over it either. But wow, you know, to tell someone, something so awful like that. And they there’s nothing they can do about it. So I was really aware of that, and aware of what it felt like to be handing that out to people. And it certainly took some of the burden away from me.

Claire 

I’m so glad you’re out here talking about it, though, does it, I was gonna ask you, you know what, what gives you hope? What gives you inspiration? What do you look forward to? And is this part of that?

Jen Curran

Yeah, you know, I really had to look at what it was about me that was like, this is the most terrible thing that could have ever possibly happened. And I have to broadcast it. I want to get on the horn. I tell everybody and have the cameras come to my lawn. But when I got diagnosed, I remember texting with a good friend of mine, and telling her I’m not like a pink ribbon wearing 5k Walker, I’m not going to like write a musical about this. I’m not going to have some sort of like, great new personality, where I become like the cancer champion. It’s just not me. And she said, Well, you don’t have to be that you just have to be you with cancer. You don’t have to be somebody else with cancer. And that helped me a lot because I realized like there are a billion ways to go through this. And the one thing that would make me really sad is if I was doing it all by myself, if it was some dark secret, and no one knew how many times I was being poked and prodded or, you know, no one knew the difficulties I was going through on a day-to-day basis.

Jen Curran  34:59

That would be hard me, and so I wanted to be kind of public with it, you know, on Twitter on Instagram, saying yes to podcasts and articles and all that kind of thing. You know, people think that I must be so benevolent, oh, you’re trying to help people, it’s truly selfish. Because it helps me to feel like it’s not the worst possible thing, you know. And I’m very grateful that it has helped other people, and that there are people who feel, you know, inspired or whatever you want to call it by my journey. And I hope that it’s inspiring, but who knows, if I die, it’s not going to be as inspiring as it would be if I survive. But let me say, though, I do I do want to say, because you had asked me this in the beginning, all by numbers are stable, and my doctor thinks I’m going to live to see great grandchildren. And things look good. And it’s not perfect. I have so many aches and pains. And I’m definitely in a world where I have cancer. But I think it’s as best as could be expected right now. And I feel really, really lucky that that’s the case modern medicine is incredible. Incredible.

Claire  36:15

I’m glad to hear all of that. Yeah. But I think that, you know, two, two and a half years, it’s, there’s still just a lot of that you’re processing a lot of grief, a lot of just shock that this is your life now. And but it sounds like you’re finding your ways to move forward to navigate it to find this new version of Jen.

Jen Curran 

I appreciate you saying that, because I am still processing it in so many ways. It feels like it just happened. And you know, I’m wearing the same thing every day. So that’s like, I’m still in that place. I’m definitely not putting on any nice shoes. You know, and I don’t think that’s pandemic related at all. So, yeah, I’m definitely still processing it. And for anybody who deals with this kind of thing, or is dealt with, you know, losing a loved one, or dealing with a terrible diagnosis or condition or life-threatening situation themselves. There’s no timeline that this needs to be on. And it can take however long you need it to take for it to be terrible.

Claire 

I agree. We try to rush people through these grief processes. And it doesn’t, it doesn’t serve anyone. So I’m grateful to you for talking about all of this. And I’m grateful to you for talking about it on social media to where everything often looks so great and perfect. Full of shit.

Jen Curran 

Yeah, exactly. Well, thank you. It’s such a pleasure to chat with you.

Claire 

Thank you, Jen. Thank you so much.

Jen Curran 

Yeah, of course.

Claire 

Okay, first, I love the reminder that there isn’t a timeline for getting through something like this. These things sometimes take longer than we think they will, or more importantly, longer than we want them to take. Especially when it feels like our world was turned upside down. And now we have to come to terms with this new version of it. They’re shocked to move through, anger to process, compassion to find one of my favorite spiritual teachers. Buddhist nun. Pema Chödrön says, things falling apart is a kind of testing, but also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem. But the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all this to happen. Room for grief for relief, from misery for joy. She goes on to say, letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure.

Claire 

Life is like that. We don’t know anything. We call something bad. We call it good. But really, we just don’t know. Those quotes from her book When Things Fall Apart, which I highly recommend. For this week’s lesson, I want you to take a look at your disappointments. Take a look at the ways in which this is not the life you thought you’d be living. And then, as Pema advises, let there be room for grief and disappointment. Those feelings are real, and they must be acknowledged. And now after you’ve acknowledged the grief and disappointment, try the rest of her advice. Let there be room for not knowing, what if this isn’t the end of the story, but really just the beginning. Or maybe it’s both the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. Who are we to say that this chapter is going to have a shitty ending we just don’t know. Mindfulness is a practice that comes in really handy for this kind of contemplation. Simply bringing your awareness to the present moment. Rather than spending a lot of time thinking about what things used look like or worrying about what the future will look like.

Claire  40:03

Bring your awareness back to this very moment. Maybe you’re sitting in your cars, you listen to this. Maybe you’re out on a walk or cooking dinner for your family. Bring these moments into focus. Feel the steering wheel and your hands or the ground beneath your feet, the smell of dinner on the stove. Just be right here, just for a moment. Here are a couple more recommendations. Jon Kabat Zinn has a beautiful book called Wherever you go, there you are, it’s a great introduction to mindfulness. I also like the mindfulness journal, daily practices, writing prompts and reflections for living in the present moment. We’ll put these in the show notes. I’m not asking you to stop mourning for the life you thought you were going to live. And I don’t want you to discard what comes next. But sometimes when the pain gets too big, or we don’t know where to put all this anger, or we can’t seem to let go of that disappointment just yet. We can at least take a breath and just be right here, right now. After all, the only thing that really exists. As always, thank you for listening. I hope you’ll tune in next week.

CREDITS

NEW DAY is a Lemonada Original. Jackie Danziger is our supervising producer, our associate producers Erianna Jiles, […] our engineer, music is by Hannis Brown. Executive producers are Stephanie Wittels Wachs and Jessica Cordova Kramer, Lily Cornell Silver and Claire Bidwell Smith. NEW DAY is produced in partnership with the wellbeing trust the Jed Foundation, and Education Development Center. Help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review. Follow us at Lemonada Media across all social platforms or find me at ClaireBidwellSmith.com Join our Facebook group to connect with me and fellow NEW DAY listeners. Hear advice on how to live with more purpose and satisfaction and suggest tools that have helped you. You can join at facebook.com/groups/newdaypod. You can also get bonus content and behind the scenes material by subscribing to Lemonada premium. You can subscribe right now and the apple podcast app by clicking on our podcast logo and then the subscribe button. Alright, that’s it for us. Thanks for listening. See you next week.