265. Megan Falley Knows What Love Is

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I walked through fire.

I came out the other side.

Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

Today is a special episode with just me

because I requested this to be just me,

because I had such an

emotional and special

and important experience reading and experiencing our guests' art.

So today our guest is Megan Falley, and she is a nationally ranked slam poet and the author of three full-length collections of poetry.

Most recently, her book, Drive Here and Devastate Me.

Excerpts from her memoir in progress have won several national prizes, and she runs an online writing workshop called Poems That Don't Suck, which has been heralded as a degree's worth of education in five short weeks.

You might remember Megan from our double date episode with Megan's partner, Andrea Gibson.

So go back and listen to that.

Megan, welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

Thank you for doing this with me today.

I could not be more excited.

Thank you for having me.

So I want to tell you one interesting thing that happened to me as I started reading your work.

Because as I've mentioned before, in my eating disorder recovery, I got to kind of a stuck place

where I wasn't making any more progress.

And my doctors prescribed to me your partner's poetry, Andrew Gebs's poetry, like as medicine.

And it worked, okay?

But I didn't know your work.

And so I started reading you to prepare for our double date because that's the kind of nerd I am.

Okay.

And this really interesting thing happened, which I wasn't sure I was going to even talk about today.

But

I, as I read, I fell more in love with your writing and with the themes that you explore.

I felt such a connection to you and to your experiences in life, which we'll talk about later.

But I also felt this feeling of surprise

that you were so good.

And then I kept thinking, I was talking to Abby about it, like, why am I so surprised?

And Megan,

I think

that I have

internalized

femme bias.

And I'm humiliated, a feminist, a femme queer person.

Like I'm embarrassed to explore this part of myself.

But I think I looked at you and Andrea and thought,

Andrea will be the badass one.

Little did you know.

Don't you think?

And it's so interesting because it drives me nuts when people do that to me.

Like people will come see me speak on stages and afterwards say to me,

God, I can't believe.

how smart you are.

I can't believe you're such a good speaker.

And I'm like, but I do this for a living.

You came to see me.

Do you think that that's a thing that we internalize this idea that the femme will somehow be less powerful?

100%.

And I feel like I've encountered that.

And I don't know if it's,

yeah, femininity, like it's interesting how you hold it in a queer relationship as well, like the patriarchal dynamic.

But I said to a friend yesterday about this interview and podcast, I was like, I'm so excited.

I'm going to do great.

And she she was like, I love your confidence.

And my initial thought was

that I didn't actually take that as a compliment.

Because

if Arnold Schwarzenegger was about to go into a competition or something and say, you know,

I'm going to win this or whatever, nobody would say to him, I love your confidence.

They'd say, hell yeah, you are.

And I exactly have felt that and I'm sure have done it myself.

Yeah.

But yes, that's real.

It's almost like you're so photogenic.

I'm like, no, I'm beautiful.

Yes.

Or you post a picture of yourself in a bathing suit and a bunch of people say, you're so brave.

Oh my goodness.

And you're like, whoa.

I've gotten that a lot when I would get on stage.

Like, you're so brave to do that.

And I'm like, does that mean it would scare you to be me in public?

I, it's fascinating.

It makes so I'm not offended.

Thank you for sharing that.

It's so interesting to me because I think it's a self-hatred thing.

That's all it can be.

Like the bias we have against other women is really like, I don't believe in myself either.

So it's so exciting for me to see it and get it out of me because I don't feel guilty about it because I'm conditioned to feel that way.

So it's cool to notice it because that's a process of getting rid of it.

Absolutely.

I think it's out of me a lot because I almost never see a man.

I know.

Our community is just, all women are so queer.

And so,

yeah, I get really strange when I see a man.

I think it's almost the opposite of me.

I assume men don't have a lot of the intelligent things to say at this point.

And I almost have to unlearn that too.

I get quite surprised.

And then I might do a thing where

if

a man does like a simple gesture that a woman might do every day, I will be like, oh my God, he's incredible.

You know?

We do that with our kids.

Like our boy will pick up the dishes and we're like, oh, he's such a good boy.

But our girls are

doing it reflexively.

It's in all of us.

It's in all of us.

Glenn, and I literally do it with my boy dog.

And I'm not kidding.

Give me an example.

First of all, we didn't know if we would love a boy dog.

He kind of came into our life and he's absolutely our favorite.

And we just can't stop talking about how good looking he is all the time and just what a sweet little muffin he is.

It's so wild.

The man worship in all of us is so intense.

And then it's this double-edged sword of worship, but also it's interesting what we're both saying.

It's like we either put them above,

they're above human, or we put them so below we think, oh, you can't have a conversation.

I am really trying.

I really want to in this next part of my life, undo all of that shit and like try to approach everybody as if they are just human, not super or sub.

Just like, yes.

On our double date, we, you said something that I'm still thinking about, which is that you have, and I'm going to

say it wrong, you fix it, but you struggled a lot with the way your body looks and feels your whole life.

And then you were talking to your partner, Andrea, after they got a really serious cancer diagnosis, and they were struggling with, you know, sickness in their body.

And they said, I just so badly want to have a body.

And that that kind of rearranged some things for you in terms of worrying about the shape of your body.

Can you talk to us about where this whole body thing started for you?

Maybe

talk to us a little bit about the brochure you found on your kitchen table when you were a little one.

Yeah.

So the first time I became aware of my body as

different in any way, or, and I do think it's a really poignant moment to ask anyone: when was the first time you were made aware of your body or made to feel ashamed of your body?

So much happens from that moment.

And I was nine years old.

I can remember exactly what I was wearing, exactly where I was standing.

And my

uncle said, you've got a real pot belly over there, don't you?

And I was nine years old.

And

I looked to my mom, who then sort of rushed me upstairs to safety away from this comment.

And sometimes I wonder now what it might have been like if she was like, oh, whatever.

You know, it was almost when it, like when a child falls and they look to their parent to confirm the damage, I think my mom's reaction

amplified it in my mind.

And since then,

it was maybe sort of a magnet, but I was like bullied for my weight as a kid and throughout my adulthood.

And I was 11, I think.

Yes, 11.

And I went downstairs one night.

My mom was out at work and she'd left a brochure for a co-ed children's weight loss camp on her kitchen table.

And I'd heard of the camp before and knew what it was and was completely mortified and so

angry with my mom.

It felt like my own mom had stuck a kick-me sign on my back.

And it came with a VHS tape.

And for whatever reason, I took it into our den and I put the video in the VCR.

And I watched it.

And I was crying the whole time and just having all my little 11-year-old feelings.

And

I was also so

much wanting to be an after picture that when my mom came home, I told her that I wanted to go.

And I went that summer.

I turned 12 there.

I went for five consecutive summers till I turned 16.

And they were always

my choice.

And I think I held a lot of anger with my mom for that place,

for what it

solidified in my psyche about,

you know, what my

problem was.

as a child.

I hadn't gotten my period yet, like I was a baby.

But when I think about it now, my mom was

one of the most loving moms ever.

Andrea says, my biggest problem is that I was loved too much.

And I think what was really happening is that it wasn't necessarily that she wanted me to be thin in the way

you might see, like, I don't know, the sort of militant mothers who are really in control of their their daughters' bodies, and that feels like a reflection of them.

I think my mom so badly wanted me to be happy.

And she saw how much teasing I was enduring, how

many times I cried to her about this.

And,

you know, that was her solution.

She was absolutely doing the best she could to give me the most.

love that she could.

So I can hold all of that now.

All of that now.

It's such an interesting,

there's so many of us that are looking back at how our moms, and by the way, we always blame the moms, right?

The dads always somehow get off the hook.

But

how they dealt with our weight stuff.

And I know I have had so much anger about it.

But

it's like it was such a different consciousness then.

And they looked at us and just wanted us to be safe too.

Like they knew, they felt like it wasn't safe to be a fat kid or a fat woman.

And so they did everything they could to protect us, I guess, from it.

It's beautiful that you can hold both of those things.

I think the narrative was

for my mom that

if you were fat, it was almost a fat woman, you didn't get to choose.

You didn't get to choose the partner.

You didn't get to choose the job.

Like, you didn't get to choose the life that you wanted.

You just sort of sat around waiting to be chosen.

Tell us about your mom.

Well, my mom is incredible.

And

she's the sort of mom where everybody kind of wishes she'd been their mom.

And she makes beauty everywhere she goes.

We didn't grow up with a ton of money, and she really wanted a Persian rug.

And so she painted a rug onto our hardwood floor.

And my favorite part would be, you know, if some

workers came to fix a furnace or something, I'd watch them actively avoid getting their work boots on the rug because that's how realistic it looked.

And

she is an incredible person who I think has grown with me through this process.

Like we can have the conversations about the past and she can,

I think, honor that she was doing the best that she could

and also acknowledge why

that

would have been damaging.

Yeah.

I also, she grew up so poor that her parents owned a candy store in Brooklyn and she lived in the back of it.

She grew up there.

And I think she

maybe had some sort of princess fantasy of being saved from that by a man.

And so I think for her, beauty was a survival mechanism.

Like it was

life or death that, you know, that she would be swept up and taken care of.

And beauty was interlocked with that 100%.

We judge people now for thinking that way, but there's also the element of they weren't wrong.

Yeah.

She 100% she wasn't wrong.

And I think that's a really good point:

we're trying to operate outside of the culture while still in the culture.

Yes.

So, how can you successfully do that?

You know, how can you be anti-capitalism in a capitalist country?

All of it.

How can you fight patriarchy within the patriarchy and still

survive it?

It's It's more complex.

But I think my

work in the world right now is wanting so badly.

I think we've come into a time where we're seeing things so black and white and we're becoming fundamentalists of what is right and what is wrong.

And even the most

liberal people are capable of becoming fundamentalists in this way.

And camp for me,

it,

you know, Andrea compared it to a conversion camp.

And I thought that I, at the same time, I was like, that is brilliant.

And that's not true.

And they really argued with me about it.

And I think what it came to is,

while I don't think that children's weight loss camps should exist, I don't think they are good.

Think that they promote, at least in me, it promoted this idea of total distrust of my body that and out of controlness, that I needed to live somewhere where there was a gate and counselors and any so-called temptation was just not there.

And I needed to be forced into exercise and forced into eating a certain way.

And it built a distrust of my body and my intuition in a lot of ways.

And at the same time,

those were the best summers of my life.

The girls that I met, it felt like we were all intimate in knowing each other's wounds.

That understanding was just there.

And I think because the acknowledgement was that we were all fat and that common denominator was

settled.

And so we weren't the fat kid in any circumstance.

And so we were allowed to be other things.

And I think I found so much of who I was outside of my body there as well.

And how do you hold all of that?

Being like, I want to burn these camps down.

And would I have survived without them?

Wow.

Yeah.

It is interesting thinking of it as a conversion camp because

it is like

sexuality is innate in us

and an energy, an appetite in us.

It's human.

And

both those things feel dangerous in our culture, our sexuality being free, a woman's appetite being free.

And so it's the place you go to shut down

your humanness.

And both, I mean, I feel like my eating disorder is tied to my queerness in so many ways.

And I haven't undone it.

I don't even know what I'm saying.

I just know that that's true, that they're both things that were shut down really early.

And that when you don't trust your sexuality

in your body, you don't trust your appetite in your body.

You just shut your whole body down.

I relate to that so much, Glennon, because I didn't know I was queer until I was literally in a woman's bed, kind of by happenstance, making out.

And

it was the night before my college graduation.

And I went to a really like liberal women.

There were a lot of queer women around.

And I would have had a better experience had I had figured this out, you know, at least a year before.

But I think what happens is I,

when you're told so much that your body is wrong,

I totally disassociated from my body.

I would have preferred to be a floating brain.

Yes.

And so I thought of attraction as, okay, well, who's stereotypically attractive?

Who does the media tell me to lust after?

Yes.

And my body wasn't.

Oh, I can look back now and see that when I

followed this girl who was a Jehovah's Witness to do Bible study with her, that

I had a big old crush.

Like I can look back and see all these nods to being 15 and or being queer young, but because I was so in my head,

it did not occur to me.

And

I also

thought

that

to be like a lesbian would mean to be masculine.

And that was all that I had seen at the time, or like sports, which certainly wasn't going to happen.

You might have to camp.

There were no gay Disney princesses.

And I wanted to be a Disney princess.

I mean, I think

what I really wanted from the the Disney Princess idea was to be loved at first sight.

And I have listened to you talk about objectifying yourself.

And

oddly, this is the first interview or anything on a podcast I've ever done where I hid my self-view because that resonated with me so much of you saying that I was like, I just want to be completely present and with Glennon and not worry about how my hair is looking or whatever.

Wow.

Yeah.

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Megan,

when I'm doing interviews, I'm looking at myself a lot of the time.

Yeah, same.

I'm like, do I look like I'm responding?

It's like my, do I, Abby, do I look comfortable?

Like, what the fuck?

Yeah.

And it just creates another layer where you can't be fully present.

You have this other awareness of how am I appearing.

And we already have so much of that, but just being able to see your own face, imagine being in a conversation and just holding a mirror.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's quite similar.

So this is actually, this feels really good to just look at you.

Tell me about

how you learned that men love women and women love men from your parents' marriage.

I didn't learn a ton about love from my parents' marriage because I had never even seen them kiss.

They divorced when I was 11 or 12.

and

my mom would always sort of say the phrase like

women marry men hoping they'll change, men marry women hoping they'll stay the same.

And

maybe that's true.

I don't know.

But I think what I really learned about love through my parents was that they stayed friends after their divorce.

And my dad would come over for brunch on Father's Days and me and my mom would maybe cook it.

I was just in Florida visiting my father, and my mom flew out as well.

And the three of us went out for dinner, just us.

And

that was so important to me that they were able to do that.

I'd had friends whose parents were divorced, and they could not be anywhere near it, couldn't be in a football stadium together.

And as a kid,

I think I was worried about what it meant that

the love that had made me died.

I just like that stuck with me as a kid.

And

one of the things I fell in love with Andrea about is Andrea's entire community is their ex-girlfriends.

The house that I live in, they bought with their ex-girlfriend.

Their manager, ex-girlfriend.

Their first girlfriend ever comes to stay with us a couple of times a year.

My entire community of support throughout Andrea's diagnosis has been like five or six exes.

Wow.

And I think in Andrea, I saw that this inherent knowledge of love not necessarily leaving us, but changing shape.

And

I think that is what really drew me to Andrea.

Wow.

So you think of your parents.

The love that made you did not die.

It changed shape.

Yeah.

Ooh, that's beautiful.

What are you thinking about now in terms of bodies and yourself?

I know you're working on a memoir and I can't wait.

I just want you to hurry up about it.

I'm just interested in all of it because of your ability to hold two different things so beautifully because I think so many of us, we just are in this idea of presentism where it's like, I'm judging everything in the past based on right now

and that's why we're so mad at our moms for doing it wrong because you're also talking a lot about bodies fat camp do you ever feel scared because you're thin presenting now i think about that a lot i talk so much about my eating disorder and eating and i'm a thin person so i have you know tons of thin privilege and all of that how do you balance all of that and what are you thinking about now like this month when it comes to your body?

So, my body is completely different right now than it's ever been.

Through Andrea's diagnosis, I lost about 60 pounds.

And a lot of people

have,

I think, wondered if what was happening for me was like I was so depressed or something I couldn't eat

when actually the opposite was true.

You know, Andrea was bald and they had no eyebrows and no eyelashes.

And what's true is I still found them so beautiful.

And we look back at photos now, now that their hair is back, and we'll be like, whoa, like this is a little alarming.

But at the time, as I was with them every day, I never felt that.

I just felt their beauty always.

But when somebody around you, so close to you, is facing their mortality, you can't help but to do that for yourself.

And when Andrea said they just wanted to have a body, they didn't care what it looked like.

I thought,

I want to have a body.

I want my body here.

Does that mean that I love my body?

And then what would it actually look like for me to act accordingly?

And

for the first time in my life,

I had been

so all or nothing that I would either be on like this militant juice cleanse and restricting everything, or I would become a human garbage disposal, and every single, like every Oreo Dorito in the house had to be gone so that the next day I could be good again.

And it was this horrible cycle.

And what I realized was

sometimes to love myself meant I would eat a healthy, nutritious meal.

And sometimes to love myself meant I would have birthday cake.

And I think once I decided not to like take anything off the table and

operate as if I loved myself,

my body really changed after that.

And I will tell you, I even though my brain was so toxed with,

you know, every New Year's resolution would be like, lose weight, whatever.

I never actually thought that it would happen.

And so

I was writing this memoir about my body,

never thinking of the plot twist that I would end up losing this weight, or that this thing would happen to my partner's body, or there would just be this whole shift.

And I did feel scared initially that

the

audience I'd originally connected to might feel abandoned in some way.

My like poetry career sort of sparked with this poem I had called Fat Girl.

And I'd been called Fat Girl in a derogatory way my entire life.

And I wrote this poem and it was reclaiming it.

And I got to stand in the spotlight because I did performance poetry and receive applause for it.

And it felt like, oh, this is,

I'm getting something good out of this.

And

I was in Poetry Slam, which is a competitive art form where you actually get scored on your poems, which I have so much to say about that as well.

Assigning numerical value to art.

And I mean, it was an incredible art form, but I think it also really had its downsides.

But I would read Fat Girl and get tens and the instant gratification of

finally being like rewarded for this thing that you were ashamed of.

And then I had this experience.

So

I think it's important to note: yes, I wouldn't read the fat girl poem now,

but when I was 60 pounds heavier, I was reading it all the time.

And a video of me reading it reached half a million views.

And I went online one day

and saw that

it was being reposted by

body-positive feminist activists in my community

who were saying,

this girl girl is not fat enough to write this she is co-opting this story

and

this isn't hers to speak on

and then they were making attacks on my body

body positive feminists and they were writing i mean i won't forget it it it stuck with me for so long you're not fat you just have a shark body

whatever that means I took to mean shapeless.

I don't know.

And you're not fat just because you don't have a chin.

And I was developing all of these new

insecurities now.

They were making fun of my hair

on these websites, and women that I really admired.

And I understood it in a way because they were much larger than me.

And when I have like a friend who is much thinner than me, call herself fat, I wanted to murder her.

So I could understand that.

And even in that body, I still had

thin privilege technically.

Like I could

sit on an airplane without being accosted by the person next to me, or

I could, for the most part, at least as an adult, go to the doctor and not have it be just about my weight.

And it was a real thing

that they felt.

But I think that the way that they went about it to attack another woman was

heart.

And

so, my

thought was like, okay, so I've been called a fat girl my whole life.

I finally reclaimed it.

Now I'm not allowed to speak about it.

And then I'm writing this memoir and then telling the story of my body.

Do I have to wait for the arithmetic of my body to be correct for me to be able to tell my story?

No.

The good news is there's no correct.

You'll never win.

So,

well, it was so interesting because for me,

there was a point where I loved the body positivity movement.

I thought it was just so incredible.

And I was, my Instagram feed and algorithms were diversifying with bodies, and I could see myself in like the lexicon of beauty.

I could see myself represented and considered beautiful.

And

I still had 20 years of this trauma of

something telling me the opposite of that.

And I would see people post:

anytime that you

intentionally lose weight, you are succumbing to the patriarchy.

Or

there would just be these messages where it started to feel to me

body positivity was equally as pressurized as you should lose weight.

And both made me feel like a failure as a female.

Yeah.

It is very much like that idea that

rebellion of a thing, the opposite of a thing, is just as much a cage as obedience to the thing.

It's like

neither our freedom.

If we have an ideology or a dogma,

And then we replace it with the opposite ideology and a dogma, we still have an ideology and a dogma, which still creates people who are in and out.

And so what does the third way with bodies look like?

Like, what is the freedom of it all?

I do feel

like what we can say is that

the culture that was manifested in your family that put that brochure on your table.

that convinced you you had a problem,

that there was something wrong with you that needed to be fixed.

And that thing was like the thing in your body that wanted food, that was appetite.

When you were cut off from that, you were cut off from all the rest of the wisdom in your body.

You didn't know about your queerness, you didn't believe your appetite.

You

got yourself into some dangerous relationships later.

Talk to us about

ACE.

Yes, ACE,

which is a good pseudonym, a little card up the sleeve.

I was 21

when that happened, and I dated a man who was quite a bit older than me

and was in a position of power over me.

And I think

he was

so gregarious.

and so out loud in his love and celebration of me in the beginning.

And I actually was dating somebody at the time who was really quiet in his love for me, but really good

and a really loving

partner.

And I

got swept up in this ace character, I think, because of

the part of me that needed to be celebrated so bad in such a gigantic way.

And that,

yeah, I mean, that ended.

I did get a restraining order against him.

I look back and think 21, I think I was a kid.

And

I do think that came from this need to just be loved in this gigantic way.

I mean, he would pick me up when he saw me and spin me around.

And so, even that, to feel light, to feel like it could be carried, I think it all connects.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do you think that your separation from the messages in your body

allowed you to

be

influenced above your own inner wisdom by an abusive man?

Yes,

I do.

And, you know, what's interesting is I was already in a way using food to cut off the wisdom I had as well, even as a kid.

Like I was eating to not have feelings.

Yeah.

I was in a fugue state.

Yeah.

That is, it's, it's cutting off.

You're right.

That's what it is.

It's cutting off your inner wisdom, yourself cutting it off.

Yeah.

And I heard you speak in one of the podcasts about

drinking, I think, as a way of

not

knowing something that you know know or trying not to know something you know.

And that resonated with me so much.

And I'm still trying to figure out what exactly I didn't want to know.

I mean, my parents were divorcing.

My brother was getting into drugs.

I don't fully even know what was at the root of it, but I can look back and say, I think I was making myself so full that all I could feel was, I'm so full, I'm going to explode.

So I didn't have to feel whatever else the thing was.

Yep.

So, yes, I can say culture 100% cut me off, but I come from a line of addicts to different things, to gambling, to heroin, to alcohol, to sex.

And I think

that was

my

way of

finding some kind of oblivion of trying to survive.

You have some poems and the way you arrange them in your books,

it's so what you do, which is the end both of things.

So you will write one thing from one perspective, like about your dad, and then the next poem will be the other perspective.

It's so beautiful.

When you got that restraining order

from Ace,

it felt so important

to me through your writing of it.

It felt like the whole world was telling you to not do that, that it was, you should protect him

by not

doing something so dramatic.

And you have this

poem where you talk about all the things that people said.

If you, if you hadn't have done it, if you hadn't have done it, if you hadn't have done it, it would have been easier for him.

It would have been easier on your whole family.

It would have been easier.

And then at the end, you said, but there would have been more of us.

Was that restraining order an important reclamation of you, of your own protection of self and listening to yourself?

It felt like it in your writing.

What's true about Ace is that I wasn't the only woman he had harmed or been harming.

And

I

felt in that courtroom like I was many women.

And I knew that

it would end up being a public thing that I had this restraining order, and

almost as if I was

taking one for the team, I guess,

in that it was

could no longer be speculative about was he harming people or not.

It was

decided.

Not that I put that much complete trust in the legal system, but it was decided in this way.

And

yeah, it's

really interesting because

as I,

I, he,

there are are things that he's done that aren't mine to forgive

but what's true is I can look back and I'm so glad that it came across that I was looking at the world then through multiple lenses because I think I consider myself a recovering slam poet

and because it's an incredible art form.

It's so exciting.

You'd pack the house with

thousands of people coming to hear poetry.

It's just completely electric and magnetic.

But what we eventually saw happening was that the judges, who were randomly selected audience members, could not hear a poem about trauma and score it poorly, even if it was bad, because the audience members would say, You're a misogynist, you're whatever.

So eventually, what became rewarded

was your trauma and how hurt you were.

And

I think we then started writing poems that that was what we uplifted and that was what we valued in each other.

And so there was a way that the restraining order was hard.

And then I got power from it.

And since moving into

writing prose, I

mean, you can only perform for three minutes and 10 seconds with a slam poem.

So that's the amount of time that the judges have to make a decision.

So of course things are going to be,

you know, make a snap judgment.

Here it is.

And writing prose has been a miracle for me because the nuance that I've always wanted to explore, I have so much more time and space to do that.

I say, you sit with the whole story.

And even my father, so yeah, my father delivered the restraining order and he shook Ace's when he did.

I'll never forget that.

I'll never forget that part of your poem.

I'm so glad you brought that up.

He delivered the restraining order to Ace.

And

yeah, he brought it to his apartment.

And I don't know why he told me this, but he shook his hand.

Like, it was like, don't do this anymore.

And then it ended on a handshake and it baffled me.

But

this is sort of an interesting story.

I hope you'll stay here with me.

Forever.

Take your time.

I did a Zoom show during the beginning of the pandemic,

and my dad was in attendance.

And I, for the first time, read

prose about Fat Camp and what I'd experienced, and how 10

years later, my mom had finally paid it off.

I think I wrote, she paid it off in dollars, and I paid it off in skin.

And I was 50 pounds heavier than when I'd left camp when I was 16.

And I, her coming in, like waving the check around, that she finally paid it off.

It just, it just crushed me.

And so I read that story and I read it on Zoom.

And my dad, you know, raises his digital hand and he comes onto the camera and full Brooklyn accent, no care of where the angle of the camera is.

He's like eating a sandwich.

And he comes on and he's like, I got two stories for everyone about Megan.

When one is she came home from camp and how good she did, how well she did at that camp.

And I brought my beautiful daughter some new outfits.

And it was just like this,

I swear I could hear 100 people cringe on mute.

And it.

It was this moment of like, oh,

you don't get it.

It was almost amazing to have all these Zoom faces as witnesses.

And then

I was totally stunned and saying, you know, dad, I don't think any kids should have gone there.

I don't think that was a good place for kids to go.

And

he gets like a moment of flustered.

And then he just goes, What can I say?

Maggie, that's what he calls me.

Maggie, I'm so proud of you.

I can't wait to go to Andrea's Zoom show

next week.

And what can I say?

You're the love of my life.

And

I'm holding all of that.

And I feel like in a slam poem, you just get the first part.

You just get, my dad doesn't get it.

And you don't get the second part of the complete lack of homophobia of.

I can't wait to see Andrea's show and all of his love for me.

And that there's photos of me and Andrea kissing on his fridge.

And

I just am so much more interested in holding the nuance and the complexity of people.

And even I'm trying to do that as I write Ace.

And sometimes it's hard, but I'm trying to find that too.

And isn't it more heartbreaking when you have it all rather than just one side?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Um

what's going on, Glenn?

I just

I think I struggle with this.

I'm really,

it's like I

do think that I tend to think in black and white more and I am trying to figure out

I feel like I'm in this weird place where I'm always, I'm looking back on my parents and my family and I am thinking you don't get it, like the first part you just said.

And like I want to prove all the ways that they didn't get it.

But there's all of the other stuff too.

There's the pictures on the refrigerators and the you're the love of my life also, just as much, just as true.

Yeah.

Um, and I just think that right now,

it's almost like a cultural.

I wrote an untamed, you make your island and you don't let anything on it, no matter who's bringing the shit to you.

And I still believe that, but it's like this next part of my life, it's like I had no boundaries and then I over-boundried myself.

And now I'm like,

there's no formula for any of it.

It's not like right or wrong, or good or bad, or

there's no way to protect yourself from love and fear.

It's like

just there's no one way to heal.

Yeah.

I think that's crucial.

There's almost arguments about what healing looks like.

Healing is,

you know, weighing whatever you weigh and being in a bikini.

And then you have other people saying you're glorifying obesity.

And then you have other, and then say that same person decides to lose weight.

Then they're like a toxic person.

And

we've agreed that one size doesn't fit all with clothing.

And And then we're applying like ideologies onto each other as if there's one size or one way

to do it.

And it's bonkers to me.

Yeah.

I just love your and both of everything

of healing too, of like, I want to be able to say what was fucked up

and I want to keep my people close.

And the picture of that for me is you telling the truth on a Zoom with your dad with a sandwich.

Like,

yeah, I don't get it, Maggie, but you're the love of my life.

Shit.

You know, we'll just have to take the rest of this offline.

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Can you talk to me about how you said that you said when you look like I do, you don't so much come out of the closet as you do a revolving door?

Can you talk to me about what you meant by that?

I mean, I know what you meant by that, but just

yes, I wear Andrea's name on my neck in a necklace.

And

if I go to a barista or something,

they think it's my name.

And it's interesting.

Whereas like, I can't imagine like Andrea would go in with a necklace like that that said Megan and somebody would think that they were wearing their own name.

And

basically, just the assumption because I'm feminine presenting that I am straight.

And I'm constantly having to

contradict that with people, just wherever on planes, it's always assumed

like a he pronoun.

If I say my partner, even my partner, which to me is such a gay word,

it's always, oh, like, what does he do?

and it's a constant process.

You don't come out once, you come out little ways all of the time to everyone.

And it makes you feel left out.

When this is, you said, when I see two women holding hands and I'm alone, I just start smiling at them, wishing for some kind of secret code or handshake so I can say, yes, me too.

But I'm just a weird smiling homicidal freak unless I have a butch there to validate me.

I feel that all the time.

I am the smiling homicidal freak, hoping that the two gays holding hands will somehow recognize me as one of them.

Unless Abby is there, I'm sure.

And then, and isn't that interesting to then be validated as who you are with a more masculine presence?

Yeah.

Always.

Always.

Full circle.

Always.

Full circle.

I just want to read this

that you said, and you can comment on it or not.

I don't think you even need to.

When I pass for straight, I feel like I fail something else, myself mostly.

But what keeps me invisible often keeps me safe.

Though there are streets where I'm not sure if I'm safer with hair long enough to pull, or if a shaved head would make them want to prove my woman to me, does the beast prefer girl flesh or queer?

Okay,

so I'm going to say this and you probably don't.

I think I have more internalized shit than you do.

But sometimes when I'm at a place

and like say I'm at like a dry, the dry cleaner or something

and I go to the thing and then the man behind the

desk says, are these your husband's shirts?

And there's something inside of me that wants to correct him, but I don't

because I don't want to like ruin the like

good girl moment that we're having.

I don't know how to explain it.

I don't want to like

rock the boat of that moment too much.

Do you know what I'm talking about at all?

Or do you correct everyone all the time?

I don't correct.

everyone all of the time.

And I think if I'm in a situation where it I might feel unsafe not to, I won't correct somebody.

I usually go for the route that's going to entertain me most.

And

so I think if I were at the dry cleaner and someone said, are these your husband shirts?

I'd be like, they're my wife's.

Like that to me, it wouldn't necessarily be rocking the boat.

But I will say, I also think

I

grew up where there's just more safety, not 100%, but there's queerness is more in our vernacular and like there's more acceptance.

And so maybe there's a freedom in doing what would entertain me the most that I sort of grew up with that.

But I mean, the other night

we had an Instacart shopper come and Andrea was walking around the house just in their underwear.

and band-aids over their nipples, which is what they use for a bra.

And they had their laptop open.

And then I'm I'm in another room, and I just hear Andrea screaming.

And I'm like, what's wrong?

What's wrong?

And they're like, the Instacart shopper just saw me naked.

And then the Instacart shopper writes and it was like, I'm sorry.

I came to the door.

I gave a knock because I didn't want

anyone to be freaked out, but I think I startled your boy.

I'm like,

so you think that Andrea is my nine-year-old son?

That was your interpretation.

And so to me, the most entertaining thing that I could do would I responded to him and wrote, oh, that's okay.

He's easily startled.

And so I think it depends each time.

But mostly I do what will make myself or Andrea laugh the most, if it feels safe enough to do.

Oh my God, that's so awesome.

Can you tell us the story of...

rediscovering your old friend from Fat Camp?

Yes.

So I don't like porn and I was trying to figure out why I don't like porn.

I thought there was something wrong with me to not like it.

And so my best friend, Olivia, and I were watching this like queer feminist porn.

I'm like, maybe I just don't like like the straight porn.

So we're on this site and all of a sudden I see in a thumbnail, I was like, oh my God, I know her.

And I double clicked and there was one of my first friends from Fat Camp, my first bunk mates.

And she was in this like really involved porn scene.

It was like watching her have sex and she was

bigger, you know, she was large and she was just enjoying her body so much and in like this

wild sexual dynamic.

And I was so moved that I felt like she'd found a freedom in her body that maybe not all of us had found yet.

It's so funny because when I and I figured out, okay, the reasons I don't like porn.

First of all, I've been a romantic since I was three.

And I realized that what I wanted to type into the search bar was love.

That's what I wanted to see.

And also that

as a person who is disembodied, as a

I mean, a queer woman who, I mean, I consider myself pretty gay.

I know I've had a lot of talk about a lot of boyfriends, but I feel pretty solid in my gayness now.

And when I had sex with men, so much of that was outside of my body that I felt like I was looking in on a performance.

And so that's what porn had felt like to me too.

And

just another way that the disembodiment manifested.

to not enjoy my body sexually, but to feel like,

you know, how does this look or how is somebody else experiencing my body?

Yeah.

And then when you saw this girl woman now,

you said everybody would say, when you'd sit, when you'd tell people, I saw my friend from Fat Camp on porn.

They would say, what does she look like now?

Knowing that what they meant was, is she still fat?

Right.

But you wrote,

yeah, what does she look like now?

Great.

Larger than this starving culture.

What a feat this is.

Here she is taking space like a comet.

Here she has roared an internet-wide fuck no.

She is my favorite after picture.

She looks free in a way that I envy, the way sometimes I look at birds.

What did you mean?

Well, the line break in that part, she looks free in the way that I envy and the way that I sometimes look.

I think I wanted my reader to think she looks the way that I look, but no, it's not the way that I look.

It's the way I look at the freedom of something else.

Oh.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

What is love to you?

There's this video.

that I saw many, many years ago.

And I don't even think it's an English-speaking child.

I think it was captioned.

And this little boy is

realizing for the first time that the meat that he's eating comes from animals.

And he's talking with his mother about it.

And he starts crying and he can't believe it.

And then the mother starts crying.

And he says,

Why are you crying?

And he says, Am I doing something beautiful?

And

I don't even know that I can put words to it, but that to me is what love is.

When somebody is

the filter of like, how can we walk through this world and like not stop and look at every tree and be just completely amazed?

We're desensitized to what's incredible.

And I feel like love is when

that

partition is sort of split open or whatever it is, and we're just moved by the beauty, the immensity, and it we're sort of shocked into presence.

I think that is it.

I mean, it's so many things, right?

Bell Hook said our culture's problem is that we don't have a common definition for love.

I think you're just wonderful, and I'm so happy to know you.

I'm just happy to know that you exist, and I can't wait for your memoir.

And I think that your

insistence on the whole story

is kind of

world-changing

and a shift that we really desperately need.

So thanks for sticking to the tension of that.

It's something that's missing and we need.

And thanks for being so present with me for this last hour.

I've loved every minute.

Thank you, Glennon.

Thank you for being so femme beautiful and so intelligent.

And I just want to make sure that everybody knows.

Okay, I have right here.

These are the books that you must go get and just keep on your coffee table all the time as medicine.

Drive Here and Devastate Me.

This is the most recent.

Is that correct?

Yeah, that's my favorite.

Drive Here and Devastate Me, Unreal.

Redhead and the Slaughter King, Unreal.

And After the Witch Hunt, just so gorgeous, Megan.

Your writing kills me and brings me back to life.

Thank you.

I love you.

You did amazing.

You were right to be so confident and brave.

So photogenic, too.

Yes, yes, yes.

By Pod Squad, we'll see you next time.

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I give you Tish Melton and Brandi Carlisle.

I walked through fire,

I came out the other side.

I chased desire,

I made sure

I got what's mine.

And I continue

to believe

that I'm the one for me.

And because I'm mine,

I walk the line.

Cause we're adventurers and heartbreaks are map.

A final destination

we lack.

We've stopped asking directions

to places

they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives bring,

we can do a heartbeat.

I hit rock bottom, it felt like a brand new start.

I'm not the

problem,

sometimes things fall apart.

And I continue to believe

the best

people are free.

And it took some time.

But I'm finally fine.

Cause we're adventurers, and heartbreaks are map.

A final destination

we lack.

We've stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives bring,

we can do a hard

thing.

Adventures and heartbreaks on that.

We might get lost, but we're okay with that.

We've stopped asking directions

in some places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives bring,

we can do hard things.

Yeah, we can do hard things.

Yeah, we

can do hard

things.