Welcome to Dear Prudence, I'm your Prudence,

Janay Desmond Harris.

Today we'll be offering advice to a friend who hates that they always have to initiate plans, a stepmother

dreading the idea of her entitled stepdaughter is moving in, and someone who lost a bunch of

weight and is obsessed with using that fact to make the other moms at school feel really terrible.

Here to help me out is Anna Sale. She's the author of Let's Talk About Hard Things and

the host of Death, Sex and Money,

the award-winning podcast about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more.

In case you haven't already heard, you probably have, it recently found a new home here at Slate.

Welcome to the show and welcome to Slate Anna.

I'm so glad to be here with you on both fronts.

We're so delighted to have you. I've been wanting to hear your advice for so long and we'll start out with asking you for one piece of unsolicited advice.

I think it's always good advice to take a beat. I think I've learned this from making

podcasts and it's helped me in my life that if you just slow it down a minute it

helps everything. So like something happens

someone pisses you off you want to send an email just don't. Yeah just take a

beat you can still send the email yeah but often you know for me the first

reaction that I come up with is often like coming out of sort of old muscle memory

and reactiveness and if I take a beat then I can see like oh how much of this is about the

actual situation and how much of this am I like bringing a whole truckload of old scars.

I love that idea.

I mean, of course, if you aren't as mature

...