I enjoy self-improvement podcasts and YouTube videos where someone starts a brand new bullet journal or like organizes their closet.

Hi, I'm Mario Kondo. Today I'm at Cosmos. I will be helping editors tidy their bugs. I love mess.

The reason I like them is because sure they're motivational, but they're also relatively simple accomplishments.

Immediate wins with immediate gratification, and the end product is pretty. But how do you make a self-improvement

podcast where all roads lead to nebulous despair and death with no immediate wins.

If anyone is qualified to do that, I think it's me.

I'm Caitlin Doi and this is Death in the Afternoon. I'm flying solo this episode so you can follow me on my months long journey to get my shit together.

This all started back in January,

when my friend Chanel Reynolds sent me an advanced copy of her book,

what matters most for a blurb.

Blurbing is when an author gives a quote about another

author's book like a stunning triumph, essential reading. I had known Chanel for

years. We spoke at South by Southwest together. She's a member of the Order of the Good Death, and she started a website called Get Your Shit Together.

Chanel's origin story of how she became an advocate is not fun.

It was a really beautiful summer night in July, and I was over at a friend's house for a barbecue with my five-year-old son and my husband was off on a bike ride, which he often did.

And a few hours later, I picked up my phone and noticed there were about a dozen or so messages and missed

calls from numbers I didn't recognize.

I quickly learned that there was an accident and that it was really bad.

And so I raced to the hospital after telling my son

he was going to have a surprise sleep over

at our friend's house, which he didn't seem like he was buying, but went along with it,

and got to the hospital and learned that his injuries were so severe that the paramedics

...