How To Love Your Face (from Slate's How To!)

How to Be a Better Human

TED and PRX

Self-improvement, Education

4.2 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 31 July 2023

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is an episode from a podcast we think you'll love. It's called How To! and it's from Slate Podcasts.

Earlier this year, our listener, Rell, nearly failed a promotion. Not because she was unprepared or unqualified, but because she didn’t maintain enough eye contact with the interviewers. Rell’s eye hasn’t been fully receiving information since she was born, a condition that’s outwardly visible and known colloquially as a “lazy eye.” It’s beginning to affect her self-confidence and is this “ugly thing [she] can’t let go of.”

On this episode of How To!, host Carvell Wallace brings on Sarah Ruhl, an award-winning playwright and author who wrote about her experience with Bell’s palsy in her recent book, "Smile: The Story of a Face." Sarah has some wonderful advice for letting go of your inner rage, making interactions with strangers less painful, and even finding people who light up your mirror neurons.

If you liked this episode you can find more of Slate’s How To! podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Ted Audio Collective.
0:02.0	Collective.
0:04.0	Hey everyone, Chris Duffy here.
0:09.0	We have something a little bit different for you today.
0:11.0	Instead of another episode of How to be a Better Human, we have a guest episode. It's an episode from one of my favorite podcasts.
0:17.9	How To from Slate. And each week on How To, co-host Carvel Wallace, find solutions to listeners problems with the help of some of the smartest people around.
0:26.4	In this episode that you're about to hear, a listener named Rel called in because she was self-conscious about having a so-called lazy eye. It's a condition that she was born with,
0:34.5	but Rell worries that it's holding her back at her job and in her personal life.
0:39.1	However, Carvel brings in the perfect expert to talk with Rall and to help her find the mirror that matters most.
0:46.2	Who is that expert? Well, you're going to have to keep listening if you want to find that out.
0:50.1	And for more life-changing conversations, you can subscribe to how to wherever you get your podcasts.
0:55.4	Now I'm going to turn it over to host Carvel Wallace.
0:59.4	Welcome to How-Toe, I'm Carver Wallace. I was thinking about my work lately and I've
1:07.3	realized that pretty much everything I write at least in my mind comes down to
1:12.4	love on some level like personal love
1:14.8	political love community love all these stories that I work on always come down
1:19.2	to people trying to figure out how to love what needs loving and how to get over the things that stand
1:26.6	in the way of loving and whether that's loving someone else or loving ourselves. It always ends up being about love, which is why I was
1:36.2	especially drawn to this week's question from our listener,
1:40.0	Rell. I'm just a great fan of the show and I listen to each episode even if it isn't directly relevant to my life and I thought I would write in with the thing that I'm struggling to kind of let go of and it's a condition with my eye that I was born with.
1:53.6	colloquially it's called a lazy eye and I just feel like it's that ugly thing I can't let
1:58.9	go of.
	...

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