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You're listening to Insights at the Edge.

Today is a rebroadcast of one of my favorite episodes. I hope you enjoy.

Today my guest is Annie Lamont. Annie is the acclaimed author of more than a dozen books of fiction, nonfiction, and collected essays, known for her honest, insightful, and humorous approach to subjects such as faith, loss, and the creative process.

She's the author of Help Thanks Wow, Stitches, Bird by Bird, and Hallelujah anyway, rediscovering Mercy, where she argues that kindness towards others, beginning with myself, buys us a shot at a warm and generous heart, the greatest prize of all.

This is a special episode of Insights at the Edge, in which we are broadcasting Annie Lamont's session that was originally part of SoundsTrue's self-acceptance summit.

In this episode, Annie and I spoke about what she refers to as radical self-care, and how it is the foundation of all true health and healing.

We also talked about her own challenges with self-esteem and issues related to body image, and what it's taken for her to develop a sense of true belonging in which she's able to welcome all of herself and others, and receive such welcoming in return.

We also talked about how women are trained to put other people first, and how self-acceptance is actually a feminist issue, and a prerequisite for truly being there for others.

Here's my conversation with Annie Lamont.

I wanted to start by talking about something that you've been writing about of late, which is the topic of you call it radical self-care, this idea of self-care, and what that means to you, and why for some of us, it's so hard, and also, you know, something like self-care, I think some people might think, oh, come on, isn't this just self-indulging?

Do we really need more, you know, and Lamont's talking about self-care, isn't this just one other way that we cocoon in on ourselves?

No, I think it's the opposite. I think it's the beginning of all healing and health.

The reason it's so hard is because we often grew up around alcoholic or mentally ill or very unhappy people, and especially girls learn to get their self-esteem and their sense of purpose and meaning on this life by taking care of everybody else.

I've written before that I was like a little flight attendant to the family, and I mean, I was mixing drinks, blender drinks at seven, and for me, what was it, what, we're not in the 50s when I was coming up that people said, oh, he's so full of himself, oh, she's so full of himself.

So this was a criticism, and you learned not to be full of yourself, you learned to be a person for others, but that meant coming from an empty, an empty glass instead of a glass that was, you know, bubbling over with love and excitement and enthusiasm for life and curiosity, and it meant that you were pretty much depleted all the time by having first taken care of the other people in the family, especially the parents.

So to start doing radical care means say, A, you're your own parent and B, you're going to get that radical care because you're going to be providing it.

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