Hi, I'm Mayan Bialic. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. So tomorrow actually is National Grief Awareness Day. And we thought in honor of this day that we would revisit another oldie, but a goodie. It's an episode we did with really wonderful author and podcaster and kind of expert on grief Nora McInerney. Nora is known for being very outspoken, giving practical tips on moving through grief paralysis, her personal story, which she will talk about, she had a heartbreaking miscarriage and lost her father and her husband all within weeks of one another, a really unbelievable story of grief and also of healing and resilience. She gives us a lot of practical tools on how to combat the struggle of dealing with other people's expectations during the morning and grieving process and why it may be difficult to relate to others moving through the grieving process. I could really relate to to what she talking about feeling alone and isolated, but how grief is such an important part of the human experience bypassing it can have really detrimental impacts on our mental health, physical health, and by actually embracing this and understanding this process, we can move through it much more easily and actually get a lot of love, compassion and joy even from experiencing these emotions. She also talks about why there's no set timeline for grief and kind of how that plays out. Also how specific and unique everyone's morning experience will be. She's also going to talk about some of the physical symptoms of grief and the benefits of getting support. And we just couldn't think of a better guest than to have Nora on in honor of National grief awareness day. Just before we get to this episode, a reminder that there's a place to get exclusive content, not released anywhere else that places on sub stack. Check out mine be Alexiallix Breakdown on Substack and join the Growing Breaker community there, ask questions and participate in the AMAs that are now living on Substack. And again, check out MindBiallix Breakdown on Substack to join the community. And now we hope you enjoy taking a look back at our episode with Nora McInerney. Break it down. You are not unfamiliar with a variety of aspects of breaking down, as it were. One of my favorite pastimes. And there's so much about your journey that is exceptional, meaning it is outside the realm of so many people's understanding. But a tremendous amount of the work that you do, which seems to obviously have started from a very, very personal journey, is one that you've really been able to expand out to sort of cover a variety of grief experiences of some of the things that many of us often fear when we experience grief, right? That no one will understand, no one will be able to relate. And in fact, that is very true. You know, I am about three months after my father of blessed memory died. A woman came up me in synagogue, and she was trying to be so nice. They're always trying to be nice. And what she said is a very banal thing. She said, I know exactly how you feel. Oh. I know. So here we are in the same thing. Was he your dad too? Oh, so that's what it meant. So this was literally, there are certain services that you go to when you've lost someone. So it was a, it was a specific service for people who had lost people. Also, I'm a public person. So like everyone knew certain aspects of my father's passing and I, I did choose to write about it a lot. And about three months is when you get that really angry irritability that comes with grief when no one can do anything right. The best part I think of grief is just that blind, indiscriminate rage. Well, this poor sweet woman, she, I mean, I kept it together, but, you know, I remember saying to myself, like, this is exactly the point of grief, is that you absolutely, you don't know. You don't know him, you didn't know him, you don't know me. That's like what was going through my head. But the place where you've really made this very specific mark, as you say, it's very niche, is you've taken something that is not just your experience. Your experience in particular is even outside of the realms of what anyone can imagine. You said, that's what people say, like, I can't even imagine. But you really, you really have built this kind of understanding around it, and it's, you know, really your life's work has been really making something that could be the least accessible thing for so many reasons accessible. So I would like to know a little bit about, you know, the years before, let's say you, I can tell you what my life's work used to be. Yeah, I'm very, I'm super curious. So tell us, tell us where you're from,

tell us like, you know, did you have experiences

with grief or anything like that when you were a kid? Or were you just like a normal person growing up thinking that life was gonna be fine? Well, first you want to know what my nickname was growing up? Blossom. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Me too.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Because guess what I love to wear that kids didn't really understand the 90s.

Hats.

Okay.

Sorry I wore a boulder. My family's Catholic. We also love a few narrows, right? But I do think that growing up, now we realize, like, Jews do death best. We kind of do. I don't want to brag. My God, I'm like a Yard site candle. What? Oh, it's so beautiful.

Like sitting, she's like everyone else having to just shut the fuck up until you want to talk. That's right. Brilliant. Like, brilliant. Yeah, we've definitely got death down. Living not so much. Living we're not so good at. Dying very good. Dying? We can talk. talk but I grew up Catholic. My life was I always wanted to be a writer and I remember

telling my mom when I was a kid like I don't think it very good. Dying? We can talk. But I grew up Catholic. My life was I always wanted to be a writer

and I remember telling my mom when I was a kid, like, I don't think it'll happen because like my

life is too good. Like you, nothing is going to happen to me. Thanks a lot for loving my dad.

You boring person. And you know, my parents worked in advertising, both of them. So I

worked in advertising when I graduated from college and I wrote tweets for great clips for years and You know put together social media strategies for you know an unnamed fossil fuel brand that absolutely did not be Need to be on Twitter and would not believe me. They're like I think you know, I think we should be there I'm like I'm gonna, I, I'm going to disagree. I'm going to go ahead and disagree, but you, you do you. And, uh, so I just had the most boring life, truly, like nothing had happened. And I mean, aside

from wearing that baller hat, getting a bowl cut also in third grade. So I also looked

like McCauley Culkin. That was like an unfortunate thing. But I just had a very, very charmed life that I did not realize was charmed until I didn't have it anymore. And I did all the stuff that you have to do in your 20s, like just go around tapping terrible men on the shoulder being like, well, you love me. You're the wrong guy. Could I be the right girl for you?

I'll change my personality. Like, what do you like me to? Oh, sports. Sports and music. I say beer, love it. And then I met this guy named Aaron and it turned out we'd followed each other on Twitter. This is such a 2010 story. We followed each other on Twitter and I had tweeted, Twitter was such a different place.

It was so joyful.

And I tweeted that I was gonna be at this art show to really just like prove how cool I was, and he was like, I'm going there tonight. And he broke through this group of friends, by friends, I mean, only my first cousins, my only friends. And I was like, you're Nora McInerney.

I was like, yeah.

I'm per mort.

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