The Body Keeps the Mileage (On Mortality & Wellness Panic)
back from the borderline
mollie adler
4.8 • 602 Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2026
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The inspiration for this episode came to me after looking at a small scar under my daughter’s eye and realizing that our bodies really do keep the f*cking score.
That thought sent me down a bit of an existential rabbit hole. Back to my millennial-era belly button piercing, my breast implants, and all the various little decisions I made when my body still felt endlessly recoverable to me and when “forever” sounded dramatic and way too far away to really care about.
Now I’m 36, raising a toddler, exhausted as hell, building things, trying to stay healthy without becoming a total psycho about it, and now my body feels way less like a sexy little accessory to my current “identity,” and instead the whole ass reality of it. It’s the one thing I have that has to carry everything for me. Work, grief, love, stress, aging, pleasure, fear… all of it.
This is a really vulnerable one. I cried more times recording it than I’d like to admit. Some of it I edited out but most of it, I didn't.
This one's about mortality, wellness panic, microplastics, biohacking, cosmetic procedures, spiritual disembodiment, motherhood, and the weird and dystopian modern feeling that everything is either going to give us cancer or something we’re supposed to somehow optimize into infinity.
Somewhere between total neglect and obsession, I think there’s got to be more honest way to live inside our bodies. It's something I'm still trying to figure out. Creating this episode was part of that ongoing process.
Reflective prompts from the episode:
- What relationship did I inherit with my body, and who taught me to see myself that way?
- What choices am I making today that my future self will one day have to carry?
- What would caring for my body look like if fear wasn’t the primary motivation?
You can take these into your journal, on a walk, or into MOODS with the Oriel archetype.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If this podcast stirs something up in your psyche, Moods is where you take it next. |
| 0:05.1 | Moods is the private pre-social ritual technology that my team and I built for your inner world. |
| 0:10.2 | It's not therapy or social media, but a place to work through what's coming up within you |
| 0:15.6 | and then get back into your real life. |
| 0:18.0 | Start your seven-day free trial today at moods. World and use the code |
| 0:22.8 | founders, F-O-U-N-D-R-S at checkout to lock in early pricing. That's moods.comodd-world code founders. |
| 0:34.2 | This is going to be a really vulnerable episode for me. So I'm even cutting out all the bullshit of even a proper introduction, right? Y'all know, my name's Molly. I'm your host. And I'm a human being. I'm 36 years old at the time of recording this. And I currently have a little girl, and she's just about 19 months old, which for those of you who aren't addled by mom discourse around speaking about your child in months of age, she's about a year and a half. |
| 1:09.1 | And my daughter is currently at the age where her body is still |
| 1:12.5 | kind of learning the terms of being alive. She's about a year and a half, as I said, and every day |
| 1:19.9 | she's, it's like she's trying new ways of killing herself. She's throwing herself off of things. |
| 1:29.0 | She's walking into corners, |
| 1:37.4 | right? She's climbing up on stuff with no plan about how she's going to get down. So it's this phase of childhood where the soul is there before the survival instinct is, right? The person's there, the body's there, |
| 1:47.5 | but the coordination is still not really online yet. And when you're a parent of a child of this age, |
| 1:56.5 | you live in this kind of like low level nervous system activation, like low grade alarm at all times, |
| 2:04.0 | because you become aware of things that you were never aware of, like the corners of coffee tables or the handle on a drawer, |
| 2:11.4 | or like have you put your coffee cup a little too close to the edge. |
| 2:15.5 | You know, the world becomes corners and hard floors that |
| 2:20.8 | could crack your kids' head open, right? And long-term listeners of the podcast know that a while |
| 2:27.8 | back, my dog, the love of my life, who I've had for about 11 years, who recently passed away, but about a year ago, |
| 2:36.4 | she bit my daughter. And it was one of the worst moments ever. It felt like slow motion and |
| 2:44.4 | fast at the same time. And it was just this, like, frantic psychic inventory. |
| 2:58.7 | I remember my daughter's face and, like, the pause between when she started screaming and the animal that I loved, you know, standing there. |
... |
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