YouSaid · the spoken record

Anne Lamott

lines on the record: 114
first: 2021-07-14
most recent: 2021-07-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You and I were laughing about how much we love Elizabeth Lesser, and she had written a book about the miracle of telling people the truth. And it ended up being a book about that's published Merrow. It's called She's the Head of Omega that was about her sister's blood marrow transplant that she was able to be the donor for. But I said, it's such a great topic, you know, blurting it out as a path to healing. And every day I can say that I either tell Neil, Sam, or my best girlfriend something kind of awful, kind of unseemly that probably a person who is supposed to have this spiritual wisdom or some spiritual tools at any rate, you'd be surprised that she still goes there. But I tell them, you know what they say? They say, oh, thank you for telling.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Part of my holistic healing from this anxiety disorder, I mean, I still have OCD. I'm going to have it, but I don't do the light switch anymore, so that's progress. Not perfection. It's holistic. I eat a certain way. I have prayer and meditation as very important parts of my life. You know, with my writing book, you will remember this. I really believe that discipline is the path to freedom so that with writing students I never just say, oh, just wait for inspiration. Wait till you feel like writing. I don't say that. And with myself, I don't say, wait till you feel like meditating. I don't think, well, wait till prayer comes naturally. I pray. Help me or thank you. You know, help me. I'm so crazy right now. I'm so afraid or I hate myself so much right now. I'm so afraid I do my meditation as an act of freedom. And I tell the truth.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The past, and that's not something you're kind of going to think your way out of. You weren't supposed to. And it's not something you're going to go to Est for. It's going to be something that is going to be holistic, whole body, spiritual, psychic, physical, and for me, medical. And so I found a great therapist so many years ago and he found a way to help me get more imbalance so that I don't like without the medicine I'm on. I mean, I have plenty of anxiety. Everything I write about is how anxious I am. And then when you and I leave, I'm going to be really anxious and think, well, this didn't go well, or my answers were too long, or he probably won't even run it. So I have plenty of anxiety, but I don't have constant thoughts at Neil or Sam or Jack's will die, which I have without treatment.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Medicine, I have a severe biochemical imbalance. I had it as a child. I had OCD. I had to turn light switches on and off seventeen times before I could get into my bed. If there was any sound in the house between the switching light switches and the bed, I had to go back and do it over. There was a system. My whole issue has been safety and whether I was safe or not. And I basically never was. But I was also addicted to unsafe people because it was about maybe getting it to come out right this time. When I was coming up, there was no awareness that children could have really terrible biochemical disorders where they would have to spend a tremendous amount of energy just getting to where regular kid without an imbalance would start off. Like you and Sam have both talked about having severe depression at times.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said it in one book and attributed it, and then a couple times I didn't attribute it. I have to say embarrassingly enough. But most people attribute it to me. And I've spent about 10 years saying it's not me and it's not me. Now I don't care anymore. And Tom doesn't care. But that's a great line that I would like to be known for.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tom Weston, again, my Jesuit friend, said years ago, maybe 30, it was 30 years ago because Sam was two and we were with Tom in Mexico. And he said, you can tell you've created God in your own image when he hates all the same people you do.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything, like everything literally works again if you unplug it. The greatest truth I know. Now, one thing I'm famous for is something I didn't actually say, which is sort of embarrassing.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do even more and to do it even better. And you break down. You know, I think all three of us, you me and Sam, have had periods that we would refer to as breakdowns where we just ground to a halt and ran out of any more good ideas and didn't even care. You know, we're just kind of done. And from those places for me, and I know for Sam, and I assume for you, Tim, that from that, and maybe not later that day or Thursday right after lunch, there was new life. There was transformative renewal of some sort. And so to unplug means that you stop and your shoulders sag and you sigh and your head drops to your shoulder and to anyone else, to anyone in the world, it would look like you're doing really badly. But what you are is like an electrical car outside the health food store plugging back in.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm just trying to, it's mood altering for me to be so busy and to be at such a high level of conversation and achievement. And if I can just stop and unplug, I might start to cry, I might start to realize how furious I am and how scared I am of being furious. When I was coming up in the 50s, an angry woman was about to get exiled, believe me, by about 61, an angry woman was replaced by a cute young woman who wasn't so angry, you know, about 61, 62, because of Hefner, the men started leaving and they left the angry ones and they left the weepy ones and they left the ones who didn't keep their weight down. So there were a lot of societal constrictions on having emotions and states of mind that were not pleasant for the men to be around. And for me, it's just kind of frantic need to.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Crying has been the way home. Crying in rage have been the way home. My parents never express rage. Not once, and they hated each other. They were like a Harold Pinter play with this very clipped eraite conversation. I've had to teach every woman I've ever helped get sober, let alone all my Sunday school kids, to cry is going to bring them back into the fullness of their own selves. It's going to base them. It's going to baptize them. It's going to hydrate them. It's going to water the ground at their feet where God knows what funny seeds have been dropped by birds and will grow with just a little bit of water. So to unplug for me sometimes means crying. Usually for me to be on that forward thrust or the rat exercise wheel is because I am trying to stay one step ahead of the abyss and I'm trying not to feel my feelings.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And stop, and what I mean is unplug, turn off your phone for five minutes, you can do it, turn everything off. If you need to cry, cry. We're so shamed into not crying, growing up, because I had a mother from England. If we started to cry at the dinner table, we went to our room without eating. And for me,”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's so awful to see yourself tweaked and maybe failing, which we all do. It's part of the human condition, you know, like Vonnegut said, welcome to the monkey house But we see ourselves feeling crying or tweaking or twitching, you know, or getting a tick in our eye and everything in us tells us to correct it. It's rule three. No, rule two, you should correct it. What I need to do then is suggest. I mean, that's why I tell my writing students, just stop. Just stop what living unconsciously. Stop trying to force everything into submission”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh boy It might be hard for me to think of anything on the spot, but I know a quote that I see frequently around Twitter, the Twitter sphere, is that everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was how I think that was an equation, let's say, that helped me know what my work on this earth was going to be, was that I was going to stop trying to fix and change and correct myself so that the culture and society would think I was more of a success.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You go, okay, look, thanks for sharing. And this is not a place where I'm going to spend a lot more time because I don't know how long my life is going to be, but I don't have time for this kind of crap.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Somewhere around eighty six I realized I was home free, that was the work I was going to do, was that I was going to insist on the right to show up, as is with my funny hair, with my funny thighs, with my hypersensitivity, with my big open heart, and I was not going to be ashamed. And if it was a problem for you, then you were going to have to go. I wasn't going to keep trying any harder to get you to see that I'm just totally fabulous and unique if it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you, you know. You know this. Not everyone's going to like you and like your work. Lots of people can't stand my work either the political people because I'm a Christian or the Christian people because I'm a left-wing activist. You know people, a lot of people you must have gotten horrible put downs and criticism in the media.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and how why I was so shamed for being who I was born to be. The first role is you must not have anything different or wrong with you. Must not have anything different about you are wrong. Second rule is that if you do, you really have to get over it as quickly as you can. You really have to fix that. It's really a problem. The third rule is that if you can't get over it or fix it, you should just pretend that you have, that it's really not an issue anymore. The fourth rule is that if you can't even pretend to have corrected it, you should just not show up because it's just so painful for the rest of us to have to see you in your current condition. And the fifth rule is that if you are going to insist on the right to show up, you should have the decency to be ashamed. I was toxic with shame from my earliest earliest years to thirty two when I got sober, and I covered it up by being so successful and so charming and just such a snappy piece of cheese. And when I heard those words which are so”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and disappointing self, so I could see that the anxiety was part of what was so beautiful about me. Like, for instance, when I was coming up, I was very, very sensitive. I think that's why I got migraines. But that was always I was so shamed by the culture, by my teachers and by my parents for being so sensitive. There was a book my parents read called The Overly Sensitive Child that helped parents not have to have their lives ruined because their child saw the cover of National Geographic and that the children in India had flies or were starving to death, had flies on their eyes. And it was all about trying to help me not be the person that I was, which was very, very sensitive. And I was gravely shamed for it. When I got sober, my friend Tom Weston told me these five rules of being human that changed my life. I'll tell you them now that had to do with who I was.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He watched it and he turned to me and he said she loves him because she can see that he's lonely. And I just wept when he said that Jessica Lang loved King Konk because she could see that he was lonely. And that's what really what the people who helped me get sober. And also at my church, I went to this, I go to this funny little failing church, half black and half white, can hardly pay the electrical bills. And it was the same thing. I went there drunk and bulimic and stoned and they loved me because they could see that I was lonely. But I couldn't take it in until I stopped self-medicating like you referred to with overcaffeination. Once I was there and I was settled with somebody who was really safe and listening, then I could begin to have a more tender, gentle feeling towards my own anxious.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of being sober, I have to say, was not a high point in my life. I was extremely anxious and kind of frantic, and it was my best friend, and everybody loved me when I drink. I'm a really funny, sweet person, and I sleep with everybody. So to give that up was kind of crazy. And, you know, I'd wake up really sick and I'd think about having a beer just to get all the flies going in one direction. And people like me when I've had a couple of beers. And so I felt like who will like me now? Who will like me if I'm not chasing the bunny at the Greyhound track? Who will like me if I'm visibly scared and uptight and sad? And it turned out that these other women did. They said we're going to love you till you can learn to love yourself. And in fact, Sam, when he was eight or nine, we were watching King Kong, the Jessica Lang remake. And he always said this trippy stuff.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Greyhounds, dogs at the races, you know, out trying to outrun each other, but that the dog who won actually had caught up to a battery, you know, with fake fur pasted to it. And that was what you win. Or that it was like Glen Gary, Glen Ross. And if you got second price, you got the steak knives. And I had that spiritual awakening, which was as important as it gets, that it's not out there. that it doesn't have to do with what you can buy or achieve or lease or own or date and that it was going to have to do with some kind of union with your own truth and with your own self and that had to do with through that union with a power greater than ourself and the great universal energy and the bigger reality you know and the first week”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My soul was so besmirched what I did with other people, what I'd done to women friends, how I had dishonored my own self. And I got that it wasn't out there in a great feature article in a local paper, let alone on the Academy Awards stage, that it was an inside job and that it was going to not be available to me if I kept chasing down the fame and the fortune and the attempt to be perfect at what I do. And I learned pretty early on. Like July 7th, I got sober. And I think I realized by the end of that first month, I was very frail and I weighed no pounds, which I loved. I also had a massive eating disorder, which I missed because I was like 20 or 30 pounds less. But anyway, I realized that my life had been like...”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“a feeling like he wasn't a piece of shit. He was drinking and using. And so when I got clean and sober, I'd had three books published. I mean, I was doing really well in the world's eyes. I live in the same county I was born in. I know everyone here. I am loved out of all sensor proportion. I'd had three books published. They'd done really well and I knew secretly that I was. A fraud and dying. I just felt like I was.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well I can reference it by tying in the Paul Williams podcast actually when Paul talks about having won the Academy Award for the Barbara Streisand movie where he's standing before 100 million people being given the greatest accolade that the entertainment world can bestow on someone and he stood there in that light, in the light of that and he said it bottom 24 hours”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I get, you know, my life is if I can tough it out or let somebody into it with me and breathe and do left foot, right foot, left foot breathe, that my world is going to become more spacious.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stop. Get back onto your own emotional acre. He's doing great. He is a miracle. That's what has come from the dark nights are the greatest truths I know, that my help is not helpful, that when I'm in the darkest, most scared place on earth, if I can not try to do the forward thrust and try to redecorate the abyss that I'm going to get blessing and light and I'm going to get fresh air.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the sunny side of control? And I was trying to control him, and that was making him worse. And I still, you know, I'm 67. He's going to be 32 this year. I still, he's on his heroes journey with his podcast, Hello, Humans that you've listened to, and he's doing a beautiful job. And I would still like to get on his heroes journey just maybe 10 feet behind him with juice box and sunscreen maybe, and just be there in case he needs me. But when I do that, it's injuring him. It's not helping him. It's certainly not helping me. But what I have to do is the awareness that I'm doing it again and grip myself gently by the wrist and say, Annie.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Incredibly crazy mother who had had it, these guys in San Francisco who were clean and sober had fished them out of the trough, you know, and one day at a time had helped him get clean and sober and he has sent him a drink or a drug for 10 years now. So those three things that I've described are the darkest nights of the soul that I've been through. But the thing with Sam and with my child in general is that I had thought up till then that I had some really, I have a disease of good ideas usually for other people and I believe that my ideas will really help them have better lives and at least make me less uncomfortable when I'm around them. And I learned that my help was not helpful to Sam and that help”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not lovely. It's where all the crackheads and heroin at. It's a really deprived, depleted, addicted prostitute pimp, terrible, terrible place. And anyway, so I drove him back to his house and he got out of the car and he hated me. And I walked over to him and I reached for him. I took a chance. You know, they say courage is fear that has said its prayers. We hadn't said a word in the car. It's an hour drive. And I just kept praying in silence in the car, and we stood together and I reached for him, and he reached for me. And I said, I'll see you. And he said, I'll see you”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The great universal spirit, and I said, Do you want to ride back to the city and to the tenderloin? I don't know if you know what the tenderloin is, but it's”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was that he had a two year old child, he had a baby at 19, and the mom and my grandchild were living with me and Sam was around, but he had a house in the Tenderloin, he had an apartment, and he showed up wasted. And I had reached my bottom. That's what the Dark Knight is. You've run out of any more good ideas. And so what I did was I took a sharpened pencil and I held it to his throat. I mean, this does not jibe with my spiritual books, my persona and my being. And I said, you're as bad as any junkie I know. And you cannot be back on this property with your baby if you so much have a hit of marijuana. And we just looked at each other and he looked at me like with such hatred and for your child to hate you is about as bad as it ever gets. And then I got some sort of holy spirit nudge or something, you know.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My husband. I did three months of this radical self love of being my own priority, of letting everybody else take the leftovers, of putting myself first, of structuring my days around what would make me happiest, what I needed to do and what I hope to do and what I love to do. And then I would find time for everybody else. And three months to the day later, I met Neil for our first coffee date and that was five years ago. We haven't been apart for a day since. So that was the most recent darkness of the soul. My son, who's right here had a very long stretch of mass and alcohol where I thought he would die. That was the most terifying thing to think I could lose him because he's my outside heart. You know, I think children are our outside heart and I couldn't save him. I couldn't fix him. I couldn't rescue him. I couldn't really help him. But the dark night of our...”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She let me cry and she said You are everybody else is your priority that your son and your grandson and your ma and your relatives and that your best friends and that your people at church and the blah blah that everybody else is taken care of and you get leftovers and it was the darkest snoddiest, wettest dark night of the soul. And it wasn't like God reached down with his magic or his or her magic wand and tapped me. It really hurt. I was really angry about what I've put up with. And I was sad and angry and freaked out. We just stayed on the phone. And then all of a sudden I could breathe again. And I drove back to my house and I became my own priority. And my older brother was there and he goes, huh, you seemed kind of, I said, oh no, I didn't, you know, oh no, I'm fine. And frantic effort took very smooth. But from that point on, I can tell you what date that was because three months later, I met the man who became”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To what they think would be a good path for you, and she said, Annie, this is what we paid for. This is where I hoped you would get someday. And I wasn't in cute adorable crying. I was in red faced, swollen nose Carl Malden, snotty crying. I said, no, but I don't have any, I don't have, I've tried everything, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out to the woods and screaming and shouting and pounding the steering wheel and saying, I hate you, Sam. I hate you to his mother. I hate you, John, who's my older brother. I hate you, mom and dad. You taught me that I'm a piece of shit unless I'm getting A's and unless the entire world and I hated everybody. And it was half hour. I turned around half hour same record. And then finally I pulled over to Side of the Road and I called my spiritual mentor whose name is Horrible Bonnie. And that's what I call her anyway. And I said, I hate, I cannot stand it. All I do is be there for everybody else. And I get nothing. And I went on and on and she listened, which is the miracle that somebody listens and they don't try to save or rescue or fix you or horse you into submission”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I finally, I know, I shared it with my older brother who'd stopped by who's a fundamentalist Christian. And he sort of basically done the equivalent of handing me some nice Christian bumper sticker about how God never gives you more than you can handle, which I think is a total croc. And I think what you got to do with God is to convince him that you really can't bear all that much. Like when you deal with a trainer at the gym, you don't want them to know how much you can lift because they'll make you lift it and that what you have to do is instead to just pretend you can't hint at liability from another gym you went to where they made you live too much when my brother handed me this stupid word bumper sticker I lost it and I said to him like one of the cone heads I said I have to go right this minute now and go for a ride I have an errand to do and my older brother looked at me like what and I got in my car and I drove”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amazing thing about Grace is that it meets you exactly where you are. And then it doesn't leave you where it found you. You know, it sort of tricks you into getting into its wheelbarrow and then it moves you to some place where maybe there's just a shaft of light or maybe there's cool water and the cool water I found was other sober people. But that was the darkest night I can remember. And then here's a recent example. My son and his son live here in a barn on the property and his son lives with him halftime and with the child's mother half time. And I was in major, major people pleasing and I was dancing. I was just dancing as fast as I could to make sure everybody's needs were met and I was taking the leftovers and the broken egg yolks and I was exhausted. I was in existential exhaustion and it had been going on for a while.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Give you a really quick spritz or maybe you get the little thin red straw inserted into you and you get a sustained spritz of it. But it was like water wings. I suddenly understood that I wasn't going to sink completely, but that I needed a lot of help. And that was the hugest breakthrough for me. Well, the help I got first. I got a couple of sober women who said I have what you have, and I found a way out one day at a time not drinking just for the day, and if your ass falls off, we can help pick it up and carry it to where we are and we'll sit together and we'll share our truth and you won't have to drink for the rest of the day and we'll help you get through the day just without a butt.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The morning of july seventh, and I had run out of any more good ideas. All I could think of was how I could figure out a way to learn to drink more successfully, and I knew that I wasn't going to be able to break that coat. And I was already a believer. I mean, I've pretty much been a believer my whole life. I already had a church by then. I was just done. I'd reached the end of my rope. That's what the dark night is. You've run out of any more good ideas. And in that space of total emptiness and lostness, I was lost and something found me. And I have to think of it as grace. I understand grace to be spiritual WD forty. Spritz is you.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two things spring to mind. I mean, I could write a whole book on the dark night of the soul and every book I've written is about it to some degree, but it's my favorite topic. I just had a million dark nights of the soul while I was drinking and using, and usually the solution then was to have eight or nine social vodkas and maybe a little amyl nitrate just to socialize. But then in 1986, the 4th of July weekend, I had a three-day blackout, which is so unfair. I'm not kidding because usually you have a blackout and it's like a wet chalkboard eraser has come by and there's nothing left on the chalkboard of what you did that evening. And it's very scary, but usually they don't happen all that often. I had three in a row, July 4th, July 5th, and July 6th. I woke up in terror.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Genetic details that we would have maybe not preferred. We have predispositions to alcoholism and mental illness or to weight gain in our thighs or whatever. But I have to remember that I can toggle back between dual citizenship, between being a child of God or of the great universal spirit and Annie Lomont, 67 Sunday school teacher and left-wing activist, mother and grandmother. And, you know, I got married at 65. I got married three days after I got Medicare. And those were my true biographical details. And I also am a person of spirit. So that's what spiritually fit means for me is that I remember that I'm not this terrible pinball machine in my mind cranking out new ideas about how I can do life more perfectly so that everybody will think more highly of me.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They seem to like you better briefly, you know. And so breathing will bring you into your body. So for that reason, May resist it, but for me to do what I call the sacrament of ploppage and to sit down and for one minute to breathe into my heart cave and do the sighing, I get my sense of humor back, you know, and laughter, even at my own quirky, fearful darling self, laughter I've written in a number of places is carbonated holiness. So if I'm breathing, and I've gotten my sense of humor back, I'm in something spiritual, I'm something that has to do with my human spirit and the divine. I mean, I believe and I've heard that we have dual citizenship, you know. We're children of the divine, we're children of sons and daughters of God. And we also have these kind of screwed up biographical details.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Allows relief. And so I told Neil, and he said, you know, you. You are so wonderful at this. Just breathe and go for a walk first and do what you do and you'll be sitting there with Sam and Tim is great and you're going to love it. It's going to go by so quickly. But Sophia expressed allows relief. So spiritually fit for me is that I'm not tripping and that I'm breathing. When I was a child, I didn't breathe. You know, I held my breath because for all the reasons I told you. And I remember I used to pass out on the boardwalk in town at three years old and my dad would nudge me and say any, any and I blink awake. But if you breathe, you may end up in your body and it may be that in your body terrible things happen to you. And if you're a girl, addict and alcoholic like I am, you know, until nineteen eighty six, you let terrible things happen in your body. You encouraged terrible things. If you let people do anything at all that they want.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cokehead friend, but they would say the false evidence appearing real, which usually means that you're at the window peering through the drapes thinking that there's a SWAT team on your lawn at four in the morning, you know, and that the best idea you have is another cool, refreshing beer. But some of the ones I love is one is the frantic effort to appear recovered. That's my main thing is that when I need to look good, when I need to appear to be doing well is when I'm at my most spiritually lost. And another one I love is future events already ruined. And so I'm just tripping out of it. Like I was tripping up this morning about what if I screwed up with Tim, you know, and you're so illustrious and your listenership, I think, is younger and why would they want this old lady with dreadlocks, this Sunday school teacher? Where do our Zen diagrams meet? And I was tripping and then I remembered, you know, future events already ruined.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, spiritually fit means I'm in my body paradoxically. Does it mean I'm in some ether world of divine enlightenment? And it means I heard a preacher years ago say the 23rd psalm, which is, the Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. But she said, the Lord is my shepherd. I shall not trip. And I just love that because when I'm spiritually not fit, I'm just tripping. You know, I'm making up stories. I'm in fear. I'm in anxiety. I have a tremendous anxiety disorder for which I'm successfully treated most of the time. But I'm just tripping on something somebody said that it stuck in my craw, on something I'm afraid of, of something, a lot of fear in recovery. There's some great acronyms for fear because people like my Cokehead friends, I mean, I'm my own.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it turned out, and you've written about this, that the abyss or in the Christian theology of St. John the Divine, it's the dark night of the soul is where transformation most often happens, and that if you can just bear being somewhere that you've never been before, where you don't really have any kind of owner's manual or a clue of how to proceed, then you're really teachable. You know, and from that place, something magical might just grow.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All I knew to do was to do better and to try to do it perfectly, and that's why I think the chapter in bird by bird is something that people so relate to because like in my family, all of us, in the American way, in fact, but in my family, the theme was forward thrust that no matter what was going on, you keep going, you keep going forward, you thrust forward so that the abyss doesn't open up at your feet, you know? And if the abyss threatens to you, you get IKEA and you buy acute throw rug, you know, you check out the abyss. They call the abyss the abyss because it's pretty abysmal. It's a nightmare. So you try not to land in it, what my family did was drink and overeat and diet. My dad had a million affairs.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know that sounds like a loving Christian thing to say, but it had to do with becoming my own priority. So that was the childhood I had. I was very afraid. I had migraines. I was too smart. I was very good at math. Girls weren't supposed to be. I skipped a grade. I made the boys feel bad because I was better at math than they were. I was small and I looked funny. I had this crazy pure white blonde kinky hair and these huge green eyes. I weighed about 20 pounds till eighth grade. And, you know”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has to do with that. Coming into radical self care and becoming my own priority, this is kind of funny. My mom, who is a black belt, as I told you, codependent, always took the broken Friday. My entire life, I can swear on a stack of Bibles my mother never once said, here's somebody else take the goddamn broken egg yolk. Ken, you take the, you know, my mother ate the broken egg yolk, and that's what I was raised to believe women did. And I had to have enough therapy, enough recovery. I've been cleaning sober 35 years now, and enough the women's movement. And a lot of outside help so that I could be my own priority. And if there was a broken egg yoke, maybe it wasn't my turn again. Maybe Sam should have the broken egg yoke. Sam loves the perfect fried egg. You know what? Tough shit.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know I was in charge of helping mom not feel so put down by dad. I was in charge of making dad come home because I was so adorable and I rubbed his feet. I'm a lot older than you, but when I was coming up in the 50s, they all wear socks with garters, these little sock garters. And I was like a little geisha girl with curly, kinky hair. And I'd sit and I'd take off his little garter on the couch and I'd take off his sock and I'd rub his feet. And I thought he would come home for that and he drank a lot. So what I got good at was pleasing people, being a stratospheric achiever, but not quite so bright that it ruined my older brother's life and it made him feel like a loser. And I know how to raise babies. And I know how to get by on the leftovers, on whatever was left over after I gave everybody the very, very best parts of me. So all of my books, including Bird by Bird and operating instructions, everything.”
2021-07-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #522: Anne Lamott on Taming Your Inner Critic, Finding Grace, and Prayer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT