Conversations on Healing

Welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast, where host Shay Beider speaks with renowned healthcare leaders, practitioners, and thought leaders to explore the world of wellness, the incredible powers of self-care, and what it truly means to heal today. Join us on this journey to become more whole healed and connected.

Shay Beider Hello and welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast. I’m your host, Shay Beider, and for today’s episode, we’re joined by author and podcast host Jarod Anderson. Jarod has three bestselling collections of nature poetry titled “Field Guide to the Haunted Forest”, “Love Notes from the Hollow Tree”, and “Leaf Litter”. He also has a recently released memoir titled “Something In The Woods Loves You”, which explores his lifelong struggle with depression through a lens of love and gratitude for the natural world. Jarod is the creator of the Crypto Naturalist Podcast, a scripted show about real adoration for fictional wildlife. In today’s episode, Jared and I discuss his memoir, “Something in The Woods Loves You” and touch on topics related to depression and suicide. For anyone who may be listening, who is struggling with suicidal thoughts, help is available. You can dial 9 8 8 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. In our conversation, Jared discusses his important relationship with the natural world and how it has informed his writing and supported his mental health journey, his powerful insights and poetry that he shares are sure to capture your attention. So I hope you have an opportunity to enjoy the depth and beauty in our conversation. Let’s have a listen.

Jarod, I’m so delighted to have you on the Conversations on Healing podcast. Thank you for joining me today.

Jarod Anderson Thanks, Shay. It’s so good to be here.

Shay Yeah. I want to give our listeners a little bit of a heads up. We are going to discuss some important topics including depression and suicide. For everyone listening, they’re aware that that will be part of the conversation today. I really want to start with some of your work, you have your most recent book, which is called “Something in the Woods Loves You”. It’s a memoir. It does invite the readers into your inner story, a lot of it which involves moving through depression, your connection to the natural world. It’s actually deeply embedded in the book the way that the book is structured. Each of the chapters is named after animals and plants and aspects of the natural world, which is really beautiful. And I actually wanted to start by reading something from the book because I thought that was such a nice way to invite people in our listeners to the depth with which you share your story and the quality of the writing and the language that’s so beautifully executed in this book.

So there’s a section, it’s on page 282 for anyone who picks up a copy of the book. You talk about this as a pep talk, the kind that you give to yourself and you’ve used to connect with others. And I’m just going to read a portion of that. I think it’s so beautiful. So here it is: “If you can make peace with the unlikely fact that squid, the size of school, buses, patrol the dark oceans at a depth that would crush you to paste, then I have faith you can also make peace with the unlikely fact that you are worthy of all the happiness you can imagine. Being afraid is natural. It is our mind’s method of protecting us. But don’t lose sight of what you are. You are so much more than a body to be kept safe from harm so much more than fear or instinct, so much more than the sum of your parts.

Not safe, but too rich and strange to be called fragile. Zoom out, the first living cell on earth was a spark. It ignited a chain reaction that thundered across billions of years an evolving blaze of lives, and needs, and firsts, and lasts. The whole of that raging fire of history and happenstance burns inside you right now. It is beyond amazing that you are here reading this. You should be impossible. Living is a rebellion, an old conspiracy of elements to organize and awaken to sensation. You climb hills, you swim against the current, you chip away at the expected. Everything you have ever done is unlikely and is forever a part of the history of the universe”. And this goes on and it’s really a beautiful, beautiful piece, but I wanted to start by just giving people a little bit of the flavor of your work because it is so lovely and I enjoyed reading it so much. So what inspired the writing of this pep talk? Like what launched this piece in particular?

Jarod So a part of that, thank you for reading that by the way. It always feels like magic to hear something you’ve written in someone else’s voice, that’s so lovely. Part of that pep talk was featured on my podcast, the Crypto Naturalist, and I wrote that particular piece at the beginning of the pandemic when everybody was staying at home and felt so uncertain about the future. And I felt like I had something to offer in my struggles with major chronic depression. I felt intimately familiar with that uncertainty about the future and with that looming threat that you feel on the horizon. And so I wanted to offer a little bit of how I address and push back against that sense of fear and doom. And obviously I find a lot of comfort in what might be considered the bare facts of nature, but part of the fun of poetry is reframing bare facts. So you don’t just know them, you start to feel them in a way that becomes a chance to make a new kind of meaning and a chance to seek healing from what we observe around us.

Shay Right, and there’s so many elements of healing in your work and in your writing because really your whole journey has been an ongoing process of navigating an experience of healing through and with chronic depression. So I feel like there’s so much wisdom. One of the pieces that really stood out to me thematically almost across your entire memoir is finding a sense of worth. Because in the very beginning of the story where you’re both confronted with and facing directly the deepest part of an initial struggle with depression, one of the pieces that you comment on quite a lot is how from that place initially there wasn’t enough of a sense of self-worth that you felt there was something worth fighting for. That it’s like there was a hopelessness because it’s like, I’m not worth it. I’m not worthy, essentially. And I felt like that question of worthiness and hope comes up over and over again in your memoir as you grapple with that and begin to redefine your worth and value in the world. So I’d be very interested to hear in your own words how you’ve coped with that tension between worthiness and hope for the future.

Jarod In the depths of depression, sort of at the nadir, it can often feel like there’s no point in seeking help or healing or that any sort of improvement that you might reach for is fleeting or too abstract to even hope for. And a point I make in the book is that mental illness, depression defends itself. There’s this initial almost leap of faith involved when you’re trying to seek healing from depression because at some point I have to admit to myself that I might not be able to conceptualize a different way of feeling to conceptualize a more hopeful future. And so in the beginning it was more mechanical. It was returning to things that I know have brought me joy and meaning in the past. And for me it was simple walks in nature, a return to the woods where depression would tell me, all right, well you loved nature when you were a child, but now that’s locked in a glass case. It’s locked behind a wall of years. And the leap of faith for me was to say, okay, well maybe this won’t trigger any kind of feeling of healing or any epiphany, but I’m going to mechanically put one foot in front of the other and I’m going to reach out. I’m going to make the effort to return to something I know once brought me meaning and a feeling of wholeness.

That’s such a hard first step, especially in terms of depression, is to set aside what you think you know and what you think you know is that there’s no point. And instead to start going through the motions of the healing journey. And then at some point a light goes on and you think, okay, well I’m not just going through the motions. I’m actually feeling the thing that before I felt like was a pantomime.

Shay There’s a whole sequence of things that are laid out in the book over what was years of your life, but that I think it’s a very interesting architecture to share with our listeners. So I just want to highlight a few key points in your story and then you can share more deeply about that. So early in the story you share about you were in an academic position, you were accomplished, you were doing all the outer things that seemed like the right path and journey and course for your life, but you were really not content with that life and you let it go. So you decided to leave your job and that was a huge risk and to grapple with the depression that you were experiencing. So that right there, that was the first major pivot in your story. You took the risk of letting go of what to the outer world seemed like a responsible job and position.

And then you went through a whole series of ways to find a new sort of reckoning internally of what is your place in the world. As you mentioned, you started to get out in nature just simply to go for walks and you started to connect with a natural world. And then that becomes a very strong theme throughout the rest of your story as it’s revealed in the memoir of this relationship with animals, with the natural environment, with the plants, with the earth, with all of it. But then you also did some other things. You eventually determined that you wanted to see a therapist, you chose a path of both a combination of medicine and cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT. So you utilized both of those things to also help to recalibrate and find a new balance. But, then you also drew upon your relationships, your partner, your family, your parents, all the people around you were also supporting in a variety of different ways.

There was this ongoing journey of trying things, seeing how they landed, getting support. It’s a continuing journey like most healing journeys are. It doesn’t have you do three things and you’re done. It’s an ongoing, and you even talk about in your story how you went back into deep depression at times. It’s not like once you got a handle on it, you’re like, yeah, that’s it, I’m good. That there was still a revisiting, but in a sense that revisiting is always from a new perspective because you’ve changed in everything that’s led up to that. So yeah, tell me about your view on the architecture of things that you’ve moved through that have helped you on this healing journey.

Jarod I think one of the main points to talk about when I think of my own evolution with depression is how I treat shame. In the beginning I struggled with even the idea of having a conversation about depression with my family doctor, let alone the idea of a mental health professional. And that was all very much wrapped up in this idea that admitting that I struggled with mental illness was already such a defeat that I couldn’t bear to acknowledge it. So it took quite a while before I would name what I was feeling for myself as depression, as mental illness, and then it took longer for me to seek help and healing. Even though I had the encouragement of my wife, Leslie, the encouragement of my family, it was tough. It was tough to take those first steps and harder still, the idea that not every therapist is a match, not every medicine is going to be a quick fix.

So as you said, it’s a journey. But in terms of how I shifted the structure of how I think about it, centering on that idea of shame, I started to take more inspiration from the natural world and think about my mind as a natural landscape. And once I did that, it became a little easier to make peace with this idea that I wouldn’t be done once and for all with the journey of mental health. And the metaphor I love is to talk about my mental health as brain weather. And one reason I find that concept so useful is that you may plan a picnic in a thunderstorm might cause you to cancel it, but you wouldn’t feel ashamed that the thunderstorm caused you to cancel your plans, right? If I think about the links between mental illness and weather, what do we have? Well, they’re both natural, observable, documented aspects of our world.

Much like that thunderstorm that ruined the picnic, nobody invites mental illness into their life. So why should I feel any more ashamed about the day when I have particularly tough depression struggles and it’s hard to get in the shower? How is that different from the thunderstorm? Well, it’s not. And so even though we don’t control the weather, so we don’t need to take responsibility for it, we don’t need to feel shame, we can dress for the weather. And that became a really powerful concept for me as I thought about my own mental health and healing. All right, maybe I don’t control the weather so I don’t have to feel ashamed about it, but maybe I can change what tools I have to mitigate the weather. Maybe I can fill my closet with ponchos and umbrellas and camping gear and maybe there’s a tool set I can bring to my own struggles with my natural environment, by which I mean both externally and internally.

Shay You mentioned that old saying in the book, I’m just paraphrasing it, but it’s basically the idea that there is no bad weather, there’s just bad clothing. You’ve dressed improperly essentially.

Jarod Yeah. And that’s one reason I knew I wanted to organize that book into seasons as well. I mean, a tree is going to lose its leaves and struggle in the winter and in photosynthesis will stop. But that isn’t a huge defeat. The tree grew over the season. It might face inclement weather, it might struggle, but also root growth increases once the leaves fall. The tree is applying energy to other things. And so no, I don’t believe I will ever figure out depression once and for all, but as the seasons continue to cycle by, I will grow and change in meaningful ways.

Shay One of the other lessons that I felt like you illustrated quite beautifully is the gifts of nature. And I mean there’s many, many in the book, but one that felt kind of primary that I wanted to share was this idea of presence. That in the natural world, most animals beings are living in the present tense completely. Whereas you talk a lot about in the book how your mind is going left and right. Most people’s minds is constantly moving into the past and the future and not, we are often not in the present moment as human beings, but that’s unusual, right? Compared to so many other animals. And that part of the gift of nature is that full presence. And the other characteristic that I thought you beautifully articulated is communication beyond language. We communicate in this verbal form, obviously we communicate in many forms through our bodies, through our energy system, et cetera, but we as a primary source of communication, use language both oral and physical. And that in the natural world there’s so much communicated beyond words because there’s other forms of communication and how something about allowing yourself to emerge into those states of full presence and communication beyond language was very healing and valuable to you, and I think it is to many. So I wanted to hear a little more about that for you. And you have some really cool animal stories related to that too, which I love.

Jarod For me, it’s almost a dilemma because I am a writer and have been since I was a kid, and I’m a lover of words, but one thing I’ve just observed about myself as a human animal is that I understand the world through stories, which is great. But in terms of the framework of stories that I think we internalize without intention is we have all of these firm structures about heroes and villains. And it can be easy, especially in the context of depression, mental health struggles in general, to say, okay, well, I’m trying to understand myself and my world as a story, the sort of story I’m familiar with. And all of these struggles make it clear that I’m not the hero, so what am I? I think one pitfall of the way we understand the world and through language in general is this pull to cast ourselves as the villains when we don’t see ourselves as these hero archetypes.

Something that I just find again and again stepping into nature is I don’t feel that external pull to step into a role that I feel when I am in more human spaces. I don’t get the sense that the trees are trying to understand me via my past accomplishments or how I’m presenting myself or if I’m playing the role correctly as an employee or as a friend or as a son. Stepping into nature can be sort of this freeing reset where I get to feel sort of what I am in a very physical, very present way outside of all of those trappings of story that I think invisibly press upon us when we’re participating in society. And don’t get me wrong, I love connecting with people, that’s why I write. I think human society is also beautiful and natural, but stepping outside of it can be very helpful for somebody like me that deals with shame because shame implies some sort of external judgment. All the times we think about all the things we should be doing or that we’ve done wrong or fallen short of, I think we’re imagining a capital T, ‘They’, standing apart and judging everything we do. And so to get back to that animal presence of just walking alone beneath the trees is always very medicinal for me.

Shay And those ‘shoulds’ and those ‘musts’ kind of fall in what you just described as the brain weather. And I think so much of that is from our early conditioning too, just messages that got into our system from a very early age often and helped to formulate a sense of self. You talk about one of your resources as a child and even as a teenager was to climb up into a particular tree. It was called Jarod’s tree. It was like the one where you hung out the most and just be there to just spend time in the tree being present and experiencing everything that was happening and alive within that tree. Why do you think that was such a good medicine for you, even from a very early age?

Jarod It’s interesting. I have vivid memories of spending long hours in that tree. It was a sugar maple tree, Morral, Ohio. I visited it recently when I was visiting my parents, but being up at those branches, I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, but as a kid with all sorts of anxiety and pretty serious a ADHD and depression that I still wasn’t naming or acknowledging, there was just this profound quiet up there that was sparse but engaging. I was never bored in that tree. I would climb up 20, 30 feet and lay along a branch kind of like a big jungle cat, and there was always something to see, and whether it was an ant crawling across a branch or a white-tailed deer in the distance, and having that little thrill of knowing that I was watching it and it didn’t know I was there. It engaged my mind in a way that as I said before, was kind of outside the structures I struggled with because I often felt like a square peg in a round hole in the world of school, but there was no hole up that tree. It was just me and nature and no expectations. And so setting aside expectations really opened the door for awe and a sense of wonder. And there’s really nothing better for somebody like me who’s deeply critical of myself, but I have a very hungry imagination. And so feeding the imagination, whatever I see once I’m up in a tree, feels like a special kind of nourishment.

Shay Yeah and that reminds me of another idea that you share in your memoir, which is this idea that of science and magic and that we don’t have to see them with this sort of oppositional tension. There’s very often you can either be a scientist or a magician or you can believe in the magical or the mystical, or you can be a scientist and enjoy research and facts. And it’s like in a way that’s such an arbitrary tension because the essence of science is a desire to learn and understand and to do that through experimentation and exploration and then to gather facts and information beyond what we currently know. So there’s fundamentally a desire and a drive to understand that’s essentially the core of what science is, good science anyway. And yet there’s this whole other concept of that which is magical and mystical and defies understanding at least current understanding because it’s just so vast.
When you look at the universe in which we live, like so much is just so vast beyond what in the moment, we have a capacity to fully process and understand and can you live with both of those things simultaneously? And my answer has always been, of course you can. Of course you can have a desire for the rigor and tools that science provides and also still live like you’re saying in how you were living in that tree with a sense of awe and wonder and mystery and magic and all of that can be true. And what I thought was beautiful in the way you presented in the book is I feel like you presented a lot of tensions between two things and said they don’t have to be an ‘either/or’, they can be an ‘and/both’. I felt like that was also one of the thematic things. So I’m curious how you understand that yourself.

Jarod I’ve often carried that same impulse, that science and something I might broadly categorize as magic aren’t in opposition to one another. And I often think that that comes down to this idea that a ‘what’ is not a ‘why’, that every fact is kind of trailed by this shadow of the question of, so what? Why do we care about this bare piece of objective data? I think what is missed when we privilege science above all other modes of understanding is how important meaning is to us and how much it shapes our world. I often categorize magic for myself as sort of the skill and craft of making my own meaning, which as somebody who struggles with depression is literally a matter of life and death. So the idea that magic is somehow abstract and fanciful and is completely divorced from the practical seems ridiculous to me. Making room for my personal meaning and privileging, whimsy and awe, and this sort of tremendous sense of mystery tied to what we don’t know in the universe and how we’re connected to one another and feelings that are difficult to measure or articulate. All of that is as important to me as understanding photosynthesis or my love of science as a beautiful window on the natural world and a way to enrich our understanding. But yeah, I don’t see any tension there, and it always puzzles me when I see that presented as a choice.

Shay Right. And you talk about how your wife, Leslie is really great at finding whimsy and some of those qualities that you were just describing, and you share a fun story in the book that maybe you want to recount a little bit of it here. In your early days when you were coming together, this firefly slash lightning bug, depending on what you choose to call them story that might be fun for our listeners to hear a little bit about.

Jarod Oh, sure. It’s interesting. It’s a story from Leslie’s perspective, and I just find it so charming to have her recount it to me. I didn’t know I was being romantic at the time, but she loves to tell me this story of when I first joined her in a trip to her hometown in Michigan, and she had a bit of a rough upbringing in Michigan and had what she thought of as kind of a humorless upbringing in Catholic school. And she was taking a walk with me down a sidewalk and there was a field and it was full of fireflies, and I talked about how much I love fireflies, and she said that she always struggled to catch them, and I felt like I had a special talent for catching fireflies. So I spent quite a while teaching her my method, which is these are big dipper fireflies, they’re sometimes called Eastern fireflies, and if they want to avoid you, they drop suddenly.
And so I showed her how to make a platform out of your hand and raise it up so that they landed. And every time a firefly lands on your hand, it’s wonderful to watch because it often blinks a couple times and then turns a little circle and then seems to bloom into this tiny flower of black wings before it then flies again off into the twilight. And yeah, she tells me that she thinks of that as one of the most romantic moments in her life, and I love that because it was me being excited about fireflies, which is so essentially me that the idea that that’s romantic is beautiful to me.

Shay Yeah. Well, and also in a way, another piece that you bring out in the book is this idea of toxic masculinity or some of the things that our culture has sort of disallowed for men. And in a way that story highlights sort of the natural essence of who you are as you have described it. But it’s also a big part of where our culture can be so hard on men to not allow that which is vulnerable, that which is sweet, that which is sensitive, that which is connected to the natural world, that which is caring and compassionate. There can be a lot of rules about not showing that side of yourself. And you discussed that I think there is a relationship between your depression and toxic masculinity that presents itself in the memoir. So I’m interested in how you perceive that relationship.

Jarod I think it’s another false connection, like the idea or false opposition, the idea that magic and science are somehow oppositional. The idea that toughness or masculinity is somehow linked to silence or numbness. And as I said, as human beings, we internalize stories whether we like it or not, and we end up crafting our worldview through these stories. And so some of what kept me silent about my depression in my younger years and then what made it so difficult to seek help as I got older was this idea that to be a man was to be silent and to be numb and to be unfeeling and to not have complicated feelings, to have three or four feelings. It was like anger, hunger, lust, and a lot of them are tied to domination in one way or another. But then on my life journey, just as somebody who pays attention, it became clear over and over again to me what a silly and wrong worldview that was.
Even in terms of toughness, I was a boxer and a weightlifter and did Brazilian jiujitsu. And the people who were best at those things were people who were open to learning and advice and were interested in criticism and people who thought subtly about things. And so again and again, I was disabused of this idea that somehow toughness was linked to numbness or a lack of emotion. As I started on the healing journey with mental health that was reinforced tenfold. The more subtly I was willing to think about it and the more grace I was willing to give myself and forgiveness and essentially empathy, the easier the journey became. Empathy either for ourselves or for each other or what I might categorize as imaginative empathy for people who don’t share your path or even non-human creatures or elements of the natural world, I think is such a key and vital virtue that is lacking in our culture. And I think toxic masculinity is really one of the big hurdles that stops it from being recognized as the virtue. It is.

Shay You share a really lovely moment in the book where it’s on one of your hardest days where you’ve returned into a place of deep depression, but after you’ve had some counseling and skill building and there’s just a moment that you express around giving yourself empathy. Where you’re basically saying to yourself, “I’m so sorry you’re going through this right now and that you’re having struggle” and just giving yourself that really clear sense of you matter, I care about you and I’m sorry you’re having to endure this. And it’s a great example of that, of holding oneself through a point of significant pain and how much that matters.

Jarod I have a poem here if you wouldn’t mind me reading.

Shay I would love to hear it. Absolutely.

Jarod So this along that same line is about essentially making friends with not being okay. And this is from my collection “Leaf Litter” and the poem is called “Not Okay”. “Not Okay. I am not okay today. So in the absence of okay, what else can I be? I can be gentle. I can be unashamed. I can turn my pain into connection. I can be a student of stillness. I can be awake to nature. I can sharpen my empathy against the stone of my discomfort. I am not okay, but I am many worthy things.”

Shay So beautiful.

Jarod It’s an idea that I’ve had to make friends with again and again because if you wake up on a rough depression day, the disappointment can be overwhelming. But if you let the disappointment overwhelm you, it really can shut doors to other ways to have a worthy day, have a full life. Because back to the brain weather idea, I’m not always in control of the weather inside my own skill. So I need to find ways to make friends with the rainy days along with the sunshine.

Shay Yeah, it’s interesting too in the book you do talk about the relationship between depression and suicidal thoughts. I would love for you to share a little bit more about what you’ve learned about the relationship between those two things, between experiencing depression and having suicidal thoughts. What have you come to understand?

Jarod Suicidal thoughts for me present themselves as logic. It is this idea that everything has failed, that there’s no path forward outside of continuing to suffer, just kind of bleak continuance. And one of the things you learn as you start to basically call depression a liar or see the essential truth that depression defends itself is that depression is always there to tell you that whatever state you’re in is permanent, and it’s just not true. And you can look to nature, you can look to your own past. There are all kinds of pathways forward and doors that are ready to be opened. And so when I feel suicidal ideation in myself, and I still have it, I still struggle with it, but I have more answers now than I once did. I can hear, I can identify the thought in my own mind that this suffering is permanent and there’s no point and there’s only one way out.

And I can say, look, I’ve been here before and then I’ve gotten out of this. I find a lot of healing for myself in writing and writing down the worst of the suicidal thoughts and writing down the worst of the self-condemnation. Once it’s stapled to a page, it’s less abstract and I can actually have a conversation with it. And one of the things I see is that once I’ve written down some of these suicidal thoughts, is that they shrank. They’re not as big and scary as they were when they were left to be smoke, when they were left to be abstract. And I struggled to chase them through my own mind. And it’s just the pattern over years now of knowing that I can reject the idea.

Of just having, building that history of, hey, I’ve sat with these thoughts before I can sit with them again. And sometimes on the worst days, if you can’t do anything, if you can’t put verbs in your sentence to do anything about it, what you can know is that just spending the minutes moment to moment, you are progressing through it. And that’s a comfort to me. And there are days I have to forgive myself for just weathering the storm. The brain weather is such that this is a day for staying inside and reading a book in my pajamas. And is that okay? Well, I get to decide.

Shay For my own story in life, I’ve always found the relationship between depression and suicide to be interesting. I don’t see it as a universal relationship. For my own life, I had a tremendous amount of trauma in my early life that was very ongoing. And then I went through a period of a lot of darkness and inner struggle, and there was a time where I attempted suicide actually. And that moment was really born out of that I had this fear that I was becoming or that I had the potential to become and would become like the people who had harmed me, and I wanted to end that cycle. So the impulse in that moment was actually to end the cycle of harm in relationship to what had happened to me. And it’s very interesting to think about the why behind these things. Like you said, the difference between the what and the why it matters a lot.

Because that was my why in that moment. It was like I didn’t want to continue to do this harm that had been experienced by me and created again, and I didn’t know then. At that point, I was so young, I didn’t know that I had the potential to do it differently. I hadn’t yet. I mean, I was still basically a kid. I hadn’t yet understood that we can change and transform from the harms in our lives and we don’t have to become the people that harmed us. But it takes time to grow those bodies of understanding. And it takes a lot of years and work and effort and wisdom too, like the acquisition of wisdom through relationship, through experience, through therapy, et cetera. The whole range of possibilities there. But I think the why that creates the situation in which someone is either contemplating or even takes action, it can be so different from human to human.

So I wonder what you think about that.

Jarod A therapist said an interesting thing to me once, which was that there is in a sense a kind of hope surrounding a suicidal thought because even the idea of suicide is an acknowledgement of your own power and agency, that you have the power to stop this or that you have the power to bring about some sort of final change. And that’s a grim thought on one hand. But the thought to follow it with is if you have that power, why wouldn’t you then acknowledge your own agency to choose other paths? And this idea that it gets easier with time, you have to take that kind of initial leap of faith, that kind of imaginative empathy applied to yourself to embrace the idea that you’re worth the time to acquire the skillsets and the experience and the history. And yeah, I’ve heard a lot of different motivations behind suicidal thoughts.

One commonality I observe is this idea that there’s no other way, that it’s the last option, or the only option. And it’s just a big, complicated, amazing world. And it’s so easy to focus on our own hands or our own little rooms and really lose sight of what a big, interesting complicated world is out there, both in nature and in the minds of other people. I had to make peace with the idea that there were people who were had spent lifetimes studying the thing I was struggling with. It felt so isolating and shameful. And then to go out and find the breadth of information and the body of knowledge was sort of humbling and amazing. Oh, right. Other people, we have so much in common and there’s this connection to the human family and opening my heart to this idea that other people had things to contribute to my own very private feeling, inner struggle. I feel choked up about it even talking about it because you weather all of this self-doubt and self-talk about being uniquely disgusting or abhorrent in some way. And then so to open yourself up to the healing that others can bring is a leap, it is a leap at first.

Shay It is a leap. Yeah. I want to share another piece. It’s a little excerpt from your book that I just want to pull up here. I thought it was lovely. In the memoir, you share how you had been married, that relationship ended, you went back to school, you met Leslie who would become your wife, but at the time you weren’t really looking for a relationship, you’d just gotten out of one. You were in a sort of a different place. And so this short piece that I’m going to read kind of stems from that moment in your life and you write, “I was afraid to fall in love with Leslie. I did it anyway, not because I was brave or wise or intentional. It was because I couldn’t help it. I’m happy to report over a decade later. I do not regret it. To feel deeply is dangerous, to do anything else is a tragedy.” I really particularly love the last two lines in that, “To feel deeply is dangerous, to do anything else is a tragedy.” And I’d love to hear how you feel in writing and speaking those words.

Jarod Well, it’s terrifying, especially for somebody like me who struggled with depression. And part of it was I had such brutal self criticism, I was also so worried about any kind of criticism from outside or another failure to put on my kind of tally, my own permanent record of myself. Getting in that mindset of trying to preserve this fictional idea of safety had made me turn inward so much in my life. I think I shared at one point this idea of procrastinating in school because if I didn’t write a paper until the last minute, it seemed to benefit me twofold. If I wrote it right before it was due, if I was praised, it meant I was a genius. And then if I got a bad grade, I could say, well, I didn’t really try. So that kind of approach, I know I applied it to my relationships, to how I took care of myself. It can be tied to the toxic masculinity thing. It can be tied to shame and numbness. This idea that if I don’t put my authentic self out there, then my authentic self is safe. But it’s a mask. And if you wear the mask long enough, it becomes a uniform. And if you do that long enough, you don’t recognize yourself in the mirror anymore.

And this kind of willful numbness, whether it’s applied to relationships or my own approach to my mental health, it sells itself as safety, I think, but it’s not. It’s a kind of insidious sleep. It doesn’t protect you from anything. It’s a tragedy. It’s not allowing yourself to engage with life in any kind of authentic way. And sometimes I think it was just digging a hole and climbing in it just another way to cut myself off from the world.

Shay And obviously the way you’re now expressing your work, it’s multifaceted. So we’ve talked a fair amount today about your most recent release, “Something in the Woods Loves You”. So you’ve written books, this is your first memoir. In your poetry, you have released a lot of that through social media has been a tool where you’ve released and shared a lot of your story, and then also you have your podcast. And so you’ve used a variety of different things. You and I have discussed before, how social media is such an interesting and complicated tool because we can see from the data, and it’s continuing to grow and evolve body of data that correlates with an increase in anxiety and depression. We see it particularly among young females. It increases also with time usage. So particularly from some of the research I’ve seen, more than an hour and a half or two hours a day really seems to have a stronger effect on impacting mental wellbeing. And so there’s these relationships that are still being understood. And so I’m curious about what you found as some of the positive benefits of utilizing social media as a tool, but then also knowing and having an awareness of what some of the negative aspects are too, and how you work with both of those dynamics in what you do.

Jarod Yeah, I mean, perhaps the most obvious benefit for me is that I live on a little one-way street in a small town in Ohio, and I wouldn’t be having any of these conversations if not for social media. It also, as somebody who struggles with depression, the idea of being a famous writer is never going to bring me to the desk. That’s just not something that is a central motivation for me. It doesn’t work. I have to fight too strongly for just an affirmation of my own ability or worthiness to draw a breath, so that’s not my motivation. But connecting with people on social media is something that’ll bring me to the keyboard.

It’s one reason I share so much of my writing and poetry freely. If I feel like my writing can unlock a door for somebody, if I feel like my writing can be a kind of alchemy that transforms past suffering into medicine, I can hand somebody else, that all makes it feel worthwhile. “Something in the Woods Loves You”, you know Timber Press approached me at one point and said, ‘Hey, have you ever thought about doing nonfiction?’ And at that point, I had written the first five chapters of that book, and I had an outline. Because I knew it was a book I wanted to live in the world because I post so much poetry about mental health, I constantly get messages from people saying, ‘Hey, I recognize myself in your work’, and they want to talk shop.

They want to talk about their own struggles, and one of the kinds of messages that I feel are most poignant are people writing to me because they see their loved ones struggling and they want to know what they can do to help. While I don’t have an easy answer, I do have things to say. And at some point I realized I wanted to have a long talk with each of these people who were messaging me. I wanted to take them on a two day camping trip and just talk about my experience with mental health. And so at some point Leslie said, okay, well this has to be a book. And that’s how “Something in the Woods Loves You” came about. I still laugh about it, I wrote that at the top of the page and thought, okay, well they’ll make me change this title at some point; and they didn’t.

Shay It’s a great title, I’m glad they didn’t.

Jarod I love it. I’m glad it survived the process. Just as a writer, I’m always like, okay, well this probably won’t be the final image.

I think there’s also danger, of course, in social media usage that it’s what I often describe as the placelessness of social media because the more time I think we spend on social media, we can start to interpret it as our environment. As natural as if we were walking down a path or walking down a road, and it’s not a natural landscape. I mean, what we know about it is that it turns our attention into a commodity and the science tells the people running the algorithms that kind of fear and anger are a better baited hook for our attention. And so there’s so much danger in that we have this space that feels like the real world, that feels like a natural environment. But somebody’s finger is on the scale purposefully making it into a showplace for fear and pain, pain and anxiety. And so I think we need to be so aware of that, and I think we need to really teach information literacy to young people as we really wrestle with what is honestly a very new technology.

Shay So I would like to ask you this question that we put forward to all of our guests and give you an opportunity to consider how it lands through the lens of your own life experience. And that question is how would you define or describe what healing is?

Jarod I think I have to answer that through two different perspectives and they’re perspectives that I’m constantly aware of. And one is on the good days. On the good days, I think of healing as a skillset or a toolbox. It’s an ongoing process. It’s like building a house or carving wood, and I get better at it over time. I get more well-stocked toolbox over time, but it’s never an object that I hold. It’s a craft and a skill that my understanding of and my goals for change over my lifetime and making peace with that idea that it’s a dynamic thing and that it’s in flux is honestly one of the tools in the box for me. On the tough days, it is more abstract and I have to make peace with that. It has to be a distant light that might be glimpsed through smoke and maybe I can’t feel the heat of it, but I have to hold a kind of blind faith that it’s there and continue to walk toward it. Even when it seems like an idea locked in the distant past or behind a wall of glass, sometimes it feels like a practice and sometimes it feels like an ideal that I walk toward even when I no longer can remember the shape of it.

Shay Yeah, it’s a beautiful description. When you think about our conversation today, is there anything either from your life, from your memoir, from your poetry, that you have not had a chance to share with our listeners that feels like it wants to come forward and that you would love to share?

Jarod You know as a poet, I’m tempted to read another poem. How about that?

Shay Yes, how about that? I think that’s a great idea.

Jarod Alright, I’ll read a poem called ‘Forsythia’. “As Forsythia grows tall, its branches bend beneath their own weight, bowing to the ground in arches of yellow flowers. Wherever they touch the earth, the branches root again and send up new shoots stitching gold across the landscape. Some new kinds of knowledge shift our center of gravity staggering us, bending us low beneath the burden. If you think of your worldview as a stone tower, this shift is a cataclysm of splintered rock. If your worldview is forsythia, then every startling truth that bends you low becomes a new connection to the earth, a new way to stand, an invitation to grow. We live in a time of strong wind and sudden pressure. It is not an age for towers, it’s an age for stubborn flowers.” Feel like that’s an important thesis statement right now.

Shay It is an important thesis statement for right now. And I think even just the act of poetry itself is an important statement right now because we don’t need those towers. We do need the stubbornness of a flower. We’re in a different moment in human history that’s calling upon different things. And I actually feel like almost the demand that, and I would say it that way based upon the reading of your memoir, almost the demand that your life placed upon you to return to nature. It’s part of an essential call that’s a necessary act for the time in which we live. That there’s a way in which each one of us needs to be called back into what is fundamental, what is essential, what is necessary. I really love you talk in one place in the book about these different forms of knowing as human animals we have certain forms of knowing, which we tend to privilege and prioritize over all other forms of knowing, which is total nonsense.

But you discuss in the book this idea that a whale has a form of knowing this body of knowledge that it carries that we couldn’t possibly know in the same way, or that a snake that experience of what they know, that form of knowing and that every other creature that they have forms of knowing too, that are powerful and profound and deserve attention and respect. And I do think in the time that we’re in, in this moment in human history, there’s a necessity to a turning towards other forms of knowing, right? Through these collaborative relationships, and you certainly talk about it in our relationship with nature, with other animal species, but you even also talk about it in human collaboration and the necessity of relationship like the way that you are using social media. As you said, the drive is to connect with other humans and to be able to help in a way. And so that fundamental collaborative nature with an understanding of that there is a respect and an attention that must be paid to other forms of knowing, seems essential at this moment in history. So I’m glad that you took that turn in your life to what felt like a deeper calling. You could have taken the path of a more superficial calling and you made a different decision.

Jarod Well, thank you. It’s made all the difference for me starting to try to be my more authentic self and really embracing what connection means, both in terms of nature and my fellow humans. The world of mental illness, I think especially can be a very lonely, very claustrophobic place. The one message I would really like to give to anybody who is in that place now and suffering is that the effort it takes to move beyond that and let other people, other loves in is worth it.

Shay Yeah. You also said something that I really liked. When people have asked you as family members, how can I help? You said a couple of things. You said encouragement and removing the obstacles were both really important, if I remember that precisely. In your own experience, like the things that Leslie, your wife had done to remove the obstacles to do some of the research for you, to try to set you up so that it was easier to take the action or to take the step, how helpful that was.

Jarod Yeah, I think, and that’s advice I often give to loved ones who reach out to me, is that it’s hard to overstate how obstacles that may seem small to you do not seem small to somebody suffering with depression. So I really didn’t want to go to the doctor and I really didn’t want to go to therapy, and there were days I really didn’t even want to go for a walk. The thing Leslie did that was really helpful beyond just being present and letting me know that she hoped that I could go get help was some of the steps were just very clerical. Hey, I’ve emailed you a list of mental health professionals that take our insurance and I’ve done the legwork to figure out who’s nearby and what their specialties are. I’ve copied and pasted them into an email. I’ve reached out to give you an idea of what it looks like to talk about depression with your doctor. All of the unknowns to somebody really struggling with depression, transform into whatever the worst scenario they can imagine is. Often people you might not think that a doctor would ever say to you, you’re wasting my time. But that’s literally the fear. And so depression saps all of your energy, and then you imagine that any reaching out you do is going to result in a hand slap and another thing to criticize yourself with. So that removal of barriers is really important, I think.

Shay Yeah, and you share about the importance of taking one small step. That actually the road to healing, it’s not some cataclysmic moment where everything changes in an instant, but rather it’s a series of small steps that you feel are where the progress is actually made.

Jarod Well, when I’m feeling good, I will laugh at myself about some of the mental gymnastics I do in order to take small steps. I talk about in the book, all of these little side deals I’d make with myself like, alright, Leslie wants me to go to the park and go for a walk. Fine, but I’m only going to sit in the car. Or, alright, I’m here. I’m only going to walk to that first tree and all of these teeny tiny little side deals like I’m getting away with something seems so silly and so frivolous when I’m on a solid footing, but they really were what I needed to do at the time to take these tiny, incremental steps toward healing.

Shay Yeah, sometimes it’s in that simplicity of just one tiny action, even with some inner resistance, but that pays off in the long run.

Jarod And then honestly, making times to celebrate the little steps as victories, we have this amazing ability to say, all right, I did this, but it doesn’t count because our brains will filter out the good in our lives and the achievements and just focus like a laser on threats and shortcomings, and so we really have to bring an intentionality to bear on celebrating ourselves sometimes.

Shay Yes, we do. Well, I hope that some of the folks listening today will check out your memoir. I think it is just a beautiful book, “Something in the Woods Loves You”, and check out some of your poetry and the work on your podcast and in your social media posts, because there’s a lot of richness there that I think is relatable for anyone. Whether they’re struggling with mental health challenges or not. There’s a depth to it that I think will be welcomed by people who check out some of your work, so thank you.

Jarod Well, thank you. I really appreciate the conversation.

Shay Great to have you on the show.

Jarod Thanks, Shay.

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