Actor or Annapolis? Carrie Coon | Choice Words with Samantha Bee

hello dear listeners fall is in the air it's time for the September scaries including school supplies parent teacher conferences and tuition payments at least that last one is top of my mind because my oldest child just started college and they said they weren't going to accept all of my quint's points college is one of those crazy things in America that you're told you need and in order to get ahead but it is so much more expensive and so much more attainable than ever you want to go to the right school but not a school that will make you seem like an elitist should you ever run for president you want to be involved in campus activities you want to make your mark but don't put anything questionable in writing should you once again ever end up running for president today I I wanted to talk to all of you college fresh people waking up from The Hangover of orientation if you're spending the next few weeks trying on different classes for size oh boy I hope you have some fun with it if you can if you can even entertain the idea of having some fun with it look I entered College thinking I was going to be a lawyer but I ended up with a comedy career all I'm trying to say is that you might not know exactly what you want to do forever when you're 18 and it's so okay we don't always encourage people to embrace not knowing the choice to make but I do think we do need to do more of that it's okay to live in the unknown for a while it's okay to test things out it's okay to be really bad at something and change your mind if you are lucky enough to get the opportunity to go to college I hope you squeeze out all the juice from that orange [Music] this is Choice words I'm Samantha be my guest today is perhaps actually undoubtedly my favorite actor of all time I feel like I started podcasting just so I could interview her it is true o I love Carrie [ __ ] with my entire self look you know Carrie from the leftovers which I cannot stop talking about from the guilded age and her new film his three daughters is out soon we talked about how she had close to 50 majors in college from business to Japanese to English philosophy political science look if it existed she dabbled and I think that is so great it certainly helped her to become one of my favorite people ever so take a listen and make good [Music] choices so okay so listeners we've been waiting for this conversation for years and then we were talking for like 15 full minutes and Technology died and the Earth's axis shifted and our entire recording would vanished it was raptured very leftovers so we're starting again and I love it because I want to talk to you forever because you're my absolute favorite but we are going to I'm G to ask Carrie who is one of the most important people in my life right now just my goodness my God you're making my face turn pink I know you're not going to want to talk to me ever again I because I gush too much and I bet like your m Western I'm Canadian we don't take compliments well it makes no we don't it's horrible I know I keep ducking I keep ducking out of the brain I do the same thing if someone says something nice to me I start to sweat I my body goes like I want to go inside my own Naval I want to crawl up inside so why can't we receive anything I guess we're waiting for the other shoe to drop that's what that's what it is I think coming on the other side yeah you like me now but just wait just wait I'm so damaged so I'm gonna I'm GNA ask here this very important question about Choice again and I'm hoping that um because it was it is fantastic we talked about choices and like big swings the Big Choice in your life that you think changed the trajectory of absolutely everything and your answer was incredible well as I said in our previous iteration I feel like never made any choices until I was about 30 because I was such a Midwestern people pleaser because I'm I was raised Catholic and I came from a big family middle child and I was taught to say yes and I was a very good girl and a very good student and I also never made any trouble for my parents I was a very good girl I was the class president and the homecoming queen and I was by all outward appearances incredibly high functioning person but what I was actually doing is compartmentalizing and shapeshifting to accommodate whoever whoever I was talking to and that's why I was popular right I could sort of move through any Circle socially right because I was just and I but I also as as I think people like who who suffer from this particular Affliction feel never really felt like I was actually fitting in anywhere so that's what the secret was right I looked very successful and very um settled and I was actually incredibly settled and uncomfortable in my own skin and again was constitutionally incapable of having any kind of conflict so I was incapable of advocating for myself in any way especially about my emotional needs and as as such I was a terrible girlfriend as we you related to that Samantha I Was a Serial overlapper because I I was incapable of breaking up with anybody and so I would just gather boyfriends and and try to juggle them and en list the help of my entire dorm to help me do that and all my roommates which was very punishing for everybody involved and try to force them to break with you big mistakes that they would actually yeah pull the trigger on that but in fact it never quite worked out that way it was it's terrible and I said I actually one time I was dating two boys and I just instead of dealing with it I just left the country I just decided to study abroad in Spain and I thought that was you know so and I was getting letters I bet they waited for you so I came home I they'll hate I mean hopefully they never listen to this I came home the next day after the plane landed I went to one's house and I told him what had been going on and then I went to the other guy's house and I told him what had been on and then I was on like a hunger strike like I fasted for three days you know it's very Catholic too you have to punish yourself for that and then um and then I got back together with my first we got back together we were together until I left for graduate school which is my big decision that I finally made oh my God he's a very dear friend of mine still actually I love him for that for his kind of a great great guy yeah he's he's he's defin he ended up where he should be okay that's good wasn't with uh but but the the only decision I ever made was going to graduate school because I had never made a decision up to that point even my even my decision to go to to undergrad was sort of by default because even though I was a straight A student and I was had good grades and blah blah blah I really hadn't prepared myself for the transition and because I outwardly looked very competent nobody was helping me make that transition so I I almost went to the enval academy Anapolis Naval Academy which is insane now when you think about my life and it's when I finally ended that process I um I had an offer to play soccer at the University of Mount Union so I just said okay because I could afford it they gave me good financial aid and Kenyan didn't which is where I wanted to go and so um I could afford to go there I was on academic scholarship and I said my first week I was a business and Japanese major and then that's so funny I know it's absurd realized very quickly in kanji class that it probably wasn't um a natural fit for that trajectory I was like I'll do international business you know it's something I heard about on a TV show I'm sure speak Japanese like no I had never had any exposure to Japanese at all what it was insane I don't know what I was thinking and so very quickly I became an education major and I did my classroom observations I was in a special education class and I realized that I was not uh special enough to be a teacher and I dropped that and then I joined the philosophy Department right and I was flirting with polyi of course I took no math I was purely I went pure logic after that so that kind of led me to philosophy and then um what else did I do and at that point I had massed enough credits in in English literature just because that was something I loved I was always a big reader so I had an English literature major by default and I I actually got a Spanish Literature degree also so I did a thesis in English lit a thesis in Spanish lit I had a psych minor I studied abroad in Spain to run away from my boyfriends and my sister is from El Salvador and so I always had an interest in Spanish anyway and I was waiting for somebody to tell me what to do I didn't know what to do and I had worked up a thesis on language acquisition and as I said before if you read the marriage plot by Jeffrey eugenes you realize what an insufferable cliche my whole life was up until that point and and I was I was kind of talking to the poly side Department you know what what should I what could I parlay this into and yeah I was looking for some mentor to give me guidance and finally Dr hendle in the theater Department I had done maybe four or five plays my grandparents used to pick me up from soccer games and drive me back to school you know to to rehearse plays in my University they were wonderful they were my my mom's parents were always there for me and he said 'I think you should go to graduate school for acting and he saidou can go to these university/ resident theater auditions I think they still have them and you can go and audition for all of these graduate programs at once and I think you could go to graduate school and be an actor and I had never it had never occurred to me I had seen a play when I was 10 and I had obviously done few plays so I had a secret Ho One play I seen one play at the Aran Civic Theater beautiful atmospheric theater my you know my friend's parents took me because my mom didn't drive us anywhere because she worked nice and so if you wanted to go somewhere you had to get a ride I I ended up going to the Palmer House in Chicago with my mom and her sisters and my grandma and they were just like trash they were just drinking martinis the whole weekend while I went walked into these rooms where all these people some of them had been out in the world being actors and who were now because the economy was just kind of starting to turn it was still good so people didn't generally go to acting school right out of undergrad they wanted you to have experience in the world before you got in so it was already unlikely I was going to get in so all these guys were like these people are stretching and doing vocal exercises and I'm just standing like I don't know what the hell I'm doing here and so the stakes were kind of low because I thought there was no chance in hell I was going to get in I worked up a monologue from IM imagin and symboling and then you know Heidi Chronicles like you said was the last play my professor had probably seen so cute God bless you Dr hendle and uh and then um I ended up getting called back to Rutgers and got on their waiting list but they never invited me to the program and then the W Madison Wisconsin called me I mean literally a couple of weeks before school started to offer me their final spot in their group of 10 actors for three years in a program that they were revamping and I said to my parents I said do you think I should go to grad school for acting that seems very impractical and they were like what the hell why not and so I got in my car and I drove to Wisconsin and I found an apartment by the capital and then spent three years banging around in Wisconsin that famous art school that F most World rown I believe polymer science is really their you know because the actors are kept in the Bas of a brutalist building the out Academy awardwinning actors left right and Center yes I believe that program is now defunct but yeah that was the revamp they were like we're g to wind it down all the way down this story is incredible to me I mean oh first of all I want to I want to remark that like thank God you took a bunch of weird risks in college and I wish that more people actually could do that because it helps you kind of it helps you to narrow your focus or like you need to try a bunch of weird [ __ ] like I think and study abroad study abroad and go to a school where you have that flexibility to change Majors 100 times I went to college in Canada when it cost me $800 my first semester and I took calculus so I was like yeah cuz I was like I should try that out yeah I should try advanced math because never I never tried it before but what if I'm a genius and it was the worst student they've ever had they were like get out congratulations they like get the [ __ ] out of this class but like what a beautiful I mean it's a beautiful story it's like Risk and choice and just like doing something [ __ ] wild what point in the program did you go oh I am actually going to do this like this is actually what I want I want this well comically I was teaching acting as a TA which took a little while to find my there so that was interesting um and I think so I had a great voice teacher her name was Susan Sweeney is Susan Sweeney she's still alive say what Susan sorry and she had taught at the pttp in Delaware which is this famous program that was based kind of started in EST you know from the 70s that sort of weird yep you know breaking you down and remaking you so that the actors in that program have a very particular vocabulary it's kind of strange n world that they come from and so she she brought some of those um just amazing voice work and old school Voice work IP like what we call the International Phonetic Alphabet how you learn dialects the EDI Skinner method so really old school Voice work and I loved it I I was an English Lit major obviously I was it was rooted in language for me the language made sense to me so that was a really and I was a cerebral actor I would always read books around the thing I was doing I wasn't necessarily in my body I was an athlete and I felt I understood the between the flow state that you're in as a an athlete and the Flow State you're in as an artist that made sense to me too so that was always a strength that was I I was connected to my body in a way that I think frankly a lot of Americans probably aren't certainly a lot of midwesterners aren't but that Voice work I mean I literally found my voice in that class right because I had I think never taken a deep breath in my life and I sounded like a pirate you know I come from the BR the a sound and the RS I I never really heard myself talking like that you know you go to Wisconsin it gets worse I still hear I did an audition yesterday and the the midwestern a that was popping out and my audition was hilarious anyway oh yeah when you go back there do you slide right back into it oh instantly for me when I go to Canada instantaneous it's like there you are wherever you go there you are where oh yeah the people start talking and there you go uh my family is getting worse I think but uh I was I The Voice work really spoke to me and yeah you know I have to say i' I've about I talked about this in a New Yorker profile a number of years ago one of the things we haven't talked about is I was also a compulsive skin picker which was another big secret I had in my life yeah it had been happening since I was two years old I never picked my face so people didn't see it but it was my the rest of my body and the thing that I had come to understand is that what that is what that impulse is about is about absence it's about taking yourself out of the present in order to process whatever or you do it when you're bored when you're hungry when you're tired when you're sad you know and and it's it's brain chemistry right you're creating actually like a little dopamine Spike and I was so addicted and I was incapable of being still and the breath work is what led me to meditation which is what led me to sort of try to create space between the moment of impulse and the actual action and that work was what led me into therapy and so you know graduate school was this door opening into becoming a more integrated person right and wow and healing myself and using art using the process of becoming an actor it actually was the gateway to profound healing in my life and in my body now that healing wouldn't come full circle until I turned 30 when I met Tracy and I did Virginia wolf that was another huge transition in my life but but if I hadn't gone to graduate school I honestly don't know what my how I would have turned out because me mentally I was not healthy person right and but nobody could tell nobody nobody could tell there are so many I mean talk about sliding doors there are so many P you might have taken just because they were a little bit easier or more expected in a way expected expected like law school whatever you know just like you got your degree now let's you want to be able to pay a mortgage you want to have like health insurance so you got to get a job so what's the job and have a settle down and have your family s I'm sure my my grandparents thought I would marry the quarterback you know they thought I was that girl when I brought home an old playright they were who wrote like dirty plays everybody was very disconcerted like he's so old wait a second hold what does he do again what does he right dirty dirty little play did you would did you think that you would be primarily a theater actor did you br like what kind of I was the other gift that that W Madison gave me was they brought in a lot of professionals so I ended up doing I ended up being invited to participate in our Town Richard Corley was the artistic director at the time and I ended up doing our town as a professional with Andre J Shields the great Andre Shields playing the stage manager and that was I actually got got credit for that even though it was a professional show and then I ended up going back to the Madison Repertory Theater rip it's great space and doing Anna Christie and oh gosh an Frank I I ended up working professionally at that theater for a number of years likewise they invited the artistic director of the American Players theater in Wisconsin a gorgeous place it was just written up in the times this week actually as a wonderful regional theater it's one of the only theaters in the that still has a company so I ended up after graduate school I went immediately out there to do an apprenticeship and at that apprenticeship I met a lot of directors who were based around the country at other Shakespeare theaters but also in Chicago which of course was the closest big city and a Midwestern City so very relatable for me and I um I I was in that company for four years that was almost eight months of my life for four years and I was I you know you you pick blackberries and swim in the river and then you go rehearse Shakespeare and then you perform it under a full Moon I mean it's it's a really special place and you're also filling an 1100 seat house right so you have to find in your body and in your voice how to be in that space truthfully but reaching the back of the house that education I just feel like so few young actors get that kind of education anymore in acting you can I mean that scale to try to tell the truth at that scale you can almost do anything after that right and I would have been very content to be a company member at that theater I love that theater and I thought that's where I was headed I was really gunning to be in the company at American Players Theater I really wanted it but I started to get commercials in Chicago and then my third year in Chicago that was when I I was finally cast in the main stage at Stephen Wolf by Erica Daniels who had been my judge at the era auditions when I had no idea what Stephen wolf company was wow and she had advocated for me in Chicago she had put some auditions in my way and she kept call me into Stephen wolf she kind I don't know if she remembered me from the eras but okay she claimed she did okay but I think she she claimed she did and she um and she always invited me to to audition and eventually I finally got the mainstage job that I had coveted and that's when I started to understand I did have instincts about right material and I knew what was good for me and what I was going to be good at and I knew what roles weren't mine that Ros belong to somebody else right and that became really clear and that's where I met Tracy and that's when my life got got really kind of shifted into the next phase right how do you choose projects or do do projects choose you do you choose or is it like a meeting of the minds cuz I mean and people are people write parts for you they think of you they write the part for you now that's happening now yeah when you're younger you say yes when you're younger you say yes and you get chosen and you wait for people to choose you and you have no control right then you get to the privilege position I'm in where you get to choose what to say yes to and for us I would say in our house pitz are prize winning playright husband always it's the writing that's the first and foremost consideration because it's not on the page it's not on the stage as we like to say and no matter what you do you're Pro you're not gonna be able to fix it um so for writing true words have never been spoken my husband and I talk about that all the time because we are we are also we also work in this business together and we're like if writing is not there there is literally nothing you can do to go in and fix it it just is what it is you can so if you're not willing to accept what it is then don't sign up you can bring your whole heart to it but you can't make it real no you can't and I don't know if anybody even knows anymore what's good but we can talk about that right but but good writing and then secondly is is it asking something from me that I haven't done before that is compelling or interesting to me is it seeing me in a new way right is it asking for more of me than has been asked previously and then of course the third thing you have to say is what will this do in terms of the advancement or the longevity of my career what does it contribute and of course included in that is sometimes the financial consideration which is is this one of those jobs you can't really afford to turn down because now you have two children and two nannies yeah yeah there's that job too now you gotta for college you gota play the game a little bit exactly playing for paying for elementary schools hard enough if you you like say my son I think is somebody who needed that and I'm a public school kid and I believe in public school but man you know my kid needed something else and oh my gosh it's just so painful oh it's all very painful it is painful to write a check to us and and a privilege to be able to do it of course privil yes of course um oh my God I have so many questions for okay I was you know I am so familiar with your work on such a deep level I mean we talked all about this none of you can listen to it because it disappears doesn't exist anymore Emeral like all of us but you and I was also reading about what other people have because I know how I feel about your work but I you know I wanted to read how other people Define it in a way or talk about it and I read something that Damon Lindelof wrote which is that you tune into a dangerous frequency and that to me was the most that I thought hit to the actual that was like the the the button that was the one for me cuz I think that's so true you tune into a frequency that is very dangerous and like a darkness in all the light in all the everything there's something so deep and I I it just resonates with me so hard you're just you just go there oh that means a lot to me I think it started young I used to wake up during Johnny Carson and come out of my room and say I was five or six I'd be like so Jesus let's talk about Jesus when's he coming back and my parents are like we he's not coming back in your life I'm like HH you don't know that nobody knows when Jesus is coming back but am I gonna get married and have children like just do I have time apocalypse totally obsessed I love mummies oh my God me too did you ever have oh my gosh when we I'm a little older than you I'm Pro I'm 54 so when barely thank you you look great just out of fresh out of college um but we had King Tutt was like a huge when I was 10 it was like King totally I had a friend who had a t-shirt that said don't touch my TTS with two little TTS on oh my God you have to resurrect that do you have a store for your podcast you have to put that in your store it's the only item that would ever be in the store don't tou my TTS but this is all I would totally buy that death like I thought death I'm an only child but like I obsessed with like and still and and still there's that that core interest in like mummies and what does it look like I guess a lot of the material that you grapple with has to do with death and has to do with do you know different planes of different dimensions of existence and this new the new film that I just saw is his three daughters it's beautiful and it you know what it's like a play it is like a play it is like a play and it opens with your monologue yeah you you just like it's the entry point to the whole world and it's really beautiful okay so the it's you're with Natasha Leon Elizabeth Olsen all of you are great and you play three sisters who return home as your father is dying two sisters return home to the one sister who's already there and it is full of conflict and I got to tell you there like that I defin I deeply liked it there was one moment where because your your character is battling with Natasha Leon's character in particular you know everybody brings their own thing to the table and there's a moment where she kind of walks out of frame and I know as a person who knows how the sausage is all being made she's walking toward the camera and your eyes follow her and the look in your eyes the seething the seething was so deeply felt by me I was like if anyone ever looked at me like that I would cease to exist in this in one second and I was like and you know what I know what Carrie's looking at I know she's looking at like 15 people who are standing there with sandwiches and a bunch of cables yeah yeah and a lot of lights and still it doesn't sound like you played that role in your own family yeah I was more of a harmonizer I mean I was responsible and I am a no all I I I still firmly believe that if my siblings did everything I told them to do their lives would be better oh my God which they you know so annoying they hate it I love that so much I just wish I feel like people should just ask us how they want the world run tell we'll fix it it's probably about time for the ladies to get a shot don't you think listen I say this all the time I'm like you need to give control of all the levers of power to women just for five years just just let us give you five years watch us go for five years if you don't like things better at the end of five years you can have the whole thing back you have that whole enchilada back and you can [ __ ] around with it as much as you want but give us five years you're not gonna you're not going to want it you're not going to want it back cuz we're going to fix it do you um oh wow yeah you're from Ohio you love it you must be loving JD Vance right now just like trolling JD Vance and Frank lose is like half of my life right now I know it's just Twitter but man do I you know I went to school Frankl I was the Secretary of State and oh I find the the the implosion of JD Vance gives me so much pleasure every single day because he has done absolutely nothing for Ohio and absolutely nothing for my family so so there absolutely nothing oh boy I can't wait for the I'm so excited for the debate the debate which they just yeah I'm just I get goosebumps thinking about it you're very you're very active you're very political you talk about climate change a lot do you okay when you I mean obviously the climate's changing we've talked about it already like we've referenced it like 10 times in this interview because we both feel that way and I got little got my little solar panels I'm like ready to go for whatever jealous but how do you I mean it was so hard even working on like even having my TV show was really anytime we did anything climate themed people literally turned off their televisions and you could track it you could track the data and you be like this is the the point where you said climate is when everybody went and made it's incredible went to the bathroom and turned you off and went and like read a book instead um do you see that changing do you see more engagement just from yourp soon enough no no I think you know what it's going to take I hate say this out loud but what it's going to take is a mass dying event that happens because of wet bulb temperatures in some place like Texas right if overnight suddenly 12,000 people die because their sweat won't evaporate people were GNA say wait a minute and at that point it will be too late because we really have I mean if you if you're paying attention to any of the really like wonky climate scientists right now we have this the Tipping points some of the stuff that's happening around us is not what they anticipated at all it's happening at such an accelerated rate and they're like we have three months oh God three months to mitigate or we're going to hit I mean the temperatures were going to hit in my children's lifetime I mean they're going to be in their 20s when we hit these right and of course the poor people will die first and people won't care it happens all the time it's happening right now poor people are already dying you know 500 people died in one night on the Haj people didn't pay any attention to that news no it's going to take white people dying somewhere for other white people to say oh no done they'll be like why didn't you tell us that there was something that there was a problem yeah hey guys and the thing is you know it's because I think I think people shut down because on some level they know what it requires is sacrificing the entire way of life that we're living and people just can't even they're trying to pay the bills and they can't reckon with it I mean most people can't even recycle they don't have the bandwidth because part of what late stage capitalism does it it keeps people you know enslaved to that machine right and and and it's an impossible it's impossible you you cannot thrive in that machine it keeps you it intentionally keeps you running and so you don't have time to pay attention to these things which are unfortunately existential and no I don't know that we're GNA it's going to take something really catastrophic we're seeing I think we're seeing we saw climate move up the list of concerns as as people get pulled in the presidential race and I think people who who do know and young people certainly know how screwed they are um I think that's part of the enthusiasm because we know if we have a republican Administration they're literally going to take away the EPA oh any climate issues so we're already behind and if they take away even the very small effort we've made then we're we're just dead so much faster but we are dead I mean I really believe that right I mean we're all cruising toward our death yeah which is why I'm not gonna get BOTOX like it's just something you're not g to maintain your Botox and the apocalypse no one's going to be around to shoot your face full of Botox so I'm not going to do it because it doesn't matter no the bo all the Botox is boiled it doesn't work anymore it's too hot yeah yeah exactly it's melt it just melts out of your face it just melts right out of your face that's why I just don't care about so many other things I mean I hope that making entertainment is at least doing no harm you know I think it does no har I think it does no harm and it's needed the Gilder is paliative care yeah I call itative care you do need a moment you do need a moment at the end unfortunately as a person who works primarily or has worked in comedy the only thing I want to watch is everyone literally getting raptured that tracks with comedian comedians are the darkest people darkest you guys are the darkest I know everyone's like what fun what's your summer beach read I'm like I'm reading a book about the Holocaust nuclear war do you want to yeah can I get finish gonna going to going to reread Chernobyl CU it's a real it's a page of chob Hitler a scent just making my way that for the second time oh my God okay okay so you and your husband you both I mean just as I stated prior to our interview departing yes um you are my power couple like you're the power couple the entertainment powerhouses that I look to because I like that my husband and I are in the same industry I think it's helpful the language is shared do you you feel that absolutely we love working together Tracy and I haven't worked together a lot on camera but we've done a lot of theater together I've done a lot of his plays mostly that he's written very little acting on stage together but but we worked really well together and I I it's so important to have a partner because I suffer from that Midwestern Affliction of people pleasing right of taking such a long time to be able to hear my own voice to be able to feel like an integrated woman it is very important to me to have a partner who can reflect me back to me in a in a way that's affirmative and so I I do trust my gut more but I still I still rely on him to confirm how I feel and it's and it's so important to have somebody in my life that does that because I'm I haven't been practicing it for that long relative to rest of my life and um and he's so great at it you know he's 15 years older than me and he's lived many many lives he never wields his experience like a cudgel he always lets me come to my own conclusions he's somebody who he never gives unsolicited advice samtha what I find it extraordinary and he's and he gives great advice you have to ask him you have to ask him oh my go give you advice but I he doesn't just walk around and so every time he's on a job women just fall in love with him because he just asks questions because he genuinely loves women he loves them and he want and he's and he thinks we're the superior gender and he respects us and so to have that kind of partner in my life and in my work and helping me decide when I am on the fence about project he's the only opinion that matters to me you know right right right and of course the logistics of our family the logistics yeah the logistics are difficult but they're challenging but they're not impossible I think they're actually people are always like how do you how do you do it with the two like it's easier than if two people had Wall Street jobs and you have to be there at like 7 o'clock in the 7 to yes it's so annoying that our kids don't understand how other children live it's like you actually see me a lot you think don't see me you see me a lot a lot of kids don't see their parents the whole week don't you love it when your kids are like you're gone you've been gone and you're like where you going all the time all the time I just spent the entire weekend with you you never Bank any points with kids you never Bank anything you never do mine are still young and it's so tedious oh it's so they you know it doesn't count you know what's fun is that that they actually well it's great it is great cuz I have like all minor teenagers they actually need you more in a different they it's really nice it's actually great I like it oh that's good to hear some people I mean I've heard it's right little kids little problems big kids big problems so I always thought it'd be harder to do this career when they're younger but I'm starting to understand that it actually will get harder when they're older I think get harder when they're older because they psych they their psyches need you more like they don't need you to make dinner for them but they need you to be there and be they need you to say no to them at the right at the right time yes oh that's really no that's interesting to hear I want to hear more about all of that how did you learn how to say no how did you because I don't think I as a people pleaser current and former it was it's very hard to say very hard and I think I think it's hard for every woman and they were all always learning it all the time but I have a very clear moment where it was brought to my attention my grandmother my grandma D and my grandpa bill they retired in their 50s because they were T-boned by a drunk driver and they almost didn't survive but they did and so they were retired for most of my childhood and so they really helped raise us I mean my parents had five kids they both worked full-time there's no way we all would have survived without grandm and Grandpa bill they used to drive me from my you know soccer games to my play rehearsals and I remember distinctly I think I was home from college and she was on the phone she was in her 70s and there was this widower who had been calling her he' lost his wife and my grandmother was a really nice woman yeah and he was calling her and he was talking to her on the phone for you know she couldn't say no she couldn't say no to him she couldn't hang up and she was in a conversation and she finally said in that moment I'm so sorry John or whatever his name was I just can't have this conversation right now I have to go and she hung up and she sat there for a second and she said my God she said listen to me if if you can learn how to say no now you will be so far ahead of any woman because she said Carrie I am in my 70s and I am still learning and I'm still struggling to say no and this it was a very Vivid moment and this is a woman too who when I was dating two boyfriends she wrote me a letter when I was doing my my three-day punishing you know fast when I was breaking up with everybody and punishing myself in a very Catholic way she wrote me a letter she was worried about me and she she said you know pity is not the same as love and you are not respecting or dignifying someone else by staying in something where you know that you don't want to be in and just that pity is not the same thing as love there were these seeds she was planting in me and I and they they just it took them long time to come to fruition it's taken a long time for me to learn how to say no but I'm but I think being in my 40s is so empowering I I love my 30s it was a life-changing decade for me really in terms of my mental health my marriage um you know I had my first child when I was 37 and my 40s it just gets easier and easier to say no and I love saying no I love it I just it's really empowering and and I and I tell young women the same thing start practicing practicing and I say and and just like you know that you're not dignifying anyone by by kind of not being fully expressed Yeah by you're not actually helping anybody prolonging prolonging their Agony because the answer is the same and they're not allowed to exactly and they're not allowed to move onto the life that they're supposed to be living yes you know this is not your life you want to be living your life I love grandmother wisdom so much oh boy oh boy oh boy you know what is so so funny when you because we're talking so much about like how we learned to say no and figured out how to be less of a people pleaser never not a people pleaser just less of one you know right and then we create these children who are not at all people Pleasers no which is great which is what we want for them but it actually makes it really hard to parent yes it really does and I I am going to be up against it with this girl this girl is I've never met anybody like her she's really been put on this Earth to test me she going to be so herself and you're she doesn't do anything she doesn't want to do yeah yeah she wear she wears no pants yep she's like I'm not wearing pants do this anyway not today I do want to talk to you about this I do I do also oh my God thank you so much for we did it we did it did we record is it recording we recorded it we did it that was car [ __ ] and I had had no choice but to look up one thing she mentioned that she almost went to the Naval Academy in Annapolis for college I was shocked her life would have been so different I mean do they even have a theater program there well the answer is no but they do have a theater group called The masqueraders at least thanks for joining us I'm Samantha Beast see you next week for some more Choice words [Music] thank you for listening to Choice Words which was created by and is hosted by me the show is produced by it'sa Baron reinstein with editing and additional producing by Josh Richmond we're distributed by lemonata media and you can find me at real Sam B on X and Instagram follow Choice words wherever you get your podcasts orist an adree on Amazon music with your Prime Membership [Music]