EP. 153 — Surviving to Thriving with Tara Schuster

Jameela Intro: Welcome to another episode of I Weigh with Jamila Jamil, a podcast against shame. Happy International Women’s week and month and day. I hope you had a nice day when it happened. I always find it’s a bit awkward because I hope that we don’t need a day soon that would be ideal for me because we’re being just sort of you know celebrated and protected and acknowledged every day. I think that’s a while away judging from the headlines at the moment. anyway. I I love you and I hope that you give yourself grace. I hope you give others grace during this time. I hope it’s just a nice reminder for us to remember to celebrate ourselves treat ourselves with kindness really look at how fucking amazing we are given all this shit we have to go through, and I hope you are just treating yourself and nourishing yourself as much as possible. Just engage in pleasure. I think that’s what this time is best for, for me. It’s just reminding myself that I deserve to be just wrapped in bubble wrap sometimes and looked after, the way I would look after my best friend. 

Anyway, I feel like today’s guest is perfect for this week, partially because of how we met. We were at a conference, a women’s conference, we were both speaking separately and you know we’re the same age, got the same haircut, we have had extremely similar lives, and I really learned to the full extent how similar we are during this podcast, during this chat, because it went very deep, and got very intimate. We have similar messages and similar hopes, and we write about, and talk about similar things. 

Now, ordinarily, in a world maybe 5-10 years ago, we would be seen as competition. We would be seen as women who should stay away from each other because we work along the same line, and that is a design of the patriarchy, right? They know that there is strength in numbers. They know that if we are divided, we are easier to conquer and easier to ignore. And the first thing I thought when I connected with Tara in the green room of this conference was oh she’s fucking fantastic and I want to spread her message to as many people as I can because she knows how to do things I don’t know how to do. And she shares the same message as me. And there is strength in numbers and I do so desperately just want to collaborate with as many women as I can, the ones who are different from me and almost especially the ones who do the same thing. We are on the same side. We are in the same fight. We have to do this as a team. And that felt really nice for International Women’s week, day, month, year. I enjoyed the mutual camaraderie that we shared and sensed between one another immediately and we stayed in touch and when her new book came out, ‘Glow in the F*cking Dark’, I was so excited to have her on my podcast to be able to teach you the things that she has had to learn through an incredibly complicated life. 

Because on the, from the outside Tara seems extremely privileged in many ways and and I’m sure she would agree she is, in certain aspects of where she exists in the world. But she’s been through a lot, and there are so many conversations when we talk about trauma that examine massive, very obvious traumas but sometimes it’s death by 1000 cuts. Sometimes it’s loads of mini traumas. The kind of things that we don’t talk about in the headlines, in the mainstream, that can absolutely devastate someone from the inside out. And there’s not really a lot of places for those people to go, a lot of places for those people to feel seen and heard and for them to work their way out of it. And they deserve to and they need to and I think her story is quite representative of so many people that I know. So many people that write to me every day and I think you’ll enjoy this chat. 

We talk about surviving a neglectful childhood. We talk about relearning worthiness. We talk about the importance of owning and affirming your own experiences, learning to separate internal validation from external validation, something that’s really fucking hard to do for women especially because we’re taught that that is our entire fucking value. We talk about the actual practice of real gratitude, not the sort of insta-gratitude, real proper tangible micro and macro gratitude. And we talk about learning the importance of Stardust. Now she’s going to explain that more so than I can because I’m British and we don’t talk about that sort of thing so much. But maybe we should so that we could be as happy as Tara is now. It’s a really vulnerable conversation and I felt very at ease with her and I feel very excited for her to bring a bit of hope and joy into the world. And the news has been fucking horrendous this week, especially for anyone within the LGBTQ+ community. It’s just been shocking and shit and it’s really hard to not just allow the doom and hopelessness to swallow you whole. And I think she is looking for a bit of light and she’s teaching us all how to get there alongside her and I think maybe that’s what we need. We need just a fucking break for a minute. We need to just check out and hear something hopeful and hear a positive survivor story and and maybe learn some tips and tricks together. So let me know how you feel. Tell me what you think. Write to Tara, find her she’s a lovely woman, and enjoy the excellent, Tara Schuster.

Jameela [00:04:23] Tara Schuster, welcome to I Weigh. How are you? 

Tara [00:04:26] I’m excellent. And I’m so excited to be here with you. 

Jameela [00:04:30] Oh, likewise. We met in a funny way. We met at a women’s conference that we were both speaking at. I was interviewing Viola Davis. You were speaking there. And it’s quick love, wasn’t it? A quick. 

Tara [00:04:41] Yes. Love at first sight. 

Jameela [00:04:43] Yeah yeah. In the in the green room area. And it’s so fun to be able to get you on the podcast because I would love to dig into both of your books, but especially the new one. Glow in the Fucking Dark, which is such a great title. 

Tara [00:04:59] Thank you. 

Jameela [00:04:59] And I love a good I love a good fucking whenever I can, whenever I can find one, both figuratively and literally. But I. I want to dig in to what it’s about, I think. And pardon me if I’m just going to go straight in presumptuously, but I think that you exist in a space that is underrepresented in the conversation of mental health because we are all talking about mental health much more than before. But a lot of the stories that rise to the top of our kind of consciousness are ones of immense and very obvious trauma. And so stories of terrible, terrible terrors and unimaginable pain. And because those are the stories that we hear, my own childhood was fucking terrifying and therefore, quite weirdly, quite easy to understand as I got older, we start to feel like we’re not entitled to feel pain if we don’t have the very obvious horror movie story. And actually there are a lot of people who have more insidious traumas and and micro pains or things that they hyper normalize because they’re children and it comes to find them when they’re older. And I think when it finds you, when you’re older, if you don’t have that immediate thing to think back to, then it can be really debilitating. I’ve seen this for a lot of my friends, because you don’t know why you’re behaving the way you do, and then you sort of gaslight yourself and other people gaslight you and you start to think it’s only chemical. And for some people it is chemical. But for some people there are these these micro traumas that happen all over the place. It’s like death by a thousand cuts. And your story to me feels like one of those. And it’s a really important conversation to have because you don’t have to have been to war to still be dealing with the scars of your childhood. 

Tara [00:06:52] Yes. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with Lori Gottlieb’s work. 

Jameela [00:06:57] I’m not.

Tara [00:06:57] She’s a therapist. Great book called Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. And she introduces the concept that there’s no hierarchy of pain, that if you went through something and it was miserable, it doesn’t have to be the world’s worst experience ever. And that it was very shaming to me, sort of backing up. I grew up in a neglectful, psychologically abusive house where things came to die. You know, all the pets, all the plants, like anything nice was immediately ruined because my parents, I actually don’t really blame them. They just truly did not know how to take care of children, nor have any appetite to learn. You know, I’m sure they were in their own worlds about that. But the thing about neglect is it’s something other people don’t really see. You know, there’s no, like, welt on your arm. There’s no obvious thing to call the authorities to. But social services did come to my house a lot because I guess people at school noticed that my tights were hanging down my legs and my hair was a rat nest. Like, those are the signs. And but neglect is so much about what you didn’t get. And then, you know, so what I learned from my childhood of no one taking care of me, being alone a lot of the time was that I was unworthy because otherwise, why wasn’t anybody helping me? I must. It must be me. I must be unworthy. 

Jameela [00:08:22] Well, you had an interesting sort of moment on a hike, right? Where you didn’t actually know until then that your situation was abnormal, that no one was caring for you. You know, like, as kids, we just sort of. We take what we’re given. And you saw a father reassure his [inaudible] 

Tara [00:08:39] Oh, [inaudible]. 

Jameela [00:08:39] about safety. Yeah, yeah. And you, you realized in that moment, Oh, my God, parents reassure their kids, Oh, my God, parents are there to look after you. And that was sort of like the beginning of. 

Tara [00:08:54] Yes. 

Jameela [00:08:55] The break. 

Tara [00:08:56] It was mind blowing. I you know, my friends always say to me, You’re so courageous. You’re so brave. Like, you go travel the world alone. And I hike in these weird slot canyons where I definitely shouldn’t be. And I’ll. I’ll go on any adventure. And I was camping alone in Zion, and I accidentally set fire to like, my the little grill. And I was like, Okay, never mind this. We’re doing takeout every single night. And I went to like the local restaurant in Zion, and I was just listening to this father talking to his kids, and he was ordering them, you know, fries with chili. And he said, Now kids, we’re going Canyoneering tomorrow. And I’ve never done it. So I don’t I don’t know what it’s like, but I’ve hired somebody who’s an expert who’s done this hundreds of times. So even if you’re scared, you’re going to be safe. And I was like, wait, what? Parents think about their children’s safety? They actually do something. They hire someone, they reassure their children. And what I’ve had to do is reality check myself a lot because my experience is just so not what my friends were. So I went to my best friend and I said, Hey, did your parents ever tell you you were safe? And like, Do you tell your kids they’re safe? And she was like, That’s the number one job of a parent is to provide emotional safety, physical safety. And in that one incident, I was like, Whoa. So the reason I have felt ten out of ten scared, like, all the time, like when a trash can lid closes, I get enormous startle is like, Oh, I’ve just never felt safe. And so I engage in risky trips and hikes and weird things that actually aren’t cool. They’re just straight up not safe. And I don’t take safety precautions because that’s been normalized. That’s what’s comfortable to me. And yeah. 

Jameela [00:10:55] Well, I just want to ask a quick question not to try and therapize you, but I just I wonder only from my own patterns, are you doing that just because you have no like innate protocol of safety for yourself, or are you also doing it to externalize the inner feeling of of a lack of safety that you get? Probably sitting on your couch, you go and do dangerous things in order to externalize it. 

Tara [00:11:18] I think it’s more the former that it’s just becomes so comfortable to me that I don’t even understand that there would be an alternative. And it truly was not until I don’t know, I must have been 34, 35 when this incident happened where I was like, Oh wow, people have safety some. And we live in a society that is so unsafe on so many levels, You know, particularly like how you show up in the world really dictates just exactly how safe you are. And I think more and more what I’m realizing is I have to find a place of internal safety because I cannot control external factors. But if I can find room within myself to feel calm, to feel safe, to know that I can handle my emotions, that’s a much better baseline to face the entire world. So that’s a lot of the work of this book, is just finding a safe place within yourself. 

Jameela [00:12:19] And so talk to me a little bit about your mental health journey. Like how did that childhood manifest as an adult that has led you to write all these books about teaching people how to kind of take back their autonomy of self regulation? 

Tara [00:12:32] Yeah, So, you know, the main message coming from my childhood, you’re worthless. It like became a distrack in my brain. So the only things I heard were you’re worthless, you’re ugly, nobody cares about you, nobody loves you. You’re it’s too late to do anything meaningful with your life. I was 25. 

Jameela [00:12:51] And were you ever told that by anyone? 

Tara [00:12:53] Not, no. It was just what I came to believe, you know, like, my coping strategy was just, well, believe them. Because if anybody cared, if you were actually loved, why would you have been treated this way? There must be something really wrong with you. So I decided, okay, my parents aren’t going to give me any validation. I’m just going to hustle at school. And so I was like, Teacher’s pet. I have lunch with the teacher. Hustle hustle hustle, got to an Ivy League school, got to Comedy Central. Like my first job ever was being an intern on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. And I was just like, I need external validation. It was so clear to me that what I was doing was I felt like such a weirdo my whole life. Like like nobody could understand my experience and nobody talked about mental health then that this job became like a magic check. Like, look at me. I made it. You know, I’m hanging out with Key and Peele, and don’t look over here at a quarter century of complex trauma, but like, look at this big shiny object over here. And so on the outside, it looked like, Wow, my career was going really well. But on the inside I was ten out of ten anxious, ten out of ten depressed, which was this horrible fluctuation. I would be like the girl crying on your stoop or like the girl openly weeping on the subway. But every day. And it might have kept going that way. Hustling externally, imploding internally if I hadn’t drunk dialed my therapist on my 25th birthday, threatening to kill myself. And you know, the next morning playing back her messages and like understanding, wow, this calm European woman who always wears like a handkerchief and has like, this little cup of tea and I have never seen her stressed out ever, was frantically trying to find me and get me to hospitalized myself. And that morning scared me. I was like, if I don’t save my life, I’m not going to have much more of a life to live. And that was the turning point. That was, you know what? I might not be to blame for any of this, but it’s now my responsibility. I’m not going to I am not going to neglect myself. And since I didn’t have any mentors or like I couldn’t turn to my parents, I turned to the thing I was good at, which was work. And I just thought, okay, I’m going to create a Google document. I’m going to put in all my questions, I’m going to research the shit out of it, you know, like, what are values? What our principles, what are vegetables, You know, like genuinely, what are they? Which one should I be eating? And I attacked it for five years, and  

Jameela [00:15:39] It became your new thing to win. 

Tara [00:15:41] Oh yeah, I was going to win at healing. I was going to crush healing so hard. 

Jameela [00:15:45] Win mental health, yeah. 

Tara [00:15:47] Yeah. Exactly. Truly. And at the end of five years, I had a 600 page Google doc, felt stable. Like I just want to highlight, underline. I never thought I could feel stable, and yet I did. And that’s when I decided to write my first book, Buy Yourself the Fucking Lilies. Not because I wanted to be a memoir, self-help writer like that hadn’t occurred to me. I was a comedy executive. It was just that I had all this stuff and I knew I couldn’t be alone and that it could help other people because I really don’t like most self-help books because they say something like, Feel joy. It’s like, cool. What are steps one through five? Like, can you break this down for me? And so that’s what I hope to do in my writing is like, entertain, make you laugh and give you like you’re actionable things that won’t work, not every tool will work for everybody, but I bet one will. 

Jameela [00:16:47] And can you talk to me a little bit about your parents? Because I know you’ve kind of like you’ve got more healing for yourself, like, attitude towards them now, right? Which I think we all, as we get older, have a bit more empathy as we start to see how unstable everyone our age is. Like, Oh my God, they had us for ten years by this age. Jesus Christ, no wonder they fucked everything up. But talk to me a little bit about, if you don’t mind, like what your parents were like and like how you now understand and perceive that. 

Tara [00:17:21] Yeah. I mean, my mom was very physically invasive. She was always investigating my body and telling me things that were wrong with me. And one of my strongest memories of her as a child was I was in a limo going to L.A.X. and I was five. And I’m like, Oh, my God, I’m the shit. I’m in a limo. This is the best day of my life. Like, look at these cups. Look at these glasses. Oh, my God there’s a phone, freaking out. My mom had bought me this faux fur like coat. Which I’m like Eloise from my favorite childhood book. She’s going to be my best friend for all of time when she sees me in this dope coat. I, best day of my life. And my mom tells me to come sit next to her and she starts pulling out cards and she says, Do you know what these are? No, these are the prostitutes your dad is sleeping with. He doesn’t love you. He doesn’t love me. And I couldn’t process what I remember as being like, I can feel right now just stunned, like, I know this isn’t good. And when she said, Your daddy doesn’t love you, I said, Well, no, no, no, no. I know daddy loves me. I know that that that that I could hang on to. And she said, Oh, yeah, because he wanted you aborted. I’m the only one who loves you. 

Jameela [00:18:44] Oh for fuck’s sake. 

Tara [00:18:46] Yeah, I’m the only one who loves you. And that kind of thing, you know, when you were talking before about how some of us feel like we shouldn’t feel as bad as we did it, we don’t. We are not entitled to trauma. That single memory played such a messed up part of my operating system. To be told by your mom that your dad wanted you dead and that you were, like, isolated. And so my mom was really much more actively, I would say, psychologically abusive. My dad just didn’t know what the fuck was happening. I don’t. I don’t know. He was a step better because he didn’t actively kind of attack me. But the basic thing with my dad was he was always telling me how financially doomed we were. We’re ruined. If this business deal doesn’t go through with, everything is going to be ruined. I don’t know we’re going to do which fair enough. Maybe. But now I know enough to know a parent shields their child from that. You know, it’s like we’re going to figure it out. 

Jameela [00:19:52] Yeah, Children are like sponges. They just absorb everything. They absorb it for life. Like it. I mean, in the first seven years, you kind of if a child goes through an incredibly stressful home situation like that, it literally rewires their brain. 

Tara [00:20:06] Yes. 

Jameela [00:20:06] So you change your brain chemistry, your brain patterns for life. Like I learned to disassociate by the age of six. And then I’ve spent my entire life not knowing how to, like, disassociate without a lot of steps in between. And it’s just like it’s just it’s that pivotal time in your life. And so to have that as your setting means that, like, kind of it enters your DNA almost. 

Tara [00:20:29] Yes yes. 

Jameela [00:20:29] You know, your cortisol response, your insulin response that affects your long term health, like it’s so fucking dangerous, it must be really hard. And God knows that, you know, our parents I had a very similar dynamic to yours in my home. And then also, like a lot of rage towards the parent who was more useless because they allowed the other shit to happen to me. There was sort of that anger to, you know, towards them, but they didn’t have any access to the information that we had now. Where would you even have gone, you know, in the seventies and eighties, like to, to find out what’s wrong with you? We didn’t have depression. We had like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is like their only representation of mental health issues. And those are like the most mentally ill people you can imagine the most dramatized version, or they would have paranoid schizophrenics, you know, who would always be portrayed as murderers and killers just so fucking toxic. But it was it was a twisted time. And I honestly don’t know, like how anyone’s stable whenever I meet friends who were just sort of fine and and I meet their parents who just sort of did a bit of pretty sane job. You just realize it’s just it’s a lottery of the lineage, you know? How were they raised by their parents? Like everyone learned there shit. I mean, it’s I don’t want children because I don’t want children. But I’m sure that, like, even when I thought I might, I was absolutely terrified because I was like all of the examples I have in my bones, like in my marrow, are fucking terrible. And I’m going to repeat the like the damage somehow without meaning to because I don’t think our parents meant to. 

Tara [00:22:12] No I And now that I’m like an adult and I would say a pretty healthy one when I actually 

Jameela [00:22:19] Smug. 

Tara [00:22:19] imagine- how dare you how dare you. 

Jameela [00:22:26] Go on. 

Tara [00:22:26] But once I imagine, like, I’ve taken care of my best friend’s kids a lot of times and so to reality check myself, I say, What if Maya was told she should have been aborted? What if someone examined her body? What would my adult response be? It would be to fucking protect that child. Call the police, throw the person off. And if that’s how I would feel about a little girl, then it really was as bad and as scary as I thought it was. And I know that both of my parents went through forms of abuse. And to your point, there were no resources of like it was just brush it off. You should be fine by a bunch of stuff. You should fine. 

Jameela [00:23:10] It was brush it off or it was like hyperbolic misinformation. 

Tara [00:23:13] Absolutely. 

Jameela [00:23:14] That made people terrified of needing a therapist if you needed a therapist than you are from the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, like it was. 

Tara [00:23:21] Absolutely. 

Jameela [00:23:22] It was just not the booming industry that it is now. Like the self-help section until like five years ago was somewhere humiliating to be seen. People would sort of like sidestep their way towards that a section pretending that they’re lost and then bury that book under like five other books, you know, and just sort of look the other way at the cash register. I remember, like I’m old enough to have watched that whole transformation. It’s wild to watch it. But, you know, I it doesn’t make it okay, but it does for me anyway make it easier to digest the fact that. Okay. Well, they weren’t like they didn’t hope to harm me. They couldn’t help it. And it’s nice knowing that you weren’t targeted. It’s really frustrating being caught in the debris of their own damage. But it’s nice to know that there wasn’t, like, a hit on my back. 

Tara [00:24:11] Well, that’s exactly how I feel about my mom when I look at other little girls now, what I realize is to to hurt me as much as she did. What was going on inside of her brain? Like what prison of horror was she living in that that was her instinct. And it’s taken ten years of very intense therapy, really trying my all to forgive her because. And I genuinely do, because, wow, she kind of didn’t get to live a life or the life that I would want. I haven’t talked to her in 15 years. And I know from that limo situation how much she wanted me, how much she wanted me to love her and to, like, have me as her own. And it’s sad that the way she treated me made sure that she would never have that love. And so in that way, I. I totally agree with you. I know I wasn’t targeted. I know my mom wouldn’t have hoped to hurt me as much as she did. And she did. And I have to deal with the fallout of that because no one else is going to deal with it. 

Jameela [00:25:25] Yeah, well, if it makes you feel any better I haven’t spoken to anyone in my family apart from my like, my extended family. Even just my brother is the only person I still have a

Tara [00:25:33] Wow I didn’t realize that. 

Jameela [00:25:33] Relationship with yeah I you know, there is there are a lot of similarities in our friendship. 

Tara [00:25:37] Yeah. 

Jameela [00:25:52] You said your mom was examining your body. Do you mean like how you looked? 

Tara [00:25:59] Did I mean two things. One was she was constantly changing me, so I didn’t you know, I love the color of my hair. I have super dark hair. I love it. I love it, I love it. I’ve always loved it. She was always trying to like dye it, make it blond, make it something else. You know, like when I started getting, like, little hairs on my body, like, pluck them, take them away. But also, you know, like, she was also a doctor. And so some of these things were physical exams, which I always questioned myself, like, was it really that bad? Like, is it really how I remembered? I was so young and I can like very distinctly remember lying on the gray carpeted floor of my parent’s bathroom with a skylight above and me just squirming and screaming and not wanting to be examined. And what I always have to remind myself is I wouldn’t physically feel that terrible just telling you that if that hadn’t been terrible at the time. 

Jameela [00:26:56] Yeah, it’s insane. I mean, there’s a reason why then you’re not supposed to, like, treat your own children like. There are supposed to be boundaries, are supposed to be something very wrong with your child before they get subjected to any kind of physical inspection. It makes someone feel so violated and unsafe. And even as a baby, you can register that maybe on a cellular level, even if you don’t know that it’s wrong. That’s why so much child abuse like, yeah. 

Tara [00:27:19] The rage I felt. I felt any time I saw my mom or now look at a picture of my mom. My, my instinct immediately is to flee, jump, run, go because it was so violating from so early.  

Jameela [00:27:33] Yeah. I when I would speak to any member of my family, my glands would literally swell up underneath my and I would look like sort of like those pelicans, you know, it was really intense. I would just like and I’d sometimes have to be sent home from my TV job because they’d be like, my makeup artist would be like, I can’t even carve this in half. Like with a contour brush. There’s like, there’s nothing I can do. I’d be sent home because God forbid, we see someone without chiseled cheekbones on television. But yeah, I so I do understand the stress response. So did that impact the way that you felt about your your body and impact dating or like, in any way. 

Tara [00:28:16] Oh my god. Yes. To like an absolute extreme. I mean, right now something I talking about in my second book is during the pandemic I was all alone and I don’t have a partner. I didn’t have any family. I wasn’t talking to either my mom or my dad. And my sister lived in a different state. And so I realized, you know what I really want? Like abs. I want Britney Spears, like snake around. 

Jameela [00:28:39] Slave for you abs yeah. 

Tara [00:28:41] Slave for you. I want these at least once in my life, like, for one minute, and then I can quit. And so I went on this journey, this, like, epic journey. I hired a personal trainer on Zoom. I he he changed how I ate. He changed my macros, my, you know, my carbs, my fat intake. I was working out maybe twice a day. I was working out more than I’d ever worked out. 

Jameela [00:29:06] Fuck me. 

Tara [00:29:07] But I would wake up at it and it what’s like, fucked up is like I started to see a difference. And when I’d go on a walk with a friend, they’d be like, Wow, you look amazing. Which felt I felt a lot of shame when they’d say that. And pride Shame because I knew it was something was messed up here. Pride because that was what I was looking for, was that validation of my body and it just got worse and worse and worse. And I was like, more miserable than I’d wake up in the middle of the night just dreaming of bread, like, truly, truly just thinking about bread. And then I would stand in front of my refrigerator just looking, wanting to eat, not eating. It was the first time I had ever been like fat restrictive with myself. And at the end of the day I was so miserable that I was like, Fuck this, apparently I can’t get abs that’s over. And you know what? I’m grateful to have a body like I am grateful that I woke up this morning. I am grateful that like my lungs work my, you know, if you’ve ever been injured or if you have a chronic disease, you know the difference between what it feels like to be healthy and what it feels like not to be. And so I’ve really taken on, you know, like I’m willing to bet every single woman on planet Earth the way that I have found more self-acceptance is through body gratitude is through like touching my body and telling it like, Oh, you’re divine, you’re beautiful. You came from an animating part of the universe. Holy shit, you’re cool. And it’s almost been like a gratitude trick to accept myself that way. 

Jameela [00:30:44] Well, I was going to say, you have something in your book where you talk about like the fact and I wanted to like, get into this with you because I don’t understand. You’re talking about fake grat, like fake it till you make it gratitude. 

Tara [00:30:55] Oh, yeah. 

Jameela [00:30:56] What does that mean? And does it really work? 

Tara [00:30:59] Yeah. I’m glad you asked. So the first time I heard about gratitude was from this, like, super, super privileged WASPy girl who, like, I’m privileged, but her family came to America on the Arabella, which was the second boat after the Mayflower. Like, this was some next level blue blood situation. She had gone to Harvard, then become a professional ballerina, then just decided, Oh I’ll be a doctor. 

Jameela [00:31:26] That’s very on the nose, yeah. 

Tara [00:31:28] It was like, you know, like exactly that person. And I went to visit her family in Maine. 

Jameela [00:31:36] Did she have a perfect chignon at the back of her head? 

Tara [00:31:38] Oh, no, that would have been good. But she does have I describe has bird like features, like everything. Very, very delicate. Very, very delicate fingers, the whole thing. And I’m having a full blown fucking panic attack cry like crying, melting down because of some stupid boy situation. But really because I feel that I’m nothing, you know, I feel that I’m worthless. 

Jameela [00:32:04] And when a relationship would fail, would it like, reaffirm this like this idea you have of yourself of like I can’t be loved. It’s not just my parents I’m

Tara [00:32:11] Oh yeah. That I will be abandoned. 

Jameela [00:32:12] Fundamentally unlovable and due to be abandoned. 

Tara [00:32:15] In fact, whenever I was looking for a relationship, I was looking for more not to be abandoned than to ever be loved. 

Jameela [00:32:24] So also maybe dating people who weren’t necessarily the person that you were most looking for, but but someone who you knew would be, like, so grateful to have you. 

Tara [00:32:35] I wish because instead it was. Instead it was just so on the nose. Carbon copy. Let me choose someone who’s my dad who doesn’t see me, I can’t have emotions and then I’ll end up breaking up with them because I can’t ultimately accept that. And then I’ll doom spiral and then I’ll rise from the ashes phoenix like. I almost knew that that was what it was happening and this was one of those I was it in the ashes at this point had not risen yet. And this girl says to me, How have you ever have you ever tried a gratitude practice? And I’m like, Oh, like why? She’s like, Well, that can sometimes really help you feel better. And every single fuck boiled up in my blood. I was like, Wait, are you kidding me? Like, you have so much to be grateful for. You have this family, you have this compound, you have your whole life. What do I have to be grateful for? Do you see me slumped over, miserable and so really to spite her? And this is like I’m very cynical of most things. That’s always where I start is like, there’s no way this could possibly work. Like to spite her and be self-righteous about how stupid her gratitude practice was. I started like I 100% faked it, and just my first gratitude was like, You’re a liar. You’re not grateful for anything. I guess. Water, I guess your health, I guess your sister. And after a few days, I was like, Holy shit, Water, my health, my sister, like, whew. Like, what could I be more grateful for? And that is what flipped it. 

Jameela [00:34:08] I, I dated someone, this lovely Irishman who used to have his “tirty tank you’s” every night before bed where he would thank. He would lie there in bed, and he wouldn’t go to sleep until he could think of 30 things he was like thankful for. And so like 30 means it goes beyond the obvious. You have to really start being, like, really grateful for that plastic fork that was available. I was having that salad earlier. Like it really like, gets into it, but he would wake up feeling amazing and obviously I’m too much of an old cunt to try that, so I, I never did, but I was always like, that’s just some sort of stupid placebo effect. But obviously placebo is real. You know, placebos medically acknowledged as something that is powerful and true. 

Tara [00:34:59] Absolutely. 

Jameela [00:35:00] And altering. And so it did alter his day. And when he didn’t remember to do his tirty tank you’s because he’d had too much Guinness like it changed his day it really did so I guess it’s a kind of I’ve just not heard anyone else talk about that before until then. And he’s not lying there actually feeling grateful to the fucking fork but or like the condom that didn’t break or whatever. Like, it’s just. 

Tara [00:35:21] Yes. 

Jameela [00:35:21] It’s just that it’s, it’s, it’s kind of especially doing it at night. I don’t know when you do it, but doing it before you go to sleep as you’re going into that altered state seems to. 

Tara [00:35:31] I do it typically first thing in the morning but right now I’m experimenting with doing it at night and joining the quest and adding to it was I kind to someone? Was someone else kind to me as a kind of like, I want to be a person people remember as having been fundamentally kind and I’m not going to get there as current me because I wasn’t really born that way, you know? So for me, a lot of this stuff is like, if I repeat it enough times, I know I want it. If I repeat it enough times, if I’m kind of disciplined about it, I’ve just noticed any characteristic I want, like I’m not a generous person at all. I’m like, How much is this going to cost? I really need to think about this. And I have to catch myself. 

Jameela [00:36:13] It’s because you were terrorized about finances a job. 

Tara [00:36:16] Money. Yeah, exactly. 

Jameela [00:36:16] Yeah, I was the same. And I drive my boyfriend fucking crazy about finances. Like if I go months without having a job, like I’ve been too sick to work for the last few months and I’ve been like, doom spiraling even though I’m definitely okay, but doom spiraling because I’m so accustomed to thinking, you know, like we got moved around 13 times when I was a child and like, I started to know the names of the bailiffs, bailiffs are the people who turn up and and I don’t know if it’s the same name in America, but who turn up and take your shit if you don’t have money to pay for your debt. So they’ll come in and just take your TV or your bed or your like Barbie drink or anything like. And so that was my child. Like constant terror of being rehoused. And every time somewhere shitter or another country where the pound was stronger. And so this feeling of constantly being out of control and destabilized has made me not controlling of other people, which I’m proud of myself for. But. In like, outrageously controlling of myself and my circumstances. 

Tara [00:37:21] Do you do the catastrophe math often? 

Jameela [00:37:24] What’s the. Oh yeah yeah yeah.

Tara [00:37:24] So this is like, if everything else goes to shit and I never make another dollar in my life, can I cover my current expenses? And how could I possibly thin them out so that over like this decade I could when nothing is wrong, when it’s just a pleasant day? I do that all the time. That is definitely a legacy of trauma around money is like not being. I also couldn’t spend money, which sounds like such a it sounds like such a weird thing to say, but ordering takeout took me at least five years of therapy to get comfortable with because if I was having people over totally different situation. 

Jameela [00:38:05] I was about to say I spend insane amounts of money on other people but won’t. 

Tara [00:38:08] Exactly. 

Jameela [00:38:09] Spend anything on myself. Yeah.

Tara [00:38:10] Exactly. Yeah. And so, you know, with this whole gratitude thing, faking it til you make it, I find that is very, very helpful. And I’m gentle with myself about it. I’m not going to hate myself into healing, you know, like, there’s no like, you must. It’s so strict. You got to do these 50 rituals for this to work. No, I like, forgive myself when I mess up, when I fall into another one of these patterns about money. Oh, it’s okay, sweetheart. You know, I put a hand on my chest, and I think what it’s helped me with is once you start a gratitude practice, you’re forced to see reality. Because if you’re just seeing what’s negative and what’s wrong, you actually are not seeing the big picture. And this isn’t toxic positivity. It’s grief and gratitude always live together that cannot be undone. 

Jameela [00:39:00] Yeah, it’s also a much needed response to a generation that capitalism has infused with the mainstay of lack. And what I mean by that is that like are the everything we are supposed to feel like we never have enough so that we continue to consume, right? And so we are being constantly trained like you don’t have enough likes, you aren’t thin enough, your ass isn’t big enough, your ass isn’t small enough now. You’re you don’t have a rich enough partner. You don’t have a nice enough car. Like this is the new makeup. This is a new skirt. This is the must have. Like we are just constantly in a state of someone else has more. And so we feel as though we don’t have enough. So it is. It is a vital practice. I found gratitude not through a practice, although I’m now going to try this and I might also try and revisit those “tirty tank yous”. I love Irish accents so I I’ll never say it any other way, but I it has really like tuned out this, this like constant buzz of capitalism that says acquire acquire acquire. 

Tara [00:40:07] Yes. I call it money sick. You know, like there’s dopesick there’s money sick because I I’ll just speak personally. I got to a point where I believed that there was no other way to enjoy your life than to have like, like real wealth. But the problem was there was no number that was enough. Like, I couldn’t tell you, like, what will be enough money? So the answer was, just hustle till you die and make as much as possible, even if you can’t use it. And even if it even if you’re trading all your time for money. And I think our whole culture I know our whole culture is money sick and it doesn’t really help that on Instagram there is so much wealth porn, you know, of just I don’t even without naming the celebrity, like someone who has a room for sprinkles in their house, like, oh, oh, should I have a room for sprinkles?  

Jameela [00:41:02] Oh fuck. What do you mean sprinkles? What?

Tara [00:41:03] Like for your frozen yogurt. 

Jameela [00:41:06] Shut the fuck up. 

Tara [00:41:07] I cannot. I cannot because it is real. And because this person also had multiple refrigerators in multiple rooms for different things. And I look at that and I’m like, What’s wrong with me? Why am I not on a private jet? Why am I not in the sprinkle room? You know?

Jameela [00:41:23] Right, right, right. You’re just trying to fill the void. And I think sometimes someone might hear that and especially in the kind of like the rise of the Marxist kind of left movement, some people are like, that’s disgusting. Or they think that you have like a poor value in that way. Absolutely, as an unhelpful value. But people do it in other ways. If it’s not money, it’s your weight. If it’s not your weight, it’s something like it’s, it’s all just ways to try and find excess to fill the void. And it never does. 

Tara [00:41:49] It it cannot work. It’s never worked for anyone. And I think what we’re suffering from or what I’m suffering from was a lack of belonging, a lack of feeling like anybody else saw me, which sounds so cheesy, except I think that’s a big part of the issue, is that as all as so many institutions have broken down, people are just like completely untethered. The only thing we’re taught to value is something external. Like I look so hot. Like 

Jameela [00:42:21] Material. 

Tara [00:42:21] Exactly. I have this car, I have the perfect husband. And truth doesn’t matter. Like, it doesn’t matter if you actually hate your husband, doesn’t matter if you’re waking up and dreaming of bread. Screw that. It’s just do you have the thing? And this ceaseless march towards the thing which I actually in the book I write about, I was Emmy unnominated, which is. 

Jameela [00:42:44] Mmhmm. I love this story. 

Tara [00:42:45] Like a fine distinction. You know, I had been working, so I had been working at Comedy Central for almost 12 years, something like that. And there was this project that I was so passionate about with two of my favorite comedians in the entire world. And I did everything on that. I helped with the scripts. I helped build the set because it was a digital thing, so there really wasn’t any money for it. So I’d be like driving these hard drives from the valley to Santa Monica at like one in the morning. And it gave me so much pleasure the process of getting to learn from them and be a part of it.  

Jameela [00:43:22] And they’re such geniuses. 

Tara [00:43:22] Oh, they’re like truly, truly, truly comedic geniuses. Beyond.

Jameela [00:43:27] It’s one of the funniest online shows in the world still, like, I watch it all the time. This is Key and Peele. 

Tara [00:43:33] Yeah, yeah. And so I it was like my pride and my joy and and I hate Emmy season and I don’t know what your take on it is, but like, it’s like TV prom and all of a sudden all the Botox is out, like all of the Botox of all of the world, like springs into existence. And everybody is it’s so self-congratulatory. And I hate Emmy season until I was nominated for an Emmy for that web series. And then I was like, woohoo! Like, Emmy season is the best. 

Jameela [00:44:05] I love Emmy season. 

Tara [00:44:07] I love like, should I get Botox? Where am I going to get a dress? Oh, my God. Like ten out of ten hell yes, Emmys. I am a winner because now, forever next to my name is going to be, say, Emmy nominated. And then I basically forgot about it because there’s a span between when you get nominated and when the actual awards are. And just went back to my job, not thinking about it. And I was out at a work dinner when I looked at my phone and saw that my boss’s boss’s boss was calling me, I’m like, Huh? He’s not usually like dialing me, especially at dinnertime. Wonder what this could be. And he said, You know, I don’t think it’s a good look for you to be on this Emmy nomination. You’re you’re no longer a producer. Like, I had made stuff for that show in the past, and that’s why I got that nomination. But I had moved into development, which is the people who oversee the shows. So as someone who oversees the shows, like you’re not the talent, it looks bad. And I said. 

Jameela [00:45:11] Why does it look bad? I didn’t understand this. 

Tara [00:45:14] I think for their own personal reasons, Like, I think there was more about maybe some people wanting to be artists and they weren’t feeling like they should have gotten credit earlier in their careers and they didn’t. It was obviously about something more than just this. And he basically said, you know, how’s this? How is this going to look? You know, this is just it just looks bad. And he said, you’re going to have to make a choice. I’m going to let you decide. And it was. 

Jameela [00:45:46] Wait what’s the choice between? What just whether to accept it or not. 

Tara [00:45:50] Withdrawing my name like me actively withdrawing my name or staying on it. And if I stayed on it, losing his respect, losing potentially the respect of all the artists, like if this was like a terrible look and this really sage person was telling me this, you know, what was I to do? And so I and I also want to add, I did not nominate myself. The way an Emmy nomination works is like the network chooses the names. They submit it. I had nothing to do with this process and I Emmy un-nominated myself. I was just like, I can’t win the people who pay me. The person who’s in control of my paycheck thinks it’s disrespectful. I did. I didn’t have a choice.

Jameela [00:46:36] It’s a mixed bag, isn’t it? It’s a mixed bag. It’s good that like I think I don’t have any particular sanctity for awards. Like, I think it’s it’s all fun and nice and whatever. But like, you know, I it I don’t know why it doesn’t have a particular space space in my brain. And so it’s good to not have that extra another external validation be something that you know it’s good to be able to walk away from an external validation, especially one that is so prized within your, you know, this like Los Angeles community. But but at the same time, I think it’s a bit fucked up that you were made to sort of emotionally blackmailed or guilt tripped into into as a woman, as one of the few women in the

Tara [00:47:22] There were no other women. 

Jameela [00:47:23] Comedy production scene to be forced to step down like I really don’t like that I like that story and hate that story so much when I was reading it. 

Tara [00:47:31] It’s like the amount of effort they had to go through to take me off was like, laughable. Like they’d have to petition. And on top of everything, I was the one who did the work. It was, I was the only woman, the one who did the work. They had nominated me. Then they made this big deal to, un-nominate me. 

Jameela [00:47:51] Ugh I don’t even know how to feel. How do you feel in, like, when you look back on it all, like, what’s the. What’s your final consensus? Cause I want to hit people now. So. I’m going to need you to calm me down. 

Tara [00:48:03] And I appreciate that impulse. Well. You know, tying it all back together. It’s just. That was the moment where I was, like, external validation is never going to get me there. And I must end now because I have to protect myself. It was so devastating how it all played out for me that I was like, I never want to be in this position again. 

Jameela [00:48:23] But also you’re having to swap one validation for another. It’s like this big like the big head, you know, head dude. 

Tara [00:48:30] What I came to understand was like, the process of working with those comedians, I’ll never forget. I was the proudest of myself I had ever been. I saved their emails. Where um to people who are listening like the, you write notes on scripts, right? That the development executive, whatever gives you notes on a script they wrote back to me of my edits. No notes. Perfect. You got it. I was like, Wait, what? You think I got it? I plastered those all over my home office. I have this to this day I have it. Respect the respect of people I respected. The process of making the actual art. It sounds so cheesy, but now what I really, really try hard to do is to always come back to the process. Am I enjoying myself? You know, am I learning rather than did this make a bestseller list? Did I get the nomination? You know? 

Jameela [00:49:23] It’s funny. This is a this is the exact argument I have with like my entire management and agent team where sometimes, like very respected projects will come up that I’m wanted for. And it just sounds like a slightly miserable experience. Or it involved working with a massive bellend, you know, person who I know would be hell to spend six months in Bosnia with. I don’t want to be away from my life. And I choose projects that sometimes aren’t the most critically acclaimed, but they’re with people that I either already love or would love to meet and hang out with. 

Tara [00:49:59] Yeah. 

Jameela [00:49:59] Because, you know, like I, I get to work with like, a hero or I get to, you know, just do something really silly that I’ve never done before. And and so I’m suppose I know what I’m supposed to do, and I know I have the quote unquote potential to do. But I have also done critically acclaimed jobs when I was younger that made me fucking miserable and made me really anorexic and made me really sad. And and the people were shit and life is too short. So that’s very much so my philosophy is like, I’m the the first factor is who’s in it? Where am I going to be? What will the life experience be like? What will I look back on when I’m 80? Because if awards don’t really mean that much to me, I’m really going to like it’s really going to need to be fucking worth my precious life. And I hope more people feel that way. So I think like, what would you say is the most pressing overarching theme in your book that you most want people to to read about and to like take away from your your experience? Yeah, you’ve got you and I kind of exist very oddly similarly in many ways, but also like, like I fucked up so you don’t have to is a big like part of are you know. 

Tara [00:52:49] Yeah, yeah. 

Jameela [00:52:51] No, you know, but what is it that you most fundamentally hope people can take away from your lived experience? 

Tara [00:52:59] I’m going to cheat and give you two things, but they’re tied together. 

Jameela [00:53:01] Ok love it. 

Tara [00:53:01] So the first and the whole title Glow in the Fucking Dark is I. I got laid off from Comedy Central. It was a nightmare because that was my identity. Insead of

Jameela [00:53:13] Should have kept your Emmy. Sorry I’ll shut up. 

Tara [00:53:19] Yeah. I know, I wonder if I can, like, write them a letter or something.

Jameela [00:53:24] That is so funny. 

Tara [00:53:25] But like, that was the shiny thing that I had to fix my identity to lost it instead of like sitting down to, like, reflect on huh, isn’t it weird that my whole self-worth is tied to a job? Fuck that, I’m going to hustle more. I’m going to go find something meaningful to do. I decide I’m going to move to Arizona and help in the 2020 election and on the road have a full dissociative disorder where I. I can’t like I see my hands on the steering wheel. They’re not my hands. I feel like they feel like they’re floating somebody else’s full body sick. For the first time in my life, I pull over. I’m like, I just have to stop. Like, this is this is actually dangerous and this feels like sandpaper on my soul. I got to I got to stop. And where I stopped was on the highway in the Mojave Desert on the way from L.A. to Arizona. And when I looked up, it was nighttime. It looks like a fucking starfield was all over me. And we are technically made of stars. Scientifically, factually. This is not some nice saying that somebody wrote on a mug one time. The carbon in your muscles, the iron in your blood comes from stars. And when I realized that through the Big Bang and how evolution came to be, but those elements like Carl Sagan talks a lot about it, like the elements in the stars are what is in our most inner cells. And once I heard that, you know how people are always like, You’re already good, you’re already good as as you are. I’m like, Why? Why? What’s the proof? I don’t know that I’m a good soul. Like, why are you saying that? 

Jameela [00:55:08] Yeah according to who? Yeah.

Tara [00:55:08] Yeah, according to who. But I know that no one ever is like stars didn’t, like, finish their to do list. They have moral failings. I don’t. 

Jameela [00:55:18] Stars don’t have abs. 

Tara [00:55:20] Yeah, stars don’t have abs. They better get some. Where’s their Emmy award? We all generally are just like stars are awesome. And so what I really you know, we’re talking about these things that I I’ve had to repeat to myself that work is just remembering, oh my God, that’s in me. There is actually something in me that is inherently good, inherently glittering, inherently tied to something much, much bigger. And so when I feel like I’m not enough, that is how I have convinced myself that I am enough as I am, that I’m already good. And since I’ve been able to do that, I’ve been able to reclaim my agency. I’ve been able to say, Hey, I can actually make changes in my life, in the life of my friends. I have not I’m not helpless even when I feel like I’m helpless. And obviously there are big, systematic, big, big, big, big problems that that one person isn’t going to change. And every day is a chance to exercise my power. And as I exercise it in small ways in um like, right now there’s such a scourge of antisemitism and that can make me feel really hopeless. Like, wow, So people have just hated Jews for all of time, and now I just see it. Cool situation. I was in a like a stupid classpass workout class and the woman played the instructor played wall to wall Kanye West. It was just like and this was like three days after he said, I’m going to go DEFCON three on the Jews, right? This is like in the news, worst possible moment. And I started looking at other people’s eyes to be like, Is anybody else scared or picking up on this? No, nobody was doing anything. I felt so trapped. What do I do? What I do? At the end of the class, I went up to the woman and I said something. I gave her the benefit of the doubt, you know. But I said it. It actually made me feel really uncomfortable. She was very defensive, but I felt good a) because I had I had spoken up like even if that didn’t lead to massive change. I had actually exercised my agency a little. And about 15 minutes later, she text messaged me to say, Hey, I’m sorry I got so defensive. You’re right. I’m going to take Kanye off. So it actually had had a little bit of an effect. And so I just really want to remind people, you are inherently worthy. You don’t need to think your way into that. Just believe science. You’re inherently good and you have more power than you think. And we really, at this point in history, need you to use that power like now. So that’s what I would like people to take. 

Jameela [00:58:03] And in the book, you go into more detail as to like how to achieve these things. It’s not so simple as just I am the stars, I am enough. 

Tara [00:58:10] No. 

Jameela [00:58:11] It’s a whole it’s a whole practice, a whole journey, like years of lived experience and trials and tribulations. And. And I know that this is stuff you’ve had to practice. And I also really rate the fact that after your first book, you know, which is about like, ownership and safety and all the good things, you then have another like broken moment and then have to write another book. And I think that’s really fucking great. I was really, I really enjoyed that because I feel like a lot of people write a you know, I was asked to like write a book a few years ago in like 2018. I got like a really big fuckin book deal to be like, you know, write to everyone about how you’ve gotten so much better from your most suicidal self. And I started writing it and I was like, You know, I’m actually not sure that I’m okay. So I can’t I don’t want to write this book because so much stuff in the Help space, let’s call it is all like, I did this and now I’m fine and peace out! Bye! 

Tara [00:59:09] And it worked like I’m perfect. 

Jameela [00:59:09] Like, I like the fact that you’re like in these incremental journeys of like, yeah I did get better for a while. I did heal some wounds, but that’s not all the wounds. And then after I found those wounds, new ones came up 

Tara [00:59:20] There were more! 

Jameela [00:59:20] from underneath the, you know, like underneath the the soil. And so I think that’s a really important thing to have out there because it doesn’t discredit your first book. It just always tells us there’s more to do. And that’s why I gave back that book deal thing, because I was I actually I don’t I have I actually have no idea what was going on. So I don’t feel any authority. 

Tara [00:59:43] Not now. 

Jameela [00:59:44] But it is inspiring to hear that like maybe it’s okay to just say this is what I’ve learned thus far. 

Tara [00:59:50] That’s I am not an expert. I do not have a Ph.D. I didn’t study philosophy or theology. I have none of the credits for any of this stuff other than I’m really, really curious. And I keep trying and my books are just do you want to hold hands on this journey? Because I don’t I don’t know the answers. I’m not the expert. I just know that I ask good questions and try. I sometimes I feel like the world’s most depressing motivational speaker because I always begin with this is going to be very hard, probably the hardest thing you’ll ever do. Plus, it’s going to take like 10 to 20 years, maybe actually, probably going to take your whole life. But that’s the truth. And it’s worth it. It’s worth doing these incremental little things, regaining our power. I can’t even believe how far I’ve come, and I know I’ll fall down again. But the the floor is so much higher than it used to be. You know, that’s what I notice. 

Jameela [01:00:48] Yeah. Picking yourself back up becomes much easier the next time around. 

Tara [01:00:51] Quicker and easier. Yeah. 

Jameela [01:00:52] Yeah. I really appreciate your perspective on all of this. I appreciate the books and they’re funny and they make people feel safe and not judged. And I think that’s a really important thing. And I really appreciate you talking to me today so candidly about, you know, difficult stuff. So the last thing to do before you go is just for me to ask you, what do you weigh? 

Tara [01:01:15] The thing I’m most proud of is my relationships, that I’ve come to a point where I realize the bonds I make are absolutely the most important thing, and everything else is just some form of artifice. And that those are the things that I have to nurture and protect. But that took me a long time to get to. And the other thing I would say is that I’m worthwhile. I took me ten years to understand that I’m deserving of love and respect and a life and I’m not a piece of shit. So that’s been really helpful, I would say. And I guess the third thing I’d say is just compassion. Like I dug so deep to my own suffering, sat in it, understood it that when I see somebody else suffering, I, I actually now understand what compassion means. And I can feel it. And I thought it was just a stupid saying on a yoga studio wall, like self compassion. Compassion. I thought that was not possible. And now it’s something I really treasure. 

Jameela [01:02:26] Mmm. That’s amazing. I agree with so much of what you said, apart from the fact that I think I am a piece of shit. But I think I like that about myself. And I think I’m like. I think I’m a piece of shit representation in this industry. And if you can see it, you can be it. And I consider myself to be the smiling poo emoji piece of shit. You know, like thriving, thriving as a piece of shit. 

Tara [01:02:47] You own it. I love that. 

Jameela [01:02:47] Yeah, I like I have Girlbossed piece of shit. On that note, Tara, thank you so much for coming. This was great. 

Tara [01:02:56] Thank you. Thank you for having me.