Pushkin hay Slight Changers. A quick heads up, This is part two of my conversation with Amanda Knox. If you haven't listened to part one, we released it in the Feed last week. I highly recommend you go back and listen. You won't want to miss the full story. Okay, now onto the show.
I have all of.
This psychological baggage that I'm carrying with me, and the last thing I want to do is to pass that on to my daughter. So I have to figure this out. Is this puzzle of my trauma. I have to figure it out, and I have to figure it out.
Now, like yesterday.
Amanda Knox has spent a decade trying to move on from the worst thing that ever happened to her, being wrongfully convicted of murder, and she's felt haunted by one question, in particular, why why was the lead prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini so determined to vilify her?
I couldn't understand how like very immediately, like from day one, people and particularly Giuliano Mignini, saw guilt in me that wasn't there, And I realized that the only way to truly understand was to ask him.
On today's show Amanda confronts the man who helped put her behind bars. I'm Maya Shunker, a scientist who studies human behavior, and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. It is shocking to me how many people still believe Amanda Knox is guilty of murder, despite the lack of forensic evidence. The real killer was identified and sentenced in two thousand and eight after his DNA was discovered all over the body
of the victim, Meredith Kircher. Meredith was Amanda's roommate at the time. Amanda was initially sentenced to twenty six years in an Italian prison, and she spent nearly four years behind bars before being acquitted on appeal. But even after Amanda's release, after she returned to the US, the prosecution continued to pursue her, and at one point they reconvicted her. After a painful multi year legal battle, Amanda was finally
definitively exonerated in twenty fifteen by Italy's highest court. The years of public vilification and fear have taken a massive emotional toll on Amanda and recently, she made a bold and surprising decision to reach back out to her prosecutor. I wanted to know why. She told me part of it had to do with becoming a mom and wanting to unpack her trauma for the sake of her young children.
We started our conversation by going back to the moment she received her initial prison sentence at age twenty two and what it all meant for her long held dream of one day having a family.
The minute they handed down that twenty six year sentence to me, I did the math, and I knew what my body was capable of and what it was not capable of, and I reasoned that I had not just
been condemned to prison time. I had been condemned to infertility, which was devastating for me because I had always wanted to be a mom, Like my mom made me sign a contract in Green cran when I was like six or seven years old, because I was already talking about wanting to be a mom, and as a very young single mom, she was like, I'm gonna make you sign a contract that says you're gonna wait until you're thirty to be a mom, because I seriously.
Like already like six or seven.
I was like, I can't wait to be a mom, and she's like, will see so yeah, So to be given the opportunity to like get out of prison as a young person, still within my fertile years, I was still up against a huge challenge, right Like I was still the girl accused of murder, which felt very, very ostracizing and very limiting to me at that point, and so I still was at a loss of how I was going to be able to have a family and have a career and be a mom, Like, who would
ever want to date Amanda Knox with all the baggage that comes with it. I was estranged from the world. And then I got very, very lucky. In twenty fifteen, I met for the first time my husband, and to Chris's credit, he did not allow himself to be influenced by all of the crap that was said about me in the world. And I'm so grateful to him, because if you really want to go down that Amanda Knox rabbit hole, you can find whatever you want, and it's very scandalous.
Here's a lot. And so he's.
Always been very mindful of being respectful of my humanity, and allowing me to be the one to share with him those moments of extreme life that I have lived.
So you and Chris get married, and you start trying to have children, and then one day you find yourself staring at a positive pregnancy test. Can you bring me back to that moment and how things unfolded from there?
I mean, that moment was feeling like finally something was going right in my life, like finally I was getting back something that meant so much to me. Like all the other things had been taken from me were so intangible, but here was a true and tangible thing that had been taken from me and that I had gotten back. And so it truly felt like this gift and this
reclamation of my life. And then to have that to you know, show up at the obgi N and to hear them say there is no heartbeat, I like, I wasn't prepared for that loss, because it had already that this was my win. You know, I was not aware of all of the statistics and how common it is to miscarry all of that, Like, I just didn't know.
I had never been pregnant before, and so this is the first time I had ever been pregnant, and then for that to end in failure sent me down a spiral of fear and pair and being triggered and wondering if I was infertile because of things that had happened to me in prison and the lack of health care, Like I had no idea why it didn't work and why this being just didn't continue to be and like just that weird limbo space of like not even knowing how to grieve, and so that that was really hard.
And I had this thought in my head, which is so stupid, but I thought, like, didn't I deserve to have this thing go right? Like all of these things had gone wrong in my life, why didn't this thing go right?
Why?
It almost felt like I was being punished again, Like why am I being punished? Like what did I do wrong?
Yeah? I found so much resonance in the reaction that you had to the miscarriage, beyond your expected grief, this feeling of cosmic and justice right that since you had suffered so much in the past, the universe in some way owed you a perfect pregnancy, which is so stupid, but it is such a natural part of our psychology. I mean, there's a concept that I've been exploring lately called belief in a just world, which basically says that we get what we deserve in life, we get out
what we put in. Good people get good things, bad people get bad things. And how much any one of us believes in a just world varies quite a bit. But what was so interesting to me is that you maintained your belief in this kind of justice despite everything you went through, Like you still, in this visceral way, felt that the moral scales should balance in the universe.
Yeah, that's a really interesting way of framing it, because you're right, I had every reason to believe that there was no justice, and I could be absolutely cynical about reality, and of course I lost my baby. What else was I going to do? And like the fact that it really blindsided me is demonstrative of the fact that I am very, very stubbornly optimistic.
In the end, I guess, yes.
That's what I glean from it, for sure, because I could totally imagine having the opposite response, just one of sheer cynicism, just extreme nihilism. There's no meaning or purpose
or semblance of order in the universe. And it's so funny because despite my knowledge of this concept, and despite my understanding of how irrational it is to believe this, I fall prey to this so often, even though, of course my rational brain is like, there's no such thing as being entitled to anything in this world, right, And so I just your story has so many exceptional components to it. But what I find so captivating are these themes is that emerge from your story that all of
us can relate to. I mean I related to that. I related to the story that you described of wanting kids from the time that you were six or seven years old. I was having imaginary calls with my neighbors about my rambunctious kids, and then I was like, I.
Loved how you were already like a jaded mom, you know, a little Bobby, such a terror Martha or whatever names I was using at the time, And it's so cute, and I'm.
Curious to know. So what it was that compelled you to motherhood, Like what were your hopes and dreams?
I think that it has to do with just how awesome of a mother I have. I've always felt, always, always, always that I was cradled by her, like that I was supported by her, that any time that something could ever go wrong in my life, I could turn to her and she would be there. And so I really was given a model of what an ideal mom is from a very young age, and of course that has proved itself over the course of time. My mom has
been there for me and through extreme circumstances. But it all comes down to that love for another being that goes beyond any love that you could have for yourself. It is just that wholehearted embrace of another person that I just know intuitively because it was given to me from the day I was born.
I wanted to do that.
Wow. Yeah, it's very stirring to hear you describe that relationship and what a gift she gave you. Today, I'm so delighted to share that you're a mom to two kids. You have your daughter, Eureka, your son Echo.
Yeah, I'm in the thick of it.
I'm curious to know about your experience of motherhood and how it's been informed by you by the trauma that you faced. And one of the most primal instincts that parents have is to protect their children from harm and suffering. I mean, you write that your first words to Eureka after she was born, were I'm sorry, Yeah, And it was just in response to the fact that, like every newborn, she was crying, right she came out of the womb crying, and you felt that just visceral instinct to protect her
from pain. And as someone who has been through so much needless suffering in your life, I want to understand how that's informed how you think about your role as a parent to both Eureka and Echo.
Yeah, trauma has really interesting ways of presenting itself in your life. And I feel like grief and the processing of traumatic experiences manifest in different ways as you change
and grow as a human being over time. And one of the big ways that I have been sort of forced to process everything that happened in Italy was becoming a mother and feeling that sense of urgency, like even while she I was still pregnant and she was on the way, but I'm getting bigger and bigger, and I can feel her and I know she's coming, and I'm like, oh my god. I was like thinking, like, I have all of this psychological baggage that I'm carrying with me, and the last thing I want to do is to
pass that on to my daughter. So I have to figure out how do I hold my arms around that, how do I keep that to myself, and how do I try to derive something good from that? My daughter is following me in my wake, and so I'm hoping that I'm planting seeds and not just dropping garbage in my wake for her to encounter. I want those to be things that are of value, that can be of assistance to her in her life. And so I was thinking, Okay, I have to I have to figure out, I have
to figure this out. This is this puzzle of my trauma. I have to figure it out, and I have to figure it out now, like yesterday, and and one of those puzzle pieces was what is the difference between pain and suffering? Because one is inevitable and the other is not. And indeed, like by giving birth to her, her first experience of the world was pain. And I felt so bad about that, Like it didn't it didn't even occur to me that that would be her first ever experience
outside of the womb until it was happening. And then obviously she was being squeezed out and it was not pleasant for her, and she's coming and she's screaming and I'm just going, oh my god, I'm so sorry. Like I have given existence to you, and that existence is going to be painful, and I can't take that away. As much as I want to, like as much as I wish that I could take that pain that you're feeling, I can't.
And I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.
But the one thing that I do know that I can teach her is that there don't have to be layers of pain on top of the pain that we inevitably experience. There don't have to be meta experiences of pain on top of pain that make it harder to get past the immediate pain that we feel. Pain is an automatic feeling that you do not choose to feel as a result from certain things that happen.
So you jam your toe in the door jam.
You feel pain, or you lose someone that you love, you feel pain. Suffering is the pain of feeling that you shouldn't be feeling. That pain is when you convince yourself that the world isn't as it should be, and therefore there is a level of pain on top of the pain that cannot be resolved, and that doesn't really go away until you accept reality as it is. It is a pain that will persist because the world isn't the way that you think it should be. The world
just is the way it is. And so I try to always accept the pain that just comes with being a being in the world, and to allow myself to let go of the meta levels of pain that come from me imposing my ideas about how the world should be on the way the world is and being able to demonstrate that to my daughter is one of my greatest weird silver linings to this cloud of like, Oh, I've learned a very extremely valuable skill over the course
of this very extreme circumstance, which is recognize that difference and to know what to do about it.
Yeah.
So is it correct to say then that you see your role as a mom as not to shield your children from pain, which is inevitable and probably a vital part of growth, but instead to equip them with the cognitive tools they need to be able to differentiate between pain and suffering and to learn, in the throes of suffering how to climb their way out. Totally, you talked about yourself as being this just like unfailing optimist, right, you can almost can't help your optimism but which is
a wonderful genetic disposition to have. You know, many of us form our beliefs about how the world works based on messages that we receive in childhood, right, And obviously your children will absorb messages from so many places. One day they will read your Wikipedia page, they will read the articles. But before that moment in time, what kind of philosophy are you trying to instill in your children about the kind of world they're growing up in.
Oh my, that's a great question, because that's a really interesting question because I've not posed it to myself that way. I've more posed it. As you encounter hardships in your life, what do you do about them? I'm thinking of all the times that baby Echo pulls Eureka's hair and how frustrated she is by that, and I try to explain to her, like I'm going to talk to him, but I want you to know that he doesn't understand yet.
And I feel like adults are like that too.
Some people are just not cognitively there to acknowledge that something they've done to harm someone, even if it was unintentional, is meaningful. And you can do something about that, and you can learn from it like that that is still a skill that adults are learning to this day. And I think that maybe is a way of thinking about the world that I'm trying to impart on. Eurekas like, yes, like sometimes things happen and they shouldn't have happened, and we can do our best to try to make sure
that doesn't happen. But I can't promise you that it won't because some people are not ready to learn from their mistakes yet.
It is a very optimistic posture to have because you are you are allowing for redemption in everyone. You're granting people a growth mindset, essentially that there is room for that edification to happen right absolutely insight they need.
I think it would be an unrealistic expectation to not expect people to grow, because I feel like we all tend to grow, especially when we encounter obstacles are hardship. I am always looking for an opportunity to grow in what happens to me, and so maybe I'm just projecting that perspective of humanity onto everyone else.
With this perspective in mind, do you feel like, in your heart of hearts you can truthfully share with your children that you still believe the world is a fundamentally good place filled with fundamentally good people.
Hm uh hmm.
Do I believe that the world is a fundamentally good place full of fundamentally good people.
I think that.
Unless you're truly a psychopath, you encounter the world with the idea of wanting to do your best in it, and therefore you want to achieve not just what is good for you, but what is good for other people too. Maybe you have some people's best interests over others. But I do think that we all think of ourselves as
a hero of our own story. We're all good guys in our minds, which I think lends to the intention to be a good guy, even if ultimately we trick ourselves into thinking that the bad that we're doing is good.
You're saying, even for those people, there are justifications in place that at least make them think best. Yeah, I think that they're acting in alignment with their axioms. However flawed their axioms are, for example, exactly exactly so.
I feel like the drive to do the right thing or be a good person is in everyone. The problem is, how is that drive manifesting itself. That is where I can't make any promises because the world is full of crazy idea and people get attached to them and then try to manifest them as an expression of trying to be a good person.
Have you thought about how you plan to share your story with your kids one day and when that might be, and do you find yourself kind of rehearsing parts of it in your head, you know, as you go about your life or fall asleep at night.
Well, the cats out of the bag already.
Which is how old is Yureka? Now?
She is three and a half, and it's coming up because a lot of the work that I do is around criminal justice reform and telling my story. I'm executive producing a Hulu show that's based upon my first memoir, Waiting to be Heard. And so my daughter, just by virtue of being around me, has become aware that there is a story, and she has asked me what is
that story? And I always take this position of be honest in an age appropriate way, So I tell her a very condensed and simplified version of the story, which is when mommy was younger, Mommy went to Italy and someone hurt her friend, and then the Italian police hurt mommy, and mommy was sad for a long time and she was in jail. But then mommy was freed and mommy came home and Mommy met Papa and we fell in love, and then we had you, and now mommy's happy.
Sorry. I don't mean to get emotional. Sorry, can I just say, like, I am so happy that you get to have this like as my friend.
Thanks mamma.
It fills me with the deepest joy that, uh, something that meant so much to you, Oh my gosh, no, thank you, something that meant so much to you is something that you you get to have in this lifetime. Like it's unspeakable joy for me.
Thank you, Maya.
I mean, I feel really really lucky, Like I am alive, I am healthy, I am safe, I have a home, I have a husband, I have children. Like all of the things that I thought were gone are here and I'm so lucky. So thank you for feeling that with me, though, because like it's true, it like any one of those things in a moment could have been taken away, and so that is not lost on me.
Every day I wake up in the morning, We'll.
Be back in a moment with a slight change of plans. The chief prosecutor in Amanda's wrongful murder conviction was a man named Giuliano Minini. From the start, Minini clung to his bizarre and unfounded theory that Amanda killed Meredith as part of a sex field satanic ritual, despite no real evidence to support it. This narrative caught on like wildfire in the European tabloids, and public opinion turned against Amanda
before the trial even started. Minini ignored crucial DNA evidence from the real killer, and he relied on statements Amanda had made under duress when she was interrogated for more than fifty hours in the days following the murder. The High Court that definitively exonerated Amanda would later cite glaring errors and investigative amnesia in the case. And so when I heard that Amanda recently reached out to her prosecutor, I was. She told me she was compelled by one question, the why question.
Why did this happen to me? I still couldn't really figure it out, and it really bothered me because I couldn't understand how like very immediately, like from day one, people and particularly Giuliano Mignini saw guilt in me that wasn't there, and I didn't understand why. But I was not satisfied with a lot of the sort of answers that were proposed by people around me, which is, ah, he's an idiot, or ah, you know, he's a corrupt guy, and he didn't care if you were innocent or not.
He just wanted to blame somebody.
Like there were a lot of different messages coming my way about what his motivations were, and none of that felt true. I could like, I could not imagine him just sitting back in his you know, prosecutor's office, Like he's not sitting there with mister Burns's fingers cackling about how he has an innocent girl in prison and who
cares if she's guilty or not. Like he is a person who believes that he is doing the right thing, and that he who believes that he's a good person, and yet and yet he was capable of so much harm, and not just harm to me, but like harm to everyone involved, principally Meredith's family, who are now left with this confusing idea of like, what really happened to our daughter? Was this girl in on it or not did she
get away with it? Like? The idea like that is that is psychological torture when they deserved closure, and they deserved direct and clear answers to what happened to Meredith.
And so.
I I wanted to understand why, and I realized that the only way to truly understand was to ask him.
I'm interested in the fact that you were so quickly willing to give him the benefit of the doubt in terms of his intentions and motivation. Right, you very quickly did away with the reductionist versions of him. He's just evil, he's ego obsessed. You know, all he cares about is his reputation, blah blah blah. And to me, this hearkens back to the philosophy you shared with me earlier, which is this feeling that by and large, people try to be good and sometimes they just don't understand yet.
Right, Yes, So, having gone through the experience of being viewed in the worst possible light and being viewed as a monster as this like black and white villain, I intuitively felt that I shouldn't do the same thing, which is to think of another human being in those terms. And I I really did want to see the good
in him. I wanted to understand how he was the hero of his own story and then hopefully change his mind, like I'm gonna be honest, Like I thought, if only he could see who I really was, Like he didn't know me from anybody, and he came to know me in the context of a murder investigation, so of course he's going to see me from this sort of suspicious, adversarial lens. I mean, I knew what that felt like.
As soon as I discover that this crime scene was in my house and that my roommate had been murdered, suddenly everybody seemed more sinister. I started to think, Oh my god, could that guy who once gave me a ride on a Vespa home maybe he's the murderer because he now knows where our Like who knows like that? It gives you this like cognitive opening where suddenly everything
can be seen in the worst possible light. And I was wondering and like, is it possible for me to have a relationship with him that isn't adversarial and that is coming from a place of really wanting to understand? But how do you do that? And one of the things that I realized was it was not going to work if I came in with an adversarial stance. I couldn't just write him a letter and be like, doctor Juliantomannini.
How dare you? You know you were wrong? And how dare you?
And you know, like that was not going to get me anywhere, because that was going to set the terms of our relationship in these terms that we had known all along, that these adversarial, accusational terms. And instead I tried to think, what in the world do we have in common? Because we have something in common. Every person has something in common, and if I could only find common ground with him, maybe that would be.
The first step.
And it wasn't hard for me to find that common ground with him. It was right there to see, which is that this case got out of control in the media, and everyone, not just me, got turned into a sort of two dimensional cartoon version of ourselves. And I knew that he felt misrepresented in the press, and so I reached out to him and I said, I don't know who you are. All I know is that you are
my prosecutor and you're scary. Therefore, but like I know that you were misrepresented in the press, and I was misrepresented in the press, and I feel like we have that in common. And I'm wondering, do you want to talk to me about who you really are? And you know, never underestimate the element of surprise because I surprised him, and I surprised him so much. We ended up corresponding over email for years before I actually ever met him
in person. And I can't tell you so much of it was like the banal stuff of just like talking to your uncle who lives in another country, like oh, how are the dogs doing? Oh? You know, like, oh, I went on a walk today and it was a beautiful rain, you know, like I love the rain. So I'm learning things about him, like I learned that he loves to listen to Wagner. I learned that he's super into Lord of the Rings and you know, and like he sees himself as like King Theoden and me like Aowin.
And it's just like but like these little moments that are like you do.
You know what you're saying? Like they are It seemed like he was always.
Sort of dropping little hints to me about like how he really felt about the case through these little personal details, like does he understand what it means. If he's such a big Lord of the Rings fan, he knows that aowen's worst fear is to be locked in a cage.
Yeah, so you felt like there are these little nuggets of contrition. Is that right? Yeah? Contrition?
And then I kept questioning myself. I was like, am I reading into this?
Or like a really great example where he sent me this movie to watch. He said, oh my gosh, you have to watch this movie. It's one of my favorite movies about Detective Micrae and it's a case where Detective Migree realizes that somebody that he had condemned to death for murder is actually innocent, and so he orchestrates this man's secret release from prison and then follows him around until he finds out who the real murderer is.
And I'm just like, what, Like is he is this him? Like I kept thinking, is this him admitting that he was wrong? Or am I reading too much into this?
And so like there was a lot in the correspondence that gave me hope to believe that he was on the cusp of like telling me, but maybe not telling me because he didn't want it. In writing and so is he finding other ways to tell Like, so it's been this weird unraveling of a code, and also like just allowing myself to just accept it for whatever it is.
How did your family react to hearing that you wanted to reach out to this guy? Like were they at all convinced by your curiosity, by your need to understand? Why?
No is the short answer to that question.
So with your family to be clear, yeah.
Yeah, and I get it.
And like, honestly, if this had happened to my daughter and I was now watching her have empathy and compassion and curiosity for her the person who had harmed her, I would be afraid that she would be setting herself up for pain that she didn't have to feel. And I would ask of her, like, what do you think you need from this person? Why are you holding on to this person as if you need him to be better? And you know that's a legitimate that's a legitimate question.
Why does he have to be in unlock for any exactly in your life?
Right?
That's giving him a kind of power that he simply doesn't deserve exactly.
And actually that was a crucial question that I asked myself as I got closer and closer to meeting with him, is I like, I had to face this idea of like, wait, am I just in a weird Stockholm situation and I'm like fixated on him?
And do I actually need him?
And I had a conversation with this person named David Zelman, and he suggested to me the idea that I did not in fact need to talk to Juliata Menedi, that I did not need anything from him, and then he gave me this very very radical idea that maybe, just maybe I might be feeling so drawn to him because I have something to give him. And that was the switch that flipped for me where I thought, Yes, this is not about him and what he is capable of giving.
This is about me and what I am capable of giving. And I know that I am capable of being kind to this man, and by God, I am going to do it and no one can stop me. And that's what it ultimately came to be about. It's not about him. It's about me and what I have in me and what I feel compelled to give that didn't need to be given, and that was not even asked for.
Yes, well, because notably when you did actually meet him in person. You brought your husband with you, you had your daughter with you. He was not in writing. But he didn't extend an apology.
Right Yeah, so what he did say versus what he didn't say, right, Like, he didn't say I'm sorry, he didn't say I was wrong, but he did say I believe you. He said, if I were asked to prosecute this case again, I would not.
Wow.
He said that me reaching out to him was one of the most important things that had ever happened to him, and he said that he was in awe by it. And I think the really interesting thing to think about is you can come away from an experience like that being deeply disappointed or being pleasantly surprised, and it's really your choice. Like the answers that I got from him were not always satisfying, but they were interesting and they
were revelatory. There was a person who I was talking to who was just like, so frustrated by the end of reading my books. She was like, I mean, he gives you this, but he doesn't give you that, Like what is he you know? What is going on here? And I was like, honey, like there are two ways of looking at the world. You either look at the world like a department store or like a thrift store.
Now a department store.
You can go in and you can get the little black dress that you saw on sale online and in your size whenever you want. And that's how it is. And you can pretend that the world is like that, but that's not really how the world is. The world is really like a thrift shop. You go in and you don't know what you're gonna find. And if you have your mindset on that little black dress that you saw online that's in your side to find it, you are not.
Going to find it.
But if you are fixated on only finding that, you are not going to be able to find the things that appear to you that you may be just delighted by that you are not expecting, like a mushroom shaped lamp.
It's you know, like, so this is like how I don't know that.
It's like such a silly way of like thinking about it, but like I try to encounter the world and life and people like you would a thrift store, and like being open to being pleasantly surprised instead of having these very specific expectations that will lead to disappointment. My mom was not satisfy. She was disappointed. She was looking for that black dress in her size. She wanted him to say I was wrong and I'm sorry, and I'll do
everything in my power to make it right. And he didn't say any of those things, and she wasn't able to hear what he was able to say. He said that he wanted to be a source of healing in my life, that he didn't want me to suffer anymore for what I had been through.
And I heard that.
I could hear that in a way that my mom couldn't, And so I came away from that experience feeling healed, not just by what he said, but also by the fact that I had put myself in a position in order to hear it.
You mentioned him being in awe. I, frankly, I think we all are, because what I see is just masterclass for the rest of us what it means to bridge one of the greatest gaps that can exist between two humans.
I mean, it is a masterclass in human empathy. You know, your book is called Free, and you've spent years searching for freedom, both from behind bars and then after you were released, And God, I hate that this is true, but even recently, just for listeners to know, you were found guilty of slander for statements that you made in
the days following Merediths murder. Police interrogated you for over fifty hours over five days, and under extreme coercion, you ended up implicating your boss at the time in the murder of Meredith. And despite your appeal, despite the fact that a European high court found Italy to be in violation of your human rights during the interrogation, Italy Top Court still upheld this conviction. In twenty twenty five. This happened. And so I mean, like so frustrating. I'm just like,
oh my god, it's so frustrating. And so what I want to ask aman is like, what have you learned about freedom? What is freedom to you?
For me, freedom means being able to see and engage with the world with a clear mind, because if you are engaging with the world as it should be, you are perpetually going to be ineffective. You're going to encounter obstacles because you're going to be thinking about what to do in the terms of what you think the world should be like, and not the world as it is.
And I think the reason why I had such an effective approach to Minnini was because I saw clearly the situation for what it was, and that gave me a degree of freedom of choosing how I wanted to engage with it. There's a Zen saying, I'm a Zen practitioner that if you really really sit with the world and with reality in the present moment, and you just sit and look at it clearly, you'll realize that it's okay.
It's not good, it's not bad, it's it's okay. You are okay, and being okay is a great place from which to choose how you are going to be in the world. You're not coming from a place of fear, You're not coming from a place of anger. You are coming from a place of being okay and choosing to be your best self in the next moment. And that makes me feel like, no matter what the external circumstances I'm facing are, like, I know that I am free to act the way I want to.
Despite the fact Italy's highest court upheld Amanda's slander conviction, she won't need to return to prison because of the four years she already spent wrongfully incarcerated To hear more of Amanda's reflections on motherhood and the story of her relationship with her prosecutor check out her new book, It's called Free My Search for Meaning. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, we in the Slight Change Family would so appreciate it if you could share it
with your family and friends. And you can sign up for my free newsletter at Changewithmaya dot com. Join me next week, when we hear from author and podcast host Mel Robbins on her battle with control.
I just started to say, let them. At any moment in my life where things just felt stress with traffic, let them the person's root in front of me, wet them. My mom's in a bad.
Moot, let her read a bad move.
And so I just started saying, let them, let them, let them, And it was so profound.
That's next week on A Slight Change of Plans. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written and executive produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Changed Family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate Parkinson, Morgan, our producers Britney Cronin and Megan Luvin, and our sound engineer Erica Huang, Louis Scara wrote our delightful theme song and
Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker. See you next week.