How to Embrace Imperfection with Anne Lamott

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and career creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Anne LaMotte, author of many New York Times bestsellers such as Dusk Night, Dawn, Almost Everything, Hallelujah, Highway, Small Victories, and many other books. She's also a past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and

an inductee to the California Hall of Fame. Her newest book is Somehow thoughts on Love.

which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. The grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

can become aware that I'm doing them. You know that they're kind of a habit or they're you know, from a scary childhood. They were in a certain way, kind of a toxic comfort zone to have anxiety or to have a situation that I think I need to fix, and so I feed it, and then the good wolf and the good pair of glasses are right there. And the miracle is that over time, over many many many

years of sobriety. I catch myself feeding the bad wolf, and I say no, and I turn around, and I'd give the good wolf a really huge, delicious piece of meat.

question that you pose early in the book. Can you say, even the darkest and most devastating times, love is nearby if you know what to look for. So what do we look for?

It is still sort of sweet that you know across the street, the neighbor who didn't used to like me very much or approve of me, it was waving and asking how things are going, and we'd look for the daffodils, and we'd look for just all of it is beautiful and sort of sweet or surprisingly okay, whereas before we thought it was all going down the tubes.

to have thoughts. Nearly everyone has this expectation that they're going to sit down and meditate and they're going to stop having thoughts. And when they stop having thoughts, that means they're doing it well. But no one does that, and so we end up feeling like we're failing all of the time. Every three seconds, failed again, failed again.

We develop a relationship with meditation that is aversive. So if you want to stop dreading meditation and actually find it relaxing, check out my free meditation guide at Goodwolf dot me slash calm. In it, I walk you through my process to engage with meditation in a new way, and a lot of people have found it really helpful. That's Goodwolf dot me slash calm. I've heard you talk about the daffodils before. This is their season and in Columbus, Ohio,

and they are beautiful and they are everywhere. Makes me think of something that your husband said to you, which is that eighty percent of what is true and beautiful can be experienced on any ten minute walk.

you hit the reset button. I mean, you've heard in recovery that you get to start your new twenty four hours whenever you remember to and you hit the button and you start over, and you decide to focus on the goodness that surrounds us.

I might not see a single one of them both. Right, It's so critical how we train our attention and kind of where we want it to be.

affairs or whatever. You get hyper alert because that's how you can protect yourself, and it's a habit. And this side of the grave, I am probably going to go to some of these old, sort of miserable ways of focusing on what might be about to go wrong. And more and more and more, as I get older and more sober and more relaxed, I notice myself doing it, and I sort of pat myself on the shoulder and go, we're okay.

yet that's a very real way of criticizing ourselves. And it sounds like that's mellowed over time in being more willing to sort of accept yourself and see your human foibles as just part of what it means to be exactly that human.

the rats are the mold. And it's been about restoring the very precious being that I was born to be and to grow into that, and away from all of the personas and the ways of defending myself or the ways of impressing the world, and all the stuff that really didn't serve me, but that I was taught and encouraged to improve on. You know, my friend Duncan Trussell, I think I mentioned this in the book and somehow said when you first meet me, you're meeting my bodyguard.

And little by little, as I've grown in faith, both in life and in myself, I've been able to let the bodyguard go take a break, go have a cigarette outside, while I really get to see who other people and myself are. And that's wonderful. I mean, I really think that's who we are is to become who we were born to be and not who we always pretended to be because we got so much affirmation for it, for doing better and better, oppress singing, reaching higher and higher

levels of whatever. But you heard, and I've always heard, that you don't compare yourself to other people's outsides. It actually everybody who looks so great is probably in exactly the same state of being human and kind of a little funk here on the edges as you are. And you also hear that it's an inside job, that the healing and the restoration aren't out there. You're not going to get such a great book review or whatever, that it's going to do any kind of healing at all.

It's going to be a nice fix. Now. I love fixes. When I first got sober, my mentor Sharon S said to me, every morning, you need to ask yourself whether you want the hit or whether you want the serenity. And I said, Sharon, I want the hit. You know I'm a drug addict, but I really wanted the serenity. And all these years later, I still notice I love the hit. I love the immediate fix of something that will mood alter me, either because I've achieved it or

it's a arrived from Amazon or whatever. It happens to be. But what I really want is a serenity, which is the very gentle self respect and that radical self care and getting out of myself to become a person for others, and you know, maybe just taking some food over to the food pantry, maybe going around the neighborhood and picking up litter.

It's what you've done for a long long time, and it's also the way that you get some of those hits we talked about, Right, You get a good book review, someone that you respect says something good about it, you get paid to do it, all those things, right, So talk to me about how you work with yourself given that there are sort of like these multiple motivations in doing something like writing, you know, how do you work with yourself to stay on the more intrinsic motivations versus

getting sort of really focused on the extrinsic piece.

always get under my skin. And I won't lie and say I don't even notice or care anymore, because I completely do. But as you get older, you just notice it. It'll pass. You know that it was one person who doesn't like your style of writing or talking, and you know you shake it off. You learned little tools for shaking up. But what does work and sustain the soul and the spirit is any daily practice, whether it's meditation

or writing or a power walk or whatever. But with the writing, if you sit down at the same time every day so that your subconscious can kick in for you, which is where all the juicy stuff is, and you do the work even though you're not in the mood or you don't have any confidence or whatever, then it connects you to something umbilically, and that is some sort of higher power, some sort of higher calling to decide to devote yourself to the writer's life, whether or not

you ever get published. It's like a calling like a monk would feel called to the monastery, and the dailiness of it, and the miracle that you will get better and better and better, and then you'll be able to help others, and just like in recovery, the beauty of getting to watch other people heal and get better and reach higher and higher levels of biting off trickier things to either write about or ways to write about them, or alternately being able to write more and more modestly

and simply and plainly and clearly. It's a wonderful thing to see it in yourself, but even more so in some ways to see it in other people. And so the dailiness of it, the habit of it, as you teach about the connection with yourself, with higher power and with the outside world is really where the goods are.

gridiosity and narcissism sis the pretty shaky self esteem. But once I have a first draft done, it starts to be more like Swiss watchmaking or something, or I'm fiddling. I'm taking stuff out that I hadn't been able to take out earlier. I'm moving check around, and the story is kind of revealing itself to me like a polaroid in a way that wasn't happening in the first draft.

this is just part of the process. You know, I'm in the part of it where it's difficult.

and I thought talk about beating a dead horse. But I also had something that was guiding me, and that was that I wanted to write a book for my son and grandson that would be every single thing I know that has ever worked before during really tricky times, hard times, rough patches, bad news, that it will almost certainly work again when I'm gone, because I know that their future, just with the climate and who knows what democracy is going to be really difficult and scary and untraveled.

And so I wanted to say this all was work, no matter how awful my landscape was and how long it took. It will work. Community, he will work, Goodness will work. Prayer and meditation and getting outside and two or three very very best friends and this and so I started writing pieces and I don't think they're sort of funny, and I tried to do the deep dive

into these different realms of love. But yeah, every step of the way, I would feel left to my own devices that I'd already done it, I've done it better da da dah. But that is why with my writing, when I teach writing, I always say, you need other people to read your stuff. I have my husband. I have two people who read my stuff for me before I send it in anywhere. My son has a website called a writing room dot com and it's five hundred

writers who are doing that for each other. They're either helping each other not give up, and they're helping each other know that the first page really didn't work. I mean, you're going to need this if you'll have an editor, but you need someone before you give it to your editor, if you don't want your editor to be worried about what they've gone and done and making giving you a contract.

But at a writing Room dot Com they say things like, I'm going to love this, but I really feel hypothetically that's the first Patre're just kind of clearing your throat. But where it really takes off. For me, it's the second paragraph on page two, that's where I would start the whole thing. And then always and I'm sure this is true for you, Eric, you go on too long and that the ending is three or four pages or

seventeen pages before the right ending. But without feedback, I'm literally hopeless because I'm going to send stuff in that I just think is just just so so so perfect, and it really needed another set of eyes on it.

You know what It's like, your eye kind of glances off it after a while at your board with it a little bit, you just want to be done, but then you give it like I'll send it over to my husband and he'll print it out and he'll really work on it, and he'll come over and sometimes she says, I just love this. I had a couple thoughts. And other times he'll come in and they'll be the scary look on his face that more doesn't work than I had hoped, But he will have some really good ideas

on how to get it to work. So I give a lot of talks at a writing room dot com. I don't give it very many workshops. That's mostly where I do my talking. Now what I repeat over and over and over again. Is no matter how great a writer, no matter how many books you've had published, you need help from somebody who's a good writer, who respects you. My students go to writing conference, says cut, and they just get torn to shreds sometimes when their piece is

being critiqued in the group of twenty people. And that's not helpful. What is helpful is to approach each thing as having already been accepted, and you're either asking for help or offering help as to how to bring it up to its very highest quality.

pick up a drink or a drug. All I do in my Sunday school classes is to try to help my kids know that they are loved and chosen and just precious. As is that this is a come as you are a deal. But yet there's a forty five minutes before and then five minutes after, you know, so you can usually strip away about eighty percent, and anything I've written you can easily strip away about a third of it. So it's just human nature. It's human nature. We care so deeply about the things in our life

that are of the highest value. We just want to get that across, you know. That's why it's good that we get a shot at second drafts.

But I really love that idea. And you know the other thing that you said that just a minute ago that really resonates me with me and I talk to people in group programs that I run about this, which is when you go into a new situation, you're gonna have one of two sort of reactions, and they may switch back and forth like every three seconds, which is I'm too good to be here or I'm not good enough to be here.

and touching. But of course the way that I've always compensated for it is with this arrogance and this kind of feeling of these people just seem really nutty to me, or these people they're sort of pathetic or or whatever, or you know, like the famous Grautuo mark line that he wouldn't want to belong to any group that would

have him. But by entering into that room each time you do it and saying hello to a couple of people, it's like Nautilus for the spirit, you know, And you build muscles to do it, and then pretty soon you find yourself really really looking forward to them. You know, there's going to be people that are just going to seem weirder than it's absolutely necessary, but at the same time you build muscle, see the way you build muscle to not pick up a drink or to not go

back to smoking. You just know that you can do it, and it's going to be ever so slightly uncomfortable, and you know, like the Nikiet, you just do it and you put out your hand and you say Hello. And then there's someone you know there and either you gravitate towards them and go, oh my god, I'm so glad that you're here, or else you hide from them and

you think, oh my god, I'll never come back. But you just do it, and you do it afraid and you do it shy, and then you start to see what they're about, and something deep inside of you, like this little doctor Seu's character of your soul, goes, oh my god, that's exactly right. And then maybe you come back a second time, which is where the mirror is.

But Food Rescue just opened a kitchen here in Columbus where we're taking some of that food and preparing it. And so I've been going, and you know, what I know about myself is it takes about three to four interactions with people before I start to come out of my shell. So the first three times i'm there, I'm just kind of like, yeah, okay, I'm just focusing on the kitchen. And then I noticed last time, I'm making a couple jokes. I just know that about myself now,

so I could be patient with myself. But I didn't always know that, And I think it's you know, one of the reasons people have such a difficult time with community is we expect that right away, it's going to be this magical thing.

in the corner of the house. You know. We were told not to space out if we were spacing out, But we were children at the kitchen table or on the couch. Somebody came along and said, don't you have somebody to do? You know, is your homework done? Is your own claim? And I tell my writing students space out, space out, like steer off into the middle distance like cats, do you know, so you can rule gather and so your mind can kind of float around and go peek

into corners that you hadn't even own. We're there. And so much for me personally has been about unlearning what I was taught. And of all the crippling, destructive things I was taught as a child was a perfectionism. You know that you can and really need to do things that are beyond reproach. That also, you need to know what you're doing and then you should stick to that. And as a writer that is never true because A I usually don't know what I'm doing until I've done it,

and B I don't need to stick to it. I'm going to take out huge chalks, or I will introduce a whole new character or whatever. So with finding a way to have a bigger and more spacious life, which may involve community, may involve spirituality, may involve activism. Who knows you have to somehow get the help to release some of the perfectionism, because not a soul here is

going to do it perfectly. Because we compare our insights to other people's out we see other people go, oh, I wish I could do it that well, I wish I looked out well, I wish i'd just wish i'd that, And their insights feel just as you know, self critical or worried as ours do. It's just they have a better persona or bodyguard for me.

So it's a win. So if we can flip that right on its head and say, oh, good job, brain, we actually make it more likely that a our brain is going to do it more often because we're training it, and b that we're going to enjoy it more. And specifically, it's about how to make you not dread meditation so much and actually find it relaxing. Check out my free meditation guide at Goodwolf dot me slash calm. The thing

that keeps close company with perfectionism is shame. And you said something that I really resonated with, and it was that I learned once again that just about the worst part about shame is the shame of still having it. Yeah, say more about that.

even noticed because of your dazzling and seductive persona. But when somebody criticizes you or says something as if they are pointing out something that's true instead of it being their opinion, there's no way that you're not going to have shame. The gift is that maybe you don't have it for part of a year. You know, maybe you have it for a few days because you call your best friend, you call your partner, you call your mentor or your sponsor or whatever, and you work with it.

You go into it and realize that it's something from fifty years ago when you were a child, and this used to come up from your very stern dad or your very codependent mother or whatever. But that piece is so painful. I actually didn't think people were going to

like it. It's called camellias, and I thought people were going to just kind of recoil because it's so painful about what I went through and thinking this friend Tim had just nailed me finally for once, that I was a two time where I was a backstabber, or that he didn't want to be like me. And it seems to be the piece that in certain ways resonates most for people, because you know what, anything I write that is really intimate is something that I'm pretty sure is universal.

I'm pretty sure you Eric, when you read that, you gropped it, totally got it. Yeah right, you have been there and you kind of went, oh, you cringed. But in that way that's exciting to cringe when you think somebody is telling the truth and is maybe reading your mail a little bit.

And so I think it's a real powerful thing when people get to see like, oh no, even somebody who has all this wisdom still goes through this stuff, right. And it's sort of back to that idea about shame. We think we should be beyond something, right. I mean, I know that's become something I've had to really work with as I've had close to twenty five years in recovery and lead these group programs and this podcast and

all this stuff. Is when I'm really struggling, there's that voice in me that goes, you should know better.

as parents or as children. But that perfectionism is just so deadly. And my husband's written a book his name's Neil Allen, called Better Days because his work with people is on the inner critic, and he points out to his clients that the inner critic is from childhood. It kept us from running out into the street when we were five years old. It kept us from swimming out beyond our ability to stay afloat. But it's a parasite, the way he describes us. It's part of us. It's

this misguided effort to keep us safe. But I'm seventy and I have very good traffic safety understanding, and I would never swim out past the breakers. You know, I'm not stupid. But with my work, when I hear that inner critic, it says to me, oh my god, I just think that is too sentimental. I think it's overwritten. I think it's this. I think it's that, or when I come off stage after presentation to inner critic. But what I've learned to do mostly I've known my husband

for seven years. He taught me to just be aware of it and to say, oh, it's you. It's not truth, it's not who I am, it's not truth. It's just parasite. It kept me alive. I'm grateful for that. But it takes practice, and again, it takes that Nautilus of the soul to get used to. You know, there's something I know in Ohio you've come upon in the secret groups of recovery, which are the three a's. The first say is the awareness it's my inner critic. It's belittling me.

Its job is to keep me small so it can control me and keep me from doing something that might either be fatal or humiliating in the public realm. But you get the awareness, Oh I'm doing it. Oh I'm just jealous. Oh I'm just I'm just sad. And that's why I'm being mean to myself, that the inner critic keeps me small and afraid. And so the awareness, oh, I'm doing it again, And Neil teaches people to say, oh,

it's you. The second thing is the acceptance. Of course I have it when I give you Eric my book to read, and when you give your book to us to read down the road. It's your very best effort, your best self. It's your heart, it's your soul, it's your education, it's your experience, your strength, your hope. Here all the best you could do. And if somebody says in a newspaper or at the dinner table, I'm surely surprised that you didn't go into that more deeply. I'm

surprised that you spend so much time on that. It's going to be devastating, But have you accept it? This is what I got as a child, and this side of the grave, I'm going to have it the miracle and I accept this is that I'll have it and I can come through it in a couple of hours instead of in my case, my twenties at the height of my my drinking and chusing. And then after the acceptance, of course I have this. This is how I was raised. You know, I was raised to be very self critical.

I was raised that a B plus wasn't a good enough grade? Was there time in the quarter to bring it up? And then the third thing that recovery teaches that the church and the Losque and the Synagogue teach is the action and the action is love. The action is self love. The action is you touch your own shoulder and you say it's okay, Imi, you know, let me get you a cup of tea, or you said, let's you go take a hot bath, or you say,

let's just put that down for now. I think you're tired, you know, I think maybe you want to lie down with a kitty for a while and just read People magazine. Whatever the radical self care is is the action. And so I do that a lot because I hear the inner critic. I hear it more and more softly. I heard it yesterday and I was crushed by it, by what it was telling me about myself. So what did I do? I went and got Neil and he said, oh, that's your inner critic. That's not truth. And so what

do we do? Well, why don't we ask it to go sit in the library and find a nice book to read while I try to get this project finished. I don't need it sitting on my shoulder telling me how disappointing it finds me, how much better I could have done, and how much more quickly. And so I did. I said, you know, there's a great lamp in the library. Anything you might ever want to read in any realm told story or self helper or Mary Oliver. Why'n't you go reach for a while? Will I finish up here?

Because I'm older, I have a number of tools in this battered old toolbox, and the awareness helps me remember that I can get one out might be at picking up to two hundred pound phone right, it might be that you need to cry, And actually I needed to cry. I had an English mother from Liverpool, and I was taught you don't cry, stiff up her lip and carry on. And my father is the same thing. And so if you cried or were angry at the dinner table, you got sent to your room without eating. And I learned

not to cry. And I was very sensitive and I couldn't help it. I just came this way. That's why I'm a good writer, because I'm sensitive. But that's back to what I talk about with my classes or my talks is a cry, cry, cry. There's nothing except crying that will help that child's grief insight of you, and it will bathe you. It will hydrate you, it will

baptize you. You know, it'll water the seeds at your feet that you don't even know what they are because birds flew by and dropped them, and buckle up because something really incredible might spring from that. So again, it's about unlearning what we were taught we should do and instead finding out who we really are and how to live in a way that's freer and float, deer and maybe a little bit sillier.

But the old timers that I talked to this is, you know, July of nineteen eighty six said, in the morning, when I wake up, I just say, whatever, life is going to be, very lifey that goes without saying, and whatever comes, you know, I have the tools to deal

with it if I'm not being a pig. And then at night, when you might be looking back over your day and thinking about how many blessings there were, how many things are where you definitely could have done better or given the person a little bit more of your time or patience, or you could have made this distolution or whatever instead of like holding a flashlight on himself with with judgment or with this concern. He just goes, oh, well, you know, still sober, still seeking union with God, still

trying to be friendlier to myself. Oh well whatever, it's fine.

we could do something better and different. That's healthy, but then taken too far, it's the perfectionism and the shame that we talked about. How do you think about balancing those things?

would say, oh, honey, you know what. We all do that, and it's a drag, and it says in our literature that no human power could relieve us of that. And you know, you need to be a retired higher power because you're not a good higher power to yourself, because you're so mean to yourself. And I would say that to you now where I talk that way to me, yep, with me, I might go, oh, God, I did that again. I don't know how many times I have prayed and

written and God boxed it about not I did it again. God. You know, that's how I talk to myself without intervention and without many many years under my belt of the three a's again, the awareness, the acceptance, the action. Of course, I talk to myself. That's how my parents talk to myself. You did that again, but you go so you did it. You got to call you know, awareness, acceptance, action, and

the action. For me with you, we beat it. Put my hand on your shoulder with permission gently and say you know what same you know and God box it. And then you get more aware of it, you start to do it next time and you grab yourself by

the wrist and say stop, honey. So that's where I would differentiate between an inventory between the harshness that we bring to our own judgment of ourselves and the gentleness with which we listen to a brother or a sister share something that is very troubling for them.

It's that beautiful combination. And they kept me alive and they set me on the path that ended up with me converting and becoming a Sunday school teacher not long after then. I was a year later I got the miracle, I mean, the central miracle from which all blessings flow, which was that I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. But my church didn't keep me sober.

Sobriety didn't give me what my community of believers of left wing, progressive, hardcore Christians could give me so And it's all of a path, it's all of a weave, you know, it's all the drugs really got me someplace. I'm not sure anything else would have. All over. The unfortunate part was that I was probably going to die,

and then off. That was the thing with the drugs or with the acid or the mushrooms or that whatever was said, it wears off, and that you know, the elevator is going in one direction, which is down, and you don't know if you'll be alive when the elevator stops at the next floor.

Buddhist framework. And the reason was, and I'm just curious how you reconcile this with yourself, because I'm sure you do in probably a great way. Is it the idea that God is what was keeping me sober?

Buddhist friends and so bridy. There's a line in the literature of recovery that says that instead of a personal God or you know, Casper, the friendly ghost, or the fairy Dad and the clouds with a long beard, that there's an unexpected inner resource, and I find that very touching.

And with the people I've tried to be there for to help them get sober over the years, a lot of them don't want anything to do with God per se, but they can the Buddhist thing a sort of good orderly direction, or the group of drunks, or the great outdoors or the grace over drama. But people, if they're desperate enough to want to give up this one thing that they love more than anything else but that is killing them and has destroyed their family, there's a way.

But a lot of people actually don't want to. They want to. Like me, for years, I mean I was a hopeless drunk for years. I just believe that I could figure it out, you know, and that I could break some sort of code so that I could stop after five or six social drinks every single night and the non habit forming marijuana that I'd smoked on a daily basis for twenty years. And at some point I've heard in twelve step programs that step zero is this shit has got to stop. And for me, it kept

not stopping. I kept working with it. I kept thinking, Okay, it's tequila. I don't do well with tequila. Okay, meth does not work. The third day is really a problem, you know. And for some reason, and I have to say it was the movement of grace in my life. I ran out of any more good ideas. It was the dark night of the soul where I'd been many many many times, as all alcoholics have been, and I had run out of any more good ideas.

really hard and it worked and I got sober. But like I said, what I described is that question about why are some of us and then also a couple of really difficult things in my life happened, and I realized it didn't have a faith that truly made sense to me. And then I went back out and I drank. I never used heroin. It's funny you say that about like crystal meth not working, because that was basically my rationalization was like, well, you know, Heroin's a bad idea.

We all can agree on that. I just won't do that right. And when I came back then I was like, Okay, I've got to figure this higher power out. And I did, uh huh.

wanted to stay alive. I felt like my life force was still tugging at my shoulders, and what I basically said to God at that moment, was with my arms crossed, was what, you know, find what? And it was just what? And I already had had like this big Jesusy life

at a church. But the problem was that the God of my understanding and I thought I was a piece of shit because of the way that I've been living all those years, what I've been doing, what I'd done to women, what I'd done to just you know, the drill, and so what so Brady brought me into was a way of life where my higher power and the group of drunks and good orderly direction of saying sober one

day at a time. Help me understand that God thought I was fabulous, you know, and that God was teaching me what I teach my Sunday school kids, which you are loved and chosen and I adore you as is, come as you are, I want you. So that was about the most radical change that could ever be in a person's spirituality. You know, right, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.

is that very striving. Right. Of course, we're doing it because we want certain benefits, but in the moment of actually meditating, we need to let striving go and focus on just being there and experiencing it no matter what's happening. It becomes not enjoyable because I'm trying to make something happen some special moment. We want to let go of that. So if you want to stop dreading meditation and actually find it enjoyable, check out my free meditation guide at

Goodwolf dot me slash calm. I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up on that idea that you are wonderful and loved as is you and I are going to talk a little bit longer in the post show conversation where I'm going to unveil my single favorite line that I've come across in your writing,

and we'll talk about a couple other things listeners. If you'd like access to post show conversations and add free episodes and joy of supporting something that means something to you, go to one you Feed dot net slash join and thank you so much. It is really such an honor to have you on.

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