Find the Potential in Change || Maya Shankar

cognitive psychology from Oxford. She's a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music's pre College program, where she was a private violin student of Itazak Proman. In this episode, I talked to Maya about change. Humans have a desire to attach roles to identities, but when events disrupt that we may feel ensure of who we are having gone through huge shifts herself. Maya shares with us ways in which we can reconfigure our identities and pivot to pursue our

goals in different ways. Change can be disorienting, but it can also afford us a deeper understanding of ourselves and afford a lot of potential for growth. Maya also believes that growth is an opportunity to re examine our long held beliefs and values. We also touch on the topics of cognitive science, mindfulness, awe, and hope. I really enjoyed this chat. Maya and I go way back to Yale with grad school days for me and she was an undergraduate.

She was always a bright light with so much potential, and now she is really realizing her potential. I couldn't be more proud of her and more excited to share with you this chat with Maya Shankar. Maya Shankar is so unbelievably amazing having you on the Psychology Podcast to be.

My parents, you know, I'm the youngest of four kids, so obviously they had to like push us to do lots of things that we kids didn't want to do. But for whatever reason, they never had to really push me to practice, which was kind of amazing. They weren't quite sure where this motivation and love was coming from, but I developed a very deep attachment to the instrument

very quickly. And when I was nine, things got a lot more intense because I auditioned for the Juilliard School of Music in New York and my family lived in Connecticut. So every Saturday, my mom and I would wake up at four thirty in the morning and catch a train from Connecticut to New York. I would have about ten hours of classes there every Saturday, come mom at like nine or ten pm. And I didn't mind it because I loved it, right, Like these were my people, right,

these like fellow musician kids were totally my people. And so it was, Yeah, it was like the light of my life, you know, starting from that young age. And then, like you noted, when I was fifteen, I had a change of plans. I was, you know, hopefully on the up and up right. Pearlman had just taken me on as his student a year or two prior. That really gave me the vote of confidence I needed in such a competitive, like uber competitive space to feel like I

maybe had what it took to go pro. And then I overstretched my finger on a single note and I heard a popping sound. And the popping sound was not a string on my violin. It was a tendon in my hand, and after a very complicated medical saga, I was told by doctors I could never play again. So it was really that one moment that and did my dreams forever of becoming a violinist unreliable?

of the instrument. I was not expecting that I would feel the loss of myself because I think, especially when you're young, and we're not constantly reflecting on who we are, what makes us who we are, We're not always coding Yeah, what constitutes our identity? And it turned out that a violin had played a huge role in defining who I was as a person, and so when I lost it, I really did feel like I'd lost a huge part of myself, and I experienced what I've now come to

learn is known as identity paralysis. So it's a termine psychology, and it refers to this idea of really feeling stuck where and paralyzed because you have been something in the past, that thing is taken away and now you're kind of stuck in place and you're not really sure what the next steps are. And so it took me a long time to break free from identity paralysis and start exploring other things. For me, it was just an accident that

led me to stumble upon cognitive science and psychology. The summer before college, I was in my counterfactual life of being a violinist. I was supposed to be in China with my classmates, touring and Shanghai and whatnot, and so I was like, you know, imagining how awesome their summer was, and I was at home just pruising my parents' bookshelf in their basement, and I stumbled upon a pop science book by Stephen Pinker called The Language Instinct, and that

I'm sure you've read it. It's like that book changed my life because until I read so, the Language Instinct details the marvelous abilities that we have as humans to both comprehend and produce language. And this was a skill that up until that point in my life I'd fully

taken for granted, never really even thought about. And when Pinker pulled back the curtain and showed just how complicated, how complex, like beautifully rich, the cognitive machinery is that's operating behind the scenes that gives rise to this incredible ability. I mean, I was awestruck. Scott. Maybe you've had this experience at some point. It's like like you, I really felt like I was in awe of this organ right, Like I cannot believe what the mind is capable of.

And then you start asking all sorts of other questions, like well, if this is what's underlying language, I mean, what underlies all of the other marvelous things that humans could do, Like what's going on when Taylor Swift writes yet another amazing hit, Like how is happening in her brain when that's going on? And so it's just lit up a curiosity in me about how it is that our minds work, how we make decisions, how we develop our attitudes and beliefs about the world, how our visual

systems work. I mean, it was just like I felt like I was a kid in a candy store again, and that was such a wonderful thing to be gifted at that stage in my life, because there have been a few years of listlessness and not really knowing if I could ever love anything as much as I love the violin, and to be kind of handed this whole area of inquiry. Looking back, I just feel so lucky that I just happen to stumble upon that book. Yeah.

Go pop science books, by the way, I feel like they get a really bad rap because they're pop science books. They get like a really bad rap. It's like, oh, you know, this thing isn't fully represented and like totally fair. There's definitely been very fair criticisms, but in terms of lighting up the imagination and pulling new people into a discipline, I am such a fan of popular science books.

of my ability to play the violin. Now I can't play the violin, So what do I have to offer? I have nothing to offer. So I definitely was suffering from low cell confidence. And I remember going to this orientation for her primate cognition lab. So she had a monkey lab and you know this right like down at the hospital, and I came into the room and it

was overflowing Scott. I was extra intimidated because I see all these seniors and juniors and they're signing up for these very limited number of spots, and I remember thinking, Okay, I'm totally screwed, because what are the chances she gives the freshman the spot. So I remember there was a short application form we had to fill out, and I just sold my soul on this application. I was like,

you can have my unborn children. I will do the four thirty am shifts on Saturday morning and new even in the dead of winter, like I will do whatever it takes, just please take a chance on me. And I was so lucky because she took a chance on me, and that ended up being the folk like research, which is already a giffer and at any undergrad to get to do right like research and just immersing myself in the world of cognitive science became the focus of my

undergrad time. And I think without Laurie's mentorship that just would never have happened, That would never have been possible. And so I feel like it was a really important part of my transition, and it also helped me. It helped build a through line for me in terms of what it is that brings me passions. So we talked earlier about identity paralysis, and one thing that I've learned since then in making my podcast a slight change of plans, is that our desire to attach our identities to something

is not going anywhere. I think it's a very core part of who we are as human beings to want to be something, to do something, to be attached to something that makes us us. And so it's possible. I think for us to escape that very innate desire. It gives us meaning and purpose and fulfillment in this world to have these strong identities. But what I learned is that you can be choosy about what you anchor your

identity to. And I think as a kid, I had made the mistake of well, not necessarily a mistake, but you know, there's just different ways of seeing your identity. I had attached my identity to being a violinist first and foremost, so like I was a violinist, and then

secondarily I was Maya. And what I've learned since then is that we can instead anchor our identities to what lights us up about the things that we do, what underlies the pursuits that we love, and that empowers us with a much more durable, reliable, anchored identity, such that when the thing is taken away from you, you at least have that underlying trait you can fall back on. And so, in my particular case, what this look like

is realizing, oh, okay, a desire. When I looked back on my time as a young violin I realized that what I loved was the human connections that form through music you know, and the fact that I could forge these incredibly deep emotional connections with people that I'd never met before, whether it was my chamber musician partners, whether it was an orchestra, whether it was the audience that

I was playing for. I mean, it was It's kind of an amazing magical experience, right to go on a stage and not know anyone and suddenly feel things together. And when I realized that that, at the end of the day, you stripped away all the superficial features of the violin, if you if I thought deeply, okay, like what is it that makes me really love the violin,

it was that it was human connection. What that meant is that I could try to find my love of human connection elsewhere, and I absolutely found it in cognitive science, like studying the science of human behavior and emotions and decision making. And then you know, with my podcast, connecting with people through the interviews, and so it's given me a really powerful through line over a course of my life. We just had so many disparate parts. Right, it looks

all very just, it looks very disjointed. Right, It's like she was a violinist, then she was a cognitive scientist. Then she's a public policy person, then she you know, and so I was like, now she's a podcaster. So

there's a lot of jumping around. But I would urge your listeners to ask themselves what it is that they love about the things they do, and to see if they can reconfigure their identities to anchor to those things rather than so rather than it being about what they do, anchoring their identities to why they do it, you.

of an unexpected change. But what we fail to appreciate when we do that kind of mental calculation is that we will actually change considerably as a result of a change, as a result of just normal living and evolution and development, right, And so it's actually important for us to keep a really open mind about what those transformations can look like, because I think one of the reasons why we get so scared in the face of change is that we

feel so unprepared for the moment. It's like, whatever capabilities and resources that we have in this moment, it feels like that's not going to get me through this horrible thing that's just happened, or this extremely challenging thing that's going to happen. But we know from research that people change a lot more than they think they will, or that they regularly surprise themselves with how they responded differently

to a situation than they thought they would. You know, you know that this concept the end of history illusion, where we fully acknowledge that we've changed considerably in the past, but we fail to appreciate that little change in the future. So there's definitely, you know, inconsistently there we're like, oh, yeah, no, definitely, I'm way different than I was in my twenties, and then it's like, but in my forties, I'll probably be

about the same. You know, we just assume that who we are right now is the stable version of us. And I think I think this is just a theory I have that really big changes in our lives, like the flip your world upside down changes can accelerate those internal shifts, can accelerate the internal changes that we experience

as people. And so on my podcast, I've interviewed so many different people about who have run up against various obstacles and hardship, and in particular, this one woman, Christine Ha. She went permanently blind in her early twenties as a result of an autoimmune condition, and at the time she was just cooking recreationally and she was really mourning the loss of independence that she had, and when she imagined

her future, it just felt so grim. And she totally surprised herself in terms of the capabilities that she had, in terms of the new passions she developed, and in terms of her thirst for learning and trying to actually overcome challenges that she ended up becoming a world renowned chef who won a season of Master Chef, the TV show. She owns two restaurants in Texas. And what's so fascinating about her episodes, so it's called a blind cook becomes

a master chef the episode. What's so amazing about her experience is that she taps into new parts of her personality that she almost didn't know existed along the way, and that fills me with a tremendous amount of hope, Scott, because we feel at any given moment in time that not only will we not change, but that we have a fairly good grasp of who we are as people right, what we're capable of, what our beliefs are, what our perspectives are, and like anything else in the world, we

just have a small set of data points that we've collected over time based on a random set of experiences and circumstances that we've been in. And what that means is we're not really getting a full three sixty degree

view of everything that we are. And so one thing that can help build our resilience in the face of change, especially unexpected or unwanted change, is just the belief, this underlying belief that new parts of yourself may be revealed to you as part of that process, and maybe you don't love everything that you see, right, I'm not trying

to sugarcoat anything. There might be parts of you that you are revealed, but at a minimum, you will develop a greater understanding of yourself and then you have more to work with in terms of you know who you are as a person and the kind of internal work you do moving forward. And so that has been a very uplifting message across the episodes that I've done on interviews that I've done on a slight change of plans

where stories look vastly different. You know, there's people who are dealing with chronic illnesses, there's people who are dealing with divorce, there's people who are dealing with a betrayal of some kind, and people who are dealing with changing their minds about something that they felt total conviction. And in all of those cases you see the same delightful expression, which is that they deepen their understanding of who they were as a result of going through the change.

huge changes in one's worldview. Very interested in education and how kids' ideas of their own capacities can radically change once they're inspired to realize a future dream, for instance. So that's there could be slight change of plans that can come about from a shift in one's own just idea of possibility.

sources of awe that I think I had overlooked. So, for example, moral beauty is a huge source of awe, right, And it's the feeling that you get when you feel so moved by the character and generosity and kindness and compassion or overcoming of another person. And what was so interesting to me about learning about something like moral beauty is that it turns out that's the form of awe that I, as a person experienced the most. That is

my form of awe much. I feel much more moved by human generosity, for example, than I do by a beautiful sunset. And you helped me see like, Okay, I'm not like an allless person just because I enjoy the vista a little bit less and then the next person, it's just I have a different source. That's my primary source. And I have absolutely had changes of plan that were over time inspired by just these small moments in life where you see someone's courage, or you see their vulnerability,

or you see them helping a stranger. I mean the ones I most touched for are like little children who are so kind or stand up to the bully and protect their friend. I mean, all those moments can be really really inspiring and shape who you want to be as a person.

have growth build in. And I'll give you a specific example because I love how you talk about values, and I love the way you talk about values. You talk about how when we have these kinds of not just slight change plays a major change of point. Obviously it's ironic when you say say slight change.

all costs. And that's a different kind of model than I feel like your model, you know and talk about.

could talk about the science of changing minds. And we actually got into a back and forth on this topic because he was talking about changing you know, we should be willing to update our beliefs and ideas about things, and I was arguing, we really should be willing to update our values because it's a harder mountain to climb, absolutely to try to change values, right. But if we are successful in changing our values, it can have a truly transformative impact on our lives right in terms of

what we care about. But it does take more intentionality because your value systems tend to be your foundation, right, It's what you've grown up with, it's what your culture is teaching you, it's what you hold most sacred, and so to challenge that can be a very uncomfortable process, but I think it's an excellent cognitive process to go through.

Like it's uncomfortable for a reason, which is that you're in some sense holding some of these values blindly, and if they really are worthy of beholding, you'll be convinced on the other end that that's a value on a pold you want to uphold, but you may as well poke at it a little bit just to make sure that it's stood the test of time, that it still aligns with who you are. I think that it aligns

with what society is like. I mean, I think sometimes we can be hesitant to jettison values because we think it speaks poorly to the kind of decision makers we are, the kind of people that we are. But what that fails to appreciate is that circumstances change, information changes. We're allowed to update our points of view based on new information, and so it's not cowardly to drop a value from your system if it no longer aligns with your current way of thinking, or if new information has come out

that challenges that value. So this speaks more broadly, I think, to the literature saying that we can benefit a lot by not too closely tethering our identities to our values, because that can sometimes keep us locked in. It can prevent us from changing our minds when we really should

in the face of empirical evidence. It can make us feel embarrassed if we do change our minds, like again, we don't have strong convictions when in actuality, it should be a very natural part of human discourse and dialogue for each side to change their minds or update their way of thinking.

of thinking again. So I got Adam with his most open mind, because what you freak right.

in meditation science. He was one of the first neuroscientists to take the study of meditation seriously and actually run rigorous randomized control trials in labs around this topic that at the time no one was taking seriously. So anyway, I'm a huge Ritchie fan. His research is amazing. He does a great job at distelling, you know, fact from fiction when it comes to all that's put out there

about meditation. But my favorite part of my conversation with him was when I asked him one thing I gleaned from reading his book is that meditation and mindfulness have been really bastardized in the Western world, so that it's a life hack. Right. It's like, we meditate so that we can be more efficient, we can be more productive, we can be more we can have better quality sleep so that we can do actually less anxiety. Right, it's

a self help tool. And I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to increase your own well being and not being critical of that.

I kind of call it like mic mindfulness, Like do the five minute intervention, you'll feel thirty two percent less anxious. But one thing I was talking about with Richie is that when we reorient ourselves and anchor our intention around meditation to better align with the true origin story of meditation, ironically, we might find that it's actually more effective at doing

all the life life hackey stuff. And he was saying that at the start of every meditation he does, he actually gives himself a reminder that he's not just doing

this practice for himself, he's doing it for others. And we were both speculating that when you articulate an intention lif that it can absolutely affect the quality of the meditation, right, It can affect the experience to transcend an experience that And again, you're more of an expert on this stuff than I am, but I believe the intention could really change the experience you have. And so I don't know.

I took that lesson with me, which was, you know, we see this happening in a lot of spaces, like you should be self compassionate because it'll help you in this way. You should be more empathetic because it'll help you in that way. And I really think we're all better off if we think of ourselves as part of a larger hole and that we are committing to these behavioral practices because it just leads us to be better citizens to one another.

a stress on the side. My friends are like I try and I suck at it. It's like, it's not a matter of being good or being bad. You know, like you're going into and you're just like, where's my mind today, you know, to get the true reality understanding of the nature of self is I mean, I guess that is a goal. I guess you can't get away with that having no goals whatsoever.

being kind to others can make us kinder. And so yeah, I really like that. But I do think you're the cautionary tale from you know, what you shared with Adam is very real. I was actually talking about this with Daker recently in the context of AWE. Now AWE is

being commodified. It's a oh if you experience, you know the intention of an onspiring experience, I believe is to make us feel that we are smaller, that we are part of a broader, bigger hole, to help reduce feelings of narcissism and self obsession, and to make us feel more connected to the broader ecosystems that we operate, and to make us feel more connected to the broader hole. And so I do see a huge irony in practicing quote moments of awe just so that we experience the

internal narcissistic boost and well being. You know, I would love for us to focus more on how it makes us feel with respect to connectedness to others.

can rethink you know a lot of things. But when we start talking about saying the people that you're allowed to change your values, there's some really interesting research showing that most people identify their real self with their values. The thing I think that there's a great fear of is well, if I'm not angry, you know who am I? Who am I individually from others? You know, And there's some things that are more central of that than others.

I think values is one of the most, if not the most sensual thing that people anchor themselves to to be able to have a sense of self.

figure out whether you still believe in them. So one thing that can help create distance between you and your values is to imagine that you were born during a different period of time, that you were born into a different family, that you were born into a different culture. How would your values be different than what they are right now? And that allows you to see that maybe the values you hold today aren't as sacred as you

might think, because they were extremely circumstanced dependent. Now, there are some values that I feel should be non negotiable, like don't cause suffering needlessly? Right, Those are the sorts of things that probably transcend a lot of these frameworks I've just given you, which is, you know, if you pulled someone in the seventeen hundreds, they're probably going to say, yeah, I also think human suffering is an ill. We don't

want to introduce more of that. But when it comes to other kinds of values, I think they're much more subject to these sociocultural factors. And if we can engage in that thought experiment, I mean, this is something that Adam talks in his book where we transport ourselves to different periods of time, or different geographic locations, or into different families. Then all of a sudden, we see our values as being a bit more negotiable than we might

have otherwise. You also realize that some of your vale, like a lot of the values we hold, we didn't really consciously build a relationship with those values. We just kind of inherited them by default for whatever reason. They're not all the result of deliberate cognitive effort that I believe X or Y thing, and so a lot of our values. If you actually, you know, do the examination, you'll realize a lot of your values haven't really been

scrutinized by you. You just believe them, right. And I think we can see that in terms of I mean, if you look at a personal level, right, I'm thinking about say, public policies that I was like super pro in two thousand and eight. Let's say, and now I've realized, wait a second, they're a lot more complicated than I thought before. And it's okay to you know shift. You can also shift your values over time so that you start you don't believe in something that you once did.

And there was an open mindedness to her fully system right from the outset, as you seem to acknowledge, Like I could have been born in a different country and been exposed to a very different set of religious beliefs, and so I'm not going to be super self righteous about mine. I'm going to embrace that there may be diversity in this landscape. And I think that stayed with me.

lot of cognitive closure. And so part of my process of discovery with the show is figuring out how I can embrace a more nimble, malleable, more open mind. And it's been a journey, but I think it's working. Like I actually do feel that I am less wedded to my internal life scripts that I've written for myself and my you know, five and ten year and fifteen year plus. I mean, I don't even that. One sign of success making this show is I literally don't even make the

five year plan anymore in my head. I'm like one year maximum. That's the only that's the runway that I have in my head. And so it's really been a process because I think, again I am this is where I hope listeners really resonate with me, because like they hear themselves in my questioning line of questioning, which is like but I hate change, or like, you know, but it's really hard to not want to know all the answers or to have that kind of closure, to not

have that kind of closure. But I think I've definitely learned a lot from both the people who shared their personal stories with me on the show, and then of course also the expert scientists who have shown us where the science corroborates, you know, our theories and whatnot.

develops an autoimmune disorder. She's incredibly anxious, she becomes an insomniac. I mean, she really internalizes her heartbreak. And because she's a science journalist. She goes on this year long quest to try to figure out how she can hack her heartbreak, you know, like how she can science her way out of this horrible state. And she tries all sorts of interventions. Scott, It's something. It's hilarious. She's like this incredible toolbox. It's like, Okay,

I'm gonna all my way out of heartbreak. Okay, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. I'm going to do six different types of therapy. And by the end of the year, I mean, obviously there's been some incremental progress. But the most humbling lesson that she learns from all of it is that the actual solution to her heartbreak is needing less cognitive closure, being more open to mystery, more open to uncertainty, more open to discovery.

And Florence tracks these changes over the course of her journey, where she said, you know, in the beginning, I was like the fifteen year planner, you know, I was down to tea. Everything was so well organized and orchestrated in my life. And she said, she shared this really beautiful set of anecdotes with me. She said, now when I go hiking, I'm just as likely to sit still feeling the breeze as I am to try and make the summit. Like she no longer makes five year plans, she no

longer even sees her heartbreak as a problem to solve. Instead, it's a process to experience. And that's a lesson for all of us who are we instantly And man, there's so many fun themes that are coming in and out

of this conversation we're having. But we talked before about make mindfulness and about using aws as like Khaki tool, and I think a lot of this comes from, you know, we live in a culture now where it's like, okay, problem solution, problem solution, how do I stop feeling negative emotions? How do I instantly terminate whatever negativity that I'm feeling?

And part of Florence's process, and I think there's a lot of wisdom in that is actually just learning to embrace the experience for what it is and not have expectations about what success looks like.

to find to discover those unexpected rewards. If you go in with the cognitive closure, you're actually like, you're probably limiting yourself right from the possibilities.

I was like single minded in my goal. It was like, I want to become a parent, you know, and you know, the first miscarriage happens, and the second miscarriage happens and all of a sudden you feel disoriented and one thing that I ended up releasing an episode about this experience.

So two days after we lost identical twin girls to a miscarriage, I actually recorded totally unexpectedly, like I'm glad I did it quickly after this happened, and I probably would never have done it, but it was about two

days after the loss. My producer interviewed me. The episode is called maya Slight Change in Plans, and I was really eager to do what my guests had done for me, which was to process my change out loud and see if there's any reflections that I could come up with that could be helpful to people, because at the end of the day, I just wanted to turn this like super shitty situation into something that had some positive quality

to it. And in the course of that conversation, I stumbled upon an insight that's just like what you were sharing is just really hitting home, which is in the process of this experience, I met this incredible, incredible human named Haley, who is our surrogate who lives in Arkansas. She's a beautiful human. I don't even believe in souls, but like if souls existed, she has one. Okay, that's beautiful.

Haley was nurturing and kind and loyal and generous and so honest and straightforward, and I just felt moved by who she was as a person. And when we weren't successful in this journey with her, it was easy instinctively to feel regret. That's how I normally would have felt, right, like, there's some regret, like, oh my god, we just went through years of this and expended so many emotional resources

and all we have is pain. And I found myself incapable of doing that with Haley because she was an unexpected gift that emerged along the way, and it was on me to make space for her to have been

that beautiful ending right. And so I stopped trying to see like a baby as being the outcome and allowed, for the first time ever in my life, and not see something as an outcome oriented process, but to again build space and room and flexibility into my life such that I allowed this unexpected, beautiful gift of a lifelong friendship with Haley to come in and stay there and to mean something in its own right, to be valued

in its own right. And I just don't think that I was that kind of person before, Like I don't know if I would have had the internal wherewithal to say, you know what, that relationship with Haley matters. That's important too. In fact, that's as important as reaching this end goal. And you know, we're still not parents, but I feel like I have a much more I feel equanimity around it because I just feel a little bit less attached to outcomes. And obviously this comes from all the Buddhist

philosophy back in the day. Like they nailed it, they figured all this out the rest of her happiness, But it takes a lot of trying in your your own life to actually get to a point where you can detach yourself from things the things that you want. And so again it's been a it's been a learning experience for me certainly, but I feel grateful to be in this position that I'm in right now because I never thought I could be the kind of person to get there.

just goal change. I feel like there's something dream change. I feel like what you're illustrating is it's possible to still hold on to a dream, but it just takes a different form, is what i'ming.

as this refuge, right, because I imagine this like idealic. I mean, it was such a naive image of family of life, but it was like perfect family, like you know, two kids, a dog, the picket, white picket fence. The house like that was always my go to place where I found so much meaning and purpose and excitement and again an

escape from painful times in my childhood. And so what's interesting now is we're figuring out I mean, I'm certainly figuring out okay, in the same way that for me, the reason I loved the violin was human was a desire for human connection. I could find that elsewhere. I've just been asking myself why it is that I was craving becoming a parent, and can I achieve that in other areas of my life? Right? Can I achieve that

by like through mentorship? Can I achieve it through I mean, there's also lots of ways to have a family, right, And so it's just opened my mind. It's opened up my mind that maybe becoming a parent isn't the only expression of the things that I crave from parenthood, which is just like loving kids, you know, and seeing them thrive that you can still yeah, you can find that

in a lot of ways. So this is a very this is very much a works in progress, Scott, Like, these are thoughts that are actively going through my brain. My husband, I've figured anything out we don't know what our next steps are. Again, there's so many different paths to become, you know, to have children in your life, like fostering, adoption, surrogacy, having kids through natural means. I mean, there's just like being an amazing aunt to your nieces

and nephews. I mean, there's just so many different paths to take, and it's really about exploring all of them.