Andrea Gibson

speaker

930 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 3 Mar

Andrea Gibson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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We Can Do Hard Things · The Bravest Conversation We’ve Had: Andrea Gibson (Best Of) · 26 Jan 2025 podcast

So I don't really know, but my folks are, they're going through it and they're sending me, you know, beautiful messages every day. And my mom and I are similar in that we both, get a lot of joy and peace from being out in the garden. And so we'll talk about the garden. But yeah, I would say that of all the grief I feel through this, very rarely does it have to do with my own self.

It's about the people who love me and my parents, especially probably because of my grandma. But my grandma has been with me through this whole thing. Oh, and my dad. You know, when I tell you about, I also believe in the realm of miracles and magic. When I first started going through chemo in the very beginning, I lost every hair on my body to chemo. I mean, every hair, y'all, it's creepy.

And except for my eyebrows, I kept my eyebrows, but I didn't tell anybody. I wasn't talking about the fact that I still had my eyebrows removed. And then my mother called me up one morning and said, you'll never believe what happened this morning. And I said, what? And she's like, your father woke up with his right eyebrow missing.

And my dad has been missing his right eyebrow ever since I started chemo and kept my eyebrows. And so I also live in those worlds and those realms and who knows what is what. But I guess it's the science of love. Maybe. I'm not sure.

I think one of the strangest things is you expect that to be what happens. Like even when you were writing back and Glennon, your email to me was so kind and it was just like, we can do anything. We don't have to do this podcast. And I think one of the strangest things is you expect everything to just stop or you expect to want it to stop. but life is still life.

And I remember early on when I was talking about my potential death all the time, Meg said to me, you know, baby, you're not a narcissist, but your death is. And it was so true. And then at that time I thought, oh yes, it is. And so, and then I sort of, I'm like, I'm going to branch out a little bit. And since then it's the world.

And also because I have felt a little bit as if I am not, not quite in the world the same way ever since I was diagnosed. I feel like I'm in kind of a different realm. And now as I get this news and I'm thinking, okay, it could be that I die soon. There is part of me that wants to be even more worldly of like, oh, this, this humanness, like this, all of it.

So I'm just like, I want to do regular things. We have house projects and I want to do house projects. I guess other people want to go hike in Switzerland. I want to paint the closet doors. But mostly it's because I've learned in these last two years how much how much of the richness and the joy and the awe of this life is in such simple, simple things.

Like I got your email and I just was running around the house saying, Meg, I love people. I love people. I love people. And then I was like, what am I going to do without people? One of the other things that happened right after my diagnosis a few days ago, was I noticed I was hanging my head for the first time in two years. And I said to Meg, I'm like, do you notice I'm hanging my head?

And she said, yeah. And I said, it's because I don't want to look up at everything I love. I was afraid to love. I was afraid to love as much as I love right now because I've never in my life loved this much. And it's, I'm so aware of how much courage it's taking in me. to look up and to love and to acknowledge how much there is to love. And Meg, my God, I am bombarding her with, I love you.

I love you. I love you. You're a dreamboat. You're a dreamboat. And then also we'll just be going on or doing something normal. And then also we're just gripping each other, like gripping each other and,

But when my grandma died, I asked her if there was anything, and I've talked about this in different ways, saying it was a friend, because I was worried about making my family sad, but it was my grandma. And I asked her if there was anything that hurt about being dead. And she said, only that the people who are living

don't know that we're not only still with them, but we're more with them than we were before. And Meg's a worldly person. You know, all this stuff that I'm into is kind of woo-woo for her. And I just get in her face like at least every three days. And I say, you better know I'm more here. You better know I'm more here if I die.

Oh, yeah, she is. Definitely she is.

I think when stuff like the eyebrow happens and also when she's forced into it, when the doctors are like, there's no hope. Meg's like, well, I'm going to go woo-woo now because the woo-woo people say there's hope.

Yeah.

Yes. You know, we have talked about it. We have talked about it a lot. And one of the interesting things is we talk about it in regards to writing because she is a writer and she has always had this fear of not writing everything that she wants to write or creating all the art that she wants to create before she dies. And I don't have that fear at all. And the reason is, um,

And I guess I didn't know this until my diagnosis, but as soon as I was diagnosed, I felt like I could see and feel how energy worked. I felt certain that there was nothing this world needs that I could take with me. I full-heartedly believed that everything in me, the energy of any poem, would just scatter like a seed and bloom in somebody else's pen.

And I feel that anything I have to say, anything I have to give, I have full faith that's how energy works. Like, my death would not deprive this world of anything. People wouldn't be... wouldn't know it was coming from me. Like I think I'm sitting here with this, I'm sitting here with this thing of thimbles, which is my grandma Faye's thimble collection that I inherited when she died.

And when she died, I would put these thimbles, like 10 of them on my fingers and type poems. And we were making art together. And I think almost all art is made by the dead and we don't know it.

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