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

A few things that I just wanted for myself that I didn't have until these last years. One was a loving relationship with my mortalities. And I think people get a little fearful of that because they think that's what's going to create more suicide. I think it would do the opposite, actually. A loving relationship with mortality, which does not mean a joyful, like you're thrilled to die.

It means a respect for it because I think our mortality is what... makes this life rich. Think about it, whatever your favorite food is. If somebody said, you can eat this every single minute for the rest of your life, like yuck, like you don't want anything forever. I remember being really young in church and hearing that hell was burning for eternity.

And I remember the kids in my Sunday school class, like getting terrified of the burning I remember freaking out about the word eternity. And I knew at a young age that anything happening forever would be hell. But what I didn't know at that time, which I've learned this year, is that applies to living too. That if we were to live forever, that would be hell.

There is something that makes this life beautiful and that is the brevity of it. So that's one thing. Another thing is to look for this because I have spent my entire career encouraging people to have their feelings. Don't push down your feelings. Open up to them all. That is where, in my experience, if I would get depressed, I could...

I could, and I know this, and I don't want to negate the fact of clinical depression and meds, all of that, I'm pro meds, but I would get more depressed if there was something I wasn't allowing myself to feel. And I thought, I am allowing myself to have all my feelings. Why aren't I fucking happy? And I realized that the feeling I was pushing down was joy, that I was afraid of that feeling.

And there were a certain number of things that led to that. And some of it was how I was relating to our culture, how I was relating to activism, growing up in activist communities, and thinking that if you weren't devastated, if you weren't despairing, if you weren't enraged, then there was something about you that was heartless.

And some people respond to the world in really vibrant ways because they're furious or because they're grieving. For me, I am much better and I have far more to offer the world when I am joyful. And so I learned that I was pushing down my joy But I also had to learn how to open that up. And for me, the opening up of that included a few things.

One, I heard this thing that said, and I don't know who said it, life is difficult, but it stops being difficult if you expect it to be difficult. If you expect it to be difficult, it stops being as difficult. As soon as I realized that all these things that were coming my way Were life coming my way? Were God coming my way? Even if I wanted to call it the devil, everything coming my way was God.

And everything was coming to in service of my spirit. As soon as I figured that out, whoa, I had so much more access to joy because I wasn't fighting with my life. The other thing I started doing was I read this book by Michael Singer called The Untethered Soul to actually figure out what had happened to me. And then he sort of had written it all out. And I just relaxed my body.

And when something comes through that's painful, I let it move through because I think that our wounds, our traumas are in the way of our natural energy of life and astonishment and joy and wonder and curiosity. The other thing is the undoing of shame. Something I call double suffering. I realized that my pain about my pain was worse than my pain.

I realized that the stories I would tell about whatever. So say I would feel a physical pain. Or I would be sick at the time. Then I would double on top of this, all these stories about being a burden. How about everybody's life is better than my life. I used to have a lot of shame around Lyme disease. I was closeted about it for a lot of years.

And that part, the hiding of it, it hurt almost as much as what I was going through itself. So anything to give yourself the love to not double suffer, to give Go with it without the stories that hurt. And one of the stories that hurt the most is a story that you're alone in what you're going through. That was the one that always hurt me.

And then finally, something that I heard that helped me so much, and this was years ago, but it didn't resonate until this year. I think I heard Pema Chodron say it. She said, if you want to have an easier time in life, you can cover the whole world in leather so it doesn't hurt when you walk, or you can make leather shoes.

And that's something that I have been learning because I think I had a lot of my focus outwardly for a lot of years of like, okay, I want to make the world safer for my queer community. I want to make the world safer for myself. So I'm going to do all of this stuff on the outside to try to get the world to be a safer place.

At that time, there were ways I was abandoning the building of my own shoes. And so I'm not saying to stop trying to make the world better. I'm saying we have to really understand the importance of doing both of those things at once. Because even right now, I see is what we're doing with trans and non-binary communities of saying, We have to do all this activist work.

We have to do all this stuff to change this legislation. And yes, we do. We do. And also at the same time, are we building communities where we are teaching each other inner resilience so we are not completely undone by the way the world shows up? Both of those things have to be happening at the same time. And people need to know their strength. I didn't know, I'm 47 years old.

I didn't know my strength until I was 45 years old. I wish I had spent my life knowing my strength and to trust, you know, trust your strength. My friend Ethel, she's in her mid seventies and she's one of my just most constant teachers. And she was telling me the story that when a butterfly is trying to make its way out of a cocoon, it is a real struggle. Like I didn't know this.

It's really hard for a butterfly to get out of that cocoon. And it can look really, just really bad. And so humans, when they witness it, they often try to go and peel open the cocoon to help the butterfly out. But if a human does this, the butterfly has far less chance of thriving because the struggle was crucial to its thriving. And so

We have to figure out the balance of when to really show up for each other, communities that show up for each other, and then also communities where we're knowing how to teach each other our strength. We're saying, you can get out of that cocoon. I know you can. And yeah, that's a thin line, a balance to figure out.

So I have all different kinds of friends, like so many different kinds of friends. Some of them are really woo-woo. Some of them are Christians. Some of them are Buddhists. Some of them are atheists. Some of them are straight edge, you know, all of it. I have the whole mix of people and people who are screaming, this fucking sucks. I hate this for you.

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