Erica Bailey
speaker
177 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Erica Bailey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
you know, in the 1960s in Poland and you're experiencing the world through another person's lens. And I've really found that books help you kind of pick up who you are and look at it from different angles and think, oh, I would have never realized that that's how someone else experiences the world.
So some books that I jotted down that are about this self-exploration and communicating yourself with others is All the Light We Cannot See, which is incredible, very timely. The other two books I really like are The Safe Keep.
which is about sort of someone who grew up in a very particular type of household who finds it really difficult to connect with other people until like sort of a rambunctious woman comes into her life and destroys all these nice boundaries that she set up for herself. And through the process, she learns a lot more about who she is, both literally her history, but also who she could be.
And then the last book is called The Power. The Power is about what would happen if gender roles were sort of flipped And what parts of our gender are sort of core to who we are and really important and predictive and what parts are just sort of society's story that it's told about who you are in your place and how you view other people.
And I think all three of those books helped me look at aspects of my own identity in a new way and think about Who really am I? And sort of how do I relate to these different aspects of the self? So that's part of why I love fiction books. And I'll come back with some good academic e-books for you next time.
Absolutely. It's a dizzying feeling to kind of come out of that world that has a very strong narrative about who you are and where you're going. And, you know, it's like to this day, the idea, oh, I could just go to France tomorrow. Like there's no one to ask, right? You could just do it. There's no sort of set plan for my life. I make that plan. And that's empowering and also scary.
Like, I hope I figure it out. I hope I make the right choices. What I found is you figure it out by doing, not as much by thinking. It's really hard to know what's going to give you purpose and meaning or what you're going to find fulfilling before you actually do it. So there's some experimentation that you can do to learn more.
what gives you meaning, what matters, what helps you find a sense of authenticity in your daily life. And then I also try and be realistic that almost anything I do, I'm going to get annoyed with it. There's going to be a day where I'm like, I do not want to do this dream job that I worked so hard for. I think that's common. People adapt really quickly to their environments, both good and bad.
And so there's not a day where you reach the pinnacle of who you are and you're happy forever. And that kind of can help take the edge off these difficult days where you think, I should feel happier, right? Or I just got tenure. I just got to this point in my career. I should kind of finally feel something that I thought was there. And It's just still you.
It's still that sense of who you've been all along that's kind of still with you and you have to make peace with that. The other piece of advice that I love is from Tig Notaro, and she talks about the joy of the phrase, nothing matters, and how it can be really sad to be like, oh, nothing matters.
You know, at the end of the day, maybe my job is super fulfilling, but what's going to be left of it in 100 years? But there's also something so freeing about that, that, you know what? Nothing matters. I made a mistake at work. My life will go on. You know, I write expensive PDFs for a living. And that's funny. Like, that's...
It is very rewarding for me, but at the end of the day, you know, it is silly. In hindsight, my great grandparents who were farmers would look at what I'm doing and say, what is this bright screen you're tapping into all day long?
So I think it's healthy to have some sense of like life is partially meaningless and partially deeply infused with meaning that we bring it and that we give to it and that we give to our relationships along the way.
Great talking to you.
Thank you so much for having me.
So this was a small religious group in central Ohio. It was related through my parents and people that they knew. It had all of the earmarks, I would say, of what you would consider a cult in terms of being a very high control group, having really strict ideologies, and a lot of isolation from people who are not part of the group.
It started off sort of smaller or a little bit distanced from us. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so a couple hours away. It gradually increased to become an incredibly central part of my life. It was a place we would spend hours and hours every week. with people from the community in the church itself. And by the time I was 19, 20, I was kind of all in.
I was living full time with people from the group. I was evangelizing on behalf of the group. And it really kind of took up my whole identity.
Almost entirely, my social community was this group itself. They really discouraged having outside relationships and really told you or taught you both implicitly and explicitly that this should be your whole life, that this message that they had was so important, it was worth sort of forsaking any outside connections that might distract you from what the group was really about.
Most people are drawn to a group like this, I think, because we are incredibly curious and maybe a little insecure about what is this life all about? What am I all about? What's my purpose? What's my meaning in life? And we're looking for someone who could help provide those answers for us. And the group provided a really appealing idea that we have all of the answers.
Showing 61–80 of 177 · page 4 of 9
← Previous
Next →