Curious Seeds is an interview series with beautiful, fascinating humans and/or creatures. Suggest someone to interview here.
Julia Bainbridge is a writer and thinker on topics such as sobriety, loneliness, and delicious food, among many other things. She’s the author of Good Drinks, an alcohol-free cocktail cookbook and creator of “The Lonely Hour,” a podcast on loneliness. She’s just begun to shutter her previously quite public and prolific life as she starts work as a therapist. She’s also a very old friend of mine alongside whom I’ve lived lifetimes.
Julia, it’s so good to be with you!
We're going to play a short game I made up called, "this or that, without context" in which I give you two concepts and you choose one - for whatever reason you want - and you can share why, or not.
Shag carpet or fresh mint? Fresh mint. (Scent will win with me almost every time.)
Typo or spinach in your teeth during a series conversation? Did you purposely misspell "serious"?! Is this all a ruse?! (reader, LOL, I must be honest I did not!)
Well, despite my disdain for typos, I would hate to be consoling a friend about something or pouring my heart out to my husband with a big patch of green blocking a tooth. Somehow takes the earnestness right out of the picture. (Although, it could also lead to laughter, which, depending on the scenario, might be welcome!)
Wizard or witch hazel? This is the most "Jess Mack" ultimatum on the list. Wizard! (I feel like you might want me to choose that one—and it is also my choice!)
Crab claw or yolky egg? Eggs boiled for six and a half minutes, so that the yolks stay jammy while the whites are cooked solid make up much of my diet, so despite being from Maryland, where we take pride in our crabs, I will go with the egg.
Turmeric or spring? Spring.
Solitude or a new bud about to burst open? A literal new bud, or could this be a metaphor for some part of myself I sense might be readying itself to bloom?
If I entertain the latter idea, we'll be here all day, so I'll go with solitude (which I love).
You are wrapping up several decades as a writer, moving into a career as a therapist. What stays and what goes as you make this shift, both practically and non-practically speaking?
Being empathetic, interested in people, and good at listening and interpreting stays. Being such a public person goes: I will do interviews rarely if ever, I will seldom appear on panels if ever, my Instagram will stay mostly private, et cetera. In order for the way I intend to practice to work, my patients or clients cannot think of me as a whole person with a rich life outside of the room we share together, so I need to do what I can to prevent that from happening. (Don't tell me you haven't Googled your therapist.)
It seems like truth is a foundational throughline for you. (Maybe it is for us all?) What do you love about truth?
Wellllll we could go down the debate route regarding whether or not there is an objective truth, but...
For context, for your readers: Jess and I spoke for a while about my interest in working in the fields of media and then psychotherapy, and she pointed out that "there's a throughline of truth-seeking in there." I would not have the audacity to say "I am a truth-seeker" out loud! (I have to explain that! Yes, my superego is harsh!)
First, for serious reporters dedicated to keeping our world honest, I have immense respect and admiration. (Sometimes I feel like I might have missed my calling as an investigative journalist, to be honest.) That we have people devoted to gathering all of the information they can in order to keep powerful people, regular people, corporations, and the government accountable—essentially, so that society can function in a just manner—is awesome, and something to really value. (Buy subscriptions for your local papers! Support journalism and democracy!)
That's not the kind of journalism I can claim to have done, but I think it's fair to say that working with integrity and getting the facts straight were important to me as a member of the media.
In my new field, I see the way I practice being in some senses about helping the patient get to the truth of themselves. The therapeutic process can help move you through unprocessed, unintegrated, unfelt bits of life by giving you a place to feel them. Then, you can also move through any related repetitions or rigidities that had been negatively impacting your life. In a way, the point of this kind of therapy is to experience more of yourself.
Tell me a little bit about your process as a writer interviewing someone.
* Make contact, explain yourself and your purpose, schedule the interview.
* Do your research. This means, depending on what kind of piece you're writing, speaking to people in the subject's life in addition to reading what's been written about them, if anything.
* Create rapport, but keep in mind that you are not friends. This is your interview subject and you are working together to serve your readership (or listenership or whatever).
* Keep questions succinct, then stay quiet. Wait. Do not scramble to fill the space. Tolerate the discomfort of silence until your interviewee is ready to speak.
* Check the facts with your interview subject(s) and other resources once the piece is finished, but do not share any final copy with anyone until the piece is published. You and your editor should be the only ones with a say as to how it reads.
This reads as instructions, and that's because I wrote out the rules that I sort of remind myself of at the start of every writing project.
What does a flow state for you feel like? Give us just a few words.
Totally clicked in.
What have you noticed about how you accompany yourself through changes or uncertainties in life?
I'm so mean to myself.
Talk to me about your relationship with perfection and how it has changed over time. What would it take for you to notice and accept an error of yours, even if you could go back and fix it?
Neither noticing nor digesting my errors is something that's difficult for me! I often see errors when they're not actually there, or I take them to be catastrophic when they are in fact slight. Acceptance is harder, and I'd do well to try to get there more often (especially because perfection is a myth).
How often does the concept of lineage or ancestry enter into your experience of your present?
This is a complicated one. I haven't worked through my feelings about my lineage or ancestry well enough yet to feel comfortable giving an answer here.
What is the power of loneliness?
This is one of the most profound ways in which my guests on The Lonely Hour influenced my understanding of loneliness: through their underscoring of its merits. And I do mean the merits of loneliness, which is an inherently sad feeling. I'm not talking about solitude, which is desirable. Isolation, I would say, is an objective measure of how many people we have around us. Loneliness, on the other hand, is a sense of being unmoored, unanchored, not belonging—and it can be important.
The poet and philosopher David Whyte, who was a guest on the show, talks about loneliness as "a doorway to becoming. Quite often, a difficult and vulnerable doorway, and one you don't want to go through, but one that's simplifying our life and bringing us down to a foundational understanding of [what] we want and need." So, he would say, try and see it as a place for understanding yourself, and then step off from it.
"Aloneness is a lovely, necessary clearing of the space in order to re-people it again. [W]e shouldn't be in this binary mode of trying to cure loneliness in order to be socially cemented to others. [We could instead] see it in the kind of seasonal way, that it's necessary for every human being to go through thresholds of deep loneliness at crucial stages in their life—and if they didn't, they wouldn't change.” I would say that's true, when I think of my guests' stories: Loneliness told people where they needed to go. It can be oddly nourishing, if you can make your way through it.
Something that you can’t live without today that you could a year or so ago.
Nothing comes to mind.
Something that’s not a part of your life right now that was a year or so ago.
A friendship that either ran its course or that I finally saw clearly enough to identify the imbalance that had always been there. I'm not sure which assessment is correct, but I've let go—or I'm working on it.
What have you been pecking at lately?
Trying to get a regular rhythm going with my husband (a term still new for me to type out), who lives upstate. We've both just come out of periods where our heads had to be completely down, so we have some more room and energy to devote to figuring that out.
What have you squirreled away for later?
Working on my writing. I took a profile writing class from Taffy Brodesser-Akner some years ago, and it was riveting. (Unfortunately, she no longer teaches.) All of her students emerged from that seminar feeling more alive and more willing to be free and loose on the page. I can report when I need to and I'm a decent writer sometimes, but I'm far from being good and I'd like to feel inspired to be creative with this work again, too. But that will have to wait until I've been practicing in the field for some time, maybe a decade or so, and I feel I have something to say.
Anything else to leave us with?
I often wonder what our world would look like if mediocrity weren't such a dirty word, and if we valued the simple, quiet life more highly. Maybe you can wonder along with me.
Jess, I always enjoy your game, "this or that". Do you create the choices based on what you know about the interviewee? I notice they're different with each interview. It's so fun and revealing! Such a great way to begin an interview.