I still can’t believe Sophie Strand saw—and responded to!—my DM. Me! With my 150 subscribers. Her! With her 37 thousand. I’m humbled. Thanks for reading, listening, being here with me. Let’s co-imagine, co-enact, a more animate, entangled world together. Out of well-founded humility/fear—“Who am I to request an interview from her? Why on earth would she bother responding, let alone honoring, that request?”—I waited until the day before leaving for the conference/retreat where she was scheduled to speak. And she got back to me! Quickly! We sat beside each other at the welcome dinner; she recognized my name when we were introduced. And to be honest, after she was put in the uncomfortable position of interviewing a couple business bros the next morning, I think she was relieved to have a reason to leave. “Are you finding this interesting?” I leaned over and asked. We were listening to a panel discussion about how to improve the world by (checks notes) being a good boss. “No,” she said, sounding impossibly bored. “Do you want to go talk about animism now?” “Yes.” For those who don’t know: read Sophie Strand! She will cut you open. She will myceliate your wounds. She will weave your tattered edges back into the exuberant earth. Read her! My massive delay in publishing had a few causes. A baby born in June, a move across town in July. But also, if I’m being honest: I’ve been scared! This format—interview—is brand new for me. There’s the technical ignorance—how to transcribe? Manually, all myself? With an AI-assist? Hire someone? (that one, in the end)—but also: listening to it made me want to hide. I didn’t prepare or speak as well as I’d like; I thought maybe the whole thing needed to be chopped into bits, the just-Sophie bits, and reconstituted. Thanks to the friend who listened and assured me that it works. That it is good, and worth sharing, as-is (though I did edit some). I’m sorry I kept Sophie’s wisdom from you for so long. Here it is, in all it’s recorded-on-a-phone-in-a-dining-hall glory. (Another attendee stopped, listened, then, at Sophie’s invitation, sat at our table. You’ll hear her introduce herself.) I highly encourage listening to this one! Though I did clean the transcript and add thematic headings for easy reference/quoting, and for those who prefer to read. And an update on her health! She mentions in this interview that she got a terminal diagnosis just weeks before. She got a second opinion, and that diagnosis evaporated. (Though she’s still not better.) btw, do you want more interviews? did I do an ok job? reply to the email, or comment on the post, and let me know! Without further ado, the (transcript of) the interview: On a scale of 1-10, how much joy do you feel in your body right now? Chad: Let’s start, Sophie. I’ve got interview questions for you. On a scale of one to ten, how much joy do you feel in your body right now? Sophie: Pass. Chad: Fair. So, you wrote a book about bodies and health, and I also get the sense that you would rather not talk about bodies and health! Sophie: Yeah, it’s interesting. You write a book about illness, and then you’re asked to talk about illness. Our culture wants us to cannibalize our worst experiences and make them our identity. Simone Weil says that what we pay attention to we pray towards. And I worry that if all I do is talk about illness, I’m praying towards illness. I’m a little superstitious about that at this point. Chad: And not just superstitious! That question, “on a scale of one to 10, how much joy do you feel in your body?” — that was the title of one of your posts. And you talked powerfully about the nocebo effect. When you’re told that this sugar pill will benefit you: placebo effect. It benefits a bunch of people, even though it’s a sugar pill! Same thing, if you’re told that it has all these side effects, then you end up getting those side effects, even though it’s a sugar pill. And our entire medical system— Sophie: It’s bad theater. Chad: It’s bad theater, exactly. Sophie: It reinforces our mistrust in experiences that could be amelioratory. Chad: Yeah, but yeah, I also understand. I listened to another interview you did about this book, The Body is the Doorway, and you talked about sort of not wanting to become your illness. I’ve heard this from other people too. Like you’re supposed to become whatever that thing is, but you are like that thing personified. For some people, it’s like, “I’m a canceled person on the internet,” right? “Now all I get invited to talk about is being a canceled person on the internet,” where you’re, you’re whatever condition personified or reified and you’re supposed to monetize it. Sophie: Yeah, we live in a very, very scared culture. In a traumatized nervous system, you need to make sense of your environment so you can find safety. So you wanna be able to label people and things. I think that our over-identification with certain identity markers and our ways of simplifying other people into how they classify themselves is… I think it’s almost symptomatic of how traumatized our culture is. We wanna be able to simplify our environment so we understand who’s safe and who’s not safe, but that’s not how anyone works. Chad: A traumatized environment, but also the like the simplifying feels like part of the sort of reductionist, scientific, … Sophie: Yeah, absolutely. And also, we’re evolving all the time. We should have different identities every day. To only have one identity is to have only one way of traveling and that doesn’t feel very evolutionarily viable. We should have different identities every day Chad: I like that. So my first questions here were about body stuff. We can skip right past them. Sophie: We can totally talk about them. How has your (individual or extended) body been delighting you lately? Chad: Yeah, sure. How has your body been delighting you lately? Your individual body, but also as you talk about beautifully in the book, your extended body. Like the ecosystem of which you are a part. I’ll let you answer for both or either. Sophie: Yeah, it’s hard. I received almost like a very serious, perhaps terminal diagnosis in the past two weeks. So, it’s a very difficult… Like, that’s like a fun question. And I think there are ways in which this book represents a fossil of who I was. I think I’m in a place in my life where… How does my body delight me? * I’m glad I’ve been here for as long as I’ve been here. * I’m glad that I have so many connections. * That I’m able to drink coffee. * That I can go on a run still. I also know that could be obsolete really soon. I don’t know. I mean, I’m happy to be materially present. Today. Chad: I’m glad you’re materially present. Sophie: Yeah, but longer than that, I have no idea. Chad: Like you don’t know how long you will continue to be materially present. Sophie: Yeah, or like, or what will continue to be possible. I’m super, super glad that I’ve been able to live independently and live on my own for a while and to really be self-sufficient. I don’t know how much longer that will last, either. Sophie: I’d ask that you not put the diagnostic information in, maybe edit that out, just because I’m not sharing that super widely until I have more information. Chad: That’s fine. Sophie: Thank you. Chad: Yeah, totally. No normative bodies (Chad’s weird body shit) Chad: I don’t know if there’s space for this, but I also think it’s, I don’t know. You’re always supposed to talk about what’s going on with you. But the able-bodied interviewer… There’s a way that I tell myself the story, or I am told the story, of being able-bodied. And that we sort of downplay the way that everyone’s body has glitches. The frontlines of evolution Sophie: Yeah, there’s no such thing as a normative body. We’re all different. And in fact, that’s how evolution works. Every hand began as a glitch that was perfectly adapted to a shifting ecosystem. There’s no such thing as a normative body I always say that people who are really sick are on the bleeding edge, the front line of evolution. Like, something’s gonna work at some point! You’re an experiment. But everyone’s body is, you know—there’s no climactic organism. If evolution is working, it means that each person is a little bit different. And that can be a match or a mismatch with the environment. Chad: Yeah. The biggest weird body shit for me over the past two years has been: I tore my cornea like two years ago. I woke up in incredible pain. And then it just… Never. Heals? My eyelid fuses to my cornea while I sleep. And then when I open my eyes in the morning, it re-tears. Sophie: That’s really intense. Chad: I mean, it’s nowhere near as intense as what you’re going through. Sophie: There’s no trauma Olympics. Everyone is dealing with lots of stuff. Spiralic time Chad: It’s certainly not as all-consuming. But there are weeks of time where I can’t see clearly out of one eye. Sophie: It sounds like it’s also a spiral. It’s not linear, “sick—fix—better.” Chad: For sure. Sophie: It’s more like: “sometimes okay—maybe not,” you know? And it’s that spiralic time that I think is really important to remember with illness. Like, it’s not a straight trajectory up. Chad: Yeah. I went to a doctor about it initially, and it was like, “try these eye drops.” And I tried the eye drop for like, a year. Thinking “maybe I’ll make it long enough that the cornea will heal enough that my eyelid stops fusing to it. And then I won’t have to think about this anymore.” But after a year of that, and it just kept happening every few weeks, I was like—Okay. We’ll go back and see more doctors. It’s a very small version of what you’ve gone through. Sophie: Yeah, it’s the wound that refu
