The One About Failure, Part 2

A follow-up to my crash and burn interview experience.

Hey, hi—lots of new subscribers here this week. Welcome, we love you already! Today’s newsletter was going to be about writing about other people (like, for example, your mom) for my BTS of Book Writing series, but I’m switching gears because yesterday, the first of my two-part conversation on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast dropped and I’ve got some things to say. (The second part drops tomorrow.)

The Writing about Other People piece will go up next week for paid subscribers.

Here’s what happened

Back in October, I wrote about how, after recording one of the biggest interviews to date, I spiraled into a neurotic puddle of terror and self-loathing. I didn’t mention which show it was in that piece because I didn’t know if I was allowed/supposed to and also because I know from hosting my own podcasts that sometimes episodes don’t get aired. Typically, this is because the show was bad: the chemistry between the host and guest is off, or the guest went off the rails or otherwise didn’t interview well. Sometimes, it’s a technical thing, like the sound quality is horrendous, but for big shows that have production crews, that rarely happens.

I have been on hundreds of podcasts at this point, some big ones, and on national television, too. I’m seasoned enough, but far from being a media pro. Getting asked to go on WCDHT is kind of like getting asked to come on Oprah in the modern media landscape—at least in the space I write in. The vast majority of women I know listen to it religiously; it’s consistently in the top twenty podcasts overall and clocks in the tens of millions of downloads per month. Regardless of whether one is a fan of the show or a fan of Glennon’s work, there’s no denying it’s a massive platform and a huge opportunity.

Still, I was excited. I felt ready and at the right point to come on. Two days before we were set to record, their producer asked if we could do one hour instead of two, as they were hoping to turn it into two episodes. Uh, sure, yes?!

You can read about it in the other piece, but basically, about an hour after we stopped recording, I fell apart. I was absolutely one hundred percent convinced it was awful. All my deepest insecurities took over my psyche.

A few days later, I was assured by both the producer and Glennon that it was a great conversation, and that tempered my mean brain for a while, but as weeks and months went on, I started to freak out again. They probably listened to it back and realized it WAS awful. They’re taking so long to publish it because they don’t know how to put together one decent episode from the rubble, let alone TWO. Etc, etc, etc.

Or maybe, even if it was crap, I’d be offered a second chance, like Shane Parrish was!

This is pretty boring, navel-gazing, narcissistic stuff, and obviously, obviously, there are more important things to think about. But when something pierces that far into your soft parts, it’s incredibly hard to perspective your way out of it. It’s not that I was obsessing about it daily, but once a week or so, I’d remember that it was hanging out there and wince. I was often able to work myself into a place of really accepting that it wasn’t, in fact, some kind of end-all-be-all situation my career; that even if it did go in the trash or if it aired and was terrible, I would be fine. Even if I was totally humiliated, I would be fine.

Still. One hopes.

Then, we got an air date