Live from the Maven Space in downtown Indianapolis, Aimee Kandrac reunites with Rachel Macy Stafford, best-selling author of Hands Free Mama, Only Love Today, Soul Shift, and more. Aimee and Rachel discuss the challenge of letting go of routine, especially during times of crisis. They also share touching words of encouragement from friends and neighbors, emphasize the importance of looking after yourself, and destigmatize asking for help. Episode Abridged Transcript Aimee: Welcome to Kitchen Chats. Today we are coming to you live from Maven Space in downtown Indianapolis. I am so honored to have my new friend and guest, Rachel Macy Stafford, here with me today. Rachel: Thank you. So glad to be here. Aimee: I love to start my Kitchen Chat conversation with the same question. Do you have a moment in your life when you found yourself in the kitchen with someone where there's this major life event, and it's time to talk to a friend about what's going on? Rachel: I definitely do. After my father-in-law died in 2017, I was just on the tail end of launching my third book Only Love Today. I was coming back from a trip to Canada and grieving, and I just had a really, really dark night where I didn't know if I wanted to stay. I wrote about it because that's the best therapy for me, and I also want people to know that you might see me having this life that seems put together but that I struggle, too. So I put it out there and got a knock on the door within 15 minutes. I do not answer my door, but they were really persistent. And it was my next door neighbor. We're not super close, but apparently she reads everything that I post because she came right over. She is the kind of person that will go there with you. She said, ‘Rachel, I just read your post about your dark night and about the questions that you were having. I want you to know that you don't have to be strong with me. I know you're strong for a lot of people. You can cry with me and tell me how it is.’ I carry that with me. ‘You don't have to be strong with me.’ I use that with people. Because how often are we told that we don't have to be strong, especially as women who are holding up so much for our families? Aimee: Thanks for sharing that with all of us. That's not something that many of us are able to admit often. And that is pretty relevant to your book and why you wrote it. It's all about: How are we showing up for our families? How are we showing up for ourselves? You wrote this book during lockdown and COVID. So how was writing this book that is so emotionally touching while you're caring a lot for your family in the world that had to be isolated? Rachel: I definitely had a different approach to Soul Shift than I did to all my other books. In my house, the pandemic deeply affected my youngest daughter. It was one of those things where when you wake up in the morning and you're not really sure what's going to come at you because things are so unstable. I had to decide I'm not going to have a writing schedule. There was no nice, neat little calendar with chapter one this week. I could not plan a thing. And I know a lot of people during the pandemic, they couldn't plan anything. Aimee: Even after the pandemic, as we're moving into ‘normal,’ when you've got a kiddo who's going through something, you can't keep that schedule. Releasing the requirement on ourselves to have a schedule is not something that I can do very well. But when you're going through a crisis, you just can't have that the same way. Rachel: One of the things that helped me the most when I was writing a book was self compassion. I talked to myself like I would talk to a friend who was trying to do something really hard at a really hard time. There would be mornings when I would know I'm supposed to be working on this part of the book, and I just couldn't do it. So I would find myself saying, ‘Wait a minute. What can I do today?’ I took over the ping pong table in our basement with construction paper, Sharpies, sticky notes. Even though I couldn't put sentences together, I had ideas and had things I wanted people to feel when they went through the book. So I laid out this kind of map on the ping pong table. What transpired is a book that has all this space in it. It has places to doodle, draw, and journal. It just feels like a place you can breathe because that is how I created it. Aimee: We talked on our last podcast about other ways that we can take care of ourselves, and you love to swing. What are some of your other self care tips? Rachel: I don't like to use the term self care because it's really been commercialized, and we tend to think of things to pamper ourselves. But realistically, we don't want to put off our self care for once every six months, right? In the book, I called it the practice of looking after yourself. Because we know how to look after other people. We're really good at it. We’re not so good at looking after ...
