 Hey guys, welcome to today's show. Today I'm in conversation with a lovely human being called Sarah Wilson. Sarah is Australian, lives in Sydney, and is a New York Times bestselling author. We chatted together about her books, about her take on anxiety. She has huge wisdom and insight about all of that, about how to write books, her process as an author, her creative process. Some of you budding authors will find that really helpful. We talked about relationships. I know that Sarah is a single in her late 40s and so much of my audience are women. And I wanted to ask her about relationships and does she get lonely? And how does she find love and connection if it's not in relationship with another person? And she was really open and vulnerable about that. And I really appreciated that. So you are going to love this chat together. Enjoy. Please don't forget to leave a comment or a review. If you don't subscribe, hit subscribe right now and stick with us. All right, thanks again for being here. Enjoy. Hey, let me start by asking you, Sarah, how has COVID been for you? How have you found COVID and the lockdown, the isolation, and so on? I think people would be interested to know how you handle that. Yeah, it's a really interesting question because there's a bit of a paradox that goes on. As you know, Paul, that's quite intense anxiety. And so, and I live on my own. And we had a very intense lockdown, almost this time last year, which was quite effective in ensuring that today we have very little COVID here in Australia. But I actually found that my anxiety abated in part because I actually feel, and this is what I've found with a lot of anxious people, it was like the circumstances finally matched our sense of intrinsic anxiety and our sense that life is not right and that we're off track and that we probably need to be living life differently. So all of a sudden I felt that, okay, this is my moment. You know, I fit into life. And I've got obsessive compulsive disorder and bipolar. And what that means is I'm highly sensitive and attuned to sounds, danger, a crisis. Fortunately, I was writing my book as well. As you know, it was due at the printer's place before COVID struck. I pulled it back from my publishers and just said, look, I think we need to sit on this and observe what's happening. And I sat on it for six weeks and then a couple of weeks longer, Black Lives Matters happened. And so, so much was happening. And my friends actually said to me, can you get that book to the printers because Martian's land next? Like, you know, so I guess I had a sense of purpose. So I was in lockdown on my own, but I was able to focus on work that I found very important and rewarding and relevant. But the anxiety piece is interesting. I mean, Grena Thunberg, she has said this in relation to her mental disorders or mental health. She was self-harming, unable to speak for a year, et cetera. When she was in her teens before she went and sat outside the Swedish parliament. And a lot of people were like, somebody with, you know, Asperger's, et cetera, you know, self-harming issues, et cetera, shouldn't be out there protesting. And her point was, when I started to take action about what was really making me anxious, then I just started to feel like I was truly living my life. And that's how I felt. I have used this time to motivate myself into even further climate action, racial action, et cetera, et cetera. So do you think there are various kinds of anxiety? You have a particular kind of brand that means that the lockdown had hidden benefits to you, but that is not necessarily true across the board for people that struggle with anxiety. What is it about your type, if I can use that word, that makes the lockdown, the pandemic, have hidden serendipitous gifts, I suppose, to you? Well, I suppose there's this hypervigilance that comes with some of the disorders. So this is getting a little bit granular, but OCD and bipolar existing roughly 1.2 to 1.4% of all populations around the world, and they believe throughout history. So they've traced it back and looked at behaviors of shaman and community leaders, et cetera, during a crisis. And what they've found is they've generally displayed behaviors like OCD or bipolar. And what some evolutionary theorists are saying is that these sort of evolutionary quirks, those of us who fit into that very narrow wither of humanity, we have these quirks because we need 1.2% of the population to have acute sense of danger, alertness, sense of smell. Anyone listening who's got these conditions will know that we can smell everything. We can literally smell danger. We can hear everything. We are thinking about everything. We are five steps ahead in terms of working out an escape route, you know? And Diane Fosey, who was an incredible biologist in the 1960s and 70s, she went and removed a bunch of chimps from a clan who possessed these sort of behavioral, behaviors like OCD type behaviors. And again, it was about 1.2% of the clan. She removed them. The clan died out in less than six months, either being eaten by tigers, not able to determine what food was safe, et cetera. So I think when you've got extreme anxiety, we exist for a purpose. And if you think back to wartime leaders, even in recent history, Winston Churchill was bipolar. They say that 70% of crisis leaders were bipolar. And the same with poets and scientists, they generally have an anxious disorder. So I think the difference is that it's almost like these qualities that in peaceful times, we feel like freaks. And of course, the worst thing about anxiety is you get anxious about being anxious. Then you get anxious about being anxious about being anxious. Now, if you are an everyday person, you can generally function and you're part of the 98.6% of the population, then you come across a crisis and anxiety is a really real response. And so when we, for instance, hungry, we go and seek out food. When we're thirsty, we seek out water. When we're in a crisis, we seek out other humans. We need to congregate. And that's for the bulk of the population. And a lot of us have been denied that, right? So that's a very real biological cause of anxiety. It makes us all wanna go and find more people, but we're prevented from it if we're in a lockdown. So those of us who don't have extreme anxiety, it's new. It's a new situation and you have to be on alert and you're not used to being on alert like, say, I am. And so it's frightening because it does trigger a flight or fight responsiveness. That's what anxiety does. It's there to tell us danger, danger, fight or flee or in some cases freeze. Sometimes that is a mechanism that's required. So that's sort of my assessment of things, but everybody is different. Everybody's going through all different types of anxiety. I think a lot of people are very nervous of going back to normal now. The idea of having to go out and be public again, to dress unlike we're dressing today, Paul, in the casual gear and to front up to meetings and to be accountable. And this is something I write about in my book, is that our culture and it's been accentuated by COVID but our culture has sort of retreated from in real life interactions. We've cocooned ourselves from discomfort to the extent where we've cocooned ourselves from having to interact upfront to confront. And real life and other humans are hard, right? The point though, we rise and we build resilience and strength and we've lost so much of that. So we're very ill-equipped at the moment to be able to deal with the transitions and the changes that are happening. And I think that we all need to understand that that our culture and technology has enabled us to avoid discomfort for, I would say, two to three decades. Particularly in the last 10 years, I think it's something like 90% of technology in the last 30 years has been created to make, to get rid of discomforts, to speed things up, to prevent us from having to wait for anything. You know, we don't have to even wonder where our pizza is, our takeaway pizza is because we're on our app and see exactly how long it's gonna be, right? And we can avoid, for instance, going on a date. All these people during COVID are doing these sort of, you know, virtual dates and flirting and are frankly terrified of actually having to turn up and have a drink with someone sometime soon. So these are all real and we've got to have compassion for ourselves as to why this is happening. But my point is we need to jerk out of that fear and stuckness to be able to move forward because what lies ahead, I hate to say it, is more terrifying. The climate crisis is being, is being dialed up. We are gonna have probably more pandemics. This is not the end of pandemic season. Right. So the sooner we start to build resilience and it's a muscle. As you know, I'm sure you've spoken to many guests who've talked about this. Resilience is a muscle and we used to have traditions, right? We used to have traditions like initiation ceremonies and sending kids out into the desert in our country, the indigenous people did that. So they wanted to face themselves in the desert and come back as men, you know? We have lost that resilience training. In fact, parenting today is all about putting them into a big mushroom-like cloud and protecting them from everything except for real life because real life is hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think what I've noticed in the pandemic with the people I've been speaking to and what I've been speaking and doing coaching and mentoring, a lot of people have moved towards stability, thinking it's resilience. So it's buttoning down the hatches to weather the storm rather than getting better because of the storm, which I think is more resilience. And I think so many individuals and organizations and businesses that thought they could weather the storm by trying to stabilize and button down the hatches have not and have not used it to become resilient in the way you're describing. So I love the way you have framed, I think it's hugely important as you say for what's coming next. Yeah, absolutely. And I think we also talk about the vaccine. Once everyone's being vaccinated, everything's gonna be fine. So everyone's sort of a pause button. If we can just sustain things until I don't know, people talk about October, they're doing that April next year. And as we know already, those timelines are being pushed out further and further as we get new strains, et cetera. So I think, yes, I totally agree with you. We need to be turning our attention to that resilience piece rather than sort of form-fitting into a slightly new shape, you know? And then trying to make that shape as close to what it used to be as possible. I'm personally excited by it. Yeah, me too. I noticed in your book you spoke about, you didn't use the word pandemic or maybe you did of loneliness in the world. Do you think we're gonna come out of this with that exacerbated even more than it's ever been? And what does that, what are the prospects of that in the coming years? This massive increasing suicide rate over isolations done to people and so on and so on. Those that didn't think they had any kind of anxiety, depression, demons have of course bumped into that. Now a lot of house accords have collapsed personally and corporately and so on. What do you think the outcome and that's gonna be with this whole loneliness thing? I loved how you framed that in your new book. Yes, so as you know, I sort of don't refer to loneliness. Well, actually piece of the part, I point out that we're not actually lonely for more social interactions. In fact, that means not by interactions. It's not like we're all sitting around twiddling our thumbs with no phone, no texts, et cetera. It's, I mean, of course some people are and that's a very real issue, but really what it is that we're lonely for is meaningful connection. Now I think COVID is just a big revealer. COVID, the bandaid, the elastic of the wound and we're now being seen what was always there. And I think that's something that we need to realize that what we're actually lonely for is meaningful connection. And so what I mean by that is we're lonely for meaningful connection with others, meaningful connection with ourselves and also meaningful connection with what I call almost the matrix of life, you know, values, nature, our bigger belonging in the world. And we've lost a lot of people on that. And I think that if we can actually steer our attention to addressing that side of things, the meaningful fullness piece, then if you think about it, suicide in America, the life expectancy has dropped three years in a row for the first time in history due to what they're calling diseases of despair, which is opioid use, alcohol and primarily suicide, youth suicide. Now, a lot of it stems from the fact that people are feeling that they don't have, it's not because they're all lonely, primarily, I think it's primarily that there's a sense of meaninglessness. There's, we don't have a discussion around values, around morals, around ethics, around community spirit. We used to. But what I call the moral umpires that were on the football field of life, you know, ensuring that our individualism didn't take over and we just became a whole heap of, you know, Lord of the Flies kind of rampant, egocentric tangles over these moral umpires. And they took the form of maybe a community priest, a spiritual guide, they were perhaps community leaders, they were scout leaders. And even human rights, or sorry, human resources departments that would ensure we didn't work past six o'clock each day, you know, we have all these kind of people that put up moral guard rails for us. They've been obliterated from the field, for the free field of life, right? And apparently by neoliberalism, this idea that we don't want intervention, we could just all be these individual units doing our economic thing and everything they'll take care of ourselves. Well, you know what, pandemic hits and gets what we need, government intervention. And we need moral guards and we need spiritual leaders and we need people to tell us what's going on. So that is what I think we need to focus on. And there's a great quote, very ironically, from Milton Friedman, the founder of neoliberalism and sort of contemporary capitalism. But it's a beautiful quote. And I love it more so for the irony that he said it. He said, a crisis produces real change that will depend on the ideas that are lying around at the time. So I ask everybody, what ideas do you want lying around as we move forward into the future? And that's the opportunity we have right now. A few years ago, our government appointed a minister of suicide. We'd never heard of such a thing in our government as a ministerial office. I think it flagged up for the first time to many people in our country, how about it must be to justify a ministerial position and department in government. And of course, this was only in response to statistics of those that actually succeeded in committing suicide. Of course, there are many more that never show up in an ER department. So you never know how many that is beneath the surface. And I think that it's flagged up for us here in the UK just how drastic it is. This is before COVID now. So God knows what the outcome will be a couple of years on from where we are now. I love the quote by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the early sixties. He just talked about the beginnings of apartheid and he said, you can only rescue so many drowning people from the river without going upstream to find out who's pushing them in. IE that the state was complicit in the drowning. You know, the people drowning in poverty and starvation and protests and crime and addictions were pushed into those behaviors by no option the state gave them. And I kind of feel that those tickets are coming home to Roos too in all of our countries that the government has appointed the minister of suicide is clearly also complicit in a lot of things that are causing people's isolation, loneliness, division separation and so on. Don't you think? Oh, absolutely. I think well, and then the government's part of a system and as you know, I identify quite boldly that I think it's capitalism. And capitalism is in a system. It's not like we can get angry at it. It's a system that we bought into. And I actually make the parallel, as you know, between capitalism and the cult. And if you go by the official definition of what a cult is, it ticks off every criteria. I mean, we pay our dues. We go into debt to pay homage to this idea that more and more and more is gonna make us happy. You know, there's a whole range of things we do. We sacrifice. We sacrifice our well-being. We sacrifice love. We sacrifice family and friends to sort of kneel at the altar of earning money for what? You know? And we don't believe that there's any alternative. So once you're in a cult, you can't believe that there's any other alternative. And so look at, when I bring up the idea of capitalism as being a problem, people go, oh, you must be a communist. You know, it's like anything else is gonna be an enemy, which is very cult-like, right? When you just come up and fathom that, hmm, maybe there's something in between, you know? So I feel that that's something that can actually be quite empowering because really there's no capitalist leader out there. There's nobody that's gonna come and shoot us if we stop spending, right? So we actually can take stock of this. And we can start to simply not buy into the message that more and more matters to us. And I think COVID actually, while it's been very difficult for so many people, I also think people are quite relieved to have had a whole heap of redundancies exposed to them. You know, people have got their expensive black SUV parked in their driveway doing nothing. And they suddenly go, what on earth have I got that car for? Or whatever it might be, the expensive handbags, the expensive shoes. And all of a sudden we've got actually quite simple and gentle and we've realized, you know, that what matters to us is actually much closer and accessible than we ever thought. And as you know, my big thing in the book, a very accessible way, a very accessible salve to the big cluster of issues going on. Cause where do you start naming the issue? It's climate crisis, COVID, it's the political fragmentation. It's the us versus them. It's the conspiracy theories. It's the rational inequalities. I mean, it's just everything. And it really is all the same thing. We are disconnected from a meaningful existence. We have been drawn away from a moral, from the moral fabric of humanity. And I argue that going back to nature where we see ourselves reflected back in the patterns, the abilities, the beautiful ebb and flow and sort of safety of nature. You know, if we can go back into nature, we can start to see that it all sort of makes sense. And nature is my greatest teacher, but I also go through a bunch of studies, as you know, that show why nature does this to our brains by just stepping into it. And it can be a park, you know. Yeah, no, I loved even the way that you analyze the nuance of the rhythm of walking to the body. Who are you? I'm like, who the hell knows this stuff? It's so true. Once I had language for it, it made such sense, actually. And I think I was gonna say it to you. I want to ask you about your work a little bit because I'm gonna say to you, of course, I'm a great reader like you are. I don't get through lots of books, but yours was such an easy read because you, I think, make complex things simple, which is itself not easy to do. And I was gonna ask you about how you got into writing. I know you had previous experience and roles in publishing, editing magazines and journalism. Was that the foundation? Because you can't just, or do you just switch one day to become an author? I'm gonna write the book, which we all know is really tough to do for most people. So how did you move into that author on writing these books? Yeah, well, I've always written and I've always had to express myself. And to this day, I comfort myself. It's one of my anxiety techniques is to write to myself and it's unreadable even to me because I write in journalistic shorthand and so on. But I suppose, I don't know, I can't say it was a pretty transition. First, we make the book Beautiful, which is about my anxiety where I reframe anxiety through a philosophical and spiritual lens rather than just slamming it with medical diagnosis. I started that and I got 60,000 words in quite some time ago, it was 10 years ago. And I hated it, didn't gel, I wasn't ready. And I threw the entire lot out, didn't keep even my notes. And I came back to it a number of years later and started writing it. And I suppose I was more ready for it. I felt that I had something I could share. I'd order so rich in a bunch of cookbooks, the I put sugar cookbooks in between. So I understood publishing realm. And also I'd been blogging. This is probably the best advice I can give. I've been blogging about these subjects. And what I do as a writer is I test my audience. I put ideas out there, see what comes out, what the questions are and where the pain point is and then I write a little bit more and I get sort of feedback. And some of that blog content can often feed into my book, you know, copy and paste some of my blogs and rewrite around it and it becomes a bigger topic. But I guess I get my confidence from having tested it with my audience on social media over quite a long period, like a couple of years before I write the book. But it's torturous. I mean, most of you make The Beast Beautiful really took seven years. I mean, I- When you said if you were ready, what do you mean by you didn't feel you were ready? And how did you know when you were ready? What does that mean for you? Well, I wasn't ready because I was still swimming around in all of the ideas, like the rules had landed. I was in a lot of pain when I wrote it. I was very sick. It was in my mid-30s and I came close to heart failure from a very bad autoimmune disease. And I'd left my post as editor of Cosmo and I'd not worked for a year. I could barely walk. So I was in a bad way, you know? And I was forcing myself to have the energy to write it. I also think that it's just, I needed a few more years on the planet. I needed more wisdom. I needed to be able to stay back. And as you know, I don't write in a didactic way. I don't write as somebody on the pulpit speaking down to people, which is how a lot of stuff goes, right? Right, right. I eat the journey. So both books, I go on a journey with the reader. They're with me as I go and interview his holiness, the Dalai Lama. You know, as I go hiking in Jordan with a shepherd, you know, people are with me along the way and I explore it like a conversation. And that voice in itself didn't develop until, probably through writing the cookbooks, the I Quit Sugar movement. Always, that probably really trained my thinking to never tell anyone what to do. It was always I quit sugar, not you must quit sugar. It's like, I quit sugar. I went and read because I've got this, you know, incredibly painful and inconvenient bipolar brain and I can go and absorb vast amounts of science and interview endocrinologists and experts around the world. And then I'm able to condense it just from my years of working as a newspaper journalist and editor of a women's magazine into information that feels accessible. So yeah, I suppose that was it. And then once you've written one, you sort of have a little bit more confidence, but every step of the way, I hate what I'm writing. I doubt myself the whole way and I do that with my life in general. But she, years on the planet has enabled me to go, well, sometimes the more anxious I am, the better the results. There seems to be a connection there. And that's why in my books, I refer to anxiety as my superpower because it's my anxiety that steers me away from a really bad paragraph. You know, I'll wake up in the middle of the night and go, that idea was terrible. Take it out, Sarah, you know? So I do try to use it. One of the most famous authors in England, one of the first of his kind to make a living from writing was a guy called Somerset Maughan and he was asked in an interview with the newspaper once, did he write when inspiration struck him or only to a schedule? And he said, I only write when inspiration strikes me. Fortunately, it strikes me at nine o'clock every morning, meaning he put himself into a space to be inspired. And I wonder what is your creative process for people listening to this that do, and I think what's gonna happen out of COVID, I've picked this quite a bit amongst young people that they've decided to aspire to a different vocation to the one they were on track with before it all got wrecked. I wonder if a lot of these young people are gonna come through to want to have a voice like yours, to want to write, to blog, to post and do it well, but are terrified at the process or that initial attempts have been so terrible, they don't believe yours have or mine have. And so they quit at the beginning. And I think it's good for them to hear what you just said, but it's awful, it's terrible, it's a struggle because he just simply went every day to his little shed like Ralph Dahl and just sat there until something good came. Some days it didn't, some days it did. And I wonder what your process is. Steven Pressfield in his writing about creativity speaks about combat boots versus slippers. That a lot of people's creative process is slippers that wait till the inspiration strikes and rarely produce anything. Others put their boots on every day and go and write whether they're inspired or not. Is that more like what you do? It is. I'm not as disciplined as some of those writers, but I think you'll find that's a really good point Paul. I think that most writers throughout history will say they just sit down and they do the work and sometimes they work as to one sentence. That sentence, right? So I accept it slog. I accept it is like, if you want a cruisy job, don't become a writer. There you go. I find that encouraging and comforting because I say to myself, I can do hard slog, it's only hard work, right? If I know that that's what it's gonna take. So yes, I get up, I need to have to be disciplined. It's non-negotiable. And I have my morning routine, I do all of that, then I sit down and I write. And to be honest, my routine for writing changes all the time. I need to mix it up. I'm somebody who can't even walk to the post office the same way I've got to mix things up. That's just who I am. But part of my thing is to accept the chaos that I tend to work to. I need to shift things all the time. I need to move my computer screen along a foot. Just to see different lights from the window. And I do things like that. Not everyone's like that, but the point is I am there doing the work every day. Equally, I also allow a little bit of chaos. Sorry, that's almost my motorcycle brandy, but I will still do the work. Like if I've done some work and I'm still feeling quite good, I will go to a cafe or there's a little bookshop that serves wine. And I would often go and sit at five o'clock in the evening and have a glass of wine and continue to write. And I write about it actually in this one while of precious life. The discordance of it felt great. Where kids are coming home from school and parents are cooking dinner or they're going out on a date. And I don't have any of those things in my life. I have my writing and my work. And so it felt kind of really, it sort of got me into this sort of broad and expansive mindset by going into a situation where I'm not meant to be. You're not a single woman in her late 40s is not meant to be sitting in a bookshop cafe having a glass of wine, writing about the end of the world in this day and age. So I go and do it. So I do like to throw a little bit of chaos into things and it makes things expansive. So yeah, I do subscribe to that idea. It's hard work. And I think it was Scott Fitzgerald said, anything any good takes a long time. And I remind myself of Leonard Cohen's hallelujah. That's beautiful song that we all think was effortless. That took him seven years to write, I think. The Bible says it took him years. Born to run by Bruce Springsteen took nine months of solid, solid fiddling and writing and all of that kind of thing. So some things take a long time. They just do. But I'll... I've heard some authors say that they write almost assuming no one will read it. It was the variety for themselves. They don't write thinking it's gonna be a bestseller or people are waiting to hear from you with this book. I suppose you get to a point where as an author you have that captive audience like a band do. You're all waiting for Ed Sheeran's next album or Coldplay's that you get to that level of momentum. But do you write, I mean, when you're writing, do you think this is great? This is authentic. This is my essence that I'm putting on this paper. And that's as good as I can do, whether it's popular or people buy it or not. Is that a big motivation or not? Oh, it's all of it. Every single doubt, reassurance, everything once and I oscillate. So I do a lot of self-coaching as I'm writing. At the end of the day, I think I just go, this for some reason, this is what life has found me as a writer. And this is what I do. And if it fails, oh well. I always know that there might be a couple hundred people that read it. And if a couple hundred people get something out of it, like my first book, my first recipe book with the eight week program in it, Mike with sugar. I did it as a, it was very early days. I taught myself how to make it into an e-book. This is before it was a print book. And because everybody was saying, oh, we want all the information one spot. And Twitter had just been invented. This is how long ago it was. And I was reading really bad photos of the meals I was cooking. That was a very early food Instagrammer. And I just put it together in this sort of e-book. And I thought, look, if I can help a hundred people, it'll pay for itself. Interesting experiment. And so it ended up becoming an Amazon best seller in three weeks. And then it got printed as a print book and became a New York Times best seller. And it's now in 54 countries. There you go. But I found that if I, my goals are generally that humble. And they still are to this day. When I say humble, I mean small. I actually want to be able to help a few people. And I let go of success and financial success in particular a long time ago. Yes, right. Yeah. So I gave all my money from my, I put sugar profits to charity and I continue to do so. And that enables me the freedom, funnily enough, to keep creating with no, I mean, people can't, I feel like I can't criticize myself and others can't criticize me because I have that freedom. And I know myself after so many years of this that I will keep layering and layering until it is right. So I write it. And then I do this jigsaw piece, you know? And I've got bits of paper, a handwriting. That's the other thing. And you probably remember walking goes at the same pace as discerning thought, but so does handwriting. It goes at the same pace as our ability to think good, rich thoughts. And so whereas typing is too fast and frenetic. So I hand write and then I have these bits of paper pinned up all over my room. And of course I wrote part of the book living on the road out of a backpack. So I moved to the next place. I pack up all the bits of paper and then unfurl it all on the next Airbnb floor. And I did that for, you know, three years. But yeah, I layer up. So it's a real process. I don't just sit down and have a stream of consciousness. I sort of write for a bit and I have a moment of doubt and then I tweak it. And then, but there is nothing more beautiful, Paul, when you actually look at a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter or an idea and you go, I think I've nailed that. And beautiful emotional thing that happens. It's almost like, you know, on a Mac computer the socket kind of sort of sucks in. There's a magnet to it. Right, right. I feel connected to humanity. And when I've hit that spot, I go, okay, I actually think I can admit I'm happy with that, you know? Yes, yes. And then I go to it. Yeah. And I can't say it's that sitting down and being with it for hours on end and layering it. And then a thought comes in. Can only, sometimes only 5% will tweak and it makes it magic. Makes something really black magic, but you've sat with it. You've sat with the problem. You are single, right? Yes. How do you manage that? I was gonna talk about relationships. And, you know, 67, I think it is 68% of my social media followers are women. And I thought some of these out there, the single women that are at a similar age to you that have a calling on vocation like you share, like you have, do you get lonely? What is your philosophy about relationships and all of that? Yeah, well, there, I mean, gosh, how much time do we have here? I've been single. Sorry to throw that in. That makes me. I'm more than happy to talk about anything I've thought deeply about. There might be an idea in there that resonates for another person. I have been single essentially for 16 years. I'm now 47. I've chosen to try and find love where I can find it, even if it's unconventional. So I've traveled a lot. I meet beautiful humans around the world. I have relationships as I go. One night stands, it turns out to be that. And of course, we don't really talk about those kinds of things, right? I do. And I stay friends with them and they are beautiful people in my life. I have two men at the moment in Africa who are in dangerous jobs who I've never met before. One of them I've been in touch with through a year and a half. We tell each other, we love each other. We speak regularly. When I'm having a bad moment, I call him. As I say, we've never met. I have beautiful humans, men and women around the world. I have children in my life. I foster Aboriginal children. It's very challenging for me, but I seek out intimacy where I can. And that's the life I lead. And you know what I do to cope with it? I have that chapter in my book called Soul Nerding. I go nerd out. That is, I go and read the works of people who are like me. So I can go cool. They had a great life. Unfortunately, a few of them they was about to site didn't have a long life because they killed themselves. Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and so on. But I think it's Martha Galsman who was married to Ernst Anyway, but then have a life, you know, wonderful life. Really, as a single woman for many years as a war correspondent. So there's all life has changed. Life has changed so much. And so we can actually create our own meaning. And then I find inspiration in Jane Fonda and what she's been saying. She's a massive climate activist. And she makes the point that as you start to reach menopause and go through menopause and your hormones drop off. You know, estrogen made us these big sort of bumbling, caring machines, right? Where we put all our energy into caring for other people. That's what we're programmed to do by our hormones. Estrogen starts to drop off and all of a sudden you're like, ah, I've got heaps of space and time. And Jane Fonda makes the point that it's a great opportunity for women who are post menopausal to put that energy because we've also got lots of energy. We're suddenly like, oh, I'm not caring about everything. We've got energy to put it into activism. And so the number of women in their 40s, 50s and 60s we are a crew, a really high caliber crew of women who are sweeps rolled up doing the good fight, you know, in the climate movement. So that's one thing I would say. I mean, I have more nourishment, more love, more care, more intimacy from that crew and that work that I do. And as well as the fostering then I used to have when I was in relationships. Wow. Wow, such a great response, such a great answer. Sarah, thanks for that. I wanted to ask you about faith. Do you believe in God? Yes, my foster kid asked me that last night. Yeah, what does that mean? What does that mean to you? God is nature. God is the inability, the patternings of nature. It's sort of the matrix in which we are in. And I don't know how far it expands. How many universes? I think it's infinity. I love the unknowns of it, but it's the power far greater than me and I pray to it. I pray to it, I trust it, I love it. And I can't, it's, you know, I access it via all in nature and that's why going to nature is to be reminded of there is an intelligence. I suppose I would call it the intelligence of life and nature. And I'm humbled, I bow to it and I love being such a small entity in it. I love that there's a bigness. And so when I contemplate the climate crisis and the fact that things are not looking good for humanity, you know, the planet will be fine. The matrix of life will be fine. It will re-correct. To do that, it might need to kick humans off the planet because we've kind of stuffed things up. And that's just what life does. And I'd be disappointed if we got to live past, if we got a sort of an exception to the rule pass as humans because we think we're that special. I'd be really upset because I'm like, oh my God, life hasn't got the perfect logic, the perfect truth I thought it did. So I have faith in that. I have, you know, but do I think it's part of our nature to fight for what matters? I think that's one of the most beautiful things about humans. Yes, I do. And that's why I write the books I do because I want everybody to have the opportunity to live as fully as they can, i.e. become fully human and fight for what we love. And what we love is life on the planet, not on Mars. So I just, it breaks my heart that people aren't getting that memo yet. Right, right. Do you think about, worry about, are afraid of dying? No. No. I've had a past of, you know, suicide attempts. I've gone there. I've faced it. I've literally, there's a moment in first to make the best beautiful. I write about looking at myself in the mirror and I can't see myself. And it's a big, it was a really big turning point. And yeah, I chose it in that moment. I was 34 and I chose in that moment to, well, I couldn't die. Or given I've got another good 50 years on this planet, why don't I do it how I want to do it? So that's when I decided to give my money away. That's when I decided to let go of all the rules and live in, I use the word kamikaze. I live in a kamikaze way. I live in a free way, as free as I can. I get caught up all the time, but it's a dance, you know? But I'll live like I mean it. So no, I'm not scared of death because I feel I've lived as fully as I can in the years I've had. Interesting. Ageing, you worry about ageing? I don't like it as a woman. Tell me too. Yeah, it's, I don't like it. I find it interesting. I've aged, we just have all spurts, don't we? The last six months I've suddenly, God, I've suddenly aged, you know? But I certainly don't fight it. I will never get Botox or anything like that. It's just not my thing. I prefer to face the truth. Are you up for a few quickfire questions? Yes, I've no idea what you're about to ask me. So we'll see what comes out. It's so unfair. They're pretty, I don't know whether they're simple or not. I was gonna ask you a few quickfire, 10 of them. Pool or ocean? Ocean. Eating or not eating out? Oh, I love eating out. I mean, I love eating full stop, but eating out, I do love. Dancing alone or together? Alone. I'm a really bad dancer. I'd say alone for that reason alone, even though my introversion would rather I dance alone and nobody see it. What books are on your nightstand at the moment? Anything stand out to mention? Yeah, I'm reading, I've got Victor Frankel's Man's Search for Meaning, which I don't do often. And I'm reading a Muriel Sparks book. I can't remember the title of it, but I do like perfletious writing. I like writers from that sort of post-war era. Very cool. Last time you wrote a handwritten card or letter. Oh, it would be last week, actually. I do it quite often. An elderly gentleman in a nursing home wrote to me to say that he'd read my book and he'd handwritten to me, so I hand wrote back to him. Wow, that's phenomenal. That's very recent then. Weirdest, most unusual gift you've ever received. Oh, good Lord. Well, my family don't do this under my very large family and we're anti-serialists, so we don't do gifts. I would say it when we were kids, we used to get a sixth of a present. So I think I own a sixth of a trampoline, a basketball hoop, a boxing bag, and a telescope somewhere in the world. But they're all presents that we all share. My siblings and I. I was interviewing an online entrepreneur in America recently called Gloria Antanamo, and she said when I asked her that question, a wooden penis. Someone gave her a wooden penis key ring and it was some kind of fertility, like she's single and the thought, you know, you should get a move on, you know, freeze your eggs or something. So they gave her this facility, this fertility symbol. So she didn't even hesitate. She just said straight away, wooden penis, I would never have seen that coming in a million years. It was hilarious. Wonderful. You can trade places with anyone for 24 hours, past or present, who would it be? Oh, the first thing that came to my head, I don't know, it's my right answer, is the queen for some reason. I've just been fascinated what the life would be like, you know? Right. Yes, let's say the queen. Yeah, someone said to me, Oprah recently, just to know what it would be like to have that power for a day or two would be fantastic. Somebody said that to me from that point of view. You can be teleported anywhere in the world now. Where are you going? It would be to Africa to visit those two men. Do they live in the same area? And do they know about each other? No. Okay, you've got to plan that trip then. Yeah, yeah. What always makes you laugh? Kids, my niece and nephew. Yeah, yeah, me too. Most grateful for in this past year. Well, COVID. Yeah. There you go. The fact that the exposure, the ripping off of the band aid, because you know what? It's just great for everybody to be seeing the same thing and to be talking about, starting to talk about or at least curious or open to or aware of some of the stuff that I've been banging on for about 30 years, you know? It feels like I feel more seen as a result because people are seeing the same things I'm seeing. And that sounds, I just feel like I belong more. Interesting. Well, listen, I don't want to keep you beyond a time allowed, but I want to say a massive thank you to you seriously for writing books about things that I think not enough is written about this well and easy to understand and feels relatable. Like you said, I feel that you're in the shoes of us all as you write. And I think that's a superpower itself in terms of the style of writing. I love Matt Hig, you know, Matt for the same reason in the country here, just brilliant to articulating what is often very difficult to say. So thank you for that so much. You are a lovely human being. I'm so thrilled to have met you. Hope we can keep in touch, Sarah. Where can people find you that are listeners and viewers especially here across Europe? Oh, by the way, Paul, thank you for those very kind words. You may be tear up a little. It's very kind to reach out like that. You can find me at sarah wilson.com and Instagram underscore sarah wilson underscore. But if you just write sarah wilson, I'll probably pop up, yeah. Love you Instagram and your podcast. I love you in them. Thanks for them too. Oh, my pleasure. Yeah, that's right. Wild with Sarah Wilson is my podcast. Yes, very cool. Well, listen, sending much love to you. Have a great day. Thanks again for your time. I really appreciate it. Hope we'll keep in touch. Thanks, Sarah. Courage to you all. Well, thanks again for listening to today's podcast. I hope you found it beneficial and I know time is precious. Come out and take photos all, but I would love if you would take the time to write a review or comment. And above all, maybe subscribe to my podcast channel. Thank you.