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In this episode, Dani tells you about her struggle with the GRE and how The Story of Stuff changed her life.
For links & recommendations, see full episode notes.
Dani is honest and refreshing in her takes on the world and society. Listen as she explains how she’s come to understand the world through kindness, both towards ourselves and everything else.
[0:00] Hey everyone! Welcome to Understanding Kindness. I’m Dani, and today we’re continuing with a story that I’ve been telling so, if this is your first episode, you might want to go back to episode 13, where this journey started. Today we’ll be talking about my struggle with the GRE and how The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard impacted my life.
[0:24] But before we get too far into the episode I want to do a land acknowledgment. From where I record these episodes, I acknowledge that I am on the traditional land of the Kiikaapoi People, traditional land of the Peoria People, traditional land of the Bode’wadmi People, traditional land of the Myaamia People, and traditional land of the Ochethi Sakowin People. Land acknowledgments show respect towards these Indigenous Peoples and their sacred land that, in many ways, was forcibly taken from them. Acknowledging these ancestral lands helps towards correcting the erasure of Indigenous People’s history and culture. By acknowledging the land I’m hoping to inspire others to do the same and invite them to also honor the truth. I’ll continue to learn more about the Peoples whose land I inhabit so this will be different each episode. I’m gonna continue to learn and I want to allow you do to the same. I’ll discuss how you can begin to look into the traditional lands that you’re on in the recommendations at the end.
[1:28] This addition, I just wanna add, is an example of me acknowledging the ignorance I had about this topic and learning from those that I was ignorant about. This is not the first time, nor will it be the last that I acknowledge and learn from my mistakes, or my ignorances. I want to remind everyone that this is an ongoing learning experience for me, and as much as I try to make it seem like I know what I’m doing, I almost never do, but I do want to know better and do better. So, I try to ask lots of questions and actually listen to the answers, then (and this is the most important part) I try to do better. And guess what, it feels really good. We should all try it sometime.
Anyway, I could go on a tangent, but let’s try to stick to the episode. Here we go, welcome to this episode of Understanding Kindness.
[2:20] (Theme).
[2:27] Before I really get into it, I want to tell you that I’m inspired today, as I’m writing this episode. While looking through some papers trying to find my birth certificate, I came across old stories I had written when I was younger. I read a few of them and became enthralled with the stories I created in my mind in the past. I used to write all the time. I was always looking for something to write about, a new story to tell. I wrote all the time and I loved it. Somewhere along the way though, I forgot how much I loved it. I remember that when I used to think about what I wanted to do with my life, I wanted to be an author. But over time, and through school, I learned that if you wanted to do anything involving writing, you’d need to go to college for English. With my knowledge of the English subject up to that point, going to school specifically for that sounded like a nightmare. I didn’t want to have to write papers about a topic someone else wanted me to write about for a grade. I wanted to write my own stories, yeah get feedback from them of course, but I wanted to write about what I wanted to write about.
[3:32] So, in my understanding of the world, I couldn’t be an author because I couldn’t see myself going to school for it. Once I saw things that way, my drive to write for myself diminished. I can’t remember now if it was a slow burn or an abrupt end, but either way it was snuffed out. I can see now how my imagination began to dwindle from there. I began thinking about careers that I could have that would make me a lot of money. I began looking for ways to fill my wallet, not my soul. All this to say, I stopped writing and upon finding my old stories over a decade after I’d written them, I became inspired again. So, I want to announce that I am in the process of creating a website where you’ll be able to find episodes of this podcast, as well as blog posts that may or may not pertain to the episodes. I also want to strive to put transcripts of episodes on there as well for the deaf and hard-of-hearing since this podcast inherently excludes them. I’m thinking that’s probably a good idea since I’m trying to get this message to as many people as possible, eh?
Anyway, hopefully this inspiration will allow this next part of my story to flow freely from my fingertips. Let’s get into it.
[4:48] The last place I left off was me scheduling my appointment to start taking the meds. My psychiatrist prescribed me the lowest dosage, which was 25mg, to start. For the first week or so I wasn’t feeling any difference in my mood, but it usually takes about two weeks for you to start noticing effects. I remember that after a month-ish I hadn’t noticed any difference, so my psychiatrist and I decided to up the dosage to 50mg, which was the next step up. A few weeks later I hadn’t noticed any amazing change in my mood, but once I looked back on the past couple weeks I noticed that I did feel that “waking-up-out-of-the-fog” feeling that my friend had mentioned. It was incredibly subtle, and I only noticed it happening once I realized I wasn’t having those hopeless thoughts and things like that as much. They gently just became less and less frequent until I realized that the combination of my doing the healthy actions & habits, with the support of my mom, Jorge, and Dr. Aimee, & the support of the meds was improving my mood slowly but surely! In turn, I began going out more, hanging out more with Jorge. I also started to become more serious about going to grad school to get my doctorate in clinical psychology. So I began studying for the graduate school entry exam (or the GRE).
[6:16] The GRE is the standardized test that supposedly measures how well you’ll do in grad school. It’s full of vocab and there’s no real way to study for it aside from just learning strategy. In the past, I had considered myself a good standardized test-taker. I did pretty well on these tests throughout school with little to no studying. So I thought that meant that I was good at them. I soon came to realize that there was no real reason for me to be good at them, aside from me actually knowing some of the answers. I never took an ACT prep course or anything like that, ever. Beginning my studying for the GRE was really frustrating. I didn’t understand how I was supposed to study for this. The test deliberately tries to trick you so you have to read very closely and basically just use process of elimination. But that seems easy enough, right? Except until you realize that this is still a graduate level exam and unless you’re very good at strategizing, instead of finding the right answer, you’re going to need to study A LOT to finish in the allotted time. And I-I hate studying, unless it’s something I’m genuinely passionate about or interested in, but I’m sure that’s most people so… Now just imagine studying [not] how you’ve been taught to study your whole school career, which is memorization and learning formulas, but now you’ve got to learn strategies so that the test makers don’t succeed in tricking you. Now I’m not saying that memorization is learning because it’s not; I’m just saying that that was all I knew how to do based on my schooling.
[7:55] What made me even more angry about studying for this exam was that it wasn’t even studying to learn and understand. It was just learning about the tricks the test makers use to get me to fail. This was far from what I wanted to be doing, but I knew this was the only way I’d be able to get into a doctoral program that I wanted to be in. So, I studied as best I could. I made 400+ vocabulary cards, and spent a few hours every day going over practice exams again and again to try to learn how to not get caught up in the tricks.
[8:26] Side note by the way: just thinking and writing about school wanting me to take a test to see if I get tricked and that be the deciding factor in if I got accepted makes me upset. School is supposed to be a place where you’re taught how to think critically and ask questions and learn; not how well you’re able to navigate this unnecessary exam trap. I’m not saying I learned any of these things from my schooling, but asking questions and critical thinking is what school should be teaching us, right?
[9:00] Anyway, so I’m studying almost daily and trying to stay sane while noticing very little improvement for quite a few months. On top of all the studying I’m also looking at potential schools, having calls with admissions counselors, making lists of all the things each school needs for the admission, and trying to learn about the faculty and programs of each school. This is all very daunting, and frankly I don’t know how people do it. I barely got past the making lists and first calls with admissions from multiple schools. That on top of the studying for this trickery of an exam, it was- it was exhausting. Keep in mind too, that I was still working 2 jobs, not even full time, but still.
[9:47] So, I’m doing that for a while when I get called off work at one of my jobs in March. I attended a meeting where we’re told that they’re closing for the unforeseeable future due to this little global pandemic that we’re all going through. Back then this was weird. No one knew what was going on, everyone had questions, and no one really had any answers. So I went home and went about my business for a few more days. I was still going to my other job, which requires me to go into clients’ homes. This didn’t last long though. Soon after that meeting with my first job, I took a voluntary leave of absence from my second. So now everyone’s quarantining, including my mom.
[10:29] Her and I were quarantined together and we tried to make things as ordinary as possible considering we couldn’t leave the house. She began working from home, and her job was practically uninterrupted. I was out of work and only being paid a bit by my first job since my not working there wasn’t voluntary. By this time, I wasn’t freaking out too much. In fact, I kept up with my studying, and researching schools, reading, meditating, all that stuff. I knew I needed to keep up those healthy habits now more than ever, and of course I needed to continue with those school efforts. So I kept that up for awhile. All the while, I kept feeling more and more like I didn’t want to go to grad school. The only problem was, I had no idea what else I would do, so I just kept studying.
[11:20] I was also reading more now than usual too, going outside, getting in that vitamin D. A few months prior to this happening, I had started a To-Do- excuse me a To-Read list and was slowly making my way through the titles. Somewhere within those first 2 months of quarantine I read the book The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard (which I had heard about it from Shelbizleee on YouTube). This book actually changed my life. I’ve spoken about it before, and I really can’t recommend it enough. This book gives an eye-opening view of our impact on the greater world with our overconsumption of stuff. Where do you think all the materials for the headphones you’re using or the device you’re listening to this podcast on came from? All the metal, plastic, copper, and really who knows what else…do you know where they all come from to create that product? I certainly didn’t, and even now don’t have a big grasp on it. But I didn’t even used to think about this stuff either. This book has shaped my worldview and self view. It’s changed my thought patterns, my actions, the way I talk with and interact with others. It allowed me to understand my actual impact on the world, and it allowed me to be kinder in that sense. Just please give it a read.
[12:46] Let’s talk a bit more about it so I can tell you why you should read it. So the book goes through the life of our stuff from mining the materials from Earth and creating a “product”, to purchasing this product off a shelf, to the disposal and afterlife of all the stuff. The thing that stood out for me most in this book during my first reading, I- again, I’ve only read it once, but I’m sure I’ll be reading it again. So what stood out for me during that first reading was the afterlife part, or where all the stuff we buy goes after we throw it away. That’s not something we tend to think about too much, is it? In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s a tactic used by an industry that wants us to consume more and more. If we actually thought about where the things we buy end up, we’d be much less inclined to buy them in the first place. Once we throw out whatever we’re “done” with using, it either goes to a landfill where it’s buried in the ground to be absorbed into our soil, and thus into our food and our bodies; or it goes to an incinerator where the toxic chemical, Dioxin, is released into our air, and thus into our bodies; many times it’s completely shipped off the North American continent to another continent and another country, like China where citizens sort through our unwanted recyclables for low wages, or Venezuela where our stuff sits in citizens’ backyards, forcing children to grow up in a landfill filled with our rotten, decomposing stuff. Yeah, this was all extremely disturbing to me too when I first read about it. The beautiful part about the book, though, is that it doesn’t just present the problem to us, it proposes solutions as well.
[14:46] In the book, Annie Leonard goes through legislative actions we can take, personal actions we can take towards the companies promoting that contin- continuous consumption, and individual actions that we can take at home. The biggest one, I think, that we can do right now, that doesn’t cost any money or take any of our time, in fact it gives us money and time, is to stop buying new stuff. It’s to remember the most important “R” in that Reduce, Reuse, Recycle model we’ve all heard before: Reduce! The actual best thing you could do is reduce your consumption. US citizens have a particularly difficult time with consuming only what we need, don’t we? But again, I’m one of ‘em. I eat more than I need to almost everyday, I drive more than I have to because it’s just more convenient for me. We- we can ALL consume less. This isn’t a judgement olympics. We can all consume less. Something that I started doing after reading this book was using less toilet paper. I would definitely use more than I needed and knew I could use less. I’d actually heard Kathryn Kellogg of Going Zero Waste on YouTube say that they only use 2 sheets and I just thought that was ridiculous! I challenged myself to use less, but didn’t think I could get to only 2 sheets. Then I discovered the bidet. These little butt sprayers are wonderful! They clean my butt better than dry toilet paper ever has AND I use less toilet paper since all I’ve gotta do is pat dry. Now I know what Kathryn meant about only using 2 sheets! Overall you actually use less water too because since toilet paper comes from trees, the water involved in growing an actual tree is MUCH, much more than the water used in a daily butt spray. Also, did I mention it’s saved me a bunch of money?! With toilet paper, you literally wipe your ass and then flush your money down the toilet, then you’ve got to continually buy more until forever….unless..you use a bidet {clicking cheek}. I’ve heard the Tushy bidet is great, I don’t have one myself, it came out after I bought a bidet, and the creator of that company is also pretty cool too, so check out Tushy bidets if you’d like your life changed forever.
[17:17] Alright, let’s talk about the other “Rs” in the model, next up: Reuse. This would be the next thing that we’d go to after reducing our consumption. Reuse what we’ve already got, reuse what other people have donated, reuse things that are gifted to you. These methods cost little to nothing depending on what the item is, and they’re helping save our planet. There’s already so much, in fact I’d say too much, stuff out there that has been created and discarded with no regard for how it will become apart of Earth again. Let’s reuse and give second, third, or seventh life to something that’s already out there. If it’s lasted that many lives, it’s probably better quality too so you should be able to use it and not have to buy another for awhile. Society’s obsession with the newest, latest thing is literally a marketing tactic to get you to keep giving them your money. Stop letting them!
[18:18] The next “R” is actually one that isn’t in the typical model of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. The next one, before Recycle, is Repair. Before we take our second-hand bike to the trash because the handle broke, let’s repair it! There are bike shops that I’m sure would love your business right now. Or if you’re really feeling up for it, look up a YouTube video and try repairing it yourself! That one’s free, you pick up a new skill, and you can brag about it to people! It’s very impressive. We want to stitch that hole in our favorite sweater before we go back to buy another much less meaningful one. Why give them more of your money when you can just fix the one you already have? You see my point? Before we toss our stuff to the side, put some effort into fixing it, it’ll mean more to you in the long run anyway.
[19:12] And now that brings us to Recycle. The way that we’re taught to recycle is much more simplified than the process actually is. We’re told that all we’ve got to do is put the “recyclables” in that green bin and then they just get recycled, right? But that’s wrong. Were you ever told that your recyclables need to be clean, dry, and free from any packaging or labels? I certainly wasn’t. I was in that group where you just throw it in the recycling as soon as you’ve finished using it. In reality, though, things need to be clean from dried food and debris so it can be recycled in it’s barest form and easily sorted by workers to be given another life. These workers already have A LOT to go through so the least we can do is make sure these items are clean. But they also need to be dry. Wet or greasy paper products can’t be recycled. So, when we put other recyclables in the bin, we need to make sure they’re dry as well so the paper products don’t become unusable. Lastly, we need to remove any packaging (like tape or stickers) and labels from recyclables. Again, items need to be in their barest form to be given a second life, so let’s help out the sorters and make their work a bit easier since they’ve got so much to sort through already.
[20:39] Now on top of all this information, each city has it’s own rules about what can be recycled. You can recycle paper and unbroken glass almost anywhere there is curbside recycling, I’m pretty sure. But plastic, on the other hand, is a whole ‘nother story. There is a variety of different types of plastics, and I’m sure you’ve seen many of them before. They’re manufactured for different purposes, so some are thick and durable, some are thin and flimsy. As a result, they can’t all be recycled the same way, and unlike glass, they can only be recycled a finite amount of times. So, if you’re going to be recycling plastic, you need to check out your city recycling site to see what number plastics your city has the resources to sort through and actually recycle. If a recycling truck comes in with too many types of plastics that the site itself can’t recycle, or too much broken glass, or too much soiled paper, the whole. entire. truck. is just thrown into the landfill. There’s only so much risk (like broken glass) and sorting these workers can manage, especially with the shear amount of recyclables, that trucks with too much risk or too many products that they can’t recycle have to be turned away. So what can we do? We can make sure that the items we’re recycling are in compliance with these and your individual city’s guidelines. For me, I found that putting the time in to make sure my items were properly recycled made me want to buy less so I’d have to recycle less in the future. Doing this made me realize that every choice I make here, whether that’s to buy something in plastic vs glass or to remove labels and clean the bottle, means something and makes a huge difference. On the YouTube channel Going Zero Waste, Kathryn Kellogg actually has a 4 part series on recycling that goes a bit more in depth, so if you wanna check that out, I’ll link it in the episode notes.
[22:46] What’s the big picture here though? Let’s remember those 4 “Rs”: Reduce first, Reuse what you already have, Repair what’s been broken, and then, if you must depart with it, Recycle what can no longer be used. Reduce, Reuse, Repair, then Recycle.
[23:09] As much information as this might seem, this is a small clink in the jar of all the things that need to be made more sustainable, and most of it is much bigger than what we can do at home and in our lives. But that doesn’t mean none of the tinier things we do don’t matter, it means there’s just much more to be done still, so we do need to keep working. That’s where Annie Leonard talks more about legislative action and corporate action in the book. Each section is really interesting and displays the issues with pragmatic solutions. So, I say again, please give this book a read!
[23:47] So, I’m done with the GRE, not doing that shit anymore, and I’m on to…creating a podcast I guess. Everything in the episode’s main portion today happened in the first month or two of quarantine, I believe..well, time isn’t really so…around the first two months of quarantine. It happened pretty much how I told it. As soon as I read that book, I knew there were more important things to do in this world than to make money. I knew I needed to really focus on getting better so I could begin to learn and create change. I came across this quote recently that for some reason is coming to me now, by John Lewis, “If not us, then who? If not now, then when?” It’s funny, I only recently read that quote, but it applies so perfectly to my feelings from months ago. I wish I’d heard it then, but I’m definitely glad I came across it now. That’s what should be at the back of our minds when our conscience comes nibbling at our choices. “If not us, then who? If not now, then when?” You have a responsibility here to take care of yourself and everyone who lives here with us, and that responsibility needs to be recognized and heeded now because we’ve run out of time. Earth will be here with or without us. Stop worrying about making money if you don’t need more. Start worrying about your well-being, your family’s well-being, your neighbors’ well-being, your planet’s well-being.
[25:37] Take the journey. I’ll be here, by your side. I love watching and listening to others learn and grow. I’d really be overwhelmed if I could have a part in helping you learn and grow. I hope me telling my story is helping someone out there- and hey, if that’s you, let me know! I’ll let you know where you can do that in just a minute.
[25:59] We’ve got some recommendations to do first. {Air horn imitation} Of course, we’ve got The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff is Trashing The Planet, Our Communities, And Our Health- And A Vision For Change by Annie Leonard. I honestly don’t know what else I could say about this book, except get ready to have your mind blown! The next rec refers back to the beginning of the episode and the land acknowledgement. If you’d like to find out whose traditional land you’re living on, or holding an event on, or maybe you’re just curious about Native languages or treaties in a given area, go to native-land.ca. If you’d like to watch the 4 part series on recycling on the Going Zero Waste YouTube channel, the link to that first episode will be in the episode notes here. I’d lastly like to add that I do not recommend the GRE.
[26:54] If you enjoyed this episode, help support the podcast! All this content is free and I’d love to make it my job one day, so if you’re financially able join our patreon or send a one-time or recurring donation through paypal! You can also share an episode with family or friends, and give UK a kind rating and review!
Check out UnderstandingKindness.com for all episodes, transcripts, and blog posts. And why not take a listen to my other podcast, Better When Awkward, co-hosted by my childhood best friend Jasmine!
Get in touch with me by emailing UnderstandingKindness@protonmail.com, or through social media. You can find all links in the episode notes.
For now, be kind, be compassionate, be understanding, and question everything. I’ll be here. Thank you for listening to this episode of Understanding Kindness. [End transcript]