Perspective Is A Hell Of A Drug With Kate Manser

Kate,

I am so delighted to have you on Coming Back today because my introduction to you and your work was with the phrase,

A cult sticker following.

And so I had to know more about that and what that had to do with grief and death and life and loss and just had to have you on the show for that reason.

So welcome to Coming Back.

And if you could please,

We'll start where we start with all of our guests with your lost story.

But I promise listeners,

We will get into the stickers very shortly.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

So my lost story started in high school.

I lost a couple of friends.

But what really radically shifted my life was three years ago,

I lost three people around my same age in rapid succession,

All in the span of one year.

My 27-year-old boss at Google died in a cliff diving accident.

My then husband's cousin died of cancer.

He was 36.

And then a friend of mine from college was killed at 27.

She was walking across the road and was hit by a drunk driver.

And I had never really thought too much about death prior to that.

In fact,

I spent most of my high school years thinking that I was invincible.

But at around 28 years old,

29 years old,

I had this really harrowing year.

And it really sent me into a death anxiety tailspin where I became so preoccupied with death and how scary it was and how unknown and how anyone can go at any minute that it really just started to take over my life.

I would think about it driving through intersections.

I couldn't sleep because I was having these visions in my mind about my mom dying and what would happen,

The whole scenario after that.

And that was really just clouded the beauty of life.

And then everything changed when there was actually one more death that occurred.

My friend and colleague at Google,

Dan Friedenberg,

Was climbing Mount Everest when the Nepal earthquake hit.

And he died in an avalanche that day.

And this was again,

Like the fourth unexpected death of a relatively young person in a short period of time.

But this time I was angry.

I was like,

Climbing Mount Everest is something you do electively.

And he chose to do this.

And he,

You know,

Now he took himself out of the world.

But as I thought more about it,

That was where the real transformation occurred.

And I'll stop there because that was really,

You know,

After I went through this anger and this death anxiety,

I had a realization that I think will be really helpful for your listeners.

That's a cool place to stop.

And I love your self-awareness there.

I want to talk about the concept of death anxiety because this is not something that gets talked about a lot or maybe even at all in the grief sphere.

I talked about it a little bit actually about a year ago,

This time in 2018.

And I talked about the concept of becoming hyper,

I called it mortality aware,

After somebody that you love dies.

And it sounds like this is exactly what you went through,

Like somebody dies,

You're like,

Oh,

Shit,

That's gonna happen to me too.

And not just me,

But every single other person around me,

And all of them are going to have to go through this process of some kind of tragedy where their physical body is no longer working,

Some kind of death or a memorial,

And then the aftermath of people having to clean out your stuff and fill in for you at work and all these other things that death kind of sets off this tidal wave of actions.

It's a ripple effect.

In the world,

When somebody dies,

They don't just die and they're gone.

It's these waves and circles of people that radiate out from them.

And I don't know,

It's sometimes it's overwhelming to think about when you realize like,

This is going to happen to me and to everyone I know,

Can you speak more on like,

What that feels like in your body and how it like manifested in your world?

Oh,

It was it was awful.

Really,

I mean,

It was,

You know,

I have not experienced in my life,

What I've heard you talk about on the show before a primary loss,

Like a parent or a sibling or a spouse.

These were all I guess you could call them secondary losses.

They were,

You know,

Varying levels of close and not as close friends.

But the death anxiety that I experienced was,

It took over my life to a point that I think is not on the level of experiencing primary loss,

But pretty close to where I couldn't really function in a way.

Like I said,

It was just,

It would take my mind over throughout the day at various points and these,

These really kind of awful movies would go off in my mind of like,

I would imagine my then husband that I had gotten the unexpected call that he died.

And I would imagine,

You know,

Going to Brazil for his funeral and what I would tell his parents and,

You know,

All of these things.

And to answer your question,

It was a visceral experience,

As I think grief so often is manifested in our bodies.

The death anxiety for me was,

Was as well.

But I think that the level to which that experience was uncomfortable was important for me in the realization that I had soon after the fourth death,

Because that discomfort was really,

Really showed me the other side of death that I soon realized.

This is a question that just popped into my brain.

But what was it like?

I'm 26 years old,

You were 28 when all these thoughts were circling around in your head and these things three major people died and then a fourth shortly after.

What was it like being 28 and then watching other 28 year olds without these thoughts in their heads operating in normal,

Quote unquote,

Normal life?

I think that's a wow,

I haven't really thought about that very much.

It's a beautiful question.

I think on one hand,

I was,

You know,

Just so in in it in this death anxiety that it didn't really cross my mind that everyone wasn't thinking about this.

But on the other hand,

I did see people kind of like floating through life not thinking about death.

And I was a little bit envious of them in in some ways.

Yeah,

I think I asked that question because in my experience,

And a lot of 20 somethings that come on the podcast,

There's this there's almost like a righteous bitterness that comes with experiencing death or knowing death in your 20s.

And of course,

Knowing death at any age kind of makes you angry at the people around you and like,

Why hasn't the world stopped turning?

And why is no one worried about this?

And it just makes you it made me at 21 want to go up and like shake people and like,

Don't you understand?

This is the way it is.

We're all gonna die.

Like it just and so I wondered,

You know,

Because death anxiety is something that can be severely overwhelming,

As you said,

But also,

It's in stark contrast to the way most of the rest of the world rotates.

Yeah,

And I think that there's,

There's a lot of different ways to process mortality awareness.

And having come from what I think are kind of the three or four main camps,

Number one being just like pretending like death doesn't exist.

Number two being this death anxiety that I know is actually really common.

I think everyone experiences some death anxiety at some point of varying degrees.

And then the third camp,

Which is perhaps grief,

Which is a very different type of mortality awareness.

And then the fourth camp,

Which is something that I hope to help people experiencing grief on this podcast today is how mortality awareness can be a source of inspiration to live and,

And vibrancy in life.

Let's get into your realization or this transitional moment for you.

What was it and what did it look like?

Yeah,

I had come from this place of,

Like I said,

Just being consumed by that fear of death.

Like,

When is it?

Where is it?

How is it going to happen?

It's so mysterious.

And I think if something is cloaked in mystery,

It's naturally anxiety producing.

And then Dan died on Everest.

And again,

I hit that anger point at first,

That he had elected to do something that was so dangerous,

And he was such a vibrant person.

I was so angry that he had chosen something that had this big risk of taking him away from us,

Taking him away from the world.

But as I thought more about it,

I realized that climbing Everest is not something that you just,

You know,

Do on an average weekend or like you just pick up on a Saturday.

It's something that takes a tremendous amount of contemplation.

It's very expensive.

It's requires an intense amount of physical training.

And it's something that you do really mindfully.

And as I contemplated that,

I realized that Dan had thought long and hard about climbing Everest.

And he decided that and he knew the risks.

And he decided that for him,

He had to climb Mount Everest in order to truly live and that it was something of a probably a die-die situation,

Like either live,

Don't climb Mount Everest and stay on the ground and live out of alignment with your values and authenticity,

Or climb Mount Everest and take the risk of dying.

And ultimately,

That is what happened.

But he died in accordance with what was important to him in his sense of adventure.

And I also realized that with all of these young people dying around me that like,

I'm spending so much time worrying about when I'm going to die.

And in that intersection,

I'm afraid that I'm going to get t-boned and that'll be the end.

But I realized like,

You know,

Dan died on Everest,

I could die in that intersection,

I could die like climbing the stairs,

I'm a very clumsy person.

And so with that realization that I don't have any control over that,

Which I've been putting so much thought and energy and anxiety into,

All of that just really transformed into a zeal to live because I said,

You know what,

If I have no guarantee of how long I'm going to live and when or where my death will come,

The thing I do have control over is how I live until that mystery moment comes.

And that was the profound shift for me.

So in my brain,

As you're telling this story of kind of the waking up the realization or like putting the pieces together,

I get this envisioning of like the other half of the story where it's like,

And then I woke up and I quit my job and I started doing things and I climbed mountains and you took up horseback riding and all these things that you've always wanted to do.

And did your life suddenly look like your ideal life?

Did you decide that the life you were living was already your ideal life?

I guess the question I'm nagging at is what if anything changed in your world after that?

Everything.

Oh my gosh,

Everything.

With that one realization,

It didn't just correct that period in my life that I had,

That anxiety.

It radically shifted the way that I live in and look at the world because everything became scarce.

Time especially became very scarce and so it therefore like raised in value.

It's like supply and demand,

I guess.

And so yeah,

Everything changed for me.

My outlook,

Number one,

First and foremost was the big thing that changed.

I loved and love harder.

I take more calculated risks.

I try to approach each day with joy and I did actually quit my job at Google.

I left Google and I traveled around the world for two years.

I started writing the You Might Die Tomorrow book,

Started the blog,

Started this cult sticker following that you mentioned.

But it sounds really,

Really idyllic.

My life wasn't terrible before I started.

My life was and still is wonderful.

It's the perspective that really shifted.

I just actually had a realization the other day about what happens after a spiritual awakening.

I wrote this whole blog post entry about how it sounds magical and it is,

But then you find out that it takes work just like everything else,

Like gratitude and meditation and really working at finding joy and all of that.

But in the scope of living like you might die tomorrow,

Which is what I tried to do,

It all seems worth it to me.

I'm laughing because the idea of what happens after a spiritual awakening,

I've run into this wall before where I'm like,

I've had an awakening.

This is awesome.

And then you wake up and like,

Damn it,

I have to put this into like reality now.

I have to manifest this in some way or like I have to take it from my brain and like push it into my reality.

Like now I have to live it now that I've been given the gift of the awakening.

Now I have to like do something about it.

Like damn.

Like what a rip off.

And then we have to figure out how to do that with compassion because like it just because we have an awakening doesn't mean we're not like sunshine and rainbows every single day.

Like life is still really damn hard.

And so having compassion with ourselves just like in the grief process that there it's like two steps forward.

Even if it's like 10 steps forward,

You're going to go eight steps back at some point.

Can you speak more on that?

Because I got glimpses of that when you were like,

My life is wonderful.

But I know that all of our lives will continue to hold elements of pain and grief in the day to day.

Yeah,

I think one of my favorite sayings is,

I think I made it up.

I don't know.

But I say perspective is a hell of a drug.

Oh my gosh.

I love I'm writing that down.

Yeah,

It's a hell of a drug.

And it's my favorite one because man,

Like it's so easy to get caught up in like the washing machine of life and all like the little things we have to do like,

You know,

Cleaning out our closet,

Which I'm actually looking at my disaster of a closet right now,

And emptying the dishwasher and like making a dentist appointment.

It's so easy to get caught up in all of that.

And even the greater stuff,

Like what people think of us and if we're making the right decision and you know,

Are we in the right career?

What do we want to do with our lives?

But death offers perspective like nothing else can.

That's what I found.

And so in terms of like maintaining that sense of spiritual awakening or just like,

You know,

Trying to like be a good human.

Death is the number one thing that helps me do that because in death everything falls away.

If you imagine yourself how you're going to look at your life when you're on your deathbed,

For example,

And you look back at the present moment,

You can look at it with a new set of eyes from your deathbed as opposed to just looking around now and being like,

Oh my God,

This is my life.

There's so many things.

How do I sort it out?

And from your deathbed,

You're like,

Okay,

Here's the things that are important to me.

It seems more clear and more simple.

And yeah,

That that death perspective is the number one way that I keep myself sane in life.

How do you keep the death anxiety from turning into time anxiety?

What do you mean by that?

Like with death anxiety,

The revolving thought is I'm going to die,

I'm going to die,

I'm going to die.

And with time anxiety,

It's like there's not enough time,

There's not enough time,

There's not enough time.

And so how do you keep these two from kind of running into each other?

So how,

I guess,

Did you shift that swirl of death anxiety into not morphing into then time anxiety?

Wow,

I've never been asked that question before.

That's beautiful.

I think,

In regards to both death anxiety or time anxiety or anxiety in general,

What helped me at first was to look at the situation objectively.

And that's why You Might Die Tomorrow is such a,

Like,

My logo is in black and white.

Like it is out there.

Like there's no questioning what this message is.

And that's really what I want to offer to other people is this objective look at like,

Hey,

I actually heard my,

I was talking about You Might Die Tomorrow with a friend recently.

And he said,

You know what's really interesting?

He said that we have a zero percent chance of knowing when we die,

But we have a 100 percent chance that we might die tomorrow.

And I was just like,

Wow,

That's,

It just really struck me that,

You know,

The now is what we have.

And that objective look at time and objective look at death.

Like,

Hey,

I don't know when I'm going to die.

That's the reality.

I will die.

I don't know when.

That's the reality.

How am I going to react to that?

And same with time.

Like I will die.

Time and death are related.

That's like,

Why do we have the word lifetime?

It's because they're so like closely related.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so yeah,

Looking objectively at like the availability of time and the fact that nothing is guaranteed and it really just lights a fire under my butt because I get into decision paralysis with the best of them.

Yeah.

I totally hear you on that one as well.

Because I can sit and look at like 12 different options if you give me the time.

But if you tell me I don't have the time,

I'm like,

Well,

I'm gonna,

You know,

It lights a fire,

But it seems like it's turned into less of an internal anxiety and more of an external driver.

For you.

I get this picture intuitively of like,

You're taking time from your brain and literally putting it outside of your body.

Like this doesn't belong in here.

It belongs out here.

And that's how you orchestrate it to make real change in your life.

I am ready to talk about the stickers.

I want to know all about them because I going onto your website,

I've seen all the cool places that people have posted them,

I guess,

To start off,

Where did the phrase you might die tomorrow come from?

And then you kind of talked a little bit of about the black and white color choice,

But kind of how did it grow from like,

I have one of these two now they're all over the world.

Yeah.

So the inspiration for you might die tomorrow came just a few days after Dan died on Everest because I was just in this like headspace of like,

Again,

Going through that objective reality of time and death and everything.

And it just hit me that,

Hey,

I might die tomorrow.

And that was the point that I knew I had turned the corner with the death anxiety as a result of like grappling with all of this because I was thinking you might die tomorrow for the whole time that I had death anxiety.

That was like the full,

Like on the forefront of my mind.

But when I looked at it in the new perspective after Dan's death,

It was,

Oh,

I might die tomorrow.

And suddenly that was the most freeing thing I had ever thought of in my life.

And so from there,

I created a website on my own and just started blogging and the sticker,

I chose the colors,

Like you said,

Black and white because I wanted it to be stark and simple and I want people to take their own message.

And I never ever on my sticker would put like my website or my email or anything.

It's the message stands on its own.

And the sticker actually comes from like,

I didn't even know how to do graphic design.

So I took a screenshot of the heading of my website,

Which was one of the Squarespace templates and sent it off to have like 250 stickers made.

And I took them on the trip that I took after I quit my job and just started handing them out to people and the response was just absolutely remarkable.

And that was when I knew that I had tapped into something that people really wanted to have a framework to grapple with.

If someone came up to you and said,

I'm thinking about death for the very first time and I'm looking for guidance on how to figure out what my values are so I can kind of realign or reorient,

What would you tell them?

I would tell them to try meditating on death with a journal nearby and to close your eyes and imagine yourself on your death bed looking back over your life and to write down the things that you felt were important in your life and that you did and things that you felt were important in your life and that you didn't do.

And you can start to hone in on the themes there that might have value for you.

Those typically are pretty similar I found for most humans that I've met in this work.

You know,

Love,

Humanity,

Sharing our light with others,

Enjoying life.

These are the common themes that humans have and the best way to,

I think,

Find those values in the context of mortality is to meditate.

That's a great look at.

Kind of a where do we begin?

Death Contemplation 101.

Death Contemplation 101 is like,

You know,

Try your very best to look at it objectively and accept the facts and then figure out a way,

Decide you want to make the best of it and then figure out a way to make something good out of it.

I like that response a lot more to death than death anxiety.

There's more,

I know our society values productiveness,

But it seems like there's a better place to put your energy there.

Especially in the aftermath of grief when you're already so short on energy.

Yeah.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

I like that reframing a lot too.

The next question that's coming to me is what,

If anything outside of you might die tomorrow,

Do you do to honor these four people in your life that you have lost?

Yeah.

The first thing I'm doing is I'm finishing my book right now and that's something where,

Uh,

Man,

I had this experience where I thought that I had a brain eating amoeba,

Which has a 99% fatality rate within 14 days.

And the first thing that I thought when,

After I read the Google symptoms and was like,

Oh my God,

I have like 90% of these.

Um,

The first thing I thought was,

Man,

I've got to finish this book.

I've got to share this story.

I've got to honor these people who died and affected my life so positively.

Um,

And so for me,

That's my meaningful thing is,

Um,

Is this project and this book.

And I think the number one thing we can do to honor anyone who has died is to just enjoy the heck out of our lives.

Man,

Just like in the face of it all,

Like life is so hard.

Uh,

But if we can find enjoyment and like really feel that in us and assign value to enjoying our lives,

Um,

That's really the best thing that any of us can do and that I try to do on a daily basis to um,

To honor those people.

Can we jump back to the brain eating amoeba really quickly?

What happened with that?

Oh my gosh.

Well,

Yeah,

I was in New Zealand with my sister on my big trip.

So after I left my job,

My sister came to visit me when we were out there and we went in this geothermal pool on the top of this mountain.

And um,

It's like,

Oh,

If you insufflate the water,

You could get this brain eating amoeba.

Of course I did not insufflate the water.

Like I kept my head above water,

But it was like very steamy.

And the next day I started feeling achy and my neck was hurting.

And so I started Googling the symptoms of this nickel area,

Fowlery and they happened to match what I was feeling.

And for those,

And so that was like,

You're dead,

You're supposed to be dead within like seven to 14 days.

And those next seven days that I woke up and alive every morning,

Even though I thought I was going to die,

Were some of the best days of my life and the most clear days of my life.

Like my sister and I had been arguing on the trip and suddenly I was like,

I love you so much.

And this was one of the ways that I realized that death is so powerful is like,

You know,

Even with a hypochondriacal near death experience like I had,

Which was totally manufactured in my brain,

I did not have the amoeba.

But having that experience offered me this beautiful perspective and appreciation for life.

I'm laughing but also I have WebMD diagnosed myself to pieces,

Especially when you've seen someone die,

Especially when you've seen someone die.

So I'm speaking to all of my grief goers listening right now.

If you have WebMD or Google diagnosed yourselves,

You are not alone.

So yes,

I totally thanks.

It's a blessing and a curse in so many ways because I know I'm like,

Here's so many people listening and found this podcast on Google,

But at the same time,

We also convince ourselves we're dying on Google.

So sit wisely.

I can have a silver lining.

Yes.

I want to ask you another question that I wrote down kind of in the early stages of your speaking,

Because I imagine that you kind of like me have pondered this a lot already.

And that is,

What would you like to die doing?

Or how would you like to die?

How would I like to die?

I went to this meetup group.

There's this meetup group in Austin that I just came upon,

Called Death Matters.

And I expected it to be like in a dark basement and it's like a few people like,

You know,

You know,

Grieving and it ended up being this group of 19,

You know,

Vibrant people who had all experienced death and grief in their lives or passionate about the idea of like shining a light on mortality awareness.

And we had this like group conversation and one of the questions was,

Would you rather die a,

You know,

An unexpected and swift death or a longer term death?

And I had to be vulnerable on that because I was like,

Well,

My ego says unexpected death because,

You know,

People just have the reaction and,

And you know,

You,

It's always nice to think about going,

You know,

Without any pain.

But again,

Like I have this ever since I had my realization,

I had a new outlook on challenge in life.

And I'm sure I'll be throwing challenges,

Which I am unsure that I'll be able to get through.

But,

But in general,

I try to like,

Have a positive relationship with challenge.

And I think if I were to die of say,

Like,

A terminal illness where I had time to contemplate and think about it,

That would kind of be like the ultimate,

Like personal research or contemplation of my lifelong work of like researching and spreading the idea of mortality awareness.

So I think I would want to die having having the time to meditate on and really feel and share with the world my experience.

There are several authors that have died in that fashion,

And then have had books published posthumously.

So after their deaths,

The first one that comes to mind for me is Elizabeth Coobler Ross,

Who a lot of the grief community shames because she is like the head honcho inventor of the five stages.

I'll say right here and now I've personally read her books and she's like the media kind of took it and ran with it.

So they're more like the five buckets of grief.

But the way that it's been misconstrued through the years has kind of misrepresented her her work and her studies but on in her book,

Not on not on death and dying but I believe her book is called on grief and grieving.

She has a dear friend named David Kessler who still is around in the world.

He's like Oprah's grief guy.

And he does an introduction for her about witnessing her in the last months of her life and she had studied death for so long she had a lot of time to think about how she wanted to die.

And I if my memory is serving me correctly,

Which I think it is she died in her house in front of this really big picture window and every guest that came into the home she just requested that they bring flowers and so she was just surrounded by natural beauty and I believe she had some form of cancer.

And so it was one of those things where she had time to think about death to say goodbye to continue to share wisdom in the midst of her pain and in the midst of her dying.

And sometimes I think on that I'm like that seems a little too good to be true.

But at the same time I'm like if she could do it maybe maybe that's a possibility for me too.

Why not?

You might die tomorrow.

So maybe we can go that way.

But that's one of many.

There's also others and like when breath becomes air.

Beautiful.

I just read that again.

Oh my god.

My coworker recommended it and didn't tell me what it was.

And I was like,

Oh no.

I know.

It's so beautiful.

It was sensational.

And there's so many books that exist in the grief sphere where people are actually looking at themselves as they're dying,

Which is just a whole wild other genre of books I'd never considered.

Yeah.

And when we get to the like what wisdom I can share portion of this podcast I'll talk a little bit about my deathbed meditation that I created and facilitate.

And that has some commentary in there about creating that like safe space of your own death.

Yeah.

Well let's jump into that then.

That seems like a good transition point for it.

Yeah.

So when I was like starting to do all of this research on,

You know,

I had my realization and I started to do all this research on mortality awareness.

I at first was like,

Oh,

I'm probably the first person to ever like come up with this amazing thing that's changed my life.

And then of course,

Like every writer and like philosopher and you and you know,

Our neighbor down the street,

Everyone has thought about mortality.

And a lot of people have hit on this idea that death is life's greatest teacher.

And so I started doing this thing that I like eventually started calling the deathbed gut check,

Which was like when I was faced with the decision that I didn't know like which direction to go in my life,

I was like,

How do I apply the wisdom of death to this decision?

Like I am trapped in decision paralysis and this sucks.

So what can I do?

And so the thing that I just started doing was I would,

When I was faced with a decision like this,

I would close my eyes and I would imagine myself on my deathbed.

And mine is either like on the beach or in like a beautiful room like Elizabeth Kula Ross,

Like facing a forest with lots of natural light.

And I would I would imagine myself looking back from the perspective of my deathbed looking back back in the present moment at the decision that I had to make.

And I would imagine like,

Oh,

How would I feel from my deathbed if I had chosen option A?

And then I take a second and a feel how my body viscerally relax like in my gut,

Do I feel like a heavy pit or do I feel light and free?

And then I do the same thing for option B and almost always I'm able to like,

Like hone in on either a negative or a positive sensation in my body that tells me which is the right way to go because in death we have this wisdom like no other like like I said,

Everything falls away.

All the you know,

Worry about what people think of us and like the perspective that we don't have.

And so I started doing this deathbed gut check and it was so valuable.

It just took me like five seconds.

I got to the point where I was doing it like almost every day for different varying like levels of decision making.

And then I created,

I started looking up like,

Oh,

Well what if I did a meditation about my deathbed and get like a greater longer perspective on my life and so I created one.

That is too cool to me because I guess just like the cult sticker following I've never heard it phrased that way before a deathbed meditation.

And I think that's something that's simple enough to grasp onto without going too deep into the morbidity of it.

And that's that's tremendously helpful.

I really like how you phrase that.