Unpacking the Power of Words and Beliefs on the Voyage to Mental Wellness #164- Jane Marie Auret

All right, everyone, how's it going Today? We have a very special guest, jane Marie, here. All right, so just to get this started, how are you doing today?

I'm doing well. Thank you Everything's good.

So can you kind of give the audience a bit of an understanding about who you are, what you're about, what your message is and sort of why you think it's important to be here today?

So, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it and I'm excited to have this conversation. I run Screens in the Ego Literary Magazine, which is an open source magazine that allows people to answer questions and engage creatively with questions like why does the world feel empty and what are moments when I actually felt full? Excuse me, I'm a little sick, so if you hear that in my voice, you sound perfect. Thank you, I appreciate that. I appreciate the affirmation. So a lot of the questions are like why are so many people in the world so unhappy right now and why did mental health become such a major topic of discussion after human beings no longer had issues like widespread hunger or sickness? And what are the things in your life that you're doing that make you feel whole and happy and what are the things that are making you feel isolated and atomized? So it's an open source magazine that's gotten everything between like poetry, live performance, rap, extended nonfiction, essays, interviews and it's based off of a book that I wrote called Screens in the Ego a meditation on Gen Z, and that book is about my experience, one with, like, a Middle Eastern background. It talks about the differences between the way that the Middle East is undergoing cultural problems, but a lot of times people say that like things like depression and anxiety don't like those. Those don't happen here. You know, like a lot of people in other cultures don't even have a discourse to talk about mental health and they are capable of describing really deep concepts about, like their own sadness, but they use a religious framing to talk about themselves. And I think that Western society before people talked about mental health. Western society did talk about the idea of like the inside of you, but they use the word soul to talk about mental health and now we have kind of a medicalized understanding of our own internal lives. I know that the Middle East definitely does not. It has a more religious framing of that idea and also just like experiences that I had in college and jobs that I've worked and things like that. So that's kind of the topic of my book and that's what motivated me to make this magazine and I really appreciate talking to you about it.

Excellent. So you mentioned the Middle East interpretation of mental health. I don't think I'm not very familiar with that, I don't think a lot of people are. Can you kind of maybe elaborate on that so people can kind of pick up more on what you're saying?

Yeah, definitely. So I guess that the easiest way to think about it is the way that people in Western society before Freud were talking about their own feelings and their own sadness and stuff. If you have read a book, maybe from the 1700s or the 1800s, a lot of times they'll talk about things like grief and shame and they'll use those types of words. They won't use words like anxiety and depression, right? And the difference between grief and shame and words like anxiety and depression is that, even though, like physically maybe they're talking about the same internal sensation, right, like if I feel, really, if I am experiencing heart palpitations or I feel a tightness in my throat, maybe what I'm experiencing right now is called anxiety. But what they would use in the 1700s to describe that same physical sensation would be nervousness, grief, things like that. So it's just about the vocabulary that people have to describe what's going on inside of them and then also, just like a religious framework about who you are and what your life is, kind of sets you up for a different understanding of what your goals are. So in Islam you have like a triad of I'm sorry, I'm thinking of the word. So you have a triad of the way that you frame all the terrible things that happen in your life, right. So it's very clear in the Quran that God will send you tests called fitness, and it's your job to endure the tests. But he will send you little good things in your life that will help you get through the tests that he's given you, and those good things are called Rahman, and the process that you go through in terms of, like, accepting the trials that you were sent on earth to endure, will eventually lead to Tuwakko, or completeness, or like a unification with God. Right, and this is a pretty standard triad that is seen throughout a lot of Abrahamic faiths. Right, and it does a lot for a person's psychology. One, the idea that, like, you come to this earth for a purpose is something that secular, like mental health culture, doesn't really like have a framing for, like why we're here. Right, like, the general purposelessness of American society is something that religion has been answering for people for the past 5000 years, and now, as we've kind of leaned towards a more secular viewpoint, we've lost that sense of this is the purpose of my life, right. Also, religion will tell you, like, how the story ends before it even starts. So you come to earth, whatever happens to you is going to happen to you, and then you're going to go back, and I think that when in modern society, we're experiencing a really, you know, a really serious existential excuse me problem with not knowing when the end of our life is, or like constantly trying to curate images, or like being really preoccupied with, like, the narrative of our life or our legacy, or like what's the story of me, right, and that's the, that type of like constant self definition is not something that is common to all people or common to all cultures, and it's really important that people understand that. That's really a mark of our time and this idea that, like you have to like think about, you, have to define yourself and like this is my brand, this is my story, that's. That's not something that most human beings were asked to do throughout history, because most human beings were told that the beginning and end of their story is just life and death, and then whatever happens in the middle happens in the middle. So did that answer your question?

Yeah, you answered it. This concept of you know, try it as you explain, that I think is really, really fascinating. And it definitely reminds me of kind of the American dream innocence, because it sort of pushes that idea of that kind of predetermined destiny, the life, the kids, the picket fence, the job, stay at home, mother, you know, sort of that. But it also brings up another thing in my while you were talking I was also thinking what about a purpose in life? This sort of reminds me of that because I think you know generally a lot of people, you know men, especially women. They need kind of a purpose in life in order to feel fulfilled. Do you think the triad in a way kind of helps to fulfill that need and maybe can, maybe that could be a way it could integrate better with that idea of Western culture, because we tend to look for things like that.

Yeah, absolutely, and I think that everyone at some point every culture, every society and every person at some point is going to have to ask themselves, like why am I doing what I'm doing right? And I think that your the way that what I said reminded you of the image of the white picket fence. It made sense because a lot of times in Western culture your purpose is to produce things or your purpose is to achieve things. And you are many people, including like me, when I was like in high school and stuff, like I was completely obsessed with trying to prove that I was as good as the people around me because I like got good grades or like. A pretty serious preoccupation for me and all of my friends in college was in high school was what college we were going to go to. And that was, like, in retrospect, a really terrible thing to preoccupy ourselves with because we were trying to prove to each other like who's better based on who went to what college, and it was just that's terrible. But it did kind of feed into like we didn't decide that ourselves. Like our school I went to a public school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, right, so it's not like I was in that fancy of an environment, but our school and the people who I knew were like, constantly rating themselves against their own academic achievement, sports achievements if they were like the captain of the swim team or whatever they were like, they constantly were trying to show how much they could do. And how much they could do was a testament to what they were worth. Right. And a religious framing says your achievements don't matter, right, the only thing that matters is the morality of the actions that you can control, right? So if you get up in the morning and you call your grade on, then you have honored God with your actions and that is something good that you've done. And then you go on with your day and you like hold the door for someone, and then you have a choice between, like, telling a lie and telling the truth, and you choose to tell the truth and you've honored God, right? So the way that a person who genuinely like has like, genuinely believes in God and actually like frames their entire worldview based on religion, they're evaluating their worth based on the morality of their actions, not on the results of the work that they do or whatever. Does that make sense?

That makes a lot of sense, and you're quite right on that, because I think that's something that even I, a lot of other people, struggle with too, because when you reach that level of competitiveness and I think I don't know, maybe it's just how the system in America is built, maybe how it's built on this kind of capitalist system, but it's sort of this whole you get better, and the better you are, the better you are as a person, and what we don't think about is valuing people on how well we treat others. And I'll be frank with you here. I've fallen victim to that plenty of times, and I think many people have too. I don't you have this world. Mm-hmm said that. Well, um, I did, you know, um. So my thing is this how did that sort of influence your life and kind of turn you who you are Sort of into the woman that you are today? It's that made any sense?

Yeah, absolutely. Um. So when I was a really little kid, I had cancer and I couldn't like be I like quarantined before everyone quarantined, and I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, who's an Arab American woman, and the earliest memories of my childhood that were like Really like wonderful, where I felt safe and happy, were with this woman and I I internalized a lot of her ideas about the world, right, and then I got better and I started going to school and and I went through all of the developmental milestones that everyone goes through, right, um, I had a best friend and then my best friend didn't want to talk to me anymore and that like had reverberating waves of like self-consciousness that I didn't think were possible. Like I felt. I felt really destabilized when I lost my best friend and then I Went through like middle school, high school, whatever, and then I got to college and I thought that college was going to be the place where I really defined myself, but unfortunately, I experienced a series of like just dysfunctional relationships and I thought that I was going to get a PhD. I've always really liked writing and I thought that I was on track, like I had studied Arabic literature and Comparative literature so I could read books in Arabic and Spanish, which was pretty unique, and I thought that that would like get me into a PhD program. But unfortunately there was so much like political anxiety and I just had like a lot of trouble Like actually making genuine connections with like my professors, so I wasn't able to like launch myself into my career the way that I had imagined that I would be able to, and and when I Graduated and I decided, you know, I don't want to get a PhD, also like high-key, there's a real problem with like universities in America right now. Like people who are getting PhDs are not treated Well, they're not paid well and then, like if someone is treating them badly or they have a hostile work environment, there's really no recourse to like make that environment better, because you are completely beholden to like your advisors and If so, so there's a lot of problems in terms of getting a PhD and ultimately, I'm very, very grateful that I didn't do that, because I Was able to spend the years after college Developing my own creative freedom and I didn't have to worry about someone else Evaluating my work or giving me a grade on it. I could just write what I thought was important and I developed relationships with people who really understood what I was trying to do, and that Ultimately led to me writing my own book, on which I'm really proud of. My book like has a certain amount of like controversial material in it, or like, at least, material that, like, different people would have different opinions on. But I'm really proud that I was able to just bring that forth, because I was speaking what I thought to be true at the time, without being Completely shackled by like, oh my goodness, what are people gonna say about me? Um and that and the so. So, basically, I'm talking about like finding authenticity right. So, as opposed to comparing myself to the achievements that I could make, what other people were gonna think after I wrote it and what it would do for my career, I wrote this book because this is what I believe to be true at the time that I am writing, and I think that these ideas will help the people who read this book. And that was what authenticity was, and I Know that that's a Honesty in the way that religion would frame it. So that's kind of how I got onto these ideas.

Yeah, yeah, you know I definitely agree with a lot of that, because I don't think you know colleges 100%. You know Necessary. You know, like my father, he had a PhD, but you know I might be going for two. But I'll be honest with you, my mother was a college dropout. You know I wouldn't be here right now it wasn't for a college dropout. So you know, I agree, and that's exactly why I'm going for a masters. But you know, at the end of the day, I think it's healthy, more so, to see a Degree as a tool, you know, to just help you with their phone. And I really respect, you know, the fact that you were able to not follow others and kind of just go down your own route. And Again, that sounds quite tough though.

So you're, you're bilingual Technically because you could do Spanish and Arabic, or yeah, so in 2020 when I graduated, I was reading full chapter length books and both Arabic and Spanish. I haven't done that as much anymore, but yeah, I would say that, like if I took a test on proficiency, I'd probably get like intermediate Intermediate for both of those languages.

Yeah, all right. So that that's very, very impressive. Um, so yeah, I'm just thinking here, though. So, as you began to dive into your journey of becoming an author, how was it like writing those? How was it like writing, you know, your first book, your second book, etc. Because I've done hundreds of interviews and I always love diving into the creative headspace of a lot of these authors. A lot of times they might have Difficulties becoming self-published, or they try to work with someone else, or they have Difficulties writing. Every single day they get things like writer's block. You know, there's always an interesting Story to it. So how was it like writing your first?

Um. So the first thing that I wrote that I got published and eventually I published again in my book was about having cancer, and it's it's actually about the, the mind-body disconnect that people ask to what type of cancer. It was a cute lymphoblastic leukemia which is, I think, cancer of the blood. Those words don't mean a lot to me Because I didn't understand anything about like my own level of sickness or this idea that, like I was more likely to die than anyone else when I was a little kid. Going through it, um, so it so, in a weird way, having cancer was like the best Like time of my childhood because I was like in a completely safe space mentally With with the people around me, like I was. I was like with people who loved me 24, 7, and I think that a lot of Like, especially females who go through cancer treatment at an early age, um do develop. This is gonna sound really weird, but it's like a common thing. They develop a certain um a Way of disconnecting from their body. That's not unlike the way sexual assault victims disconnect from their body because as a, as a child, you have to like just like stand there and let people like stick needles into you, or like you have oh the doctors coming in like strip naked and Let him like perform this painful procedure on you and you just like have to do it right. So so the the mental effect of like prolonged, prolonged cancer treatment can have a Psychological effect of like mind-body disconnect, and that's something that a lot of people who do not experience prolonged childhood illness, um, might not be aware of, but it is a thing that's pretty common for people who go through it um and it. It is pretty interesting because, like even now as an adult, like If I cut myself, there's a very long, like if I, if I accidentally, like have an injury or something like there's a very long delay between, like when I notice that I'm bleeding and like when I'm like, oh, like I, I feel pain. Now, like, like the, the Length of time that it takes me to register pain, even as an adult, is much, much longer than it is for, like, my husband. So he's like, dude, doesn't that hurt? And then I'm like, three seconds later I'm like, yeah, that did hurt, I should go get a band-aid. So I think that that's. I don't really remember what question I was answering when we got on that. Can you remind me a question?

Yeah, so I was basically kind of. I Kind of pushed you off topic there because I was interested more so in the cancer discussion. Mm-hmm but just to bring it back, though, I was just asking how do you go about being an author? How was it like kind of writing your first book and kind of what was the experience like?

Yeah, so the first thing that I got published was about cancer. It was called why I Hate Bananas and it was just kind of a funny piece that talks about the mental and psychological effects of it and also the fact that someone who I knew passed away and all of that stuff like early encounters with death, things like that. And then the next piece that I wrote was trying to talk back to a lot of the problems that I saw in the atmosphere of college. So okay, so I think that it's really harmful for people to pursue mental health without understanding what mental health really is Like. I think that there's some really really bad versions of mental health going around and, for example, I know a lot of people and maybe you haven't encountered this, but I know a lot of people who say that they are experiencing, and say that they are experiencing crises, that they are not actually experiencing, and maybe they are experiencing. Maybe they say that they're suicidal, but they would take like one pill instead of like actually like pursuing a method to like want to die, right, and this is a really important thing to consider, because the primary goal of any mental health treatment is to alleviate the mental health treatment. Right, but there's like a lot of issues, especially with women, who have much higher suicide rates but who have much lower rates of actually committing suicide. There's a lot of people who think that they are suicidal but they are not actually doing things that would result in death. Essentially, what they're doing is self-harming with medication and experimenting with the idea of wanting to die within the context of like people who they know will help them. Right, so that was an experience of like witnessing. I was an RA and I also just like had friends that had difficulty and they weren't getting helped by their doctors. Like that's the thing. Like I knew so many kids, so many girls who would like go to the therapist or go to a counselor and say, hey, I need help or hey, like I'm really struggling right now, and they didn't. Their symptoms were not a lead by the therapy. Right, and that's kind of like just true for all of society, because the mental health rates for Gen Z are upward of 40%. Like we're talking like one in two people, one in 1.5 people, 40% of Gen Z is suffering from a mental health issue, and that precludes the idea that means that mental health professionals and public health do not have control of this situation right. Like the rates of mental, the rates of people who have long-term reliance on therapists and long-term reliance on antidepressants are so high that we know that a lot of the treatment that people are getting is not working right. And that's not to say that there aren't individual counselors who can help you, because there absolutely are. But there's also a lot of really, really bad counselors and really really bad ideas. And taking it back to the example of, like people who think that they're committing suicide but are not like there's kind of this weird idea that you have to believe people when they are saying that they have the mental health issue. Like you should read the book to describe it, because the book describes it a little bit better than what I'm saying now. But the thing is is that you have to be real about the mental health issue that you are having. You do. You have to actually look at the symptoms and the behaviors and you have to say that it is what it is and you cannot develop self-esteem if you act badly. You just can't do it. If you want to genuinely respect yourself as a person, then you have to act in a respectable way. You don't have to like fake yourself into respecting yourself if you do things that are respectable, right? So this idea of developing self-esteem despite pursuing extremely destructive behaviors drinking too much or whatever like just being a really crappy friend If you drink too much and you don't pay back people who've given you loans and you are just a really nasty friend and then you turn around and you try to develop self-esteem, it will not work because you can't respect someone who is not respectable. But if you act in a way that is respectable, then you don't have to fake yourself into respecting yourself, because you'll have genuine self-esteem, because you know that you're a good person, self-evidently, because that's the way that you act. Right? And that's like a fundamental teaching of religion, right? That people who are religious and who are evaluating themselves based on the goodness of their actions don't have to spend time wondering if they're good or bad, because they are as good as they were able to follow the commandments.

Excellent and that you really hit a lot of different points that regarding the same point. No, no, no, it was a lot. And the thing is, what you did is you kind of provided a generalized summary of kind of what was in your books. Now, what I'm trying to remember here, was it the banana book that this was all in, or was it the other?

thing. Yeah, it's short stories, so they're all published short stories in one book called Screens in the Ego, which is what my magazine is based off of. But, yeah, the actual short story that I wrote, that's one of the most widely written not that I'm that widely read, but of the stuff that I have written, that one has been more widely disseminated than the other stuff that I've written and it's called Screens in the Ego and it's a short story about. It's a fictionalized version of some real experiences but I changed like I changed a lot of characteristics to preserve privacy and whatever. So the story as it's written isn't true, but the content and the message is true. Right, the underlying content and the concepts are true and it's about how people who are seeking mental health treatment are not really helped. And yeah, that's one of the main books. And that's why is that an important anecdote? Because I developed the courage to write something that was not being written about before and that was kind of considered taboo to write about and there's not really like a standard vocabulary that I could build off of right, there weren't exactly the right words to describe what I was talking about, and yet I tried to depict it. And once I did that, then I could start telling my stories, and the main experience of writing my book for me was saying you know what? Screw everybody. I'm gonna write what I believe is true and that's the reason that I wrote the stories.

Excellent. So when you wrote these stories though, you mentioned it being in an open source magazine. I don't really know what that is. That sounds interesting.

Yeah, yeah, so I the stories are published in a book and there you can buy it at Barnes and Noble or Amazon or wherever you buy your books. I also have a literary magazine where, after I published my book, I was like you know what? I want to give other people a platform to speak their truths, right. And that magazine is just an online magazine that I run and I'm soliciting submissions from people. So like if you, if you wanted to write something, or if any of your listeners said, hey, you know, like this is an idea, that's like I've been thinking about and I really want to grapple with it, but I don't, I don't really know. You know who who would read it or who who would put it up? Send it to me. I have the submission guides on my website, jane Marie arraycom backslash submission guide, and you could send it to me and I, you know I love honoring pieces that are meaningful to people, you know. So if you're writing from an earnest heart, I'd love to put it up.

So, as we continue forward, what is your writing process?

Yeah, that's, that's a good question. I think that my writing process starts with me being angry about something, and then me, instead of staying angry, I go into the experience and I stare at the memory or the idea until I can break down what, what has caused this issue and what? What is the like miscommunication between me and the other person, right? So like what? What do I think about this issue? It was take an issue, whatever issue, and it'd be easier if I gave an example. So I mean, mental health is like the main thing, right. But also I could talk about, like the, the equality between men and women, right, like that's a really big issue. And also like there is like no tolerance in the Middle East for this idea that, like, women and men can essentially perform the same roles, or that they're the same level of, like strong or whatever, like the Middle East just does. The Middle East does not really have a cultural acceptance of Western feminism. And that's not me generalizing about that, that's me stating something that's true, right. So, for a long time, honestly, it's kind of funny. So, like, okay, a lot of professors in universities have problems with talking about Middle Eastern literature because a lot of times it will depict things that are considered wildly inappropriate and not feminist, right and like, instead of just reading the Umayyad poet, that's like a period of history in the Middle East, the Umayyad emperor instead of just like reading him and trying to connect with him on an emotional level for what he's experiencing and thinking, they're like, oh gosh, I don't really know how to reconcile this idea of Western feminism with the Middle East right? So so that always had been like a for four years, when I was learning to read Middle Eastern literature, that was like a source of anxiety for everybody in the room because nobody wanted to say things that came off as rude or insensitive and, at the same time, like we were reading material that was coming from a completely different culture. And so so my story my brother the fanatic, kind of gets at that, because the truth is is that there's a relationship between feminism and the amount of violence that you experience on a day to day basis that that people don't really understand. But this is like inside the US as well as outside the US, like if you just took the US right and you're like, okay, what are the most violent sex of the United States? Like, what, what portions of the population tend to have the most violence right or like see the most violence. Well, there's police, there's people who are in the military, and then there's people who are involved in inner city violence, right, and between the police and the military and people who are involved in inner city violence, even if they have no common like political party or whatever. All three of those groups tend to reject feminism culturally speaking, whereas people who don't really interact in violent areas or see combat regularly tend to not tend to be more feminist. Right, and the the Middle East just has has a legacy of patriarchy where, like I mean so, patriarchy right now has like a Western definition, but before it had a Western definition, it meant like a pre capitalist social formation where, like tribes of people would basically defend themselves against other tribes. Right, it's a decentralized, patrilineal, just this person here, this is the family and this is their, their group, and this is a family and this is their group, and that's kind of how the region works, right. So so, in any region where there is a legitimate chance that, like someone's going to break into your house and do something terrible to you, like you're going to send your men to do it, like you just are like like in a situation where there is a tangible and constant threat of combat, men will be the people who fight that combat and if they are your protection, then they are your authority, because you need protection, and that's just kind of the way that it works, right. So so yeah, basically the idea is just like the story my brother the fanatic kind of brings people back to reality, about like hey, you know, people who are different than you mostly have a reason why, right, and if you just can't understand why anybody would like believe that, then there's probably a fundamental difference in their perspective that's causing them to believe that. And also, just like in the same way that, like anthropology is, is like such a this is a separate thought. Let me pause for a second. Did that make sense? Do you want to declare?

It made. It made a lot of sense and personally I just learned something new because I always thought patriarchy was more gender associated, but also has a deeper meaning to this concept of tribes and those types of things. So also the violence, too. It's quite an interesting thing. What do you think is the reason for that increased violence in areas that might not really support feminism as much?

Yeah. So I think that the reality of violence walks back to feminism really quickly. And as long as you feel protected and safe, and as long as you feel protected and safe, then you know women are smart and capable, just like men. So there's not going to be a compelling situation where, like, a woman cannot do something that a man can do. As long as you are safe, women and men can basically do the same thing. And as long as you are safe, women and men are able to pay taxes. Women and men are able to, you know, engage in politics. Women and men are able to earn incomes. The moment you are not safe, women and men have different roles. Men just fight better. They do, they fight more and they fight better. And they have always fought better and they have always always been the people who like lead armies. They just are. And that's like not me being sexist, that's me talking about 5,000 years of human history. Like the warriors in, like Yoruba, are males. The warriors in the time of Hammurabi, which is like what, 3,000 years before Jesus Christ, males. The warriors in modern China, males the warriors in the all of Western history up through like 1950, literally up through World War II, all the warriors were males, right Like the reason that, like so many cultures throughout so much time, has sent men to fight, because men fight, and that's just the. That's just a reality of the situation, and the only reason that modern America was able to take off on the feminist trajectory. That it did is because people felt extremely safe, because they were living in the country that had the atom bomb, and in the areas that people did not feel safe, they didn't take up feminism that is a very, very interesting piece of insight.

I could probably explain why a lot more first world countries tend to embrace these more liberal new world topics.

Right, exactly.

And I like how you also have different views from other cultures too, because my family is actually from the Rubatribe, where slaves ship to the Caribbean. So that's a very interesting insight. And again, when it comes to wars right now, what is your opinion of what's going on with mine? If I ask Israel and those types of things, Are you your insight? I think would be really, really interesting because, again, this is a long-form conversation. I just like to know yeah, definitely.

So, yeah, I think that the first thing that we need to understand is that there's really no such thing as a Palestinian people, right, and that's something that a lot of people who are on the side of like Arabs don't want like people to know about. Very, very long ago, there was a group of people who did not speak Arabic, who were called Philistines with an F, and then the Ottoman Empire, many other empires, including the Ottoman Empire, came in and the people of the Levant and Lebanon and Syria and Jordan and in the region that is now Israel-Palestine, they were all Arabic-speaking peoples and they had a patriarchal culture that was Patrilineal Muslim and they had. The identity of Palestinian was something that came much, much later, right? So the first thing that you need to understand is the Levant has always, kind of like, been one thing, right? So Israel came in and they said that Israel was created because people were being murdered in Europe and, unfortunately, they needed to be relocated and it was natural to like let them live in their historical homeland, right, and like the right. So what am I saying? So, I'm saying that when they came in, they didn't just offend the Palestinian people, they offended Lebanon and Syria and Jordan and that really reverberated throughout the Middle East and that was like one of the main reasons that there's like a central Arab identity now. So the creation of the state of Israel is one of the like major things that mobilized the Middle East to like think of itself as a united thing, right? So it's not really a conflict between Israel and Palestine. It is, symbolically, a conflict between people of the East and people of the West, almost Just because it was like so fundamental, to excuse me, just because, like, the idea of being full of steamy is not. That's not, that's a made up identity. That's like a Lebanese person saying that they're Phoenician which, by the way, a lot of them do, right, a lot of Lebanese people who don't wanna be associated with the Arab identity. They'll say that they're Phoenician even though they speak Arabic and French. They'll say that they're not whatever. They're like going back to like identities from like ancient times in the Middle East. So, yeah, I think that I don't really have a solution like that I can propose in terms of like understanding like Israel and Palestine. I think that any violence is terrible and I think that both sides kind of believe that the other one started it, but at the same time I do think, ultimately, if the Palestinians laid down their weapons, I think that there would be peace in the region. I don't think, because currently the people who are like, really like prodding right now are Palestinians, right, like with what happened with October 7th, which was really just terrible. And if someone comes into your country, and if someone comes into your country, you kind of have the moral obligation to go in and make sure that they can't like do that again, right, like if someone attacks you, you do have a moral obligation to neutralize them, right. But the problem with this conflict and with so many other prolonged conflicts is that both sides believe that the person who started it was the other side and because of that it's kind of difficult to it's kind of difficult to establish a narrative, because there's two competing narratives. But one thing I will say about it is that, like, the idea of Palestine is not really the issue, that's not the fundamental thing that we're fighting. Like, the thing that is being fought in the Middle East, the difference between Israel and Palestine, it's the entire Arab world trying to say to the Western world hey, get off our land. And the thing is, is that historically, the Jewish people do have a claim to that land, because if you believe in the Bible, then you believe that, like the Bible or the Quran or any Abrahamic faith, then you do know that, like, jewish people were in that land before. So that's, I'm not sure if that's super insightful. Do you have any other questions about that?

Yes, yes, so I do. Do you think this situation is similar to the one going on with Russia and Ukraine, in a sense?

No, no, I don't think that it's similar with Russia and Ukraine, because Ukraine has historically been part of Russia for a very long time, right, so I did watch the interview with Putin and Carlson, but I also knew, like a lot of the stuff before Putin said, what he was obviously going to say, which was that Ukraine was historically a part of Russia. The entire idea of a Russian identity extended to that region far, far before the Soviet Union. And Ukraine, like the language is not, it shares about 60% of the vocabulary of Russian and it's always kind of been part of that empire. So, basically, after the Soviet Union collapsed, russia tried to like make peace with the US, right, and one of the things that they did is they said, hey, can we be part of NATO? And I think it was Bill Clinton who they asked that to, and Bill Clinton was like no, no, you could not be part of NATO. And they're like, hey, but like, we wanna be part of your trade network. And they're like, well, no, you can't. And they're like, hey, you know, like one of the really important like ways that we trade is through the Mediterranean, and the only way to do that is through the ports, like through the Black Sea and in Ukraine. And so they decided that Ukraine was gonna stay a neutral territory, it was gonna be independent from Russia and it was gonna stay a neutral territory. But then, eventually, they made Ukraine part of NATO and they committed a coup the United States the United States committed a coup so that they could establish pro-Western leadership in Ukraine in 2014. And that's part of this like narrative that like no one's talking about. And so basically, they incorporated Ukraine into NATO, despite having previously agreed that Ukraine was gonna stay neutral, which was basically like Black ball, like Russia and Russia had a huge amount of trade between Ukraine and Russia that they decided they were going to tax, because now Ukraine was going to be like a little satellite country, a satellite of the United States, right, and the United States does this all the time. The United States will, like, perform coups all throughout South America, all throughout the globe, actually all the time, and that's how we established the globalist trade network. We did really was through committing pretty serious political atrocities, Excuse me, and Russia knows this and they said, hey, you're not gonna do that in literally the most important part of Russia. So I am kind of on the side of Russia. I'm mostly just like on the side of like not committing coups in Ukraine, and it was just kind of like so sad that the entire Vladimir Putin was like, okay, we have to invade Ukraine because you can't, the United States is not gonna control that little nation. I'm gonna control the little nation. And then, like unilaterally, every single media outlet in the United States was like, oh, you need to support Ukraine and no one in journalism was willing to like call out the facts that, like we did, like metal in Ukraine, we neg on our promise to keep Ukraine neutral so that both Russia and the United States and Western countries could trade, and now a lot of people have died. So are you okay?

Yes, yes, I'm okay. My camera sometimes freezes out very much.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, so you are describing a prime example of what is called framing. That's essentially where the media will set up certain agendas or certain things to push a certain idea. It's called agenda setting fear and a lot of times, depending on what area you're looking at it from, it's going to push out a different type of idea. And look, there's a Syrian website, okay, and I'm just gonna push this out again. They don't support me, but it's called allsidescom and you can look at how media pushes out different messages. You'll have one thing that talks about AI, for example, this one news topic and they would have a very centrist idea on the view that AI detection is a big thing and companies are now making an effort for it right. But then on the more far right end of the spectrum, you have a lot of people that might be more on the side of these big companies looking at AI exception. They're saying they're definitely doing that, but then on the far left, there's a lot of skepticism. So each of them are going to be framed differently, and why? Because they want to manipulate the behaviors that we have. So, again, I'm glad you know, because again, you're one of the many people and again, a lot of political activists well, not many, but a decent amount. They're aware of this. They can pick up that the media wants to manipulate a lot of different messages, you know. So, again, that's definitely you know a very interesting piece of stuff, and you know you're talking about stuff that, again, I'm researching now. You know. So you know, you really really are on top of a lot of this political stuff. So I'm just curious, though are you thinking about? Do you write about politics, do you write about news? Because you remind me a lot of these political speakers you know on places like YouTube that talk about these types of things.

Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate that. Also, I agree that I think that it's so respectable when someone is like you know what I'm gonna get both sides before I render my opinion. And the website was bothsidescom or what. All sides, all sidescom, all sidescom. That's really, really cool. I'm definitely gonna check it out after this. Thank you for letting me and your viewers know about it. Yeah, so I do follow politics a little bit. My husband follows it a lot, so I get to hear a lot through him, which is nice, because then, like, he's the one reading like the terribly long books, and I'm the one like getting the information, which is super helpful. But, yeah, I also do sometimes actually read myself. It's rare but occasional, and I did think that it was important to research the Russia-Ukraine situation and the main thing that I did was hang on. Let me remember it was there's a YouTube channel called the DPA chat that you should check out, because that'll DPA is something that will tell you a lot about Ukraine and like war strategy and stuff. There's also a book. It's about the Faustian. I'm sorry this is going to kill me, faustian failing.

I'm pretty sure screens share is an option Okay.

I can't remember the book. So there's this idea of the Faustian ethic, which is like the fall of the west, and some guy wrote something really profound about it and I read it. But I can't remember, so I'm sorry.

No, I'm familiar with Faust. I think I heard about him in English class In high school. English is not my specialty. I think he's the guy that tried to make a deal. You could kind of explain a little bit if you want to Again a little bit.

So he tried to make a deal, and the idea is that the deal that he made is symbolic of the way that the west lost its soul, because the west kind of sold out in terms of deciding that we would do anything for profits, that we didn't have to care about our people. There was this idea for a while, in the early stages of capitalism and mercantilism, that this was something good for humanity. That was coming from a culture the medieval ages where kings would control you and you had to just do what the king said always or you would die. If the king said that Joe Smith gets to own the salt mine, but he's obligated to give you salt, but he owns the salt mine, and you're like, hey, that doesn't make sense, because he owns it and he's not going to give it to me. You just had to work it out Whatever bizarre, ridiculous thing that satisfied the king. Whatever it was, you just had to do it because he was the central authority. And so there was this idea like, hey, we can take on these transactions as the people, and if we take on these economic transactions, then we can ultimately create a system that works, because we'll act according to our self-interest and it'll create an ecosystem of trade and commerce that ultimately benefits everybody, which is the idea of the invisible hand by Adam Smith and this idea that people can control trade and ultimately, the people who are bringing things that are valuable to people are the ones who are making money, which is just in the sense that if you are bringing value to people, then you have earned that money, and then capitalism just sold out and there is nothing just about inheriting massive amounts of wealth because you own a company that exploits your workers. So that's kind of the critiques of capitalism in the beginning of Karl Marx and the idea that the bourgeoisie are really doing something that is denying a huge amount of people control over their life and agency and the ability to act according to their own self-interest. So that's kind of the idea like the Faust made a deal with the devil. So the idea was like the West sold out when the goal changed from being a fair system to not, and I don't think that anyone would argue that Russia is a fair system. You have to understand that being a serf in Russia in the 1800s was exactly like slavery People could be ripped from their family and sold to a different burger. I think that's what they're called to pay off their lord's debt. And there was no human rights and there was no appeals process and there was just the amount of abuses that they have recorded of some guy like his cattle are starving and he needs to get through the winter, so he lets his cattle graze on public property without a permit and then his children are tortured to death or whatever. That thing happened in Russia really regularly and it was based on fear. They controlled the population based on fear and then in World War I literally one they sent all of their young men to die with no shoes and they sent them on horseback when Germans were bringing machine guns to World War I. So they were like 100 years behind in terms of like technology and war strategy. They also didn't care to properly equip their men, and that was not okay with people. They had a revolution in 1917. And for a moment it really seemed like they were going to do something that emancipated the people and gave them the opportunity to reclaim their own agency and their own self-respect, because being under the thumb of a violent regime it takes away all of your self-respect. And finally they started developing this rhetoric that was like hey, we, the people, are going to do this thing together and basically, it's a terrible tragedy in Russia. It's a terrible, terrible tragedy because the people were like we are the Soviet Union and we believe in equality for all people, and the people who controlled that narrative corrupted it and they established the same authority. They established an equally authoritative regime, granted with less like human rights abuses they are a lot less likely to be like boiled alive in Russia right now, but it's still like they perverted what was supposed to be emancipatory and they used the rhetoric that was like we're all in this together, comrade, you're my comrade, I'm your comrade and they established the exact same structure.

So when we talk about kind of the way different cultures are set up, different cultures are designed and how this all works, you mentioned this idea, that kind of we're going through the opposite to maybe what's happening maybe when we were talking about the history before, with the manifest destiny something now bad, something now that's causing a lot more issues. How do you think these issues maybe could influence the role that authors play? Because I noticed in a lot of these times whether there's good times in America, bad times. How do you think authors could make a change or an influence, no matter how small or how different that may be?

Yeah, I think that authors can help people have a vocabulary for what they're seeing and they can also create an understandable narrative behind what happened to them and why, or what happened to their society and why. And I don't think that that's just what authors can do. I think that anybody who controls the media or controls television or runs a podcast, like you, any person who is a thought leader in their community or who has a single group of people who listen to them in some way, is helping those people rationalize their experiences and giving them the vocabulary to describe it. So I think that authors do play an important role when they're willing to think about things really critically and speak the truth. I also think that authors unfortunately just don't have as wide of an audience as like, say, podcasters right now, because a lot less people are reading, because it takes a lot it's a lot emotionally to like read something and keep your eyes glued to the page. It's a lot easier to watch a movie. I definitely watch more movies than I read, even though I really like reading. I also listen to audiobooks a lot. But the point is that I think that authors are doing the work of like interpreting experiences same as podcasters, and I think that that's really the fundamental value of them.

Excellent and kind of as you sort of move forward with your career and your business. What is sort of the future?

I don't know. That's a really good question. I really hope so. I am trying to get into stand up comedy. I was in my university stand up comedy team. I know that's a really that's a side ball. It's something that's actually really fun for me. I'm going to start like actually I'm moving to New York soon and that's super exciting and I'm going to try to get into certain clubs and kind of like figure that out and feel that vibe and see if I can't like book some interesting shows. It's very likely that I won't be able to book shows, but I'm still going to try. And either way, I think that I'm going to just try to continue to write and if you don't take no for an answer, eventually something will happen. So my goal is to see if I can't maybe get a job and you know it would be crazy if I could get a job at a news program. I'm always going to continue to, you know, run this magazine and accept submissions and at some point I'm going to make my website like even better than it is right now, but I need to hire someone to do that. So definitely check out my website and the stuff that's already on it, because it is really good, Really interesting art like interesting and valuable art that I that like I'm really honored that they were willing to share with me Definitely encourage you guys to submit and and we'll just kind of like try to try to do this thing together.

Definitely, and I think you know you have a really good chance breaking into any field really because again you're, you know, an author, you're bilingual, you're from the Middle East Again. So that kind of puts you in a massive, massive niche. And again, from our interview so far, you're very well read into politics too.

So thank you. Yeah so are there any?

clothes yeah.

Yeah, Go on, no, no. Hopefully. Hopefully other people will see that. Hopefully a hiring manager will say that that's the goal. Thank you.

So so, before we kind of close off this interview, are you ready to close it off now, or yeah?

I don't have anything else. I really appreciate your questions.

No problem. So are there any closing words you'd like to tell the audience or anything that they would like to get from you, and or it's a further improved level?

Yeah, I would say that one, anything that you really need is already inside you and, whatever you're going through, just know that, like, just know that, like, life is life and it will happen, and that ultimately, ultimately, I don't know. I don't have any more profound remarks. My remark is that the philosophy that I live my life by is that everything I need is already inside of me and I hope that. I hope that, whatever you're going through, I don't know I recently read Richard Pryor's autobiography and that man, like, lived a really, really like, dysfunctional life, a really dysfunctional life. He didn't have any control over his emotions. He was like, like, had the development, like the mental, emotional development of a three-year-old his whole life. But the one thing that he said that always got him through like, like, all of the terrible things that happened to him, like him being arrested and him, like you know, having a series of dysfunctional marriages and then eventually him like getting fair degree burns. Whatever he did, the thing that brought him joy was putting sunshine on his face and just being in the sunshine, and that was the last thing that he wrote in his autobiography prior convictions. So these are not my words, these are Richard Pryor's words, but put some sunshine on your face.

All right, so put some sunshine. Okay. So I want to thank you again, jay Marie, for being on the show. This really was a beautiful, beautiful privilege. This definitely, I think, would be a great podcast to push out once again. So, yeah, I will see you all next time.