Vanessa Cornell on the Transformative Power of Female Friendship at Midlife
Show Snapshot:
We all know that midlife is more fun with friends. But friendship is more than a nice-to-have—female friendships are a balm and a salve, tethering us when the roller coaster of (mid)life threatens to catapult us off the tracks. This week, Katie explores the uplifting power of friendship with Vanessa Cornell, founder of the women's community NUSHU. After experiencing her own breaking point at 35, this Harvard graduate and mother of five built what she needed—a community that lets women unmask and connect deeply. Want friendships that help you squeeze all the juice out of life? Craving relationships that accept even your "darkest, ugliest self?" Listen in for practical wisdom on friend-making, cultivating vulnerability, and why midlife is the perfect time to begin "no-regret living." Start now, beauties! Today is the day!
Transcript:
Vanessa Cornell 0:00
If you give women an opportunity to be in a place where you assure them this is a space where you can just be you, where you can just be unmasked, where you can be honest, where you don't have to pretend—it's like a force as strong as gravity.
Katie Fogarty 0:18
Welcome to A Certain Age, a show for women who are unafraid to age out loud. I'm your host, Katie Fogarty. Today, we're exploring the transformative power of female friendship in midlife with Vanessa Cornell. After graduating from Harvard and working at Goldman Sachs, Vanessa spent a decade raising her five children before experiencing what she calls "a breaking apart of everything she had known." This awakening led her to found NewSu, a women's community centered on wellness and empowerment.
You may be at the critical crossroads many midlife women face—when we can either see life's inevitable changes as loss, or, as Vanessa puts it, the greatest opportunity of our lives to finally write our own rules. We'll explore why connection with other women is essential for navigating the midlife transition, and how our friendships can deepen in ways we might never have imagined in our youth. As a firm believer that midlife is way more fun with friends, I am so excited to explore all this with her today. Welcome to A Certain Age, Vanessa.
Vanessa Cornell 1:25
Thank you so much, Katie. I'm so happy to be here.
Katie Fogarty 1:28
I'm happy you're here too, because we are exploring one of my favorite topics. The women friends in my life have buoyed me up at every single phase of life. It's so critical at midlife also to have our old friends and to create new ones. So I'm very excited for this conversation. I know that you have described midlife as sort of a fork in the road, right? Where we either see change as loss or a great opportunity. And as a starting point, I would love to ask you: when did you first recognize this fork in your own journey?
Vanessa Cornell 2:00
Well, there's a very dramatic moment that happened to me. I was about 35 years old, and I had had five children in the last six years, and I had been pregnant, breastfeeding, or both for eight years. And before that, from zero to 27, I had similarly been hardcore and overachieving in everything that I did in life. And so I got to a place where I had been going, going, going—I was absolutely exhausted—and I hit this point where I realized everything I've ever done has been to meet other people's expectations, and I've been giving my entire life, and I'm done. I literally was like, "I can't anymore. I just can't anymore."
And I think I've spoken to so many women who have gotten to a place in their life where they're like, "I don't know what this is, but something has to change. I cannot go on like this anymore. I just can't go on like this anymore." And so what happens oftentimes is we feel afraid to say that, because we feel like if we start to say that everything that we've built in our lives—some of which are really amazing things, like a career or family or friendships—we're going to blow it up. But frankly, a lot of us feel like blowing it up, because it's gotten to a place where we're so disconnected from ourselves, we don't even know what we want anymore, and we're just exhausted.
And so I got to that place in my life, and I was like, "Something really, really, really needs to change at this point in my life." And it was a dark time. It was an ugly time. And so I think in this midlife crisis that people like to call it—it's really got a bad rap. It's got this rap of being destructive, of being kind of where you're lost and you don't know where you're going. But in a sense, it's destructive of everything that came before, to lay a path for what's coming next. And that's what happened to me.
And so to me, I saw that breaking down as a breaking open and an opportunity to finally discover who I am, what I like, what I want to do, who I want to surround myself with, and how I want to choose to live the rest of my life. I had this moment where I realized that I could possibly get to the end of my life just having put one foot in front of the other for my entire life and never choosing what I wanted to do in my life. And I determined from that point forward that that was not going to be my destiny. I was going to hopefully live a long life, and at the end of my life, I wanted to be surrounded by the people I loved with no regrets. And so that's really how I've been living my life ever since.
And midlife, I think, is this period of time where we have an opportunity to look back and break down everything we don't want and start to build the life we actually want for ourselves without the burden of all of the expectations and rules that have been put on us as little girls and young women and even older women.
Katie Fogarty 5:11
That is so incredibly powerful. And when you use the phrase, sort of breaking down and breaking open, it reminded me of an interview I did with the sort of midlife thought leader, Chip Conley, who's written a wonderful book called Learning To Love Midlife. And he talks about midlife not being a crisis, but a chrysalis. We're really in this sort of transformative state, and a chrysalis sort of breaks open, and this butterfly emerges. So at 35, when you had this epiphany that things needed to look different going forward, what came next? How did NewSu come into being?
Vanessa Cornell 5:46
Yeah, so what happened was—it was ugly. Let me tell you. I'm sure it wasn't like an overnight transition, but it wasn't an overnight transition, and it was hard. And I was confused. I was like lost in the woods. They don't call it a dark night of the soul for nothing. It was hard and I was confused. But what happened was I finally realized that I had been living my life according to other people's rules, and I started to look inside and ask myself some fundamental questions, which is like, "What do I even want to do? What do I even enjoy? How do I feel about this?"
And the world went from black and white to Technicolor, and I had all of this creative energy, and I didn't know what to do with this creative energy. So I started to say, like, "If I'm curious about something, maybe someone else is curious about it." And I started to gather women to learn about meditation and to learn about conscious parenting, and I brought teachers in, and I basically took all of the energy that I had that felt like it needed to go somewhere, and I brought other people into it. And consistently bringing people together to experience this with me was the path that over and over and over again, I chose to bring my curiosity and my energy into my community.
Katie Fogarty 7:02
And so in creating NewSu, what surprised you most about the needs and maybe the desires that other women expressed once given the sort of safe space of this sort of women's circle, this women's conversation, the retreat, the evening, the community? What did you learn when women were open and sharing?
Vanessa Cornell 7:20
Well, I'll never forget my first speaker was Dr. Shefali, and she came into my living room and she met with a number of women. I live in New York on the Upper East Side, and she gave a presentation on conscious parenting. And afterwards, she said to me, "Vanessa, I'm really surprised. I'm really surprised at how open these women are. It's not what I expected."
And I think what I realized was, if you give women an opportunity to be in a place where you assure them, "This is a space where you can just be you, where you can just be unmasked, where you can be honest, where you don't have to pretend"—it's like a force as strong as gravity. People want to be in that space, and people want to connect to each other in that honest way. But the world is a scary place, and people are afraid of being judged. But if you can create that space of non-judgment, where people feel safe, people want to connect to other humans in that way, and everyone is capable of it.
So the thing that shocked me the most was the inevitability of people feeling like they could open up and connect to other people very, very quickly, if you just created the right conditions for it. If you set up the right premise, if you shared with people what your intention was and how you expected them to show up, and you give people the permission to be honest and open in that space, people are dying to be honest, people are dying to be open. People are dying to connect with other people. And so as long as you create the conditions for it, almost everybody rises to the occasion and wants to be there in that space.
Katie Fogarty 8:53
And I think some of the conditions are, at least in my own experience, like being in a room full of women who are going through something similar. And I've seen this in the midlife space, the menopause space. I am thinking so clearly of being at an apartment in New York City, when one of the co-founders of Alloy Women's Health gathered a group of women to share what she was building with her co-founder. And it was 30 women in the room, and everyone was sharing their menopause stories. And I got in the elevator to exit, and it was only like an eighth-story elevator, and two women and I were like talking about our HRT and our sex life and our rage during our early days of menopause. And then the elevator doors opened and we walked off into the night, still two strangers, but who were so just like a pot boiling over, ready to share our experience with one another, because we recognized in each other that we had this experience.
Vanessa Cornell 9:55
And I mean, it's just—it's so fundamental that people want to be known and want to be seen. You can't hold all your stories inside of you. You have to share. This is how we are built, fundamentally as human animals. We saw this during COVID—like we are not meant to be isolated. We're meant to live in community with other people, and we can't thrive without it. But so many of us hold so much of ourselves inside for fear of being judged or cast out. The only thing stronger than this drive to be known and seen is the drive to belong and not be cast out.
Katie Fogarty 10:33
And so is that what gets in the way? Loneliness is an epidemic we keep reading about. COVID is such a great reminder of how we suffered as people in a community when we were forced to be apart from one another. But why does loneliness still persist when bans are done, we can be with one another, but yet loneliness does still persist as a condition. What do you think is the reason why?
Vanessa Cornell 11:01
Yeah, because being in the same room as somebody else, or being surrounded by people is not the same as not being lonely, right? You can be surrounded by people and still feel very, very lonely. Because to me, loneliness is caused by an inability to show yourself to somebody. The way that you connect with somebody is to show them who you actually are, and they see who you actually are, and they show you who they actually are. And so you and the other person are connected in a human way.
But we, for so many reasons, including technology and social media and urbanization, don't show each other our true face. Don't show each other our true selves. And so when your avatar is interacting with somebody else's avatar, or your curated version or your costumed version of yourself is interacting with someone else's costumed version of themselves, it doesn't count. It doesn't help. It doesn't make us feel connected. So you can be in a room full of people having conversations at work, surrounded by people, and still feel lonely because the only person really interacting with other people is not the true you.
Katie Fogarty 12:12
Vanessa, we're heading into a quick break, but when we come back, I want to explore ways that we can allow our truer, more authentic selves to surface and get the connection that we desire and need for our flourishing. We'll be back in just a minute.
Vanessa, we're back from the break. When we went into it, we were talking about how we can be online, presenting ourselves in one way. We can be in real life with sort of a facade or a veneer, because we don't want to reveal our true selves, like true connection requires that vulnerability that you identified. So for somebody who is feeling like maybe they're struggling with this, what would be a prompt or a tool you might offer them to allow themselves to become more vulnerable and to create the connection that they crave?
Vanessa Cornell 13:01
Yeah, first of all, I would say, if you're feeling this way, I want to just acknowledge that this is not an easy thing to do. You're not doing anything wrong. You're just being a human being, right? Some people might say to you, "Well, just be yourself." It seems like the easiest thing, but it's actually kind of the hardest thing to do, because what happens when you put yourself out there, your true self, the actual person you are, and somebody potentially rejects you or doesn't like it, is that you've put your whole heart on the line. You've put your actual self on the line. If you put some version of yourself that's not really you on the line and someone rejects it, it's like, "It's fine, it's not actually me."
So I first just want to acknowledge that that vulnerability feels risky for a reason, because it's your whole heart on the line, and it's scary. I acknowledge it, but it's the only way to really find true connection. And so what I would suggest is take a calculated risk. Find a person who you can kind of acknowledge like, "Hey, I think I trust this person. I think this person likes me." And think to yourself, "What's on my heart that I really want to share?" And say to this person, "What is something that's been like held inside for me, a burden that I'd really like to set down? And can I share it with this person?"
And if you still feel like it's too risky to share that, ask yourself, "What is the worst thing that can happen if I share it with this person?" And usually the worst thing that happens is they will reject me, or they won't love me, or they'll judge me, or they'll think I'm a terrible person. And I will say that time and time again when I've done this with people in my life, or I've done this in groups, almost all the time, the opposite happens. Almost all the time, the person says, "Wow, thank you so much for trusting me with that. I feel so much closer to you." And so it's ironic, but the thing that makes us think that people are going to push us away is actually the thing that draws people to us—sharing our thoughts and our fears and our worries with other people, our burdens with other people.
Katie Fogarty 15:03
And our messy and imperfect selves that allow the other person to think to themselves, "Oh, thank God I'm not the only one."
Vanessa Cornell 15:10
Absolutely, absolutely. And another thing is, if you have trouble doing this, one thing I always remind people of is it is a gift to the other person for you to show your messiness to them, because then they get to also not be perfect.
Katie Fogarty 15:25
It's a two-way street. I have a question for you about the notion of "be yourself," which I understand—that kind of advice is hard to practice maybe. But I want to ask you about the question of self versus selves, because I feel like often in life, maybe we go to work and we have a work self and we're a different self with our partner or our intimate friends that we've come up through the years with, and our neighbors, and we do have different ways that we present ourselves to the world, sort of based on the audiences that we're with. And so how do we navigate that when we feel like being vulnerable in different spaces can be challenging given the audience?
Vanessa Cornell 16:08
Absolutely. And listen, we are women. We contain multitudes. There are so many, right? I mean, we tend to be a lot of things to a lot of people, and not only in terms of our identity, but also in terms of our self and what we want and what we need. I just was sharing the other day that I feel some days like I'm two people in one body. Part of me is so ambitious. I want to build things and take over the world and build an empire, and I'm excited about all these projects I'm into. And then like, part of me just wants to sit in bed and crochet and knit and do crafts and snuggle my kids. And I can't reconcile the two parts of me that live inside all the time where it's like part of me wants to do this and part of me wants to do that, and they're completely opposite things. And I think the key is to acknowledge that we do contain multitudes, and it's a great thing.
Katie Fogarty 17:05
We have that push and pull that pulls us back and forth. First, I want to talk about crocheting and knitting. I just read an article that I think the title was "Grandma Hobbies Are Good for Your Mental Health," and it was talking about the power of knitting and gardening and crocheting and doing sort of hand work, stuff that is so important to sort of center your brain.
Vanessa Cornell 17:28
Yeah, I'm super into grandma hobbies, and I'm super into puttering.
Katie Fogarty 17:33
You're also into surfing, because I've seen that on your Instagram. So you do contain multitudes. Your hobbies are varied.
Vanessa Cornell 17:39
My hobbies are varied. So we contain multitudes in what we want. We contain multitudes in our identity, but we also contain multitudes in terms of how we present to the world and who we are inside. And so one of the things I think that really trips us up is when we start to decide there's a hierarchy of the different parts of ourselves, that some parts of ourselves are the good parts, and some parts of ourselves are the bad parts.
And so I'll often prompt women with a question: "What are the three parts of you that you like to share with people, the three personality traits or aspects of you that you like to share with people?" And people will often say, like, "I'm kind, I'm hard working, and I'm smart," or whatever they choose. And then I'll say, "What are the three parts of you that you don't like to share with people?" And then it gets a little bit dicier, right? People are like, "Oh, well, I don't really like the fact that I am depressed sometimes. I don't really share that with people. I don't really like the fact that I'm jealous sometimes. I don't like to share that with people."
And so I think part of it is we've decided which parts of ourselves we're going to show to people and which parts of ourselves can't be shown, shouldn't be shown, we're ashamed of. And we put those parts away, we squirrel them away in a dark corner, and don't show them. And then when we come to people, what we don't realize is we're not coming with our full selves. We're only coming with part of us. We're only coming with a shiny part of us.
Katie Fogarty 19:05
Vanessa, that is fascinating. I'm thinking about this hierarchy myself, and I'm already taking inventory in my mind of the three parts that I share and the three parts that I don't. And I actually just had the pleasure of having a repeat guest on the show, Dr. Judith Joseph, who is a well-known—she's amazing—mental health expert, and she is out with a book called High Functioning, which is about hidden depression, and it really focuses on the trap of productivity and the "good on paper" life, and just like the shiny life, the resume, all of these things, and we don't allow ourselves to be fully integrated. And it creates this sort of depression because we feel like what you just outlined—the parts of our lives or personality traits that we have sort of deprioritized or have shame over. When we push that down, what bubbles up is this sort of sense of depression and maybe living a false life and negative mental consequences.
Vanessa Cornell 20:09
Absolutely. And I think when we decide that we're going to take a part of ourselves that exists in us, and we're going to disown it, that we're just going to like try and cut it out of ourselves, ignore it, pretend it's not there, and then we have this lingering feeling that something's off, something's wrong, and oftentimes it's that part of you that you've disowned, that you're shaming, and you're like, "Why can't I love myself? Why am I not happy? Why do I not feel lovable?" It's because we've already decided that there's a part of us that's not lovable and that we're just gonna sort of say, like, "I'm just gonna try and wish you away." But it's still in us. It's still part of us, because we are humans with a full range of human emotions, not just the good ones.
So one of the things that I think is the most powerful antidote to this is to find a person with whom you can be the ugliest version of yourself. And I call these my "shame spiral friends." People will say great friends are the ones that are there for you when you're down. I agree. Better friends are the friends that are there for you when you're up, right? The friends that are still cheering for you when you have a huge success. Like we all know those friends who are totally there for you when you're down in the dumps, but if you're doing well, they're kind of like conspicuously absent.
To me, there's a third tier. The third tier is friends to whom you can show your darkest, ugliest, nastiest, pettiest, most jealous self, and they're like, "Thank you for trusting me with that. I love that part of you as much as the kind, loving, shiny, highest self version of you."
Katie Fogarty 21:56
Vanessa, your work really is centered around the idea that connecting to other women is essential for our mental health, like you just outlined how we can share our sort of most vulnerable, darkest selves with somebody. When we have strong friendships, we are happier, we are more confident, we're more energized. These are all key to sort of moving through midlife and making the most of this phase of life. I am curious if you have a particular story of a female friendship that helped transform a challenging period in your life, maybe the period of time that you talked about earlier, or even a separate one.
Vanessa Cornell 22:32
I mean, I'll say there's a lot of stories of female friendship, but I'll start from the beginning, from my childhood all the way up to 35 where I actually didn't have really any true friends. Now, what I mean by that is not that I didn't have great people around me who wanted to be my friend, but I just never showed myself to anybody, like I never confided in anybody. And I remember my husband saying to me, like, "You don't have any friends, Vanessa." And I was like, "What are you talking about?" I was kind of offended. And he was like, "You don't really actually share anything with anybody. You don't confide in anybody."
And so I realized that I had myself basically created a world where I had no friends, and I started an active practice of saying, like, "I am going to tell the truth out loud, as ugly as it is, to as many people as possible." And so I want to say to people, if you feel like you're in this position, I turned it completely around from 35 on.
Katie Fogarty 23:27
What do you think made it so that in your earlier days that you weren't able to be vulnerable and open?
Vanessa Cornell 23:33
You know, I think it had to do with the way I was raised. There was a "you don't share your dirty laundry outside of the family," which I think a lot of people can probably relate to. Feelings weren't really openly discussed in my family. It was never modeled for me. And so I kind of thought that you just had to kind of hold it all inside, that you didn't really talk to people about things. And I had a huge fear of getting in trouble or being rejected, as I'm sure a lot of women can relate to.
And so, you know, I think it was a confluence of both family of origin and cultural messages that it's like "you will be rewarded for being a pretty, overachieving, pleasant, friendly, shiny self. So go do that. That is the key to being loved and accepted in this world." And I did it very successfully. And I got all of the external measures of success from following that model. And I never had a different model shown to me. And I found myself at 35 years old, on the brink of losing my marriage, completely devastated and spiraling out of control, and I didn't tell a single person.
Katie Fogarty 24:34
Wow, that's so powerful.
Vanessa Cornell 24:36
I didn't tell my mother, my father, my brother, a friend—zero. I didn't tell anyone. It didn't occur to me to tell anybody. It didn't occur to me to look to anyone for support or to talk about it with anyone. And I look back on my childhood, and there were hard things I went through, and I think to myself, "Who did I talk to about it?" Nobody. I just held it. It's not even that I was like, "Oh, I'm afraid that someone's going to reject me." It was totally unconscious. I just never told anybody anything. I held it all inside.
Katie Fogarty 25:23
And did you find somebody at that time who was able to help you let it out?
Vanessa Cornell 25:28
I mean, listen, anybody who was around me, I was telling because I was like, "I cannot live like this anymore. I must share things out loud." And so I started NewSu. I was doing groups. I was talking to people. I was seeking people out. I was having every conversation I possibly could have. So it was an inflection point where I decided that my practice—my practice for the rest of my life—was going to be truth telling. My practice was going to be saying things out loud that people might be thinking in their heads, people might be feeling, but wouldn't occur to them to say out loud, because I needed it for myself.
And as I started saying these things out loud, and I do it on my Instagram, and I do it in speeches, I started saying these things out loud, people would say, "Oh my gosh, thank you for your honesty. Thank you for saying that thing that I've been thinking in my head. But I really thought I was the only person thinking it."
Katie Fogarty 26:23
It's so interesting. I'm nodding my head listening. I've heard this theme repeated on the show from other guests. I've experienced this sort of at different phases of my own life, where I'm more willing to be vulnerable and open, and then there are times where I feel like there are things I don't want to be talking about and sharing. I just told the story to you earlier in this recording about how I had this very funny elevator ride where this woman and I were like—and the doors open and like, you know, we part, and we walk out into the colossus of New York strangers, but who were put into this little space of intimacy and sharing.
And it's so powerful, and it's one of the reasons why I do the show. I get to connect with women, and I get to pull my audience in, and they listen and DM and message me because they feel seen and supported by what's shared on this show by all the amazing women that come on it. And now that you're in this moment of telling and sharing and connecting and community, what are the changes that you've seen in your own life based on your new way of practicing being and your truth telling?
Vanessa Cornell 27:29
Oh my gosh, life is so fun. I mean, I can't tell you how much energy I have, how inspired I feel, how connected I feel. When I tell you, I felt half dead, and now I feel alive. The only way I can describe it is like a full aliveness. And so much of that has to do with my relationships with women.
You know, a lot of times I do things, and then I look back and I sort of recognize what I did in the moment and why I did it, and maybe as I'm doing it, I don't really acknowledge it or realize what I'm doing. I'm just trying to fill a need inside of me. And so in a sense, I was creating groups where I would say, "Okay, here are the ground rules of these groups. We're not going to give any advice. It's confidential. We're not going to judge each other. I'm going to give you a prompt, and everyone's just going to share what's in their heart and on their mind, and you're going to speak from your own experience."
And these groups were so powerful, and in retrospect, I think it was that creating of the container of safety that was able to create this power. And now I'm looking back at what I've been doing for the last 10 years, basically gathering women in spaces like that to support each other and realizing that I created what I needed, which is, I'm a mom. I've got five kids. I take care of a lot of people in my life, and all I want is to be mothered and taken care of the way I take care of others. And the only people I recognize who can do that for me are the other people who know how to mother, and that's my women friends. And whether they are biological mothers or not, I'm talking about the energy of mothering. It's like, "Who can I go to who is going to care for me? Listen to me. Be there for me, hold me, hold space for me in the way that I know how to do for others."
And I've been married for a long time, and I love my husband, and he's absolutely amazing, but he doesn't have that energy that the women have for me, and I need that in my life. And so what I realize now is, for the last 10 years, I've basically been creating this group of support with women friends, intentionally through dinners I give, or events I do, or activities I do. I'm like the anti-gatekeeper of all the stuff I like. Like, I've taught so many women to surf, and I've taught so many women to crochet, because I'm like, "I want you to like all the things that I like to do, so that we can do it together." Because all I want to do is hang out with my girls.
Katie Fogarty 30:07
Exactly. You're like, "More people to be with and to love the things that I love."
Vanessa Cornell 30:11
Yep, I love that.
Katie Fogarty 30:13
First of all, something that you said jumped out at me. You said, when you are in these circles and you ask people to share, one of the rules, one of the sort of ground rules is to not give advice. And that hopped out at me, because I've had a wonderful guest on the show who's one of my closest and dearest friends, a woman named Lisa McCarthy, who's written a book called Fast Forward, and she does a lot of trainings at large companies. I don't want to get into like describing it, but she works like Facebook and Meta and Google and like all these massive companies giving sort of like a whole life training for creating an extraordinary life, basically.
And one of the practices of the framework that she teaches is this notion of helping somebody "clear," and that's when somebody is experiencing a moment of anxiety or stress or tumult in their lives, and they come to you and they share it to sort of clear it from them. But one of the ground rules of that is you do not give them advice. People do not need to be told what to do, how to live their lives, unless they're asking for it, unless they say, "Yep, can you help me figure this out? What would you do? What is your advice?" But if you're not hearing that from either the friend that's clearing with you, or, even more importantly, your child, to come in and tell them what to do and how to be and how to live their life, can feel so—I think alienating. And that, for me, is one of the hardest parenting lessons to absorb. And I feel like I'm better at it with my friends, like I'm surrounded by amazing women, and I don't need to tell them how to live their lives, because they're already doing an incredible job. But I think with our children, it can be very hard not to be in the position of, like, "I know better," or—
Vanessa Cornell 31:59
Yeah, it's really hard, and it's a concept that I call "holding space"—not just me, it's not my word, but that's what I call it, holding space. And I think it's one of the most powerful and valuable and underdeveloped skills that we have.
Katie Fogarty 32:12
And how would you define holding space?
Vanessa Cornell 32:17
Holding space is basically letting somebody have their experience and share what's up for them without letting your experience insert itself in, right? And so it's like being so comfortable and steady in yourself that you allow somebody else to have their experience. So let's talk about kids, for example. So somebody comes home from school and is like, "Oh, my God, these girls, they are so mean to me, and they cast me out of the group, and I'm so upset, and they're bullying me, and they're horrible," and the first thing you want to do is be like, "