1. What is your current state of mind?
Open.
2. How do you switch off?
A long drive down a winding highway.
3. What is the trait you most admire in others?
Sincerity.
4. Which living person do you most admire?
Stevie Nicks.
5. What is your greatest extravagance?
I can turn anything into an extravagance if given the liberty, and often do.
6. What is the first thing that you do when you wake in the morning?
A few minutes of complete silence, often with a cup of coffee.
7. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
This is perhaps less a virtue and more just a notion, but it’s that that our stream of consciousness is our ultimate truth.
8. Do you have any daily rituals?
A short drive to a long walk before I begin my work.
9. What do you most like about your appearance?
It has a way of evolving as I do.
10. What does wellbeing mean to you?
Adaptability. I once heard that emotional health can be measured by our flexibility, in the same way that a healthy body can repair itself and respond to its environment, a healthy mind can likewise do the same so as to maintain its full bandwidth of expression. We think of wellness, or being healed, as this perfected state but that would also be too rigid. An inability to grieve, cry, rest, mourn and otherwise express certain aspects of our human experience would sort of be an expression of sickness, too.
11. What is the quality you most like in a person?
Uniqueness, but in a genuine way.
12. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
I once had a few friends make up a game where they were to take a drink each time I said “micro-shift,” “upper limits,” and “Pat.” According to my most recent book edits, my most repeated words are actually “root,” “arena,” “victory,” “meant,” and “growth.”
13. What or who is the greatest love of your life?
Writing.
14. When and where are you happiest?
At the beginning phases of a task I feel is important and yet challenging, for which there is a timeline in which it must be completed, and I am currently devising a plan.
15. Which talent would you most like to have?
Singing.
16. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
I’d like to be normal.
17. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
I have shook the hands of multiple human beings who came to inform me that I had saved them from taking their own lives, and my words had been with them through their darkest hours. I met a woman who could not get out of bed and listened to my podcast to talk her through the morning. I met another who held one of my books in her arms as she went in for chemotherapy. I sent boxes of books and workbooks to a women’s prison where they had begun their own book club with the single copy of ‘The Mountain Is You.’ These are just a few stories, and they are all real. If I die tomorrow, I will go knowing that I helped someone, in some way. That is more than enough for me. I don’t know what else there really is, actually.
18. If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
A bird.
19. Where would you most like to live?
Precisely where I do.
20. What is your most treasured possession?
I have a drawer filled with art and letters from readers.
21. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Seeing no way out.
22. What is your favourite occupation?
Creative director.
23. What is your most marked characteristic?
I think it depends on who you ask. I would hope that it is tenacity.
24. What do you most value in your friends?
The feeling like we’re walking one another home.
25. Who are your favourite writers?
Mary Oliver, Joan Didion, Alan Watts, Cheryl Strayed, Rumi, Jack Kerouac but specifically for “The Scripture of the Golden Eternity,” Marcus Aurelius, more I am failing to think of but will surely remember the minute I’m finished with this interview.
26. Who is your hero of fiction?
Elle Woods. (Yes, I am serious.)
27. Which historical figure do you most identify with?
There are many I admire but I am not sure I see myself in any of them, realistically. Perhaps with a few more decades of intention behind me, I could get there.
28. Who are your heroes in real life?
Anyone who makes the most of what they have.
29. What are your favourite names?
Anything that is becoming to a person, anything that fits their nature.
30. What brings pleasure to your day?
Voice notes.
31. Do you have any products or objects that you can’t live without?
The line between want and need is often blurred for me. I can comprehend the fact that I don’t really need anything other than air and a roof above me and something to eat in order to live, but to be alive, everything feels like a requirement. I need my closet and I need my skincare and I need my computer and my phone and I need the sheets I like on the bed and my favorite perfume and candles and really good food at very good restaurants and the perfect Syrah and a group of friends I love and a very apt playlist and coffee out of a handmade mug. I can live without all of these things, but I don’t care to.
32. Where is your favourite place to wake up in the world?
My own bed, in my own home.
33. What is your motto?
The words you speak become the house you live in.
