Hope Comes to Visit
Hope Comes to Visit is a soulful podcast that holds space for real stories, honest conversations, and the kind of moments that remind us we’re never alone.
Hosted by author, speaker, and former TV journalist-turned-storyteller Danielle Elliott Smith, the show explores the full spectrum of the human experience — from the tender to the triumphant. Through powerful interviews and reflective storytelling, each episode offers light, connection, and presence for anyone navigating the in-between.
Whether you’re grieving, growing, beginning again, or simply craving something real, Hope Comes to Visit will meet you right where you are — with warmth, grace, and the quiet belief that even in the dark, transformation can take root.
New episodes drop every Monday and Friday, so you can begin and end your week with a little light, reflection, and hope.
Hope Comes to Visit
Back to School: Dr. Gina Barreca on Hope, Grief and How Laughter Gives Us the Mic
Humor doesn’t just make us laugh—it hands us the mic. In this episode, Dr. Gina Barreca—award-winning professor, cultural critic, and bestselling author of Gina School—shows how wit turns grief into agency and outsiderhood into belonging. From losing her mother young to pioneering gender-and-humor studies, Gina traces the path where jokes become bridges and stories transform shame into connection.
We dig into how many women use humor differently—not as a weapon, but as an invitation—and why inclusive laughter thrives in everyday places (yes, even the women’s restroom). Gina is both bold and practical: you can’t live on other people’s praise, and outward confidence is not the same as inner self-esteem. The real fix? Steady self-kindness, cleaning up old messes, and the courage to claim your story.
Gina also takes us inside Gina School, an anti-AI, hand-crafted collaboration with a talented former student—pairing distilled lessons with pen-and-ink illustrations to prove that cross-generational creativity can be both human and timeless. We end with a grounded definition of hope: the belief that change is possible—and often better than we expect.
If you’ve ever felt like the “away team,” this conversation offers language, laughter, and a map back to yourself.
Connect with Gina on her website: GinaBarreca.com
Read more from Gina on Psychology Today.
And head right to grab your copy of Gina School here.
Thank you for listening to Hope Comes to Visit. If this episode resonated with you, please follow, rate, and share the show — it helps others find their way to these conversations.
New episodes drop every Monday and Friday, so you can begin and end your week with a little light and a lot of hope.
For more stories, reflections, and ways to connect, visit www.DanielleElliottSmith.com or follow along on Instagram @daniellesmithtv and @HopeComestoVisit
My humor uh was uh really um born and developed um from a sort of tough childhood. Um I lost my mother uh pretty young. She was ill. Uh she died when I was 16. And um I'm sorry. Thank you. And it was a loss that it's taken um a very long time to process because especially at 16, you don't know what's going on and you don't know how to deal with it.
SPEAKER_01:Hi friends, welcome to Hope Comes to Visit. I'm Danielle Elliott Smith, here for the tears, the belly laughs, and the grace in between. If you've ever found yourself wondering about hope for humanity or wishing everyone you knew could go to school to be the very best humans, I have the answers for you today with our most extraordinary guest, Dr. Gina Barecca. Gina Barecca is amazing. Board of Trustees, distinguished professor of English literature at the University of Connecticut, and winner of UConn's highest award for teaching, is the author of 10 books and editor of 17. You've seen her on PBS's American Masters, The Today Show, CNN, The BBC, and Oprah. You've heard her on every NPR in the galaxy, including This American Life. You've read her in The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Cosmopolitan, Forbes, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Harvard Business Review, and Psychology Today, where she has almost 8 million views. Her new beautifully illustrated book is Gina School, a graduate of Dartmouth College, Cambridge University, and the graduate center of the city of University of New York. Gina lives in Connecticut, and she is here with us today. Gina, did I did I cover everything? I I'm I'm confident there's going to be more we're going to talk about, but did I did I hit the highlights? You did a great job.
SPEAKER_03:And people should know I make a really good lasagna. Um, which, you know, if they buy enough copies, I'll FedEx it. So you know what?
SPEAKER_01:I'm on my way over.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, that's great. There's always enough. I always have a lasagna. Every three months I make batches of lasagna because there's no reason to make one lasagna at a time, right? You have to No, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:Lasagna has always been one of my favorites. And I and I feel so if people are listening to us, they don't have the ability to see your fantastic office. So I'm going to encourage people to head to YouTube as well so they can watch and see how gorgeous your office is and how beautiful, how beautiful you are. And I I swear I want to just come sit in your office. It's as as colorful and as rich as I could tell your personality is.
SPEAKER_03:Oh God, I would like that um on a blurb, please. And then I can have a bait on t-shirts and stationary. Danielle, that's just great.
SPEAKER_01:So no, I thank you so much for being here. You know, there's there's so much that I want to want to talk about, and we can delve right into the beauty and the hope that is Gina School. But I I said in in the intro, you know, one of the things we like to do on Hope Comes to Visit is we laugh and we cry. And and I have a feeling that we're we're gonna do a lot of of laughing here. But um, so how did you find yourself in the realm of writing books from this career in in teaching?
SPEAKER_03:Well, I mean, the the humor preceded everything else. And so that's what's led to my focus on humor, which is both uh what I write about in in books for a general uh reading a bunch, you know, and and then it started out with as an academic, you have to get you have to write these scholarly books, which establish your position in an academic world and also sort of show what your footprint is going to be for future generations. Like if I'm I was an early uh uh sort of researcher in the idea that there are differences between men and women's humor. And uh they people, I I remember when I was going to write my dissertation uh for the PhD, and one of my beloved professors, a great guy named Gerhard Joseph, um, who ends up being my advisor, and he said a very typical thing. I bet a lot of women, but also some men, have heard a version of like, how can you say that there's a gender difference in humor? Don't you think somebody else would have realized this? You think you're the first one to ever see something like this? If there was that, there would have already been publications on it. And I'm going, like, I don't think so. I I really think I got an argument here to make. And basically that became both my first academic book, uh, which was called Untamed in Our Bash, Wayne State University Press, God bless them. And then it became a best-selling um trade book called They Used to Call Me Snow White, but I drifted, uh, women's strategic use of humor. And basically, it could be summed up. What's the difference between men and women's humor? Is that women hate the three stooges. Not all women, but most women hate the three stooges. Um, you do not see women in professional settings, at bridal showers, during the events, uh, going up to each other and going, nya, nya, nyah. We are not trying to poke each other in the eye. We don't smack each other across the forehead. We don't make farting noises as a way to bond.
SPEAKER_01:Right? So we don't have bathroom humor. I mean, I think that, and I think this is so beautiful. I've never had this conversation on this level, but it's that fifth grade boy humor has never entertained me. I I don't fall into I love rich, witty language humor. And this is why, I mean, my daughter is smart funny. She is like one-liners get me every time. People who are quick, and I find that a lot of women are that way. And they can do it without necessarily without being disparaging, right? And that's a huge part. Yeah. That's a huge part of it. I I find that there is less uh mocking of other people and more uh just straight uh zingers without taking you taking you out at the knees.
SPEAKER_03:I think it's uh what you're you're focusing on is absolutely essential, that women's humor is inclusive. Women's humor, and it's it's one of the pages from Gina School uh that John did such a great illustration of, is that what women are looking for is it in most interactions in the world, but especially when it comes to humor, is a sense that we're not nuts and we're not so we're not alone. That's it. We're not nuts and we're not alone. So that when we're talking about bathroom humor, it takes women. Tell me if this is your experience. It takes women about 13 seconds in a bathroom for three women who have never met to start laughing. There is always laughter coming out of the women's room. Now, which is why we always go together. Right, but there is also rarely laughter coming out of the men's room. And when there is laughter coming out of the men's room, we should worry. You ever been right?
SPEAKER_02:Well, they're in and out as fast as they can.
SPEAKER_03:Well, they're peeing in a trough. I mean, right, you know, we're there where women are saying, Oh, I have a headache, and another woman is coming over. Do you want aspirin? She opens her 500-pound bag and she's going, I know I have aspirin, I have buffin, I have motrin. Is it allergy related? I have pseudoped, I have actafed.
SPEAKER_01:I'm out of toilet paper. Do you have any? Can you pass it down from the very end? Right.
SPEAKER_03:And the jerky doesn't have toilet paper. There you hear people going, I don't have toilet paper, I don't have tissues, but I have two fives for 10. Right. Exactly.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly, right? This is see, and this is this is amazing. So I I want to talk about Gina School because let's start with the reason you wrote Gina School, because I I loved the intro and the dedication, because I think that we, and this goes to the the intro I did. We we and I and I think this is I almost I just got chills. I think this is extraordinarily uh timely in that we find ourselves in a place right now where we are inundated with a lot of bad news, a lot of where is the humanity, a lot of damn, I I thought people at their core were good people. And I I do believe people are good, and sometimes we need the reminder, right? So I I suppose this is an opportunity to say, hey, if if you think somebody needs the reminder, you can go ahead and send them this episode because Gina, you're gonna remind them. Um and and they can, if they don't get enough in the episode, they they should go buy the book because this is something they can pass along to everyone too, because this is this is a book that I want on my coffee table, right? So while people are are sitting in my home, they can be reminded of those little pieces of of good. So let's start with the the the reason you wrote the book and and why you think this is something we need.
SPEAKER_03:I'm gonna uh that was beautiful, thank you. Um, and I I take that in, and it means a lot to me because I I do hope that Gina School is about starting conversations and and starting from funny places, but also from some hard places. Um my humor uh was uh really um born, developed um from a sort of tough childhood. Um I lost my mother uh pretty young. She was ill. Uh she died when I was 16. And um Gina, I'm sorry. Thank you. And it was a loss that it's taken um a very long time to process because especially at 16, you don't know what's going on and you don't know how to deal with it. And also, in retrospect, I realized that my mother was what we would now sort of identify as clinically depressed. She was very sad. Uh, she was French-Canadian, um, and so uh raised me, as many immigrant mothers do, uh in not a mother tongue. Um, she taught me and my brother, again, I'm 68 years old. Uh, so in those days, um parents who came uh with English is not their first language, were encouraged to speak to their children only in English. So my older brother and I lost out on learning Italian and French. So that the only, uh for me at least, the only um the only things that I can say in Italian and French are the things you can't say in front of the kids, because they would argue in their native languages. So I can swear up and down, um, which has turned out to be useful on the streets of Paris and Rome. But I'll bet then if somebody asks me for directions, I got nothing to say. No, capitale, and they're looking at me because I look like I'm out of a Follini movie, and they don't believe that I don't speak, then they yell at me in Italian. So it becomes, again, a way of connecting until they understand that I really don't speak. So my mother um felt isolated. She she moved down to live in Brooklyn, New York with my father's big Italian family. And they were lively and they were loud, but they weren't really accepting of this little green-eyed, blonde-haired French-Canadian woman. And um, and I think she felt um as if she was in exile much of her life. Um, we we didn't have money, so she couldn't go back to Canada very often. And I think um she uh she took an early exit out of her life. It's hard to be the away team. Yeah, huh? What a good way of putting it. Yeah. It's hard to be what a that's a brilliant way of putting it.
SPEAKER_01:And you said that to other people about well, so I'm I've been the away team my entire life. I'm actually Canadian by birth. I'm I'm I'm a dual citizen. I'm not French Canada, but um Toronto. Yep. Um, I'm Canadian by birth, dual citizen, and I have, and it's been a long process and a lot of work to understand how I've operated, and a lot of the struggles that I've had have been as a result of identifying as the away team. So I grew up um in Los Angeles. We moved to the States when I was five, uh, but moved to Missouri. And um, I'm in recovery and I was in treatment at one point, and my I had a therapist look at me and say, Your true addiction is not to alcohol, your addiction is to uh believing that it's your job to live in uh being the outsider. And you are so addicted to being the outsider, you married into a relationship that meant you would permanently be the one on the outside. And so my ex-husband always sports metaphors was was you're the away team. And so that's where the away team comes from.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, actually, that's that's such a smart, precise summary of that feeling of always being the outsider, which is uh again, uh a lot of what Gina School is about, because I have always felt um like the outsider, but um, in fact, there's uh I'll see while we're talking if I can find it. But the older I get, the more I realize that all of the people who I thought were the insiders also felt like the outsiders. I was the first girl in my family to go to college, or I think to graduate from high school in a timely fashion. It was not what girls in my family did. It was not expected of them, and it was looked at rather suspiciously. And so I'm I was one of the first women at Dartmouth College in 1975. Um, I'll just say It's extraordinary. Well, they weren't expecting me, and I wasn't expecting them. And it was quite a blind gate. And um, so I get there, and in 1975, I look like every girl from my neighborhood. I have waist-length black hair, I have tight t-shirt, I have black jeans, I have fry boots, I look like a hooker, right? But on a good day, I look like Janice Joplin. The other girls on campus, many of them were alumni daughters, they had brothers there, they had they knew of the culture. I had no idea.
SPEAKER_01:It was a very 70s proper, I imagine. And you were very edgy.
SPEAKER_03:I had Ivy, you know, it was this Ivy League, and there were people who I thought they were named after the buildings until I realized the buildings were named after them. They came from families. I thought they named you after the dining hall. And they're like, my grandfather built the dining hall. The dining hall is named after me. I'm like, oh, that's funny. Do you get extra dessert? You know, I mean, it was just it was a different kind of thing. But so um what I realized this is on page 59 of Gina's wall, is when even during those moments when we're feeling desperately, despairingly alone, we are kind of kidding ourselves. If only we could see it. Looking around, we could at any moment encounter 40 million other desperately alienated outsiders chanting exactly the same mode of dejection. We're like a conga line of alienated outsiders. I mean, I just got elected to be the class secretary. I'm now a class officer at this place that I felt absolutely rejected by one of my books is called Babes in Boyland, a personal history of co-education in the Ivy League. When I was there, guys would come up and say, When all grandfathers went here, there were no women. And for three years I tried to make an argument about the usefulness of co-education. Not everywhere, I think there should be same-sex colleges, but at these places that are really just the entryways to the hallways of power and American and international culture, blah, blah, blah. Nobody listened. By the third year, when they said all grandfathers went here, there were no women. I said, when your grandfathers went here, there were no window lights. I said, sometimes things get better. And they would laugh, and maybe this is what you were talking about, your daughter doing, because you realize that if you get somebody to laugh, for that moment, there's a bridge. Right. They understand, they couldn't laugh if they didn't understand your point. If they don't get it, they don't laugh. But for that moment, if they're laughing, you got them.
SPEAKER_01:And you've created a bridge too, and you've also said in your own way, I'm not interested in you belittling me. Right. Yes. I'm thank you, thank you for your point that isn't a point. I'm not interested. Sit at a different table. This table is for humans and funny ones at that. And clearly you don't qualify.
SPEAKER_03:So, so no, and so humor has always been for me a way to protect myself, uh, to get a sense of control of agency over the situation when I'm feeling um like I need to make what I see humor, and I think this is where having read some of your work and and seen, you know, the compassion that you offer, the generosity you offer the world, I see humor at its best as an act of redemption. That humor lets you get your deposit back on the terrible stuff that's happened to life. Uh, because humor um humor allows you to make something that happened to you into a story that you tell. And once it becomes a story you tell, you get to control it. So it's not just that you're, you know, the object that this has been done to, but you are the one who holds the story and can either put it down, use it to help somebody else, put it out into the universe, but you can see how it's transformative. And what the best humor has always done is to take out of the shadows and the parts that we are ashamed of, the parts that we want to keep secret, the parts that we think uh separate us from everybody else, the away team manifesto, the part where I don't understand the culture here, I don't understand anything, no one will ever understand me. And humor allows us to open up that circle. Humor isn't about one person on stage with a mic, humor is about the women in that bathroom who don't know each other laughing together at the fact that not only do women hold up half the sky, but we do it while carrying a 500-pound bag that has everything in it.
SPEAKER_01:So that we It's about community, it's about feeling less alone, it's about the collective. And I I love that. So humor for me is is a little more quiet. It's uh my and my family, and by family, um I'm getting married soon. So James is is thank you. James is is the the newest core in my family. But the my ex-husband, I mentioned, is a good friend of mine, and so he and my two children, I've always been told that I am the fourth funniest of the the four of them. And Jeff was always the funniest, but Delaney has superseded him as at the top of that, but I still remain at the bottom, apparently. And it's interesting because anytime I say anything funny, one of the three of them will say, that was actually funny. And I think I am funny. It's just that my funny is not that knee slapping, guffawing. It it is a quieter form, and I'm feeling very validated by this conversation.
SPEAKER_03:So I'm gonna can I interrupt for one second? Of course, because they just what you said is it's perfect. I'm afraid it'll slip away. That when with funny people, I was a member of the Friars Club when it was active. I was the only full-time academic to be initiated into the Friars Club, which had been, again, another all-male institution. It's sort of my job to go in and infiltrate. Disruption. I I climb into the windows of these places. I don't get tossed out of them. I sort of sneak in. But I love it. Um funny people, really funny people, especially people who really make humor. You know, when you're really funny, not when they laugh, but when they absolutely listen and then say, just as the family you're describing did go. That was funny. It's not, there was a guy I was giving a talk, it was for a healthcare organization, four inch people in the room. And I'm talking about how women, we we have to learn to look after our hearts, um, literally, because we spent our whole time as children figuratively giving them away or waiting for them to break or whatever. And now we have to actually see them not as some sort of charm that we toss out, but something that we have to keep and nurture and keep safe ourselves. And it was a it was a really good talk, and I got a standing ovation. I'm sure you get them when you talk. And there was one guy in the front who stood up and was applauding, but he hadn't laughed the whole time. And he came up to me after, and I thought, oh God, is this one of the cardiologists who's gonna tell me I I I didn't include enough about this or this? This guy came up and said, I'm a I'm a cardiac nurse. And he said, But on the sign I do stand-up comedy. And I said, I want to tell you that was very funny. And I thought, thank God, that's right. Because he was paying attention like to the timing and the way he was dissecting.
SPEAKER_01:But I really he was dissecting and he was copying and he was thinking, how can I incorporate? And and she really did this well.
SPEAKER_03:But it was his, I really thought, oh my god, they're gonna sue me. I didn't know what. You know, so with that kind of when you're playing to that kind of house, and for you, that house is a home, you're you're kidding. But you're clearly I you're you're clearly a dynamic person, and I did a dynamic person, and a leader has to have a sense of humor. And that humor has to be, again, compassionate and open. It's not humor, it is not about um uh telling jokes. The funny person doesn't tell jokes. Women don't tell jokes, women tell stories.
SPEAKER_01:I love that. And storytelling is is hard work for me for sure, and uh, and a lot of it is not intended to be humorous, it's intended to evoke emotion, to make people feel connected, to help people understand community and the and the common ground. That's always been my my goal. In that vein, I would love to go back to. I asked, you know, you and I, you and I could clearly talk for for days. I want to go back to the dedication to the book and why you wrote Gina School because there are a couple of I wrote down, I realized as I was going through your book, and I was I wrote down, you know, number number 27 and number 54, and I realized I was writing them all down, and I thought, okay, slow down, Dionyla. We'll just you're gonna have to pick your your tops. But I want to go back to the dedication and why you wrote the book.
SPEAKER_03:They uh I was sitting at um an astonishingly amazing anniversary party and uh for one of my best friends actually from college, um, and she and her husband were celebrating their 30th anniversary, and the book is dedicated to Beck, Becca and Zach, right? You're talking about the dedication. Yes. And um, so we were in Axe Provence, not a place I throw out lightly or go to on most weekends, but this was like what like a party. Slightly fancy. Yeah, a party out of like a movie. And um, so there are about 15, 20 people. They had uh come from all over the world. Um, and uh Pam and Florian, the couple, had chosen um the uh menu, which was printed out on this beautiful paper, and chosen the wines to go with each thing, and they had uh sparkling water for people who didn't drink, you know, on the table, the fancy Perrier, not just regular Perrier, some candy fancy Perrier. And and but then there were wines that were paired with the courses and you know, uh uh a group of servers just for the table. I mean, it well, I've never been. So I'm sitting next to the eldest daughter who I've known since she before she was born. She just graduated from Brown, and she was with her boyfriend, and she's now actually a journalist who's won a couple of Pulitzer Prizes. So she's doing amazing. So and she's sitting with her boyfriend at the time, they're now married, and um he says, here the service are coming and they're doing the wine and they're doing the appetizers, and he says, Um, I'm gonna order a gin and tonic. And I like put my old lady hand, you know, I'm well dressed, but I put my my pearl-wrapped hand on his wrist. And I said, You're not gonna order a gin and tonic. It's not on the menu. You're not gonna sell the servers. This was in a chateau. I said, You're not gonna send the servers to a whole other part of the structure to get you a gin and talk. He said, I'm not really a wine guy. He was like 23, also just out of school. Yeah, baby. Very smart, very smart, but an idiot. And I said, You're not doing that. He said, I don't, I'm not a wine guy. I said, then have water. You have water in front of you. And his girlfriend at the time leaned over and said, Can he go to China school?
SPEAKER_02:And then he said, Yes, can I go to China school?
SPEAKER_03:And that just became a joke. So I started writing things down, and then I, you know, I I write a lot, um, as you mentioned, and you know, for psychology today. And I started thinking about okay, what are the real lessons in life? And the short ones, the ones in clear language. And so I'm writing down a lot of what I need to remember, because one of the things that I realized that every lesson I've ever learned in life is a lesson I've learned before.
SPEAKER_01:But you know what? One of the things I have learned that has has struck me as truly profound. The things we need to hear, the things that strike us as at the heart, the things that hit us the most are the things we already know. It's the stuff we need to hear, but damn, we know it. And it hits us because it's so true. It gives us chills because it resonates. It gives us, it gives us that full body feeling because we think, wow, I knew that. But I needed to hear it, and I needed to hear my story, my truth coming from you. Because I needed to know that I'm not alone. I needed to know that my experience is yours too. I'm gonna tell, so I was writing all these down, and so many of them are lighthearted, and so many of them are beautiful, but there was one that I found myself tearing up at. Number 95. It's complicated to be in a relationship with somebody you don't trust, especially if that somebody is your partner or your spouse or yourself.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you.
SPEAKER_01:And I and at first I'm like, yeah, especially if that's somebody that, you know, if you're with a partner, and then I'm like, oh, or you right? Yeah, and you have that moment where you think, right. Sometimes you don't trust yourself. Sometimes you have lost trust in yourself, and then then what do you do?
SPEAKER_03:I I I I'm glad that this echoed with you, and that's exactly it's it's the echoes that sometimes it's only in hearing the echo that we hear our own voice, right? Right, that we hear it back. It's like otherwise we're speaking into the abyss, but then we hear an echo, and it's it could be in some. Else's accent. It could be from you know someplace we never expected to hear it, but then we're going, right? Actually, that made sense. And this is, it is, it's just just to know that. And then, you know, the illustration, I mean, the reason it became a book was because I I recognize that these passages needed that third dimension of an illustration.
SPEAKER_01:The illustrations are gorgeous. Tell me, how did you connect with the illustrator?
SPEAKER_03:Uh, the illustrator was a student of mine. And really, yeah, that's one of the nice things about. Perfect is that. And he is, and we did this is the anti-AI book. This is we crossed this, this could not be done. You're like, absolutely not. Except by two human beings. He is a 26-year-old man who was my former student who had actually come to Yukon, um, then dropped out, and went to the West Coast, and then found himself um working in a hospital in the hospice ward uh during the pandemic. Wow. Um, and then decided to come back to finish school because sometimes that's what people do. Right. The thing about being in college or being in a university or being in any kind of institutional structure is that the institution will be there. You know, I tell kids like, I'm not sure I should be here. I said, go, go do something else. Come back. We'll be here. It's not going anywhere. Yeah, we'll be here. It's okay, it's safe. You can go find something else. You're not gonna lose us. You know, we'll be here. And he took advantage of that. And um, and I realized that not because he was in my creative writing classes, and I realized that not only was he a good writer, but then he started, I just saw his notebooks, and they were filled with these astonishing pen and ink drawings that he were, he was just filling every page with sort of life studies. This was somebody he'd seen on the bus, this was somebody, these were buildings that he was, he lives in New Haven near Yale, he was doing, you know, and and I thought this is what the book needs. It needs this other dimension. This was like taking these passages that I'd written and making them, it was like watching somebody, I don't like like taking a square of paper and making it into an origami swan. I love that. He took this and made it into something else with the art. But the art was drawn, and they were so again, this is across generations, different sexes, different backgrounds, different everything. And we came together to come up with this book. I mean, I really, it's his first book. I I I hope it won't be my last, it might, but that he's gonna go on to do remarkable stuff. And he, one of the great things, and I'm I'm sure you I know you've talked about this in other places, but it's working with other people and the the essential nature of the collaborative process, whether that's with a personal coach, whether it's with a therapist, whether it's with other people, it's in a workshop. But the importance of not fencing yourself off and thinking that you're the only one who can do this or that you have to do this, but having the humility and I think as you would call it, Danielle, the grace, right? To understand that working with other people and allowing yourself to be essentially vulnerable to that is the way to strengthen yourself, what you're doing, the process. And so John and I went back and forth, um, sometimes in cheap Chinese restaurants, um, you know, so I can buy all the food. Um, that's through uh, you know, sometimes in Zoom calls, uh often in person, sometimes actually just putting things in the mail, in the post. Because seeing an illustration, seeing the hand-inked illustration, he didn't do these online. He drew and so can put the originals in the mail to me. I have students who don't know how to write out an address. You know that?
SPEAKER_01:I mean, there are people who don't know that because I joined when I sent my children to school, I joined the Facebook groups for freshman students. Ah, the parent the parents of freshman students, and the number of parents who will go to the trouble of sending addressed envelopes to their children so that they don't have to deal with it.
SPEAKER_03:Or I mean we could we could make that a whole other episode, but but yes, we sure can because I could do a gene of school just for parents of children for what your children should know when they go to college, yes, and what you should not do for them. Like yes, yes, when they are calling and saying, Mom, should I have the apple or the banana? It's like hang up. Parents hang up. Your child, if he is or she is old enough to cross the street, you have to decide that first because they have to take out their ears and they have to look up if they're crossing the street. Um, and if they're crossing the street, they can decide on their own fruit. And it should not be something they're called about. If it is, then you need to restructure that relationship a little bit. So, but anyway, so he knew how to address an on the life, which again is a miraculous talent these days to someone under 30. And proud of John. Uh yeah. And put it in the mail. And um, he ended up redoing 40 of the images. Really? The original ones, and I ended up rewriting some of the passages because he was like, I'm not sure I get this. And what I wanted to make sure of in Gina School was that everybody, so that somebody 40 years younger and from again a completely different universe would understand what this meant, as well as women of my tribe, which is, you know, anybody too old for work study and too young for cremation. You know, that that would be like, you know, I so that everybody could get this.
SPEAKER_01:That the book was truly cross-generational. Do you have a couple of tidbits from the book that fall into your favorite?
SPEAKER_03:Well, the one I'll tell you, actually, I was thinking about that coming up because they were the ones that um that I think would fit mostly or fit best into the kind of work that you're known for and your interests. So that uh number 35. Um, this is the one that I needed to remind myself of. We're going back to the part I needed to hear. This is a lesson I have learned since I was 17. Um, and that I need to hear every day. And I don't know why this goes through me like I'm a sieve, and I need to remind myself of it all the time. And then I realized that other people need the same reminder. So this is you cannot count on the praise of others to keep you going. Ever. I have that one written down. Probably ever. You will almost never get it, and when you do get it, you won't get enough of it. And when you do get it, it won't be the right kind. Also, it probably won't be the right person saying it, or it won't be about the right thing. It doesn't work that way. Learn to give yourself credit. That's one of the hardest things in the world uh for me to remember. I blame need because I I have looked for validation from other people, um, I think since I was a child. And um, and it's taken me a long time and a lot of different kinds of work, which I still do, uh, to um understand that I'm responsible for my own well-being. And one that goes along with that, which is another big one, is uh 27. Do unto yourself as you would do unto others. I think for women, the golden rule is not do to others as you would do to yourself, because we treat everybody better than we treat ourselves. Yes. So that this is do unto yourself as you would do unto others. Start treating yourself with as much generosity, charity, kindness, and graciousness as you would treat the least favorite among your acquaintances. Be as kind and as forgiving towards yourself as you be towards a pal. Stop torturing yourself about what you might have done or not done 10 days ago or 10 years ago. Offer comfort to yourself that actually helps, such as cleaning out old wounds and cleaning up old messes. Don't rely on merely short-term diversions, such as drinking heavily before lunch, or eating an entire Sarah Lee cheesecake before letting it defrost. You wouldn't suggest to a friend that she do such things. Why allow yourself to do them? Imagine you're put in charge of taking care of yourself the way you might be privileged to take care of someone you love. Then do it.
SPEAKER_01:See, I love that. It's um the way I've always framed that is that I treat try to treat myself the way I would treat my daughter. Yeah. Because there are times that I and and that actually comes from something a therapist said to me at one point. She said, if right now your daughter was telling you that she felt the way you do, what would you do? You would lock her in a room and force her to sit on her bed and feed her bonbons and ice cream and make her watch Winnie the Pooh. You would not tell her to get up, get going, keep it up. Like you don't get to go, you don't get to sit down until you have surgery. Like it's like that's when you rest. After you have surgery, you'll be fine. Right.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Um So how do you how did you learn that though? What made practice?
SPEAKER_03:Correct.
SPEAKER_01:Practice, I had to keep saying to myself, how would you treat Delaney? How would you treat Delaney right now? And it's there was one of the sentences you had on the on the previous one, um, number 36, there are few things worse than feeling like an embarrassment.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Yet that's how I felt for much of my life. I tag along uninvited, unchosen, annoying, as if my presence must be accompanied by a shrugged explanation or a shushed apology. The fear, I'm there as a default. They pretend to accept me because they're too embarrassed to admit they've abandoned me, ditch me by the side of the road. And the last sentence of this is what really hit me. Don't assume outward confidence indicates inner self-esteem. And that to me is that your outside and your inside don't always match, right? We live in a world where we're constantly seeing everybody's A game, but we don't have any idea. And I I think about the whole influencer space, right? What you're seeing is the one picture they're showing, not the 420 they took, or what happened to the picture in post before they actually decided to share it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:No, though that's absolutely wonderful. And I hadn't thought about it in terms of the influencer idea, but I think that's right. And I think that so many, again, people under 30, under 20 are so uh swept off their feet by the idea that that's what they have to be all the time. And so that the one that you chose was a very hard one for me to write, obviously. And I think that you saw that, that that came from from looking for the hope arriving.
SPEAKER_01:That that well, and I that that girl, that was me. That was high school me. Um, high school me was not going somewhere to anything unless you specifically looked at me and said, Danielle, would you like to come? I could be standing in a group of people, and if somebody, if there were plans for Friday night, unless somebody specifically looked at me and said, Danielle, are you coming? Or would you like to come? I wasn't going because I feared that I would show up and there would be this, what are you doing here?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Uh, and I didn't want to be the tag-along. And I think that that goes, I moved a lot as a kid, so it goes to that piece. I want to talk, um, we're gonna wrap up shortly, but I want to talk about your your article in psychology today that you know that has your nearly eight million views. Snow White doesn't live here anymore. And this speaks to your conversation about humor, how important humor is. And of course, we're learning a little bit about that right now. Um, with are we canceling humor? Are we not canceling humor?
SPEAKER_03:Um, humor is uh, I think probably one of the first cave drawings that our ancestors did was probably a joke. You know, the cave. It showed somebody trying to attack an antelope from the wrong side or something. You know, it was something um that humor, because humor allows us, like I said, to unveil parts of ourselves that the public is not allowed to see, and or that we're afraid to show to other people. But that the best comedy has always shined light on the parts that we're not supposed to look at or that we're supposed to pretend aren't there. So that um that's why humor is also illuminating. It's literally illuminating, it lights up. We talk about somebody lighting up a room or you know, a joke like, wow, that was really that spotlighted the most important issue, or that did it. We actually, the words that we use talk about illumination, even if it's indirectly. And so the the idea that humor allows us to address what we often try to hide means it's essential. Because as we've been talking about, anything that opens up conversation and creates connection and allows, you know, allows shame or what is often, you know, uh hidden from behind shame to come out and to say, look at me. And then when we can laugh, not at it, but with it, because we recognize it, again, that's redemption. Hubert is alchemy. It turns straw into gold, it takes those worst moments often and transforms them into value. When I give a talk or do a workshop if I have enough time, I ask people, what's the story that you dine out on? Right? In England, the English say we the stories you dine out. So what's the story you always tell about yourself? Most of the stories people tell about themselves are awful things that happen. They're not the great things. When you say, okay, what give me your childhood story that sums you up? It's not about the time I won the spelling bee. It's about the time that I hid under the desk because I hated my Halloween costume. It's the time when my parents forgot me at a rest stop and came back two hours later. It's the time, I mean, it's the time when we were left out, when we were forgotten, when we were humiliated, when we were desperate. And we take, that's the straw, but we then transform it through humor into gold. It takes what could be self-pity, which is entraps us. It's a trap that's hard to get out of and turns it into something that can free us, that gives us access to other emotions and ways to heal. Gina, how do you define hope? Hope is the first hope is getting up in the morning. They're talking about giving credit for yourself. Um hope is the idea that everything changes and that it is possible for that change to be for the better. Um, and that, I mean, hope is so um, you know, so such a potent uh uh precious thing. I mean, I think of Emily Dickinson's hope is the thing with feathers, right? And then I think of Woody Allen. I'm sorry to bring up his name, but then he said Emily Dickinson hope said hope is the thing with feathers. He said, but we have discovered that the thing with feathers is my nephew, and we're taking him to a specialist in Zurich, right? So but I see hope as just the idea that things will change. Despair is the belief that nothing can ever change, that you were stuck in repetition. Hope is the wish that something will change. And then what hope really depends on is your ability to allow hope to embrace you, not necessarily for you to embrace hope. You may not have the energy to do that, but that for hope to embrace you and for you to allow yourself to accept that change for the better.
SPEAKER_01:And sometimes it has been such a delight to have you here. Thank you so much for spending time with me, for making me laugh, for making me think, for for schooling us in all things good and hopeful. Where can people find you?
SPEAKER_03:Um, ginabarrecka.com, G-I-N-A-B-A-R-R-E-C-A, so it's psychology today, in every bookstore. Please buy the book. Absolutely. In book clubs, all the rest of it, but I I am easy to find, and and I answer every email and uh on Facebook and on all the rest of it. And I'm I it has been an honor, Danielle. And I hope this won't be our only conversation. You are a treat, and I wish you so much happiness in this new wedding coming up, in this new marriage. Thank you so much. And have your kids if they have any questions about how to deal with school, they can write to me.
SPEAKER_01:I I definitely, I definitely will do that. Dr. Gina Barecca, thank you so much for joining me and friends, thank you so much for being here. However, we have found you today. I certainly hope we have left you with some light and some laughs and some good schooling. Make sure you go out and find Gina's book and ginabarecca.com. And please go back and find one tidbit in this episode, share it with a friend, pass the episode on. And of course, if you are enjoying the show, as I so hope that you are, you can either send me a text there on the episode itself, you can write a review, you can pass it on. And I do hope that you will take very good care of yourself between now and the next time that we see you. Thank you for being here.