When Wanting Something Is Reason Enough with Rachel Hartigan

What happens when wanting something is reason enough?

In this episode of A Thought I Kept, I’m joined by writer and journalist Rachel Hartigan to explore a thought that has stayed with her for years: “I do it because I want to.”

This opens up some surprisingly big questions: How often do we feel the need to justify what we want? How do we separate our own desires from expectations, responsibilities, fear, or the stories we’ve absorbed about who we should be? And what changes when we stop looking for a better reason?

Rachel’s thought comes from Amelia Earhart, the pioneering aviator at the centre of her new book, Lost: Amelia Earhart’s Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life. As we talk, Amelia’s story becomes a way into a much broader conversation about curiosity, self-trust, adventure, identity, and the unfinished stories that continue to hold our attention.

Together, we explore the tension between doing what feels comfortable and doing what feels alive, the challenge of knowing what we really want, and the ways curiosity can help us navigate uncertainty when we don’t know what comes next. We also talk about visibility, creativity, midlife, motherhood, freedom, and the vulnerable experience of releasing something deeply personal into the world.

Along the way, Rachel reflects on the years she spent researching Amelia Earhart, the pull of unanswered questions, and why some stories stay with us long after they should have faded.

Rachel Hartigan is a writer and journalist who spent more than a decade at National Geographic and previously worked for The Washington Post Book Review. Her latest book, Lost: Amelia Earhart’s Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life, explores both the enduring mystery of Earhart’s disappearance and the people who continue searching for answers nearly ninety years later.

This is a conversation about curiosity, courage, self-trust, and what it means to follow the things that call to us, even when we can’t fully explain why.

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Transcript

A Thought I Kept | Claire and Rachel Hartigan

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hi, and welcome to this week's episode of A Thought I Kept, a podcast about the ideas that stay. I'm your host, Claire Fitzsimmons, and each week I speak to a guest about ideas. Mostly. The ones that return in different moments of our lives. These are the thoughts that refuse to settle into a single meaning, and instead keep unfolding over time. In that way, I think, ideas are a little like people's stories. They're told and retold, revisited, reimagined, sometimes even simplified into myths, and sometimes rediscovered in more human ways. And few stories have been revisited quite as many times as the story of the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. Nearly 90 years after her disappearance, Earhart remains strangely alive in our imagination. Her life has been written about and debated and mythologized and investigated again and again and again. New evidence appears, old theories resurface, and the question of what really happened to her continues to draw people back. My guest today is Rachel Hartigan, a writer and a journalist who spent more than a decade at the National Geographic and previously worked at the Washington Post's book section. Her new book, Lost, Amelia Earhart's Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life explores both the woman herself and the enduring mystery of her disappearance. But what makes the book so interesting is that it isn't only about Amelia Earhart. It's about the people who have spent years trying to find her. The theories they follow, the questions that keep returning, and that's very human pull towards stories that never quite resolve. So today's thought we're keeping begins with Earhart. But it opens into something bigger about the stories we return to, the meanings we keep making from them, and the thoughts that stay even as we're writing. And maybe because we're writing new chapters. Here's my conversation with Rachel Hartigan. Rachel, thank you so much for joining me on A Thought I Kept. I'm really excited to be talking to you today and spending this time with you. I'm very happy to be here. So how are you arriving today from just outside of Washington?

SPEAKER_01 2:54

Oh, I think I'm about to get a cold. So I'm a little bit sleepy and tired. But I'm also just I'm just very happy to be here. I really like the idea of this podcast. I think it's I'm looking forward to this conversation.

SPEAKER_00 3:07

Thank you. That's really kind of you for saying that. I really love the idea of your book, which I know we will get on to. I know that we'll talk about how you've been spending the last few years of your life. But before we really do that, let's get into the thought that you've kept and what you're bringing. So the idea that has really stayed with you and has shifted something.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Yeah.

The Thought: "I Do It Because I Want To"

SPEAKER_01 3:28

Well, it's a thought that I go back to and I then I forget and then I have to remember it again. And it's come to me in different forms. But most recently, it's come to me because I've been spending a lot of time thinking about Amelia Earhart because I just published a book on her. And so it's something that she said at one point. She people would always ask her, Why are you flying, doing these very risky flights? And she would say, I can only say that I do it because I want to. And she didn't, she really resisted having to give a reason. Like, why should she have a reason beyond wanting to do it? And when I first heard her or read that she said that, I thought, well, that's kind of flippant. You should have more of a reason to fly across the oceans and risk your life. But then I thought about it a little bit more, and I think she was thinking she didn't have to justify herself. She felt like women were always asked to justify themselves, and men weren't. And she just said, I don't need any other reason. And just this morning, actually, I was thinking about this, and then I remembered a moment. Oh, this must have been like eight years ago. I was in Puerto Rico with my son, and my son, I think he was maybe 13 at the time. So it was an up and down vacation with just a mother and a son. Certain amount of, I don't want to do what you want me to do. And there was a morning where I think all he wanted to do was lie on the bed and play games on his phone. And I was getting frustrated because we were in Puerto Rico and it's a beautiful and wonderful country. But I just went outside and uh sat on this porch and we were in this sort of guest house where there were a lot of cats. And I sat and I read, and I kept thinking, what would people think if they saw me? I'm just sitting here wasting time. And then I thought, this is what I'm doing. This is what I'm doing right now. And so the combination of thinking this is just what I'm doing. I don't need to explain it or justify it to anyone with Earhart's I'm doing it because I want to. They're both combined to be a reminder that I don't have to think about what other people are thinking of what I do. I don't have to justify what I'm doing. Which doesn't mean be selfish and just air all through life and not think of other people. It's just I don't have doing what I want in the moment, whether it's sitting on this patio with all these cats around or anything really flying across an ocean, is that that can be enough.

SPEAKER_00 6:33

Yes, yes. And it's such a surprising thought in a sense, isn't it? That it can be enough. Because I hear the like you said something about it can be a bit flippant. It can be just something that we do feel we have to justify so much. And there is that sense of I hear freedom in that. And I hear that deliberation of it and the possibility of it. That we, if only we allowed ourselves the capacity just to do what we want without it seeing it as selfish, but as needed and necessary. Yeah, and then it makes you think about well, what do I really want to be doing? Which is a much, much harder question, isn't it? Like what do you really I wonder whether so often we do things for so many other reasons. Like you said, we expect there to be other reasons, but often there are other reasons, whether we have determined them for ourselves or others have determined them for us. And that question of what do we want to be doing, how do we want to be spending our moments, can be extraordinarily difficult to sit with.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

Yeah, because you have to think, well, does what I well, first of all, it's just hard to untangle it from everything else. If you're a parent, how do you untangle what you want to be doing with what, say, your child needs or your partner needs or the world needs from you? Yeah. You just you don't even know how to think about that. You don't know how to think about even what do you want in relation to other people? Are you really doing what you want? And that's something I've struggled with a long time. But now that I'm in middle age, it's a little bit easier. But it's still you, I still have to, it's a conscious thing. Okay, wait a second. What do I want to do? And you know, stop all the thoughts saying, well, no, that's lazy or that's selfish, or whatever it might be that is getting in the way of me thinking about, well, deep down in my gut, what do I want to be doing now?

SPEAKER_00 8:33

What is something that you have wanted to do that you haven't done because you have judged it indulgent, flippant, selfish?

SPEAKER_01 8:42

Oh, lately I have been doing what I want to do. I think for me, some of the things I haven't done, especially in the past when I was younger, I haven't done because my I had thought about going abroad and teaching English when I had graduated from college. And that seemed like I was per trying to perpetuate being young and not just getting a job. But it also I was scared of doing it. And so there's all that's another aspect is you want to do it. But are the reasons you're not doing it because it's not really what you want to do or because you're scared of doing it? That's an I think that played a role in me not ending up in Poland teaching English.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

Yeah, because there is how you judge yourself and but there's also that fear that comes in the way that then makes it so that you don't say, I want to do it. It's like I now don't want to do it. And you switch it around.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

Yeah, and it's just very uh that's and the thing I actually have the hardest time is deciding whether what I don't want to do, and if I don't want to do it, is it because I'm scared or lazy or I'm perfectly justified in not wanting to do this thing, whatever it might be.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

That's so hard, isn't it? Like I find that too. There's I speak a lot about uncertainty and discomfort, and there is a moment that it not doing the thing can be about avoidance. There's something about that relationship that I find really fascinating. So, like, okay, I do want to give this talk. I know that I will be afraid beforehand. If I listen to myself, maybe listening to myself means I don't give the talk because I'm honoring my emotions and my needs, or am I being avoidant because I am listening to myself and I should just get really uncomfortable and really uncertain and just push through it. Right. And you said something earlier that you've got to midlife, and there is something about this moment for you when you are more and more doing what you want. What does that feel like to you now?

Doing It Because You Want To: Living It

SPEAKER_01 10:50

Um, it feels good, but a little bit scary. Uh but it mostly feels good. Part of it, I was married and now I'm not married, so I have a little bit more freedom there. But in some ways, I very much to what you're saying, I think, well, I don't have to go out because I'm a little bit of an I'm a lot a bit of an introvert. And so it is the sort of doing the easy thing rather than the uncomfortable thing, which is a lot easier to do if you live by yourself to do the easy thing because there's nobody else saying, No, we have to go to this thing. So that is a that's something for me to work on.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

Tell me, did you do you believe her? So when you said that you heard this from Amelia Hart saying she does it because she wants to. Do you believe her? Because what I was struck by in the book is how many other factors came into flying for her and into her exploration. And I'm curious about whether you believe her.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

Not entirely. I mean, I think she really did want to do it, but she also needed to make some of these flights so that she could then set up a lecture tour afterwards and make money.

SPEAKER_02 12:16

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 12:17

So it was her job in a way to do it, but she could have chosen a different job that was not flying. A lot of people would say, Well, what's the point of breaking records? And I think people did and people still do try to say, Well, there's a scientific reason, you know, or we're testing the equipment or just seeing how far the human body can go. And in a way, I think it's kind of um clarifying that she brushes that all aside and just says, No, I just want to, even though she did sometimes use those justifications herself. Um I think that it was maybe just as much as it is for me, it may have been aspirational for her. And I think she wanted to be free of all those other reasons. You know, she wanted to be free of having to explain herself or having to have a reason. I think she loved to fly. She loved to be up in the air, she loved the feeling of it. So at her core, that's what she wanted to be doing. And that's what she always um leapt at any chance she could get. But it did come with all these other reasons why she had to do things at certain times, or why she had to make sure that she did a flight before another female pilot did, so she could say that she was the first and get all the publicity and make some money from that. Like anything, it's not simple. There are a lot of, it's entangled in lots of reasons. But I think she she was aspiring basically to that feeling that she had when she was up in the clouds. And that's what she wanted to get back to.

SPEAKER_00 14:09

There was something, as you were saying, that I was thinking about these things that we aspire to, like Amelia aspired to at her call to fly. And I'm thinking about is there anything that you have aspired to do that has come with these other expectations around it that you maybe didn't want to do? So for her in that case, there were the publicity, the public speaking, the constantly being on the front page is like she was such a sort of extraordinary kind of celebrity in that moment. So there's a lot that came with that that wasn't desired or maybe welcome. Have you found anything that you wanted to do at your core that has similarly come with these other pieces that were maybe not so wanted?

SPEAKER_01 14:50

Well, writing a book. I mean, I've always wanted to write a book, and I'm a late bloomer in that. I love writing the way she loved flying, even when it's really hard. But it does come with a lot of things that I don't particularly like or don't feel adept at. It's more like things that I dread until I'm in the moment. Like publicity is I've been dreading all the podcasts and interviewing, you know, appearing in front of people. And it turns out that it's actually been really fun and rewarding. But given the choice, I would have been said, uh no, that's okay. I'll just let the book speak for itself. So this is one of those cases where I had to make myself uncomfortable for sure.

SPEAKER_02 15:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:37

But it and it's also the price of writing a book in this day and age. You have to go from being a very solitary person working on this thing all by yourself for a really long time with a long deadline to talking to all these different people and trying to condense something into a few sentences. So it's a very different skill set that I wasn't sure I had.

SPEAKER_00 16:09

Yes, in a sense, in order to do the cool thing that you want to do, it comes with this. I think about a lot of these creative pursuits that come with those things, like somebody who wants to sing, somebody who wants to act, somebody who wants to, you know, be a stage performer. And yet there are these other pieces that are required of us now. They need to be on social media, they need to be visible in certain ways, they need to perform ourselves. Like there is something about the way that we have to almost cohabit that space. Like we can be a creative person and we can be an introvert, and we can be someone who likes to write for eight hours and never talk to a person, and yet we then do a week of podcast interviews, and we have to be telling a story about that experience too. And there are there are those very much those both those pieces that we have to navigate. Was there a point for you that you thought because of those pieces, I don't want to do the things that I want to do? Or was it always like that is a necessity, and I will just figure that out?

SPEAKER_01 17:12

I thought it was a necessity, but I also was sort of in denial. I'll just say that's in the future. That's in the future. So when it actually the future came, I was thinking, oh no, here it is. Now I have to deal with it.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

And the future is here now. This is your experience now. So the book is very much in the world. You have I spoke to an author once who said that it really helped her to understand that the moment that a book goes out, it's not your own anymore. You know, that's the there's a release of that. There's it's almost like a child leaving home. There's a moment that it goes out into the world. What is that experience like seeing something that has been so personal and private have this public life?

SPEAKER_01 18:00

It's been thrilling in a way to talk to people who have read the book because it was private and it was just something that I wrote. And then to go to an event, maybe the people at the events haven't read it yet, but how to have questions to talk to people who are curious about it, uh, to be interviewed by people who have read it. It's it is a little bit of an out-of-body experience. It's almost like you have a kid and you talk to somebody who knows them separately, like in school, and they say, Oh, your child is so polite and does all these things. You're like, Really? My kid? It's like it's he's seen in a different way, and this book might be seen in ways that didn't even occur to me. So it's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 18:50

All right, so let's think about this. At the beginning of that process of writing the book, what did you hope that would be for you? Like, why Amelia Earhart? Why that curiosity, why the even starting position for you?

How Rachel Found Amelia Earhart

SPEAKER_01 19:03

Um I had been working at National Geographic, and I would I was not what you would imagine a writer at National Geographic to be like necessarily. I wasn't swashbuckling or anything like that. My previous job had been with a Washington Post book review, which was more my speed. But when I started there, I thought we just have to jump in and say yes to everything. So a few years in, I uh mostly just writing and editing from the office, but one day an editor stopped me and said, We have a berth on a ship that's going to an island where some people think Amelia Earhart died and they're going to look for her bones. Do you want to go? And I said yes right away because I told them myself I have to say yes. But then afterwards I was thinking, oh, oh boy. I didn't really know where it was. And then when I found out, it was really this island on the other side of the world, nothing around it really, and a five-day sail from Fiji, just way out in the ocean. And at the time I was married, my son was 12 around 11 or 12 around the time. So I was thinking, can I be gone that long? And what if something happens? Is this a really reckless thing to do? But then I also felt this pulse. How could I say no to this opportunity? I just, I just couldn't. That would, I would be so ashamed of myself. And in that case, it would be very internal. It's not of what people would think of me. I would just know that I wasn't somebody who would do something like that. And I thought, well, maybe I am somebody who does, who goes off and does, goes on an adventure like that. So that's how I got into Amelia Earhart. It was very indirect. I didn't know much about her. So, and then I went on a second expedition two years later. And after that, an agent had read my stories and said, Oh, this sounds like it could be a book. And I had to really think about how to make a book that was both about Amelia Earhart and also about these three main theories about how she died. Because I didn't want to diminish her in favor of the theories, because I think in a lot of the news stories where, including the ones that I've written, it really says these people think they've found her and doesn't really focus on who her was. So that's I wanted to make a little bit more of a balance. And it took a while to figure out how to do that.

SPEAKER_00 21:56

It sounds really organic. It sounds like something in that is about following your. Curiosity, almost like the wanting in that isn't it's very clear. This is a big directional sign saying do this, but it's more like there's an inkling there is something there for you, and there's a pull of something without really fully understanding what that is. And there's a stage that it becomes something that is more and more in your life as a story. And I'm curious about what was the moment that you really realized that this was how you were going to spend the next couple of years, maybe? Like, how did you what was the moment that you were like, oh, this is it for me? This is that sense of not being pulled along, but going towards something. I really want this, I really want to write the story. I think I'm the right person to write the story. Like, when did that happen for you?

SPEAKER_01 22:43

I think that happened. It happened a little bit on the second expedition because I started making connections between what she was like and what the second expedition was doing because it was very high-tech, very adventurous. It was run by Bob Vallard, who was the one who found the Titanic. So it was a very much of this explorer mindset, which I think she had. And I felt like I was able to see the connections between them in a way that uh hadn't been really obvious. So it felt like I could bring some depth to the story. And then when I started to think about how to tell the story, I just felt like I I could bring a narrative to it. I always when I write, I like to bring, I don't know, an emotion or a humanity to what I'm writing about. And I felt like I don't know, I just felt a moment where I got it. When I'm writing, I always think about, and this is maybe reveals my age, but the metaphor in my mind is sort of a record playing, and the needle is not quite finding the groove, and then all of a sudden it finds the groove. And so when I was thinking about the book, it took me a while to find the groove. But when I found it, I was like, okay, I think I can figure this out, I can tell this story.

SPEAKER_00 24:23

What what is that groove for you? Because you have a very particular way of approaching the story in the book, and maybe you could speak to the three deaths than the one life idea and really woven these different threads together. And it is a very I feel like there's a sort of returning to the emotionality of it and the humanity of it. Like maybe like people over myths.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

Yeah. I think one of the things some of the people are so there are these three theories. Some of them are crazier than others, just for listeners. There's one theory that Earhart was captured by the Japanese, and there's lots of permutations on that, including one that she was took on a new identity and lived in New Jersey for a long time. So that one's a little bit on the the outer edge of possibility. Another theory is that she died a castaway on this island that I went to. And then the third is just that she uh she ran out of gas and ended up in the ocean. And when I was writing the book, you know, people would always say, Oh, those people are so ridiculous. Why do they keep um pursuing these theories? I mean, people all in there's different groups of people pursuing those theories, and they've spent decades. All of them have spent decades researching it. And uh, people, including my editor, were like, oh, they're just nuts. And I didn't want to write about people that way. Because I didn't think didn't not some of them were, it's hard to explain why they were doing what, why they were doing what they were doing, but I did want to write with a certain amount of respect for them, or at least an understanding of what was pulling them. And I think ultimately what was pulling them along was the same thing that was pulling Earhart, or even that was pulling me. It's just this curiosity and this urge for an experience, an adventurous experience, a sense of wanting to have something that's their own. And so I thought by intertwining the stories, I could uh elevate that a bit.

SPEAKER_00 26:44

What's really fascinating about it though is that you th the thought that you've bought is about because I want to. I think I probably had the expectation that people who are spending time on the story of Amelia at heart, people who are researching it, living alongside it, living in pursuit of it, there is something in that that is about conclusion or resolution or finding a plane or finding both. And as you're saying this, there is something that is more about because I want to. That's more about curiosity, that's more about being in relationship to it in any way at all. And it doesn't really matter what an end point is. What matters is that you are in that story somehow. And that because I want to is something else for those people.

SPEAKER_01 27:33

Yeah, I think so. I mean, definitely there are people who really want to be the person who found her. Okay. They definitely want that, but I think they also enjoy being the person who is looking for her. You know, that becomes their identity. It takes them out of an ordinary life. Uh, it's more exciting than grocery shopping and going to your nine to five job. It's much more exciting to be on this island in the middle of nowhere and being super competent on there, knowing how to get on shore without being smashed against the reef, knowing how to cut through the jungle, knowing, you know, finding um artifacts that may indicate that she was there. There's just uh there's just this, you're right. It's just I want to do it because I want to be that person who does it. And that, yeah, I I found that really that was something that interested me from the very beginning. It's like, why are all these people so devoted to this search? And a lot of this has to do with Earhart and her allure, which I think people are still feeling many years after her death, but I think it's also just the experience of it.

SPEAKER_00 28:59

There's something that I wonder about, which is this idea about an unfinished story as holding our attention. And I don't know, I know very little about the subject, but this idea that that's something that has very little possibility of resolution. But maybe you could tell me if that's not true, and maybe there is a possibility of resolution, but something that in and of itself may never be finished, always having a hold on us. Because there is that yearning for an ending that will never come, so it just keeps us returning back to it. It keeps us its hold on us. That and that that way that we interpret stories and tell stories and need stories is as much a reason that we stay as Amelia herself.

SPEAKER_01 29:42

I think that that is true, that it's almost like we're holding our breath, waiting for the ending note, and it just never comes. Um, I mean, you just look at the search for, I don't know if this has been as much in the news in the UK or but the search for Savannah Guthrie's mother. You know, she's a disappeared, total mystery, nobody knows what happens. And people are riveted by it because how can that be? How can you not know what happens? And we do want that final note, the conclusion, the end, even if it's not a happy ending, we do want to know. And another aspect of it is that Earhart was so famous at a time when media was exploding that it seems almost impossible that somebody so famous could disappear. Like, how is that even possible? Don't the crabs on the island know who she is?

SPEAKER_00 30:45

It's just that's that parasocial relationship too, wasn't there? Exactly this idea about this ownership of her and sense of knowing her and know- I hadn't really understood that about how visible, known, kind of consumed she was in that moment. Yeah. What is your sense of her as a person? And I asked this because what I'm noticing, I have a daughter, and we read Rebel Girl books, and we read stories about women through history. Amelia is always there, she's always this figure that is seen associated with freedom, risk, possibility, agency. And my understanding from your book is that yes, she had pieces of those things in her, and there was so much more. And so, what have you come to understand about who she actually was?

SPEAKER_01 31:41

Well, I mean, you're right that she did have those elements of herself, but she was a real person who had real experiences. She was very much shaped by being the daughter of an alcoholic who lost his job multiple times. So I think that in a way is why she would always put on a good face about things. She was somebody who always worried about money because of that. She was somebody who somehow sometimes had a tense relationship with her mother and her sister. Just, you know, she was she was flesh, she was real, and she was capable of doing incredibly brave things and understanding how a plane works and how to fly. But that doesn't mean that she lost any of the nuance of being a human being. And that that was something I wanted to in the book make sure that was clear and juxtapose it with searches that sometimes flatten her as a person.

SPEAKER_00 32:53

Yes. Yeah, because one of my surprises thinking about because I want to was this sort of this need to fly. And also there was something about how she took risks not being mitigated with care or with planning, and that she wanted to, even the last flight, that she wanted to do this around the world flight, and yet didn't want to learn how to use a radio.

unknown 33:21

I know.

SPEAKER_00 33:21

And there is something in that I found really fascinating, like this tension in this person, because of course she's human, and there are things that we desire and things that we absolutely do not. But how did you come to understand that kind of contradiction and how you saw her and how we no longer see her because she's just really the one story, the one really comes on the side of risk being positive and freedom?

SPEAKER_01 33:47

Yeah. Yeah, that's that's such a good question. I one thing that I thought was interesting is that she'd had some really risky flights that could have ended badly. Her solo flight across the Atlantic in 1932 was a nightmare of a flight. Big storm, her altameter didn't work, she had fuel dripping on her shoulder. It sounds her wings iced up. It was a nightmare, and she survived. And I wonder if a little bit of surviving a series of flights that could have gone terribly wrong, if she started to feel like maybe she was immune. I think that's part of it. And then the other thing with the radio, for most of her flights, she didn't have uh radio. And because that was a new technology. The kind of radio she had was let's see, on the it wasn't until later in her career that she had two-way radio on her flights. So it wasn't she'd done flights without it. So she knew she could do flights without it. So she felt like she didn't need to count on it. Same with a direction finder. Obviously, she should have had a direction finder, understood how to make it work so that she could have found the island she was supposed to find. But it wasn't so crazy that she didn't learn them because in her experience, she had made flights without them.

SPEAKER_00 35:23

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 35:24

But she was willing to take a risk, push things go a little too fast, rush things, think things were gonna be fine when she really should have prepared. Even though she one of the quotes that's often quoted from her is it's something along the lines, is you can take risks when you prepare for them. It's like, well, yes, listen to yourself.

SPEAKER_00 35:54

But what do you how do you see this period of your life as like the time that you've spent with Melia at heart and the parts before when you worked at the Washington Post and what's coming next for you?

SPEAKER_01 36:08

I'm thinking about this all the time because I keep thinking, I don't know what comes next. Okay. Yeah, because I quit my job at National Geographic to finish the book. So yeah, I really don't know what comes next. I'd like to write another book. But one of the reasons I really wanted to do that first expedition is that I was feeling so bored and underutilized. And I don't like feeling like that, it turns out. So yeah, I have to, I have to figure out what what's going to happen next. So we I feel a little not in free fall, but a little bit suspended right now. I don't know. I just yeah, it's a strange feeling. And I it's been nine years since that first expedition and almost seven since I got the contract to write the book, which was delayed for I had several deaths in the family. So there's just been a lot that's happened in this time period, and my son's also graduating from college, so it's just I don't know what's gonna happen next. Yeah, and how do you feel about that? It depends on the time of day. I mostly feel okay about that. I sometimes this being America, I think, oh, I've got to figure out health insurance. But I I like not being beholden to anyone like another organization. I like that it's my own decision, what happens next. That feels very freeing, and especially I'm in my mid-50s. If I can write, I can keep working for two more decades, and I I really love to write and I love to learn about things. So as long as I can keep doing that, then that's good.

SPEAKER_00 38:11

It's really beautiful. It comes back to the because I want to stage of your life. The idea about like there is something about free fooling as having, in a sense, there's something about the choice has gone in there because you're just suspended and you're in this. But there is also something about you're not tethered to anything quite the same way that maybe you were before, whether that's an institution that you're writing for or a family system that you're part of. There's a sort of there's an aspect of choice there. And you said something, there is something that I find about your work that's about curiosity that I find really reassuring. And I'm somebody that does turn to curiosity when I have that feeling of I think you said about boredom. What has curiosity come to mean to you? And maybe what we can do actually, given the time, maybe we can make that our first word of the five that we'll start exploring. But what has curiosity come to mean to you through all these different explorations and different moments and and your work as a journalist and a writer? It just means life.

SPEAKER_01 39:06

It means living to me. It's just about like how could you not be curious? The world's a fascinating place, people are fascinating. So if I'm curious, that means that I'm living.

SPEAKER_00 39:18

Yes. Yes, yes, a hundred percent. Okay, so my second word for you was about adventure, because adventure can be a word that is loaded in different ways, and I wonder what adventure has come to mean to you having gone through periods of adventure and witnessed somebody having an adventurous life and having worked at somewhere like National Geographic. What is adventure even?

SPEAKER_01 39:43

I think of it as testing yourself, as seeing what you're capable of doing, and putting yourself in challenging situations. And what my challenging situations were not much compared to some of my colleagues at National Geographic. One of my friends, she scuba dived below pyramids, like water-filled pyramids in the Sudan. Another would, you know, traveled with nomads in um the Sahara. They full-on National Geographic. I was on a boat. I had my own bed. I was far away from anything, but I still ate at a table when I was eating. So but it was still an adventure because I was pushing myself.

SPEAKER_00 40:29

Yeah, and an adventure could be going to the supermarket on a Saturday night alone or a movie. I don't know, like, adventure is such a problem, isn't it? Like there is there are like gradations of depending on life circumstances and expectations and career and professions and all those different things. And there is something about the you going to the island is the adventure in spite of the table. Right. Exactly. Okay, what about this idea about this isn't a word I think about a lot right now? And it might be because I'm also a woman in midlife. But that is the idea about visibility. And that's a word that I was thinking about because I had been thinking about your book in terms of like disappearance, mystery, what's not seen, what is seen. And I just wonder what like an idea about visibility means to you having written this book.

SPEAKER_01 41:20

Oh, that's interesting because I am experiencing visibility when I was not that visible. I'm in front of people in a way that I haven't been before on my own behalf. I've done some public speaking, but it's always introducing somebody else. It's not about my own work.

SPEAKER_02 41:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:47

Um and it's that's definitely something that I find daunting. And sometimes I think of it as exposing. I'm like I'm being exposed. Yes, vulnerability in it. Yeah. But one thing that's been wonderful about just the last few weeks is realizing that I'm being visible, I'm visible right now because of work that I've done and things that I have learned and know and am telling other people about. It's not, I'm not being put up on a in front of everybody for people to mock me. It's because I know some things that maybe some people are interested in.

SPEAKER_00 42:32

Yes. And it's about your work and in service of the work rather than hi, I'm here, look at me.

SPEAKER_01 42:38

Exactly. It's it feels a little bit more solid than say an Instagram post.

SPEAKER_00 42:44

Yes, and there's something that's really nice about anchoring yourself in that, in a sense, the work that you're doing. Which leads to my next question, which is legacy.

SPEAKER_01 42:53

Oh, legacy. Legacy is not something I've ever really thought about for myself, but I definitely something that I think about for Earhart. In fact, legacy is something people people talk about in politics or something. People are talking, well, what does the president want his legacy to be? And my thought is always, well, he'll be gone. Why think about your legacy if you're not going to be around? I want for me, my legacy is my son doing well. Is he, does he have a good life? Did I set him up for that? In terms of Earhart, I think she has a tremendous legacy, just because, as you talked about, anytime there's any book about brave women, she's in it. I still come meet people who say they named their daughter after her.

unknown 43:48

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 43:49

And just this idea that you can be a woman and say, I'm doing this thing because I want to do it, and I don't need to explain myself any further. I think that mindset. That is a legacy that people aspire to.

SPEAKER_00 44:04

Yes. Yeah, that's quite a legacy. And not necessarily of a legacy of choice, because the legacy maybe for Earhart was around, maybe you write something around flying, but in a sense, the legacy has become about bravery. Like there's it's interesting how the legacy shifts depending on different generations and how we are willing to hear and receive that story or that person. Okay, my last word for you is the title of your book. Well, the first bit, which is lost. What does it mean to be lost, do you think?

SPEAKER_01 44:33

To be lost. Um it's interesting. You could be lost, you yourself could be lost, or something could be lost to us. You can lose a feeling. One thing I was thinking about, yes, Amelia Earhart got lost. She's lost to us. But also it's possible that the people who are searching for have lost, maybe they've lost their way. I'm not sure that they have, but that's one way of looking at it. Um maybe sometimes it is good to be lost. It implies you're not stuck to a path and on the straight and narrow. So yeah, I guess it means a lot of different things. You'd be lost in a book, even.

SPEAKER_00 45:22

Rachel, I was wondering how you hold on to it, how in this moment this is something that you find yourself returning to. And if we go back to the beginning, you said that it's something that comes back. It's something that you forget and it comes out in different places. This idea that I do it because I want to. So, how do you hold on to it?

SPEAKER_01 45:42

Um I think what I've been trying to do in general is um pay attention to how my body is responding to things. So how something makes me feel. So I don't necessarily think of the phrase, I'm gonna do it because I want to. But in a way, it's embodying that by saying, Well, wait a second, what does this thing make me feel? And if is it making me feel actually nervous? Is it making me feel elated or excited? Um, just trying to pay more attention to that physical sensation.

SPEAKER_00 46:32

Thank you, Rachel, for being here. This has been such a fascination.

SPEAKER_01 46:36

Thank you so much. This has been really fun. Well, it was so nice to meet you, Claire.

SPEAKER_00 46:41

Thank you for listening today to this conversation with Rachel Hortigen. I've been thinking ever since about this idea of how certain ideas, maybe certain lives, certain stories, are never really finished. Amelia Hart disappeared nearly 90 years ago, and yet her story keeps resurfacing. New theories emerge, old questions return, and each generation seems to revisit the mystery and ask again, what happened? But perhaps the reason her story stays with us isn't simply because we want the answer. It might be because there is something about the thought that Rachel brought today when Amelia Earhart said, I do it because I want to. Maybe there is something in that that also keeps us coming back to this story of Amelia Earhart. And maybe even helps us keep coming back to our own story and the one that we're currently writing, or maybe not writing, if this is something that is feeling a little bit harder to connect with. Rachel's book explores the theories about Earhart's disappearance, and it really reveals something else, and that is this very human pull towards curiosity. Our instinct to search, to investigate, to keep turning a story over in our minds, even when certainty remains out of reach. And in that sense, Amelia's story feels a little like the ideas that we do explore on this podcast. They never really do end. They evolve, they resurface, they get reinterpreted as we encounter them in new moments of our lives. Which brings me to the question that I like to leave with you. Is this thought I do it because I want to? Is this thought that one that you will keep that has made you listen a little bit more today, pay some more attention because it holds something for you? Or do you think it's something that you will forget, that you think it's kind of not for you, that there is something about it that doesn't quite resonate yet. Or maybe it's something that you'll share. Maybe there is something that feels exciting about this. And as with all great stories and as with all great ideas, we want them to have a life of their own, to spread, to be out in the world too. If you do enjoy these kinds of conversations and you want to keep exploring some of the themes, some of the ideas behind them, then do join me on Substack. That's where I share a newsletter where I write more deeply about many of the themes that we touch on here. Things like curiosity, emotions, things about identity and how we make sense of the world as we move through it. It's also often a place where listeners do reach out, do share their own thoughts, and do continue the conversation. So if you're curious about what other people think about these episodes, think about these conversations or the thoughts that are being kept and how people are using them, then do come over to More Good Days, My Substack. And if you're somebody that is looking for a little bit more, maybe emotional support or everyday guidance when things do feel confusing or overwhelming, and you do find that you're more free-floating through your life, then do explore If Lost out here. That's where you'll find resources, coaching sessions, programs and workshops, all the things that are designed to help you navigate your emotional and mental well-being, and maybe even find your way back to yourself or even the world around you. You can find both linked in the show notes, as well as details about how to find Rachel, how to get hold of a copy of her book, and how to connect with her as well. Thank you. Thank you as always for spending your time with me, with us. If you want to support the show, it really does help if you press those five stars. I didn't really know what those were before I started a podcast, but I've since learned that they're important. So if you do one thing today, it would be very, very lovely if you would spend probably about five seconds hitting five stars so that other people can find these conversations and the ideas that sit behind them as well. So until next time, I will be with you next Monday morning for another thought that you might want to keep. Maybe try on next week, maybe see if it fits for you, or maybe even forget. Bye for now.