Being a People Pleaser Might Be Ruining Your Life
If you’ve found yourself, more often than not, living a life you don’t want chasing goals that don’t feel like your own, you might be a people pleaser. A life of bending to what others want from you and their visions for your future can lead to burnout and depression, like it did for today’s guest.
Tara Schuster knew something had to change when she drunk dialed her therapist after a particularly bleak night. Diving into her trauma wasn’t easy, but when she did, she found a new lease on life and how to continuously choose herself in both the big and small moments.
In this episode, Tara and Tori dive into:
- Why banking your self-worth on a job is a one way ticket to frustration
- How to reframe your thoughts to be a little kinder to yourself
- How to build self-trust when you’ve always looked outside of yourself for answers
Tara’s Links
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Meet Tara
Tara Schuster is an accomplished entertainment executive turned mental health advocate and best-selling author. She is the author of the just released “Glow in the Fcking Dark”, and the runaway hit, “Buy Yourself the Fcking Lilies,” a finalist for Goodread’s Best Non-Fiction Book of 2020. It was selected by Cosmopolitan, Real Simple, Goop, Publishers Weekly, and many more as one of the best books of the year on mental health and self-care. Previously, Tara served as vice president of talent and development at Comedy Central, where she was the executive in charge of such critically acclaimed shows as the Emmy and Peabody Award–winning Key & Peele. She has contributed to InStyle, The New Yorker, and Forbes, among others. She lives in Los Angeles.
Transcript:
Tara Schuster:
Living your life, your life, not a life that has been prescribed to you or that you have been condescended to to live, is the biggest act of resistance and is the biggest act of change, because if we don’t all do that, first off, how is anyone else going to know that’s possible? You don’t know how powerful you are until you grab your agency and then you see, “Whoa, there’s so much I can do to improve my lot and the lot of everyone around me.”
Tori Dunlap:
Hi, financial feminists. Welcome back to the show. If you’re an oldie but a goodie, welcome back. If you are new here, I’m so excited to see you. My name is Tori. I’m a money expert, a millionaire, a podcast host, obviously, also a New York Times bestselling author, and we’re just excited to see you. We talk about how money affects women differently on the show. We talk about getting out of your comfort zone. And yeah, we talk about how to get fucking rich unapologetically.
This week, we’re joined by the lovely Tara Schuster, who I think you’re going to just be obsessed with after hearing this interview. I know I was. We actually have been texting since we recorded, and she is just lovely, and I’m so excited to get to know her better. We’ve spent a lot of time on this podcast and this year talking about the importance of mental and emotional health and self-care and working through money trauma, and this episode offers such a unique perspective on how to care for all of the parts of yourself, even the parts that you may not love or show to a lot of people or feel a little shadowy.
Tara Schuster is an accomplished entertainment executive turned mental health advocate and bestselling author. She is the author of the just-released Glow in the Fucking Dark and the runaway hit Buy Yourself the Fucking Lilies, a finalist for Goodreads’ Best Nonfiction Book of 2020. It was selected by Cosmopolitan, Real Simple, goop, Publishers Weekly, and many more as one of the best books of the year on mental health and self-care.
Previously, Tara served as Vice President of Talent and Development at Comedy Central, where she was the executive in charge of such critically acclaimed shows as the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning Key & Peele. She has contributed to InStyle, The New Yorker, and Forbes, among others, and she lives in Los Angeles. We talked a lot in this episode about overcoming financial trauma, how to reframe negative thinking, making peace with your inner frenemy, and how to kick them to the curb.
This episode is a great one if you just need a pep talk to remind you how fucking awesome and deserving you are and how to love yourself, even the parts of yourself that you may not like. So let’s go ahead and get into it. But first, a word from our sponsors. Financial health and mental health and spiritual health, they’re all of the same, yet people want to categorize finances as like, “Oh, it’s something that you need a degree in,” or “It’s something that’s different.” And I’m like, “You need money to do anything you want to do.”
Tara Schuster:
Well, talk about omnipresent. What is more omnipresent than money? Actually, all day, every day, we’re making choices about money. And if we’re not completely aware of how we’re making those choices, they absolutely affect our spiritual health, our medical health, every aspect of our lives. I love what you’re doing, getting the message out there, that it’s not so obscure and hard to understand these terms and what to do. I mean, I could go on a rant about the banking industry, and they profit when we don’t know the terminology. And so, I love how you break it down.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. That’s my not-so-conspiracy conspiracy theory, is all of this is more complicated than it has to be to just keep people employed, and typically Wall Street Chads. The Wall Street finance bros only have jobs because they’ve told us it’s complicated when really it’s not.
Tara Schuster:
Well, and when you learn the first thing, you’re like, “Oh, this was it? Oh, I get this.” But I think a lot of us get… Or I can speak for myself. I was really afraid to know anything about money. I didn’t want to even know how much was in my bank account. I didn’t want to know my 401(k). I just didn’t want to know. That felt more comfortable to me. But the moment I started learning, guess what evaporated? All of my fear, and then I could make better, more informed decisions. But it really was just, “Oh, that’s the stock market? Cool. Now I get it. I didn’t need a degree for that.”
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and a lot of your work, and this is the perfect segue into your incredible book and your work, is about shame. And I spend the entire first chapter of my book talking about basically shame, of the emotions around money. And you had this difficult and tumultuous upbringing that caused you to feel all of this shame. But on the outside, you were this really high-performing career woman. So was the pressure of keeping that up making it harder to really excavate, as you say in your book, your emotions and the healing process when you were performing, this high-power career person who has it all together, when inside it was just not working for you?
Tara Schuster:
I mean, it’s so not linear. I just got to the point where I couldn’t continue. I had grown up in this mess-wreck disaster house where things came to die. It was psychologically abusive, neglectful. And now looking back, what I realized is the central message I took away is, “You are not valuable.” That’s what I thought about myself. And when you don’t think you’re valuable just because you were born, if your value is tied to anything else and you’re seeking it externally, we all know this, but then we don’t know it, we want to pretend we don’t know it, it messes you up. You start making decisions to have other people love you and other people give you your worth.
And so, when I was a kid, I looked to teachers. Those were the authority figures who could tell me I was good. Grades were the thing that could make me feel like I had some value. Meanwhile, severe anxiety, depression that just got worse and worse and worse as I got older, and as I was self-medicating with weed to just numb me out from my mood, my memories, I mean, I was a zombie. I was a zombie who was good at work, but bad at life. And it might have kept going that way had I not drunk dialed my therapist on my 25th birthday threatening to hurt myself.
It is a special kind of feeling the next morning when you wake up with an unexplained sandwich in your bed and all these voicemails from your therapist trying to find you. That morning, I just realized, if I don’t save my own life, I’m not going to have much more of a life to live. So for me, the urgency of reparenting myself, of healing my trauma, I didn’t want to die. That’s like, achievement, no achievement, I just got to the place where I just didn’t want to die, and that’s what kind of set me on this whole journey.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Wow. Oh my gosh, there’s so much to unpack. We’re in the midst of a lot of layoffs, and you are our second comedy writer, Jon Stewart alum to be on this show. The first was, as we talked before, Chelsea Devantez. And you were working at Comedy Central and had this big, high-powered job, and then you lost your job in 2020. And you shared that you staked your entire life on this job, your identity, your life. So was that part of the deconstruction of what your identity was?
Tara Schuster:
Absolutely. I was using the job, looking back, as a magic trick, as a distraction, as “Look over here. I’m so fancy. Key & Peele are shouting me out from the Emmy stage, but don’t look over here at 25 years of complex trauma.” It was my way of saying to the whole world, “You see, I’m not a weirdo. I made it.” And I didn’t realize how much I was trying to prove myself with status and who I knew. And I loved that job, and I love comedy, so it wasn’t all for show, but I definitely was kind of using it to stabilize myself, to give myself some value and worth.
And so, when I lost my job, I lost my identity. At a certain point, my identity had become so tied to my job that when people introduced me, it would be, “Tara Schuster, Comedy Central.” It was my married last name. So it wasn’t even just that I thought of myself this way. Other people thought of me this way too. And when I lost my job, my worst traumas came flooding to the surface because now there was space for them. I wasn’t constantly stressed out. I didn’t have a boss who was defining me. I didn’t have to be on someone else’s schedule. So there was the space for these things to come up.
And I realized, “I need to figure out who I am without all this stuff,” without the job, without the status, honestly without the trauma. The trauma happened to me, but it is not me. So do I have a soul? Am I a unique individual? If so, who is that person? That’s sort of been the journey of my second book, Glow in the Fucking Dark, which I don’t know if I’m allowed to curse. So I was bold.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, you’re 100% allowed to curse. I want to pause you what you just said and I want to unpack that. You had trauma. You weren’t your trauma.
Tara Schuster:
Yes. Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
Because then even when you’re trying to find identity, then your trauma becomes your identity. Right? If suddenly there’s no job, there’s no anything else, then it’s like, “Okay. Well, what is my identity? Oh, I went through a ton of trauma. Now I’m dealing with that,” then that weirdly becomes your identity.
Tara Schuster:
Yeah. And I think until you address it and heal it, because I definitely thought of myself as this neglected, abused kid who nobody was going to love because what was wrong with me. And then within that identity, all of the trauma lived, and I sincerely believed I’d never be able to heal it. I thought it was so cheesy that anyone in a self-help book would say, “Oh, you can heal your bedrock wounds. It’s possible. Let go, feel joy.” I’m like, “Cool. What are steps one through five of ‘letting go’? How do you do it?”
And what I’ve learned is that it’s not that bad things don’t happen to us. I think some people feel uncomfortable saying, “I need to be fixed.” But actually, we are damaged by the world. Duh. How could we live in an environmental degradation, capitalism, sexism, system of oppression? It is insane to me that anyone would ever say, “Oh, no. I don’t need to be fixed. I’m perfect.” What is actually perfect is your innermost self, however you want to refer to it, soul. I refer to it as stardust because we are literally made of stardust, the carbon in our muscles. We are from that.
And thinking about that helps me trick myself into the truth, which is, I can’t fight with a scientific fact. I am made of stardust, and stardust is awesome. I can’t knock myself down a peg when I think of it that way. And so, I think it’s really important to distinguish between the stardust self, which is absolutely real, scientific, and miraculous. No one ever looks at the stars and say, “The stars need to do more. They didn’t get their to-do list done.” We don’t say that. We’re like, we all generally accept, “They’re fucking awesome. Cool. Thank you, stars.” So if I can really see that-
Tori Dunlap:
And they’re enough for just existing. Right? They’re enough for just existing and being. Yeah.
Tara Schuster:
Yeah. Absolutely. They’re more than enough for just existing. And so, I frequently, every day, come back to that, “Wait, wait, wait. I’m getting lost in a story about how I’m bad or I’m not enough or I hate my body.” Whatever it is, that cheery potpourri of things I think about myself. I just come back to, “Wait a minute. There’s a real self here, and it’s not the trauma and it’s not the status, and it’s not what I’ve achieved. It’s just that I am enough. Stardust is enough.”
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. I apologize for diving right in. We just really just dove right in.
Tara Schuster:
Let’s go there.
Tori Dunlap:
No, it’s great. There’s been a recurring theme of episodes in the last couple months that we’ve recorded about self-worth. And really, the big theme is, a lot of people stay comfortable until literally the universe forces them to make a different choice. And I always want to define comfortable when I say this. We don’t mean safe, we mean just playing it safe. So it sounds like you had that moment of pushed out of Comedy Central, like, “What the fuck am I going to do?”
And we had a previous guest on the show where it was like, literally, if you don’t make that call, even if it’s a call that you know is right for yourself somewhere, it’s the little voice that speaks to you before you fall asleep at night, the universe will make that decision for you. Your relationship will end. Your career will shift. Something will happen. And typically, it’s a lot worse when the universe decides it for you than if you just proactively go, “Okay. It’s going to be temporarily uncomfortable,” or “I’m going to be in a state of discomfort, but I know this is the right thing for me.” Does that ring true for your experience?
Tara Schuster:
Oh, absolutely. I got very comfortable with the uncomfortable because that was what I knew. And recently, I’ve been thinking about it. Well, was that because I had never tasted joy or emotional freedom before? I didn’t even know what was on the other side, but I really think… You used the word safety. I think there are so many of us who just lack basic safety for a number of reasons. For me, I’ll tell you, the first time I ever realized safety was even a thing, I was camping in Zion. And because I don’t know how to actually camp, I was going for takeout food for dinner.
I’d be in the park. Yeah, yeah, yeah, hike. But obviously, I’m getting a burrito at a restaurant when the sun goes down. And I was standing next to this family and this dad was talking to his sons, and he said, “Kids, tomorrow we’re going canyoneering. I don’t even know what canyoneering is, but if you feel scared, I’ve hired a guide who’s done this hundreds of times. So even when you feel scared, you’ll be safe.” And I was mind-blown, explosion, “Wait, wait. Parents are supposed to make their children’s life safe. They don’t tell them how unsafe they are.”
I grew up being told rapists and murderers were going to take me from my house. I grew up in a literally unsafe construction site of a house. It had never occurred to me that safety was even a thing. So I learned how to live with a low-grade anxiety and almost no regard for my physical or mental safety. And so, what you’re talking about really resonates. I basically just got myself up on a good enough plateau, stopped when my life was pretty good, things were pretty good, and I had this gnawing sense that I didn’t have the right job.
My job was amazing, super fun, super creative, but it wasn’t exactly me. I wanted to be a creator, not necessarily the one overseeing creation. And I had known this for years, but I never grabbed onto my own agency to make the decision. And I totally agree. I think that’s why it was much worse because I didn’t choose to climb off of the good enough plateau. I was kicked way off of it. So I totally agree with that. Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
You were talking before about people were like, “Feel joy.” And you’re like, “I feel like that’s step six.” What was step one for you in your healing journey? What did that look like? Because I imagine if I’m listening and I am dealing with trauma or I maybe don’t even know I’m dealing with trauma, but I am, what is step one?
Tara Schuster:
Yeah. Well, I’ll say step zero is you have that awakening moment. Something goes terrible. Unfortunately, I don’t know of another way to get there. Maybe it’s that you just notice that things are terrible and you decide to become self-aware. And self-awareness is always a part of any healing journey, just being able to witness yourself at all and not be trapped and overwhelmed in how you’re feeling. So for me, that took the form of journaling, which sounded so cheesy and terrible, and who has the time to journal? And, “Oh my God, I don’t want to do this.”
And I was at the point in my life where I was drunk dialing my therapist and just desperate to try anything. And so, I started journaling, and almost immediately I could see my life more, because I was out of my head and onto the page, and there was a mind-body connection between thinking and writing where I could see that a lot of my negative self-talk, a lot of my fears, they weren’t me. They were within me, but they were separate from me. And so, any kind of practice where you can just start having a little self-awareness and start to see, “Oh, you actually have a lot of control over the narrative that you are telling yourself,” you really do, that really jump-starts the whole process.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and I think you had mentioned this struggle with self-trust of like, “When I’m working through trauma, I’m gaslighting and doubting myself in my own experience, in my own trauma.” I think this is something I deal with. I know it’s probably every single woman. Every single, maybe, person deals with this, of just fully gaslighting yourself and then potentially having outside forces gaslight you too. Right?
The toxic jobs are like, “No, we’re all family and everything’s great,” and maybe you’re in a relationship that’s bad and it’s like, you can’t get better somewhere else. When I think about that experience of just not being able to engage with self-trust, was there a moment, a vent, a revelation that really helped you recognize and come to peace with your understanding of what was happening to you? And when you do start gaslighting yourself now, how do you work through this when it comes up for you?
Tara Schuster:
I’m so glad you asked this question because I’ve never been able to answer it in this way, that I always doubted that I was abused, because it wasn’t that bad, and didn’t other people have it much worse than me? I could imagine a million scenarios that were worse than my own, and wasn’t I privileged? And who was I to complain? Didn’t I go to the schools?
Tori Dunlap:
I don’t have cancer, so my day-to-day… Yeah. And even I think parents are guilty of this too. Right? It’s like, you come to them and you’re like, “Hi, I’m hurting.” It’s like, “Well, everything’s fine. Suck it up. You don’t have cancer.” Right? And I don’t know why that’s the thing. Right? Like, “You don’t have cancer.”
Tara Schuster:
Yeah. Lori Gottlieb, a writer and a psychologist, she calls it the hierarchy of pain, that nobody is higher than anybody on the pain scale, because whatever the external circumstance, if you feel it, it’s real. You can’t should it away if you feel miserable, even if you think you don’t deserve to feel miserable. And if anyone listening takes anything away from this, let it be. You are allowed to feel however you feel. And that actually is more helpful to all of us for you to actually experience your own feelings than to push them down or to deny them.
So for me, for years, I was like, “Well, was I really abused? I know this scene, I know this thing happened to me, but did it really happen? Was it really that bad?” And what I started noticing was how it felt in my body. Why was it that I felt 10 out of 10 panic, scared, angry every time I thought about my mom? Why was that? Was it because I was making some stuff up and that had some reaction to my body? No. It was because something really did happen. Otherwise, why would I feel as terrible as I felt?
So I started paying attention to actually how do I feel and validating, “Well, something must have happened.” Maybe it’s not exactly how I remember it, but we don’t just get in our body these horrific feelings of shame, embarrassment, fear. We’re not born that way. So something had to have happened. So that was a big turning moment for me, was I’m allowed to feel however I actually do feel and I’m validated by the fact that it’s in my body. I can’t make this up.
Tori Dunlap:
Yup. Yup. Well, and you said two things that were so impactful for me. When I started going to therapy, I learned about big T trauma versus little t trauma. Right? And big T trauma is the things we would define as stereotypically traumatic, right? Sexual assault, murder, living through a natural disaster, hate crimes. Right? Things that are very, very traumatic. And for a good chunk of us, myself included, I don’t have, knock on wood, any of the big T trauma. So I’m like, again, if we’re doing comparison, like, “I don’t have cancer. I didn’t see something happen in front of me that scarred me forever, so I don’t get to complain. I don’t get to feel any of that.”
And then, of course, we all, every single one of us, have some sort of little t trauma from something, whether that’s, like you said before, just existence of living in the world or it’s fraught family dynamics or it’s that weird thing that guy said to you on a street once. I mean, I’ve talked many times about it. My first boyfriend called me fat on a beach, and that still fucks with me. I know. Told me because his mom said she expected me to look skinnier the first time we met, that I should lose some weight.
Tara Schuster:
Oh. Oh, no.
Tori Dunlap:
And I don’t give a fuck about this person’s opinion. We are not in contact. I don’t care. And yet, that still fucks with me. So that was something that was so freeing for me, is understanding that all of us have trauma, and that’s the way the cookie crumbles in that way, but weirdly accepting, “Yeah, it doesn’t have to be this huge traumatic event to matter.” And then what you just said about body connection, oh my God. I think, if you are not understanding how… I mean, the body keeps score, right? Perfect example of a book where we hold everything in our bodies.
I literally got a massage from an acupuncturist who was working on the top of my left arm and is like, “Have you been grieving something?” And I had been for a year, and I just start crying, and she’s like, “This is where your body carries grief.” The body does show you where you keep trauma and is an emotional response, vice versa. And something that was so helpful for me, it’s like, when you stub your toe, you have a bodily response before you’ve even registered that you’re in pain. Right?
Tara Schuster:
Right.
Tori Dunlap:
I end up crying, because I just stubbed my toe before I’ve even registered, “Oh, how do I emotionally feel about this experience?” which tells me that my emotions and my body are inextricably linked.
Tara Schuster:
Absolutely. And something I’ll add is that I was very uncomfortable with the word trauma. I thought it was either for, like you said, people who went through big T trauma or for weak people who couldn’t handle their shit. That was my belief around trauma. And one thing that really helped me was realizing, exactly like you said, trauma is just a circumstance of life. It’s nothing new. It’s nothing that fancy.
In religions, they’ve called it, in Buddhism, suffering, pain. All of these words are just synonyms for the state of trauma that just does exist. And that really helped me accepting, “Oh, this is just a normal part of life. It’s not comfortable and I’m going to heal it, but it’s not some alien, exotic thing that I should feel embarrassed about or that I don’t have the right to claim as my own.”
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and we’re talking about trauma, and you mentioned… We were talking about, before this, financial trauma as a result of your childhood. You shared that it took you five years to order takeout, which is really funny you say that because I had a takeout thing for many, many years. And I don’t even know if it was traumatic. It was just frugal parents being like, “No, we don’t order pizza. No.”
Tara Schuster:
Right.
Tori Dunlap:
Maybe I can count on, I don’t know, probably a couple fingers the amount of times we ordered pizza or got food delivered to the house. That’s not a thing. Yeah. I still remember the first time I ordered DoorDash and I was like, “What am I doing?” And it was a slippery slope. Can you talk about the process and what was the belief that kept you from spending, and what helped you work through that?
Tara Schuster:
Yeah. As I said, emotionally, everything is tied together. So leaving my childhood, the number one message is, “You are not valuable. You are not worthwhile. You are not worthy. You don’t deserve anything.” And part of that really was the messaging I got around money, which was, my parents would go on a lavish vacation to Hawaii where I would hear them fighting with the front desk about the bill. It wasn’t easy-peasy. There was a lot of strife even there.
But then we’d get home and I couldn’t go to the dentist or I wasn’t allowed to go to the doctor because it was too expensive and we couldn’t afford it, and we were dodging bills. And I saw my first car repossession when I was younger than 10. I can remember it like it was yesterday, black asphalt, a guy going in my mom’s car and taking it away.
What I came to understand was that I wasn’t worth spending money on. And even though I was privileged, even stuff like I went to a really nice private school, which you would say, “Wow, your dad made such a sacrifice,” except every single day, I was told how much credit card debt it was putting him in. I just felt like a burden. So I couldn’t spend money on myself in any kind of nice way. And that’s actually where the title from Buy Yourself the Fucking Lilies comes from.
As I was on this reparenting journey, I’m learning new techniques to take care of myself. I’m changing my whole perspective. I would go to Trader Joe’s to buy my very budget frozen meals that I was subsisting off of, and I would see the lilies in their weird bucket of water, and I just think, “Ugh, lilies. What is more beautiful than a lily?” And the moment they blossom, they just fill your home with this elegant, beautiful scent, like, “Oh my God, I love lilies.” But no, they’re $7. I can’t afford those, and I’d race to the register before I was tempted by the lilies.
Tori Dunlap:
And I don’t mean to interrupt you. You’ve also been actively shamed by financial experts of like, again, “The latte is the reason you can’t afford to buy the house.” Right? So my entire book is the shame cycle of money. Right? So these little tiny things that literally do make life worth living, like a bouquet of lilies or a chocolate croissant that I would get walking through Pike Place Market on my way home from work some days when I was 22.
Tara Schuster:
Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
Those are the things I end up remembering. Those are the things that are beautiful and lovely, yet we’ve been told, “Don’t spend your money. That’s frivolous. That’s wasteful.” And of course, the whole thing that frivolous spending is only for women. That’s the other thing.
Tara Schuster:
Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s like, frivolous spending is only the feminine things, like flowers or lattes, but not NFL season tickets.
Tara Schuster:
Absolutely. And I also think just millennials are frivolous, because if we had just saved enough from the lattes and the lilies, then we’d have houses, and it’s like, actually, no. Generational wealth, systematic oppression, the way that the environment has been destroyed. There are so many other reasons that the lilies-
Tori Dunlap:
9/11, 2008-
Tara Schuster:
Yeah. Exactly.
Tori Dunlap:
… Occupy Wall Street, Trump getting elected. We can keep going, student debt crisis. Yeah.
Tara Schuster:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Tara Schuster:
Before you take away my flowers, I actually-
Tori Dunlap:
Right. They’re the only reason I have to live anymore.
Tara Schuster:
Yeah. And let’s not forget, how do I have the money to buy them? I worked my ass off and I saved a little money to buy them. So you’re going to tell me that with my little savings, I can’t have this one thing that delights me? No. I just decided in Trader Joe’s one day, “I don’t care if this makes me a bad person who’s going to lose all their money,” which is mostly what I thought about any financial decision.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, because you’re told that. Yeah. Yeah.
Tara Schuster:
Absolutely, that you’re being luxurious or decadent, or if you find yourself in debt, that you did something drastically wrong and you’re morally questionable. We get all this terrible messaging about money, and then is it any wonder why we don’t want to buy the flowers? So one day, I just said, “Truly, fuck this. I am buying these lilies. I don’t think it’s actually going to kill me.” And guess what? I didn’t die. In fact, my little studio apartment smelled so good. And once I went off that cliff, I was like, “Oh. Oh, the biggest luxuries are actually tiny, having holes without socks. Wow.”
That, every time I go through TSA, is like a blessing, and I’m like, “Ooh, I love my socks more than a blowout night with my friends.” If we can build basic luxuries into our life, we can uplevel everything. But it’s in those teeny decisions to treat yourself a little better, to treat yourself with a little more respect. And they don’t need to be crazy expensive. We’re not talking about a blowout vacation to Hawaii, which sounds really nice, and if you want to go, I’m totally down, like, “Let’s go.” But that’s not the kind of self-care, the kind of treating yourself that I’m talking about.
Tori Dunlap:
And even we’re calling it, which I think is the thing that even we’d have to unpack further, I and you call them luxuries. Right? They’re small luxuries. Socks without holes in them shouldn’t be luxurious. They should just be the thing that is fine. Flowers that make you feel special should just be an occurrence of just being a happy human being. Yet again, we’ve been conditioned to believe these aren’t necessary to life.
And if my work is championing anything, it’s just like, “How do I live a life of capital-G goodness and capital-B beauty? How do I use money as a tool to provide myself as much ease as possible?” And unfortunately, that shouldn’t be a luxury, but for many people, it is, of just, “I have slightly better than just basic necessities.” Your book, Buy the Fucking Lilies, is broken down in three parts, mind, body, and relationship. Would you be able to drop one lesson from each for our listeners?
Tara Schuster:
Yes. Absolutely. What we were just talking about kind of reminds me of this. When I do a workshop about impostor syndrome or about… I call it the frenemy within, the critical voice, always, every single time, someone towards the end asks, “But don’t we need a little bit of self-criticism to keep ourselves honest, to keep ourselves going? I won’t improve if I’m not mean to myself a little, right?” And I’m like, “Oh my God, no. Have you been listening to anything I’ve been saying?” We do not grow stronger by beating ourselves up. We just become more brittle.
Self-rejection, like continuing to self-reject ourselves, does not get us to self-love. Hate doesn’t get us to health. You can’t operate in a way that just doesn’t work and has never worked for anyone. And so, my first thing on the body is just do one nice thing for yourself. Challenge yourself to do one nice thing for yourself every day this week. Even if I say this 10 years after going through and documenting this process, even I’m like, “Oh, are you so decadent that you deserve to do one nice thing for yourself?” And I have to say to myself, “Yeah, because I’m stardust, and who cares? I’m allowed to do one nice thing for myself.”
And when I’m relaxed and feel good about myself and confident, I tend to treat everybody around me much better, which is why self-care, when done authentically, is community care, because you are a part of your community and how you act really, really affects the rest of us. And I always say, if you want to change the world today, it’s so cliché, but start with you. Start with your own mental health, because if you’re not dealing with your trauma, probably your loved ones are. So let’s take care of ourselves so that we’re better citizens, and also people aren’t taking care of us as much in those ways.
So first thing, I feel like I’m on such a rant about this because it’s just I couldn’t say… I want to shout from the rooftops, your mental health is your number one priority. It’s your responsibility. The only way towards enjoying your life is to be somewhat stable, and it’s the only way to create a better world today. We want everything else to change. We want politics to change. We want the environment to change. We want financial situation to change. We can work towards systematic change, yes, and we must, but we can’t do that all today.
What we can deal with is that horrible comment about your body on the beach, looking at it for what it is, seeing it as something different from you, doing whatever you need to do to heal from it, because your healing is also my healing because we are a part of the same community, and we’re both made of stardust. End of rant on the mind.
Tori Dunlap:
You and I’s work is so similar. Literally, my whole thing is like, “Get financially stable. That is an act of protest.” Before you do anything for anybody else, you getting financially stable is an act of protest, because you show up differently in the world. And if especially you’re a member of a marginalized group, society does not want you financially stable and mentally healthy. They don’t. And you getting there is, that’s 100% enough. That’s more than enough, and that is an act of protest against a system and a society. It’s like Rest Is Resistance, right? It’s this other book and movement, and it’s like just being well-rested, especially if you’re a member of a marginalized group, is, that’s the thing. That’s the thing.
Tara Schuster:
I think it’s hard to see, particularly because we’re taught we’re nothing. And especially if you’re a part of a marginalized group, you’re taught you’re nothing. You don’t matter. One of the saddest moments of my whole life is, I went to Arizona in the 2020 election because I just couldn’t… I was so anxious and I needed to do something, and I became a ballot healer, which means I’d get rejected votes from the state and then I’d go try to find the voter who either forgot to sign their envelope, they put it in the wrong envelope. A clerical error was going to lead to their vote being rejected.
And I found this young woman. This is her first time voting. She’s 18. I track her down to her first apartment out of her parents’ house, and I’m like, “Guess what? Good news. Your ballot has been rejected, sucks, but I’m here. You can totally fix this. This is going to be easy.” And she looked me in the eye and said, “I’m not going to fix it. Things never change. The president is just going to be the president.” It was her first election. She had taken the time to vote, but did not believe she mattered at all.
And I find that left and right that people think they’re not powerful. They can’t change themselves or they’re afraid to change themselves, afraid of how much work it will take, afraid it will overwhelm them. And from the other side of that, I just know it’s easier to live a life where you’re responsible for it, where your eyes are open. Closing your eyes just makes you afraid.
And so, I don’t even know how we got here, but I emphatically agree with you that living your life, your life, not a life that has been prescribed to you or that you have been condescended to to live, is the biggest act of resistance and is the biggest act of change, because if we don’t all do that, first off, how is anyone else going to know that’s possible? Right? How are people going to wake up?
Second off, I show up as a really shitty, bitchy person when I’m not confident. When I am self-critical, then I need to put other people down, get in this whole spiral. So if I’m responsible for me, I’m just going to be a better person across the board. And that’s a change, as you were saying, that really has ripple effects. You don’t know how powerful you are until you grab your agency and then you see, “Whoa, there’s so much I can do to improve my lot and the lot of everyone around me.”
Tori Dunlap:
Yup. Anybody listening, and I need you to rewind five minutes, and I need you to listen to all that again.
Tara Schuster:
Fuck.
Tori Dunlap:
Yup. Yeah. And I know from my own experience, just like you, when I am well-rested, when I feel good about myself, I show up better in every aspect of my life. I show up better as a leader. I show up better as a partner. I show up better as a friend. I show up better as a daughter, and I show up better to myself. And it allows other people to see, “Oh, I can show up like that too.” Yeah.
Tara Schuster:
Absolutely.
Tori Dunlap:
Could not agree more.
Tara Schuster:
I was just going to say, it’s often seen as selfish or self-indulgent to want better for yourself, but the only way that would be true is if you were your own island completely disconnected from all other people and the environment, and then… Yeah. Maybe.
Tori Dunlap:
You’d also be miserable.
Tara Schuster:
Yeah. Yeah. So that’s not the case. You’re here with the rest of us. So our healing is necessarily everyone else’s healing.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and you mentioned something, and I want to come back to it at the beginning, where you said, there’s this question at the end of workshops, which is just like, “Yeah, but I have to be a little hard on myself, right?” And that’s something that I hear a ton, especially with Dave Ramsey, and I’m very publicly outspoken about him. And one of the things that people comment on my posts sometimes is they’re like, “Yeah. He’s a hard-ass, but he motivated me.” And I’m like, “He also caused you financial trauma that you don’t understand yet.”
Tara Schuster:
Absolutely.
Tori Dunlap:
And I do this sometimes too, where a friend is having a hard day and she’ll call me and I’ll be like, “Oh, I’m so sorry.” Like COVID, same thing. That was the big thing I realized. Somebody’s like, “Oh, I’m having a really hard time,” or “Something’s going on.” And I’m like, “Oh, I’m so sorry. Take a day off. Take care of yourself.” And then I turn back and I’m like, “No, but I need to keep working. I need to keep doing this.”
Tara Schuster:
Yes.
Tori Dunlap:
And I’m so generous. I like to think I’m so generous with all of the people in my community and all my friends, and that I am like, “Yeah, but that doesn’t apply to me.” People gained weight during the pandemic, and I’m like, “Yes, it’s really hard. We went through a lot,” but it’s unacceptable, the 20 pounds I gained. Absolutely unacceptable. Yeah.
Tara Schuster:
Absolutely. A really quick hack on that is just when you find yourself in a spiral like that, ask yourself, “Would I talk to a friend the way I’m talking to myself now or a stranger?” Because there’s no way that I would be body-shaming a stranger about their COVID weight, and yet a complete unknown person to me, and I would do that to myself? The stranger thing has really got me, or a guest in your house. Anybody who’s not you, would you treat them the same way that you’re treating yourself? If no, you don’t deserve to treat yourself that way.
Tori Dunlap:
Yup. Totally. So if Buy Yourself the Fucking Lilies is a healing book, Glow in the Fucking Dark is an expansive book. Can you share anything from the other side of trauma with us? And can you talk about the emotion wheel you shared in this new book?
Tara Schuster:
Absolutely. Buy Yourself the Fucking Lilies is basically a 600-page Google Doc I assembled of weird advice I heard watching my friends’ parents cook dinner and how did they interact. It was me observing the world looking for healthy ways to live, because I didn’t want to be miserable anymore. And I did all those things for five years. At the end of five years, I felt like a stable, content person, which truly, I never thought those words would ever apply to me.
And I turned them into a book as an offering of, I just tried something called structure. And structure really helped me become grounded. And I have these rituals that are actually quite beautiful, and I can rely on them. I live in an unsafe world, but my rituals are really safe and I can look forward to them every day, and it got me to a place I never thought I could be. But once I was there, there was a calling much deeper than that that was asking, “Why are you even here? What is the point of all this? How are you living? Are we just going to burn ourselves out at this job toiling forever to get more money, to buy more stuff, to end up in this trap, or is there a bigger purpose here?”
I feel grandiose saying this, but I needed to recover my soul from the trauma I had been through and from the society that I was living within. And so, Glow is really about, finding your soul actually isn’t that big of a deal. It’s not that hard. It’s just that we discount things like this to such an extreme and we’re taught to hate ourselves to such an extreme that we’re just disconnected, totally disconnected from the stardust self within.
So Glow is about reclaiming who you actually are, reclaiming a life you actually want to lead, and remembering that you have agency that no matter how much the world wants to tell you, “You can’t change. Things can’t change,” you actually have a lot of power. And that’s how the world gets away with what it gets away with, is because there’s a term in psychology, learned helplessness. The more we believe we can’t help, the more we can’t help. We get stuck in this cycle.
So I think it’s a two-step process, and I think it’s first finding stability, grounding yourself, having a life that doesn’t make you actively miserable. That’s Buy Yourself the Fucking Lilies. And then once you’ve got that, how do you deepen? How do you find freedom? How do you find freedom from your trauma? And I think you could read them one and the other, but also, so many of us are in different points in our journeys. So they’re for people on a journey of some kind.
And you asked about the emotion wheel. Even getting back to something else you asked, what’s the first step in any of this healing? It’s noticing. It’s like, “I am awake enough to notice my life, to even see what the fuck is going on here.” And where we get really caught is… I’ll speak for myself. I thought the only emotions I had were bad, sad, tired, busy, fine. That’s how I would describe the great miracle of my life, was those five terms, and I realized, “Oh, hold on. There are so many more emotions available to me, and it’s actually quite powerful that I can hold a few emotions at the same time.”
There’s a lot of science behind just labeling how you feel. It makes you a lot less anxious, a lot less depressed, I think because, again, you’re reminding yourself of your agency and that you control your narrative more than you thought you do. And in the book, I provide my own… Yeah. Atlas of the Heart is all about that. Yes. Absolutely. So I provide my own emotion wheel with words that made sense to me to find our emotion. And the coolest trick of all is, if you can label your emotions, you can make different choices. You can respond differently. For example, I thought I had a really… For legal reasons, I couldn’t explain everything that happened, but basically, he just… What word did they want me to use? Wasn’t necessarily truthful constantly. So I felt like I was-
Tori Dunlap:
Yup. Lied. Got it. I can say it. Lied. Sure.
Tara Schuster:
Whatever, about everything. So I lived in this weird state of what’s true, what’s not true. And I went to a psychiatrist because I was feeling really anxious and I was explaining the whole story, “I’ve done all this healing, and now I’m dating this guy and I kind of feel off-kilter all the time, and reality is warping constantly. Why am I anxious?” She looks at me and she said, “I don’t think you’re anxious. I think you’re furious.” And I realized, “Oh my God, you’re right. I don’t know how to feel angry or fury. I don’t know what to do with that.”
So by stuffing it down, I am thinking that that feeling of stuffing myself down, that’s the anxiety. And it’s not really what I’m feeling. It’s a secondary emotion. And so, something like an emotion wheel, you learn. Most of us are not taught what emotions are available to us nor what to do with them. So none of us should feel bad about it. We just, again, need to be a little more educated.
Tori Dunlap:
And I think anger, fury is not socially acceptable for women. And I can’t speak from a woman of color’s experience, but I know it’s even worse. That’s, I think, especially an emotion that we as women are not comfortable with because we’ve been conditioned to not be comfortable with it. Yeah.
Tara Schuster:
And I think that the greater… I hate to keep generalizing about society, but I do think that women are more often labeled anxious as a way to dismiss their very real concerns, their very real fears. In my book, it’s the scarlet letter. It doesn’t stand for adultery, it stands for anxious. And if you’re just irrational and anxious and there’s no reason, you just are pushed aside. And so, for all of our mental health, I think getting good at deciphering how you feel, which is what I do in a journal, I pull out the emotion wheel. I ask myself every morning, “How do I feel?” That act alone, huge, completely changes how you show up and what you’re able to do about your own life.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. And I held up, while you were talking, Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown, which is like an encyclopedia for every emotion, and it sounds like yours as well, and I’m excited to read yours. Speaking of that, what is next for you? Where can people find more about you? This has just been just a lovely, lovely conversation and so life-affirming, so thank you. Where can people find you?
Tara Schuster:
So if you go to taraschuster.substack.com or just google Tara Schuster newsletter, I have a newsletter that comes out once a week and you can talk to me there. I reply to everything. It’s a really easy way to keep in touch, and I write a new essay every week. I promise they’re very short. I’m also on Instagram where I talk a lot about this. I’m just @taraschuster.
And what’s next is, this is, again, going to sound so grandiose, but I want to know the truth. I want to know the truth of what is happening here. And so, I hope that I can continue to write in a relatable, funny way about these bigger topics for my own investigation of the world. But also, I’ve just realized everyone else has the same questions. We basically all have the same experiences. We just feel so alienated from one another that we don’t even talk about these things. So I just want to keep writing, keep talking. That’s my plan.
Tori Dunlap:
I love it. Thank you for being here, and thank you for your work.
Tara Schuster:
Thank you. This has been life-affirming for me, so thank you.
Tori Dunlap:
Yay. We love that. Thank you so much to Tara for joining us for this episode. Make sure to check out her books, Buy Yourself the Fucking Lilies and Glow in the Fucking Dark, wherever you get your books, especially if it’s an indie bookseller. It goes great with a copy of Financial Feminist, just saying. Thank you for being here. If you love the show, feel free to leave a review. Leave us a voicemail. If you got a question, comment, concern, we would love to hear from you. Thank you as always for being here, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First $100K podcast. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap, produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Researched by Sarah Sciortino, audio and Video Engineering by Alyssa Midcalf, marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First $100K. Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Taylor Chou, Sasha Bonar, Ray Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Claire Kurronen, Darrell Ann Ingman and Meghan Walker. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolf. And theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First $100K community for supporting the show. For more information about financial feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit FinancialFeministPodcast.com. If you’re confused about your personal finances and you’re wondering where to start, HerFirst100K.com/quiz for a free personalized money plan.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
