Life right now feels like putting on a pair of jeans immediately out of the shower. We’re gonna get through it. But it’s gonna feel sticky.

Hi friends. I'm Lauren Howard, and this is my podcast Different, Not Broken.

I did so much peopling in one single Sunday that I genuinely lost track of what week it was. A makeup class. Brunch at a place that charges $30 for an omelette and somehow recommends the cheeseburger. My mom’s birthday dinner at the Melting Pot. The balloon bouquet she hates. Venmoing at the table because I’m very Gen Z apparently. All of it, start to finish, until I got home at 6:30pm and was absolutely cooked.

If that sounds familiar—if you also left a room full of strangers and had to run a silent internal audit of whether you were being annoying—this episode is for you.

Also, Alison answers a question from Alejandro in New Mexico, who graduated with his bachelor’s at 37 and can’t stop doing the math on the years he considers “lost.”

And so I got my phone out, and I was like, can I Venmo you

the money for my meal? Because I gotta go.

And that's the first time I've ever done that, probably because I'm usually always

paying for the meal. I usually go out with a bunch of mooches, is really

what it is. I was like, man, it's been a long time since I've been

in a room of strangers, small enough that everybody could hear the

stupid shit that goes on in my head. And then it sometimes accidentally comes out

of my mouth. It's fondue, but it's all sorts of dipping of meat and

cheese in different patterns, which is my

happy place.

All right, here we go. I'm gonna pretend I'm pushing record, because that feels right.

Okay, I'm pressing record. Boop. Hi,

everybody. I'm Lauren Howard. Welcome to Different

Not Broken, which is our podcast on exactly that.

That there are a lot of people in this world walking around feeling broken. And

the reality is, you're just different, and that's fine.

I have made no secret of the

general trial and tribulation of my existence right now. There is

so much. It is always a lot. Every morning I wake up and I'm like,

really? Again? And every morning, the answer is yes

again. And we get up and we do it again. But I was thinking about

it this morning, and I realized that life right now feels like

putting on a pair of jeans immediately out of the shower. We're gonna get

through it, but it's gonna be difficult, and it's probably

gonna feel sticky and like, I can't think. More apt description. And I don't think

it's just me. I think that's a universal experience, at least in the US Right

now. So get your pants on or don't. Don't put jeans

on. That's awful. But I would imagine we have the same problem with leggings, Right?

But jeans, specifically. Put your pants on or don't, but just

know that if it feels like a struggle, it's not just

you. And I am undoubtedly gonna get my foot

stuck in the leg of one of them and fall over relatively soon. So

you can come join me. It's such a universal feeling. Have you seen the

newsroom? There's an episode where he says that the pants are cut

wrong because he can't put them on right. And he makes a

comment about how he's so smart, and somebody's like, really? Because you just told us

that you can't put your pants on, and then later that episode, he

has to rush to get the pants on, and you see him falling out from

behind a curtain because he couldn't get his leg in. That's what it feels

like. I was about to say, yeah, but skinny jeans are trendy now.

And then I realized that skinny jeans were trendy literally 20 years ago.

Last Sunday. I did so much peopling that I still

have not recovered so much that I'm just

realizing that it wasn't even last Sunday. It was the Sunday before.

That's how bad I burned out my social battery. That's how much

out of the house I did. That's how much logistics

I did. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Orlando, but in Orlando, our, like,

swanky area, I guess one of them, the oldest swanky area is

Winter Park. There's an area in Winter park, it's called Park Avenue, that has

all of the upscale stores, the restaurants

that charge $30 for an omelette and charge you

more to deconstruct things so that you have to put them together

instead of just giving you a plate of food you can eat. They're like, here's

a deconstructed gazpacho. And you're like, why did you just bring me

tomato soup with cilantro on the side? That doesn't make sense. Anyway, they're very

impressed with themselves, and to their credit, I have eaten at a number

of them and all of them were very good. But I am a person

who will happily eat a gas station hot dog. I'm not their

target demo. I will very happily go to them. I will find something

to eat there. I will put. Probably really enjoy it 100%. Well,

they look at me and they're like, oh, she might have showered in the last

week. This is interesting, but there's this. It's lovely. I really like

the area. I like. It's well manicured.

There's green space. The nightmare is the parking. But we went very early

one day, so there wasn't really a parking issue. But Natasha, who's a dear friend

of mine, got a makeup class or something in a silent auction, and so

she asked me if I wanted to go. And I was like, you want to

play with makeup for two hours? Yes, Absolute G. We went

and there were a bunch of people there, and I

forget how much of a jackass I am

around a bunch of new people until I'm around a bunch of new

people being a jackass. So there were all of the people who were

there, and then there were the people who worked at the store

because it was like a class that was held at a makeup store. And

there was me, and we were there for several hours. And

I could not stop making smart ass comments to

the group, which everybody laughed at. I don't think I was actually annoying people. Now

in hindsight, I'm like, oh, God, was I annoying people? But I don't think I

was. I think we were cool. I was like, man, it's been a long time

since I've been in a room of strangers small enough that everybody could

hear the stupid shit that goes on in my head and then it sometimes

accidentally comes out of my mouth. But they all could. They did laugh, which

is really bad. If you want me to stop, don't laugh. I'm like a toddler

who said the F word. I'm going to keep saying the F word now because

you laughed. First off, being a full nerd, I think they thought that they

were dealing with a bunch of, like, makeup novices, which most people were, which is

totally cool. But I am not a makeup

novice. And I have a whole chest of drawers next to my desk that

has makeup in it that I play with every day and I try new stuff

all the time and I spend way more money on makeup than I should, considering

how much makeup I have, but I don't care. And

so they were like, okay, so this is

a primer. And you put this on your face before. And

so the woman came over and was like, what would you say that your makeup

understanding is? And I was like, I have 18 different foundations that I

choose from each day. And she was like, so, some experience,

okay. And so then they, like, wanted to bring me all the products, hoping I

would buy all of the products. So she was like, well, I'm gonna bring you

over this one because this is a brand you can't get anywhere else or very

few other places. So I know you haven't tried this yet. Anyway, she was very

cute. She was very sweet. And then I was sitting at the same table as

Natasha's mother, who is a fucking delight, a lovely, wonderful person

who I wanted to take home in my pocket. Her mom doesn't wear a ton

of makeup, and so I couldn't not do my makeup like I always do.

And so I'm sitting there and I've got, like, all the tools in front of

me and I'm putting it on my face and I'm doing, like, all the things

that you do for. I don't know, I feel like a full nerd. And

she's watching me the whole time, and she keeps going, wow, you're really good at

this. Wow. No, you really know what you're doing.

How did you make that look like that? And I'm like, first off, I can

show you. I'm happy to show you. But also, like, these professional makeup artists who

actually know what they're doing will show you too. Like, that's why they're standing by.

So anyway, I became, like, the spectacle, which pretty on brand did several

hours there. And then we went to brunch, and I had

a wonderful waspy brunch. I don't even know how to

describe it, but it was supposed to be Mediterranean fusion or something.

I don't know. I saw eggs Benedict on the menu, and I was like, that,

please. But it's one of those places where you order food and

you get food. The food doesn't come with a side

because you're fancy and you have to order a separate side.

Not that I needed the side, but it was still like, that's the kind of

place it was. Everything's a la carte except for the cheeseburger. And

riddle me this. They have a menu, full love,

really expensive, really, like, the type of food you cannot get

anywhere else. Specialized stuff, all sorts of fancy

ingredients, stuff that even somebody like me was like, this

feels like I'm not going to have any other opportunity to try this. So I

want to try it, even though I'm probably going to hate it. One of the

people who was with us looked at the server and was like,

I'm between this and the cheeseburger. Which should I get? And he was like, oh,

definitely the cheeseburger. Our cheeseburger's really good. And I'm like, good for you.

I support you. But also, I don't feel like you're supposed to come here and

get a cheeseburger. And why is your cheeseburger that good? Why would you have a

stellar cheeseburger at this crazy, fusiony,

very expensive place? And you're like, Nope, get the $16 cheeseburger. It's

better. That doesn't make sense to me. That feels like there's a failure somewhere else.

I didn't get the cheeseburger, and I was a little regretful because it did look

really good. We did brunch, and I

stepped into 2026 because I had to leave a little bit

early from brunch before they had settled everything out. And so I got my

phone out, and I was like, can I venmo you the Money for my meal

because I gotta go. And that's the first time I've ever done that.

Probably because I'm usually always paying for the meal. I usually go out with a

bunch of mooches is really what it is. So I felt very like Gen Z.

Like I was with the times, which those times are actually five years ago, I

literally got into my car, drove the

40ish minutes home, changed my clothes. My kids came home,

they had been out. We jumped right back in the car. I literally

just left a meal, just got back in the

car, drove over to my mom's house, picked her up, took

her out to early dinner for her birthday. For the record, not because

she wanted to go to early dinner, but because I am

exceptionally old and I don't want to be out past

bedtime. So my mother, who was turning an

age, that I will be immediately struck down

from heaven if I say on a live microphone, I will not

say, but on that day was turning that age and should be

the one who cares about early bird specials, was

like, why do you want to go eat so early? And I was like, why

do you want to go eat so late? She's like, I want to go eat

at 7. And I was like, no. So we went

very early, but we took her to a very nice restaurant. We took her to

the Melting Pot, which is a nice restaurant. It's just like meat and

things you put on meat. It's like basically just repetitive meat and cheese, which is

not a problem for me at all. It's all sorts of dipping. It's fondue, but

it's all sorts of dipping of meat and cheese in different

patterns, which is my happy place. But then we did that and then we

were there for several hours and then we did birthday and then I finally got

home. It was probably only like 6:30 when we got home.

And I was like, I'm spent. I talked to so many people today.

I did so many things. And I remembered to get the balloon

bouquet for the table, which I should get some sort of award for.

And by remembered I mean I checked the box when I made the reservation.

But it did feel like I remembered to do something. And then we got to

the table and my mom reminded me that she hates balloons. And I was

like, oh, that is a thing that you've said for literally my entire life. I

forgot. I forgot. Awesome. But man, I can't think of

a day in the recent past outside of when we were

at a conference and I knew that it was

going to be like, morning to night peopleing. And I still

escaped momentarily throughout the day to

recharge and get a soda and find some

solace and put my AirPods in and noise cancel the whole world. Like, I can't

think of a day that I have peopled that hard in a very

long time. There were two meals, there was a whole

class where a bunch of people were touching me.

I didn't karate chop anyone. There were people looking

at me while I was doing stuff and I didn't freak

out. And nobody said that I was being weird.

And that is probably the biggest

victory. So all I'm saying is, if

you need me for anything in the next six weeks,

know you don't.

And now we'll go to Allison, who has this week's small

talk. We have a small talk question from

Alejandro in New Mexico. I got my

Bachelor's degree at 37, finished last

May, and everyone around me was very kind about it, saying

it's never too late, all of that. But the ceremony was full of

22 year olds, and I spent a lot of it in my head doing

the math on all the years I consider lost. I

know intellectually that comparing timelines is pointless.

My path is my path, et cetera. But there's this voice that occasionally

whispers that I'm permanently behind in my career,

in my life, in some imaginary race I didn't sign up for.

I'm curious if you have ever had to actively grieve an earlier

version of your life, what you thought it would look like and

how you stopped measuring yourself against a timeline that was

never really real. Okay, so first off, the thing I want to say

and the thing you need to get out of your brain is that there

is no finish line. Life does not have

a checkered line on the ground that you run through.

Break the tape and you win at some race. There's no race.

There's no race. You're not running against anybody else. You're not

running against yourself. There's no finish line. There's a

clinician who works for me. I've worked with him a long time. He's a great

doctor. And he was a corporate, like, retail

manager for 20 years. And then he went back to medical school

and left his career, lived the

medical student life like full time medical student in

his 30s, I want to say, did residency in his late

30s and became like an

independent trained doctor. Like, I think he was like in his 40s by the time

he was done. And he might be the best doctor that I work

with. He might be the Most caring, the most compassionate, the most

understanding. When I get to see the way he interacts with

individuals or, you know, see his notes or things like that, he approaches

it with a level of insight and compassion

that I can only assume comes from the fact that he

understood humans before he understood the human body. He

had life experience behind him before

putting all the science into his brain. And I

just get a sense that he is a better doctor

because he did life first than he would be

if he had started fresh out of college. And that's not

a criticism of people who start fresh out of college. Like, we need doctors to

start whenever you start. But his career is different. I

actually had a teacher like that in high school. He was a

military pilot. He was Top Gun three times. He was a

Navy pilot. And on his desk in his classroom

was a Top Gun award, and he actually was

Top Gun four times. But he didn't count the fourth time because it was in

combat, and he didn't feel like that was appropriate. He taught

the hardest subject that I ever took in school, which was calculus,

and kicked my ass. Left, right, BA,

select, start. It was so hard, and yet I loved

his class every time. And it was because he

loved what he was teaching. This was his choice. He

chose to do this thing. He wanted to come to school

every day. He didn't need to work. He did 30 years in the

military. He had a sweet pension and all

these things. I'm sure he had a great bank account and did not need to

make $40,000 a year as a teacher in Florida. But he

chose that. He wanted to do that. He loved his students. He loved teaching

math. He told me once that his favorite thing was working with people

who insisted they were bad at math because he could show them that

they could be good at math and that they were just in their head about

it and then also getting to work. I mean, he worked with really

complex subjects. And he would invite students

who had been struggling in, like, remedial math classes because

he wanted to show them that they could do this. He just liked math.

He just liked math. All math, including calculus, which is

evil. Absolutely evil. So evil. But he

probably would have been a good teacher straight out of college, but I don't know

that he came at it with a different understanding about what

teaching was and also what high school was to us. And

it made him a different kind of teacher. And so there is no

finish line. You are going to get where you're going

when you get there. And are you allowed to grieve

the version of life that you thought you would have. Absolutely. But I don't know

what you're grieving because that doesn't mean you can't have it. You can have whatever

version of life you still think is possible and it's probably

going to be better for the things that you have behind you that are informing

your decisions. Now you're older, your prefrontal cortex is

developed, you're not making stupid decisions now that you would have

made with a bachelor's degree at 22, when you still have three,

four more years of brain development that need to happen before you're actually

a grown adult. We treat people like they're an adult at 18 and then again

at 21. And the reality is most men are pushing 30.

Don't say that critically, it just is. There's no finish line. And

then beyond that, you can't measure yourself against a

timeline that doesn't exist. If you stop thinking that there's a path that you need

to be on, there's no path that you need to be on. There's nothing linear

happening in your life whatsoever. You are probably better at

the things that you are good at now than you would have been at 20

because you have life experience behind you. There is nothing

about starting a career at 22 that you

would not be better at starting that career at 42.

You're a more confident human, you're a more experienced

human, you're a more successful human. There's probably a lot that you would say to

22 year old you about life and these aspirations that you had.

And I'll give you another kind of example. My husband and I think I was

24 when we got married, maybe around there. And to me

we were going to turn around and we were going to have kids five minutes

later. Now, he didn't want to have kids right away, he wanted to wait a

little bit of time. And we did sort of wait before we started actively trying.

I think we waited about a year. But to me any time before

that would have been a happy, not happy accident, but

just like we were preventing it, let's put it that way. So in the way

that 24 year olds are, we should have been pregnant on month two, even though

we weren't trying, that was what happened to my brain. And then we got a

year in and I thought, well, it's because we haven't actually been trying. So now

we'll actually start trying and I'll learn about some things and we'll figure out how

to do this and then Another year went by, Then we went to some doctors

and another year went by. We tried for four years. We had our first

child just before our fifth anniversary with fertility

treatments and a whole lot of outside intervention and a whole lot of doctors and

a whole lot of heartbreak. It changed me molecularly. It was the

hardest thing I ever went through. Then we had our second two years later, also

through fertility treatments. My oldest turned one and I was like,

I want this part of my life to be over. Let's get the second one

done. And at that time, I would have had 100 kids if it was

possible. And I. I didn't necessarily think we were going to stop it too.

But not only does my reproductive system suck and make it impossible

to get pregnant, but then I undercooked them and they kept coming out authentic.

And so after two, we were like, if we're going to do this again, we're

going to need to rent a uterus. And I say all that, you know, it

was almost. My husband and I were together almost seven years by the time we

had our second kid and technically completed our family. Which, by the way, I hate

being pregnant. Being pregnant is the worst thing in the world, but I would do

it. I love having kids. I want to have 50 more kids. But also, like,

we got two kids when we really thought we would have no kids. And so

the point of that being, I could have had the kid

two months into our marriage. I could have gotten

pregnant that fast and we could have an almost 15 year old now.

But I got these two kids who are perfect. I wouldn't change anything

about them ever. And as much as it

destroyed me and it was the most

difficult thing I have ever been through, it changed the way I

relate to people forever. It was that hard. It was that

difficult. As much as all of that, I

like these too. They're good. They're funny, they're

smart, they're sassy. They make me laugh

every day, they make me smile every day. They

have the tenderest hearts that are wrapped up in. In the

sassiest, smartassiest bodies. And if you

had to tell me now that I could

undo all of the damage that did to me in every possible way,

but I wouldn't have these kids. I would say, no, no way.

I like these kids. I don't want any other kids. I like these kids. I

mean, I would have more kids, but I want to keep these kids. And that

doesn't mean that I didn't still grieve the experience.

It doesn't mean that I didn't still struggle with the scars of

infertility for a long time. It doesn't mean that I didn't have medical

complications from it. It doesn't mean that I don't have

just residual baggage from it. All of

that's still true. But at the end of the day, I got the kids

that I don't know if I was supposed to have them, but I'm so glad

that I do. And I wouldn't change the journey, even though the journey

sucked, but the outcome was kind of great. And

so you are where you are supposed to be.

And that doesn't mean you can't grieve and process

through what got you here. But you can't be behind on

a race that doesn't exist. You are doing

the best you can with the situation that is in front of

you. And there is nothing else that anybody could ask of

you. So I'm proud of you. Congratulations. Big

fucking congratulations. Getting your degree is a big deal. And you know

what they call the person who graduates from medical school

at 45? A fucking doctor. You did the

thing. I'm proud of you. Thanks for being here, guys. Have a good day. Love

you. Meaning.

One of my favorite things that floats around the Internet occasionally

is life is short. So tell people you love them,

but shout it in German because life is also terrifying. The German

language, like, actually has really good words. Like, they have words

in German that you cannot find in any other language that you have to

explain with multiple words in any other language. And they are like,

perfect. I tell people that my love language

is schadenfreude.