Holly reconnects with her friend and former podcast co-host (Quitted) Emily McDowell for a raw conversation about how extreme adversity can strip away everything that doesn't matter and reveal what does. After years of health crises, family loss, and business transitions, Emily describes arriving at a place of No Fucks Given that feels like coming home to herself. Together, they explore what it means to build real community, trust your body's wisdom, and stop proving yourself to the world.

Topics covered include how selling her business and facing health challenges (brain tumor, autoimmune thyroid condition) led Emily to question everything; the impact of her mother's sudden death on her relationship with money, work, and pleasure; Holly's parallel journey of family awakening and learning to trust her body over her mind; practical strategies for building intentional adult friendships with agreements and conflict resolution; the difference between self-love and self-friendship; why real community is inconvenient but necessary; discernment in relationships without guilt; and the shift from constantly striving to arriving in your own life.

As an advisor, thought partner, and coach, Emily McDowell helps entrepreneurs answer the questions they can’t find the answers to. As founder and CEO of the stationery brand Em & Friends, Emily led the brand through explosive growth, and as a writer and illustrator, her work has gone viral countless times, and she has a decade-plus long track record of creating products that make people wonder if she’s been reading their diaries. Emily is also the co-author and illustrator of There Is No Good Card for This: What to Say and Do When Life Gets Scary, Awful, and Unfair to People You Love (HarperOne, 2017), and she offers unsolicited advice and missives from the great adventure of midlife in her newsletter, Subject to Change, a Substack Featured Publication of 2023. You can find her online at withemilymcdowell.com, and IRL in Portland, Oregon.

Original music by Gracie Coates (of Gracie and Rachel) @graciecoates @gracieandrachel on Instagram, gracieandrachel.com

Sound engineering, editor: Adam Day, adamdayphotography.com

Producer: Holly Whitaker, hollywhitaker.com

Co-Producers: Adam Day, Afton Swenor

Original art by Misha Handschumacher, cmisha.com

co-regulation is listener-supported, made possible by us and by you; you can support this podcast by joining our Patreon community patreon.com/coregulation

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