Life After Traumatic Brain Injury: Identity Loss, Healing, and the Origins of BestGuessistan

In this episode of Rupture: The World of BestGuessistan, host Wendy Lurrie is joined by Kim Lauersdorf, founder of Cosmic Shift, for an intimate conversation about life after traumatic brain injury.

This is not a story about quick recovery or inspirational transformation. It’s a conversation about rupture. About what happens when a brain injury reshapes identity, language, work, and relationships, and when the healthcare and disability systems meant to help instead create more harm.

Wendy shares her journey from a successful marketing career into the disorienting aftermath of TBI. She speaks candidly about denial, invisible pain, identity loss, and the challenge of explaining symptoms that medicine often cannot name. She reflects on navigating insurance, disability, workplace accommodations, and the emotional labor of constantly translating her experience to others.

Out of this rupture came BestGuessistan. A conceptual world for people living in the After. A place for meaning-making, accommodation, and community when certainty is gone.

This episode is for anyone living with traumatic brain injury, chronic illness, caregiving responsibilities, or any life-altering rupture. It’s also for anyone trying to understand how broken systems shape personal suffering, and what it takes to build something new when the old rules no longer apply.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BestGuessistan

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Transcript

Kim Lauersdorf (00:00.078)
happening.

Wendy Lurrie (00:01.559)
Kim Lowersdorf came up in the trenches of advertising, making sure that her clients succeeded and that their brands truly resonated. After that, she helped co-found, with me, Gyro Human, a healthcare agency that not only challenged the status quo and bucked the industry, but succeeded. And she took that spirit with her when she moved to the client side, first as VP Marketing at Emblem Health, and then as Chief Marketing Officer of Health Benefits at Elevance Health.

After 20 years of building teams, brands, and companies, Kim realized her favorite part of the work wasn't actually the marketing, sorry, marketing. It was helping people unlock their potential. So she formed Cosmic Shift, which combines her expertise in brand building, leadership, and her deep understanding of energy and astrology to help organizations and individuals not only locate their gifts, but actually use them. Welcome, Kim.

Kim Lauersdorf (00:55.352)
Well, thanks, Wendy. I'm excited to be here today and have this conversation.

Wendy Lurrie (00:59.915)
Me too.

Kim Lauersdorf (01:02.574)
Well, it's, you I've reflected a lot on one, just the privilege to have this interview with you because this is your show, but this is really gonna be the story about you. And I feel that we have spent, you know, over a decade and a lot of time together and probably know each other some of the best on the planet. So I'm really excited that I got the privilege to have this conversation. And today we're gonna talk about

the actual accidents, the TBI and how that came in. We're gonna spend some time talking about how different systems approached at your injury and still approach it. We're gonna talk about how you started to process that and where that's gone and the world you've created. So I'm super excited. So let's start with the drama. Let's start with the injury, the accident.

Wendy Lurrie (01:52.535)
Thank

Wendy Lurrie (01:56.246)
Okay.

Wendy Lurrie (02:00.447)
Okay? Okay.

Kim Lauersdorf (02:01.324)
the rupture. So take us through this moment.

Wendy Lurrie (02:05.919)
Okay, it was a little over three years ago, almost three and a half years ago around now. And it was a normal Sunday. I had started a great new job. I was super excited about it. My daughter had just gotten married. I was flying to Paris. Everything was great. And I came back and I did what I often did on a Sunday, which was go to my guitar lesson. I am a student of classical guitar, which keeps me very humble because few things in the world are as difficult as classical guitar. And I had an Uber.

And when we got to the location, he let me out. I reached into the back to get my guitar out, but he didn't check to see if I was gone before he hit the button for the hatch to come back down. And it landed on me like skipping stones, but with a million pounds more weight, like boom, boom. And honestly, my first reaction was, I'm fine, because my first reaction to every situation is always, I'm fine.

I think he looked at me to see if I was okay. I think I might've given him a thumbs up. I definitely gave him a five star review and a one dollar tip. And then I went upstairs and had a guitar lesson while my head was bleeding and I have no memory of that lesson. I don't remember a thing about it. And I came home and I said to my husband, Nick, I think I need some first aid. And he cleaned me up and I just figured everything was going to be fine until the next day when I went back to work and everything wasn't fine.

And it was interesting because I was working in a tech company. It was mostly men. And so they were they were guys on call. It still during COVID lockdown. And they asked what happened. And I told them and they were like, no, no, you have to take this really seriously. We play sports. We understand concussions. I'm like, I'm fine. I'm fine. I mean, I was wearing dark glasses, too. But I'm like, I'm totally fine. Later that day, the headache started. And that's the headache I've had for three and a half years, plus other symptoms. So that's that was the drama. Of the moment.

Kim Lauersdorf (03:54.132)
the drama. I will tell you there's not a trunk latch that I do not look at and think of you and how just in a minute, right, is something, an innocuous object, right, can change everything. When did you start to understand that this was not an acute injury? This was not something that was going to be stitches and healed, that it was going to be a more chronic situation for you?

Wendy Lurrie (04:06.549)
Yes.

Wendy Lurrie (04:23.319)
It took a while because one of the first things I learned, because I did my research like we all do, and it turns out that between 70 to 90 % of people who have a concussion recover within 10 to 14 days. So for most people, the concussion is done and they just move on. So I didn't realize anything right away. A neurologist I had been working with insisted that I go get a CT scan because they're always looking for a bleed, which fortunately I didn't have, but these things are very hard to pick up on imaging.

And it really wasn't until the days dragged on into weeks that I started to see that I was likely going to be in that percentage of people who didn't heal right away. And then every day was a little bit more reckoning, a lot more denial. Little reckoning, even more denial. And just push, push, push, just keep going. Just keep going. I didn't want to deal with the idea of having something chronic or something in any way disabling. It's just not who I am.

So was just, let's just keep going. honestly, denial was my, was my, my first rap.

Kim Lauersdorf (05:25.326)
You know, it gets us to a lot of wonderful places sometimes.

Wendy Lurrie (05:27.479)
It does. It also stops us from getting to a lot of wonderful places sometimes.

Kim Lauersdorf (05:32.63)
It does, for sure. When you, I'm putting myself in the ER, I'm putting myself in these doctor's offices and trying to language what I'm feeling, what you're feeling in your head, right? I think we say headache, right? It hurts, we do a pain scale. What was it really like?

in your body, in your mind? What could you feel? How can you articulate it now, maybe that you even couldn't then?

Wendy Lurrie (06:06.721)
Great question. I felt a lot of things in my body that I had never felt before. I all kinds of shocking sensory sensations. couldn't tolerate sound. I couldn't tolerate light. And everything made me feel like my skin was detaching from my body. Parts of my brain felt locked and sluggish. And I did call it a headache in the beginning.

But my mother actually helped me coin a better word because it isn't a headache. Headache means something to everybody, right? Everybody pretty much knows what a headache is. Tension, migraine, whatever kind of headache. This wasn't that. This is what we, what she and I ended up coining head pain because it really was a different kind of pain than anything I had ever experienced. And one of the very odd things about concussion pain is that the pain you experience has no relationship to where in your head you were hurt. So I was hurt here, but the pain was here.

It still is. And back here. And in all of these unrelated places, because basically when you have a concussion, your brain gets shoved inside the skull and kind of everything feels like it dislodges. But the language piece is really, really important because it is so hard to describe these symptoms. And if you want to just talk about that a little bit right now, the, you know, one of the places I went was Reddit because where do you go when you can't get answers to anything? You go to Reddit. And one of the saddest places on the internet is the

Kim Lauersdorf (07:21.016)
Yeah.

Wendy Lurrie (07:32.023)
TBI subreddit. And I looked at the way people were describing their symptoms and they were generic. They said things like, I have brain fog. They said, I feel like I'm a battery with only 20 % power. They're grasping for ways of describing things that didn't actually have any language. And that becomes part of the challenge, especially when you're dealing with something that's actually an invisible injuries that no one knows you have unless either something shows in how you engage or you tell them.

So I think language became a giant barrier. I think it is a giant barrier for a lot of people in describing what they're going through.

Kim Lauersdorf (08:05.902)
Well, I mean, I think simplistically in the form of, you know, healthcare, everything's a code, right? The language is minimized to a code that you can put in. And can you say it right to your clinician to get coded right for what you need? And so I think we have a wildly narrow, you know, definition and many of us are not as gifted in language and it can be a...

Wendy Lurrie (08:06.784)
Okay.

Wendy Lurrie (08:12.577)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Kim Lauersdorf (08:33.934)
hard to describe what we think and what we feel. so how did people around you understand this change? Because yes, you could probably language it better than most, but still, you're the patients. You're the injured, right? And you're going through it, not just experiencing it from the outside. You're not observing this, right? You're experiencing this. How did the world around you handle it?

Wendy Lurrie (09:03.423)
They didn't. They didn't know what to do with it. Partly because I was relatively inarticulate about what I was feeling, but also because unlike a lot of other conditions, this is kind of uniquely unrelatable. If you haven't had a TBI, I wish that no one ever got another TBI and there were concussion protocols everywhere. It isn't something that most of the population experiences. Most clinicians have never experienced it. So people, I looked fine.

I kind of sounded fine because the parts of my brain that were still working well, which were some others, like I said, slow down, they compensated. So I developed these sort of compensatory mechanisms that would allow me to sound pretty much fine. It's what I did at work, but I could feel distance growing between me and everyone else in my life. I think they started to feel it to different degrees, but I definitely felt this sense of the place where I am, where I'm standing is unstable.

and all of the people who usually occupy this world with me and help make it stable, it's like pieces of this island or this ice flow are just breaking off and floating away.

Kim Lauersdorf (10:10.462)
It's one thing to have an injury that people don't understand, to be experiencing it, but we've talked about one of the greatest losses in this was identity. And you are a brilliant mind. You come from brilliant minds and your parents, and that has always been.

probably our first love language with each other was our minds, our intellect, what we could think about and idealize and create. And so you're not only injured, but you're injured in the place that has defined you.

Wendy Lurrie (10:40.757)
with.

Wendy Lurrie (10:45.463)
Okay.

Kim Lauersdorf (10:57.742)
What has that journey been like? Because identity loss is isolating in and of itself. Injury is isolating in and of itself. And you went and did both. You injured your identity.

Wendy Lurrie (10:58.432)
Yes!

Wendy Lurrie (11:14.871)
That was the first system that failed me actually, was my identity. look, I've been through a lot of things, everybody's been through a lot of things, but not everything that's happened to me has affected my identity the way this one has because I identify my intellect so tightly with my identity, right? I mean, that is who I am. And when I was suddenly faced with a situation where my brain couldn't figure out how to figure this out, I was gobsmacked. I was sad. I was...

twitchy, I was anxious. The only tool I had to fix things was my brain, and my brain was now the thing that needed fixing. And it would take quite a while until I figured out how to fix it. I mean, went through two, I would say two years of sadness and difficulty and denial and isolating myself from people and withdrawing because I couldn't reckon with this identity shift. Who was I without my brain? So it was brutal, absolutely brutal, long two years.

Kim Lauersdorf (12:12.46)
Yeah, and we live across the country from each other. So we're not the neighborhood. You know, can't bring you chicken soup. Could order it for you, but can't bring it to you. And it was a couple years before we saw each other in person. And, you know, I didn't know what to expect. We hadn't really engaged in a physical state.

you had talked about, you you've written about being tired, you wrote about, you know, these things that you struggled with. And I will tell you from the outside, our first time together, it didn't feel like much had changed, right? It didn't feel like you were different and you were injured and it still doesn't often. And I put that in a little bit of two buckets of one, yes, you've done miraculous work to...

Wendy Lurrie (12:54.081)
Okay.

Kim Lauersdorf (13:05.773)
make this system, new operating system for you work. I also put it in, that's probably lonely in and of itself because now you're trying to look at a world and say, this world is not the same, I am not the same. And then a good friend is sitting there going, but you look the same and it feels the same.

Wendy Lurrie (13:28.171)
Yes. Yes.

Kim Lauersdorf (13:30.594)
There's probably a tiny part that says, congratulations, Wendy, you did this well. And there's probably a much bigger part that says, crap, like, what does it take for people to get this? If my best people can't get this? Is there truth in that?

Wendy Lurrie (13:46.699)
There is truth to that. I might even assign some percentages. You and I like data. I would say it was probably 15 to 20 percent. Look at me. I can I can still read as the person I was. And the rest of it was just, my God, nobody gets what I'm going through. And I don't know how to how to help people understand. And I also don't want I don't want pity. I don't want, you know, overemphasizing, you know, what this is. I don't I didn't want this to become the subject of every single conversation, which is exactly what it was becoming.

for a really long time. So it was a mix of both, but mostly it was just, how do I expect anyone to understand what's going on if I don't understand what's going

Kim Lauersdorf (14:25.614)
And I mean, I know we, there's the advice piece of this to people, right? I know we're talking about the story and what did you experience, but I just think this point is really important. And I want to draw out your kind of advice in this space of how would you help people navigate that? And so, you know, from the outside, as someone helping a friend navigate it, I would say you've got to make room for all of it.

Wendy Lurrie (14:35.125)
Okay.

Kim Lauersdorf (14:55.31)
right, and I think it's very important. I think it's very easy. We want our friends to be okay. We want our loved ones to be okay. We're okay if they're okay. Oftentimes. And so I think we have this knee jerk that we want to be, we want you to be okay so we can be okay. And I think it's okay for you to not be okay.

Wendy Lurrie (15:04.907)
Right, yes.

Kim Lauersdorf (15:19.124)
And that's, think, really important for the caregiving side on the outside of this. But what would you from the inside of it say to us?

Wendy Lurrie (15:28.651)
Well, I think a big part of the work I've done and the whole sort of ethos of this project is the idea that it is okay not to be okay. That we live in a world of advice overload and toxic positivity, which may work for some people, doesn't work for everybody. And it becomes a burden and it takes a ton of energy to deal with all that. It takes a ton of energy to deal with every friend who read something about turmeric or this supplement.

Kim Lauersdorf (15:54.83)
Wendy Lurrie (15:58.289)
or the endless Reddit opinions on all kinds of things. And what I encouraged people to do in the beginning was just, I mean, just read about it a little bit. Like I said, because this is so difficult, because it's so unrelatable, a little knowledge is useful, but the advice becomes overwhelming and confusing and just adds to the sense of fog and blur that you live in. It really, really, really does. And also, I think this is true with caregiving, with people who are going through caregiving too.

having to do a lot of phone calls were almost impossible for me. This was the other sort of social problem. I couldn't really do phone calls because I had a very hard time focusing. Doing things on a screen was difficult because I had visual disturbances. Being in person was difficult because people were expecting me to behave a certain way. So I had to create this moat. And yet I still owed people updates and they were status updates. And for a while I had status. I mean, I don't have status updates anymore because nothing's changed. But for a while...

I tried every treatment that was available. mean, pretty much every legit treatment and a few that were kind of on the bubble. And so we could talk about those. But once that stopped and there really wasn't anything new to try, talking about it, even now when people are like, how's your head? I'm like, nothing to talk about, nothing changes. It's not a good use of my energy or their time. And I'm done with the advice. Like I said, I have tried everything.

Kim Lauersdorf (17:23.648)
Yeah. And I mean, think that's part of, so we definitely walked ourselves right in the system failure part of this conversation. Right. How could we not? Right. One of the probably essential systems in our lives is the community we build around us, right? The families we were born into, the families we build, the friends we build. It's a system around us. And what fascinates me about this system is it's governed by two different rules, right? It's governed by

the norms and values that you have created, right? And your family and your friends and what you expect. And it's governed by cultural norms. We expect people to behave this way with people that they are friends and family with, right? And these can be two different sets of norms. There can be overlap for sure. And so I think when I think about you've done both, right? You've done, and when you,

Wendy Lurrie (18:09.281)
Yes.

Kim Lauersdorf (18:22.294)
you'd stripped away and you talked about like it was, was really challenging for me as not being a, a physical proximity friend to you. You, as you just said, you took away email, took away phone calls, you took away texts, right? Text was harder than email. Right. And it was like, well, where do I meet her? Right. How do I get across this mode and what does it look like? Right. Cause now, now there's not a book here. So

Wendy Lurrie (18:36.609)
So go ahead Zoom.

Kim Lauersdorf (18:52.334)
How do you think about this family and system structure? Where did it hold for you and where were the failures? And it's not failures in our structures, right? These are cultural norm structures. If you just send the flowers, it's fine, right? You did it. Where did it hold and where did it fall apart for you?

Wendy Lurrie (19:14.135)
I don't think the family and friends systems failed me. I think I failed them, which is interesting because it's also the language they use in medicine when something doesn't work, it didn't fail you, you fail it. I was not fit to be the person I was anymore. I couldn't command a room or laugh easily or focus on it.

I was so wrapped up in these symptoms, which again, now I'm used to them. You live with something for three and a half years, right? The human ability to become a newer to anything is almost infinite. But at the time it was all new. And I was so caught up with what was going on and the fact that because it's your brain, it affects everything. I couldn't hold up my part and I felt like I still needed to. And I think that was where the challenge was, was not giving myself the grace or the permission to say, you know what? I'm not okay.

And this is what not okay looks like. That was completely out of character and you know that. You and I have the muscle through everything.

Kim Lauersdorf (20:16.174)
I I laugh because we had clients tell us and you started this with your injury. And so was so glad that these men came to your rescue because we've had so many men tell us that unless it's bleeding or falling off, I'm not going to healthcare, right? And I've had this conversation recently about in order for me to say I'm not okay, I'd have to be dying. And that is insane. That is insane.

Wendy Lurrie (20:38.155)
Exactly. Exactly.

Wendy Lurrie (20:45.367)
But it's true. It's true.

Kim Lauersdorf (20:46.258)
But so yeah, right. And then we understand, right. We understand the go, go, go and our, our systems are built to go, go, go. And me to not say, okay, would mean I'd have to be quitting, right? It's a loss. It's done. We're done.

Wendy Lurrie (20:57.323)
Right? I'm weak. I'm no longer strong. I can't muscle through this. All of that, what that does is it, in addition to everything else you're going through and all the systems that are failing and all the ways you're failing, it adds this heavy, heavy blanket of guilt and shame. Because you can't, I could not fix this. I couldn't push through the way I pushed through everything else. And I'd had health challenges before. None of them felt like this.

This was so unique, so different, but it came with all of these other really, really unwelcome emotions that also created more space between, created greater distance between me and everybody around me. I mean, the safest place for me was at rehab because there everybody was in a sort of similar boat. Everybody had a brain injury. These are my people now.

Kim Lauersdorf (21:46.86)
Yeah. I think it's, know, both things are true here of you did need space, right? You did need time. And that space and time, back to the cultural norm of it, you know, we're conditioned that that is bad, right? We are conditioned that if I give you space, you're leaving, not that I'm just creating more room for you, right? Space is creating more

Wendy Lurrie (22:05.665)
Yes, yes.

Kim Lauersdorf (22:16.802)
room. And so I think, you know, when to the outside of it of having to be there for you is, is we needed to be better at creating space, not leaving. And you probably experienced both of that. And I think I hope people can understand space doesn't mean leaving.

Wendy Lurrie (22:38.935)
Right. Well, and what's ironic and unfortunate about it is that I needed the space. The space existed. It was already, mean, all of a sudden I felt like I was looking at the world through thick plexiglass. There was a barrier between me and everyone else and everything that was going on. And even though it was space I needed and space I created, it didn't make me feel any less abandoned for it. I felt abandoned, even though nobody abandoned me. But, you know, add the abandonment to the shame and the guilt and you start, you just get this toxic

Kim Lauersdorf (23:00.365)
stuff.

Wendy Lurrie (23:08.737)
Peru of feelings. and that's the other thing that happens with a head injury often and happened with mine is that things you could always manage suddenly become ungovernable. My moods, my anxiety, my emotions, things that I had always been able to just keep under wraps. You know, right? Don't show it, right? Never. I couldn't match everything. Everything was at the surface. I cried at everything. I was having anxiety attacks all the time.

And that also made me want to create more space, right? And I keep people further away, which adds to the abandonment and this whole vicious cycle that I was caught in for several years.

Kim Lauersdorf (23:43.586)
So because we're just too good at taking the blame for ourselves, let's move on to different systems. Let's talk about the healthcare system. You started the introduction that we...

Wendy Lurrie (23:48.127)
Okay, okay, okay, okay.

Kim Lauersdorf (23:59.82)
down as probably my favorite thing I ever did in my career. And we used to say, right, we had a very broad view of the industry. didn't just look at pharma like most of the marketing agencies did. And we used to say when one part of the system sneezes, another part catches a cold. And that was really our way of articulating that it's so interconnected and that it is so

reliant on each other's pieces that you could not, you know, sneeze in a subway car, you're going to get everybody. It's kind of how that system is. Were we right? How true was what we were thinking when you had to experience the system in a whole new way?

Wendy Lurrie (24:37.175)
Thank

Wendy Lurrie (24:46.775)
We were right. But one other thing that turned out to be true and interesting and surprisingly challenging was access, right? So I'm in New York City. I had really good insurance coverage, right? I know a million people, big orbit of healthcare providers and all kinds of professionals. I needed to get to a concussion center. Large systems have concussion centers and NYU has one of the best in the world. I couldn't get there. Even with all my access, even with all my information, I needed a favor.

My brother, who has a very, very good friend who's a neurologist, got involved and made a plea to the concussion center to please take me on as a patient. Because I did have a neurologist, but that was a neurologist I had for headaches because I've had a long history of migraine. And he was great, but concussion is different than headache. And I needed someone to specialize. Yes, I had a wardrobe of neurologists.

Kim Lauersdorf (25:35.682)
Was the access just finite resources or just only so many?

Wendy Lurrie (25:42.135)
It was no appointments, no appointments, sorry, no appointments. And then my brother's friend, Howie intervened and I got seen. And once I was inside the system, then I had access to rehab, then I had access to Rusk and they could start to work on the deficits because parts of what go wrong in a brain injury, it affects different people in different ways, right? You can have speech and language issues, vestibular, which is the fancy word for balance, vision, sensory, a whole bunch of other issues.

And there are lots of therapies that actually really do help with that. Nothing helps with the pain ever. But because I had access to the concussion center, they were able to refer me to Rusk. And I was able to start balance therapy and the first of what would become two rounds of vision therapy, which really, really helped. I would not be able to do this right now had it not been for that. So it was all interconnected. The shock for me was the front door was closed.

Kim Lauersdorf (26:37.303)
It's.

Wendy Lurrie (26:37.463)
And it also made me wonder about, there are something like, I think there are about three million new concussions in the US every year, right? Then take the 10 to 20 % who don't get better in 10 to 14 days and start to add it up. There are a lot of people suffering with this out there. And most people don't even live near a major hospital that has a concussion center. So if I'm struggling with this, what is everyone else doing?

Kim Lauersdorf (27:03.736)
Well, and that's where my brain was starting to think through of, first of all, it's not an elite club that anybody wants to be in, right? So you make it sound elite, but it's normal, right? It's so prevalent. And in order to get through the layers of diagnostic understanding, Well, first we had to, guess, get in the door. Let's get in the door. Then let's get to the level of

Wendy Lurrie (27:12.065)
hardly.

You

Kim Lauersdorf (27:32.814)
can I articulate and people really understand what I'm saying and really take these symptoms seriously. Then can I get access to the therapies, to the treatment, to all of that. Then of course we're gonna get into the payment side of things and what are insurers gonna enable in that. I'm very curious when you got into the diagnostic symptom part of it, were the clinicians...

Did they easily grab on to what you were saying and they knew like this is what was going on with you or was it kind of nebulous and you had to keep driving at what you were experienced? What was that? Once you were in the door, how were you welcomed?

Wendy Lurrie (28:17.693)
I would actually say I was very welcomed and I was also, it was, was the first place I felt kind of understood. mean, when, when I said to the neurologist, when I went in for the first exam, can we turn the lights off in the exam room? And she said, of course. I said, okay, someone gets it. I mean, my, one of my greatest wishes, and I built a ministry of accommodation that does this is that every light switch everywhere in the world is on a dimmer. So that anyone who has sensory issues with light can turn it down. it was, it was interesting, like.

Kim Lauersdorf (28:40.652)
I agree.

Wendy Lurrie (28:46.743)
She made me feel welcome and understood. was incredibly fortunate to meet her when I did. And I still see her to this day. Rusk was great. And Rusk also showed me people who were in much worse shape than me, which is kind of a mixed blessing, because it's like, okay, it could be worse, which is one of the things people tell you, could be worse, but it would also still really, really sucked. doing things like walking down hallways, this is part of like the vestibular thing.

They make you walk down these long, wide hallways and look up, look down, and you get dizzy very, quickly. And look right, look left. And there are other people doing it in this. It's an out-of-body experience to watch everyone stumbling down this hallway, just trying to stay upright. It was bizarre. And part of me felt like... Sorry?

Kim Lauersdorf (29:32.782)
It's the wrong kind of drunk take. It's not the drunk take. It's not a drunk take.

Wendy Lurrie (29:41.545)
Right, exactly. I part of me was like, found my tribe, but the other part of me was, I don't really want to be part of this tribe. So it was, yes, I felt like I was in the right place, but also it like, this is not a place I really want to be in.

Kim Lauersdorf (29:54.668)
Yeah, so speaking of our accommodations, I hate light as well, but let me open the lines a little bit here.

Wendy Lurrie (29:58.378)
Okay.

Wendy Lurrie (30:02.379)
but I did check out one thing and you'll appreciate this. I did check out all the pharma pipelines to see what drugs for this were in the works. And the thing that shocked me, and I've looked at it since, there wasn't a ton, which really surprised me because this happens to people we consider among the most elite of our society, Athletes, people in the military, people in dangerous situations. And you would think that with all that interest, there would be so much more research going on and

What I found was pretty much all of the treatments are repurposed migraine meds.

Kim Lauersdorf (30:34.52)
Which I mean, when you told me that, it still spins me a little bit because it is fascinating, right? It is, we know, right? Culturally, you know about CTE and you know about the concussion risks in major sports. Of course we know football, but it's actually even more common in soccer. Like it is so prevalent and these are big money making engines in our society, right? So it is shocking to me.

Wendy Lurrie (30:52.993)
hockey, soccer, yep.

Kim Lauersdorf (31:04.334)
And we know that drugs are designed for men more than they are for women. So again, being so prevalently male, often the injury, from a sports side of things, it just shocks me that this isn't a problem that is looking to be solved.

Wendy Lurrie (31:23.243)
I think it's a little bit better now, because I looked recently and there's more work going on. I mean, CNS, as you know, is like a huge area of pharma research, mostly because of Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. But I think this is a uniquely hard thing because so little of how the brain works is deeply, deeply understood. And I recently started writing a series of posts called The Physics of After, which are really just ways to document how my brain worked before on a specific sort of

vector and how it works now. Not that I think I'm going to shape the future of clinical research for traumatic brain injury. I don't, but maybe because I do have access to language and a pretty good understanding of the before after of how the brain is working. Maybe that could actually help send researchers in a slightly different direction. But I think it's an incredibly difficult problem to solve. And they're trying to solve it with things like better protection for kids who are playing sports.

better helmets, even though the NFL players don't seem to want to wear them, you all of that stuff. they're trying to get better at the sideline testing, make it a little less, you know, gross and more fine, and try to prevent as many of these as they can. And pharma has really got to pick it up in terms of research, but I do think it's a very, very difficult area to study.

Kim Lauersdorf (32:39.65)
Yeah, so there's, we're gonna get into this language piece very, very soon. But I wanna talk about one more system, but before we leave the healthcare, is there anything else, any blind spots in it? We haven't talked, you we both have worked very closely in the insurance space. And we know even when you're inside the insurance space, it is a very hard thing to navigate, let alone being outside the insurance space.

Wendy Lurrie (32:59.703)
Okay.

Kim Lauersdorf (33:05.942)
Is there anything else that you really think there are blind spots in the healthcare industry you want people to know?

Wendy Lurrie (33:10.581)
This is healthcare adjacent. So I was fortunate and the insurance company has been consistently good about approving things that have to do with this injury, which I'm appreciative of. The system that failed me in sort of an epic way was the disability system.

Kim Lauersdorf (33:26.574)
Mmm.

Wendy Lurrie (33:27.919)
And about two and a half years, because I kept trying to work. I I kept just trying to just keep one foot in front of the other, muscle for, it wasn't really working. It went so far as to have the idea of to start my own business, which was going to be baking business, which was a horrifically bad idea.

Kim Lauersdorf (33:45.368)
Well, first of all, anyone that has eaten your baked goods does not think this is a bad idea, but maybe the business part of it. Got it. Okay. Got it.

Wendy Lurrie (33:50.971)
Thank you. Right. The business part, just doesn't scale, but I was, I needed to just, you know, continue being who I was. wait, sorry, I lost the question. Go back again. That happened with a brain injury too. What? disability. So, you know, after I tried doing this and tried many different ways to work and continue to a living and do all that stuff, I just, realized one day, I can't do this. I, my brain can't handle the stress of the jobs I used to have. I can't handle the screen time. the anxiety is too great. And so.

Kim Lauersdorf (34:01.09)
disability.

Wendy Lurrie (34:19.947)
I decided to apply for disability, which seems to be the system that is available for people who can no longer work because they are disabled. I mentioned it to my neurologist and she said, I've been waiting for you to say that. And I've been wondering what's been taking you so long. And it was because of the denial, because that said, I'm not the person I am. And so I went into this.

It is not a great situation when someone with a brain injury has to navigate a major governmental agency with all of its paperwork and bureaucracy and like internet 1.0 and all of that kind of stuff. And one day I just sat down and I go with paperwork stacked everywhere and I'm going to go through it with all the medical records, everything, and I did the entire process. And I made a mistake. It actually asked me if I was applying for social security benefits.

The answer was no. I said yes. This is why you don't leave people alone with brain injuries to do this, which required redoing the entire thing and just adding, adding, adding layers of complexity and confusion. There was someone very, very nice who sort of offered to be my, a little bit of a sherpa at disability, and she would keep me posted on what was going on. I had to be tested. I had to be evaluated. I had to go to these kind of dreadful places for these independent medical exams and be treated by people who didn't know me and didn't care about

me. But I did it because these were steps in the process that I needed to take. And at the end of it, I got a denial. I got a denial, which turns out to be the norm. And I know people who said, well, I got approved on the third time, on the eighth time, on the fourth time. And there was absolutely no way that I had the energy to do that. And to ask someone who's going through this to also deal with that kind of bureaucratic horror just seems doubly unfair. So that was a system that failed.

Kim Lauersdorf (36:11.096)
Yeah, it's almost designed to fail if you have to. Third.

Wendy Lurrie (36:11.607)
It felt that way. It felt like you were running hurdles, right? And the hurdles kept getting higher and then they were like flaming hurdles. Yeah.

Kim Lauersdorf (36:22.754)
Oof. So one more system that I wanted to talk about, and you kind of touched on this and get walking through the disability door is the workplace. And, you know, I think part of our bond was, is a strong belief of what leadership looks like, what culture looks like, how people should be treated in an organization doing right.

Wendy Lurrie (36:30.551)
you

Kim Lauersdorf (36:49.314)
by people, by clients, by each other, I think was part of our connective tissue always. How did you experience this through the workplace lens and did your definition of right by people change?

Wendy Lurrie (36:53.399)
Thank

Wendy Lurrie (37:07.403)
It's interesting because I would say where I was working, they were humane and they were concerned and they offered me accommodations from day one. They were like, do you want to cut back your hours? Do you want to take more time off? I mean, they couldn't have been more accommodating. They weren't the problem. I was. Because to accept those accommodations was an admission that I was weak, that I couldn't just muscle through this, that I couldn't fix it myself. So I pushed those accommodations away.

it became clear over time that I needed those accommodations, right? And that the person that I was now was just not the person they had hired. I just couldn't do the job at that level. But it wasn't their lack of willingness. It was my lack of willingness to accept.

Kim Lauersdorf (37:56.334)
It's heartbreaking. If I'm just honest, it's heartbreaking because one, I think you were fortunate that you had accommodations. I think there are plenty of places that will quickly roll up the carpet or turn their back on that. so to know that it was there and it was available and

we get in our own ways because of the stories we tell ourselves or just frankly how we're conditioned.

Wendy Lurrie (38:27.126)
Okay.

It was also a European company and that actually had a lot to do with their sort of attitude toward illness and recovery and taking care of people. It was not as much an American ethos, which where I think I would have had quite a different experience.

Kim Lauersdorf (38:42.274)
Okay.

a little more. We're trying, but don't look at us trying. not really trying. Good. Good. Okay. So we're going to move kind of onto the next topic about language and writing. And I know we've already touched on language a little bit, but anybody who knows you, knows you're the word lady.

Wendy Lurrie (38:46.891)
So much you mean.

They tried. They tried.

Kim Lauersdorf (39:11.148)
There are still hundreds of words I do not know. I've looked them up when you've used them in casual conversations. And so again, that's just, it's been one of your natural gifts, right? It's been part of this. How has language played a role in all of this for you? How has it supported you? Where has it come up short?

Wendy Lurrie (39:39.745)
So language definitely comes up short, as we talked about before, with describing symptoms and how you're feeling. I will give you an example of a bit of language I used many, many years ago and something completely unrelated. I was having some kind of abdominal pain and the doctor asked me if I could describe the pain and I said, I feel like my internal organs have been turned into guitar strings and someone is plucking them. And he said, you have a very interesting way of describing pain. But I found the limitations of language very quickly, especially in communicating with

everybody, love what was really going on. But then I started to write because writing has always been the way I have made sense of things, especially things that were new and confusing and nothing fit that definition more than this. It took me about a year before I started writing. I didn't write right away and I wasn't writing for anyone. I was just writing to try and figure out what the hell was going on with who was I now? And a friend of mine, former creative director we work with helped me name what I was writing, Concussed CMO.

because both of those were true. was concussed and I was a CMO, but I wasn't writing for anybody else. I wasn't writing to tell the story. I was just writing to try and make sense of things. And that's actually how the project started. And that's really all it was. It was kind of like my blog for me. I can sort of talk through the evolution of where it went from that if you Okay. So.

Kim Lauersdorf (41:01.144)
Sure, I can drive this car wherever we need to. That's right.

Wendy Lurrie (41:05.025)
Perfect. And I can drive now because I'm a driver. I'm new one, I'm new one, but I'm a driver. So I started writing it that way for a while. And that was, like I said, just for me. And then I realized my friends were reading this. People in my family were reading this. And this could actually be a really good vehicle. This was how I solved the problem of no email, no text, no Zoom. This is how I could let everybody know what was going on without having to talk to every individual person because that was just a crushing amount of energy that I didn't have.

And that worked and I broadened it and I made it about Nick and I made it about Bear and things that were going on in our lives and it became like a completely different thing. And I was writing that way for a while. And then, I it was late last year, maybe early this year, I just had an idea, which was, you and I are marketers, you and I are strategists. What if we looked at the problem through marketing lenses? What if I took marketing frameworks like...

the four C's or building a brief or briefing creative or creating a content journey and looked at this problem through that lens and how would I solve it sort of as a marketer, which was interesting. And people started to flock to the writing more because I was making it more relatable because it was something that was relevant and familiar and understandable to them. And that was fun. It didn't know where it was going to go, but it was fun. And then I kept doing that. And then in one of the marketing pieces I wrote,

I had a throwaway line, right? mean, by the way, I didn't know about you. All of my best strategies have been ones I backed into, right? I've gone forward into. I had a line in there about how no one seems to know how to solve this problem with what's going on. Nobody seems to know the answer. Everyone's just taking their best guess. Welcome to best guesses stand. And that's all it was. That's all it was. It wasn't a world. It wasn't a concept. It was just a throwaway line. But when I went back and looked at that, what that triggered next was

Wait, what if it is a place? Why can't it be a place? Why can't I create a world where the things that people like me need are already there and they don't have to be negotiated, they're anticipated and they don't demand that you rise to meet the world, the world rises to meet you. And that sort of gave me the idea of like, let's just build a country. Let's build a nation for people who are going through what I would later recognize and call rupture, right? The thing that breaks your life into before and after.

Wendy Lurrie (43:25.089)
So it started with TBI people, but then as I started broadening my thinking, I was like, wait, rupture comes in all kinds of ways. And this could be a place for everyone.

Kim Lauersdorf (43:27.395)
Yep.

Kim Lauersdorf (43:35.342)
Well, my mind goes a couple different places on that of one, I think so often when people are writers or trying to express, you try to find the lane and you try to stick in that lane and the world's messy and our minds are messy and our experiences are messy and it's really hard. for me, it's that evolution feels very natural to what you were experiencing.

Right? I need to get my hands around what is this thing? What, how do I even language it to, okay, yeah, now I'm ready to use my framework, part of my brain, and now I'm ready to get into creativity. And of course I think about, you know, how many lines have we picked up off of a creative idea of like, no, it's, but it's a line, right? A line is an idea.

Wendy Lurrie (44:15.863)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Wendy Lurrie (44:25.545)
I know which one you're thinking of.

Wendy Lurrie (44:30.231)
It's the architecture of hope.

Kim Lauersdorf (44:35.634)
And I was reflecting on you have always been drawn to world building in what you read, right? Your favorite books as a kid, the ones that I, you know, I read Brave New World on one of our vacations together so that I would be invited to the dinner table. That I could come back inside the house.

Wendy Lurrie (44:45.771)
Yes, yes.

Wendy Lurrie (44:54.935)
Sorry about that.

Wendy Lurrie (45:00.277)
You had to read Ravenous World, sorry.

Kim Lauersdorf (45:03.284)
I am grateful I did and because there is something different in world building, right? There is something creative, expansive, less limiting in the language. so talk to me about that part of like, world building or what has world building given permission to?

Wendy Lurrie (45:28.737)
Great question. Okay, so why world building, first of all, because one of my favorite things, and you and I have done this together, it's create something out of nothing. I mean, a lot of people can tinker with an existing system or product or process, but to create something out of thin air, that's magic. That's adding something to the world, right? And all those years at agencies, I I did business development for a long time. You're selling a reality that doesn't necessarily exist. You're solving problems in completely new ways, but you're creating things that didn't exist.

basically with nothing, dust, glue, a little bit of spit. So I've always felt the most alive creating things that way. And I've said to people, you just need someone to tinker around the edges, I am not your girl. But if you need something built from the ground up with, frankly, give me nothing, I'm the one. So I've.

Kim Lauersdorf (46:15.064)
Give me the wood, the pile of sand, I'll build you the sandbox. Do not put me in a sandbox and ask me to build a castle.

Wendy Lurrie (46:18.679)
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So it's always been a natural place for me. And you're right. It's reflected in the things I've read. mean, know, lives of the English majors and all that stuff. it's like Gulliver's Travels. Those kinds of world building stories have just like always been like really, really magical. But what I found was once I started to do it, I realized how infinitely expandable it became. And

The first one I wrote was called 36 Hours and Best Guests of San. I ripped off the New York Times' 36 Hours and Travel thing, and I just created all these places to put in the different time slots, and then started to think, wait a minute, maybe we do need something like this. Maybe we do need a Ministry of Accommodation. That's for people like this. Maybe there should be a Ministry of Updated Expectations. And the more I thought about it, and the more I started thinking about this larger idea of rupture, which is grief.

and loss and betrayal and diagnosis and caregiving and menopause and anything else that like fractures your life this way. People need different things. And what the whole project became about, yes, it's the world building, but it's a world building in service of something. And it's in service of permission. Giving people permission to not be okay when they're not okay and not to force them into the toxic positivity that

just permeates the culture and makes people feel like failures when they don't recover on a schedule, when the healing takes longer than they're told.

Kim Lauersdorf (47:51.392)
Okay, it's so.

Kim Lauersdorf (47:56.108)
the language opened something up, right? So I was looking through notebooks the other day and I found our one and our agency creating notebook. And I laughed out loud because instead of barriers or obstacles or threats in your handwriting in my notebook, it says corridors of panic. Sorry, I shouldn't have done that while you talking.

Wendy Lurrie (48:22.167)
That's okay. That's okay. Get it down. I forgot about that.

Kim Lauersdorf (48:26.27)
And I was like, in a moment, I knew exactly, right? It was so the right thing to say, right? These were gonna be the areas that people were panicking in. And our job was gonna be to alleviate this panic. Of course, nobody would write that down on a piece of paper. They would say, know, barriers, objectors, threats. Best Guest of Stan uses this very different language. Like, are there...

Are there things that you have named that you just are like, this is so universal? Are there ministries that you've named? Like talk to some of the language that you love in this, because I think that is what my outside perspective of what makes best guest to San so approachable is it's universal, right? You found language that no matter what I'm experiencing, it fits. Like I can, understand that.

So what has been some of how you've gotten to that unifying language or that unifying language that has really landed for you?

Wendy Lurrie (49:31.659)
Let's start with a name, right? The word best guess-a-stan does not trip off the tongue. And early on in the world building phase, I was talking to Nick, my husband, about it. And I said, what do think of the name? And he said, it's hard to say. And I went, interesting, it's hard to say. And then I went and wrote a piece called It's Hard to Say. That's the point. Because recovery isn't easy, and it isn't smooth, and it isn't linear, right?

And everything about this process is difficult and it was okay that the, not only okay that the name was difficult to pronounce, it was kind of the point. And I tried to strip out, I don't have a lot of medical language in there. I don't have a lot of therapy language in there. I do borrow the language of corporate America a lot because I find it very, very useful, both as a sword and a shield. But I actually, just, I take language, you know, Nick calls me the word lady. I feel like I've, I'm glad I did all the reading I did when I was younger.

because I can't do it now because I retained all of that. But every play I wrote, every poem I read, every piece of history I knew, it's all in there. And I have just been able to hold on to all of those different types of language and try to find ways of talking about things that are more approachable. I I read stuff that people wrote who were going through this and it just didn't speak to me.

to people with TBIs talking about other people with TBIs, it didn't speak to me, it didn't relate. So I was looking for language that would break through, because there's a lot of like mushy squishy language around this, right? And I wanted language that would land. I wanted people to feel something. And by helping people feel something, the distance between me and them shrunk. I that's what this project has really helped do is reduce the distance between me. mean, the plexiglass isn't there anymore.

Kim Lauersdorf (51:21.912)
Yeah, it's so...

Kim Lauersdorf (51:28.206)
When you think about language, think, you you use this, squishy language. And I think oftentimes it's some language is so big. It's so bigger than me. Right. I think about going through healing journeys myself and I'm like, God, it just doesn't fit. And then, you know, I might wrestle with it for a few months and want to change the language. And then I'm like, okay, maybe I understand how it fits.

So I think the language of best guestistan is so critical and there's really only, there's three buckets, right? When we talk about our strategy brains, right? We've got the rupture bucket, you know, how do you get into best guestistan? We've got the systems, right? Talking about systems and systems are not widely unique, right? They are systems and intentionally similar. And then there, as you said, the possibilities.

Wendy Lurrie (52:07.233)
Hmm.

Kim Lauersdorf (52:27.564)
Like that's kind of the through lines of best guest to stand. So let's talk about the rupture because you came into best guest to stand through a TBI.

But when you reflect, that the only rupture that brought you to to best guestistan? Can any rupture bring you to best guestistan? What is a rupture and why is best guestistan your destination after a rupture?

Wendy Lurrie (52:54.351)
I'll start at the end. So let's start with rupture, right? So it is the thing that happens in your life that forces you to realize at some point that you need to stop comparing yourself to who you were before it happened. That's a trap, right?

Wendy Lurrie (53:15.615)
Ask me the question again.

Kim Lauersdorf (53:17.566)
I'm looking at why ruptures are the way in, right? Because you're on, in these conversations, you're gonna talk to people about very different ruptures, right? For you, your way in was TBI. Knowing you, I know TBI is not the only rupture you have experienced in your life. And I think part of best guestestam probably comes from the amalgamation of ruptures that you experienced, which makes it.

Wendy Lurrie (53:33.673)
No, no.

Kim Lauersdorf (53:44.0)
so accessible. So how does, what does a rupture look like for someone and why best guest to stand?

Wendy Lurrie (53:50.103)
It has to be a rupture that breaks you, right? I mean, there are things people go through that are very difficult for some, less difficult for others. I've definitely powered through some things that other people would find very difficult. They didn't break me. They didn't change my identity. didn't alter my understanding of who I was or what value I have on this earth or what I mean to people and what they mean to me. None of that happened until this. A friend of mine had asked me a while back, because I had dealt with a breast cancer scare in 2018. I was treated for it.

cancer-free, all that. I was very fortunate. And she said, why is this different? And I said, because honestly, my boobs don't define me. I never broke. That was never a rupture for me. My brain defines me. And it had to be that level break at the identity level for me to recognize the power of the idea of rupture and how many different ways it manifests. And when I started talking to people about it,

Kim Lauersdorf (54:31.438)
Yeah.

Wendy Lurrie (54:47.729)
It was actually interesting. started bringing up this idea to just, you some of our best guests of stand officials in the early days and their first reaction would be like, yeah, I haven't been through anything like that. And then I would say, well, you know, it's this is the kind of thing I'm talking about. And someone, you know, one of my friends said, you know, it's interesting. He said, I would never have thought about it that last year, but my job was eliminated and I'm having trouble finding a new one. My my parents are moving away. I'm having trouble at home. And yeah, it feels like a rupture.

And once I started hearing that from people, that really helped me universalize the entire thing. Because honestly, this is a rupture. This isn't even the worst kind of rupture. There are, there's no competition in rupture, all rupture is bad. But there are worse, but this is just my origin story. But for me, what had to break was here. That's what had to break.

Kim Lauersdorf (55:36.034)
Yeah, it's what I love about the language of rupture. And I've had this debate, right? Is there a difference between a breakdown, a breakthrough and a break apart? We use those as three different things. I had a breakdown. I had a breakthrough. I broke apart. And to me, I look at those and I go, they're all the same thing. They're just which lens you picked up to look through. And I think that's what I love about rupture. It brings that unifying

Wendy Lurrie (55:45.879)
Hmm.

Right.

Wendy Lurrie (55:55.819)
Yeah, they are.

Kim Lauersdorf (56:05.676)
piece to these things that we try to delineate. We try to delineate the breaks.

Wendy Lurrie (56:12.343)
Put them in their lanes, right? We have to put everything in lanes.

Kim Lauersdorf (56:15.18)
And it won't be so bad if I put it in this leg. Right? I'm not, I'm not that. And rupture just brings this real neutralizing to.

There's a law that will break something.

small ways, undeniably irreversible ways. And what we will experience from that rupture is a lot of universal emotion experience. And so that's where I do think rupture really nullifies that. But you don't stop at the rupture. That's not the point of best guest to stand, right? The rupture is just the mode of transportation.

Wendy Lurrie (56:46.839)
Mm-hmm.

Wendy Lurrie (57:00.599)
It's the initiating event.

Kim Lauersdorf (57:04.599)
How did you take, did you get here by boat? Did you get here by plane? How did, okay, always a boat.

Wendy Lurrie (57:08.373)
You get the best guess at standby boat. Always a vote. It's an island in an archipelago.

Kim Lauersdorf (57:14.552)
Kristin, my wife will be thrilled that it's a boat. She'll be right there. She's there already. The next kind of real existence of best guest to stand is to challenge the systems and is to look at, we have a roadmap in real life of experience this rupture, get put into this system or

Wendy Lurrie (57:16.727)
Tell her it's a fairy.

Kim Lauersdorf (57:44.354)
put into the system experience a rupture. It could go both ways. talk to me about what does it mean when I say best guest of sans about the systems?

Wendy Lurrie (57:47.691)
The system can cause the rupture. goes both ways.

Wendy Lurrie (57:59.927)
What that means to me is that you understand that what the ruptures are revealing are the failures of the systems, right? Like all of these systems that we expect to be in place for us and work when we need them, whether it's finding the right treatment for the condition, making sure you have access to the right services, surviving a workplace, managing your relationships, all of those, they fail. They fail. And it's never people who fail.

And I'm really careful in the writing to make that point. I'm never talking about individual human failure. It's systems that fail us. We don't fail the systems. And very often you don't know how these systems will perform until you need them. And at the very moment you need them, at your moment of maximum vulnerability, that's when you experience a system that wasn't really designed for what you need. And the idea of best guesses, I mean, best guess is that it's not a utopia. And anyone who's read it knows that I'm not painting some,

happy picture of a perfect land, it's not that at all, but it's a place that lets it be okay for you not to be okay, and doesn't force you into a lane, and doesn't put you on a schedule, and just gives you the space and time and resources and support in a million different ways to figure it out on your own. the rupture reveals the systems. The systems reveal their failures.

Kim Lauersdorf (59:20.13)
And it's so I'm sitting here, you know, just if I've never read best guest to stand, like, how do I, how do I get it? Right? How do we make people get it? And, and I, and I think, you know, we're, still using conceptual language, but, we are there, right? You experience a rupture and you come into this world and, and to your point, you're not, you're not pointing fingers at

flaws in the systems, you are, you're exposing them, but you're telling people, it's okay to feel exactly what you feel because here's how it wasn't built for you. Here's exactly why you feel like that because it wasn't right. And it's not about the failures, it's about the acceptance that it isn't that failure.

Wendy Lurrie (01:00:11.841)
Exactly.

Kim Lauersdorf (01:00:12.66)
it's creating this world that when I sit down and I look to the people next to us, I go, yeah, you're here too, right? We're here. And then it doesn't sit, you don't sit on that bench, right? It then moves into what if.

Wendy Lurrie (01:00:27.095)
Hmm?

Kim Lauersdorf (01:00:33.697)
What if, and so this is where you start creating, right? You've helped people see themselves in the rupture, then you've helped them sit among a group of citizens that say, we're all like this, it's not us, it's that system. And then what if, and so a lot of this what if comes in your ministries. And so let's touch on a couple ministries to help people understand.

Wendy Lurrie (01:00:56.405)
Yeah, it does.

Kim Lauersdorf (01:01:02.616)
how you're thinking about the what if and what you're hoping people pick up from the what if.

Wendy Lurrie (01:01:07.489)
So I mentioned the Ministry of Accommodation, which I tend to refer to as sort of the oor ministry, because kind of everything comes from that. Everything comes from the idea that people going through this need different things than they had before. They need different forms of support. They need to not be questioned. They need to not have to prove their disability. That's a big one. There's also a related one is the Ministry of Plausible Narratives, which are the stories we tell ourselves.

to make sense of what's going on. I have a house of blues, which has a reckoning room, which is if you really want to face your rupture, go there. I have an island called Prohapsia, where you just go just see what if, just what if. And the world building keeps continuing. In fact, just over the last few days, there's been the creation of a Ministry of Intelligent Timing. By the way, that's for you. There's a Ministry of Received Wisdom.

Kim Lauersdorf (01:02:00.908)
Yep, yep.

Wendy Lurrie (01:02:04.683)
which is about a topic you touched on earlier before, which is sort of the advice piece of it. And that one felt like it was a while in the writing, because it was really about the idea of how we've weaponized and industrialized advice. know, what used to be friendly and helpful and, you know, benign mostly is now an industry that kind of commands you. Three steps, four phases, do this. I was able to get over it, so you can too. All that self-help stuff is really...

difficult for people who have gone through this kind of rupture and are not finding solutions in the existing world. I that stuff makes you crazy. So, and the third one, the third one's sort of the most important one, and I think it took me the longest one to write, is actually the Ministry of Rupture. Because the rupture is the defining event, and then the Ministry of Accommodation is what starts to create an infrastructure. And a big part of the whole idea of the ministries is the idea that they are

an infrastructure for survival. They're not decorative. They are to provide, to take away the things that stress people who are going through this. And I actually, in some of them, I have a gym, I have a hair salon, I have a whole bunch of these different kinds of places. And in each one, I kind of interrogate what is going on in those settings that make people anxious, especially people who are going through these kinds of things. Is it the waiting in line? Is it feeling that you're being pushed to do something like that? And then I just inverted them.

what if we made those go away? What if we solved the problem in a different way? And I actually think that's kind of the heart of best guess is on too is, we just solve the problem in a different way. So the ministries and the sort of governance system, they are the architecture of, I wouldn't say recovery, but of repair.

Kim Lauersdorf (01:03:54.67)
the wayfinding.

Wendy Lurrie (01:03:56.053)
Yeah, the wayfinding. They don't give you the answers, but they give you the roots.

Kim Lauersdorf (01:04:00.78)
And you don't have to go through them in order. You can experience them however you are experiencing them. they just help you, know, touch stones on that journey. This has been a fantastic conversation. And I know we could go all day, but I want to ask a little bit more rapid fire and thinking about what we talked about, right? Rupture at the very beginning. So let's go back to the beginning and your...

Wendy Lurrie (01:04:03.369)
Nonlinear, any way you want.

Kim Lauersdorf (01:04:30.21)
your citizens here are listening are in the rupture phase. What do you really want them to know about the rupture phase?

Wendy Lurrie (01:04:38.079)
them to know that they are not alone. What they're feeling is not unusual. It happens across different types of ruptures, even though the ruptures themselves are different. Because that's one of the things about rupture is that even though you may come in a different door than somebody else, you're still dealing with the same confusion. The rules have changed. You don't know what the new rules are. You're not even sure what language the new rules are written in. And I want people to know that they are not alone and that there need to be spaces for

I mean, I've made one up, but how amazing would it be if there actually were other spaces, but that feeling that you're not alone and that this is not your f-

And the pressure, would also like to, just in the rupture phase, relieve some of the pressure people put on themselves to, well, the doctor said I should be better in 30 days. You know? I've been doing this supplement for six weeks, why aren't I better? I want people to give themselves some grace. They've been through something. It's taken its toll. It changes everything.

Kim Lauersdorf (01:05:38.606)
But you're hitting on where I was kind of going to go next, which was, what do you think some of the biggest lies are, right? In that rupture phase? Or to you, what was the lie?

Wendy Lurrie (01:05:52.971)
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And go to not Kanye. Sorry, but that was what it could be worse is one when you tend to hear or at least you're still alive. This is alive. Or, you know, I just read a thing about a thing about a study and it says that if you do this, you'll get better. Did you try it? And then people would come back like, did you did you try that product? Did you get that thing and did it help? You're told a lot of things they're well meant, but they don't land right. And

Kim Lauersdorf (01:05:54.704)
Yes!

Wendy Lurrie (01:06:21.463)
I mean, you and I have talked about the difference between intent and effect. I mean, if something's well intentioned, but it lands wrong, who cares about the intention? It landed wrong. And you're told a lot of lies about, if you just do this treatment and this will help. And then when that doesn't help, it's like, OK, we'll do more of those treatments or try other things. And it puts you on a path. Right. And a lot of people just chase treatment for a really, really long time and more power to them. At a certain point, I said enough. I said stop because.

The only way I'm going to learn to live with this and build a life with it is to stop denying that it's there and stop trying to fix something that I know after this point, it just isn't fixable anymore. Things will improve. And I know people who have had TBIs much longer who have said things do improve. And I've had, like I said, some improvements in the deficits through rehab, but what I live with every day doesn't improve. And a lot of people are there.

Kim Lauersdorf (01:07:12.622)
we are so hyper focused on the destination is the outcome. And what I hear in that is a pivot for you of the process is the point, right? The process is the point. And when I think about, I'm thinking about belonging here, right? And I'm thinking about like, yes, we want people to get to best guests to stay on, but not because it's

Wendy Lurrie (01:07:27.626)
Yes.

Kim Lauersdorf (01:07:42.156)
the like it's the destination. It's to get to the experience. And so why do you think this belonging and this community is now the point? Like that's, we've gotten there kind of together. Definitely believe the destination was the point. And how has that shift, you know, occurred in you?

Wendy Lurrie (01:08:01.299)
We have, we have.

Wendy Lurrie (01:08:11.767)
You know, Nick describes the writing as the only therapy that's ever worked for me, which is true. And that's what it's really become. And the exploration that I've been able to do through the writing of understanding my own rupture, what I need, other people's ruptures, what they need, made me realize it's just, it isn't about the destination. Because then we don't know where we're going to land, right? Will people who have gone through this be better in three years, better in five years? We don't know. But starting to take agency back is really important.

And if you are driving the journey and you're exploring these ministries and you're exploring these different places, it's a way of getting your confidence back. Cause one of the things that gets knocked right out of you when you go through rupture is your confidence. I mean, my confidence was based on my intellect. And all of sudden, if that's not there, like, what am I so confident about anymore? But it wasn't until the world building, the exploration, the deeper understanding of what this could mean to more people and how alienated and isolated these people are.

if we could just make them feel like this common cause among us, it starts the process of accepting who you are. Because I said it before, like, you, one of the things that my mother had said and I had written down, which is the stop comparing yourself to who you are. The question is, you pretend it doesn't exist and try to create a life separate from it? That, maybe that works for some people. For me, it was about accepting that this will always be part of my life and building a life with it.

And that's the process. The process is building life with it. It's not the destination.

Kim Lauersdorf (01:09:45.772)
No, I'm buying it. I'm in. There's versions of me that did not buy that. But I did. So we have talked about Best Guest to Stand. We have talked about this place. We have invited people to this place. What does that literally mean? How do we get to Best Guest to Stand? What does it look like? How do I become a... Okay.

Wendy Lurrie (01:10:06.827)
Well, there is a map. My genius stepdaughter is the creative director and designer, and she has done a beautiful, beautiful map. You can subscribe to my sub stack. I publish at least once a week, sometimes more frequently, sometimes too frequently, because I have too many ideas that feel the need to get out. I have a little less impulse control than I used to also. The podcast will be launching. That's a way the book will be published in March, which also turns out to be TVI Aware this month, because of course,

TBI has an awareness month. So there are lots of ways to come in. There's social media, we're building communities, there are conversations, and everyone's invited. Bring your rupture.

Kim Lauersdorf (01:10:48.152)
Bring it all. Well, we have covered a ton and you're going to build this podcast in this world. Is there anything that I didn't ask that you want to make sure people know in this first episode?

Wendy Lurrie (01:11:02.091)
I think just the only thing is I want to make sure you are accepting the position of Minister of Intelligent Timing. I mean, okay, because there will be paperwork. It will be confusing and confounding, but you know, you know, no wrong answers in best case.

Kim Lauersdorf (01:11:06.744)
Yeah.

Kim Lauersdorf (01:11:15.896)
I mean, as the minister of intelligent timing, I cannot not say that this Pluto and Aquarius, right, we've got the next 20 years of Pluto and Aquarius, which is all about dissolving systems. And it is, right, so obvious to me that best guess to stand is rising up and it is a new system in and of itself, but it really is more an examination of it. So how could I not?

step into the moment, the stars say it. Thank you. Thank you for this time. I consider it a great honor for the many things that we have done in our life together, but I accept it as an incredible honor to be the curator of this story for you, right? It is your story, but it was my opportunity to ask you the questions. And I know this is not the easiest conversation we've ever had.

Wendy Lurrie (01:11:46.465)
Thank you for accepting.

Wendy Lurrie (01:12:12.065)
Yeah.

Kim Lauersdorf (01:12:13.09)
We've had harder ones. But I hope that everyone really gets to see what you've gone through, what you have become, and how wonderful this journey is for anyone, for us, for you, and for anyone that wants to hop on.

Wendy Lurrie (01:12:33.793)
Thank you. And it was, you were the only person, honestly, who I wanted to have on to interview me. It had to be you. And I love you forever. And we did our Vulcan mind meld a long time ago, and that was our first love language. I would agree.

Kim Lauersdorf (01:12:42.145)
I love you.

Kim Lauersdorf (01:12:47.224)
There was. All right, well, thank you all for your time.