Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered, the podcast for people trying to figure it out.

Martha Beck:
Mm-hm.

Rowan Mangan:
But, not just another episode, Marty.

Martha Beck:
No, indeed. We’re going to be doing things a tiny bit differently today. We’re not doing our usual spiel, talking about the struggles we have with everyday life, not because we don’t think it’s fascinating…

Rowan Mangan:
And not because we don’t continue to struggle with everyday life.

Martha Beck:
So hard. But we’re trying to figure out a whole new way of doing the podcast because…

Rowan Mangan:
So over the past few months, we’ve been on a bit of a journey. Marty, and me, and our family, and it’s been a fun journey. It’s been a big journey, but we are sort of seeing that pretty much everyone we know is probably, one way or another, neurodivergent. And so as a consequence, we’ve been learning a lot about what neurodivergency really means, what it’s all about.

Martha Beck:
And there are all kinds of neurodivergence, and it’s kind of like the whole society is starting to talk more about neurodivergence, meaning different nervous systems. There are various, people get diagnosed with all kinds of things all over the map. I’ve known for a long time that I have ADHD, or so they told me, but I didn’t really think, I just thought, oh, I have a tendency to be a little scattered. But lately, as we’ve talked a lot to people we love and realize that so many of them are genuinely, identifiably neurodivergent, I’ve realized it’s not just everybody’s a little different from each other. For Ro and for me and the people that we love most, we’re talking about a really different brain, significantly different from the normal culture, for what’s typical for people. I’m in the weeds. Help.

Rowan Mangan:
And so inevitably, there’s this sort of recognition that maybe that’s what we’re talking about here on Bewildered, and maybe this is actually what we’ve been talking about all along is this in some form. And so the worst thing, the most of-the-culture thing we could do at this moment is to say, “Clearly this podcast is for people who are identifiably, medically different from la-la, and this is this team and this is that team, and we separate them.” No, no, no, no, no, no. That’s not what this is at all. But we can’t deny that there’s this recognition on our parts that these conversations that we have on Bewildered, if they’re connecting with you, then you probably have a type of brain that is unusual, and that doesn’t have to be a medical thing or whatever, but it’s just a different way of thinking, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And as I said, it’s getting more diagnosed for more people. More and more people are being told that they’re neurodivergent, that their children are neurodivergent. I think the reason there’s so much diagnosis of neurodivergence is actually the cultural norms are becoming more and more ossified, more insistent, more narrow.

Rowan Mangan:
More insistent and more insisted upon.

Martha Beck:
Yes. And this is what Max Weber, my favorite ancient sociologist, said would happen as the sort of left-hemisphere culture developed. He called it the iron cage of rationalism. It would become more and more insistent upon everyone being alike and not being “abnormal.” But that condition, everything we see around us is very abnormal for our evolution. I have a client who was, had a great job in New York City and doing really well, super anxious, having a really rough time, and she went to all these different doctors and psychiatrists and everything, and not one of them said to her, “Your lifestyle is incredibly abnormal for your evolution.” Like living always in little boxes, never seeing the sun. She really works from sun to sun. Not hanging out a lot with people in a relaxed way, not being around animals or plants. That’s not normal! But most people have a genotype, a neurological ability to fit within what our culture calls a “normal” lifestyle. But we don’t. What’s normal for the culture and insisted upon in the culture, I don’t think it works with our nervous systems.

Rowan Mangan:
Our nervous systems are actually different. Our brains are actually different. I remember there’s been so many realizations recently, but do you remember that thing that I said to you not long after we got together?

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah. This was so funny. We were so delighted with each other. All three of us. We were just so delighted. There was so much laughter and so much love just exploding in our little house in California in the woods. And then one day I came in and you were hiding behind a bed, curled up into a ball, and you said, “I just really need to be by myself.” I was like, all right. You were like, “No. I mean for at least three days.” I was like, we all live in one room, how can we do this? It was so sweet. You kind of confessed to me, “I can’t do human.”

Martha Beck:
You said, “I can fake it for a few days. I’ve been really working hard to fake it, but then I have to be by myself and I have to heal from trying to be human.” And I was like, is there anyone who’s not like that? That’s certainly how I am. I’m so divergent I don’t even realize I’m divergent. I just assume I’m like everybody else and that everybody else is faking it better. But I was like, oh yeah, you’re perfectly normal. We all need to curl up in a ball and just try to find ourselves again after a few days of being with other people and trying to do social.

Rowan Mangan:
And yet I know that that’s not true for everyone. And so it’s been a fascinating time and has been a real reckoning for me in terms of realizing this on the sort of literal plane that there’s been things that have been like that, that have been hard for me my whole life that I’ve always framed up as being defectiveness or deficiency or something. And so to be at this point now of no, there’s a reason for that and other people have that too, and it’s just the type of person you are. It’s been phenomenal for me. It’s been a really interesting time.

Martha Beck:
I realize there’s a whole group of people. And now we go online and we look at like I can go to ADHD people online and they’re actually having experiences. I saw a video the other day, the person said, “This is my brain trying to remember why it’s going to different rooms in the house.” And it was just a duck just frantically galloping back and forth along this hallway over and over again. And I was like, wait, whoever put this up and saw it recognized in that duck themselves and it recognized me too!

Martha Beck:
So the wonderful thing is that as we’re discovering this, we also can say that you, Rowan Mangan, came by this very honestly, yes. You were taught to be true to yourself by the very person who is about to join us as a guest here on Bewildered.

Martha Beck:
We’ll be right back with more Bewildered. We don’t say this enough. We are so glad you’re a Bewildered listener and we’re hoping you might want to go to the next level with us. By which I mean if you rate and review the podcast, it helps new people find us so we can keep bewildering new souls. And you know how much we love that. Ratings are very much appreciated. Obviously, the more stars you give us, the more appreciation is forthcoming. Reviews are quite simply heaven. And we read every one and exclaim over them and we just love you all, mwah!

Martha Beck:
So we have a guest on the podcast today and this very special moment is because today’s guest is the person who introduced us to a very important concept that has actually become a bit of a guiding metaphor for us, very much, and all the best metaphors. It’s a story. And so we have brought this person in to tell us the story directly as someone I’ve known for a very long time since before I was born. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Paula Keogh, my mom. Welcome, Mom!

Paula Keogh:
It’s great to be here. Hello, Marty. Hi, Ro.

Rowan Mangan:
Hi. Hi, Mama. It’s so good to see you. It’s 6:30 in the morning for her. So she’s saving our bacon by getting up early. So Mom, many years ago, before I was born, it’s not all about me, something happened to you that was a cool story. And I was wondering if you would tell us about your trip to Moon River.

Paula Keogh:
Right, well, it was 1978, the fall of 1978, and I was living in Toronto. I was 28 at the time, and I heard that the Monarch butterflies were flying down from northern Ontario on their route back to Mexico. And I thought, wow, that would be amazing to see monarch butterflies on their migratory path. So I took off, headed north with a map of where they were supposed to be going.

Rowan Mangan:
Just by yourself?

Paula Keogh:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I took a week off work and just took off. And I came across, I was following the route that they were taking and came across Algonquin National Park. And there were all these butterflies, and it was the most amazing site because they have this fluttering movement of their wings. They’re just sort of shimmering. They seem to be shimmering en masse. It was so beautiful. And they were everywhere in the air, in trees, on fences. It was just extraordinary to see. It was really beautiful. And just on that, there used to be a million butterflies, a billion butterflies headed south, but now there’s many fewer. But at the time, it was an extraordinary sight. And anyway, I was in the national park at Algonquin there, and there was an information hut and I went inside. And there was a park ranger and up on the wall there was this huge map of North America and the migratory path of the monarch butterflies and other migratory and migratory birds.

Paula Keogh:
But this monarch butterfly route was there and he was pointing it out to us, and he said, “Of course, only 90% of the monarch butterflies fly this route. There’s another route taken by the other 10%, and they’re the aberrant genotypes, and they take this different route in order to ensure the survival of the species. If for example, there’s a huge storm or some other catastrophe that knocks out the 90%, you’ve got this little 10% of butterflies that are on a different route.” And I just stood there and I remember thinking, “Oh my God, that’s me!”

At the time, 1978, there wasn’t a lot of room for difference or thinking about divergence or diversity, and it was amazing and I just couldn’t get it out of my head this term, “aberrant genotype.” And I discovered that aberrant, rather than having negative connotations, actually it comes from the Latin “ab” move away and “errare” which is to stray, to wander. I thought I’ve just strayed a little from the path most taken. And so the word “aberrant” is a lovely word. And so from that point on, I just had a different way of thinking about the difficulties that I was having in fitting into the path most people travelled. And I thought, it’s okay. I’m just out here on this different path. But there are another, there’s 10% of us here, and we’re on our way to save the species if necessary.

Martha Beck:
I love that. It’s such a great story. And I love that definition of aberrant. We were talking about it before we came on the air and I said, well, okay, that’s such a negative term, but then the way you’ve explicated it, I think it’s only negative because when one does wander astray, we talk on this podcast constantly about the tension, the pressure to be like the 90%. So even the word “aberrant” is beautiful and has become negative compared to conformity. So thank you for that, Paula.

Rowan Mangan:
And I love the idea that that 10%, it’s their destiny to stray. It’s their purpose. It’s inbuilt. That’s why aberrant genotype, it’s like, no, they’re the straying genotype for the species. It’s not they couldn’t get their shit together.

Martha Beck:
Right! No.

Rowan Mangan:
This is what they’re here to do. This is really important.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Didn’t you tell us, I seem to recall, I don’t know from where that only every third generation migrates in the first place? And that third generation, the butterflies are different and they put on extra fat so they have enough energy to fly the whole way. And so the whole, it’s a fascinating thing about what’s moving all the butterflies from within and then they take off in this one direction and 10% go, no, I must go south.

Paula Keogh:
Yes. So the environmental factors also come in because apparently it’s to do with the milkweed and the availability of food along the way. So you’ve got these two things happening and they all work together.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s so funny that Cheryl Strayed, like “Strayed” isn’t the name that she had from birth . She chose that name, and it was after she did that long walk along the Pacific Crest trail that she later wrote Wild about. And it’s just so interesting that aberrant: to stray and that Strayed was the word that she chose to identify herself with after something that is very much what we’re talking about.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It also brings to mind Tolkien’s favorite line, “Not all who wander are lost.”

Paula Keogh:
Right. Yes, that’s right. Yes.

Martha Beck:
Maybe we wander because we’re found.

Paula Keogh:
Yes, that’s right. And the association of wonder and wander, those two words together are so lovely. They just have this mutual sort of connection and resonance.

Rowan Mangan:
And maybe what we’re wondering is part of our genotype as well, that when we wander, that’s also part of that mysterious pull of our destiny or how we’re built. It’s to stray in our dreams and our imaginings as well as in our path.

Martha Beck:
And people say, “Don’t let your mind wander,” but maybe we’re supposed to let our minds wander. And a wondering mind is a wandering mind, and that’s what finds the way.

Rowan Mangan:
Wandering is all my mind ever does.

Paula Keogh:
Daydreaming is such a wonderful sort of “recreational thinking” I call it, too.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, actually, yeah. That’s what this podcast is all about, recreational thinking.

Rowan Mangan:
In divergent directions. Well, that is such a great way for us to kick off the conversation that we want to have about taking different paths and different routes. So thank you so much, Mom, for coming on the show.

Martha Beck:
And for going to the Algonquin National Forest in 1978 because that’s the kind of person you are. I love that.

Paula Keogh:
Exactly. It was a beautiful trip and Moon River coming through the park and all the migratory birds were there. It was wonderful. But yes, the monarch butterflies.

Martha Beck:
Well, you were a queen among the aberrant genotypes.

Rowan Mangan:
Absolutely. And so thank you.

Martha Beck:
Paula is so great. I just love Paula so much. And when she told me that story a long time ago, years ago, it blew my mind. It felt so liberating. It was like the perfect metaphor for people who are trying to figure it all out. Some of us are way, we’re flying way down the Gulf of Mexico, and everybody else is up in Ohio, and we’re going, why do I feel so pulled this other direction? And I, like you, had always thought that it was something wrong with me. And when I heard the story of the butterflies, I just went, oh, it’s built in. And it’s a call that we really can’t deny to go a different direction from most others.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s interesting because even at the same time, as I said earlier, there’s this culture, it gets more and more demanding that we get everything measured and scored and named and classified and all of that sort of school left-hemisphere stuff. But I want to make sure that as we talk about this, we’re still talking about it sort of loosely in a way. It’s how you identify. It’s not how a doctor has told you you are.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Yeah. But also I do think as the strictures get tighter, I think more and more people can feel themselves sort of chafing, whether or not they get any kind of diagnosis. It’s like, this is too narrow for me. 40 hours a week in an airless office is just not working for me anymore. And guess what? They just reduced my wages and increased my hours. It feels to me like it’s moving. The norm is getting more absolute. And as a result, more and more people I think are going to identify as outside it.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, yeah. So well put. I think that’s exactly right. The airless rooms are getting more airless, and it’s all just starting to feel smaller and less easy to handle.

Martha Beck:
And it really, really, really doesn’t mean, oh, please, please understand that we don’t mean that this is a better way to be. There are different ways to be, and the thing I love about Paula’s metaphor is that the 10% are celebrating the other butterflies. They’re like, we love you. We’re all one group, and we differ so that we can serve. And those who want to go off the beaten path and can be in a position to say, “Oh, I have a whole new feeling. I have a whole new idea.” It’s to serve all the butterflies that some of the butterflies go a different direction. And I think it may be time for us aberrants to start really developing and sharing our own perspective. It might help everyone. It might really help the whole group.

Rowan Mangan:
So offline, Marty and I have been having conversations about these things that we’re now talking to you about and just feeling like this is going to change this podcast a little bit. It is just going to change the direction a little bit. It’s still going to be us shooting our mouths off and we don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like. Right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. That’s the thing. It’s like we’re kind of migrating along and then we’re like, yeah, we’re going to show you the places along the way that we go and assume that you’re going to go places that you can explore and celebrate as well. So we’ve called the podcast for the people who are trying to figure it all out, but we left what we’re figuring. We’ve left it sort of vague.

Rowan Mangan:
Sort of universal.

Martha Beck:
So “people who are trying to figure it out.” And we were like, what are we trying to figure out? I don’t know. I’m trying to figure that out. Yes, exactly. And now I think, oh, it’s kind of this little mind expansion thing where the it that I’ve been trying to figure out as we plod through things on this podcast is what’s another path for human beings right now in a very difficult and stressful period of our history? How do we make it a better world? We’ve made it—we’re an incredibly successful species in terms of sheer numbers, but the way we’re doing it is not optimal for ourselves or our long-term survival or for other beings in this world. And that’s what we’re trying to figure out, I think.

Rowan Mangan:
So maybe as we start to bring these thoughts and these conversations into Bewildered and into this community, it’ll be more about seeking out what is our butterfly path. So for those of us who are feeling bewildered and wanting to be be-wilder-ed, that feeling is actually us looking for our migratory route. And now’s the time for us, Marty, you and I to start doing this more consciously in this forum and more deliberately.

Martha Beck:
And we have no answers.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh God, no. Are you kidding me?

Martha Beck:
We have questions, but it’s the questions that pull you forward. It’s the wondering that makes you wander. Right? And so wonder, it’s really interesting for me. In the brain, the opposite of the impulse that makes us afraid. The sort of antonym of it is the impulse that makes us draw towards something that makes us curious. So in a weird way, wondering is the opposite of being afraid. They’ve done studies where if people are biased against another ethnic group, all they have to ask people is to start wondering what those people have for breakfast or dinner for that fear, that initial fear to drop, and for people to be more inclusive. So we just have questions. We’re wondering as we wander, and we are finding our migratory path from here to someplace, and the call to go has come. Like every third generation of the butterflies has come, our generation needs to fly, right? And the call is getting louder and louder, and some of us are flying, 90% are flying one general direction, and then there are 10% of us going, I don’t know. Let’s just figure it out.

Rowan Mangan:
So we’ll just figure it out together.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ll keep trying to figure it out together.

Martha Beck:
And just remember that I said when Paula was on, “Not all who wander or lost are lost.” Actually, Tolkien said that. But I want to just remind everyone that we’re not lost if we’re wondering, we’re not lost if we’re wandering, but believing that we wander because we’re lost will make us feel alienated from our nature. We were born to wander, and we are not lost. So if you feel lost, it’s because you believe that your direction is wrong. But in your instincts, in your genotype, you know that the wandering you’re doing is your nature. It’s following your truth, and that is what you must do.

Rowan Mangan:
God, it’s so interesting. The other, you know, wander/wonder, the other interesting wordplay that I just thought about is when you take “to stray” and you turn it into a noun, that’s such a pejorative term, like strays, stray animals. Oh yeah. Stray. And it’s seen as lacking in purpose. And I love this reframe that to stray is to be following the correct path. And so it’s not about being a defective version of the same thing the culture is making, like a broken doll. We’re not broken dolls. We’re an entirely different thing.

Martha Beck:
Right. And not different in a way that attacks any other. Not difference in defiance of others, but different in ways that are meant to save and preserve others. You like wordplay? Try this. Our difference is not defiance, but defense of all people. It is not defending against anyone. It is to defend the entire group so that everybody has a chance to arrive at the place that they’re called to, no matter what path they take.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s so perfect. I love that idea that we’re actually all going the same place.

Martha Beck:
We want to go to the place.

Rowan Mangan:
We’re all going to the same place. And it’s nice there.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. The place we’re going. Yeah, it’s nice. It’s that, sorry, I go back to my near death experience of absolute and complete love. No question in my mind, every human butterfly on this planet is headed there.

Rowan Mangan:
So for Bewildered, we’re still going to be showing up here and having fun. And there’s maybe just a little bit more awareness of why we might be all on this different route and maybe talking to people about ideas related to this too.

Martha Beck:
So let’s all have so much fun and so much joy and so much delight and laughter on the path we’re finding, no matter where we go.

Rowan Mangan:
Thanks for flying with us.

Martha Beck:
And…

Rowan Mangan: 
We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word ‘WILD’ to 570-873-0144.

We’re also on Instagram. Our handle is @bewilderedpodcast. You can follow us to get updates, hear funny snippets and outtakes, and chat with other fans of the show.

For more of us, Martha’s on Instagram, themarthabeck. She’s on Facebook, The Martha Beck, and she’s on Twitter, marthabeck. Her website is, MarthaBeck.com. And me, I too am on Instagram. Rowan_Mangan. I’m on Facebook as Rowan Mangan. And I’m on Twitter as RowanMangan. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI.