Fresh Take: Sara Hirsh Bordo on Autoimmunity and the Threat to Women's Health

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Amy (0:40): Hey, everybody. Welcome to fresh take from what fresh hell laughing in the face of motherhood. This is Amy. Today, I'm talking to Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux. She is a 15 time award winning filmmaker and the founder CEO of Women Rising, which creates films and experiences to empower women and girls.

Amy (0:58): Women Rising was named one of the most innovative, interesting, and purpose driven women led startups to watch by Inc Magazine. Sarah previously held positions in media and entertainment, including executive director of interactive marketing at Paramount Pictures. She is aunt Sissy to 11 nieces and nephews and godmother Sarah to three godchildren. Today, we're going to be talking about Sarah's new book, Autoimmunity and the Good Girls, How Permission to Put Ourselves First Has the Power to Keep Us Well. Welcome, Sarah.

Unknown Speaker (1:31): Thank you so much for having me, Amy.

Amy (1:34): You, reminded me of my grandmother today, my very beloved grandmother, because I called her grandma, but she was to our enormous Irish Catholic family and sissy and sissy to, like, 45 other people.

Unknown Speaker (1:47): No kidding. Oh my gosh. Well, let's invite her in

Unknown Speaker (1:50): today to Exactly.

Unknown Speaker (1:52): To speak through one of us.

Amy (1:53): Yeah. Exactly. And Sissy was a wonderful woman and a sufferer of arthritis from a surprisingly early age. So this I wish this book had existed when she was my age. Let's put it that way.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (2:05): Well, I wish that this work, whether it came from me or someone else, existed when my grandmothers were here too.

Amy (2:11): So, Sarah, let's start at the very beginning. For people who are not familiar with the term, what is autoimmunity?

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (2:18): Autoimmunity is essentially a class of diseases that is anywhere between a 130 and about a 150 on record as of now. What they have in common is there isn't a cure for a single one. Some that a lot of women must have heard of or might have had in their own life, whether it's a diagnosis that they have been given or someone in their family or friends, Hashimoto's, which is what I have, which is underactive thyroid, celiac disease, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, Graves, vitiligo, ulcerative colitis, and the list goes on. What they all have in common is it basically means that the body is, in essence, at war with itself. The immune system can't recognize what is a healthy cell versus an unhealthy cell.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (3:11): And so what happens is that the immune system because the immune system isn't able to recognize itself, it begins to attack itself.

Amy (3:20): It's my understanding that this is a process that sometimes is useful. You have a bacteria, a virus, your immune system goes to work attacking the invader. There is no benign form of autoimmunity. If your body's turning on itself, it's always this disease or disorder.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (3:34): That's right. The immune system is by nature designed to attack something that is of danger and to, in essence, right the ship. But with autoimmunity, we, in essence, have an immune system that no longer is able to recognize itself.

Amy (3:52): These conditions, they can be very serious things like Hodgkin's lymphoma, and they can be less serious but very bothersome things like Raynaud's phenomenon, which I have, which is if the temperature dips below, say, 60 degrees Fahrenheit, I need to have gloves or hand warmers with me because my fingers will turn completely white.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (4:11): Yes. I have multiple friends with that.

Unknown Speaker (4:14): That's a very common women's thing.

Unknown Speaker (4:15): And you

Amy (4:16): think of it as like, ah, it's just this little bothersome thing, or I have mean, I I have several autoimmune things that kind of go together. But there's a spectrum between very serious like lupus and more bothersome like psoriasis.

Unknown Speaker (4:28): That's right.

Amy (4:29): But all of them have unsettling thing of your body is attacking itself, and you are not in control of process that is happening to you even though it is you.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (4:38): That's exactly right. And for me, what I found so as you said at the top, I'm a documentary filmmaker and a storyteller by nature, and I've been in the women and girls space now for about fifteen years. But for me, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune when I was 30 years old. And I just found myself, Amy, noticing that the women around me that were also being diagnosed, we had a couple things in common. We were either the eldest or the only daughters in our family, or we grew up as the caretaker in our family.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (5:13): And I found that fascinating. I didn't really do anything with that kind of hunch, if you will, right at the top for a few years, but I had a feeling that I would maybe test it out to see if that trend was happening outside of my intimate circle. So I did a survey amongst 300 women that were in the Women Rising Network, and seventy percent of the women that were diagnosed with an autoimmune condition were either the eldest or the only daughter in their family.

Unknown Speaker (5:43): And you thought, that's weird.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (5:46): I thought think I almost found it a little bit of a validation instead of something that was pesky or weird. If there isn't a cure for a single one and eighty percent of all the diagnoses in an autoimmune condition across the country is in a woman's body and there isn't a cure for any of them, then whether it's a doctor or a researcher from the CDC to Harvard to Stanford, everyone is just looking for what are the contributing factors that might be at play here. So for me as a storyteller, I'm always thinking of what's the story that's being told here. I found it fascinating that if my body has turned on itself because it can't recognize itself, then what's the story that might be at play behind that?

Amy (6:36): And there are other, risk factors for developing an autoimmune disorder like having Epstein Barr, having COVID. I have vitiligo, which is another, autoimmune disorder. Well, we'll talk about it more later why that might have happened, but it did happen after I got a very early version of COVID in the spring of twenty twenty. Having a relative who has an autoimmune disease means you are more likely to have one.

Unknown Speaker (6:59): Absolutely.

Amy (7:00): And having an autoimmune disease already, it makes it more likely that you're going to get a third. But way above all of these is this tendency for it to be female that is acknowledged to be true in medical science. Yes. But they're poorly understood. They're under researched.

Amy (7:18): They're not taken And like I said, some of them are bothersome, some of them are very serious. And, that's weird. It's all women. Just sort of put to the side. And so I'm so struck that you, as a filmmaker, use platform because your filmmaking platform was to center women's stories, that you use that platform to look into this because you weren't finding those answers anywhere else.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (7:41): That's exactly right. I, am very curious by nature. I've been in the documentary space for now about fifteen years. I love to ask why. I think a lot of us are are that way, especially if we're told something that feels like we've been given a life sentence.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (7:58): That's a scary place to be. You know, when you're told that you have a diagnosis, and then you're told that there isn't a cure for it, but we'll manage it. Right? I think that in a time when society has never put so much on women in the history of humanity. And in a time when our plates, especially mom's plates, have never been more full, I just started peeling back the layers of not only my own health and my own health timeline, but also the women around me.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (8:31): When were we getting sick? What were the things that we had in common? And so I've decided to take that 70% stat that I shared with you a second ago. But I knew that as a documentary filmmaker, I wasn't going to be taken seriously unless I, in essence, upped the ante. So I used my own savings from my work, and I funded the first quantitative research in The United States at the intersection of female empowerment and autoimmunity in American women.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (9:03): And that was amongst a thousand American women. And once I saw those results, Amy, and those echoes across women like us, that's when the book was pretty much catalyzed.

Amy (9:17): So you were able to recreate these results at a larger scale with a control group of women with and without autoimmune disorders, that the women with autoimmune disorders were very likely to be oldest daughter in their family or the only daughter?

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (9:33): Sixty three percent. And so I hired a research company. I knew that I wasn't gonna myself. It would be one more thing that people would be skeptical about

Unknown Speaker (9:43): Mhmm.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (9:43): Coming from a documentary filmmaker. So what I did was is I hired an outside research company named Proof Insights, and they have done many, many lifestyle studies over the years, worked with them on a questionnaire that really peeled back the layers of the things that we're talking about. What did we have in common with our girlhoods? What were the family dynamics around us? What were we asked to do that might be a little bit different?

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (10:13): Were we growing up too soon? Were we asked to hold too much responsibility? And then how were all of those questions and commonalities playing out in our womanhoods now, and what did all of them have in common?

Amy (10:28): So you asked these questions. I pulled some of these questions. You felt forced to grow up before you were truly ready. Do you identify with that statement? Do you identify with you felt your needs and wants mattered to your parents more before your siblings were born?

Amy (10:41): And along with this, on an equal footing were questions about medical history, were questions about family history of illness, and you also pulled in some questions from the ACE questionnaire, which I think our listeners, we've talked about the ACE questionnaire before, but explain that a little bit to us and how that came to be part of this study.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (10:58): Yeah. The ACE questionnaire stands for adverse childhood experiences. It was commissioned and basically created by two male doctors and scientists who came up with this list of questions that basically got to the point of childhood trauma. And then they were able to discern that certain levels of childhood trauma were causing disease later in life. I've been inspired by the ACE questionnaire for a really, really long time, but I just felt, Amy, that there were experiences that were so specific to being a girl.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (11:39): Those are the questions that you just so kindly, you know, brought forward, and there were many more. But what I really wanted to peel back the layers of, not only questions like the ACE team, you know, and the ACE questionnaire brought forward, and it's really the gold standard of childhood trauma. So I wanted to not only include that, but I layered on a few others. So the ACE questionnaire has questions like, did you have enough to eat as a child? Did you grow up in a family that might have had divorce or separation?

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (12:10): Were you hit? Was there alcohol and drugs in the family? Questions that we've all been asked and a little more familiar, but I really felt that this layer of this lived experience that girls have had is pretty singular, and I wanted to build that into the research.

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Amy (15:41): Here's why the ACE thing matters because I think we all have come to understand this research was groundbreaking. I think that came out in the nineties maybe. But we've all come to accept because it is so that if you had an adverse childhood experience and with each one you have, because some people have several on this list of an incarcerated parent or, as you said, drugs and alcohol in the home, the more of those you have, it shows up twenty, thirty years later in cancer and asthma and autoimmune disorders and all sorts of things. And so the mind body connection, medical science accepts this as so that ACE's childhoods affect your health. So you're taking this one step further and saying, yes.

Amy (16:24): Being a oldest daughter, being a good girl, to go back to the title of your book, can also adversely affect your health.

Unknown Speaker (16:33): That's right.

Amy (16:34): I think the first reaction from a lot of people will be like, oh, come on. That's that's too much. They're not the same that an ACE's childhood even if they accept that. Well, an ACE's childhood is actually, in quotes, traumatic, not having enough to eat or maybe not having enough to eat. That's traumatic.

Amy (16:49): Being the eldest of four kids and you had to babysit for free all the time, that's not the same. And so I wanna get into a conversation about trauma with a lowercase t as you put it.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (16:59): I'm so grateful you brought this forward because, you know, you and I were talking before you hit record about how women's experiences have been hushed or dismissed or disregarded or silenced or understudied or undervalued for a very, very, very long time. I think that it all goes back to the age old reference of you're being hysterical. Yes. I don't feel like we're in a time where that's useful anymore. And I believe that the questions that haven't been asked, it's because most of the research has been done by male scientists, male researchers.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (17:45): And the experience of being a girl who has experienced anywhere between two and five environmental conditions with a lowercase t all contribute to what is not my new favorite line of study, which is epigenetics. Epigenetics has been defined by Harvard as what happens around you environmentally that can turn off or on certain genes in your DNA. What I found fascinating is the high, high percentages of lowercase t trauma in girlhoods in my study, it's very statistically significant. The women who had experienced feelings of being suppressed, silenced, only loved for what they did instead of loved for just being. I'm telling you right now, the differences between what a girlhood caretaker experienced and what that has done to her health as women is a very different set of truths than a daughter regardless of birth order who simply had the space to be free.

Amy (19:01): I wanna read a quote from Gabon Monte that you put in the book that I think explains this. Mhmm. He says that trauma is what happens within someone as a result of the difficult or hurtful events that befall them. It is not the events themselves. If you constantly had to worry about family members' well-being

Unknown Speaker (19:20): That's right.

Amy (19:21): The reaction within your body is trauma or can be traumatic, and it doesn't matter that it wasn't what somebody across town experienced. That's not the point. Painful experiences aren't competitive, as you say.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (19:33): I do say that. And doctor Mate and I are going to actually be talking about why nice girls and why the good girls are getting sick first. We're going to be doing an Instagram live, which is really exciting specifically about this. One of the things to really keep in mind is that many of us were raised with a set of permission slips, Amy Mhmm. That might have been a little bit more limited than those potentially around us that weren't raised with limited permission slips at all.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (20:05): And in my research now over a thousand women and talking to many, many, many women one on one that were also diagnosed, but also young women and, you know, women in their fifties and sixties who were raised not to be good, but to just be themselves. And they are in very good health.

Amy (20:27): This meant so much to me because I wrote about this in my book, happy to help. I developed vitiligo in this very early days of the pandemic. I probably developed it very suddenly, maybe six months after first being diagnosed. It was an incredibly stressful time in literally everyone's life and in my house very much so. We were all sick, very sick when there was nothing to do.

Amy (20:48): Hope you don't turn blue, and one of us never really got better. And it was it was really rough, and then I get vitiligo.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (20:54): I'm so sorry for that experience for your whole family.

Amy (20:58): Thank you. I appreciate that. I did not connect these two things in my head at all, the event and then this autoimmune disorder showing up, which is unusual. It's unusual for it to show up in somebody in their fifties for the first time. Went to the specialist, and he said and this is imagine this, summer of twenty twenty one.

Amy (21:15): Have you been under stress recently?

Unknown Speaker (21:17): And I was like Sweet lord.

Unknown Speaker (21:19): I first stopped laughing, and I was like, yeah. I have. And he said, well, what kind of stress? I said, well, you know, like, the pandemic and everybody at home all the time, and we've been ill, and it's just it's been really hard. And he said, no.

Amy (21:31): I don't mean that kind of hard. I mean hard like you were in a car accident and went on to explain to me that what had happened to me could not possibly have caused this vitiligo, so there must be some incredibly stressful event that I wasn't thinking of because that was, as you say, trauma with a lowercase t. And I knew he was wrong. In the moment, I'm like, okay. What does this guy know?

Amy (21:50): But that is the reaction, I think, from the larger world, the things that you're talking about. Growing up with a restricted set of permission slips, as you say, that can't be enough to cause this, but you're here to say that's not true.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (22:03): I'm here to say other doctors are saying it and have been saying it for many years and scientists and the NIH and I mean, the book is loaded with evidence. First of all, I'm so irritated on your behalf.

Unknown Speaker (22:19): It just to kick

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (22:20): that out. I'm so irritated and disappointed on your behalf that you would put your trust, faith, time, need in a physician's hand to validate your pain, to be witnessed, and collaborate on a solution. I have to ask, are you still seeing that doctor?

Amy (22:42): Well, I was because it was a very good doctor. And guess what? My vitiligo is in remission. So, you know, lucky me. But it was this sort of like and now your body's turning on you, and you you're looking at it every time you do anything because it's on your dominant hand, it's crawling up your arm, and maybe it'll stop and maybe it won't.

Amy (22:57): Nothing I heard in that visit was reassuring, but now I'm in remission.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (23:01): Well, I'd like to celebrate your remission.

Unknown Speaker (23:03): Yeah. Me too.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (23:05): And may it stay that way as long as humanly possible. Just to sort of stay on that doctor's visit for a minute because in my research, I really wanted to peel back how feeling like our needs didn't have space as little girls, how our wants didn't really have an opportunity to be heard as little girls, and how prevalent and common it is for so many of us to grow up with feeling that we're actually more loved when we need nothing.

Unknown Speaker (23:42): Mhmm.

Unknown Speaker (23:43): Right? I mean Yeah. Preach. Hands up. And it doesn't preach.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (23:46): My research basically asked not only the girlhood questions that you were kind enough to bring forward. And for any of your amazing community and listeners, I have actually put not only the survey in the book as you saw, but I've actually made it available on the website if you just want to go and take it yourself to be curious about some of these questions and to answer some of them yourself. Because I think that for a very, very long time, again, when research is often in the hands of men who don't have the lived experience we have, we aren't asked these questions. We're not asking each other these questions. Our family isn't asking these questions because if they were asking these questions, then it would have likely shaped our girlhoods and womanhoods differently.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (24:39): But we're asking them now. So there you have it, as my grandfather would say. And so the questions and the survey are available on goodgirlsbook.com or autoimmunity and the goodgirls.com. Both of them will take you to the same place.

Amy (24:53): I'll make sure to put those in the show notes for the episode as well, the links to those.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (24:56): I have woven in so many answers and certainly all of the statistics. But within women that were raised in some layer of girlhood caretaker, it has completely shaped the ways that we are behaving as women. Yes. And some of those might be about how painful and uncomfortable it is to receive care, to receive a compliment, to receive generosity. And your incredible community has heard the episode about receiving and giving and caretaking and different ways of taking care of one another.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (25:35): It all comes down to the stories that we believe. What do we believe? And it's very difficult to receive when you actually don't believe the story that you have permission to receive at all and that you have the permission to have needs and that you have the permission to have wants and have the permission to basically be a human being. You've just been hardwired with the belief that I'm more loved when I don't need anything. I'm more loved when I'm good.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (26:08): I'm inconvenient when I have needs, and I feel like I'm trouble when I have needs or wants. And I don't wanna cause trouble, and I wanna stay good, and I wanna stay treasured and seen on the outside as easy.

Unknown Speaker (26:25): Right. And which complicates it. Which absolutely complicates it. I'm talking to Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux. Her new book is Autoimmunity and the Good Girls, and we'll be right back.

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Amy (27:37): We had Mara Glatzel on. We just reran that episode actually. She wrote a book called Needy, and she made a point which really stayed with me that as somebody who takes care of other people's needs, when you have needs and they aren't being met, probably because you're projecting hyper independence, when those needs aren't being met, then you start to think, well, nobody's meeting them, so they must not be as important as I think they are. Right? These symptoms that I'm feeling must not be that big a deal because I'm being told there's nothing I can do about them.

Unknown Speaker (28:05): Just put up with that. Just live with that.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (28:07): That's exactly right. We all know this. You know, when the body is ignored, it starts to speak a little louder. And I think that so many of us I know that I did this. I know that my mom did this.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (28:18): I know that my grandmother did this. I come from a long line of eldest daughters raised to caretake, and we've all had cancer and autoimmune. So to me, I learned it from the very best. I learned from the very best, which is why it was so difficult, uncomfortable to begin to unbecome with these stories so that I could then build myself back up. Because when we operate from a place, Amy, tell me if you agree.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (28:49): But when we're operating from a place that is completely conditioned by the outside

Unknown Speaker (28:57): Mhmm.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (28:57): We're living on quicksand because whatever is invited or not invited, allowed or not allowed on the outside is completely changing the ground that we're standing on.

Amy (29:12): And in fact, that hyper attuned way we can get to the input of things around us, our nervous system can get turned up to really notice who's in a bad mood or what's not going well, and that might be a factor in autoimmune disorders. I was just reading an article about long COVID yesterday. One theory is that it is just a nervous system stuck in overdrive, stuck in fight or flight, and you have to figure out how to turn it off. How do you do that? Good question.

Unknown Speaker (29:37): But that is what it is, that it's an over attuned nervous system.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (29:40): Yes. And these elements of, quote, good girlhood. Right? And what I mean by good girl, we were raised to be in service instead of being in authenticity. We were raised to be so in tune with the energies around us, it made us the savior of the room.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (30:03): We were so accustomed and trained to have such little needs to not be seen as being any trouble that we programmed our body and our immune system to not be able to speak up. So when we haven't programmed our body, our mind to, in essence, be conditioned from the inside out, but we're constantly waiting for inputs from the outside. We become so hypersensitive to the energies around us, to the attitudes around us. It's no wonder why there is a huge wave of women like us that are now identifying as an empath.

Unknown Speaker (30:47): Mhmm.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (30:48): We can read a room because we're absolutely masters making sure that everybody is getting what they need before they know they need it. We're taking care of it. We're anticipating. We're hyperaware. We're hyperskilled.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (31:04): That's what makes us good hostesses. But that's also what makes us so brilliant at understanding the wants and needs of others that we've actually never met our own. Right.

Amy (31:17): I wanna make sure to say that this is not blaming the woman. No. If you weren't so uptight, you wouldn't have migraines. If you weren't such an empath, and you wouldn't, you know, have arthritis, that it it's not it's not as simple as just don't be that way. As you say, there's a distinction between blaming yourself for your feeling health and understanding the mind body connection as you move towards healing instead of just putting up with it.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (31:41): That's exactly right. And the thesis of the book is that a self in compromise is creating immunity in compromise. And whether you want to listen from an MD, I have those experts in

Unknown Speaker (31:56): the book.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (31:56): I interviewed those experts in the book. If you lean a little bit more eastern, I have Reiki healers, shaman, alternative medicine doctors. The book is, in essence, a literary documentary about this thesis so that no matter where you're coming from or who you prefer to listen to or who you trust a little bit more than others, the book offers experts and points of view that are all supporting this thesis, that a sense of self in compromise is creating immunity in compromise. And within my own journey, when I basically turned my entire empowerment or disempowerment was more like it, upside down, learned how to listen to my intuition, learned where that even lived, learned what she was saying to me, gave her space, listened to the physical cues, listened to my emotional cues, understood when I was in overdrive and I needed to bring my nervous system down and regulate, taught myself how to do that, and more than anything, gave myself permission to disappoint people. And when I gave myself permission to disappoint people and believe in my gut that I was worth loving me anyway, even though I might disappoint you.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (33:19): I'm doing it because if I don't put myself first and know how to do that, I can't ask anybody else to do that for me. And all of my conditions, Amy, like yours, thankfully, are in remission or have disappeared. Congratulations. Thanks. Right back at you.

Unknown Speaker (33:37): It makes me think of my grandmother and Sissy where we started. She had very bad arthritis, which is starting to show up and be known to. She grew up I mean, it was obviously a very different time. It was fifty years ago. Right?

Amy (33:47): But there was nothing to be done that we all have our crosses to bear. Right. And she was a very faithful woman. This is just something you put up with. Looking back, I think it probably got worse quicker because she was just putting up with it and because nobody offered her an alternative.

Unknown Speaker (34:04): That's right.

Amy (34:05): And I think about that and how far we have come in some senses and yet also how much farther we have to go to prove to the rest of the world that these autoimmune disorders are worthy of consideration because mostly women are putting up with them, and so they must not be that important or as hard as you say or as painful as you say. And something must have happened to you, right, that you need to give me an explanation that's worthy of your suffering. But none of that has to be true. And as frustrating as it is, we really do have to start to reset that each of us one at a time.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (34:38): Thank you for saying that beautifully said. And I would also just bring it back to I am here to tell you from the bottom of my heart that the body doesn't just speak science. The body speaks story. And the body is believing and operating on the stories that you're telling it, that we're telling it, that I'm telling it. And if I have told my body her whole now 50 year old life that we aren't able to inconvenience other people, that it isn't safe, that we'll get in trouble, that we need to just keep it to ourselves, that we'll just stick with it and suck it up a little bit longer, that everybody has their something, that no one has time to help, and most importantly, that we don't even know how to receive it when it's time.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (35:31): These stories are crying for a rewrite. Right. They are crying for a rewrite, and that really is the premise and the journey of the whole book, that we aren't meant to stay the same, that we came here to transform and rewrite these stories that are ancient and the women in our family have been telling them, and the women in our families have been sick, but they don't have to stay that way.

Amy (36:00): I'm so inspired, Sarah, that you used your platform to bridge a gap in medical science that wasn't being studied, and you were making change happen.

Unknown Speaker (36:10): One uncomfortable introverted step at a time.

Unknown Speaker (36:13): Yeah. One introverted step at a time, but it's just such an incredible example of, like, well, what can I do about it? It's like, you can do a study, and you can have a book, and that change is possible. And we don't all have to have done this incredible thing, but it's proof that it's possible. It's proof that we don't just have to put up the things the way they are.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (36:29): Yes. And just just an echo of that. First of all, that's very kind. Thank you for saying that.

Unknown Speaker (36:35): I mean it.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (36:35): But listen. The amount of female patients turned authors right now living with chronic conditions is the highest number of female authors published living with chronic conditions in the history of publishing. This is a thrilling time. If I don't resonate with you or my voice doesn't resonate with you, there's Amy Kurtz. There's KJ Ramsey.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (37:01): There's Christina Applegate. There's Jamie Lynn Seigler. All of us published right now and a dozen more. So I think that we are just in the time that I know it's hard and terrifying to get started. But if you're just arming yourself with a little bit more permission at a time every day, and my book holds your hand through it, you aren't alone.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (37:29): And we need each other in order to heal not only from a place that can stick, but from a place that can actually collaboratively make us more well.

Amy (37:41): Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux's new book is called Autoimmunity and the Good Girls, How Permission to Put Ourselves First Has the Power to Keep Us Well. I loved this book. I'm putting the link in the show notes for this episode so you can get it. Sarah, you tell our listeners one more time about where they can take the study for themselves and where they can find you and your work.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (38:00): Yes. Goodgirlsbook.com has the survey that you can take online, has a little bit more about me, has a playlist on Spotify to accompany you, has downloadable handheld tricks and steps for your journey, and I'm mostly active on Instagram. So thank you.

Unknown Speaker (38:20): We'll put the links in the show notes for all of that as well. Sarah, thank you so much for talking to me today.

Sarah Hirsch Bordeaux (38:25): Thank you so much for inviting me.

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