Ugh. I cried again on a podcast.

It was an Ask Me Anything question and my response was unexpected.

Well hi, I’m Mia Freedman and this is my Babble newsletter. If someone sent it to you, you can sign-up to get it for free…..and remember you can leave comments at the bottom of this email!

Sometimes the things that bring you suddenly undone are a surprise. They usually are to me because I am a goldfish who is endlessly startled by life and my responses to it.

And so it was in the studio recording an Ask Me Anything episode of Mamamia Outloud this week. It started well enough. The first question asked of me and my co-hosts Holly Wainwright and Clare Stephens was about how we feel about the amount of our lives we share on the podcast and in our writing and where we draw the line.

The next question was for Holly about how she felt about her move to the country a couple of years ago and whether it was everything she’d hoped.

Trying to hold it together and failing.

The final question was to me. “How is it being a grandmother? Can we have an update?”

And that’s not even when I cried. It was when I was trying to explain how I was being very careful about finding my place and not wanting to intrude. “I’m conscious of where I’m at on the leaderboard of People Close To Luna and at the top is obviously Jessie, then Luca and then Clare [Jessie’s twin sister] and then her mother Anne and then maybe me although maybe not because Coco [my daughter, is anyone still following this convoluted anecdote?!] is right up there also probably above me…..”

It was at this point that Holly cut me off. “My friend, do you have any idea of how often you use leaderboard analogies to talk about things"?”

And I stopped talking, startled. Do I?

What it looks like, I know, is that I’m competitive and I see every situation as a race to the top, winners and losers.
I am competitive - intensely, embarasingly - but in that moment, as Holly laughingly pointed this out with love, I realised what this was.
It was not about wanting to ‘win’ Luna’s love or be the best at loving her or seeing her the most.

“I think I do that because, I’m not sure if it’s my ADHD or just my personality, but I need an objective measure of where I rank so that I can behave in the right way…”

And this is when I started to cry.

I’ve spent a lot of my life - even now, even yesterday - knowing that I over-step. I’m a poor judge of boundaries. Of what’s appropriate. Of what pisses people off or intrudes on them or is just too much.
Most of the time I’m not aware of it until after it’s happened, after I’ve crossed an invisible line and I’ve learned to recognise it in different, subtle ways. The look in someone’s eye. A distancing. An irritation.

Sometimes they’re not so subtle. My children are excellent at giving me direct feedback. “You’re being too much,” they’ll say. Or, “You’re just….a lot.” Or “Go away, you’re pissing me off.” And often, “No more questions.”

I have a pathological hunger for feedback which many people find strange. The reason I need it though is because I’m often unable to read a situation when I feel strongly about something. It’s like the way I feel becomes so overwhelming that it needs to burst out and all over people in a flurry of words or over-excitement or intensity.

Leaderboards are feedback. They are an empirical measure of who ranks where and by making them in my head, it helps me to calibrate my expectations and in turn, my behaviour.

In the podcast studio, as I tried to explain this a little bit through my tears, poor Clare was horrified. She doesn’t do emotions. She’s the opposite of me. Holly was remote and kept urging her through the screen to give me a hug which made me laugh because Clare would rather eat a box of hair.

Instead, she patted my hand gingerly as though it was a turd and that made me laugh.

You can listen to that episode of Mamamia Outloud here……