What’s your pea under the mattress? What are the daily discomforts you’ve learned to live with—out of lack of time or a lack of self-awareness? And really, what are peas compared to mattress-sized problems? Is it worth caring deeply about something that maybe doesn’t matter at all?

What are your problem-solving capacities today? What do you draw upon in moments of need to move through mental chaos and create? Our traumas and experiences teach us and provide unique, often subtle tools for dealing with our pain. Do we need third-party observers?

Can you define your greatest qualities and flaws? What words define your personality? Why does defining or fitting oneself sometimes seem so difficult for some, and so easy for others?

Would a well-lived life be one where we are neither too good nor too bad? What are the joys and struggles of living in the middle? What’s the problem with ordinariness? Why does being average bother us so much?

Where do you grow? In a pot or on the ground? Being watered every day or exposed to all the harsh elements? The doubted children who grew up wanting to prove to the world around them that they were never truly bad found in rigid Christianity the comfort to live and bloom amidst chaos. After all, for us, asphalt ferns, waiting for the end is a tonic for action and life.

Loving yourself is an art, and hating yourself is part of it too. We all have weeks when our self-esteem isn’t great, and I call those “weeks of luck” because only those who’ve hated themselves their whole lives know how just one week of bad self-love can be bearable.

Have you ever wondered how your relationship with your home affects your life? And more importantly, how your life affects your relationship with your home? How do we live in modern societies where cleaning the house is considered inferior, menial work, while young women make millions creating cleaning videos nostalgic for reclaiming the image of a woman from the past? Has that image truly passed? Cleaning out of desire, duty, or to ascend? That is the question.

We often reduce our stories to nothing. We compare ourselves indiscriminately to others, and in doing so, we disrespect existences without even realizing it. If education is about treating others and ourselves well, being to others what we would be to ourselves, then isn’t comparison the greatest form of disrespect?

An existential crisis at every corner. Thinking about yourself and the world places you in endless spirals of questions with no answers (or worse, with many of them). How much time do we invest in reflecting on life instead of living it? Is it worth it? Maybe yes, or if not, then dumb is the new black for an entire new generation.

Can you say what experiences have shaped you? What were those complex memories, filled with animated characters from your psyche, that fell into the river of your personality and defined who you are? Who’s in charge of your mind? And what do you think when there’s no one left? An episode about mental health, grief, and Inside Out.