Gabrielle Feather - Holding Both on Substack

This is one of the most intense interviews I’ve done. Surely.

Please check out our new Substack, which is an audio and textual hub for all things Vanilla Club Podcast, where we interact and engage with complexity in order to better appreciate simplicity.

This episode is a continuation of a run of episodes with Substackers whose writing we admire. Gabrielle Feather is a brilliant guest, who as you’ll see, brings a warmth and sensitivity and a remarkable emotional range to this special episode.

Gabrielle is known as 'Holding Both' on Substack, and describes her page as a space for the "in-between" - grief and awe, collapse and becoming, motherhood and undoing, hope and rage.

She is also a PhD Candidate at the University of Tasmania, working in the field of psychology, with a niche specifically in “climate and collapse aware psychology.”

In this episode, Gabrielle was prompted with some open-ended questions (sometimes these “simple” questions are the very hardest to answer), relating to the state of the climate, and the general proximity of the looming and intersecting crises we are facing.

We talk about how folks in their 30s and 40s today are the bridging generation between the old world and the new. We speak about how collapse is in fact a process, not a singular event. And that matters because we all play a part in life processes, day in and day out; we can’t therefore be fatalistic even in the face of crisis.

Gabrielle walks us through her own healing journey, her choice to have children, and the life and times of a young activist at the Wilderness Society. She speaks of struggling to find her life purpose in a system that she didn't believe in, and finding disillusionment at every turn, to then embracing the disillusionment, and finding joy on the other side of it.

Gabrielle also tells us about an experience she had with Ayahuasca, where the plant told her that emotional regulation is the number one thing that humanity needs to cultivate. Psychedelics are a smitch out of my wheelhouse but to hear the “pro” case for them and for mysticism writ large was thought-provoking and worthy of further reflection.

We were delighted to record and produce this episode. We hope you enjoy.