TRUST ME I KNOW WHAT I'm DOING

Over the years, I’ve been grateful to share conversations with each and every
wonderful guest, but the greatest reward always comes from you listening and subscribing and
expressing and building community. And so thank you for sharing TRUST ME I KNOW WHAT I’m DOING your friends and family, and for following along wherever you might be catching this right now. I truly appreciate the kind reviews and ratings so thanks again.

One thing I’ve appreciated and that’s genuinely needed in not just our community, but every community, is normalizing conversations and dialogue around our mental health and hygeine. And to drill down a bit, I’ve always been interested in how people express and synthesize grief, and I know it’s a topic that for many is not often explored or discussed because it feels quite personal and private. Loss and change are part of every human relationship, and especially for the conversations that we have within ourselves, expressions of grief can manifest through stories of incredible love, pain, power, recognition, and transformation. Now for brand strategist and author, Raj Lulla, grief - in a very unique expression - serves as the substrate for his new novel “The Caring House”. It follows the story of Gabe and Jenny, two children who first met at a grief counseling center after each having lost their fathers to suicide. Now grown and married and seemingly having overcome their tragic upbringing, Gabe and Jenny face the sudden loss of another close family member, disrupting their peace and opening new discoveries that test a fragile patchwork of family secrets in a backdrop of local community culture and question the basic trust that integrates their past into their future.
Now for Raj, who is an Indian American living in Omaha, NE, grief and loss are familiar for him, as early in his marriage, his wife Lindsey unexpectedly lost her sister and soon thereafter, Raj had also lost a few close friends. Raj and Lindsey used to live in Salt Lake City, UT, and after learning about a nearby grief counseling center for children and teens called the Sharing Place, he was inspired to write and craft a novel around grieving. And being a pediatrician, I was heartened as it speaks to the voice and perspective and experiences of children around trauma. So Raj and I had a chance to chat about the book, about his thoughts on how grief is processed and even metabolized, and of course the immigrant and Indian American perspectives on mental health and emotional expression, but since we are both avid Aaron Sorkin fans and how everything can relate back to the West Wing, I did in fact want to know about who he’d choose to be his power broker - Josh, CJ, Sam, or Toby?

Thanks Raj and please do check out his book “The Caring House” and I’ve put links to how you can order in the show notes. And remember that if you’re in the US, anyone can call or text 988 24 hours a day for mental health crisis support for suicide or emotional distress. A huge thank you worldwide to all of the mental health professionals and peer counselors out there. I hope we can together all build more mental health awareness and find comfort through conversations. Till next time, I’m Abhay Dandekar.