I would have been horrified. I want to be clear about that before I say anything else. If my mother had a podcast — if she had a show, a platform, a presence, a whole thing — I would not have survived it. The second-hand embarrassment alone would have been a medical event.

And yet.

Here I am. With a whole thing.

I think about this a lot. Not with guilt exactly — my kids are at the age where I am already a source of ambient embarrassment just by existing in the same zip code. The podcast, the website, the opinions delivered directly into the internet — these are not making things worse so much as they are making things more specific. I was always going to be too much. Now I am too much with a content calendar.

We invade their final frontier and then have so much personality about it.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about building a public presence as a parent. It’s not that you’re sharing too much of yourself. It’s that you’re sharing yourself at all, in a space your kids can see, with an audience they didn’t consent to. Their friends could find this. Their teachers could find this. Their future partners could find this. You are, essentially, having a very long loud opinion in the room next to the one where they’re trying to pretend you don’t exist.

I grew up in northern Utah — not Mormon, but surrounded. There was a specific architecture to public and private life there that I’ve been turning over ever since. Three spheres, not two: church, state, and private. The separation of church and state was one thing. But the private was its own territory entirely, heavily guarded, because anything that crossed into visibility could jeopardize everything. If people knew you drank, they assumed the rest. They couldn’t separate adherence to a religious code from general goodness as a human being, and that meant your private life — the wine at dinner, the opinion you didn’t perform for an audience — had to stay completely invisible to be safe.

I internalized more of that than I realized. The version of myself that existed publicly was careful. Appropriate. Calibrated for an audience that expected a particular kind of legibility.

And then I started a website.

The thing about building something in public is that it forces you to decide, repeatedly and in real time, what you are willing to be seen doing. Not who you are — that’s a different question. But what you’ll let be visible. Where the private ends and the public begins and whether that line is actually yours or whether you inherited it from somewhere that no longer applies.

My kids are going to cringe. They already do. I cringe at myself sometimes, watching old footage, reading old drafts, seeing the version of me that thought that was the way to put it.

That’s fine. Cringe is a sign that you grew. It means the earlier version is recognizable but no longer current. It means something changed.

I’d rather have the cringe than the nothing. The nothing is what happens when you stay so careful that there’s nothing to look back at.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk. My kids have long since left the room.