Chronically Candid

Pretty Precarious

Welcome to Fireside Friday! In this cozy, unfiltered solo episode, Morgan checks in with a few life updates before reading a poem close to her heart. She shares about the decision to step back from millennial nostalgia content on Instagram — a move that felt harder than it probably sounds, given how well it was performing. But when she fast-forwarded in her mind and asked where is this actually taking me, the answer got quiet. Her end goal is being a published author, and she's trying to make sure everything she's putting energy into is moving in that direction — her Substack [https://morgannbarrett.substack.com/], this podcast, her Instagram [instagram.com/morganbarrett__] — all of it feeling more like one cohesive thing and less like ten different versions of herself. Then there's home life, which is its own kind of beautiful chaos. The twins are five and a half, about to start kindergarten, and have each lost two teeth — which Morgan finds both fun and a little disorienting — wasn't she just five-years-old losing her first teeth, like, yesterday? Morgan reflects on how hard it was to be fully present in the early years of her kids' lives, how the weight of constant caregiving made it nearly impossible to just enjoy the little people in front of her. And she extends herself some grace for that, while also sharing how much more she's settling into this phase — the one where they're funny and weird and asking a lot of questions about death. (Winslow's current theory: we turn into skeletons, and then into roses. Which, honestly, love that.) The episode closes with Morgan reading a fully renovated poem she first wrote in 2023 — a raw, honest look at body image, the ever-shifting ideal, and what it means to try to make peace with your body while your daughter is observing and absorbing your attitude toward your body. It's tender and complicated in the way that Morgan's writing always is: sitting with something uncomfortable without pretending to have resolved it. This one's short, personal, and exactly what Fireside Fridays are meant to be. Support Morgan's work by subscribing to Chronically Candid on Substack at morgannbarrett.substack.com [morgannbarrett.substack.com] Support my work by reading & subscribing to Chronically Candid on Substack at morgannbarrett.substack.com [https://morgannbarrett.substack.com/?utm_medium=podcast] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Sobriety, Complex PTSD, and Learning to Believe Your Own Story with Lindsay Sparks

Morgan sits down with Lindsay Sparks — Registered Dietitian Nutritionist, certified intuitive eating counselor, sobriety mentor, mom of two, backyard chicken keeper, and self-described chronic over-sharer — for a conversation that wastes absolutely no time getting to the good stuff. Lindsay shares her story growing up in a military family, moving every four years, and being a deeply shy, highly sensitive kid trying to find her footing. She opens up about falling into disordered eating as a teenager, growing up in a home shaped by a toxic parental dynamic and emotional neglect, and how, by 16, she was using cocaine as what she describes as a form of self-medication — something her late ADHD diagnosis helped her eventually make sense of. Lindsay talks about the shame of performing "good girl" on the outside while balancing a dangerous habit behind closed doors, and how a missed AOL Instant Messenger conversation was the one moment her behavior almost came to light — only to be swept under the rug and never spoken of again. Morgan and Lindsay dig into the complicated terrain of complex PTSD: what it actually is, why it's so easy to gaslight yourself out of believing your own experiences were "bad enough," and why the body often holds the truth when the mind refuses to. They find a lot of common ground here — both grew up learning to read the emotional temperature of a room, both married to steady, uncomplicated men who they still sometimes treat like ticking time bombs out of old habit. Lindsay traces her relationship with alcohol from college drinking culture through pandemic-era binge drinking while navigating the challenges of early parenthood — to the moment she found out she was pregnant with her second and felt mad that she couldn't drink that night. That moment of clarity, she says, is what finally sent her to therapy. They talk about gray area drinking, the spectrum of alcohol use disorder, and why learning the actual neuroscience of alcohol — serotonin, dopamine, GABA, the gut — changed everything for Lindsay in a way that none of her dietetics training ever had. Lindsay shares what eventually led her to quit, what her first year of sobriety felt like (lonely, identity-shaking, genuinely hard), how THC briefly became a transfer addiction, and how she's now approaching 1,000 days alcohol-free. Morgan, in turn, is refreshingly honest about where she is on her own journey with alcohol — still in the gray area, still grappling with the part of her that finds the feeling of release elicited by drinking hard to replicate , and not yet ready to say she's done. It's one of those rare podcast conversations where the host doesn't have it all figured out either, and it's better for it. They close with a conversation about reframing discipline as devotion, gentle self-parenting, all-or-nothing thinking, and what it means to stay curious about yourself — even when the answers are uncomfortable. Resources mentioned in the episode: * This Naked Mind [https://thisnakedmind.com/] by Annie Grace * Reframe App [https://www.reframeapp.com/] * She Recovers [https://sherecovers.org/] * HOP WTR [https://hopwtr.com/] (adaptogens, Lindsay's current go-to) * Recess [https://takearecess.com/] (adaptogenic sparkling water) You can find Lindsay and her work at the intersection of alcohol-free living and intuitive eating on Instagram at @sobernourished. [instagram.com/soberandnourished] Support my work by reading & subscribing to Chronically Candid on Substack at morgannbarrett.substack.com [https://morgannbarrett.substack.com/?utm_medium=podcast] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Trikafta, Living Longer Than You Expected, and Using the Time You Have with Author Cindy Baldwin

This week on Chronically Candid, Morgan sits down with Cindy Baldwin — disability activist, award-winning children's author of Where the Watermelons Grow and No Matter the Distance (the first novel about cystic fibrosis written by an author with CF), and founder of The Salty Pen, a writing support community for writers with CF across all genres and experience levels. The conversation they have is the kind that starts mid-thought and never really stops — which, if you know Cindy and Morgan, is exactly how it was always going to go. Cindy was diagnosed with CF at six months old in an era when that was rare, and she spent much of her childhood genuinely unaware of what the disease would mean for her future. She learned that CF was life-shortening at age 13 — not from a doctor, not from a parent, but from reading a Redbook magazine article written about her own family. If that's not a story that only someone with a chronic illness can tell, nothing is. From there, the conversation moves through so much territory: being one of the first three women in the world to get pregnant on a CFTR modulator (yes, really), navigating a medical team who were just as uncertain as she was, watching modulator babies go from "no data exists" to "there was finally a baby boom." Cindy shares what it was like to be the person people found on Google when they searched "Vertex modulator pregnancy" — and how Trikafta eventually made that a less lonely search for everyone who came after. But this episode really opens up when Morgan and Cindy get into what life looks like when the disease you organized your entire identity around starts to look different. What do you do with the urgency that chronic illness installs in you — the need to hurry up, get it done, find the person, publish the book, have the baby — when suddenly the timeline shifts and you're not in the last chapter of your life anymore? Cindy describes a genuine identity unraveling when her daughter turned eight and she realized: she might actually be around for a long time. That realization was harder than she expected. They dig into the strange grief that can come with getting better. Missing the hospital — the structure, the being-taken-care-of, the world where everyone already knows what CF is and you don't have to explain yourself. The weird guilt of feeling like you can't fully claim your CF identity anymore when you're healthy. The way Trikafta didn't fix fatigue, and what it means to be a writer when your brain force-quits on you after just a few hours of being awake. There's also a genuinely fascinating thread about creating while chronically ill — how Cindy learned to write entire books in ten-minute increments while her toddler wasn't napping, and why she believes the most important thing she does by showing up online is simply be the person she didn't have growing up: proof that you can pursue something creative and meaningful, even when the conventional writing advice has absolutely nothing to say to you. The episode closes with Morgan's "fun Q&A" (which, as always, is not really fun in the light and fluffy sense — it's more that it tends to make you examine your soul a little). Including the question that never gets easier: would you remove chronic illness from your life if you could? Cindy's answer is worth sitting with. Cindy's poetry collection Don't Live Like You Are Dying is forthcoming. Find Cindy and The Salty Pen online, and support Morgan's work by reading and subscribing to Chronically Candid on Substack at morgannbarrett.substack.com. Support my work by reading & subscribing to Chronically Candid on Substack at morgannbarrett.substack.com [https://morgannbarrett.substack.com/?utm_medium=podcast] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Finding Home in the Tallgrass: Art, Place, and the Prairie with Kelly Yarbrough

This week on Chronically Candid, Morgan sits down with artist and arts leader Kelly Yarbrough [https://www.kellyyarbrough.com/] for a rich, wide-ranging conversation about what it means to truly belong to a place — and how art, curiosity, and a willingness to be a forever student can completely reshape the way you move through the world. Kelly — painter, drawer, MFA graduate of Kansas State University, and founder of the Tallgrass Artist Residency [https://tallgrassartistresidency.org/] in Matfield Green, Kansas — grew up in Plano, Texas, a rapidly expanding suburb of Dallas where roots ran shallow and the land felt more like backdrop than home. Morgan, who grew up in Olathe, Kansas, finds immediate kinship in that suburban experience: both women lived alongside prairie their whole lives before they ever truly saw it. The conversation explores what it actually takes to become "prairie aware" — and why it's so easy to drive straight through the Flint Hills your entire life and never register what you're looking at. Kelly traces her own awakening to relationships and volunteer work in Kansas City, where people introduced her to grasslands not as the absence of something, but as a rich and irreplaceable ecosystem in its own right. That curiosity eventually led her to K-State for her MFA and, ultimately, to the tallgrass prairie itself. Morgan and Kelly dig into what it means to find your intersection — that overlap of passion, skill, and calling that shapes the work you're meant to do. For Kelly, that intersection is art and prairie: using drawing and painting to pull viewers into an intimate, visceral experience of landscape rather than offering them a neat, conquerable view of it. Her work resists the tradition of early American landscape painting — the Thomas Moran-style epic vistas that functioned as visual propaganda for manifest destiny — instead putting the viewer in the middle of the experience, disoriented and present, forced to reckon with a place rather than pass through it. That thread leads to a genuinely moving discussion about colonization — of land, of perception, of beauty itself. Kelly shares how her MFA show grew out of a desire to unlearn inherited narratives about place and find a more honest, intuitive relationship with land that was taken. The conversation holds space for the weight of that history without collapsing into shame — both women arrive at something more generative: the idea that letting go of systems that don't serve us can actually be a beautiful, life-giving act. Along the way, there's warmth and laughter too — composting disasters, coyotes, and the meditative magic of sitting by a pond at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve [https://www.nps.gov/tapr/index.htm] with a journal on Mother's Day. Kelly also opens up about building the Tallgrass Artist Residency from scratch as a grad student in 2016 — a program she describes as simply connecting dots between people who cared — and what it's meant to watch artists from across prairie regions arrive in a town of 50 people and leave transformed. Now in its 11th year, the residency is the thing she's most proud of, and it shows. The episode closes with a "fun" (read: Morgan needs to rename this section) Q&A and a reminder that wherever you live, magic is available if you slow down enough to look for it. Learn more about Kelly: * "Tallgrass Prairie & the Power of Perenniality" | Kelly Yarbrough | TEDxAustinCollege: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha_HKlNTMQA * Kelly's studio work, including the painting Survivor (watercolor featuring a coyote in prairie grass): https://www.kellyyarbrough.com/studio-work Support my work by reading & subscribing to Chronically Candid on Substack at morgannbarrett.substack.com [https://morgannbarrett.substack.com/?utm_medium=podcast] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Religious Trauma, Purity Culture, and Honest Writing with Author Carrie Etzel

This week on Chronically Candid, Morgan sits down with writer Carrie Etzel for a layered, thoughtful conversation about growing up inside an authoritarian, evangelical subculture, unraveling purity culture and discovering who you are outside of that subculture when you have no 'blueprint' to follow. Carrie—essayist, Substack writer at Sister Swan, romance novelist, and mom of five—shares how narrative shaped her from childhood. Raised in a deeply religious environment (with a pastor father and missionary grandparents), storytelling was woven into her identity early on. But, in her twenties, life as she knew it imploded as she increasingly questioned the tenets she was raised on. The conversation explores: * What authoritarian religion actually looks like from the inside * How questioning faith can cost you your community—and why people still choose to do it * The nuance of recognizing the harm and feeling gratitude for the people and spaces that shaped you * The long shadow of religious trauma, including how our bodies remember Morgan and Carrie dig deep into purity culture—what it is, how it functions, and why Carrie calls it “a system of sexual ownership.” They unpack the ways it reduces women to objects and men to uncontrollable urges, creating confusion, shame, and distorted frameworks for intimacy. Carrie speaks candidly about how these teachings shaped her sense of self and the slow, ongoing work of disentangling those beliefs. One of the most powerful threads in the episode is Carrie’s reflection on romance novels as a tool for healing. After years of self-policing very human emotions, she found freedom in a genre that centers consent, female pleasure, and emotionally mature partnership. That discovery inspired her to write her own romance novel—one where purity culture itself is the villain. Her hope? That other women who left or want to leave authoritarian systems might see themselves on the page and imagine something different. The episode also touches on: * The intersection of religion and politics in America * Why dehumanization is a hallmark of authoritarian systems * Parenting after authoritarian upbringings * The complexity of telling your story when it overlaps with others’ Throughout, Morgan and Carrie model what it looks like to stay curious, hold nuance, and speak honestly about painful things without flattening them into caricature. This conversation is tender, brave, and deeply reflective—an invitation to examine the stories we were handed and decide which ones we want to keep. If you’ve ever untangled faith, questioned inherited beliefs, wrestled with shame around sexuality, or wondered how to tell the truth about your past without burning everything down—this episode will resonate. Resources mentioned in the episode: * STRONGWILLED on Substack: https://strongwilled.substack.com * Shiny Happy People on Prime Video: https://www.primevideo.com/detail/Shiny-Happy-People/0TRV2VQKIE3NEHOPKZ5G3HION5 * Bridgerton on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80232398 * Carrie's Substack: https://substack.com/@sisterswan * A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape From Christian Patriarchy - https://tialevings.com Support my work by reading & subscribing to Chronically Candid on Substack at morgannbarrett.substack.com [https://morgannbarrett.substack.com/?utm_medium=podcast] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.