Pickles and Vodka: a Mental Health Podcast · Christina & Lauren

#229 Cupcakes After Dark feat. Rachel Kramer Bussel

·50 min·2 clips

She emailed me: "I'll always have anorexia, but I know how to do it and not die."

1. Pickles and Vodka episode #229 features Rachel Kramer Bussel discussing ADHD, hoarding, eating disorders, and grief across a roughly 50-minute conversation. 2. Bussel is a writer and the editor of Open Secrets magazine, where she runs a monthly-intended column called "The ADHD Diaries" and published an essay by host Christina on bulimia and food insecurity. 3. The conversation moves from name and pronoun etiquette to Bussel's mental health history, ending on the death of her friend Kiki and its effect on her parenting. 4. Bussel says mental health was openly discussed in her family, citing her social-worker mother, her father's alcoholism, and her grandfather's PTSD from being a POW in World War Two, while she kept her own disordered eating secret from her parents. 5. She describes hoarding as separate from her ADHD in her mind, saying she keeps items like 20-year-old throwaway-camera photos because they connect to memories, and she frames minimalists and hoarders as two ends of a circle that both care deeply about belongings. 6. She admits to people-pleasing, saying a five-paragraph critical email about her call for submissions was still on her mind three weeks later, and that she feels more sensitive at 50 than before. 7. Bussel recounts keeping a cupcake blog on Blogger while working as an erotica writer and editor, and accidentally posting a photo of her butt in underwear there from England, which led to the rule of checking where each post lands. 8. She describes her friend Kiki, whom she dated when she was 27 and Kiki was 25, as a psychotherapist and death doula who died at 45 after a roughly 20-year eating disorder. 9. Bussel recalls Kiki's email, "I'll always have anorexia, but I know how to do it and not die," and says she is now careful about how she talks about eating and weight around her one-year-old daughter, while Christina and Lauren, who both live with eating disorders, respond with their own experiences of losing treatment friends. 10. Suited to listeners interested in ADHD, eating disorders, and grief.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Pickles and Vodka: a Mental Health Podcast