Taking back control of your life with Kirsten Powers

My Q&A about living the way you want in the second half of your life

Connect with Kirsten: Instagram //

Changing The Channel with Kirsten Powers

// Buy her book, Saving Grace

Kirsten Powers is a New York Times bestselling author and writes the bestselling Substack newsletter Changing the Channel. Jon Meacham called her most recent book, Saving Grace: Speak Your Truth, Stay Centered and Learn to Coexist with People Who Drive You Nuts, "a great gift at an urgent hour." Kirsten served as a CNN senior political analyst for seven years, providing on-air analysis of major political and cultural events. She was a columnist for USA Today for more than a decade and, before that, for the Daily Beast and the New York Post. The Columbia Journalism Review praised her as "an outspoken liberal journalist" in a sea of opposition at Fox News, where she previously served as a political analyst. Before her career in journalism, Kirsten was a political appointee in the Clinton Administration, worked in New York Democratic politics, and was Vice President for International Communications at AOL, Inc., during the late 1990s tech boom.

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You were a busy political consultant, executive, national columnist, and political analyst in the first half of your life. How and why did you eventually step away from what many would consider a glamorous career?

The short answer is that I became emotionally healthy. It's true that I was unhappy, and that was the proximate reason for stepping away, but I had been unhappy in my work for a long time. What really changed is that I did a lot of inner work, including tons of therapy, and one day, that gaping hole inside of me that made me desperate for external validation was gone. I felt whole. I wasn't looking outside of myself for my value the way I had for my entire adult life. It's worth noting that if you had asked me at any point during my career if I was looking for outside validation I would have found the idea preposterous. 

It was only once I started looking at my cultural and family conditioning and intentionally shedding it that I could see how off-track I was and how I was being driven by unconscious programming to live a life that was not aligned for me. I could see how overworking was my drug of choice to numb out. I no longer needed to numb out when I realized what it was that I really wanted and that I was not obligated to keep doing something because everyone else was saying I should be doing it. What I really wanted was a life that was more simple and to do writing that wasn't tied to the 24/7 news cycle. I wanted more time with friends and family, time in nature, and to feel like I was really helping people with my work. I didn't know if this life was possible, and I was afraid to make a shift so late in the game after I had established myself in this other arena. But to a certain extent, I didn't have a choice–I was so miserable. So, after leaving CNN, rather than trying to continue working in that space for another outlet, I gave up my USA Today column and reconfigured my Substack publication and started writing about what I cared about, and it's been a wonderful experience connecting with people who are on the same path as me and writing about issues that really matter to me. I'm about to sign a contract to write another book, so I'm excited that things are falling into place in terms of making writing my main focus, at least for this season. 

What did you learn from how you lived that first half of your life about how you want to live in the next half?

The first half of my life was about doing what I was told would lead to a happy life and a sense of fulfillment and being left feeling drained and disconnected. I completely bought into the "American Dream" and made my life about achievement and success and finding my identity in my work. I can see now that I was on autopilot–almost like a robot that had been programmed–without ever really interrogating whether any of this was what I really wanted to do or whether it could reasonably lead to a happy life. It was like I kept waiting for happiness to come, but it just didn't. It was always right around the corner. 

It's easy to say, "I learned that life is not about accomplishment and that it won't lead to happiness," but the fact is a lot of the first half of life is actually about building up your ego and sense of self, and there is nothing wrong with that. The problem is that I did that for too long and in a really unhealthy way. I don't think I'm alone on this front.

The way we ideally should be living in the second half of life is to move away from the ego-reinforcing efforts into the place of being an "elder" and taking what we learned to support the younger generations and to give back to society. This can look different depending on the person. For me, in addition to mentoring, my work right now is focused on questioning the cultural and economic assumptions that have led to so much misery and struggle for so many Americans. I completely bought into these assumptions and destroyed my mental and physical health in the process. It took years to recover from that. In fact, I'm not even sure I've recovered yet. But whatever I dealt with pales in comparison to what Millennials and Gen Z are facing. American culture pushes disordered thinking around what matters and forces people to try and survive in a hyper-capitalist economic system that is untethered to any sense of decency or morality. It’s unsustainable and has to change. 

Your newsletter, Changing the Channel, is about unlearning societal conditioning. What do women need to unlearn in order to live fulfilling, authentic lives?

Different women will have different kinds of conditioning based on their race, ethnicity, religion, economic status and other factors. I think if we want to know who we authentically were before our families or society started grinding us down, we need to connect with the youngest part of ourselves.  So, I would think back and really try to feel into, "Who was I before my family or society told me I needed to be quiet, less "selfish," or less opinionated? Who was I before I was told that I wasn’t good enough and started being shamed and punished for being me?"  

We may not have conscious memories of our authentic selves, because the conditioning starts so early, but we do have unconscious memories that we can access through sitting with ourselves, meditating, or journaling. Once we have clarity around this we need to grieve what was lost. Only then can we start to reconnect with that authentic part of us and own it. Understand that not everyone is going to like it when you unapologetically step into your authentic self. There's a reason they tried to stop you from doing it in the first place. We can do all the inner work in the world, but the systemic issues still exist. It’s important that we surround ourselves with people who accept us and support us when those who don't try to force us to conform to their ideas of who we are supposed to be. 

You recently bought land in Italy and plan to move there full-time. Can you discuss that decision and your experience so far?

Something that has helped me a lot in my journey of unlearning societal conditioning is spending time in Italy. My husband is obsessed with Italy, and so when we started dating nearly a decade ago, I became a beneficiary of this obsession through many trips there. It's easy to think that the way we do things in the US is "just the way it is." But if you spend any amount of time getting to know people in other countries, you will start to see that actually a lot of what we do is actually sort of strange. Things that we take for granted, like working all the time, deprioritizing friends and family, rampant consumerism, going into debt for medical care, or only getting a few weeks of vacation (if that), don't make sense to people in Italy, or frankly many countries. That we live in a society with constant mass shootings is mind-boggling to people in peer and many non-peer nations. 

At some point, it became clear to me that in order to really unlearn my conditioning, I needed to be in a different environment and be around people who think differently. I also realized that if I wanted to cut back on how much I worked, to make space for relationships and community, I needed to live in a place that was affordable and where I didn't have to worry about being bankrupted by a medical emergency. This is the very short version of how my husband and I ended up buying some farmland in southern Italy. We are in the process of renovating a small structure on the land called a Trullo, which is about 300 square feet and will become a  "tiny home" when it is finished. As a writer, I'm lucky that I can now do my job from anywhere, something that wasn't true when I was at CNN. 

I know that Italy is not perfect. It is rife with problems. But I’m not looking for perfection. I’m looking for a simpler, less stressful way to live and this is what I felt drawn to at this stage of my life. 

What advice do you have for other women who feel stuck in or trapped by the way they're living their lives but, like you, want to make a significant change? How and where should they start?

It's easy to feel paralyzed when we want to make big changes to our lives. My advice is always to just take the next step. Don't try to solve all your problems at once. Just do the next thing. The next thing might be going for a walk every day, taking up a meditation practice, or prioritizing sleep. Then, once you feel a little more resourced, you can take another step. I really believe that when you take a step toward what you want, the Universe will meet you there. I'm always surprised by how the tentative steps I've taken have revealed options that would have never even occurred to me. 

Moving to Italy is the perfect example. I first decided I wanted to move out of the US probably five years ago, but I couldn't figure out how that could possibly happen. There were so many barriers, not the least of which was that I didn't know how we could afford it. What I learned when I started doing research (my first step) was that it's actually drastically less expensive to live in parts of Italy than in the US, particularly in the south of Italy (where we ended up buying), where real estate is inexpensive due to a population decline. The Italian government is also offering incentives to draw people to this part of the country because they need more people to live there. There were many more steps, frustrations, and stops and starts in this process, but that's just an example of how taking one small step can open up possibilities we haven't considered.