Lena Dunham and Amna Nawaz explore public stress and trauma on 'Settle In'

[0:00] more than a decade ago lena dunham rose to fame as the comedic force behind the hbo hit series [0:06] girls in her new memoir fame sick out today dunham candidly hilariously and sometimes painfully [0:14] explores how she balanced her sudden celebrity with chronic illness addiction and trauma i spoke [0:20] with dunham for the latest episode of our pbs news podcast settle in here's a clip of our [0:24] conversation i think that there were moments like and this is i feel extremely grateful for my job [0:32] and i'm certainly not throwing a pity party for myself about what happened but at the same time [0:39] i was looking around at my friends lives who were still maybe having the chance to figure things out [0:46] in a more private way to have more spontaneous experiences to travel to sort of live a more [0:56] quintessentially 20-something life and i was recreating a 20-something life on screen but i [1:03] was basically never not at work you're also not getting to live your 20s and make the mistakes of [1:09] your 20s that all of us make in the privacy of your own life right it's a very public experience and a [1:16] highly scrutinized experience and all of this we should remind people it's all unfolding at a time [1:22] when blogging is taking off and social media is taking off and everyone on the internet has a hot [1:27] take and an opinion that they really want to share in that moment and you bore the brunt of a lot of [1:32] that right a lot of it was focused at you in a really intensely a lot of times unkind personal way i [1:40] wonder how you dealt with that at the time how you navigated that on top of managing the responsibility [1:45] of a successful show and running a team and trying to be creative in the moment well i think firstly i'm [1:52] going to hook on to two things you said one is i think talking about the fact that this was the [1:56] rise of blogging i mean i've said i remember like joining twitter the year that girls started i remember [2:03] like posting my first instagram photo this was sort of the wild wild west and now we're sort of we've [2:10] become used to you know i don't know the grammys happen and then everybody gets on with like 57 [2:16] opinions about sabrina carpenter's shorts and we are used to that cycle but it was new and um people [2:25] were trying to figure out what it was and what it meant and we happened to be in new york at a moment [2:32] when new york media was really the center of that and we were sort of adjacent to the people who were [2:37] writing but just far enough away that they could be pretty hypercritical but just close enough that it [2:44] could sort of feel a little like eating your own and it was looking back it's a kind of a fascinating [2:51] cultural moment it's a fascinating study in in so much about creativity human behavior you know [2:59] how we adapt to new technologies i wouldn't say in the moment it felt like an incredible cultural study [3:05] in the moment it felt like i was just fighting to survive truly and and in terms of how i dealt with it [3:11] i loved what you said about holding on to your creativity that was always the most important [3:15] thing to me which is what do i have to do to be able to continue to do this thing that got me here [3:20] which is right and direct and make this work and i think in terms of how i dealt with it is that i [3:25] didn't deal with it and and that was part of what was so i think i think unmanaged trauma unhandled stress [3:36] we know is you know a deep sort of um it's like pouring an accelerant on on illness and so these [3:44] things that i had always dealt with i'd always sort of been like a sickly kid or someone who you know [3:49] had my who had my rough moments but suddenly that was neck and neck with um the rest of my life as the [4:00] most kind of um the loudest theme i wonder what all of that means for your relationship with social [4:07] media today how would you describe that how would i describe my relationship with social media i'm [4:12] really lucky because i have some people um you know i have a production company and um the the the [4:19] young folks who work for me are very online so they let me know if there's things that i have to [4:23] know about or things that are special or amusing or really good memes um scandalous tick tocks that [4:29] one must see um at the same time i i really treat it more like a part of my job i have a social media [4:36] manager um i have a creative director and those are people that i sort of engage with in terms of like [4:44] what is an interesting and new way for us to use social media but i'm not actually on the apps dealing [4:51] every day with um people's perceptions which i recognize was like a pretty unhealthy cycle for me and [4:58] i'd and i'd argue a pretty unhealthy cycle for anyone and i look at at what it means to be a young [5:05] celebrity today which is you don't just have to be an actor or a singer or you know you also have to be [5:13] a content creator and that means engaging with all of these voices and i do think we'll find sort of the [5:20] same way that we're learning how be spending so much time on a screen is affecting the human brain we're [5:26] going to learn what this is doing but it's going to take a little bit of time and i think about it [5:32] the way we think about the fact that like we didn't know in the 1940s that smoking was bad for you [5:37] and so for a while you just get to smoke cigarettes with impunity until one day we discover the truth [5:44] and i think we will learn the same thing about social media and it's certainly not going away but [5:49] learning how to mediate it in our lives so that we can actually engage with what's in front of us whenever [5:56] i talk about this i feel like i sound like i'm i sound like my father talking to me when i was 23 [6:01] but i'm gonna be 40 in a month and we all get here it happens fast doesn't it lena it happens fast [6:09] it's wild i suddenly hear myself saying things where i just go oh my gosh like i sound like when [6:14] my mom and her friends would say like but what is it you like so much about the backstreet boys like i'm [6:20] so mortified and you can watch that full conversation and all episodes of settle in [6:26] on youtube or wherever you get your podcasts support journalism you trust support pbs news [6:34] donate now or even better start a monthly contribution today