The Longest Shortest Time

EPISODE #222: Cyndie and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year

Cyndie Spiegel built a career on optimism. In 2019, she was traveling the country giving motivational speeches to thousands of people and she had a bestselling book called A Year of Positive Thinking.

And then came 2020, which Cyndie has come to call her Very Bad Year. 2020, of course, was bad for almost everyone — but for Cyndie, the pandemic was merely a backdrop to a host of other bad things. And she suddenly found that her daily affirmations — the ones she’d been promoting to hundreds of thousands of people — were no longer helping her.

But slowly, while she sat with her grief, she found a new strategy. It started with some daffodils that bugged the crap out of her and led to her next book — Microjoys: Finding Hope (Especially) When Life Is Not Okay.

Tune in to hear the surprising (and sometimes snarky) ways that Cyndie pulled herself out of the darkness. And if YOU’RE feeling not okay these days, we hope Cyndie’s techniques help you, too.

A peek at Cyndie’s living room
Cyndie says that every item in her home is a “microjoy.” Here are some of the objects we talk about in the episode.

Cyndie’s headshots and book photos by Ira James