About

About the show

The Other Side of Misery is me, living out loud. Processing life. Making meaning in real time.

The through-line isn't a topic. It's a refusal to disappear. A commitment to aliveness. An insistence that the hard parts of life—grief, pain, not-knowing, starting things that scare us—aren't just obstacles. They're full of texture and meaning and life.

Each week, I think out loud about whatever's moving through me. Sometimes that's psychology or neuroscience. Sometimes it's tarot, chronic pain, a poem, a trip I took, dance, physics, mythology, or the small sacred moments that quietly hold life together.

I blend what I know—psychology, philosophy, clinical training in meaning-centered grief therapy, years of neuroscience research—with what I'm still figuring out: identity, chronic illness, fear, desire, what it means to live intentionally and honestly.

This is not a self-help project. I don't have steps or strategies or answers. This is not therapy or clinical advice. I'm not here to fix you or prescribe how to live a good life—I don't know if there even is a single right way.

I'm here to wonder out loud. To share what moves me, confuses me, breaks me open, puts me back together. To show you how I make meaning—not so you copy it, but so you feel less alone in making your own.

Everything I say here is a living thought. My beliefs are always changing. Take what resonates. Let the rest go.

A podcast for those that lean in.

About Michelle

I'm Michelle Meital Sanabria—a PhD student in Counseling Psychology studying how humans make meaning across cultures, identities, and experiences. Specifically, I'm interested in eudaimonic wellbeing: not just happiness, but flourishing. What does it mean to live well, not just happily? How do we stay whole when life breaks us open?

My academic path has been winding. I have dual bachelor's degrees in Psychology/Biology and Communications/Philosophy. I spent years researching psycholinguistics, learning environments for children with autism, and suicidality in clinical populations. I studied cross-cultural conceptualizations of mental health in psychiatric hospitals in Indonesia and India. Then I spent three years at Stanford conducting affective neuroscience research on stress, depression, and trauma in adolescents—looking at inflammatory processes, the body's response to suffering.

After that, I lived in Mexico and worked as an artist for a while. I needed to remember what it felt like to make things, not just study them.

Now I'm back in academia, doing doctoral work that integrates Aristotelian virtue ethics with cross-cultural approaches to flourishing. My clinical training is in existential and meaning-centered psychotherapy, and I work primarily with bereaved parents—people navigating profound loss and identity rupture. I also collaborate on community programming with QTPOC communities and have been teaching about wellbeing since I was in high school.

The questions I'm asking, both in research and in practice: How do humans make meaning from what breaks them? What are our whys and how do they shift across cultures, identities, and life's ruptures? How do we live with integrity inside complexity?

I'm also more than an academic. I am a ballroom dancer, world traveler, poet, painter, and nature lover. I read tarot. I think about physics. I live with chronic pain and illness—which means I think a lot about what it means to flourish when your body won't cooperate. I'm Mayan, Guatemalan, Israeli, and Jewish—I've spent my life existing between worlds, and that multiplicity shapes everything I think about identity, belonging, and meaning-making.

I believe meaning isn't found—it's forged in the asking, the living, the becoming. This podcast is part of that forging.

Important disclaimers