#81: Sean Thor Conroe

"Lately, I’ve felt strongly that if you’re in your purpose, 'in your myth,' this gives you an intangible advantage in your spiritual and physical health."

Dec 28, 2025

Sean Thor Conroe (@seanthorconroe) is the author of Fuccboi (2022) and host of 1storypod, a literary podcast with past guests including Sheila Heti, Stephanie LaCava, and Tao Lin. He made a brief cameo in the audio recording of our Tea Party event last spring.

#81: Sean Thor Conroe
Aquarius/Aquarius/Leo
On a mountain, in the woods

What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?

Being healthy, above all, for me, means cultivating your spiritual health. As in, the well-being or vigor of your spirit. This means a quiet knowing about what exactly you’re meant to be doing, locking in and doing it, not avoiding your destiny, not distracting yourself with the wrong things. Believing in your mission even or especially if no one else understands why you must.

How would you describe your current lifestyle?

Solitary and monastic, borderline anchoritic.

How do you start and end your days?

I start my days with water and coffee and loose, additive-free tobacco. I put on the eight-cup coffee maker and pour myself a large vessel of water, straight from the tap since where I live, on a mountain, we have clean, cold spring water. Then I roll a cig and sip my water, and once the coffee’s ready, I sit in my fold-out chair or pace on my covered porch and slowly drink my coffee and smoke my tobacco, trying to stay off my phone, though I often fail.

Most of all I like to be still and not respond to anything or anyone or look at social media. I try to pick up where I left off the day before, with what I’m reading or thinking about. I look at the things I wrote down by hand the day before while I drink my coffee and water, smoking on my porch. At some point, I move inside and switch to a nicotine pouch so I don’t have to get up to smoke. I work on what I’ve been working on, either at my desk in my office or at my kitchen counter or, lately, at this standing desk contraption I’ve set up in my office since I messed up my back sleeping on it weird traveling last month. It’s better now but I still like working standing at my at my stand up desk contraption.

After about four hours, I make eggs on toast or oatmeal with grass-fed butter and maple syrup, or a smoothie in my Nutribullet with a banana, berries, peanut butter, spinach, celery, ginger if I have it, and water, and eat and drink that. Then I walk to the lake in the middle of the forest I live at the edge of, it’s about a five to ten minute walk. I walk there and sit on a little bench at the edge of the lake and listen for bears or deer for five to ten minutes, and then walk back to my house.

To sleep, I’ll read lying on my side with either a candle going or, if I’m out of candles, my headlamp.

Can you recall a moment when you became more aware of your health, or your relationship to it changed?

I had a real bad health crisis back in 2019. It’s been fictionalized in my novel, Fuccboi, but my whole body just kinda crashed out due to a terrible diet and an avoidant spiritual outlook and poor living conditions. My skin got all fucked up and wasn’t healing and I just let it get worse and ended up hospitalized for four nights.

Since that experience, I’m much more aware of the intangible aspects of health, things like tending to your spirit and loving and accepting yourself, along with other, more obvious things, like hygiene and modern medicine.

I’d grown up in a very homeopathic household, and struggled with autoimmune stuff throughout my childhood, and tried many diets; my mom went to great lengths cooking just about everything in the Nourishing Traditions cookbook, and we saw Chinese and Tibetan and homeopathic doctors. While I still take echinacea when I’m sick and light candles and burn palo santo, in some cases, modern medicine is where it’s at, and your body needs is to be treated scientifically. That was how I overcame my skin thing; I’d been thinking it was like God’s wrath that I was how I was, when really I just needed a specific medicine.

Do you have a spiritual practice?

My spiritual practice, when it comes down to it, would have to be something like “sustained concentration” or “contemplation” or “strong, courageous, clear thinking, combined with openheartedness, fueling deliberate, diligent action.” That would be the aspiration, anyway.

On the one hand, that means certain physical actions of staying away from the negative side of technology, in a quiet, still place, and being okay with this stillness. But it also means trying to stay grateful for what you have and to stay loving and forgiving towards others and the world even if you feel wronged, or are at a distance, or if others don’t understand why you’re living how you’re living.

My spiritual practice is doing what I must, reading or breathing or sitting still, in order to get myself into a state such that maybe the Holy Spirit will feel safe enough to flow through me in the form of writing.

What’s your relationship to self-healing?

That’s what ended up happening in my past, I went too far in a self-healing direction, or in any case refused to go to a doctor, and that caused my health crash-out.

At the same time, I’m a firm believer that just living every day and loving others and yourself enough to be able to be in your body, in the world, is a thing you must work on, in a self-healing type way, must re-commit to daily; and the idea that a doctor will cure things like sadness or lack of meaning is naive.

Lately, I’ve felt strongly about this idea, that if you’re in your purpose — “in your myth,” which is a phrase I started saying jokingly, like “damn that person’s in their myth right now,” though have come to believe — this gives you an intangible advantage in your spiritual and physical health.

Do you work with any practitioners, texts, or modalities on a regular basis?

I’ve lately been a practitioner of “automythography,” a concept I invented (though it may actually already exist as a term, though not how I mean it, so don’t look it up), which for me means dedicating yourself to reading and internalizing every mythical and religious text in human history and trying to understand both how and why those humans came up with those ideas, those myths, archetypes and gods, and how they each relate to each other, and most of all how I might understand the most difficult and painful and confusing aspects of my life — which we all have our own versions of — through those stories and myths. Every novel or artwork or biography has a specific myth attached to it, and these are really what we’re sharing as creators, our personal myths. The last step is to try to write new myths that help me process my life and show others how they might be able to process theirs: “auto” means I’m using them to understand my life; “myth” meaning the myths I’m looking at; and “graph” meaning you ultimately must write.

When do you feel the most nourished?

When I’m inspired and thinking clearly and acting deliberately and loving others and myself and the world (in my myth).

How do you reset?

Chamomile tea (huge jar), manual labor, walking through the woods with no phone, sleeping flat on my back with no pillow.

Do you have a favorite meal? What do you keep in your fridge/pantry?

I eat rice, salmon, steak, eggs, bread, corn tortillas, grass-fed butter, oatmeal, berries, bananas, greens, Greek yogurt, peanut butter, coffee, black beans, onions, potatoes, garlic — that’s my grocery rotation, give or take.

But my favorite thing to make, I made it last week when I was under the weather, is the whole-chicken soup. You just drop the chicken into the pot, bones and all, and fill up with water and simmer for two hours and then remove the chicken and debone and clean the good parts, and strain out the gunk from the broth, dropping in an egg to attract all the gunk if need be, you strain the egg and gunk out and then you’ve got your big pot of broth and you throw carrots, celery, potatoes, onions, garlic, a bunch of spices in there, and simmer down the veggies till soft, then add back in the cooked chicken you deboned and cleaned, and add apple cider vinegar and chili oil, whatever you got, and just do a chicken soup fast, eating only that for three days. I love doing that.