How to Love Family When You’re Divided On Beliefs with adrienne maree brown & Autumn Brown
December 15, 2023
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Today is a special episode with two of our favorite sisters in the entire world. We’ve got four sisters on for you today, two of whom are Amanda and I. The other two are Adrienne Maree Brown and Autumn Brown. adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public through writing, music and podcasts, nurturing emergent strategy, pleasure activism, radical imagination, and transformative justice. adrienne’s work is informed by 25 years of social and environmental justice facilitation, primarily supporting Black liberation. adrienne is the author and editor of Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Grievers, and Maroons.
Glennon Doyle:
Autumn Brown is a mother, organizer, theologian, and artist with 20 years of experience facilitating movement strategy and strategic development with community-based and social justice organizations. She grounds her work in healing from the trauma of oppression. She was a founding member of The Rock Dove Collective, a radical community health exchange, a past president of the Board of Directors of Voices for Racial Justice and is currently a facilitator with AORTA. Together, Adrienne and Autumn co-host the excellent podcast, How to Survive the End of the World. If you haven’t listened to our first We Can Do Hard Things conversation, which everyone freaked out about, with Adrienne, please go back to episode 239, Why are We Never Satisfied. And now we give you the hilarious, the beautiful, the two who are just truly rooted in joy and love, Adrienne and Autumn.
Autumn Brown:
Here we are. I feel so humbled.
adrienne maree brown:
Wait, I’m so geeked out that y’all are meeting Autumn Brown. I don’t know if you know this, but last week was her 40th birthday. So she not only turned 40, but she released the first single off of her new album, which is incredible. And she released a music video because that’s how a Sagittarian turns 40.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, of course she did.
Autumn Brown:
It’s true. I do believe it might be the most Sagittarian thing I’ve ever done.
adrienne maree brown:
Yeah. She had a release party as her birthday party with her sweetheart there who had just met her kids. It was just brilliant, beautiful, intentional, awesome. So y’all are meeting her in this peak moment of life that is unfolding during the apocalypse. It’s amazing.
Autumn Brown:
Yeah, that’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
It feels to me that you live on many peaks though. It feels like you’re always doing a million, trillion things. It just doesn’t surprise me that this just happened at all. I know that you think I don’t know you, but I do.
Amanda Doyle:
Very old friends.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, Autumn, the times we’ve cried together, the times we’ve walked together, the relationships we’ve had.
adrienne maree brown:
Y’all have a lot in common because you both have had what I call real marriages, bad ones with men that were like-
Autumn Brown:
Real marriages?
adrienne maree brown:
Real marriages as opposed to non-marriages and then leaving that, realizing your queerness, leaning into a queer life and making art from that place. Yeah, there’s a lot there.
Autumn Brown:
I was thinking about that coming in, knowing that we’re both divorcees. Why do I feel like I can say now?
adrienne maree brown:
And Amanda, you’re a divorcee also?
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, but I wasn’t as creative as y’all and I just married another man.
adrienne maree brown:
I think there’s nothing wrong with moving… there’s a lot of man dating happening in this circle these days. I’ll just say.
Amanda Doyle:
Okay. All right.
Autumn Brown:
My new sweetheart, the person that I’m currently deeply in love with is a cis man.
adrienne maree brown:
And he’s okay. He’s great.
Autumn Brown:
One of the things that’s been really beautiful about this latest, this newest love relationship that I’m in is… I’m so sorry. One of my children is calling me. And why don’t the three of you-
adrienne maree brown:
Who is it? Which one?
Autumn Brown:
It’s Mairead and I’m just going to try texting her and telling her to-
Glennon Doyle:
Please. How old are her babies? I don’t know this.
adrienne maree brown:
So this one who’s calling now is 10 going on 45. Okay. She is like a suburban mom as a child somehow. It’s amazing. She wears high-waisted jeans, she’s got and all of these are decisions she’s made for herself.
Glennon Doyle:
Is she on the HOA board?
adrienne maree brown:
She would like to be. She would like to be. The list of things that she wants for gifts right now is a very specific list of a facial care protocol that I’ve never had a protocol anywhere close to this. And she said, “I only want these things.”
Glennon Doyle:
Oh my God.
adrienne maree brown:
So don’t get the knockoff face washing pads. Heart-shaped ones are the only ones.
Glennon Doyle:
I think that’s smart to call that out though, because when my sister and I were little, all we wanted in the whole world was Cabbage Patch Kids. I don’t know if you guys remember these things.
adrienne maree brown:
Oh, I remember that. You wanted those?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, that was all… I was of that age. Just one Christmas, that’s all we wanted. And then so we got our Cabbage Patch Kids, and they were homemade Cabbage Patch Kids. They weren’t Cabbage Patch Kids. They were like-
Amanda Doyle:
Homemade, soft face.
adrienne maree brown:
The whole idea is it’s supposed to hurt if you hit someone with it.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. And you’re not going to take your homemade Cabbage Patch Kid to school and say, “Here’s his fake birth certificate.”
Amanda Doyle:
But here’s the thing about that. It is actually interesting. We didn’t have much money. I get it. But also there’s a little bit of family dynamics because it’s like, “So y’all going to be the ones to say that this isn’t a Cabbage Patch Kid? Because we all here and know this isn’t a Cabbage Patch Kid, but we’re going to have to perform-“
Glennon Doyle:
We did have to perform.
Amanda Doyle:
And Pretend it’s a Cabbage Patch Kid and act as excited.
Glennon Doyle:
And we did.
Amanda Doyle:
And we sure did, because we sure were not going to do that.
Autumn Brown:
Oh interesting.
Amanda Doyle:
So there’s something interesting there.
adrienne maree brown:
Because there is a gratitude practice. There’s some kind of gratitude where it’s like if you really unwind it and think about the love that your parents was trying to show you within the limitations of their economy, I think as kids we have this internal thing of, “I don’t want to hurt your feelings,” or at least generationally. I don’t know if that’s still the case, but I feel like there was this thing of, “I don’t want to hurt your feelings,” and I’m receiving the thing.
adrienne maree brown:
But I do also remember a certain age and recognizing, “Oh, this is privilege.” I was like, “Oh, this is privilege.” The fact that I say I want something even is privilege as opposed to just being like, if someone gives me a gift, I should just be like, “That’s so nice of you. You totally didn’t have to do that. Thank you.” But now we’ve normalized the culture such that there’s an expectation like, “Of course, you’re going to get me gifts on these five days throughout the year, and here’s exactly what you’re going to get me.” That’s just a sign of where we live and the time we live in.
Glennon Doyle:
And it’s compulsory. It’s not a gift-
adrienne maree brown:
It’s not universal at all.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Okay. Speaking of holidays, I was listening to one of your many episodes that I’ve listened to, and you two were talking about family holidays. And I think I heard adrienne say that your family holidays used to always end in an explosion. And I bet a lot of folks can very much relate to that. And so many people are trying to figure out how to do the holidays different, which when you think about it is really just how to do family different.
adrienne maree brown:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Just how to do family. Why are holidays so hard? I don’t know. What’s the common denominator?
Autumn Brown:
Why is family so hard?
Glennon Doyle:
Right.
adrienne maree brown:
I’m around you people.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. So you guys actually found a way to make holidays different, which means you must have found a way to make family different. What I find so fascinating about you two is that what you do is what you do everywhere. You’re doing this love, liberation, justice work all the time in every avenue of your life, which means that family, which for a lot of us is a frontier of struggle, for you to-
adrienne maree brown:
It’s the spark for all of our struggles. It’s like the starting ground. The particular struggles that most of us are going to experience in our lives starts in our familial space. So it’s like all the norms that were set, all the insecurities that our parents had, all their limitations, that’s the structure inside of which family is happening, and which also means all their parents’ limitations and all the economic crisis of their time and diet culture was normal. So you and I are surviving eating disorders. All of those things create the family dynamic. And I get astounded regularly when I think about how young my parents were trying to generate something new in the world, which was a family that was coming from two different cultures, two different races, two different places in the deep south. And I’m like, “Oh, y’all were 21 and 23 deciding to try to create something that you had not seen before.”
adrienne maree brown:
So the limitations of that experience for us are like, what were you deciding to do as a 22-year-old mom or as a 26-year-old dad or a 34-year… all these are ages that are far behind us now. And I’m just now figuring out how to live inside my own values. If someone had asked me to do that 20 years ago, I have no idea what kind of person I would’ve generated in the world, but I probably would’ve had a little monster in there. And then we go back and we get together every so often to be like, “How are we doing?” But I think in our family, there’s a blessing because our parents were intentionally like, “There’s some stuff that we don’t want to replicate as we create this new space,” so we didn’t grow up around a lot of our extended family.
adrienne maree brown:
When we were younger, we were really in a little unit of five, that unit of five that was like we’re traveling around together. And so the issues we have are really shaped by that. I think we’ve all been, as adults, learning how do you sustain relationships longer than two years and how do you build friendships that can last a long time.
adrienne maree brown:
And then I think from what we’ve learned, that’s what we’ve come back and brought into our family space. And I will say, I think we’re doing really well. It’s not that stuff still doesn’t come up, but I feel like now we have much more built-in sense of practice and repair, being like, “Oh,” even if stuff gets tense, we’re like, “Okay, but we know how to find our way back to each other.” We have a regular practice with the sisters of doing a sister check-in, and then we have a regular weekly, not meeting, but a weekly gathering of the five of us with kids and spouses or whoever else is around who wants to plug in. That started during the pandemic and the sister check-in, we’ve been doing maybe a decade or more now?
Glennon Doyle:
What does that look like? What do you do? What’s a sister check-in?
Autumn Brown:
So this is something… this is actually a practice that we evolved in direct response to the explosions. So adrienne and I have a sister in between us, April. And we noticed that within 24 to 48 hours of getting home together, we would end up in a brawl emotionally.
adrienne maree brown:
A very passive aggressive brawl. Sometimes it was moving things around and being mad.
Autumn Brown:
You tended to be more passive aggressive. But April and I would scream at each other. Yeah. But you’re the oldest.
Amanda Doyle:
So everyone has their own roles. Okay.
Autumn Brown:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
So you and April, you go at it. But adrienne is like-
Autumn Brown:
adrienne is not going to yell at anybody. That’s not her style of conflict. I will yell.
adrienne maree brown:
Yeah, you’re good at it.
Autumn Brown:
And April will just say very mean things. So it’s like…
Amanda Doyle:
She remains in control of herself, but she’s like, “I shall exhibit-“
adrienne maree brown:
She’s like, vicious.
Amanda Doyle:
Okay.
Autumn Brown:
Yeah, exactly. I can think of any number of those explosive moments where all of us are feeling victimized inside of the conversation. Everyone is feeling misunderstood. Everyone is feeling hurt, unseen. And that’s what we figured out that the explosions were happening because we felt like the most important things that were happening in our lives were not visible to one another. And of course, a family like ours, a very global family, where as adrienne named, we grew up moving around as a pod of five, and then as we moved into adulthood, we sometimes live continents away from each other. And so there’s a pressurization that can happen around our family time because of how far apart in the world we live. So that was a contributor, the pressurization, the need for it to go well, our mom’s need for it to go well. So all of it. Our dad’s sort of cluelessness about it not going well, all of the dynamic-
Amanda Doyle:
He’s like, “It’s been a great time y’all. It’s been a great time.”
Autumn Brown:
Yes, exactly.
adrienne maree brown:
We’re together, we’re all alive. What’s wrong?
Autumn Brown:
And then what would happen, the explosion would be followed by tears and catharsis, but then it would be draining and exhausting and leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth around the holidays. And so at some point a little over a decade ago, we had the idea to have this intervention of let’s make sure that the sisters, at least, the three of us, within the first 24 hours of being in family space, that we get into a room together and close the door. And at first we would set a timer and have a rule. It was the three most important things that have happened in your life since we all saw each other last and no more than 30 minutes. Oftentimes we would go way over. But we tried to keep it kind of contained, and it was incredible, the difference it made in our experience of one another because suddenly things that were feeling so… the invisibleness that I’m feeling that feels so personal to me is like, “Oh, of course the way you’re behaving is not about me. It’s never about me.”
Autumn Brown:
I mean, it’s the truth of being a human, which is that someone else’s terrible behavior or difficult behavior or negative behavior or whatever word we want to ascribe to it is almost never actually about us. And it’s hardest to see with family, I think, which is why I think adrienne and I are both of the mind that family… it’s such an excellent dojo for practicing a different way of being because all of… whatever patterns I’m trying to heal in myself are all right there available to me as soon as I’m with my family. Whether I want to be working on that healing or not… and now we’re all at ages where we can kind of be like, “I don’t think I want to work on that this year.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, I like that too. Yeah.
adrienne maree brown:
I also think it’s like everything shows up right away with family. I also think family is like, “I don’t care about your mantras. I don’t care about your talking points. I don’t care about the story you’re telling everyone about what you’re doing. I know you. And so either you have changed and I can feel that or you haven’t. And I know how to push your buttons.” We started doing that as sisters, and we still do that as sisters and the whole family knows the value of it, so they actually support us. It’s like, “Hey y’all, we have to do the sister check-in because it’s going to impact everyone here’s experience.” And so everyone is like, “They’re on the porch. Don’t interrupt them. They’re doing their sister thing.” Everyone makes a really big deal and we have our little tea, our little coffee. It’s very important that no one can hear us.
adrienne maree brown:
We leave our phones far away from us so that it’s just no distractions. We’re really just being present with each other. And then I think now that we added the family practice on during the pandemic, what I’m finding is it’s making it easier to have hard conversations because we have a practice of being in conversation with each other. So as the pandemic was unfolding, it was like we need to have hard conversations about how everyone’s holding these boundaries around Covid-19 and hard conversations around masking and vaccines and-
Autumn Brown:
Travel.
adrienne maree brown:
Are we going to the theaters, not going to the theaters? Are we traveling? Are we not traveling? And we got the reps in and it’s so helpful now because it’s like, okay, there’s this situation going on in Gaza and we actually have a family practice that allows us to get on the phone with each other and say, “We’re going to spend two hours and we’re going to talk about this.” And we have different perspectives. And small things, but I really appreciate that. My dad, for instance, if I interrupt him, which I might do because I get in my feelings and I’m like, “I already know everything you’re going to say.” And he’ll pause me and be like, “If I can finish what I was saying.” And that is a cue to me that I’m like, “I’m not hearing him. I may think I know what he’s saying, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t get the right to say it. And that doesn’t mean I actually do know. And let me slow it down. Let me hear him.”
adrienne maree brown:
And then be able to come back from a place of not like, “I’m trying to correct you or fix you,” but just like, “You are telling me where you’re at. Let me tell you where I’m at.” And we’re not going to resolve this in our family. It’s not resolved in the world, so we’re not going to resolve it here, but we can get more information. We can get more in alignment around this in such a way that I feel no shame about where anyone in my family is sitting on this because we’ve talked it through. I understand. And I can feel the humanity of each person inside of it.
adrienne maree brown:
And then I feel supported in the actions that I’m taking or the risks that I’m taking. I feel like I’m out here being a loud voice of ceasefire and I know that my family is at my back like, “We love you. We understand that.” And I look over and I’m like, “Oh, there you are, Autumn. Ceasefire…” Things like that I think matter so much in these moments where I have so many friends who are like, “I’m fighting it out in the world and I’m trying to fight it at home, and I’m trying to fight it with my friends and with my funders.” It’s like, well, where do you feel flanked? Where do you actually get to take a position and be a human being in it?
Amanda Doyle:
Where do you feel flanked? That’s beautiful.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s a big damn question.
adrienne maree brown:
Yeah, my family has the first experience of flanking. But my sisters, when I came out as queer, my sisters were like, “We are here on either side of you. And if our grandparents are not going to let you come visit and bring your partner, then they will not be visited by us either.” They did not go. They didn’t take the kids. They would not go until I was welcome. I’m flanked. No questions asked.
Autumn Brown:
Yeah. Not even a hard decision.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s so wild that we usually don’t do the things we know to do out in the world with our family. Like what you’re talking about, so you’re saying people need to feel seen before they can hang out, like, “Oh.”
Amanda Doyle:
Some revolutionary shit, y’all.
adrienne maree brown:
You know that.
Amanda Doyle:
But it’s ironic that family’s the only place-
Glennon Doyle:
We don’t do that.
Amanda Doyle:
That we’re like, “We know that’s best practice. Everybody agrees. But you can’t bring that shit to your family.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Autumn Brown:
Yeah. I think there’s an interesting dynamic where I think we’ve certainly noticed this and we’ve navigated it in our family, I navigate it in my family that I’m now guiding, it’s the balance of family is a safe place to dissolve and come apart. With my children, I want them to know that I am a safe place for them to have some level of dissolving and coming apart, particularly if they have places in their lives where they feel like they have to be really armored up. And that can get out of balance because it’s one part of our coping and healing.
Autumn Brown:
But I feel like as we get older, as we become more adult, as we become more responsible for our own selves, then we build the resilience to be able to dissolve and come back and dissolve and come back. And I think part of what can happen in some families is that the family system itself doesn’t build the resilience around that kind of dissolving, reforming, dissolving, reforming. So then people come together and they come apart and they don’t feel responsible for their behavior. So if I don’t feel like I’m responsible for how I behave with my siblings or with my parents, and it sort of feels like, “Yeah, anything kind of goes in this…” Then I’ll do things in that environment that I would never do with friends or with colleagues.
Glennon Doyle:
I love that.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s so true.
Glennon Doyle:
Do your parents get real and show up? If you’re not talking about issues, if you’re not talking about Gaza, but you’re talking about your own personal lives, do they bring their full selves to you like you do as sisters?
adrienne maree brown:
I feel like they do. Our parents are southern people, so I do think there’s a certain degree of what is the right time and place for conversations to happen. But when it’s just us, I can really feel them… and I’m not sure when this shift happened. Maybe Autumn, you have a sense of it. I really feel like there’s been a shift such that our parents now are really like, “We are learning from y’all.”
adrienne maree brown:
And so a lot of times they will come to us with something that’s like, “What do you think about this?” Or, “Here’s something that’s going on and I’m not sure what to do about it,” but it feels like they’ll turn because they know that we have opinions, but also I think they know that we are working on this stuff. We’re working on doing our own healing work around our bodies. We’re working on figuring out how to have justice in our workplaces. We’re working on these things. And so there was recently a conversation that was around body image and body safety. And for me, I’m like, “Okay, I’m working on this eating disorder stuff.” And it’s an opportunity to come into the conversation and let them be curious. I noticed that they were able to say, “I’m feeling kind of triggered.”
Glennon Doyle:
Triggered? Is that the word you crazy kids say? Triggered?
adrienne maree brown:
Yeah, what do y’all say. But I’m feeling like it’s hard for me to be in this conversation and here’s why it’s hard.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow, that’s big.
adrienne maree brown:
I was like, “This is huge. This is huge.” Because in the past, I think what happens, and what mostly happens amongst humans is it’s hard to be in the conversation. And we don’t say it’s hard to be in the conversation. It just shows up that we are struggling and we try to get ourselves out. We’re like, “How do I finish this or shut it down?” So a lot of times we’ll be like, “You know what? I’m not talking about this anymore or I’m leaving,” or whatever.
Autumn Brown:
Except…
Amanda Doyle:
I’m on my way out. It’s your fault anyway.
Autumn Brown:
Throwing daggers.
adrienne maree brown:
Exactly. And then what we’re waiting for after that is for the other person to figure out how wrong they were and come and apologize correctly about all the wrong things. And then we will reengage and we never get that. And life goes on and people die and we miss them. And I think that for us, the idea is, oh, in this moment while this person’s still alive, we are having a hard time talking about something. And we can say why. Why? Oh, because we all created some of these fucked up conditions for our bodies together. In our family, none of us are innocent here. If I have an eating disorder, I was in an eating disordered family structure that we all are having to unlearn diet culture.
adrienne maree brown:
We all are having to unlearn fat phobia. It’s not like I will just go off and do that by myself and return and be this fundamentally different creature. I also think there’s something about the growing up, the idea that we’re all growing, which for me is really helpful. And my parents, I’m like, “Oh, you’re still growing.” And I feel like maybe sometime after college that clicked for me that I’m like, “Oh, you’re not completed.” I grew up like, “You’re done. You’re my mom. You are doing… you’re finished. This is what you’re doing.”
Glennon Doyle:
And you should be better because you’re grown up.
adrienne maree brown:
And you should be better. Why are we talking about this? You’re an adult. And now it’s like, “Oh, you’re going to keep changing-“
Glennon Doyle:
They’re still growing up.
adrienne maree brown:
“Until the last moment.” And I’m going to keep changing until the last moment. And getting our parents to see us as adults and be like, “Oh, y’all are grownups. Still changing, but you’re not the kids you were. You have grown up issues and we’re going to have grown up conversations,” that to me has felt like such a revelation.
Autumn Brown:
And I think collectively building the wisdom within our family to know that we all might also be wrong about most things that we think and believe.
adrienne maree brown:
That’s right.
Autumn Brown:
And it’s so easy as the younger generation… I think in some ways, me having children and then my children aging into their teenage years, it’s been one of the places where I can see it with the greatest ease. It’s easy as the teenager becoming an adult, becoming middle-aged person to be able to really believe I’m right about the things that I’m right about. And my parents are… they did the best that they could for the time period that they lived in.
Autumn Brown:
But I’m here knowing the actual facts and truth. And then my children are coming along and they’re knowing their actual facts and truth, and I’m like, “Oh, oh, oh.” Trying to expand and make sure that my mind is flexible enough that I can keep up with the things that are now becoming true that I couldn’t have foreseen because it’s so far beyond the horizon that I can see. And then that wise mind, trying to develop the wise mind of just knowing, yeah, I might be wrong about almost everything. So then if most of the things that I think I’m right about are… just it’s not knowable to me, then I have to get really focused on my values. I have to be really focused on my values and my purpose and what motivates the way that I behave.
Glennon Doyle:
Values.
Autumn Brown:
For me, it feels like it’s like a step behind what I speak into the world.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Yes. I feel that too, Autumn. I feel like I’m always just writing… I feel like I’m my own self-help author. I’m writing it and then I’m like, “I’m trying to do that.”
adrienne maree brown:
Right.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s the smartest version of me.
adrienne maree brown:
All the time. I’m actually like… I’m working right now with people who are like, “You know that book you wrote, Emergent Strategy? We’re going to use it. We’re going to use it.” Okay. What does that that mean?
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, on you?
adrienne maree brown:
Yeah. They’re like, “We’re going to use it. We’re going to budget with it.” For instance, I was like, “I need to stop this war right now. We need to do something big.” And they’re like, “But small is all. And you know that that’s how change happens is relationships and you know that you have to create more possibilities.” They’re just like, “We’re going to use it. What is the most effective thing you can do that’s at the scale of your actual existence?” And I’m like, “Hmm.”
Glennon Doyle:
You are like, “That sounds really smart.”
adrienne maree brown:
Okay. No, this is really helpful ideas. This is really helpful. This is great. And then bringing that into family where it’s like my sister… you talk about fugitivity and I’m just like, “Oh yeah, we are living in a family of people living in the south with white family, they are still struggling with race, struggling with what it actually means to be a white person.” And I’m like, “Oh yeah, Autumn is writing the text that is going to liberate our family that was also learned in part from living in our family.”
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, okay. I have a question for you, Autumn about that then. I was trying to explain to my sister, how am I going to ask this question. Okay. So I-
Amanda Doyle:
Good luck, sissy. Good luck.
Glennon Doyle:
Good luck, sissy. Okay.
Autumn Brown:
We all believe in you.
Glennon Doyle:
Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So I heard you on a podcast long ago talking about how when you were young, everyone would say, “What are you? What are you? What are you?” So they could figure out all the things, how to treat you, where to set you up in their mind’s hierarchy, which is how I feel about gender completely. So you said that you used to just start saying, “White mom, Black dad.” Right?
Autumn Brown:
Mom White, dad Black.
Glennon Doyle:
Mom White, dad Black. Mom White, dad Black. Okay. So when you said that, I just can’t stop thinking about because my children are mixed race and my son is not White presenting at all. He’s Japanese. And he just is in a new world of figuring out who he is. And it took him to get to college to where now he’s like, “Oh, these are my people. This is who I am. You didn’t teach me shit. I actually don’t know you.” Anyway, talk about thinking… I feel like I’m between generations. I spend most of my day looking one way and saying, “Why didn’t you do better,” to my parents, then looking in the other way to my kids and saying, “I did the best I can. Just can you please just relax?”
Autumn Brown:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
And not seeing the irony. Okay.
Autumn Brown:
But right now you see it.
Glennon Doyle:
Right, right. I do. I do actually, it’s just in the moment.
adrienne maree brown:
I can actually see it. But in the moment when they say something to you-
Glennon Doyle:
Because it’s devastating, it’s devastating. Nothing helps you forgive your parents more than watching them grow up behind you and you’re going, “Oh my God, you really do just do the best you can in the moment you’re in. And we don’t know shit.” My question is this. What does it mean… because now, I understand right now that I am not just my children’s mom. I am my children’s White mom. And by the way, just PS, I’m my children’s White, anorexic recovering mom. So I’m like, “Whiteness is like…”
Amanda Doyle:
Looking real white over there, Doyle. Real white.
Glennon Doyle:
I won. I won White woman.
adrienne maree brown:
Yeah. You’re like, “I’m all the way up.”
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. So they gave me a challenge and I fucking nailed it.
Autumn Brown:
I’m dead.
Glennon Doyle:
I almost died. Okay? I just know that there is so much in my babies that is from being a mom White, of whiteness that they’re unlearning. So what does it mean to have a mom White?
Autumn Brown:
A mom White. A mom White. Yo, yo, it’s such a beautiful question. Thank you for asking that question. As adrienne referenced, I have been doing a lot of work around the political concept of fugitive practice or the notion of in order to practice freedom or that we can practice freedom as a temporal state, that we can create even inside of unfree conditions. And so much of it is about finding inside of ourselves the places where we feel safe inside of White supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, et cetera, et cetera, we feel safe through compliance or we achieve a false sense of safety through compliance with the forms and norms.
Autumn Brown:
It’s helped me sort of, I guess, re-express to myself something that I have held very true my whole life related to my mom White, which is that if I truly don’t believe that White supremacy should shape the world, I have to be able to release all of the lies associated with White supremacy, including the way that resisting White supremacy might make me want to reject her or would make me think that in order to find my dignity and ground, it has to come at the expense of hers.
Autumn Brown:
And it’s very complex. It’s very complex the ways that we all get pitted against each other. And then as I’ve started to see over time that the world definitely wants me for whatever set of reasons to reject my mother. But my mother would never reject me. My mother has always been… and this is not the case for many. Many people with our racial identity have White parents who did not protect them. We are very in the lucky position of having a badass White mom. I have so many memories of this woman walking up into schools that I attended and having direct confrontations with teachers, particularly over race. She would come into school and she would say, “You do not get to tell my child anything about her racial identity. She is the only person who gets to decide what language she uses for her racial identity, and you will not say a word to her about it. That’s not your job. Your only job is to teach her math.”
adrienne maree brown:
Period.
Autumn Brown:
She never hesitated to protect my dignity. Now I’m an adult and I’ve had to ask myself, “Oh, would I hesitate to protect her dignity?” What do my politics actually require of me? As I evolve in my understanding of this massive collective lie that we are constantly navigating together, surviving together, and many of our adaptations for survival make a lot of sense. And I have so much gentleness, compassion for myself and for everyone living under late stage racial capitalism for the ways that we have adapted to survive it. And yet it’s, as you were naming, adrienne, with Emergent Strategy concepts, if I do believe that small is all, if I do believe that everything important is going to happen inside of relationship, then I have to take seriously that how I orient to my mom White and to my dad Black, how I orient to them as individuals who are worthy of inherent dignity and freedom themselves, that will matter even if it doesn’t make immediate obvious sense to me or it doesn’t feel like there’s immediate obvious impact.
Autumn Brown:
So it’s been deep as we’ve navigated conversations as a family because I have mixed race kids who also… two of my children really present as White, and one doesn’t.
Glennon Doyle:
I have that too.
Autumn Brown:
So that’s a dynamic too. As we’ve been navigating their unfolding childhood, I’ve brought the same sensibility that my mom brought to me, which is I’m really encouraging and creating the conditions for my kids to self-define, protecting their room to self-define even though it actually… I mean, I have so much compassion for her now because creating room for them to self-define means that they’re going to self-define in ways that I don’t necessarily feel comfortable with. So it’s pressing on my edges, and then I have to say, “Okay, well.” Again, what do I mean when I say freedom?
Glennon Doyle:
Oh listen, that is so correct. What does freedom mean? I mean, freedom my way. It reminds me of Abby when our kid dresses totally butch and she’s like, “Freedom.” And then my kid puts on some fem shit and Abby’s like, “She’s just totally listening to the patriarchy.” I’m like, “I think…”
adrienne maree brown:
That also might be her freedom, their freedom.
Glennon Doyle:
I think we have to support all of it.
adrienne maree brown:
Well, but I do think that there’s this also thing of phase. I think the only thing I want to add, Autumn, because I feel like you really captured this beautifully. Maybe two things. One is there’s this non-monolithic aspect. For me, I’m like, “I don’t want to be set in a group and dismissed because someone has externally defined something about me.” And so they have decided, “Oh, you’re that. Boom.” Anytime I’m fighting against racism, against transphobia, Islamophobia, any of it, I’m like, that is the fundamental behavior that is most harmful to us is being like, “I have decided externally who you are, and I dismiss your humanity because of that.” And so I don’t do that to anyone. If I don’t like you, it’s specific to you.
Glennon Doyle:
Nice.
adrienne maree brown:
I know enough. I listened to what you said, and I don’t like it. And it may fit into a pattern.
Autumn Brown:
No, no, no. I’m sure I don’t like you.
Amanda Doyle:
I can tell you all the reasons why even if you’re curious.
adrienne maree brown:
Exactly. Exactly. And part of that is because I’ve grown up around Republicans, I’ve grown up around people who are conservative. I’ve grown up around gun-toting people. I’ve grown up around farmers. I’ve grown up around people who were way under the poverty line. I’ve grown up around all the different kinds of people and what I have found-
Autumn Brown:
And elitist Democrats, don’t forget those.
adrienne maree brown:
And so many elitist Democrats. And what I have found across the board is there’s a goodness of heart in people that doesn’t fit into a lot of these things and is not visible or necessarily on the surface. And there is an evilness of spirit that is also not visible in those ways. And what I’m curious about is that part of us that I think is beyond socialization, I think each of us has a part of us that is beyond socialization, which is how our parents found each other and fell in love because they both came into circumstances where everything around them said that their lives were going to be a certain kind of life. There was a certain path, there was a certain kind of person they were going to marry. It was all predefined. And neither of them felt that that made any sense for them.
adrienne maree brown:
And when they found each other, it was like, “You make sense to me and what we are going to create will make sense to us.” And our little weird family makes a ton of sense to everyone who’s in it. And it’s love based. So that means that every friend that we’ve had over the years of every kind of background, all the partners we’ve had, everyone who has come around, love has been the primary experience that they have received from interacting with our family. And that to me is… that’s where my deep respect for my parents is rooted in that, where I’m like, “I don’t know how you got there, but it gives me faith in humanity that you got there and now you get to keep growing.” The fundamental quality that my parents have, both of them have, mom White, dad Black is a deep curiosity that they’re like, “I’m so curious about who you are.” And when I came out to my mom, she was like, “And what was that like?” It wasn’t like there was no-
Autumn Brown:
She wasn’t surprised.
adrienne maree brown:
My dad also, he was like, “Well, I knew that one time when you went to go to New Year’s Eve with that person.” And I was like, “That’s when you knew? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Glennon Doyle:
Somebody tell me.
adrienne maree brown:
You know all this stuff. Anyway. But they’re both fundamentally curious both about themselves and for my dad in his Black Southern family, to watch him and his Black Southern family is so magnificent. He’s so curious with each person about what they’re experiencing and how he can support them, how he can help them, and my mom with her family, and it’s challenging. I would say the most challenging place in our familial structure is actually our White family in terms of how we relate to them. And I feel like we’re in a tender moment right now where my parents have moved back south and we’re slowly reconnecting. And I think the emphasis is on the slowness.
adrienne maree brown:
For a long time I was like, “I don’t have to do this. I will pull all the way back and I will never talk to y’all again, and I will be okay with it. I’m sad that it went this way, but you had all this time to know that I was a Black person and to choose something different and you still voted for Trump and I just can’t deal with you.” Now I’m like, “Okay, I still might have to make that choice.” Every time we interact, I’m like, “This may be it.” But one of the things that’s most interesting to me is I can feel how much these people love me. I don’t know what to do with that.
adrienne maree brown:
I’m like, “I don’t understand how you are sitting here looking at me and I can feel the authenticity of love that is in you. Even as I know in the next moment you might say something that is highly offensive.” And that part of humanity befuddles me that I’m like, “I don’t understand it.” And because I don’t have a whole framework for it, maybe someone does, but to me, that keeps me curious about humanity also that I think socialization makes us say things, but I’m really interested in getting under that to the part of us that feels things. And I think the part of us that feels things is the part that we’ll be able to knit together and move forward together as a species, as the structures of socialization fall apart.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s how my therapist told me to think about… when we talk about our kids and what we probably did that wasn’t, and we thought we were right, but then they’re going to have a different… and I used to obsess about what is he going to think about this thing? Or what does he think about what I think about this? What do they think about my stance about this? And my therapist just said, “Could we just… let’s for a second, stop talking about what they think of you. What would you say they feel about you? How do they feel about you, Glennon? Do you think they feel loved? Do you think they feel safe? Do you think they feel cared for?” And it just helped me so much because I don’t know what the hell they think of me. I can’t figure it out.
Autumn Brown:
They don’t either.
Glennon Doyle:
They don’t either. But I think I can say what they feel.
adrienne maree brown:
It’s also like the family is not a social media app, which also helps me is I’m like, “Oh, I’m not trying to perform something or present something to keep myself from being canceled as a human. In my familial space, I’m being. In all of my relationships, I’m being.” Every day I think maybe I’ll get off of social media and just spend the rest of my life just being, because in that space, it feels like people are constantly being like, “Well, what do you think about who you are? And are you real and are you good enough and are you this enough?” And I’m like, “I don’t know. But I do know that when I get off of this space, what I find myself doing is singing to children, playing games with my friends, doing organizing that I really care about, writing stories that I really care about and being in real relationships with real humans, all of whom have a multitude of stories and lineages that are flowing in and through them.”
adrienne maree brown:
And I think that’s how we get to the other side of the painful impacts of all these constructs because these things were done to us. These things were done to us very strategically. It’s so smart to be able to create a condition where someone thinks they have to turn against their mother and Disney kills off all the moms. There’s something really structural about the way our society tells the story of a parent, that it’s like a parent is something you have to survive and get rid of as opposed to… in so many other places I’ve traveled to, it’s like your parent, your elders, your ancestors, you honor them, you respect them, you listen to them. You don’t follow every single thing that they say. You challenge them. You’re in relationship, but it’s a relationship of like, “Oh my God, you gave me everything and I want to give you everything for the rest of my life.”
adrienne maree brown:
And I think that that feels more righteous to me than this other way where it’s like, “Oh, I can’t wait to be done with you.” And this is the other thing. I’ve been telling Autumn’s kids who I text with, so I’m like, “We cancel bad ideas. We don’t cancel people.” And a lot of times the people who are older than us were socialized by really bad ideas, but that doesn’t mean that they’re bad people and we don’t give up on them and you can’t save everyone.
adrienne maree brown:
But I’m like, there are a couple of my uncles that I’m like, “I do want to pull you further along on this path and I will keep looking for the openings that help you to see that you’re out of alignment with your own humanity and your own relationship to God.” And maybe I’m also out of alignment in some way. Do I really know how to plant anything? One of my uncles is such an amazing gardener and planter, and I’m like, “I would want to be near him when the apocalypse hits because he really knows how to make food.”
Autumn Brown:
He’d keep you alive.
adrienne maree brown:
He’s going to keep me alive.
Glennon Doyle:
This is how you’re going to survive the end of the world.
adrienne maree brown:
But I think he could also call me on… he’s like, “You love to talk all this stuff, but do you actually know how to grow some collard greens?” And I’m like, “Well, growing collard greens is a little triggering for me because of what your ancestors did to mine.” But to me, being able to have a sense of we can talk about reality-
Autumn Brown:
What our ancestors did to us.
adrienne maree brown:
Oh yeah, exactly. Thank you. That’s the complexity. That’s the complexity.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s tricky, man. That is tricky.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s complex shit.
Amanda Doyle:
Autumn, do you know the answer or unanswer to what adrienne was just talking about? Because I want someone to tell me about-
Autumn Brown:
The answer.
Amanda Doyle:
Like, “I love you, queer person. I love you, trans person. I love you, Black person.” And these are the decisions I’m making politically, which I had always just been like, “Well, that’s bullshit. That’s not love. That’s something different.” But then I’m listening to you with the wise mind and I’m like, “Maybe I don’t know shit.” And maybe it’s the same thing as the parents. It’s like, “You love me so much, but you did this thing. You love me so much, but this happened.” Is that the same construct as the, “I love you but I vote”? What is happening there? Tell us, Autumn.
Autumn Brown:
I love you, but I vote. I mean to me, these juicy questions, this is where I love to live. First of all, I just want to say that. I love being out here on the edge.
Glennon Doyle:
Happy to be confused with you all.
Autumn Brown:
It’s like, “Oh, we’re all right out on the edge of our own thinking right now.” And I feel like this is where I’ve been spending a lot of time in the last year, is just being on the outer edge of my own thinking, being like, “I don’t know. Maybe this, it could be this.” Again for me, this is where fugitive practice comes from. The fugitive from the plantation doesn’t know what’s beyond the border. All they know is they have to get out, and so they go off into the forest knowing that that could be more dangerous, but probably better than to continue being enslaved.
Autumn Brown:
So I like being in the borderland on the edges. Because to me, it comes down to this… the question is also kind of like, well, what do I actually believe the human heart is capable of? If I can hold the nuance and complexity that yeah, we’re capable of feeling incredible love, incredible grief, incredible joy, I really believe that joy and grief are actually the same emotion. We can feel all of that and also still act against our own highest good. It leads me to some interesting places in terms of what do I think a human is? Because when we do things like that, it’s like when we are like… we love, we love and then we kill, then oftentimes what initially comes up inside of us is that’s so inhumane.
Autumn Brown:
What’s happening in Gaza right now is… it’s so abhorrent and it’s so hard to understand. And I think it breaches our sensibility of what humans are capable of. And yet this is also humanity. It’s not not humanity.
adrienne maree brown:
Cyclical too. It’s a cyclical humanity.
Autumn Brown:
Exactly. Exactly. And we exist inside of a lot of dissociation and confusion and that dissociation and confusion that we experience on a daily basis in our relationships, inside of ourselves, inside of our families, I think that that’s all strategic. It’s very strategic for these systems, for us to feel confused, for us to feel dissociated, for us to not fully feel what we feel. Because the more confused we are, the more dissociated we are, the more at odds we are with ourselves, the less we can act, the less easily we can act in alignment with what we believe.
Autumn Brown:
And so that question you asked of like, “Yeah, how is it that someone can love and then vote in this way that’s so obviously counter to a love ethic,” that to me it’s dissociation, that it fundamentally… like any behavior where you’re acting against your stated beliefs or you’re acting against your own best interests or the best interests of your family or the best interests of your community, you can only do that if there’s some internal cracking that’s happened where parts of yourself are not making contact. And that dissociation, it’s such an effective tool of systems of dominance and supremacy. All systems of dominance and supremacy use that tool.
adrienne maree brown:
That’s right. I’ve been thinking about that too, is the demonic energy. I don’t think there’s demons. I think there’s a demonic energy that shows up as this kind of foggy, numbing, confusing, enforced inhumanity that it’s like, “I’m going to create a condition where even your story of yourself doesn’t make sense.” Because I think that that happens so often where you’re listening politically to someone and I’m like, “What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense to me. You’re telling me that you are a Bible thumping Christian. And so thou shalt not kill is the top thing on the list of things that you should not be okay with ever. Period. It doesn’t say thou shalt not kill, except for these little clauses. It just says don’t. Don’t do it.”
Glennon Doyle:
Who? Thou. Who?
adrienne maree brown:
Who? Thou.
Amanda Doyle:
Say it with me.
adrienne maree brown:
Thou shalt not.
Amanda Doyle:
Who? Thou. Shalt what? Shalt not.
adrienne maree brown:
Shall not, and shall never, right? And it’s so interesting because it’s like it doesn’t say thou shalt not fornicate with your girlfriend. It says, “Thou shalt not kill.” But you are killing to keep me from fornicating with my girlfriend? It literally doesn’t make sense. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately that I’m like, if you’re telling me a story and it doesn’t add up, then I feel like there’s a demonic energy afoot. And I’m like, who benefits from you being so confused? Who benefits from you being so confused? And I think in this time, so many people are benefiting from our mass confusion, our lack of critical thinking skills that were not developed. We are really in an interesting bind right now where I think relationship is the only thing that’s going to pull us through.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s not a meme or a graphic or saying the right thing on social media. That’s what you’re saying? It’s not that? Damn.
adrienne maree brown:
I don’t think that we’re going to be able to do it through social media. I think what Autumn… I think that practice of fugitivity that you talk about, when you talk about, Autumn, what I think about is who would have to show up and be like, “You are enslaved and I know a way to freedom,” that I would trust to be like, “Oh, you’re saying everything around me that feels normal and safe to me. Even though it’s scary, but I have survived it thus far. You’re saying it’s worth it to leave this condition and go with you.” And what we’re saying to White people all the time is the thing that you think is great where you have this superiority complex, it’s not great. That’s why everyone’s depressed. That’s why everyone’s killing each other. That’s why no one ever feels secure. It’s not actually working. It hasn’t worked.
Autumn Brown:
It’s not good for you.
adrienne maree brown:
It’s not working. This thing is not working. Any system that’s like, “We are superior in some way and we deserve more,” literally is at odds with the whole species surviving. So the sooner we can get you to leave that, come out here into the wild land where we don’t know what we do if no one’s superior. We aren’t familiar.
Autumn Brown:
And we also don’t know how to grow collard greens, but we’ll learn.
adrienne maree brown:
I bet we all have to learn how to grow collard greens though. I bet that that’s actually a part of it. Or grow something. I’m trying to be like, “Can I just grow this aloe?”
Glennon Doyle:
Is that the movement? You two over and over again, you are the movement. We are part of the movement. We are the movement. What is the movement? Where are we moving to?
Autumn Brown:
Well, we’re leaving the plantation and we’re going into the forest. And we don’t have a map of the forest. That’s where we’re moving to. That’s why it’s so scary. That’s why it’s so scary. But we’ve heard stories. We’ve heard stories, some from the past, some from the future. So we know that there’s some islands. We know that there’s water. We think that there might actually be other people who are already free, and so we have to go find them. But there’s a lot we don’t know.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. I’ll follow you two.
adrienne maree brown:
And I think we have leaders. I love what you talked about with when your kids start coming back and being like, “I know more now than you do.” And I remember that when your eldest sat me down and was just like, “I’m going to give you a lecture about communism.” And I’m like, “Me? You are going to tell me about it?” And then they did. And I was like, “Damn, you’re right. I didn’t think that through.”
Autumn Brown:
You literally had done more research than the rest of us combined.
adrienne maree brown:
I was like, “Wow, you read more books.” I took several classes, I’ve been living in my life, there’s just this beautiful moment about youth shall lead us. Indigenous peoples shall lead us. The earth itself shall lead us. And if we can listen to any one of those three, we can head in the right direction.
Autumn Brown:
So true.
Glennon Doyle:
I love you both. Thank you for this hour. I think seriously, we got to one of our questions for you.
adrienne maree brown:
Awesome.
Amanda Doyle:
Damn it.
adrienne maree brown:
Well then-
Glennon Doyle:
So if you can just come back nine times.
adrienne maree brown:
I mean, I knew our sibling relationship is going to be… we might have to do an annual gathering or something.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, please.
adrienne maree brown:
Because I don’t feel like there’s a lot of people out there who are sister pairs or sibling pairs doing a podcast that is all about revealing as much as we can about what it means to be a human being in this time. It’s so exciting for me to know that y’all exist and that you’re covering the Pod Squad and you have your folks, and it’s so exciting for me that we exist and that we’ve got… I do think there’s something about siblingship and about the honesty and the love and just we’re going to be in this for the rest of our lives, this… of siblingship that is actually a part of the medicine that we all need right now. So it’s so good to get to sibling with y’all.
Glennon Doyle:
Let’s keep doing it.
Autumn Brown:
What magic, what a gift to be here with you guys.
adrienne maree brown:
It’s wild.
Glennon Doyle:
Every minute has been magical.
Amanda Doyle:
I really want to thank you for this hour. My head is flooded and I can’t wait to just go digest it all. And I really appreciate adrienne, what you’re saying about not giving up on our people, and Autumn, what you were saying about my mom would always step in for my dignity and would I step in for hers and about the dissociation, how we don’t make any sense and aren’t acting in alignment with our values when we dissociate from ourselves and you’re refusing to follow the world’s pressure and disassociate from your mother is keeping that unity of you two, saying, “I’m not going to make this real tidy for you, world. But this is my truth.” And y’all work out your confusion on your own. That is so beautiful. I’m just… thank you.
Amanda Doyle:
For all of that.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s the answer.
Amanda Doyle:
I’m going to be thinking about it for a long time.
adrienne maree brown:
I also feel like family is the antidote to policing, if that makes sense. So much of what you’re talking about is that people are going around and they’re policing how everyone else navigates their relationships, their family, their identity, their actions. Policing has gotten so deeply ingrained in the West and especially in the US so that we’re constantly walking around either policing or being policed by others and thinking that that’s a normal interaction, that it’s normal, that someone would be like, “You need to drop yo mama.”
adrienne maree brown:
What are you talking about? My mother? My mother? I need to navigate my relationship with anyone in my life based on what a stranger interprets the circumstance to be? That is policing. That’s policing. And so my job is to love. In this lifetime I’m trying to love as many people as I can, as deeply as I can. That’s my work. And when you love people, you don’t need to police them. You hold them in relationship and you change together and that’s what always happens. And sometimes you’re changing in the direction of the good and sometimes you’re backsliding in the direction of things that cause harm, but it’s my life. I’ve got to live my own life the whole way through.
Glennon Doyle:
The whole way through is how you do it.
adrienne maree brown:
To the end. It’s mine and I’ve got to live it and I’ve got to be accountable and I’ve got to find out who makes sense for me to be accountable to. And one of those people is my mom. The other is my dad and my sisters. They’re always with me and they don’t care what anyone else thinks about me. They care how I treat them. The biggest changes that I’ve made in my life have come because my family was like, “We want you to be more present. We want to feel you more. We want to see you more. We want to know you more. If you’re out there struggling with your food, we want to know. If you’re feeling suicidal, we want to know.” That has actually changed me much more than any external pressure from anywhere else because I’m like, These people love me and they’re in this for life.”
adrienne maree brown:
Now I know we’re lucky. We have a family that is dedicated to doing this, but I think we’re also a model that other families can look to. That’s why we’re telling the story of it, that it’s like, I think you’re given your family for a reason. I think there’s things only your family unit can heal. I think only you and your family know what they are and that shouldn’t be something that someone’s blasting in from outside. But the youth will tell you, the youngest people in your family are the ones who will come back and be like, “Hey family, here’s the next piece of work for us to do.” Their children will reach them.
adrienne maree brown:
Just like all these leaders, you see all these people’s children who are coming out and being like, “I don’t support what my Senator dad is doing.” The Jewish young people are leading all these actions. Youth, I’m telling you, I have so much faith in what kids can do and what young people can do, and that’s also a big reason why I’m like, “Ceasefire, ceasefire,” because all these children, we need them.
Autumn Brown:
Yeah, every one of them.
adrienne maree brown:
We need all the kids. They’re the ones who take us into the future. So, anyway.
Amanda Doyle:
And that spirit is different though. That spirit that you’re talking about, I bring to you. My gift to this family is to come bring tidings of great joy, which is that there is betterness for us.
adrienne maree brown:
There’s better.
Amanda Doyle:
As opposed to I have a tendency to mix the policing with the family, which is it is my job to defend my humanity by policing the shit out of you people.
adrienne maree brown:
Exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
And telling you what you did.
Glennon Doyle:
I’m going to tell you-
adrienne maree brown:
Instead of saying I get to change the culture of our family, I get to change the culture of our family to being one where we ask questions, I get to change the culture of our family to one where we have hard conversations and we don’t have to have them all the time because I do know there’s people in my family who, I don’t know, for some weird reason, don’t like talking politics all the time. Weird.
Amanda Doyle:
Weirdos.
Autumn Brown:
My ten-year-old being one of the many ones.
adrienne maree brown:
Literally every time we’re sitting down and she’s like, “Are we going to talk politics? Ugh.”
Autumn Brown:
And play Monopoly.
Amnda Doyle:
I’ve got a face regimen to take care of, people.
adrienne maree brown:
“I’ve got a face regimen to take care of and play Monopoly.” And I’m like, “Oh, no.”
Glennon Doyle:
Monopoly, watch out. She’s playing Monopoly.
adrienne maree brown:
But then we just have to love her through this so that it can be a phase and it’s not something she has to rigidly like.
Autumn Brown:
I will tell you, I have no doubt about where she will land and I think she will make a great manager of the revolution.
adrienne maree brown:
Okay, great. That’s my hope.
Autumn Brown:
She’s got big CEO energy.
Glennon Doyle:
I kind of already believe that.
Autumn Brown:
She does. She’s going to be a CEO for freedom.
Glennon Doyle:
I think adrienne you know this, my call for ceasefire that I did on the interwebz was a direct result of watching my baby and their friends and the work they’re doing and their Palestinian friends, their Jewish friends, what they’re risking. It’s just what they’re doing together in their little groups, what they’re doing with their families, what they’re doing out in the world, it was family. It was family.
Autumn Brown:
Oh, I love hearing that, Glennon.
Glennon Doyle:
And it was backwards. And it wasn’t policing, it was nothing, none of that. It was learning what they know and watching what they do and being so, “Oh yeah, of course. That’s the way.”
Autumn Brown:
That’s right. Right. It’s that deep moment of being like, “How dare any of us think that we are taking a risk by saying the truth?”
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly.
Autumn Brown:
Yeah, yeah. It’s amazing.
adrienne maree brown:
That’s the privilege of the young people, but being young enough to be like, “I’m adaptable and flexible. I can make the change. If you want to rescind the offer you made to me because I speak up on behalf of not killing kids, then that’s okay. I want a job where I can do that.” And by doing that, your kid and all these other kids change the culture so that free speech is actually a real thing that can happen, and so that never again means something and all these things. These are cultural shifts we’re inside of. And the people I feel the hardest for are the ones who are resisting it, going rigid in the face of the cultural shift. That’s where you end up with the most painful things inside of a family or inside of a society. So it’s always inviting that softening. You softened when you saw your child standing up for something. You’re like, “I’m going to soften and move towards it, and I’m going to let it reshape me.”
Amanda Doyle:
That’s so beautiful.
Autumn Brown:
That’s beautiful.
adrienne maree brown:
Good job, mama.
Glennon Doyle:
I love you two so much. And also next time we talk, I want to talk to you guys about how you love each other, but also differentiate because I haven’t nailed that yet.
Autumn Brown:
We are actively working on this, and I’d be so excited to talk about it.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, good.
adrienne maree brown:
Let’s do it.
Glennon Doyle:
Part two.
adrienne maree brown:
We can do part two.
Glennon Doyle:
Perfect.
adrienne maree brown:
I mean, I’ll say the quickest thing is as the older sister, just to know that the person is another person.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, so I need you to start before that.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s too advanced. That’s the end. Way to start with the varsity shit, adrienne.
adrienne maree brown:
I pushed you into the deep end. Nevermind.
Glennon Doyle:
We’ll get to that at the end.
adrienne maree brown:
We’ll do it next time. But I’ll just say it’s blowing my mind that I’m like, “Wow, you’re just a different person not influenced by me.”
Glennon Doyle:
No, I don’t understand.
Autumn Brown:
I am influenced.
adrienne maree brown:
No, but there’s things you do now that I’m like, “Oh, you just did that…”
Autumn Brown:
Completely without you.
adrienne maree brown:
That was completely without… she just was like, “I’m doing my album release party.” And I’m like, “Just with other people?” Intriguing. Proud of you. I’m proud of you. I’m happy for you.
Amanda Doyle:
Intriguing? A little aggressive, a little aggressive.
Autumn Brown:
I thank you for your support. I know that you love me.
adrienne maree brown:
She knows that I love her and I’m like-
Autumn Brown:
It was so nice to meet you both. Oh my gosh. Thank you for having me.
Amanda Doyle:
You’re the best, Autumn.
Glennon Doyle:
We love you all.
adrienne maree brown:
At least she knows it’s time to end.
Autumn Brown:
I have to go pick up my child who’s non-stop texting me.
Glennon Doyle:
No, you go get your daughter.
adrienne maree brown:
I’m going to text her to comfort her until you get to her.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s awful.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay Pod Squad, we love you.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh my God. We love y’all.
Glennon Doyle:
See you next time. Bye.
Autumn Brown:
Bye. Thank you.
Glennon Doyle:
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