Unbound with Tarana Burke Part 2
October 14, 2021
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. We are not going to waste any time today. We’re going to jump right back in with our friend and author of Unbound, Tarana Burke. We ended Tuesday’s episode with an emotional story about Rob, about how Tarana found dance as a place to safely explore her sexuality, with no demands on her body. And we also talk about the double bind, that so many survivors of sexual trauma have, which is that these same bodies, which are the portals through which we access our pleasure and sexuality, are the same bodies that have been poisoned by assaulters, with shame. So let’s pick back up, let’s hear from Tarana.
GD:
Tarana, have you heard from other survivors who find dancing, to be a place where they can feel free, and not feel afraid? Is that a thing?
Tarana Burke:
It is. Kaia, my kid, they write about it in the, You Are Your Best Thing, the book I did with Renee. Their essay…
GD:
Oh that’s right. Oh my God.
TB:
They talk about discovering pole dancing, which was a whole thing for mama. I invested a lot of time and money in being a dance mom. We were, ballet, tap, jazz, modern African, where did poles come from?
GD:
They added their own category, the pole. You didn’t have it in the original plan.
TB:
No. I cycled through all the emotions that a lot of parents would have first, like, “What?” But I remember we were in… I had to go to Barcelona for an event in 2018 or 2019. And just playing around… and Kaia is an amazing dancer, generally, just beautiful dancer. I thought that’s the direction we were going, to Alvin Ailey, but apparently not. And they were playing around and they jumped up on a pole in Spain. And I watched them contort on this pole, and I was like, “Oh, I get it now. This is a talent. This is a skill unlike anything that most of us have,” and I had to relent.
TB:
They said, “It makes me feel powerful. It makes me feel alive and connected to my own body.” And I said, “Spin around baby. Do what you got to do.”
GD:
Tarana, do they know how to get us or what?
TB:
They do. They always come back with our own stuff.
GD:
It just makes me feel alive? Yes. Yeah. Like my daughter, I thought about her, a nice feminist thought about one of her outfits, that she was leaving for school the other day.
TB:
Oh, don’t even get me started.
GD:
Tarana, I said a thing, but I said it kindly, she walked into her room. She came back out. She said, “Mom, I’m comfortable and confident in this outfit.” And what did they have to say? I had to say, “Go with God.”
Abby Wambach:
She’s lucky I was dropping the other one off at school.
GD:
Yeah, she was lucky. I was like, “Go before Abby gets home, go.” Okay. So my favorite college moment for you sisters was, on the dance floor. I just love seeing a ferocious Tarana. The sparks in high school… First of all, the phenomenal woman part that we won’t discuss on this pod, but every single person who’s listening to this, will be getting the book and reading it, so they will know, is when the white teacher tells you that the poem was about whiteness.
TB:
Yes. So annoying.
GD:
And then you’re just going to have to read the book to see Tarana’s self, who rejected that notion very clearly and beautifully. So you can see there your grandfather’s teachings, it ran up against you in that classroom. And you stood up and said the thing, and put your truth outside of you.
GD:
Then in college, oh my God. Your first organized, like your first activation, your first organizing, your first rally?
TB:
Well, actually, had the first rally in high school, went around Central Park Five, but this was my first sort of big… well, I organized it from beginning to end, so it was the first one I did, and I’m taking off my head wrap, I’m so dramatic. I’m like cutting up my head wrap, and handing out black arm bands, so dramatic, but I was so hyped. I was just like, “We have to do something. Why aren’t y’all mad?”
TB:
I honestly though, always wanted to be the organizer, not the speaker. I just want to pull it together, give you the talking points. Get the people there rally them. I might hype up the crowd, and then bring in some eloquent speaker. And then Ms. Sanders is like, “No, it’s you.”
TB:
“Oh, I can’t do it,” but that’s why I know I’m hardwired in a particular way, because my heart is saying I can’t do it, really, my brain is like, “Oh yes, you can. I already got the words, and I’m going to push them out your mouth if you don’t hurry up and get in front of a mic.” By the time I’m ready to say something, I’m ready to say something.
GD:
Then the first words you said into that mic, were telling and super emotional, because it was right around the Rodney King, with everything that happened with Rodney King. And so everyone at the rally was talking about Rodney King. And then your first words were…
TB:
What about Latasha Harlins?
GD:
I’ve heard a lot of things today, but one thing I haven’t heard is the name Latasha Harlins. And so there you go, your first thing was like, “What about the women?”
TB:
What about the women?
GD:
What about the black women? Then after you spoke, you wrote this, “I had set out to reinvent myself, but it turned out that I didn’t have to start from scratch. I just had to dust myself off because the best parts were already there.”
TB:
Glennon your face.
GD:
It’s so damn good. This book is so good. Talk to us about your early organizing self, and what it felt like to put that flyer up and say, “If you’re pissed off, meet me…”
TB:
Come meet me at the-
GD:
Bring this arm band.
TB:
It felt good. When I started organizing in high school, I realized the thing like, “Oh one, when I speak, other people will listen,” which was fascinating. I was like, “Huh?” It’s so funny right now, people in high school, write on my Instagram posts, “I remember in high school, you was the same way.”
GD:
Nobody’s surprised.
TB:
No. People are like, “Yeah.” Anyways, so I learned that early in high school and I was really kind of addicted to that, for the social justice reasons, of course. But I think beyond that, it was like another thing to kind of pour my energy into. I know now, I wasn’t faking it, but I got to add another layer that separated me from this other person. And so I was all in.
TB:
When I got to college, I went to Alabama State University, initially, and I thought it was going to be like my camps, it’s leadership camps, because I had been going to leadership camp in Alabama for several years. And it was like, “No, what is that? We here to party. We here to listen to this bass music,” and I was like, “What’s wrong with you kids? This is the land of Martin Luther King. Why aren’t you all…?” And they were not feeling me in that way.
TB:
But again, my brain, when I am really, really, really pissed off about something, when there’s a big injustice, it feels like my whole body has to… I’m not going to be settled until there’s something done. I say this to young people all the time who want to be org… It doesn’t have to be a huge rally. You don’t have to get a million people to march on Washington, but there is some, a sense of relief, or accomplishment.” I’m not sure what the right word is here, but every bit counts.
TB:
And so for me, it was like, we’re all on this college campus. This campus is a small little example of the rest of the world. You got a president and vice-president. You have a council, you have a little government. You have authorities like police. So it’s like a little small microcosm of the rest of the world. And we get to be citizens, essentially. And we get to respond like citizens. And as citizens, we got to do something.
TB:
You have to want to do something. It was also a big lesson in everybody doesn’t want to do something. You may feel like that, Tarana, we don’t.” It was a lesson in like… because I was around more like-minded people before, and now I was in a different situation, but it also tested what organizing is about. So no, you don’t come automatically just because I said, like a Pied Piper, but let me rapporteur with you. Let me talk to you about this and how it affects you, in small groups.
TB:
And then when you see me in the big group, you know. It was that way in high school, people knew. I remember I organized the black girls to try out for cheerleading in high school. Not necessarily a social justice issue, directly, but our high school cheerleader… So the way my high school was is, it was predominantly white because we were in a predominantly white section of the Bronx. But right at the end of that section is called Throgs Neck, was a projects.
TB:
The projects was mostly black and Latino, LatinX. And so that’s where most of the kids… I wasn’t from those projects, I was from another one, but my great-grandmother lived there, so I used her address to go to the school. Statute of limitations have passed, they can’t arrest me. That’s how I got into the school because my mother was trying to get me out of this other terrible school.
TB:
So the school was used to catering to their white students. The football team was mostly white, except for, of course, the black guys who were really good football players. And then the cheerleading squad was all white. We had a Black History Month program. I organized a Black History Month program, and one of the performances was a step routine, like from HBCUs. And we were replicating on school days into the step routine, and the white cheerleaders, who thought I was a troublemaker, went and complained, and said that my step routine was to tease them. That we did a separate team to mock them. And we were like-
GD:
Just like phenomenal woman with a [crosstalk 00:11:40] white women, like that?
TB:
How the fuck did you send to yourself in our cultural display? This is a Black History Month program, you think we’re going to extend this time to tease the white cheerleaders? Because see what they did, That was wrong, is now you got me paying attention to the white cheerleaders. I wasn’t even thinking about y’all.
TB:
I sat in that office and I watched her… and this is the ’80s, she had big hairs, like Van Halen hair and all of this stuff. And so she was just going off about how disrespected she felt. And I think there were tears. Anyway, I was formulating a plan in my mind, because I’m looking at all these cheerleaders in there; every single one of them was white. I’m petty in this way, because cheerleading trials was months later, and I got all the black girls who I knew dance their asses off.
TB:
There’s a girl named Delecia right now. She’s still a friend of mine. Delecia could do a falling split y’all. If you don’t know what that is, it’s when you throw your leg up and hold it, and then fall into a-
GD:
No.
TB:
Yes. Delecia could do a falling split. She could do walking splits. She was amazing. I got about 15 girls, held my own tryouts.
GD:
No.
TB:
I did. This is God’s honest truth. Held my own tryouts. I took the best of those girls, and I organized them to try out for the cheerleading squad, and they made it.
GD:
No.
TB:
And that’s how we integrated our cheerleading squad. If you hadn’t fucked with me, you could’ve kept your Lily White squad.
GD:
That is amazing.
TB:
But I’m saying that that’s the way my brain is wired. We’re going to organize something and change the situation because this is not right. And what happened in college around that Rodney King rally was a similar thing. It was like, why aren’t we moving? Why aren’t we saying anything? It’s just, I don’t know.
GD:
Oh my God, okay, so you graduate from college.
TB:
Kind of.
GD:
Ish. [crosstalk 00:13:55]. Abby and I say we left college. They asked us to leave-
TB:
Or I finished.
GD:
I am done. So you were done with college, and your work in the world started. And you started these amazing programs, were part of programs that were about creating space for girls to share their stories and lives. Can you just tell us about Heaven?
TB:
Oh Heaven. I had a thought last night that I wonder if I should have used her real name, so she would know exactly who I’m talking about, because I’ve been using an alias for so many years, even before Me Too, I was using an alias. But Heaven is a little girl who I met, doing this work, who came to one of our leadership camps. In 21st Century, our leadership camps are the core of our work. The young [inaudible 00:14:56]. Young people come three times a year, and get leadership development training.
TB:
And she was a part of a chapter, but not… she came with the chapter, but wasn’t a part of that chapter. And she came off the bus. I mean, you read it in the book. She came off the bus, “Wow.” You can spot them, like this one is going to be a hell. This is going to be a handful for me all week. And I did with her what was done with me, and what was done with other people.
TB:
It’s like in 21st Century, we wrapped young people in love. The adults, we had discipline, but even our discipline was like, there’s a disciplinary committee made up of your peers, your young people, and they decide, and everything was fair and equitable and blah, blah, blah.
TB:
And so I wanted to give that to Heaven. What’s really important though, is that I’m 22. There’s a couple of things. I’m 22 at this time, I have not really started doing this work. Not just the work around sexual violence, but even on myself; I had not really dug into healing. I don’t even know if I had that language yet. I was just still trying to figure it all out.
TB:
I meet this baby, and I’m giving her what was given to me. “I love you. I care for you. You can trust me.” And this moment comes where she puts me to the test, essentially. She’s like, “Oh, you love me? I can trust you? Well, here, I need you to hold this for me.”
TB:
And she begins to privately tell me about being molested by her mother’s boyfriend. So by this point, you have to know, I don’t talk about my stuff at all. People in the camp, when I was younger, I talked about theirs and had come forward. None of it compelled me to be like, “Oh, me too.” Nope. I was just like, “Wow, that’s really messed up.” And I would just be quiet.
TB:
And so now I had this little child who was as courageous as people accuse me of being, in real life. She did what you’re supposed to do. She believed. I told her the innocence of believing because I said so.
TB:
And when she tried to get me to hold this for her, or just be in community with her, just to hold it with her, I just couldn’t do it. It was just too much. There are a few things worse than disappointing a child. I mean, as parents, we do it all the time, right?
GD:
Yeah.
TB:
To be honest, we do it all the time, but I mean that kind of deep disappointment, not like, “No, you can’t go on a school trip,” but like just really this deep disappointment that I read in her eyes and whatever little progress we had made in a few days, and the week that we had known each other, I just knew it was all over.
TB:
She was like, “You just like everybody else.” But even in that, even when I saw the disappointment, it didn’t move me enough to be like, “Wait, wait, wait.” Because this thing I had been holding was much bigger than this 12 year old. But what it did tell me after the moment had passed, but it did tell me, it was a chin check for me that said, like, “If you going to do this, you have to do this.”
TB:
I was really also kind of intrigued and curious to how does she so freely just say, “Hey, this happened to me and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” I thought I had been safe in other places, and I probably was safe enough to say it, but there was something else that needed to happen, because I had not told myself.
TB:
I could not talk about it to other people, because I didn’t want to talk about it to myself. And so the Heaven situation forced me. I think that’s all we talked about it early. So I was standing in the bathroom in the mirror, talking to myself, shaking in my boots, like I was talking to some stranger, but having to push through that, and she gave me the courage to do it.
TB:
Because I’m like, “If this baby can do it, I can at least tell myself.” The other part was like, I watched these little girls tell each other these stories. We would have sister to sister sessions, and they would be talking about what happened to them. I had made the choice that I wanted to work with little black girls.
TB:
So I’m like, “If this is what you want to do, this is what you’re up against. You going to run from everybody? You’re not going to be able to do this work well.” So I had to get my balls out my purse, as they say.
GD:
The scene, was actually your life, the scene where you look in the mirror and you tell yourself the truth, how do we get from that moment where you’re finally letting the truth stand outside of your body, and you don’t die? How do we get there to Me Too? When does the Me Too…[00:20:32]
TB:
The year literally that happened was ‘96. So there was still 10 years between that and the founding of, solidifying of Me Too. A few years later, maybe two years after that, I did the work of Me Too, without a name for many years.
GD:
Exactly. I’m trying to get at. Yes.
TB:
Hell yes.
GD:
Not Twitter, Me Too. I mean your Me Too.
TB:
And not even my Me Too. I mean, I started doing work with girls and survivors before I had the name Me Too, or before we had Just BE, even. I wanted to shift focus.
TB:
I did an interview the other day and they go really deep. And so they asked, could they interview somebody from my past? And they interviewed this, she’s a young woman now I still call her my little muff. Oh, I mentioned her in the book, my little muff.
GD:
Yeah, you did.
TB:
And so I interviewed her and she talked about how… I met her in ‘98. So somewhere around ‘98 and ’99, she talks about how I was the second or third person in her life that she ever told what happened to her, but I was the first person to believe her.
TB:
And what we were doing, then I was trying to also be a little more responsible in the Sister Sister. So we created space for her and talked her through what she’d experienced and told her all the things, “You’re not alone.”
TB:
So I’d started doing that kind of work, but for me, it was still part of the leadership development. It was still part of being responsible in doing the leadership development. Fast forward maybe it’s about 2002. 2002, 2003, we started Just BE Inc, which was the organization that started for black girls. Black and brown girls. It was not all black girls in it.
TB:
And that was amazing and it worked so well and we started with high school girls and we took them through rites of passage and it was wonderful, but we still kept running into sexual violence all the time. And the truth is, whenever we gathered a group of girls or a group of women together, it reared its head some kind of way.
TB:
And a lot of times with my girls, it wasn’t confession, it wasn’t disclosure. It was just stories. It was just happenstance. And that’s why my very first workshops were about giving them language. I had a situation with the, one of my seventh graders who…
TB:
My program was middle school. It was high school, and then we moved to middle school. And I happened to stay late at the school one day and one of my middle school kids, seventh graders are standing outside, I’m standing. I said, “Who are you waiting for?” And she’s like, “Oh, I’m waiting for my ride home.”
TB:
We’re just chit-chatting like normal, she said, “I’m waiting for my boyfriend.” And I’m thinking that some little kid is going to ride up on a bike, some scrawny, little seventh grader is going to come rolling up, and a car pulls up. And what I am clear is a grown man is in this front seat. Some 20 something year old grown man. This is a 12 or 13 year old kid.
TB:
And so I’m like, “This better be your uncle or your brother.” And she’s like, “Hahaha.” It turns into a whole thing because I had to send him off and threaten him within an inch of his life. Stay away from these children. It was a whole thing.
TB:
But you know what? The next day when we were back in school, she was hot fire burning mad at me. “You in my business. That’s my boyfriend, blah, blah, blah,” and nobody had ever said, just in a very clear way, “This is statutory rape. This is the definition of it. This is the definition of molested.” Nobody had ever given them language.
TB:
And I often talk about the importance of language. We cannot underestimate that. When Kaia was a baby, I tell the story about how, when Kaia was a baby, I rushed them to the hospital once because they had 102 fever and I was a young mom and I was like, “Oh my God.”
TB:
And they were fine, but Kaia being the inquisitive child, they were three years old was like, “Why are we at the doctor at the night time?” and was like, “What’s the matter?” And I said, “You were sick. You had a fever.” I tried to explain it.
TB:
For months after that, every time something happened, Kaia would stub their toe and say, “Oh, mommy, I have a fever in my toe.” They would get a scratch and say, “I have a fever on my arm.”
TB:
And it was so adorable but the reason why I think about it is that because they didn’t have the language to describe actual pain, what was actually happening to them. So they use whatever language was available. And that’s what my girls did. They didn’t have the words.
TB:
I don’t know that this 12-year old was comfortable in whatever position she was being put in by this boy, but does she have the language to explain to me that, “I’m uncomfortable. I don’t like it, or I think that I have to do something like this.” So that work started off trying to fill in the gaps.
GD:
Yes. You talk about that so much and so beautifully in the book that nobody was saying the thing to you. It’s this open secret talking around him. “Is he messing with you? Is someone messing with you? Is someone bothering you?” but never like-
TB:
Just say it.
GD:
“This might happen and this is wrong.” Saying it.
TB:
And if it does, just say it. And if it’s already happened to you, you’re okay. You’re going to be okay. Healing is possible. You are not the sum total of the things that happen to you. These things don’t define you.
TB:
Honestly, I was so scared starting this work because I’m like, “I’m not a therapist. I’m not a social worker. I don’t want to mess up.” But what I had was my experience. What could somebody have said to me at 12 that would have changed the trajectory of my life?
TB:
Any of those things. “You are not a bad girl. It’s not your fault.” Those things sound so simple when you hear them now because we see them on lifetime movies. We hear it all the time, but it really is as simple as hearing, for a 12-year old, “It’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong. You’re not a bad girl.”
TB:
“And this thing hurts and it’s okay that it hurts, but it’s not going to always hurt.” Those things are important.
GD:
You said something to Kaia that my sister is now saying to Alice at night. Sister, can you talk about that for a second? We’re going to have to let Tarana go in a little bit, but I want to end by talking about Kaia and you and mothering and how we are mothered by our parents and everybody does the best they can, and I am utterly obsessed with this one thing you talk about when it comes to motherhood, which is capacity versus desire.
GD:
You say, “There’s no question that self-hate severely limits one’s capacity to love fully and wholeheartedly. Capacity and desire are not the same thing, especially in discussions of love. I was an adult with a child of my own and a trail of mistakes behind me before I could say with certainty that my mother loved me.
GD:
The clarity came from being faced with my own limited capacity. No matter how deep my desire was to love my child, I was still encumbered by the ghosts I had tried to bury.” Can you talk to us, Abby and I have talked this to death now, can you talk about how we can have the desire, but not the capacity and how those are two things that can exist at once?
TB:
Absolutely. I think they often exist at once. And I think what happens is that either people conflict them or they don’t acknowledge that they’re both existing at the same time, and we set our expectations based on desire, not on capacity, and it often leads to deep disappointment. It’s expected as a child.
TB:
And the reason why I added that part in is because I didn’t want to just spill about what my 12-year old mind understood about my mother, and our relationship and the decisions she made. I may never understand the decisions she made or the posture she took, but I do understand that that had to come from a place of limited capacity.
TB:
She gave what she could in that moment. I’ve been in that position where I’m even clear that my child needs more than what I’m giving, but I just literally don’t have it. The difference is that, because of my experience with my mother, I was determined with Kaia to expand my capacity.
TB:
To figure out what I need to do, what therapy I need to go to, who I need to talk to, what I need to change in my life to give me more capacity.
TB:
But the reality is some people just don’t have it, no matter what you try to do. It’s like trying to, if you have two people, one is an eight ounce cup and one is a 12 ounce cup, it does not matter how many times you pour over and over again, you can’t fill that cup. You just can’t.
TB:
It was so helpful to me and other people have said this too, it’s been helpful to them to reframe our understanding of my mother. My mother did everything she could for me. Everything. I don’t know the traumas that she went through. I have some idea. I don’t know how those things impacted her. And I also know that generation was not privileged to have what we have.
TB:
So I’m laughing and joking about the secret and [inaudible 00:30:57] and all the rest of that, but we are the self-aware generation. We’re the generation that grew up with those things that know that we have to, “I should probably take a step back here. Let me take a beat. Am I being this?”
TB:
We can ask ourselves these questions as almost second nature. My mom’s 71. That’s not second nature to her. And so she was using what she was given to do the best that she could and I think it would help a lot of people to think about the people in their lives who love them. Because it feels weird. It feels like, “I think you love me, but you keep doing this.”
GD:
Yes, it does.
TB:
“You say you love me…” and I’m not talking about abuse. I think there’s some real clear lies that we can see the difference in, but in some of these relationships that feel complicated… And the other part is, when you find out that somebody has limited capacity, it doesn’t mean you have to stay and just put up with the capacity they have, it just helps to settle in your spirit.
TB:
So be like, “Oh, I get it now. I still got to separate myself from you because you just cannot meet this capacity, but I understand. I get why.” For me and my mom, it was what allowed me to build on our relationship and engage her from a different place and level set my expectations. It was life-changing once I got that realization.
GD:
And then allowed you to not take it personally.
TB:
Yeah, I know.
GD:
I mean, it’s not about you.
TB:
Mm-mm (negative).
GD:
Sister, let’s end with you telling Tarana what we decided that all of our little ones need to hear forever.
AD:
I just thought it was life-changing for me to hear what you said to Kaia when you were reaching out to them to share with you and when you said, “You know baby, there is nothing that you can ever say to me that will separate you from my love.” Sorry. I just think that that’s just so beautiful and so important, and now I say it to both my kids every night and they’re like, “Yeah, I got it.”
GD:
They’re like, “Can we just go and brush our fucking teeth. God.”
AD:
But to me, it’s the whole ball game. Because it’s you needing to separate from yourself so early, because you thought that that made you not worthy of love and of living and our kids to just know that there’s nothing that can separate them from our love.
TB:
I’m going to tell you, and I feel like I can have this conversation with you all because sometimes I feel like when I talk about being Christian or about God, people are like, “Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay.”
GD:
That’s a nice hobby you have.
TB:
I want to be like, “I’m not one of those Christians,” but two things about that moment. One, I really do believe God put that in my heart. And sometimes we don’t have the words and they come to us what feels like magically, and you’re like, “Oh thank you.” Because I knew, when I tell you I knew in my bones from the time Kaia was five that something had happened.
TB:
And I had asked over and over and over and over, and I kept asking the wrong way. “Did somebody bother you? Did somebody mess with you?” not even recalling my own experience that I didn’t feel like that. I felt like I had done a thing and that’s exactly what Kaia was holding.
TB:
And pulling on what I would have loved to hear at that time, myself, that that came to me. And when I tell you, you can talk about spreading the gospel.
TB:
I have emails still of when I was emailing my other friends, “Hey, y’all I discovered something.” “Say it this way. Let’s stop right now interrogating our children in this way. It really is about creating all the love and safety around them that’s possible so that they feel the kind of comfort they need to come forward.” And that was it.
TB:
If you ask Kaia now, again, to your point, Glennon, when the kids use it against you, Kaia will sometimes be like, “I thought you said…” There was nothing [inaudible 00:35:45] Kaia.
TB:
But it is our thing. It is our thing and I’m so happy to share that with other people and it is really one of the things I’m like, “Yes. Please say this to your children.” Please let them know that there’s, because those other people, the people who mean to harm them, burrow in their brain and that’s what grooming is, right?
TB:
Systematically separating you from your parents and the people who love you and making you feel like that’s not a real thing and I needed Kaia to know without a shadow of a doubt, there is nothing that will ever separate you from mama. And that’s how God is for me, right?
GD:
Yes.
TB:
That’s where that comes from. There’s nothing. What could separate me from the love of God? What’s going to make God stop loving me? And that’s what we replicate or try to replicate in our relationships. Oh, Amanda you’re making me emotional now. But I’m so glad that part resonates and you share that with your children. I’m going to tell Kaia. Kaia is going to get a kick out of that.
AD:
I need to just say because your gospel is so generous, your suggesting to write it down, that Alice was able to dispose something to me that she was not able to say. It is outside of this particular thing we’re talking about, but a traumatic thing for her that she couldn’t say because of your writing down, inviting your kids to write it down if they can’t say it out loud with the words.
AD:
I mean, those two things, are going to save a lot of people, give a lot of people life. So thank you for that.
AW:
Tarana, you’re are a fucking miracle. Seriously. You have changed, not to center myself or my two beautiful hosts on the show, you are a fucking miracle and you have changed us these last couple of weeks, just digging into your book and you deserve every little bit of success and it just is going to keep coming back to you because you’re doing God’s work. I don’t care what kind of faith you’re talking about.
AW:
I love you so much and you’ve opened up so much of my eyes and just sharing your story is giving us language to talk to our daughters, and by the way, our son, about some of this. You are just a fucking miracle. Thank you so much for existing.
GD:
And we want to say to all of our beautiful, We Can Do Hard Things. Your next right thing is to get this goddam book. Okay. I don’t know what else I can… It has to be on your shelf. It has to be. And also you need to have it on hand. When someone comes to you, who shares with you, and you don’t know what the next right thing is, the next right thing is to have Unbound. The next right thing is to put it in people’s hands.
GD:
Tarana, I’ve said this to you, but I imagine all of the little girls, little black girls who I know you wrote this book for, who are… You’re they’re Maya Angelou now. They’re seeing you and they’re seeing your pain, but they’re seeing your joy.
TB:
I hope so.
GD:
We love you so much. Thank you.
TB:
I love you all. I do. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate just the support and even the freedom to have this conversation. Because I can’t have quite this conversation with everybody, so I appreciate it so much. I really do.
GD:
Go rest and please give Kaia big hug for us.
TB:
I will. I love you all.
GD:
Love you.
TB:
I love you.
GD:
Unbound people, unbound.
AW:
Get it.
TB:
Bye you all.
AW:
Bye.
GD:
Bye everybody. We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence13 studios. Be sure to rate, review and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts. Especially be sure to rate and review the podcast if you really liked it. If you didn’t, don’t worry about it. It’s fine.