episode 4: affirmation

Episode 4 of Divesting From People Pleasing.

In the final episode of the season, NK talks with her friends Asha Grant and Kamala Puligandla about how people pleasing has impacted them, and with Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis about the process of coming home to yourself. 

The Heart · Divesting From People Pleasing: Affirmation pt 1

The Heart · Divesting From People Pleasing: Affirmation pt 2

This episode was produced by Nicole Kelly and hosted by Kaitlin Prest. 

Affirmations: “That Blackness” by Nina Simone & “Uses of the Erotic” by Audre Lorde. Music: “Good Times” by Audiobinger, “True Blue Sky” by Blue Dot Sessions, and “The Healing” by Sergey Cheremisinov.

transcript

Kaitlin Prest:

From Mermaid Palace and Radiotopia, welcome to The Heart, I'm Kaitlin Prest.

On The Heart, when we make a series that's about something related to trauma or issues that are triggering or really hard to represent like sexual abuse, assault, abuses of power, and like NK's most recent series, Divesting from People Pleasing, which if you haven't listened to it yet, you should definitely go back a few episodes and listen to the whole thing. After making episodes like these, what we like to do is have an episode where we basically just process everything that we just heard and to step outside of art land and representation land and to just very frankly, openly and honestly discuss all of the issues that were represented in the episodes so that we can, you know, have a debrief or analyze and dismantle some of the big ideas or intense feelings that emerged in the you know, in the episodes. 

So that's what this episode is. We're having a roundtable chat with NK and a bunch of her super smart friends. Here's NK… [gentle piano music that sounds uplifting and a little wistful]

Nicole Kelly (NK):

Hey y'all. It's NK. And this is the follow up episode to Divesting from People Pleasing the series. 

Thanks so much to everyone who has shared the series or written to us about it, shared your own artwork or writing in response to the series. It's really dope to hear how it's resonating with people. We — that's me, Chiquita and KP — really appreciate it. 

I know I'm echoing a lot of people in movement spaces when I say that we can't seek to end harmful systems of oppression or to end abuse in the world without first paying attention to some of the ways that we have harmful and abusive relationships with ourselves. My hope for this series is that it makes everyone feel more free to talk about your own shame or your struggles with mental health or anxiety or self-loathing. Because I think that the more we talk about these things, our shame and our vulnerabilities, the less it will be stigmatized to talk about them and without that stigma, it will make it easier to seek the care and healing that we, queer people, people of color especially need. I really wanted to bring in the perspective of a mental health professional. So later in this episode, you'll hear my interview with Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis, who's a licensed psychologist, ordained minister and artist based in LA, whose podcast is called The Homecoming. But first I talk with my good friends, Kamala and Asha, about how people pleasing has impacted them. 

NK:

Kamala Puligandla is the deputy editor of the online lez publication Autostraddle. Her novel Zigzags Drops this fall. And Asha Grant is the founder of the Free Black Woman's Library Los Angeles. And as my esteemed co-minister of the erotic in the Church of Audre Lorde, which we founded. 

So you're both obviously brilliant, very well dressed and you both were at the listening session last fall where I played all three episodes when they were still under construction and we had a really productive conversation about, like what I was trying to do and what was happening and what was working, what wasn't working. Do you all want to introduce yourselves in addition to, like, what I already said?

Asha:

I'm going to give my, like, anti-LA intro, which actually has nothing to do with, like the work that I do. So actually, I am going to do a little bit of the work that I do. I, I am a hood librarian. I'm also a co-minister of the erotic. I'm an advocate for eating rich people. And I am a Black girl. 

And I'm a queer Black girl. 

All:

Yeah, yeah, the cutest! 

Kamala:

I'm Kamala, I don't know. I don't know how to introduce myself. I like to talk to people. That's like one of my biggest skills. 

NK:

[laughs] Conversing.

Kamala:

Being in conversation, I feel like I'm perpetually in conversation and I use a lot of it for my writing. So I feel like my writing is like the product of many of the conversations that I have. And this particular like my relationship with NK has produced a lot of work between the two of us I think also and like we've been in conversation about many things that have been in the podcast. 

NK:

OK. So before we start recording I was talking about how when I first started talking about this idea, divesting from people pleasing and like named to the series that, that I felt like some people had an immediate idea like what they thought I meant by people pleasing. 

And then I found that to me the idea that people often had felt really tied to like specifically like white femininity. And I was like a lot of things that are being talked about are that I'm thinking about are that are like sort of like gender things having to do with like how we regulate, like our bodies or voices in space or how we respond to patriarchy, patriarchal conditioning. But I was like, it's just like a lot. There's a lot more going on for me that I will try to get into. And I'm just curious, like for you also like the concept of people pleasing. What does it bring up for you? Like, what does it mean, like your lived experience in life? 

Asha:

Can I start, please? Okay. Cause I as you were talking, I was thinking about the ways that people pleasing is like a generational thing, at least in my family, especially, I think within, for Black women. A lot of times that's like a part of your survival. And um, I was thinking about when I was growing up and my grandmother would take me shopping to like Macy's or like a department store. And before we would leave the house, you'd be like, okay, you need to change your clothes. Like, make sure that you're dressed well so that when we go to this store, like people want to, you know, serve us, like you know wait on us. And like, I'm like a child who grew up in the 90s. And so this sounds very like 1960s, like conversation. And it. And also, I grew up in Los Angeles. And so just thinking about the ways that, like from a child, I understood, like people pleasing in a way that really had nothing to do with like the immediate like one on one interaction where I have to make a decision to people please. It was sort of like almost like a daily strategy, sort of, that was more uh, it wasn't as intense as like, oh, someone's asking you to do something and you just say yes because you feel pressured to and you want them to think that you're. Yeah. Polite or you have the capacity to do it or that whatever. This was like a very like, normalized and like you like how do you want to say like insidious like just like another, It was like underneath our skin I guess. Yeah. That's what I was thinking about as you were talking. 

NK:

Yeah. I think what you just said brought up two things for me. One was like recently also in Los Angeles, like two years ago, I was having to go to a gynecological specialist and I like have, I'm on medi-cal, so I don't have a lot of options, as far as like where I get to choose to go. And it was hard for me to find a gynecologist who was a woman which I really wanted. And I wound up going to this place in Chinatown here. And all of that same stuff that you're talking about as far as like the strategy, basically the first time I went I was really not treated well, it was actually like an extremely traumatic experience. And I had to go back two more times on the subsequent visits I just remember being so fucked up over the fact that I was like getting dressed like strategizing exactly how you describe kind of like, what do I need to do to have these people treat me like a professional adult woman and not treat me the way they treated me the first time I was there? The first I was there and I wasn't sure, like, is it cause I'm on Medi-cal? Is it because I'm Black? I mean all these things are going through my mind. I was thinking of like, even the history of gynecology is like tied to the abuse of Black women and the trauma of Black women, like all of that was like going through my mind as I was like ready to go to the gynecologist to have this like invasive procedure, like that's the shit that I'm, that we’re talking about. 

Asha:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. 

Kamala:

Do you think in some way, like the whole dressing up thing and like the considering what you're gonna look like, it's like to differentiate oneself from whatever the expectation might be? Yeah. Is it to defy an expectation or to, like, show? I don't know. Like, I'm trying to figure out. Like, I. I do think that, like, yeah, there's like a whole respectability thing. Like, my family for sure. Also does, like, you can't wear like, my mom's underwear outside, like there used to be like pajama days at my high school and my mom would be like you cannot wear underwear outside. And I was like, yeah okay, there's some of that. And some of it is being like, we're not going to be like these, like whatever. Like I think in my family, it's like we're not going to look like the immigrants that you think we are. 

NK:

I think it's similar. Yeah. And I think also, I wonder if you this resonates with you. Is that the other thing I felt when you were talking also was about for me and my mom, like I grew up in Tennessee and like a in a military community, so it was pretty multicultural. But where I always looked like my mom always wanted to live in like these particular neighborhoods. Like, that were definitely not. 

And so I grew up like around a lot of like white kids who were acting who would like wear pajamas to school. Like, who could just kind of be free to do whatever. And I think, like, I wanted to like, just be like the people around me and like that felt normal to me. But my mom, I think I could see now, looking back like her conflict over being like, I want to like police you. like I don't want you to, like, leave the house looking how you look right now, but also like part of like what I'm trying to give you is the opportunity to do whatever the fuck you want. Like everyone else. And leave like, you know, you look right. And so she would like, let me do it. She'd like would let me leave. I would look crazy all. But like she let me do it. Yeah. But also she would always comment on it I could tell that it really, she didn't, it didn't sit well with her. You know, I think the I'm just having some a moment of like I guess compassion for her having to like navigate those two things. 

Asha:

Yeah. I think the thing. Yeah. Because I think about those moments with my grandmother,  a lot and even with my mom, who was always like, stop trying to look homeless or like stop trying to look like you're, you know, on drugs. And I was like, it's just a flannel. [laughter]

Like like, oh, I get to literally be like, I hate this world. And that's okay. Literally. It's just a flannel and jeans and vans like relax but. But yeah. And my mom giving me a lot of really conflicting messages about clothes, people myself and like her always being like, oh, you should be really proud to be Black or you should be really proud to be who you are. 

And then when I am feeling proud, you know, making me not feel like shit. Yeah. And I'm thinking too about like. My having compassion for that and understanding like you just want what's quote unquote best for me or whatever, but also it's like this overarching idea that, like, we can strategize our way out of oppression that other people inflict on us. And like that, there's like a cheat code. And even though I think we.

Kamala:

There's like an easy way. Yeah. Like, this is the easy way. Yeah. to try not to encounter like, too much extra friction.

Asha:

Right, even though it's like we all know it doesn't work but, It's like, it's like what else do people have I guess in trying to like hold on to whatever agency they think they might have. But I don't know. 

NK:

Yeah. I mean, yes. Like one thing I definitely was wanting to touch on, I had to cut a lot of it out of a series in my first episode was talking about, like my strategies my parents were using in their case. I feel like class and the accumulation of like wealth was like their their way of trying to access liberation or something. And I was like definitely trying to show them like these things do not work. 

Asha:

No, uh, We know this. 

NK:

I was like, I see what you tried to do. I got it. I appreciate it. But it didn't work. It doesn't protect me. It didn't protect me at all from any of it, you know. 

And I think, again, now that I'm like older and the kind of especially like for me, there's kind of like life before divesting from people. See, there's like life afterwards, to be totally honest. Like, I feel like. 

Kamala:

Oh my god, That's pretty cool.  

NK:

Yeah, like I think I said on the series, things I have never said to anyone ever, except maybe like very recently before, like my therapist. But like that was in the last two years, I was like just revealing myself in these certain ways. And so now that it is in the world, I feel like just extremely liberated and just kind of like. Everyone knows all the shit that I was like the most ashamed of, like it's recorded. It's like in the world, you know, I know that everyone at the Ralphs down the street hasn't like heard the series. Like, I can pretend that they have and feel like I've got nothing to hide from you. And that's it's very freeing. And I've been thinking a lot more about, like, my ability to access, like joy, like Black girl joy now and like and I find it in these moments that we were talking about where I'm kind of like just being utterly like my emo ass alternative self you know [laughs] like, but kind of like letting myself be that person that my mom, like, was afraid for me to be or whatever, that is like the protective. 

That is the strategy, is like being, leaning into your, your selfhood. Not into like the protective. 

Kamala:

I do want to talk about this idea of protection though, because I do think that that's also what the, the pleasing is about. Right. Like we learn it as a form of protection. 

And I was like listening to on my way over here the last episode in the series where you just start talking about like grandmothers and how they were raised and how mothers were raised and everyone gets passed down the stuff and like in their DNA. And I do think that, like, a lot of the things that we learn are like supposed to be for our own protection and that like, I don't know, like I'm like, what is what has changed? Like, is it just that, like, I no longer feel protected by that? Or is it that, like, I feel empowered enough to like no longer need that kind of protection? Like I don't really know what feels different for me because like I also similarly learned all these things about my dad was like going insane when I first cut my hair like this. And that was like so long ago now. And he was like, no one's gonna hire you. And like, people are going to harass you on the street. And I was like, yeah, I guess people will visibly be able to see that I'm gay. But like, my life is like so much better because people can visibly see that I'm gay. Like, it's such a weird and I guess like maybe that is more dangerous. And maybe as my parent that feels scarier. 

NK:

Can you talk a little bit about — just for the listeners at home — you are not Black. 

Kamala:

Oh yeah, I, I'm not Black. I am South Asian. I'm Indian and Japanese. 

NK:

Okay, yeah. 

Asha:

And it is important to know because a lot of times you don't know who's speaking and that context is so important. Yeah. 

NK:

Yeah. One of the reasons I asked Kamala to join the conversation was one because we have had a lot of conversations like this about being, about the both, the both-and-ness. and like being in-between-ness and I feel sort of in between cultures sometimes still even now, but also because like we got some letters from people who I feel who have similar stories to yours and who I felt like would really resonate with the series reason that I was like, I totally get why this speaks to, even though, you know, it's kind of a little bit different then what I'm talking about but. But there's some overlap. 

Kamala:

Blackness is, I think, like a very different situation. But I do think that we all share like a space together and sometimes there's some overlapping experiences. 

Asha:

Can I add a quick anecdote thing cuz I'm thinking, too, about, like a part of my understanding of people pleasing, obviously have a lot to do with, like, what people you're trying to please at the moment. And like, who are the people who hold the value in your space? And so I didn't really grow up around a lot of white people. And so people pleasing, like my grandmother telling me, like we need to dress this way was so foreign to me. I was like, I don't understand why. Because I, but, like, she was raised around, like, a lot of white people. And so, like in my community where I was growing up, like Black boys were the people that I wanted to please and spaces. And the people who held a lot of value. And they were the ones that were like just were able to like really capitalize on, like the Black cool that people talk about, a lot of times was really geared towards, like them, their experiences, like the way that they dress, like the things that they said. And for Black girls, it was really difficult for us to tap into that coolness. 

So, yeah, I just remember being in class and seeing boys, Black boys say anything like literally anything like it could be like somebody said something. Then there's a pause and then they're like, naw, and everybody just like busts up laughing. And I would just be sitting there like, this is not even that funny I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but like, I too have a personality. And I just really was like, these niggas are not really that great. But like, they get to like they get to enjoy like all of the things that, like Blackness has allowed us to enjoy with just like creativity and like they get to have the space to just move around. And like even in and it's not to say that Black boys are not confined by societal like restrictions because, obviously they are. But um, but I do think that, like, their being boys just afforded them a different kind of freedom and a lot of spaces. And so, yeah. So growing up, it was really important to me that Black boys saw me as somebody that was valuable and somebody that was like, um like I said, I already knew I wasn't going to have access to white femininity. So like being that girl, like I shut that down quickly. And I think too often about like, did I become the person I am from that, you know, like, I really do love hip-hop. I really do love Biggie. I love doing, I love all that shit. And I'm like was that me or was that me trying to become someone that Black men thought could, like, navigate both spaces and be this and be that? 

Kamala:

I mean, I do know it's interesting because I do feel like for me personally, I'm like I feel like I naturally just like don't fit any of the, like, ideals of what femininity looks. -Very few people do right. Like not most people do. But I feel like I also spent like some time in my youth, like being like, obviously this is not going to work out for me. If this were a path that I were trying to go down, that's just not going to work. And I think particularly when I think of like related to like my ethnicity is like the way that Asian people are valued is by being like slight and like conforming. And like, like my hair when it's long is like highly valued because it's like thick because it's Indian, but like straight because it's Japanese. And everyone's like when I cut it off, everyone was like, you should have saved it to like sell for wigs or something. And I was like, that's like that isn't saying that like the value of the body is attached to like all these commodified, like colonized ways that like my body has been introduced to like the Western world. So I do think about that. And then I think also, like it's part of my personality then, is like a living in a body that, like, doesn't fit. Right. So, like, I think I'm like, yeah, like, was I funny when, like am I just a funny person or has that just been a way for a long time of me to be like, here's some other value to tell you how to value me. That is not about, I don't know, something would be related to how my body should be expected to be. 

NK:

[exhales] Yeah. I feel like I use academics and intellect to attempt to do that as well, when I was younger, like I was such a perfectionist and I was like, so, so, so much anxiety around performing well in school. I think that related to being like this is the value I can bring you know, because I'm not funny. [laughs]

Asha:

Yeah. No, I think about people like that with myself. Like personality traits where I'm like, you think you know who you are and why you do these things. But a lot of this shit comes from like insecurities and trying to you're it's almost like your body trying to reach like homeostasis. 

Kamala:

You're like, I need to find a balance in here. 

All:

Yeah. So it's like, yeah. 

NK:

Yeah. I love that, I think that I is actually a perfect segue to the last point I want to make, which is that this morning I was relistening to almost there the book that I mentioned before, Sister Citizen, that was sort of like foundational to the first episode. Sister Citizen is like sort of an exploration of like Patricia Hill Collins idea of controlling images and shame and how that works and like among Black women. But she's talking about like this idea of the crooked room, like a study that she read where, do you know about this? [someone says no]  Yeah. Where she's like saying like there's like all your presented. Like there's, there's an actual study that has the thing is like a neurological study of like whether you can whether if you're in or you're actually enough physical space where, like, things are tilting, that what certain percentage of people can figure out how to, like, be upright in that space. And some people will be sitting like at a 45 degree angle in their chair and they'll think that they're upright. And it's kind of like that was what the study was observing. But she's sort of saying, like this idea of the crooked room is that like as Black women go through the world, you're presented with all these like crooked images of yourself, some of which, you know, the mammy, the Jezebel, those kind of things, like those would be considered, some of those images and that you see.You're presented with these images and they kind of distort how you see yourself or how you like, think of yourself. And I was thinking about, like the process of divesting from people pleasing or like of adulting really just being a process of trying to constantly right yourself. Like trying to find that balance or to find that like where like where is actually home, like what is me and like what is everything else. And I feel like I just kind of, I'm making this motion with my hand that's like a metronome or something as I feel like I'm just constantly like swinging back and forth and just like trying to. And all these moments I'm like, I'm in the center. I found it. And like, that's those moments I said like. I felt like when I understand, like what what actual joy feels like, like that's those moments that they don't they're not constant. But, I'm definitely feeling them like more I feel more in the center now than I ever have felt before. 

Asha:

That's so exciting.

NK:

I know. 

Kamala:

That's amazing. I do think of it as like a pendulum like that, because, like, you change the world changes everything’s sort of moving. 

Kamala:

I don't know. I guess I think of adulthood as like the as I get further into it, like all the different identities that I have like, I can, like, sort of like hold them closer. Yes. Yeah. 

Asha:

I think, too, like finding because I think we've got to like what you're searching for and I think all of us are searching for it is like there's like a reckoning sort of. Because like I think about me and like colonizer bops and like my white tbt playlist and like, you know, this colony [laughs] colonizer music is so fucking good. It's like it's a way for me to, like, do the both-and. And I'm like I'm like I'm really like people who know me. Like I'm I don't play when it comes to white supremacy, but I'm also like, and a part of that not playing is like naming it. Yeah. And so like naming like yes. This is all like colonizer stuff but like it's, and I love it and it's mine, now. [laughs]

NK:

I think you're so right. I think you're getting at something that I also think about a lot as far as adulting and stuff integration, I sometimes feel like, I know people have a relationship to Blackness and whiteness that feels sort of.... [NK's voice fades out as introspective music fades in]

Kaitlin Prest:

Please forgive this brief interruption. We'll be right back. 

Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis:

I'm Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis, a licensed psychologist with a focus in trauma recovery and I'm a professor of psychology at Pepperdine University and an ordained elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. 

NK:

Licensed psychologist Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis is the host of a podcast called The Homecoming, which is a show about the concept of coming home to yourself. It's largely informed by the wisdom and experiences of Black women and Black Feminist thought. Dr. Thema gave me some time at her office in the Valley and we got into a conference room and just started talking and then I had to scramble to turn the mic on, so that's what you're hearing at the beginning. [laughter]

NK:

Um, go ahead. 

Dr. Thema:

The reality of liberation is an internal journey, and ah, but it's a contextualized internal journey. So what is happening outside of us definitely has an impact, but it is internalized oppression, when we start to wear those chains and think of those chains as our identity so much to the point where we're not even clear we're wearing them. We say this is just me. I'm just like this. And so when we can get the revelation, this isn't me. This isn't me. 

This is how I have been shaped. This is how I have survived. But it is not me. And the amazing thing is this free me that I don't know is the authentic me, even though I don't know her. 

Yeah. I'm excited that you have been on that journey and that you're sharing that with your listeners because it is empowering. And so many times we are looking for those outside of us to fill us. And when we discover we have a well that we have been talked out of, that has been hidden from us when we discover the well that we've been carrying. And I know that as a girl, as a girl, I had a deep, deep well. And the experiences disconnected me from that truth and then continued experiences, continue to teach us that we are empty. 

And the reality is we are full.

NK:

I love that. [NK and Dr. Thema laugh]

NK:

That makes me think of well one, that makes me think of course, like what I think what I really wanna talk to you about is just the concept of homecoming, which is the name of your podcast and how that shows up in your work. But also, I'm really, I'm really obsessed with the essay Uses of the Erotic by Audre Lorde. Do you know that essay? Yeah. So I thought about that as well when you're talking about that like deep inner well, it's become like it almost feels like it is my affirmation, you know, that I return to. 

Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis:

Absolutely. And that's the beauty of sacred work. And being a sacred artist is there are layers. There are levels to this. So you can return to it and say, I thought I had it, but now I get it on another level, as an artist, we censor less. Right. And when you are all buttoned up in censoring and trying to predict what other people want to hear, it cuts us off from our power. And so, you know, the incredible artist is one who, who is released, who, who lives out loud. And then, as you described with your experience, suddenly discovers I'm not the only one. You know that we have all been living buttoned up and then it is contagious. Freedom is contagious. And when people are in the presence of a free woman, it frees them. 

NK:

Yeah. 

Dr. Thema:

Yes. So that is the gift of this podcast. And in my podcast, I called it Homecoming. And it is the journey home to ourselves because many of us are wandering. And I would say in particular women, that as girls, while there is a beauty in relationship, there's a beauty in community, there's a beauty in family. Sometimes those things have been used as tools of erasure where it is not real relationship if I'm not present. If I am only in service of another. And so I can lose myself in the hunt to be chosen. To be seen. To be heard. And it's no coincidence that people talk about Black girls and Black women being so loud that while we are simultaneously loud, we are very much unheard. 

Which is a part of the loudness, is, can you hear me? Can you hear me? 

And the desire to be heard and to be seen can cause us to adapt, adjust, modify ourselves, to present ourselves in ways that we feel will be, not only accepted, but celebrated. And that is not a figment of our imagination. The lack of celebration that exists for those who reflect us. And so the more I am disconnected from myself, the more disempowered I am. The more depressed I will be, the more anxious I will be, because there is no grounding. And I am looking for something to give me ground to give me air to give me life, to give me identity. And when I release the fantasy that someone else or something else will complete me and I come home to myself. It ends up shifting everything. It changes how, how I think about me, affects how I operate in the world. 

And so it will change my work, my art, my relationships, my spirituality, because I am actually good with me. And that is the journey. And the beginning of that journey requires knowing I'm not at home. 

And often we don't know it, especially when we have been talked out of homebase as children. Then we have grown up in this disconnected way. And can I say we are even rewarded for being these disconnected beings, especially those of us who are over achievers who intellectualize. And so we can perform. And when you perform well, people will praise you. But with that perfectionism comes dissatisfaction. And so people around you will be impressed and you will be empty. And so when we discover it really is not about my works. It is about my being, that I am enough. And that goes counter to our training. Our training is we have to be more and do more and and hustle and grind and lean in. 

NK:

Like prove that you're enough. 

Dr. Thema:

Yeah, you know, you need to lose sleep and you need to be impressive and you need to, all of these things to to be halfway enough. And that's how we're walking around with this imposter syndrome while at the same time pretending we believe we're amazing. Which is why in psychology we give self-esteem measures. Black people rate very high because culturally it's not acceptable for us to say we don't think well of ourselves. Right. So if you ask us, we're gonna say, I'm amazing. I'm fabulous. Right. We're gonna say these scripts. 

But then when we look at how we live, how we treat ourselves, how we rest or don't rest, how we eat, what we do to medicate ourselves and I mean other things that are detrimental to our being, then we have to raise some questions of, am I really good with me? And often the answer is not. And while that can be jarring, that's the beginning of healing, is when I'm suddenly uncomfortable with living the life of this false self. 

NK:

That's what happened to me. I felt like this, I have a relationship with this voice that kind of maybe was always there, but sort of felt as if it appeared kind of. And then became progressively louder and louder until I could not ignore it. And I sometimes think now that that voice has really quieted or when it appears I fucking am just sort of like, Allright, like, I know you now. You know, um, and I know that it's not telling the truth per se. But I did feel like it sort of it was like alarms going off, kind of like you can't continue, like how much longer you gonna, like, walk around with, like, the mask that you're wearing and like that. I was able to identify that a lot of my anxiety was just the pressure to maintain the mask and to like I was saying, that no one knew any of these things about me. I'm also really curious about, something you touched on which I also think about especially in making this work. Something that felt very one of the reasons it felt very risky and vulnerable was this understanding that, like some of the things I'm saying about myself are counter to how I'm supposed to talk about myself as a Black woman or what it means to be. It feels yeah like I'm not. I definitely have the feeling like I'm not supposed to admit that I have felt this way, I'm not supposed to admit that like oppression won, you know, or that I had internalized these things, that I had self-loathing thoughts, really. And I sometimes, like I said, I guess I see the discomfort with me having even before the podcast with me being some sort of self-deprecating. But now, like me exposing myself, I think there's I see some discomfort, sometimes I'm just curious, how do those two things work together, sort of like the individual desire or need to start that healing process work with the sort of cultural imperative to maybe, like, not talk about it so much? 

Dr. Thema:

Absolutely. It is, as you said, when we discover it's unsustainable and in some ways we call people strong who can sustain it longer. But I am excited when someone shows up to therapy at 19. At 21. Like, do I have to wait till I'm 60 to heal? Like, until like it really, you know, I carried it as long as I could. But now I have decades of unpacked baggage. And the reality is. Even when we think we're holding it together, it comes out, it comes out even in our parenting. It comes out in our vocabulary. And even when we think, like, you know, I'm superwoman. If we talk to the people around you, they often would hope that you would heal. Right. And so what I asked myself when we think about being a role model is, is the way I am living. Not the way I appear, but the way I'm living. Is that what I want for my daughters? Like, do I really want Black girls to duplicate this? And like, how does it feel for real from the inside? And one of the pieces I think is coming, coming to terms with the truth that these opposites can coexist. So meaning to acknowledge my vulnerability does not mean I have no strength, that we, we possess all of it. So we are incredible and we're hurting. Right. So me acknowledging hurting or wounds does not erase that. Yeah, I've done some phenomenal things. Right. And that's humanity where we don't have to be robots or simply goddesses. Right. But that there are cracks in it. And and that is truth. 

NK:

Thank you for saying that. Yeah. I feel I feel that way as well. Yeah. I have to remind myself that, like, one does not negate the other. It's all of me. And yeah. And also it makes me think of something else I want to talk about with regards to the process of self defining. I sometimes think of it as like integration. And like I think I'm integrating all these parts of myself. That have been, that I have been suppressing or that I pushed away or denigrated for whatever reason. I guess can you speak to what what that is? Well, when someone has sort of done this, has begun has embarked on the healing work, and maybe have gotten to a place where I am, where I'm like, OK, I've sort of feel like I've divested from people pleasing, but I'm in a place now where I'm like okay but like who? So, who am I? [laughs] which is exciting and fun. Like I said, I'm falling in love with myself like it is. It feels like a new relationship. It's exciting. But I guess I was curious, like, what do you have? What guidance would you offer to someone who's going about this strange process? [NK laughs]

Dr. Thema:

I would let them know, let us know that the journey doesn't stop with recognizing who I'm not, that that is only, that's a beginning. It's like when people come into counseling and I tell. I trained therapists who are studying at Pepperdine. And I tell them, you know, therapy doesn't end with what we call symptom cessation, meaning. Now, people aren't so depressed or they're not cutting or they're not getting high every day. Now they can get to work. 

Right. But sometimes we think the absence of distress, active distress is wellness. So it's like, okay, I got these other voices out of my head. You know, the shoulds, everyone's saying, like, what I should be. And now, as you said, I get to explore and create who I am. And that's especially important for people who have grown up with these scripts and trauma since childhood, that it's not a return. Right. It's I never, I never knew her. Right. I never knew me. And so for some, that can be like, well, you know, how do you do that? Well, it is, we get to create it from scratch. And the reality also is. She, who is you, has been showing up all along in glimpses, so it is not absolutely from emptiness, right. That parts of our hopes, dreams, needs, fears have been peeking out but have been silenced. So it's not a total creation. It is a permission. I give myself permission to explore new aspects of myself and that will also come into fruition with like time is limited. Time is so sacred to me that you want to guard it and invest time in places and with people that cultivate you blossoming. You know that once you have gotten tired of shrinking, and masking, you know, you have to have your radar on. It's like, oh, and this place like masks are required. So I really have to like, minimize my time in this space. And so when I start to engage with people that stretch me or I start to attend these workshops that tap me into myself, then I'm being fed and I'm being nourished. And that's, that's my priority. So much, especially as women, we're taught to pour, you know, give, give, give, you know, to whom much is given, much is required, give, give, give and it's a lot of empty, resentful cups that are giving, from, from a broken place. And so this is the season. You say identity formation is the season for me receiving. And so if it doesn't feed me. No, thank you. 

NK:

Wow. Okay, That was exciting. I feel like I'm maybe intuitively knowing this but it's nice to hear someone say that, that like okay because I feel like. And also, I was reminded of the day that I emailed you. I had listened to an episode, I forgot which episode it was but I definitely wrote down some some notes and one of them was pay attention to when you're when you put your mask back on. And like, what's going on in those situations? Can you learn to not have your mask in those scenarios? You know, for me, I think when I'm actually in when I'm in predominantly Black spaces, is when I tend to have the mask goes back on. And so that's my work to do. As I was like okay, that's an area where I like, I want to like stay in that space and practice not doing it. And the other areas I'm like only I don't need to spend my time there, you know. But it's really nice to hear that. 

Dr. Thema:

Absolutely. And in our spaces there can be the pressure for the script or excellence. We say hashtag Black excellence hashtag Black girl magic. Right. What if I'm not feeling so magical today? What if I don't really feel excellent? And what I have discovered is so many of both our sisters and brothers are longing for places where they can tell the truth and so too, in some ways disrupt environments with truth. And while some will resist or be uncomfortable, many will gravitate. So sometimes being the trailblazer in our vulnerability, but you have to be in a certain place where you're free and comfortable and not invested in people's response. And I would say therapeutically it helps me to know that often people's surface response isn't the real response. So, you know, sometimes it's coming out of people's discomfort. And so to just lean into it. But we, you know, you decide what is what is the worst thing that could happen from this is that suddenly people are not going to think I'm perfect. Okay, right. And then what? And then what? So some people will just say, like, you need to, like, shake it off and get over it. And other people will say, like, oh, like me, too. That's the that's the beauty of us being transparent about our process is other people benefit. They do. They take it in to varying degrees. 

NK:

This has been so lovely. Um, I have one more question really, and it's kind of optional. I've just been asking different Black women... [NK's voice fades out and we hear piano fade in gently] 

Audre Lorde:

The erotic is a resource within each one of us that lives in a very deeply female and spiritual plane. It is firmly rooted in the power of all our unexpressed and unrecognized feelings, in order to perpetrate itself every oppression in our history must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed. As, for instance, within our culture as women that can provide energy for change. But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to any woman who does not fear its revelation nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough. 

Nina Simone:

I think what you're trying to ask is, why am I so insistent upon giving out to them that Blackness, that Black power, that Black pushing them to identify with Black culture? 

Angela Davis:

I think that's what you're asking, is, is, I have no choice over it in the first place. To me, we are the most beautiful creatures in the whole world. Black people, I mean. And I mean that in every every sense. Outside and inside. And to me, we have a culture that is surpassed, by, by, by, by, no other civilization. But we don't know anything about it. So, again, I think I've said this before. In this same interview, I think sometime before my, my job is to somehow make them curious enough. Or persuade them by hook or crook to get more aware of themselves and where they came from and what they are into and what is already there. Just to bring it out. This is what compels me to compel them and I will do it by whatever means necessary. [beautiful piano continues]

Audre Lorde:

And the erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos and power of our deepest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire once having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognized its power in honor and self-respect. We can require no less of ourselves. 

Dr. Thema:

I will give two. So one is Lucille Clifton. Incredible African-American poet: "Come and celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed." 

NK:

[laughing] Damn.  

Dr. Thema:

Every day! And that is the truth of the trauma and triumph, right? That there is so much designed to dismantle me and some of it has dented me, has had an impact. And I'm still here. Right. And the other one from a sacred place. My mom, Reverend Cecillia Bryant, wrote: "God is speaking, my life is God's vocabulary." And this gets at what you were saying about Audre Lorde, we are a sacred text, right? We are sacred beings. And so as we're living. What a truth that is being revealed in our lives and the other beautiful part about the idea of something being written by us and within us is each moment. We have an opportunity to turn the page. And I could not stop some people from writing on the pages of my life. And I now have the pen. 

Kaitlyn Prest:

This episode was produced by Nicole Kelly, Chiquita Paschal edited the Divesting From People Pleasing series thanks to Asha Grant, Kamala Puligandla and Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis for chatting with NK for this episode. The voices you heard at the end were Nina Simone and Audre Lorde. The Heart is Nicole Kelly, Phoebe Unter, Sharon Mashihi and me, Kaitlin Prest. It is a production of Mermaid Palace and it is distributed by Radiotopia. The Heart is now a more than 10 years old queer feminist institution that once in that once in the long past, went by the name of Audio Smut, we encourage you to dive down deep into the feed and listen to the audio that we've done over the years. It's a trip and it's worth it. Thank you to my two first radio loves Jess Grossmann and Mitra Kaboli for being cornerstones in the foundation of the show that this has become. If you like, this show tell your friends we need listeners to keep the show alive. You can follow you can follow the heart at the heart radio on Instagram. You can follow me, at Kaitlyn Prest. If you love this work and you want to support it with your cash dollars, go to The Heart Radio dot org to donate. We would greatly appreciate it. Do follow Mermaid Palace Art on Instagram. Okay, that's it. Thanks for listening. 

episode 3: memory

Episode 3 of Divesting From People Pleasing.

When trauma is held in the individual and collective body, shame, grief, and rage are passed down for generations.

The Heart · Divesting From People Pleasing: Memory pt 1

The Heart · Divesting From People Pleasing: Memory pt 2

___

Divesting From People Pleasing is a mini series written, performed, and sound designed by Nicole Kelly, edited by Chiquita Paschal, and hosted by Kaitlin Prest. Design by Phoebe Unter.  Music in this episode: Wonton Soup by Audiobinger, Away by Meydn. This episode includes 2 excerpts from It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How To End the Cycle by Mark Wollen. Special thanks to Meenadchi, whose Decolonizing Nonviolent Communication workshop was the impetus for this series. Produced with the generous support of Mermaid Palace & PRX. 

transcript

Kaitlin Prest:

From Mermaid Palace and Radiotopia… welcome to…The Heart.

[theme music comes in, sounds like a beating heart]

I'm Kaitlin Prest. This is episode three of Divesting from People Pleasing. In the last episode, NK realizes that she's looking for release, a way to externalize shame. In this episode, she finds a way. Episode three: Memory. 

Nicole Kelly (NK):

When your mother is still a baby inside her own mother your DNA already exists.

[moody synth builds tension, bubbling noise quietly begins]

To put it simply, we receive aspects of our grandmother's mothering through our own mother. The traumas our grandmother endured, her pains and sorrows, her difficulties in her childhood, the losses of those she loved who died early. These filter to some degree into the mothering she gave to our mother. If we look back another generation, the same would likely be true about the mothering our grandmother received. These patterns appear to be hardwired into the brain and begin to be formed before we're even born. How our mother bonds with us in the womb, is instrumental in the development of our neural circuitry. 

A life completely devoid of trauma, as we're learning, is highly unlikely. Traumas, do not sleep even with death, but rather continue to look for the fertile ground of resolution in the children of the following generations. 

[this was from] “It didn't start with you, how inherited family trauma shapes who we are and how to end the cycle” by Mark Wollynn.

NK:

We started going on these Black history vacations. Me, my mom, my dad and my sister. We went to Washington, D.C., where my mom is from. Because we wanted to visit the new Smithsonian, the African-American History Museum. At the museum, you work your way up from the basement, from the exhibits on the invention of whiteness and the Middle Passage. Through emancipation, reconstruction and the civil rights movement. In that section, the section that covered the civil rights activism of the 50s and 60s, I stood looking for a really long time at this photo of Ruby Bridges. 

When she was six years old she desegregated an elementary school in New Orleans in the same year that my mom was six years old. When Ruby arrived at the school with her mom they were escorted past an angry mob of white parents who later refused to send their kids to school with the Black girl. I've known the image of Ruby Bridges since I was a kid because my parents had a framed print of The Problem We All Live With, a Norman Rockwell painting depicting a little Black girl in a white dress. She's flanked by four white men in suits, U.S. Marshals. And the small girl's head barely reaches their elbows. A racial slur scrawled across the wall behind them. It looks as if someone has thrown a tomato at them. The fruit slides down the wall behind her, leaving a red trail in its wake. When I was a kid, I thought the girl in the Norman Rockwell painting looked like me. Her hair's in pigtails and stiff braids that stick out straight behind her head, just like mine did. In the photo that inspired the painting. The photo that is in the Smithsonian, Ruby is ascending the steps of the school with the U.S. Marshals. In the museum, it's the text beneath a photo that captures my attention. Beneath her photo, the text quotes one of the U.S. Marshals who said: "She showed a lot of courage. She never cried." I can't help but think about the six year old girl. She never cried. The angry mob, the men in suits. 

Would she have been any less heroic if she had cried? 

It's been three years since Divesting From People Pleasing, and three months since I started therapy and I'm in another workshop. 

[The voice of someone leading the workshop begins to come in and out: kind of keep us regulated or let us know]

In class, we study the brain, the prefrontal cortex.

[Okay heartbeat you can slow down because you're in a really safe environment]

The part that handles emotional regulation and safety and the fight or flight response

[or, you know, stomach you can relax and it's okay to eat right now]

We also learn that there's a third response, to go numb

[because it's the body's way of saying]

when your body thinks we can't make it out of this alive. 

[And so I'm going to keep you safe by making it so that you can't feel anything.] 

Soon I realize I need a witness to my shame.

[NK's voice documenting her experience: I just want to remember this, that I just...]

I feel compelled to document and share this process [got out of therapy and told my therapist that um] just like, to me, it just means it's like that feeling is like all the things I don't say, like all the ways of suppressions.

[these awkward expressions of sexuality in public are like really unbearable]

I want to just like disappear, I want no one to ever see me again. I want

[I don't want to have to be seen]

divesting from people pleasing.

[I spent all day yesterday just like immersed]

all of the things that are unexpectedly coming up for me, by other people, which I start to think of as my decolonizing

[NK's voice tearful, emotional: like I wish I didn't feel so like alone in this process.]

Meenadchi:

My name is Meenadchi, and I facilitate nonviolent communication workshops specifically with a decolonial lens. So today's workshop is going to be looking at shame and rage. 

NK:

Before that day’s somatic exercise we discussed our relationship to shame and rage, and I share that I'm not easily provoked to anger other than the righteous rage I direct towards bigots, rapists and unjust power structures. 

Meenadchi:

I think a lot of people are ashamed of feeling angry, but like who are the bodies that I think could benefit from being able to have access to rage in a healthy, safe space? 

NK:

Before that day's workshop some of us had been asked to participate in the somatic exercise, which asked us to channel and release our rage, which asked us to push against Meenadchi, our facilitator for three minutes. It was both a vocal and physical exercise and I was reluctant to do it. 

Meenadchi:

We're outside and the moon is probably the brightest light. And there is also this quality of energy that is just running around and through the group to where the group feels really connected. One of the things that feels like a thread that connects us is that we're all people of color. Almost all people of color.

NK:

One by one the people Meedadchi had chosen before went up to do the exercise. 

Meenadchi:

You put your hands on me and we would move together and you would just push as hard as you could. 

NK:

If I felt anything in my body in the workshop, it was the familiar feeling in my throat when I'm holding something that I need to express. 

Meenadchi:

[breathes in] And at the same time you would be making vocalizations and they can be any kind of sounds, they can be grunts, yells, whatever you want, but no words. 

NK:

I mostly felt it while watching others release their rage. 

Meenadchi:

And we're also moving out of the story or the narrative of what the rage might be. Right. Especially because a lot of the work is that underneath rage is a lot of grief. 

NK:

Each time someone finished their turn, Meenadchi would look at me, but I needed several invitations to participate and then permission to use their body. And finally, reassurance that they could actually withstand my release. 

Meenadchi:

So you're gonna put your hands on me right here. 

NK:

I placed both hands on Meenadchi's body beneath their shoulder. 

Meenadchi:

So when you're pushing on me, I need you to push consistently. 

NK:

And I started to push a little. 

Meenadchi:

I can really feel the hesitation and resistance. 

NK:

But then I whispered to Meenadchi, 

NK:

[whispering] I just don't think that I can push you, I can't, I don't think that I can do it, I can't push you. I'm sorry. 

Meenadchi:

I know that this is not an activity that is beyond what her capacity can hold. And there is an underlying need for me to be able to take us there, to be able to get us there. And I know that I can't do it by myself. I know that NK can't do it like it can't be just the two of us. And so I'm hoping that pulling in these other three people will help us get us to where we need to be. 

NK:

In response Meenadchi said to the rest of the group: 

Meenadchi:

Okay, okay. So I'm gonna have three people come stand behind N.K. and I just want you to be with her and just make sounds as she goes. Just make whatever sounds feel appropriate as we're working. 

NK:

So then I push against Meenadchi’s body 

Meenadchi:

So now we're moving. 

NK:

Slowly at first and then faster. 

Meenadchi:

There's a stronger energy coming from her end.

Carmina:

And as she's doing it like, her head moves up and down, she's kind of just breathing. 

Meenadchi:

And I can also feel the energy of the three people behind her. 

Carmina:

You would pause in between, even though you're still resisting and just kind of take deep breaths, and like start pushing again. 

Meenadchi:

I'm sensing, hoping, imagining that that energy is flowing into her body. 

NK:

But I heard the people behind me making different noises. I wasn't sure how many people there were. They are sort of like making those noises of release. 

Carmina:

Like it was a lot of release of like air, deep, and like long with every push. It came like a sound from your throat, guttural, like grunts. Also, like I was also crying because I was like feeling all of this emotion, like radiating. There was like one final good push. And then and then it stopped, it ended. It was so emotional. 

Meenadchi:

It feels like NK falls into my arms. It's like the first time that we've had, that I feel like she has let me hold her in this space or in this way. 

Carmina:

It was very palpable, that there was stuff inside that needed to come out, so. 

NK:

A total of six people did the exercise. I was the last one. 

Afterwards, we went back inside and we talked about it. And there was no explicit or linear connection made between the conversation about shame that we'd had earlier that day and this final rage exercise.

Carmina:

Well, just because in the previous sessions, the folks that had gotten picked for this activity, had expressed that they had a hard time talking about how they felt or communicating their feelings or even like not being able to cry. 

Meenadchi:

I don't know yeah. Just to the comfort level you had with, like, your feelings, feeling your feelings. I knew that there is just like stuff in there that wanted to come out. 

NK:

But someone said — Carmina said — the most revelatory thing. 

Carmina:

It was just kind of like you were exhausted. It just sounded like you were tired of holding this stuff. 

NK:

And I was just so shocked that she said she could feel that because in that moment when she said, I hadn't been thinking about it during the pushing, but in the moment when she said it, I I felt like everything drained out of my body like yeah. I am so tired. I'm so tired of having to hold this. It's like having to hold the posture. Like the constant sort of the rigidity of like constantly policing myself. 

Carmina:

And I remember thinking about that saying like, you know, all the women in me are tired. And I think that it came back to that when we all kind of shared back. I think I guess it confirmed what I was thinking when you talked about, like, you know, issues with the ways in which your mother would express herself or lack of expression. But whether or not you express it doesn't mean you don't feel it. Right. So I felt that maybe you carry that without even meaning to. We all carry things that we don't mean to carry because we inherit pain and trauma and love and all these things that the women before us have carried. 

[bubbling oceanic sound]

Meenadchi:

For any like, any work that we're trying to do with collective experience, with witness and with knowing your body to be able to discern what is rage and what is grief, because if we confuse the two, we don't actually attend to what needs to be attended to. I guess grief just feels like big fucking open water. [Ocean sound of waves moving in and out gently] And then rage feels really clear. It feels very direct. It feels like a boundary. It also feels like, you know, when it is acknowledged, when it is really heard, listened to, attended to, it can dissipate immediately. It doesn't have a need to hold on and stay in the body. 

NK:

On a neurophysiological level, each time we practice having the beneficial experience, we're pulling engagement away from our brains trauma response center and bringing engagement to other areas of our brain, specifically to our prefrontal cortex, where we can integrate the new experience and neuroplastic change can occur. 

Meenadchi tells us that trauma isn't always a big event like rape or abuse or other kinds of physical violence. 

Meenadchi:

Like even the framework that we use right is really ableist colonial sort of framework, the idea that I'm supposed to be able to live by myself. 

NK:

There's also trauma anytime we don't experience belonging or feeling safe in a group. 

Meenadchi:

The idea that I'm supposed to be able to survive in a context where I'm not loved and celebrated. 

NK:

In fight or flight, your inner ear shifts to hear the lower frequencies of predators. Which means that today in a contemporary setting, we may not hear the higher tones and the voices of the people we're speaking to, the tones that would reassure us that we're safe and wanted and not actually in danger of attack. The terrible asshole voice in my head once kept me safe, but now it's preventing me from fully living my life from experiencing connection with the people I most want to connect to. My public persona, the person I am in the world has been shaped by what was essentially a coping mechanism. [NK's brain voice: you're so fucking stupid. Everyone hates you, you're so fucking stupid] in Meenadchi's workshop we learn to confront our demons. 

[NK's mean inner brain voice: You're a fucking asshole, you're a fucking bitch, everyone hates you, you're a douche bag] 

To write down what they say.

[You're horrible]

[this is fine, this is fine, this is fine]

[Shut the fuck up. What are you doing. Shut the fuck up, What do you think you're doing.] 

and to thank them for their service.

[Shut up. No, one want's to hear, you're stupid]

[it's fine.]

And then to tell them that we don't need them anymore. 

[crackling fire sound or wind blowing]

NK:

That winter, I'm home for the holidays with my parents and my sister. My parents live near Nashville and in the days after Christmas, we drive four hours south through Memphis and across the state line into Alabama

[Rescue Me by Fontella Bass starts playing-the wind sounds like the air moving through a car's windows]

to visit a part of the south I've never been to: Birmingham, Selma and Montgomery.

[can't you see that I'm lonely, rescue me]

It turns out to be the closest I have ever felt to a homeland. 

[Car navigation sounds of a woman's robot voice giving directions] 

From Birmingham, we drive a few hours south.

[car window sounds-slight right onto Alabama 22 west]

to Selma. 

[Sounds of people joking around in a car, what are you doing, you ruined it] 

Where we walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where 600 voting rights activists began their march to Montgomery in honor and in protest of a Black man killed during a voter registration drive. 

[sounds of rain falling] 

It was raining in Montgomery when the marchers arrived from Selma and it's raining when we arrive, which seems fitting. 

NK:

We visit a museum in downtown Montgomery that connects the condition of chattel slavery to the contemporary condition of mass incarceration. The Equal Justice Institute's Legacy Museum highlights the trauma of family separation and the shame and humiliation of Jim Crow, which was especially resonant for me since I was home researching my personal lineage of shame, trauma and grief. Historically, the first room of that museum was the room where people waited to be sold at auction. Just a few blocks away, the walls of the room are painted with accounts of mothers separated from their children, husbands separated from their wives and siblings ripped apart.

[When you take us out on the block — they want us to sell ourselves?]

One person describes the anguish of being separated from her family. 

NK:

[reading quote from museum text] "Oh, such crying and weeping when parting from each other."

And then the punishment for showing this natural human affection, the lash. "The slave holder would apply the lash or paddle upon the naked skin." 

I'm thinking about how for us, displays of vulnerability were forbidden and how showing that you care about something could put that thing at risk. 

[film footage: Seems like I hear my daughter calling out for me, I, I can't find her. ]

Beyond this first room there's a corridor of motion activated holograms. 

Voice of the hologram:

A little girl, a little boy. 

NK:

The voices and stories of people who are looking for their families. In the days before this trip, I was reading a book on epigenetics and preparing to interview my mom, to ask her questions about her childhood and mine. 

Voice of the hologram:

[A high pitched voice singing emotionally] I can't see my children. 

NK:

But, I haven't done the interview. I've been putting it off. We've never really been close or comfortable expressing affection or opening up to each other. And I sense she had the same relationship with her own mother. 

Voice of the hologram:

I can hear, I can feel, I think I can hear them, but I just can't see them. 

NK:

In the museum, I watched my mom and wonder what she's thinking, how she's feeling. But I felt that it was important not to disrupt whatever defense system she had built up over the years, the ways she had learned to protect herself from the impact of these images. These stories, this history, our history. 

NK:

When we got back to my parents house in Tennessee, I went down into my parents basement and started looking through boxes of old photos. I was looking for photos that would remind me of Georgia, remind me of my younger self, younger versions of my parents, my grandparents. And I find a photo of myself from my High School prom in the photo, I'm standing alone without a date in the parking lot of my High School in a vintage lace dress in heels and a dark red lipstick. And I just kind of hold this photo and just stare at it and, like, examine every detail of the photo. Like, I'm really interested in what's conveyed by my expression. I'm really interested in the expression on the faces of the two girls pointing at me in the background, you know, sort of like there's this kind of arc of attention around me that I don't think I was aware of at the time. I definitely wasn't aware of it. It's like a record of this disconnect, like knowing exactly how I felt about myself at the time the photo was taken, knowing how I saw myself versus how other people see me. I felt a lot like now, like how I see myself. The narrative that's going on inside my mind that is so different from what's actually happening. And right then I made a promise to myself that I would end that disconnect, that I would stop seeing myself through this, this distorted lens that white supremacy and misogynoir had given me. 

[rain drops falling softly]

NK:

I fell asleep that night to the sound of rain, and in the morning I woke up crying. It was the last day of the year, my last day at my parents house before flying back to Los Angeles. And throughout the day, I'm just weeping. There is this overwhelming feeling that there is a self that I have to leave here, a self that I have to leave behind, leave here in this year, leave here in this house, just leave in the past. 

It's like I can't go back to California. I can't, like, live another year. I have plans to spend New Year's Eve with my sister. Our parents drop us off at a hotel in Nashville an hour from where they live. And as I climb out of my dad's truck, I'm just unable to stop crying. My mom looks at me with concern, but she smiles and she tells me that even though we didn't get to do the interview, that she'll call me that she'll answer my questions over the phone. I'm grateful, as the day turns into night I'm kind of overwhelmed with this feeling that gradually I come to understand, is grief. 

My sister leads us in a ritual, a cleansing with a glass of water, some table salt and a lemon. 

[introspective music quietly plays] 

We write down everything we want to release on pieces of paper. We fold them up and gather them into a drinking glass, sprinkle them with the lemon water

[sound of a match lighting-] 

and set them on fire. 

[music fades out]

Kaitlin Prest:

This episode was written and produced by Nicole Kelly, Chequita Paschal edited this series. In this episode, you heard excerpts from It Didn't Start with you, How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. By Mark Wollyn. Many thanks to Meenadchi, whose Decolonizing Nonviolent Communication Workshop was the impetus for this series. Many, many people helped make this series into what you heard. We are so grateful. You know who you are. Thank you to all the people who have ever worked on this show from 2008 all the way until now, especially my original business partner and the original senior producer, Mitra Kaboli. If you want to reach out to NK about this work and how it made you feel or the ways that you related. Follow us on Instagram at the heart radio or write to the heart at Mermaid Palace dot org. 

NK:

Okay, so I was standing outside this place called the Rage Room in Downtown LA. um, I guess I'm about to go smash the shit out of some bottles and well, I got the package that comes with one large object. Not really sure what that's gonna be, but I want to make sure there is something substantial to rage against. This is like another thing I've been putting off. I've been knowing I wanted to follow up the workshop with some kind of like intense, loud, aggressive, physical, full body expression of rage and haven't really known exactly how to do that. I've been looking for different things to do. I don't know, I. I've been putting it off because I wasn't sure if it was like I wanted to do it, but didn't want to do it. Or like, I couldn't imagine I couldn't really imagine myself, um, really going for it and so I'm going to go in and see what the deal is. 

NK:

[outdoor street sounds] Can I ask you a favor? Can you — I'm just making I got a little radio story about rage. What's your name?

Kimber:

My name is Kimber, hi.

NK:  

[Laughs] Have we met before? 

NK:

The music in here sucks. This is not really what I had imagined I'd be listening to. I was like, can you pipe jagged little pill into the room? [laughs] Okay. Yeah, whatever this works, it takes me back to 9th grade. I can work with it. There are a bunch of like lead pipes in here. The large object is a printer. So I'm going to have a little office space moment. 

[sounds of breaking things, glass breaks, metal and glass falling, NK yells] 

NK:

[laughs]

Kaitlin:

Okay, that's it, Bye. 

episode 2: Power

Episode 2 of Divesting From People Pleasing. 

After considering her sexual past, NK learns that the body has information.  

The Heart · Divesting From People Pleasing: Power

___

Divesting From People Pleasing is a mini series written, performed, and sound designed by Nicole Kelly, edited by Chiquita Paschal, and hosted by Kaitlin Prest. Design by Phoebe Unter.  Music in this episode: Nature Shuffle by Ketsa; Ole by Em Hache; Heat by Derek Cleg; and Gamma Burst by Nathaniel Wyburn. Special thanks to Aesha, the New Orleans healer, and Mistress Velvet, the reparations domme.  Produced with the generous support of Mermaid Palace & PRX. 

transcript

Kaitlin Prest:

From Mermaid Palace and Radiotopia… welcome... to The Heart.

[theme music starts, light bass sounds like a heartbeat] 

I'm Kaitlin Prest. This is Divesting from People Pleasing, a mini season by Nicole Kelly. In the last episode, NK investigated her anxiety and shame and some of the psychology of why we feel, how we feel, the conditions that affect Black women in particular. In this episode, the second installment, NK tries to understand herself on a somatic level. This is episode two: Power.

[Jazzy heartbeat fades out]

NK:

I want to get out of my head and into my body, I want to get out of my head and [NK’s voice begins to echo and layer over itself} and get out of my head, out of my body, out of my head. into my body, I want to get out of my head and into my body. [throbbing pulsing bass]

Phoebe was going to Berlin for a few weeks. [party noises, people chatting club music]

So she threw herself a going away party at this place we like in the Valley, earlier in the night at my house, some of us had shared a little bag of our favorite party favor. [twinkling whirling star synth]

It's a drug that makes most people want to dance and make out and touch each other. But it always makes me want to stare into someone's eyes and share the things I don't normally share. That's why I love it. Like, Phoebe and all of our friends are on the dance floor moving around under the multicolored disco lights. And I just wanted to talk. I stood near the bar with a new friend and the conversation turned to sex.

[NK moans Uhhhh and it turns into a chuckle]

I tell my friend that I think I may have been ruined by cis-het sex. 

Neither of us are straight. But something that we have in common is having been with men more often than we've been with women. And coming out later in life then a lot of our queer friends, I can orgasm when I'm alone, but with a partner, I, almost never get off. I say.

[stringed instrument plucking, guitar song begins]

Of course, I know that trauma can be ordinary. Can be so subtle and commonplace so as to not even register as trauma. 

I know that the body and the brain don't need many opportunities to create automatic and habitual responses to perceived danger that they both are working to protect me in ways I'm not even aware of.

But that night, I don't sleep. And it's not just because of the drugs. Something clicks. Something makes sense to me for the first time.

[plucking rhythm guitar continues- the sound of a brain figuring it out]

It's hard to explain what I'm feeling. A slideshow of my sexual past runs through my head, and I realize that for most of it, I haven't really been in my body. I've been there, but not there. And having sex as if my own body didn't belong to me. 

And now I wonder why.

[Drum beats, synth goes up and down like a bee buzzing] 

NK:

I only orgasm when I'm alone, and usually that feels like a defect. I remember coming for the first time around age eleven. Already I'm preoccupied with sex. I have no idea if this is unusual, but I make two Barbies kiss each other. I make one hard plastic mouth hit against the smooth plastic absence of a nipple. [synth continues]

I make the two Barbies feel each other up. [mechanical toy talking voice says "I love (something) under the stars"] I act out elaborate romantic fantasies, fantasies where I'm older and have a body. The kind that can fill a bra. And I straddle a little mound of bed pillows lined up in a generic shape of a boy. No one in particular. With something hard to rub against. Positioned more or less where his crotch would be something like a plastic toothbrush holder. [gem sounds- then a sax comes in quietly]

I've always been the kind of person who thrives between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 4:00 in the morning. And I've been doing this since I first saw softcore on Showtime late at night. [jazz sax slides back in for a moment] I realized the squiggle pen I got for my 10th birthday is actually the same as a vibrator. And when it stops working and we change up our cable package, I realize that face lotion and fingertips work just as well. Or the bathtub faucet. Another idea I got from porn [water splashes down onto tile-a synth starts to make a tapping and throbbing sound]

Everyday after high school, I have two hours alone before my mom and my sister interrupt my privacy. I turn the TV back and forth from Bob Ross [Bob Ross says "double prime pre-stretched canvas"] to the scrambled Playboy Channel [woman's voice moans] and back again. Every time I think I hear the garage door go up. [Bob Ross says "tap it"] This is a strategy for plausible deniability. [Bob Ross says "Little criss-cross strokes'' then abruptly a woman's voice moans]. I'm not furiously jerking off to distorted images of white dick, white fake tits bouncing. I'm just an innocent, small-town girl who regularly attends Fellowship of Christian athlete meetings and appreciates the arts. 

[Bob Ross says quietly: I just sort of make a decision and put it in]

NK:

Where I live, high school girls do not masturbate if anyone suggests that they do. It's considered hilarious and disgusting. [guitar starts to jam] I keep my frequent masturbation seshes hidden. I don't tell anyone. I never admit it, until senior year when a certain prestige comedy makes it cool to acknowledge our clits. [vibrator sounds]

Everyone knows that I'm still a virgin [upbeat sitcom music starts] and everyone knows that all the girls who have publicly promised to save themselves for marriage are giving lots of head and taking it up the ass. [hopeful sitcom music continues]

I'm not saving myself for marriage. I'm saving myself for college, where I imagine that I'll have many, many lovers and get to act out the sexual fantasies I started practicing for in middle school. [upbeat sitcom guitar fades out]

I'm not just waiting for sex. I'm waiting to feel wanted and to have the social currency, the power that comes with that. 

I don't really need my first time to be special. [indie country singer] Despite growing up in the Bible Belt, I know that virginity is a bullshit social construct. I just want to get it over with on my college campus. We celebrate sexuality at the annual coming out ball on something called Sleaze Week. Third wave sex positive feminism is rampant. [Man's voice: How does a woman have sex like a man?] And it demands that women have as much sex as we want. 

[Woman's Voice quietly: Conveying sexual interest or readiness?]

[Man's Voice: Who seriously thinks that this makes sense?] 

NK:

As much sex as men. 

[Woman's Voice: His cup runneth over]

It demands that we get off and suggests that if you aren't getting off, that there's something subordinate about that

[Samantha from Sex and the City: I mean I just spent the last two hours with no finale]

like an orgasm is a political act

[Dr. Laura: had been raised in a highly sexualized environment]

NK:

In college, I relish finally being free to talk about how often I think about sex, how sometimes I sit in class daydreaming about the next time I can touch myself. 

My college friends call me the Virgin Slut. 

The summer after sophomore year, I broke up with my first boyfriend, the first person I have sex with, cut all my hair off and prepare to spend my entire junior year in Barcelona.

[horns triumphantly announce, drums kick in- salsa rhythm]

It's my first time in Europe. My first time ever leaving the U.S. I'm 21. I've never lived in a city before. I've never learned to speak a language. Barcelona is beautiful and romantic and sexy. And I feel more free, more myself, more excited to be alive than I ever have before. [salsa fades out]

Most weekends I go out with friends from my study abroad program, sometimes to the high end clubs in La Rambla, or all the women are in heels and there's always a cover. Sometimes dive bars in the Gothic quarter where college students drink cheap red wine. 

And sometimes to seedy clubs in Puerto Olympico. The kinds of places where every night is ladies night, which means no cover for women and free shots, go-go dancers and lots of dudes. Wherever I go, I stand out. 

Usually when men approach me, their opening line is, where are you from?

[Where are you from echoes in a drunk dudes voice]

And when I'm with men, I watch myself have sex, like how I used to watch porn, like I'm watching myself play out these scenes in different locations with different men. And if the guy's hot and if the setting is hot or sexy, then I'm like, the scene is hot. My friends joke about my sexcapades. My slut adventures. And I feel like I'm getting away with something. I had a ton of one night stands where I refuse to tell men my name or refuse to give them my number. Or if I did give them my number, I wouldn't answer when they called or I would answer, but refuse to meet up with them again. 

It was... fun, like a, fun adventure, and I felt like my powers were growing like every dude I fucked and then forgot about [quietly: or pretended to forget about], every dude I blew off. I'm like a vampire for their masculine power. I'm just taking it into myself and I like the narrative that I'm creating. I like this version of myself. 

At my small, private, affluent, very white liberal arts college in the US, I usually feel lonely and invisible, but in this context I feel desired, really desirable. 

For the first time, and I don't yet have a critique of what it means when they call me exotic. 

NK:

One night in Barcelona. I'm out with my friends at a warehouse. [pulsing bass echoes like how it sounds when the music is so loud at a club you just hear the vibration] We like to go to. There are three or four floors with different rooms and different deejays. And in the room, I like to go to this D.J from Madrid plays electro dance mash ups of indie rock songs like Dance Remixes of Radiohead and Block Party. On the dance floor, this guy approaches me. [sexy synth quietly enters]

At first we shout to be able to hear each other. And then we give up. He tries to pull me closer and I push him away. But I don't mean it. He plays along. [quietly: I'm 10 times more likely to fuck someone who says he's an artist] we make out on the dance floor. He tells me his name and I make no effort to remember. And then we make out in the cab. We make our way back to his studio apartment. It's not long before we move to the bedroom. 

I'm the aggressor. I'm in charge. I'm in control. I want this to happen. I don't care what he wants. He's on top, he's inside me. I can tell he's about to come. 

At the moment that he orgasms, he says: you're....

so....

Black.  [Black, Black, Black the word black echoes, the sound of breathing in and out]

...and I freeze. 

I'm mortified. [breathing in and out] ...I'm soo mortified. I'm just aghast. [NK’s voice echoes in her head quietly: it's fine, it's fine, it’s fine], in the past when white men have said... dumb things to me. I have just laughed it off. I laugh it off. It's fine. It's fine It's fine. [quiet whispers: sexual trauma transgression it's fine]

It's not usually grounds for me to [it's fine] it doesn't usually dissuade me from wanting their continued attention. Ultimately, they get away with it. 

But I can't... laugh this off. 

I also can't make a big deal about it. I get dressed and I leave. 

And I don't tell anyone about that.

I tell many stories about many of my so-called sex capades in Barcelona, but I don't tell anyone about this for... years. The memory resurfaces occasionally and I feel the same sense of shame wash over me. I keep this to myself. I just keep it kind of buried. It's deep. [NK’s voice echoes in her head quietly: It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine.] It's like a reminder that I don't have power, that I am constantly just reduced to a body, a black body, a black femme body that I am also just like a screen [Melissa Harris-Perry: jezebel] onto which [Melissa Harris-Perry: hot, lascivious, oversexed black woman] a lot of things are constantly being projected. [Melissa Harris-Perry: rooted in the experience of American slavery] 

You can't really look too closely at like what an experience like that means. It's like, you know, intuitively deep down. But it's it would mean to acknowledge it. To name it would almost mean like I have to do something about it. 

Even though third wave white feminism told us that if we fucked around like men, we'd be able to share in their power. 

By the time I'm out of college in my late 20s, I know that doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't change anything. Men aren't changed by being treated in the same patriarchal ways that they have treated us. They don't learn anything. I spend most of my 20s writing thinly veiled fiction about women who are deeply dissatisfied with the men in their lives and the expectations of heteronormativity in general. But I'm 30. Before I do anything about it. Mostly by having a lesbian separatist phase and then a first girlfriend and a first serious queer relationship. 

But even in that relationship, I'm not getting off. 

I get desperate to try anything. I go to an erotic embodiment workshop where you get naked with strangers in a dark room but are forbidden to make eye contact with anyone. It's basically a glorified circlejerk. It doesn't help. [a quiet voice reads out a list of fears]

It's like my past experiences are encoded, are part of me. With a queer partner who I love having sex that makes me feel authentic and in my gender, fully allowed to express myself fluidly, I still can't get out of my head. I can't relax. It's not just that it's hard to center myself, which it is, or that it's hard for me to receive, which it also is. It's that the idea of surrender is too intensely uncomfortable to entertain. It's that I don't know what will happen if I let my guard down. 

NK:

After this night at Oilcan Harry's, I start fantasizing about a performance, a persona. A reparations domme, who's like an alter ego in thigh high boots. 

I've been a version of her before as the host of a dating game where all the questions are designed to expose the fraught historical relationship between Black women and white cis-men. 

The audience had laughed while my unsuspecting bachelors had squirmed uncomfortably. [canned game show laughter]

So now I imagine myself leaning into that, humiliating a cis-white man who's begging [slapping noise] for my abuse. Except [slapping] this time they thank me for it. I look into renting a dungeon in L.A. and write an a post on Tinder: Black femme dominatrix, seeks straight white men for slaves. I fold a belt in half and slap it hard against the palm of my hand and I imagine how good it will feel to press the sole of my foot against some white dude's face. 

But then on a whim, I Google reparations domme and find Mistress Velvet, a Black femme dominatrix with a reputation for making her white submissives read Black feminist thought. 

Mistress Velvet:

Um I think I'm well known for having clients read Black Feminist Theory and Liberation Text and Marxist and Leninist stuff. Ultimately, it's for people to explore themselves intimately, sexually, physically, in ways that society doesn't allow us to do. 

NK:

When I arrive at Mistress Velvet's house in Chicago, she and her partner are having brunch. I'm in town for a wedding and they tell me that at the end of their own wedding, they hosted an orgy in their hotel room as a way to subvert the institution. 

Mistress Velvet:

Fuck, this is amazing. 

NK:

That’s hot. 

Mistress Velvet:

Yeah. It was really great. It was really great. 

NK:

Mistress Velvet knows that what she's doing doesn't amount to structural reparations for Black folks. Reparations domme was a label given to her by the media. But it does have a personal benefit. The same kind that I was looking for. 

Mistress Velvet:

I feel like I've been used and erased by white man and I just kept finding white man after white man to help me feel good about myself until I learned that that's not where I was going to feel good about myself. 

NK:

But unlike my misguided sexcapades in my early 20s, Mistress Velvet is actually teaching her partner something.

Mistress Velvet:

It is much harder to work with white men. 

When I get to work with folks that are like people of color and queer in the dungeon, it's really beautiful in a very different way from when I get to work with white men who are so honestly so used to just receiving. But it's still like really challenges their, their like fundamental parts of their identity that has grown up with privilege. And I have to then deconstruct that for them and let them see things in different ways. 

NK:

So we talked for about an hour and I'm surprised to find out that we have a lot in common. 

Mistress Velvet:

By the time I was in high school, I had really internalized being the oreo, which is a horrible slam to my academic performance and attributing it to whiteness. 

NK:

We both grew up in the South,. 

Mistress Velvet:

Promiscuous sex. 

NK:

We talk about fucking around in college. 

Mistress Velvet:

I need to have lots and lots of sex because I had left a relationship and was really finding myself. 

NK:

We talk about being Black and queer and compulsory heterosexuality.

Mistress Velvet:

It turned out to not be fulfilling. [laughter]

NK:

We talk about the ways being Black, queer and femme have contributed to our anxiety and other mental health issues. 

Mistress Velvet:

Oh my gosh, this could be a whole ‘nother episode in and of itself. What Mistress Velvet is like in therapy um [laughter...talking continues in the background ]

NK:

She's researching the connection for her Master's thesis

Mistress Velvet:

I think I want to preface this by saying I find that a lot of the people that I read about have very similar...  [Mistress Velvet inhales and exhales slowly] Upbringings or experiences to me, and the folks that I've been reading about are also like struggling or coming to terms with or coming into themselves around their queerness. And I'm just like, this is not an accident that so many of us like. Basically, I'm like reading these articles about Black, Black queer femmes that have borderline. And it's like they all use the same language that I'm using around, like self-worth and um and finding your worth and navigating a society that, that hates our existence and hates our bodies. And I'm just like, fuck. [punctuated laugh] You know, when I find myself sighing and letting my breath out in the dungeon... 

NK:

[in conversation] Yeah, Sameeee... [laughter] I find myself holding my breath a lot.  

Mistress Velvet:

Yes!

NK:

[in conversation] I have had a lot of similar experiences that you describe as far as like how I grew up. And I also had a lot of traumatized responses to Black folks as a result of that.

Mistress Velvet:

mmm hmm, yes.

NK:

[in conversation] And so what I'm doing right now is like intentionally I might actually, like, be super purposeful about prioritizing Blackness by surrounding myself with Black imagery. I like prioritizing relationships with Black folks, being in Black spaces that honestly have felt really threatening to me because of things that happened to me when I was like 12 or something. And I've learned about this sort of like way that emotion is processed and the brain processes like that really small things can become traumatic experiences

Mistress Velvet:

Yes!

NK:

That your brain reacts to almost instantly and forms a defense response to, this memory like rejection, I think —

Mistress Velvet:

Yes.

NK:

Is in my body.

Mistress Velvet:

Yes.

NK:

But I guess what I was getting to is I had was I had read that like if you introduce yourself an experience as previously traumatic or traumatizing or threatening, your body and your brain will learn like, oh, this is no longer a threat. It will have a different reaction. 

Mistress Velvet:

I think um sometimes I think about my work as a domme, as I'm putting myself in like almost like exposure therapy because — similar to what you said — as I've gotten older and I have like like redeveloped my relationship with Blackness, I am very intentional. And looking specifically for folks that look like me, spaces that are just for us, like I need that. And it's not something I've had growing up for a lot of reasons. But also, I didn't shame myself for not having that feeling of worth. Internally, I'm like, it makes sense that I have a I struggle a lot with my self-worth because this is what society has taught me. But it's also why it's so important now, like why relish and being in Black spaces, which which used to be a space that I would not find myself in. Now it's like, oh, I don't know how we'd be surviving and thriving without these spaces where we have like a commonality and a shared experience that is like so deep, you know. Yeah. 

NK:

[back to narration] For a while I've been interested in the ways that kink creates a space for consensual relationships that play with power and narrative, historical narrative. A lot of the media attention on Mistress Velvet focuses on what the white men who seek her out get from the experience. But what I want to know is what the role reversal does for her. What kind of historical or generational trauma is being worked out in the dungeon? 

Mistress Velvet:

Sometimes in the dungeon is the only time that I am like around a white person or specifically a cis-gender white man. It is much harder to work with white men than when I work with folks of other races and folks of other genders. That's where I get the most challenge in the dungeon. It's like I go in there with the pre assumption that I have. I am a complete being with so much value and worth more than they will ever have. My clients come in as my submissives and they're like they are defaulting to me. They exist in those moments for my pleasure, almost like the opposite of what I've experienced.

NK:

[in conversation] I think that I had assumed before, because I was interested in like expressions of rage, that is also a big part of this. And I think I was like, oh, this, that's why reparations domme came to me as a performance idea, being like, how can I look like abuse white man or whatever as a way to for me to feel something. Is that really at play for you? 

Mistress Velvet:

That definitely is there. I don't [pause] want to erase that. I mean, but this isn't, you can't use this space to completely just process everything as much as it is very enticing. That's not what the space, the space isn't fully for us, 100 percent in that way. You know, we have to care for the people that we're that are there with us. Yeah, and that's hard. Yeah. Because you're coming in with so much of these feelings. 

NK:

Well, I wonder if that required mutuality is why. It's part of why it's healing as that like. It's very enticing to sort of like want to just take your rage out on white men or subjugate white men in the way that they have done to us. But that's ultimately not that's just a replication of what they've done. I think this model that you're describing, it feels like a larger metaphor for a kind of collective care and consciousness should feel like needs to take place.

Mistress Velvet:

Yes, absolutely I could not have said it better myself. That's exactly how I feel about it. Yeah. 

NK:

That's incredible. [laughter]

Mistress Velvet:

Yeah, it's, um. This work is beautiful and it's so complicated.  

[drums and brass]

NK:

A few months after meeting Mistress Velvet in Chicago, I spend my birthday with friends in New Orleans. As a surprise gift, they write an address on a piece of paper and tell me what time to show up. They haven't told me exactly what the appointment is for or who I am meeting with. But they've told me to think about my intentions for the year. I've been thinking about the Leo in my chart and how I want to embrace fire, by which I mean ask for attention and then receive it. 

I'm expecting a really in-depth tarot card reading or something witchy, since this is New Orleans and I'm vaguely into that kind of thing. 

When I arrive, another Black woman opens the door and she tells me her name is Aisha.

Aisha:

Where is the energy flow and how can we like better —

NK:

[narrating] And when I step inside, she tells me she's a bodyworker. A healer.

[Aisha and NK laugh, and speak softly: and your intuition. Amazing. a lot of people have like it's blocked…]

NK:

[narrating] The way you go to a massage therapist for a worn out muscle. You go to Aisha when there's something more intangible going on. 

Aisha:

And then on the other side of our body, we're like control it. But not like actually let it be a source of information. Or like a place of inspiration.

NK:

[narrating] She asks me what things she can help move through my body, what history, what experiences can she help release or expel? I tell her that when I think about trauma in my body, I think of sex. 

Aisha:

Where in your body… I wish I had brought my other cards… um, [knocking on hollow wood sound] where do you feel like that story is in your body? 

NK:

[in conversation] Which, the, my relationship with Black women?

Aisha:

Yeah. This Yeah. 

NK:

[narrating] And I don't know what stories, what information my body is still holding.

[in conversation] Well, ok, two things come to mind, one is when I was little...

NK:

[narrating] She takes me into a back room where a massage table is. She puts on Nina Simone. Earlier she told me about how Nina Simone and Lorraine Hansberry were lovers. She tells me to bring Black women into the room with me. And I think about Saidiya Hartman and the women Saidiya Hartman is writing about. I think about Toni Morrison, who's recently passed. I think about my mom and my grandmother and my sister. My eyes were closed. But we talk. It's not exactly like a massage. I'm not necessarily trying to relax. I'm thinking about my intention for myself, for my birthday, for the next year, for the next 10 years. 

At one point, she asked me to roll over and she's cradling my head in her hands. 

At this point, my eyes are closed and I'm starting to tell her about my sister. But for some reason I stop mid-sentence. 

Nina Simone is singing a cover of a Bob Dylan song, Just Like A Woman, [Just Like a Woman plays in the background quietly] which is a song that I used to like, like in college when I liked Bob Dylan and like other like white bro music. But somehow I like hearing Nina Simone sing this song, like and imagining her singing it to another Black woman, like imagining her singing it to Lorraine Hansberry just kind of stops me. [Nina Simone singing]

I'm really intent on the song until I'm not. It's almost as if I'm transported like I, leave the room, like I am physically there, but mentally I'm just, I'm somewhere else. I don't know how much time passes. It seems like minutes go by and then suddenly I'm just like sort of abruptly back in my body. I'm back in the room. [Singing begins again]

And I'm gagging, I'm choking, I, I have to open my mouth. Because I can't — there is like a lump in my throat. And normally I would try to swallow it. But in this case, it's so big that I'm gagging on it. It's a familiar feeling. It's the feeling that I get. When there's something that needs to be expressed or communicated that I just can't access. 

I feel it there. But this was so intense. It was. I couldn't close my mouth. I had to open my mouth. I had to even stick my tongue out to, like, let it out. and Aishas cradling my head and she's telling me to breathe, to breathe in a certain way, so I can loosen it up. 

She tells me it's like soaking a pan. Like some things are gonna come out. But not everything. And there's no need to scrape the pan. You can just soak it. Give it time. But some things are going to come out right now. 

I don't know what things, I don't feel anything else physically, I just feel, I just have the gagging sensation. But after a minute or so, it goes away. I can breathe again. I can swallow. It's fine. 

She asks me if I feel any other physical sensations, and I tell her that my right ear. Is burning. It's really, hot. Not uncomfortably so, but just really hot. And then my left ear. There's kind of a high pitched whining, like almost electronic. It's also not uncomfortable just to kind of… [NK makes a high pitched humming sound]

And the same Nina Simone song, the Bob Dylan song is still playing, like it hasn't even been that long? It feels like so much time has passed, but it hasn't been that long. 

And then shortly after our session is over, she leaves the room. She leaves me to get dressed. And I feel completely spaced out. I'm just kind of amazed, like, what the fuck just happened? I have no idea what happened. I don't know why it happened, but I feel amazing. I'm just like, so relaxed. But also. I leave. I walk a block or so down the street to City Park. This beautiful park, it's through these huge old ancient trees just with Spanish moss hanging down and swaying in the wind. [breathing in and out] Spanish moss always reminds me of... Georgia. And it's really humid and I sit down in the grass just to kind of collect and gather my thoughts, and I feel like I feel called to return to the South. I feel like I need to be back there. It's something about these giant trees and all of New Orleans that feels like so... erotic. It's like I can just feel the, the history of that place really palpably. And I feel really confident about the work that I have to do, about what I need to say and why it's valuable for me to say it. In a way that I can't always tap into. 

[Nina Simone sings “Just Like a Woman” quietly: a long time curse, and what's worse, Is it's baaaaaad, yeah, I can't stand it...please don’t let on, that you knew me when, I was hungry and it was your world...]

Kaitlin:

This episode was written and produced by Nicole Kelley. The series is edited by Chiquita Paschal. The heart is Nicole Kelly, Phoebe Unter, Sharon Mashihi, Chiquita Paschal, Jen Eng and me, Kaitlin Prest. You can follow the heart on Instagram at the heart radio. You can follow me at Kaitlyn Prest. There were many, many people involved in the making of these episodes. 

You know who you are. We thank you. 

The Heart is a production of the Mermaid Palace Arts Company. If you want to check out other Mermaid Palace shows, go to mermaid palace dot org. If you love this show and you want to support it with your cash dollars because you like to pay for good art, we would greatly appreciate it. We rely on donations to make this work. 

You can donate at Mermaid Palace dot org. Slash the dash heart. Thanks for listening. 

Episode 1: Threat

Episode 1 of Divesting From People Pleasing. 

As NK gets older, she gets smaller, she gets more and more quiet. But the self loathing voice in her head just gets louder. 

The Heart · Divesting From People Pleasing: Threat

___

Divesting From People Pleasing is a mini series written, performed, and sound designed by Nicole Kelly, edited by Chiquita Paschal, and hosted by Kaitlin Prest. Design by Phoebe Unter.  In this episode, you also heard: Melissa Harris Perry speaking on her book Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America.  Produced with the generous support of Mermaid Palace & PRX. 

transcript

Kaitlin Prest:

From Mermaid Palace and Radiotopia, welcome... to The Heart. 

[theme song begins lightly underneath] 

I'm Kaitlin Prest. A couple of years ago, Sharon had an idea for a show that was gonna be called “Self Hatred.” It was about the ways that living in a world that is set up to silence you or suppress you, that the marginalization that happens outside in the world ends up happening inside in your own mind, and that the very understandable rage that would come from being ignored or silenced or left out or placating other people's wants, needs and ideas... That rage, instead of going outward, goes inward. To the self. What does that do to your heart and mind? [sharp inhale] And how do you work through it?

This season is looking at some of those things. It reflects the way that you work through your shit, going backwards and forwards in time, remembering things suddenly and making new meaning out of experiences you thought you already understood. This season, Divesting From People Pleasing is a creation of Nicole Kelly. She wanted to make something about the topic of shame and rage. This is the first episode of three episodes. This is NK...

NK:

Three years ago, I met someone in a bar in Bushwick and she invited me to a workshop called Divesting from People Pleasing. 

[burst of a glitchy beat] 

In Divesting From People Pleasing, we sit in a circle. 

[burst of a glitchy beat] 

Most of the other women in the room are white. Like me, they're polite when it would make sense to be bitchy. We're nice. We say yes because it would be rude to say no. 

[glitchy beat] 

In the workshop, we're asked to think about and name the rules we make for ourselves. 

Facilitator:

I have to. I'm not allowed to. Or, I'm afraid to. 

NK:

These rules are the things that we have learned are acceptable behavior. 

Facilitator:

Who are you afraid to displease? What are you afraid will happen if you are displeasing or break rules? 

NK:

When we do things that break our own rules, things that fall outside of the small window of acceptance, those behaviors can often evoke a feeling of deep shame. In Divesting From People Pleasing, I talk about how self-conscious I am about being too loud, about talking too much or for too long. And then there are some movement and vocal exercises that ask us to break our own rules. 

Facilitator:

And so we get on all fours and we close our eyes. 

NK:

Close your eyes. Imagine that you're a small beast. What does your body look like? Is it covered in fur? 

[softly] Is it covered in scales? 

Do you have spikes down your back? 

[softly] A long snout? 

How big are your teeth? 

[softly] Do you have fangs? 

Now think about your ears. 

[softly] About your tail. 

Think about the size of your paws. 

[softly] The size of your teeth. 

Think about the texture of your fur. 

Now make a sound that evokes the animal that you imagine. You are that animal. You are a beast. You are monstrous. What are the sounds that you would make?

[the sounds of beasts unfurl softly around you. They're hissing and growling. The sounds escalate. Someone cries out, others scream]

My eyes are closed, but all around me, I hear wild animals.

[sounds of women screaming and whooping]

The women in the room have transformed into their least censored, most monstrous, most hideous selves. 

Except for me.

[women roaring]

I'm on the periphery of the room, down on all fours, like everyone else.

[the growls crescendo]

My knees pressed into the hardwood floor. The only woman of color. And my eyes are closed. And I can't be monstrous and ugly as instructed.

[the sounds peter out]

I couldn't make a sound.

[glitchy beat returns]

[scene tape: NK talks to herself, or is in conversation with someone]

NK to herself:

What were the words that I actually wrote down... 

NK:

In Divesting From People Pleasing, I write down a list of my personal rules. 

NK to herself:

These three prompts: I have to. I'm not allowed to, I'm afraid to. 

NK:

A stream of consciousness list.

[NK talks to herself in the background]

A representation of an inner monologue so quiet I hadn't realized it was there.

NK to herself:

I'm not allowed to be demanding. 

NK:

Humming beneath the surface, judging and directing my every move. 

NK to herself:

I'm afraid to be loud and to take up space. I'm afraid to be judged. I'm afraid to be looked at. 

NK:

On some level. I'm afraid of what will happen if I'm not agreeable. 

NK to herself:

I have to keep it to myself. I have to pretend. I have to let it go. I have to make other people comfortable. I have to stay calm. I have to keep it down. I have to hold it in. I have to accept. I'm not allowed to yell. I have to be even. I'm not allowed to go off even when it's warranted. Like at work. And then, what am I afraid will happen if I displease or break the rules?

[scene tape trails off]            

NK:

I have days where I don't have any of these thoughts at all. But the minute I stop. When I'm not watching TV, I'm not answering emails, I'm not scrolling my phone,

[NK repeats what she's saying in the background]

I'm not texting someone, the lights are off. When It's just me—

[NK speaking in a more raw, emotional tone]

Me alone with my thoughts lying in bed. And I'm lying there in the dark and I hear this voice—

 Voice in NK's Head:

[NK's voice, but sullen, angrier] You're a fucking asshole, you're a fucking bitch, you're a douche bag, you're a fucking stupid bitch. And everyone hates you. You're so fucking stupid—

NK:

Sometimes I actually make a sound.

[NK groans painfully in the background] 

I can't even deal with like, what

[sighs]

[more groaning in the background]

I can't even deal with what I'm saying, like what the voice is saying to me, what it's telling me,

[Voice in NK's head drones in the background, barely perceptible]

I'm just like... I'll cry out the middle of the night, like I'll moan in the middle of the night and I think my roommate can hear me like moaning.

[NK screaming, muffled]

I'm just trying to, like, make a sound to kind of drown out this other voice, this other noise. And it's like I want it to go away, but it's just right there. Like, those are the mild moments. When it's like not attached to me, but I'm just like, why won't you go away? Like, let me sleep. And it won't let me sleep. And I smoke a lot of weed. To I fall asleep.

[relieved sigh]

NK:

The gap between ourselves and the earliest humans is small.

[drumbeat fades in]

We are still social creatures. We thrive most when we are part of a group. If left to live alone, we suffer. Our bodies are still wired for connection and still wired to quickly scan our environments for threat. That's instinctual. It happens automatically. It only takes seconds or milliseconds. When the brain scans the environment and perceives danger. It has a stress response called fight or flight. In this highly activated state, the inner ear shifts in order to hear the lower registers of approaching predators. The heart beats faster, pumping more blood from the heart to the muscles, which tense up, making you ready to run at any moment. When poised to flee or fight —

[quick, hard breathing joins the drumbeat]

You also breathe more quickly.

[breathing and drumbeat crescendos]

The greater the threat, the greater the physical response. But if your brain concludes that the predator is too powerful to overcome,

[breathing peters out]

that you wouldn't win against the predator in a fight, or that you wouldn't be able to outrun it, your body's third strategy is to go numb.

[breathing comes back]

Your heart pounds, but your breathing slows down. Until it's hard to take a deep breath at all.

[beat untangles and you hear a couple stray notes]

However, your brain responds to danger the first time is how it responds forever.

I went looking for the origin of my shame, that voice in where else? My childhood! And found that most of my memories were tied to a particular location. A small town in Georgia where I went to kindergarten, first and second grade. It was the kind of town with one grocery store and one high school, the kind of town where everyone went to the football game on Friday nights in the fall. My dad was an officer in the military. And my mom was a microbiologist who got into real estate because she got bored working in a lab. The house we lived in had an actual white picket fence around the yard. But we also have a neighbor who loudly refuses to eat my mom's food at those parties

[archival tape of NK's mom talking to this other mom]

in the VHS tape of Christmas '92 that I found in my parents basement, she's making a really big deal about this. She needs everyone to know. 

[archival tape: bitchy white mom with a thick southern accent says, “we might have the kids eatin' it but I don't know about mom and dad eatin' in. I tasted it.” Another mom says, “Valerie, I think it's delicious”]

There's only one other Black family in the neighborhood, which is mostly other families with connections to the army. And all the army wives hang out and have block parties and swap kids.

[sound of kids playing]

I only remember one other Black kid from school: a third grader, a boy in the grade ahead of me. That year my teacher is always putting me in the corner, for talking, mostly. My mom goes over my teacher's head to get me into the gifted program. 

NK:

(on the phone, to her mom) Because it is a small thing. But it just seems like so weird, you know? 

NK’s Mom:

Yeah, because if she had said that to Daddy, his first reaction would have been: it was racism. And I'd have been like, no, Mark, it can't be that, you know?

NK:

As a kid, I have no idea that these experiences are unique, are different than what the white kids around me might be experiencing. 

NK’s Mom:

This is why I have questions, more... because I don't want to jump to that conclusion. So Daddy will go immediately to that... 

NK:

Or are different than what my parents experienced when they were kids. 

NK’s Mom:

Now I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt. But it's different than the way you grew up and what you experience. 

[we hear the beginning of Do You Know The Way To San Jose? by Dionne Warwick — a series of drumbeats and then ‘60s pop vocal style singing of descending notes]

NK:

Both of my parents were born in the 1950's. My dad is from a small town in rural Virginia. His dad was a farmer who owned his land. My mom grew up in D.C. and her dad was a pharmacist. And when my mom was 16, a high school junior, her family was one of the first Black families to move into a mostly white neighborhood. 

NK’s Mom:

He always made that comment, he said he didn't want anyone to be able to impress us, that we went skiing, we went to play tennis, we did golf. And what he was really saying is, he didn't want anybody to ever think that they were better than us because they were white. 

NK:

When my mom says that she and my dad had different childhoods, she means that she wasn't subjected to explicit racialized violence, the kind my dad experienced, the kind that you think of when you think of Jim Crow. 

NK’s Mom:

I didn't grow up in environment where that happened. 

NK:

But what is the same about them is that they both grew up knowing all of their cousins, their aunties and uncles. They both grew up with a real sense of Black community. And then they met at an HBCU in the 70s, and they both pledged the oldest black Greek organizations and they knew a whole array of Black folks. Who looked like them or like someone they knew back home. And it was new and different to both of them, but it was also familiar and they never had to question their belonging, their sense of Black identity.

[electric guitar riff from Al Green’s “Love and Happiness” plays]

NK’s Mom:

I think that's basically what he was saying. It doesn't matter what color your skin is or whatever you can do whatever you want to do, so someone thinks... 

NK:

And then, 10 years after they graduated, they had me. And then my sister. And they wanted the same things for us that their parents had wanted for them: for it to be easier. They wanted us to have the best opportunities that they could provide. 

NK:

(on the phone, to her mom) Those experiences... were you sort of thinking, even when we were younger, that we need to be prepared to —

NK’s Mom:

I don't know if I was thinking that directly, that, you know, that, you know, exposing you to those things and people that you would know how to act around them, so that that wouldn't be a foreign thing to you. 

NK:

(still on the phone) One of the memories I had that I am writing about is going to department stores, or just being in stores and people not taking your check all the time? Or what feels like all the time to me. Do you even even have any memories of that? 

NK:

(no longer on the phone) I have these memories:

[glitchy beat comes back]

my mom yelling in department stores. 

[NK imitating her mom] Call a manager! you better call a manager! 

Grocery store, cashiers at the J.C. Penney or the Piggly Wiggly. 

[NK imitating her mom] Every time I come in here, you take my checks. I don't why you're not doing it now—. 

Usually because someone is refusing to take her check in a place that has always taken it before. 

[NK impersonating her mom] Call the manager! 

Usually because of a woman, usually because of a white woman who's refusing to take her check. 

[NK impersonating her mom] you've taken my check before, so I don't know why—. 

My mom yells at people in department stores, cashiers, store clerks. Four hundred dollars worth of clothing draped across the register, conveyor belt full of groceries. A white woman refusing. 

[barely perceptible chatter of NK as her mom] 

[NK, in a more conversational tone] I don't remember exactly what was said. More what I have is an emotional memory. 

[fragmented, softly] of a woman

[NK imitating the cashier] Ma'am, I'm sorry, we just can't take checks! 

Of a woman. 

[NK as cashier] I'm sorry, I don't know what to tell you. 

[NK as her mom] You better call a manager! 

Meanwhile, I take on the role of trying to police my mom. 

[NK as child NK, embarrassed, annoyed] Mom, stop! 

Trying to get her to be quiet, just wanting it to be over and feeling really embarrassed that my mom is causing trouble, sometimes even saying to her like: 

[NK as child NK] Mom, let's just go. 

Just wanting to leave. Just wanting her to stop. Just wondering why she's always so agitated. And why is she always so? 

[NK's voice at different volumes is layered, fragments pieces together] Why is she always like this? 

Undisciplined. 

These cashiers are just trying to do their job? And my mom is getting angry instead of accepting what they're telling her. And I don't understand why my mom just won't accept this. They're telling her how the world is. And I don't get why she's like this. 

[faintly, NK as child NK] mom. stop! 

Why is she so...

Why is she so...

Easily provoked? 

Inevitably, a manager intervenes. It's over. She takes her clothes, her groceries. We leave the store. 

NK’s Mom:

Yeah, I don't ever remember that being an issue, because of racism. 

[glitch beat ends]

Melissa Harris-Perry:

Historians have talked brilliantly about this, the dissemblance of, sort of maintaining a perfect exterior in order to push back against any notion that you could be any of these negative stereotypes. 

NK:

In her book on Shame, Stereotypes and Black Women in America, Melissa Harris-Perry describes the stereotypical images of black woman in white media. Patricia Hill Collins called them "controlling images" because they're images designed to discipline. These images—

Melissa Harris-Perry:

Jezebel, the angry black woman image, for example, the mammy— 

NK:

Are meant to produce shame. They're designed to make us feel like we're one dimensional. To make us feel like oversexed, subservient and angry is all that Black women are or can be. Melissa Harris Perry adds to this original list of controlling images by pointing out that there is also a fourth, a fourth image, a fourth stereotype. A controlling image that we created. 

Melissa Harris-Perry:

That in the push back the other way, the strong Black woman emerges as this internal community narrative about the ability of Black women under all circumstances to be able to manage, to be able to do well, to be able to stand up for family, for community. For church. For spouses. And to do so almost naturally. 

NK:

The strong black woman is a political strategy. She's a shame management strategy. For an entire community. 

Melissa Harris-Perry:

That it becomes a kind of racial imperative. If you are weak. If you are sad, if you need help, then you are not only, sort of failing in terms of the general American individualism, rugged individualism, but you're actually failing the race. You are actually generating shame in your neediness, in your desire for help. 

NK:

While I'm in middle school and high school, we live in a small city in Tennessee where I'm not the only one in the school anymore. But I talk like the white girls in my neighborhood. And I wear Chucks and a Green Day T-shirt to basketball tryouts in the sixth grade. I make the team, but I'm self-conscious around the girls who look like me and they can tell. In the girls' locker room before practice or before games. I usually get dressed without talking to anyone. The other girls talk around me, making jokes. When they direct their attention at me, it's to call me whitewashed, which feels like the worst thing anyone could ever say. Because they're pointing out something that I really don't want anyone else to see. I take their teasing as a confirmation of my worst fear. I take it as a rejection. It's not the kind of attention I want, but it's the kind of attention I keep getting. And every time someone insists that I'm closer to whiteness than to myself, I leave my body. I disintegrate a little bit more. I don't go home and tell my parents. I don't tell anyone. I don't cry about it. I don't even react. But I do eventually quit the basketball team. And for a while, I avoid Black spaces altogether

[glitchy beat returns]

Melissa Harris-Perry:

It turns out the shame is not just a bad feeling. Shame actually creates physiological responses in your body. And guess what? If you have those cortisol responses regularly, if you are consistently confronted with shaming images—

[glitchy beat loudly interrupts Melissa Harris Perry] 

NK:

I get older and get really good at pushing everything down. 

I never feel like [layered fragments] I have enough. Not pretty enough for the white boys. Not confident. Not good enough. I'm always worried about not being perfect. I'm always worried about not being smart enough, about not being perfect.

[Melissa Harris Perry's voice braided in with NK]

And over years, the shame compounds [sharp sound of microphone feedback] in college at a very expensive PWI, never talking to anyone, only leaving my room for class—

Melissa Harris-Perry:

Maintaining a perfect exterior— 

[piercing microphone feedback]

NK:

do white people have these thoughts? 

I'm 20 and I start taking medicine for high blood pressure. And doctors can't find any explanation. 

[sound of doctor talking braided in] central aortic pressure...

It's just common in Black communities. It's just genetic. At the clinic on campus, they prescribe me a sedative. In grad school, I start going to parties in white drag. I get So anxious I start to pull on my curls. 

Melissa Harris-Perry:

And so the strong Black woman emerges [pang of feedback] 

NK:

It's making a little bald spot of the back of my head. I'm thirty two and a white woman turns around on a plane to tell me to be quiet. 

[woman] you're screaming, you're yelling. 

And ten minutes later, her eleven year old daughter stands up and turns around and imitates her tone and tells me to be quiet. For years. I just push it down. Internalizing it, internalizing it, internalizing it

Melissa Harris-Perry:

You're actually failing the race

[feedback]

NK:

Until I'm so anxious, until I'm so anxious, until I'm so filled with self-loathing, a constant kind of low grade shame.

[final glitch beat, then a pause]

After I turned 30, my new life is very precarious. For a while, I feel like I'm in a liminal space, like I'm a temporary person between selves. I know I want to be an artist, but I have no idea what that means or how to do it. I move to West Adams, a neighborhood in LA that used to be called the Black Beverly Hills. I want to live near people who look like me. At one point, I adopt the mandate of a local writer and performer and comedienne Amanda-Faye Jimenez, who says her New Year's resolution is no new whites. No new white friends. So simple, so effective.

I start to follow other Black artists and see a lot of Black art. Every year there's this big exhibition of emerging LA artists, and one year the biggest prize goes to an artist from South Central. And the museum is hosting a talk about her work, which is an installation, a room made of sandy white material, the same materials that were used in the construction of the pyramids. The walls of the room are carved with hieroglyphs, images of South Central: lowriders and rows of palm trees and women with cornrows. Pharaohs use the hieroglyphs as archives, and the artist has used this ancient method for a contemporary portrait of Black life.

It's kind of a big deal and it's a big deal for me because I'm finally feeling comfortable. I finally feel like I'm starting to belong in spaces like this, spaces that are for me. The Black curator is in conversation with one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, who's also an artist, and a fairly large crowd gathers around the installation to listen. After the talk, people line up to go inside, and I'm one of the first ones while a long line of mostly Black women starts to form outside.

[glitchy beat returns]

I spend a few minutes looking closely at the carvings, but as I turn to leave, I run into a white woman that I know. For some reason, I'm caught off-guard and at the same time I kind of... snap to attention. I was about to leave, but now I'm frozen. We're in the room, we're in the installation, there's a long line forming outside because only four or five people can be in there at once. And this white woman starts asking me questions. 

[NK's voice slightly filtered] questions about various things that don't pertain to the art. 
Around us, people are leaving and new people are coming in. I see a friend of mine and as she passes through, she whispers, "just so you know, there's like a line forming outside."

[fragments of different NK voices] This white woman taking up space in this installation. And there's a long line forming outside. Lots of Black people waiting to see it. I'm aware of this whole other universe around me. There are a lot of Black artists who I recognize there. It's a very important work for Black people, especially Angelenos. 

But it's like I'm... trapped inside myself. She talks to me and I begin to perform… professionalism. The placation of whiteness that's I've been trained — a sort of placation of whiteness I've been trained to perform my whole life because talking to whiteness is like, a reflex. Like, it's just like it happens in spite of me — she talks to me and I begin to perform professionalism. It's like... a switch is flipped. And it just happens in spite of myself. As if my body responds before my mind even does.

[final glitch beat] 

I hear my own voice leave my body and it sounds like someone else's voice. It sounds like someone I used to be all the time. And I don't want to be that person, but my mind and my body just take over. I just stand there for what feels like a really long time.

[glitch beat comes in softly]

And it's not until later, afterwards, that I feel so much shame. I feel so much anxiety that night. It's a Friday night. And I go home and I'm trying to watch TV and I can't concentrate on TV because I just hear myself telling my brain... This voice in my brain, telling me how stupid I am, how terrible I am, how I'm not Black enough, how it's so shameful that I would like, do would do this to appease and placate a white person in that context. And how everyone saw it and knows how I'm not Black and knows how I'm so like white, you know, white adjacent, like white aligned and I — go out of my way to appease whiteness, make whiteness comfortable, and that they heard me use my white voice that I normally use at work. Which I don't even have to use, like no one asks me to use it. But I just automatically did it. I just used the white, the white voice [gasps for air] and I have so much anxiety, I smoke weed. It doesn't go away. Like usually that kind of calms my mind down but it doesn't go away. So I smoke more weed. It doesn't go away. At this point, it's like 11:00 p.m. I text my partner, I say, like, I can't stand this, I'm I just like having an episode. I feel so fucked up. He's like, what's wrong? And I'm just like, never mind. I can't even tell you. I just feel so ashamed. I can even say, never mind. I stop texting him, I smoke more weed, it doesn't go away. It's like eleven thirty. I decide to go for a walk, I walk for like an hour and a half. Just like walking really quickly, just like, as long as my feet are moving, like one step after the other, they're moving, as long as my feet are moving, then I'm not thinking about these thoughts. The thoughts kind of go away for a second, it's just like, it's like, I feel a sense of relief as long as like my body's in motion. I feel a sense of relief. Like I don't hear that voice. The voice goes away. But as soon as I get back to my house and sit on the couch, like, bam — it's like back. It's like as soon as the door closes, the voice just floods in, like, my entire brain is filled with these thoughts. 

[voice in NK's head starts murmuring]

And I can't take it, I just can't take it anymore. I'm like stoned, like smoking weed isn't working. I start taking shots of whiskey. I'm just like trying to like numb it out. I just want to go to sleep. Like the only way I can escape this voice is if I go to sleep. So I just like drink, I just start taking shots of bourbon until I just feel fucked up enough and tired enough that I can just go to sleep. That's the only way I can escape is just go. To. Sleep. And so I do that until I pass out my bed.

[sighs]

 I perceived threat everywhere: on stage, at parties, in the gazes of strangers, in the gazes of friends. I'm almost always in a state of fight or flight. The shame and self-loathing is about self-discipline. It's this horrible asshole voice that keeps me in line. It thinks it's keeping me safe from judgment. It thinks that if I seek attention, if I do a performance, I'm standing on stage. If I'm talking too loud, if I'm telling a story, if I'm asking for attention. That those are all the reasons, those things are all risky. It doesn't want me to do that. It wants to keep me in line. It's like, shut the fuck up. What are you doing? Like, what do you think you're doing? Who the fuck do you think you are? No one wants to hear this. And no one wants to listen to you. Nothing you have to say is valuable. Just shut up. Shut up. Shut the fuck up. Shut up.

[sighs]

It's a nightmare and it's unbearable. But I'm always telling myself it's fine. Like I hear — I just live in this constant state of anxiety. But I'm just like, it's fine. I tell myself, it's fine. I tell myself it's fine. I tell myself, it's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. I put up with of all of this and I'm fine. I'm fine. It's fine. [pause] I'm fine. 

[Al Green’s Love and Happiness plays]

Kaitlin Prest:

This episode was written, produced and sound designed by Nicole Kelly, NK. Chiquita Paschal is the editor of the series. In this episode, you heard the expert opinion of writer and political commentator Melissa Harris-Perry. Her book is called Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes and Black Women in America. Thanks to Joanna Roberts for creating the workshop called Dismantling People Pleasing that NK attended years ago. And NK's Mom, who had many conversations with NK about her experiences as an upwardly mobile Black woman for this piece.

If you relate with NK's story and you have thoughts, feelings, ideas, stories to share, write to theheart@mermaidpalace.org. Many people helped make the series into what you heard in various big and slightly less big ways.

The Heart is Nicole Kelly, Phoebe Unter, Sharon Mashihi, Chiquita Paschal and me, Kaitlin Prest. You can follow us on Instagram @theheartradio. You can follow me @kaitlinprest. 
The Heart is a production of Mermaid Palace, my new Audio Arts company, and there's going to be all sorts of cool stuff happening. And if you want to know what they are, go to our website at mermaidpalace.org. Or follow us on Instagram @mermaidpalaceart. 

This show is made possible by donations. People who pay for the art that they love. If you want to donate for the art that you love, go to mermaidpalace.org/the-heart, scroll to the bottom and you will see a word. The word is donate. Thank you. The Heart is now a more than 10 years old, queer feminist institution that once in the long past went by the name of audio smut. We encourage you to dive deep down in the feed and listen to the audio we've done over the years. It's a trip and it's worth it. The show was created by me, Kaitlin Prest with Mitra Kaboli and many other artists and audio producers. In order of appearance, Jess Grosman, Nora Roman, Britt Wray, Beansie Staretzky, Mitra Kaboli, Jen Ng, Rider Allsop, Ray Dooley, Samara Breger, Megan Detrie, Sharon Mashihi and Phoebe Wang. Special honor to Mitra Kaboli, the original senior producer and artist. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting. Thank you for being.