35. UNBOUND with Tarana Burke—Part 2

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Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things.

We are not going to waste any time today.

We're going to jump right back in with our friend and author of Unbound, Tarana Burke.

We ended Tuesday's episode with with an emotional story about Rob,

about how Tarana found dance as a place to safely explore her sexuality with no demands on her body.

And we also talk about the double bind that so many survivors of sexual trauma have, which is that these same bodies, which are the portals through which we access our pleasure and sexuality, are the same bodies that have been poisoned by assaulters with shame.

So let's pick back up.

Let's hear from Tirana.

Tarana, have you heard from other survivors who find dancing to be a place where they can feel free and not feel afraid?

Is that a thing?

It is.

Kaya,

my kid, I had, they write about it in the You Are Your Best Thing, the book I did with Brene.

Their essay.

That's right.

Yeah.

They talk about discovering pole dancing.

Yes.

Which was a whole thing for mama.

I'm like,

I invested a lot of time and money in being a dance mom.

We were, you know, ballet tap, jazz, modern, African.

Where did polls come from?

Yes.

They added their own category.

You didn't have it in the original plan, but no.

And I was, I went through, I cycled through all the emotions that a lot of parents would first like, what?

But I remember we were in, I had to go to Barcelona for an an event in 2018 or 2019, and just playing around.

Nakaya is an amazing dancer, generally, just beautiful dance.

I thought that's the direction we would go in, Albanale, but apparently not.

And they were playing around and they jumped up on a pole in

Spain.

And I watched them contort on this pole.

And I was like,

oh,

I get it now.

This is a talent.

This is a skill, unlike anything that most of us have.

And I had to relent.

And they said, you know, I just feel, it makes me feel powerful.

It makes me feel alive and connected to my own body.

And I said,

spin around, baby.

Do what you got to do.

God, they know.

Tarana, do they know how to get us or what?

They do.

It just makes me feel alive.

Yes, yes, yes.

Yeah.

Like my daughter, I had a thought about her,

a nice feminist thought about one of her outfits as she was leaving school for school the other day.

Tarana, she, I said a thing, but I said it kindly.

She walked into her room.

She came back out.

She said, Mom, I'm comfortable and confident in this outfit.

And what did I have to say, Abby?

I had to say,

go with God.

Yes.

Go with God.

I mean, she's lucky I was dropping the other one off.

Yeah, she was lucky.

I was like, go before Abby gets home.

Go.

Okay, so my favorite college moment for you, Sisters was on the dance floor.

I just love seeing like

ferocious Tirana, like the

sparks in high school.

First of all, the phenomenal woman part that we won't discuss on this pod, but every single person who's listening to this will be getting the book and reading it so they will know,

is when the white teacher tells you that the poem was about whiteness.

Yes.

And then you're just going to have to read the book to see Tirana's self who rejected that notion very clearly and beautifully.

Okay.

So you can see there, like your grandfather's teachings, just like, just it ran up against you in that classroom, and you stood up and said the thing and put your truth outside of you.

Right.

Then in college, oh my God,

your first

organized like your first activation your first organizing your first rally well i actually had the first rally in high school went around central park five but this was my this was my first sort of big well i organized it from beginning to end so it was the first one i did and you know i'm taking off my head wrap i'm so dramatic i'm like cutting up my head wrap and handing off black armbands and so so dramatic but i was so hyped you know i was just like, we have to do something.

Why aren't y'all mad?

It was just so dramatic.

And then I ended up, I honestly, though, always wanted to be the organizer, not the speaker.

Like, I just want to pull it together, give you the talking points, get the people there, rally them.

I might hype up the crowd and then bring in some like eloquent speaker.

And then Miss Sanders is like, no, it's you.

Yeah.

Oh, no, I can't do it.

But, but that, that's why I know I'm hard-wired in a particular way because my heart is saying I can't do it.

Really, my brain is like, oh, yes, you can.

I already got the words.

You know, and I'm going to push them out your mouth if you don't hurry up and get in front of a mic.

So that's, that's how when I, by the time I'm ready to say something, it's, I'm ready to say something.

And it's just.

And the first words you said into that mic

were.

telling and super emotional because

it was a lot about it was right around the Rodney King, what everything that happened with Rodney King.

And so everyone at the rally was talking about Rodney King.

And then your first words were,

what about Latasha Harlan?

Yeah.

I've heard a lot of things today, but one thing I haven't heard is the name Latasha Harlands.

And so there you go.

Your first thing was like, what about the women?

What about the black women?

And I just, and then, and then after you spoke, spoke, you wrote this.

I had set out to reinvent myself, but it turned out that I didn't have to start from scratch.

I just had to dust myself off because the best parts were already there.

Glenny, your face.

It's so damn good.

This book is so good.

Talk to us about, you know, your early organizing self and what it felt like to put that flyer up and say, if you're pissed off, meet me.

Come meet me at the bring this armband.

It felt good.

It felt, you know, when I started organizing in high school, I realized a thing like, oh, one, I can speak.

When I speak, other people will listen, which was fascinating.

I was like, huh.

You know,

it's so funny right now, people from high school, like write on my Instagram post.

I remember in high school, you was the same way.

Nobody's surprised.

No, people are like, yeah, because anyway, so I learned that early in high school, and I was like, really kind of addicted to that.

You know, it's like, for the social justice reasons, of course.

But I think beyond that, it was like another thing to kind of pour my energy into.

Right.

And,

and I got to

I know now I wasn't faking it, but I got to add like another layer that another layer to separate me from this other person.

and so I was all in.

I was all in.

And when I got to college, I thought I went to Alabama State University initially, and I thought it was going to be like my camps, this leadership camps, because I had been going

to leadership camp in Alabama for several years.

And it was like, no, what is that?

We had a party.

We had to listen to this bass music, you know.

And I was like, what's wrong with you kids?

This is a land of Martin Luther King.

Why aren't you all?

and they would not they were not feeling me in that way um

but

again my brain when i am really really really

pissed off about something when there's a big injustice

it's just it feels like my whole body has to i can't i'm not going to be settled until there's something done

And it doesn't have to be, you know,

I say this to young people all the time who want to be ordered.

It doesn't have to be a huge rally.

You don't have to get a million people to march on Washington.

But there is some, sense of

relief or

accomplishment, or I'm not sure what the right word is here, but every bit counts.

And so for me, it was like, we're all on this college campus.

This campus is a small little example of the rest of the world, right?

You got a president and vice president, you have a council, you have a little government, you have authority, like police authority.

So it's like a little small microcosm of the rest of the world.

So we get to, and we get to be citizens, essentially, and we get to respond like citizens.

And as citizens, we got to do something.

You have to wanna do something, right?

It was also

a big lesson in everybody doesn't want to do something.

So it's like,

you may feel like that, Tarana.

We don't.

And it was a lesson in like, cause I was around more like like-minded people before.

And now I was in a different situation.

But it also tested what organizing is about.

So no, you don't come automatically just because I said like a Pied Piper, but let me wrap a taste with you.

Let me talk to you about this and how it affects you in small groups.

And then when you see me in the big group, you know, it was that way in high school.

People knew,

people knew, I remember I organized the Black girls to try out for cheerleading in high school.

Not necessarily a social justice issue

directly, but

our high school cheerleading, So, the way my high school was, is it was predominantly white because we were in a predominantly white section of the Bronx.

But right at the end of that section, it's called Throgs Net, was a projects.

And so, the projects was mostly Black and Latino, Latinx.

And so, that's where most of the kids, I wasn't from those projects, I was from another one, but my great-grandmother lived there, so I used her address to go to this school.

Statute of limitations have passed, so they can't arrest me.

But that's how I got into the school because my mother was trying to get me out of this other terrible school.

So

the so the school was used to catering to their white students.

The whole, the football team was mostly white, except for of course the black guys who they who were really good football players.

And then the cheerleading squad was all white.

We had a Black History Month program and I organized the Black History Month program.

And one of the performances was a step routine, like from the HBCUs.

And we had we we were replicating um school days and they did a step routine and the white cheerleaders who thought I was a troublemaker went and complained and said that my the step routine was to tease them

that we did a step routine to mock them just like we were like just like phenomenal woman was about

right exactly

white women like that how the fuck do you send to yourself in our cultural display this is a black history month program you think we're gonna expend this time to tease the white cheerleaders to see what they did that was wrong is now you got me paying attention to the white cheerleaders.

I wasn't even thinking about y'all.

I wasn't thinking about y'all.

And I sat in that office and I watched her.

And this is the 80s, you know, she had big hair, like Van Halen hair and all of this stuff.

And so she was just going off about how disrespected she felt.

And I think there were tears.

And anyway, I was formulating a plan in my mind because I'm looking at all these cheerleaders in there.

Every single one of them was white.

Chilling in.

And I'm petty in this way because chilling and trials was months later.

And I got all the black girls who I knew danced their asses off.

And there's a girl named Delicia right now.

She's one of still a friend of mine.

Delicia could do a falling split, y'all.

If you don't know what that is, it's when you throw your leg up and hold it and then fall into a state.

No.

Yes.

Delicia could do a falling split.

She could do walking splits.

She was amazing.

I got about 15 girls,

held my own tryouts.

No.

I did.

This is God's honest truth.

Held my own tryouts.

I took the best of those girls and I organized them to try out for the Chilean squad.

And they made it.

No.

That's how we integrated our Chilean squad.

And if you hadn't fucked with me,

you could have kept your Lily White squad.

That is amazing.

Yeah, but I'm saying like that, that's the way my brain is wired.

Like we're going to organize something and change change the situation because this is not right.

And the college, what happened in college around that, around that Rodney King rally was a similar thing.

It was like, why aren't we moving?

Why aren't we saying anything?

It's just,

I don't know.

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Oh my God.

Okay, so you graduate from college.

Your work, you're ish.

Oh, well, so all the rest of us are ish, too.

You left college.

I still haven't graduated.

Yeah, that's me and I always say we left college.

They asked us to leave.

Or I finished.

Yeah.

I am done.

I'm left.

Okay, So you were done with college and then you went and your work in the world started.

Okay.

Yes.

And this began with these, you started these amazing programs, were part of programs that were about creating space for girls to share their stories and lives.

Can you just tell us about heaven?

Oh, heaven.

So, you know, I had a thought last night that I, I wonder if I should have used her real name so she would know exactly who I'm talking about.

Cause Because I've been using alias for so many years, even before me too, I was using the alias.

But Heaven is a little girl who I met doing this work who came to one of our leadership camps.

And in 21st century, our leadership camps are the core of our work, right?

Our young, the young people, I went through them.

Young people come three times a year and get leadership development training.

And

she was a part of a chapter, but not, she came with a chapter, but wasn't a part of that chapter.

And she came off off the bus I mean you read in the book she came off the bus wildest like and I can you can spot them you know like this one is getting ready to be a hell yet this is getting ready to be a handful for me all week and I did with her what I what was done with me and what was done with other people it's like in 21st century we wrapped young people in love right that was our that was our the adults We had discipline, but even our discipline was like, there's a disciplinary committee made up of your peers, your young people, and they decide and everything was like fair and equitable and blah, blah, blah.

And so I wanted to give that to heaven.

What's really important, though, is that I'm 22.

There's a couple of things I'm 22 at this time.

I have not really started doing this work.

Like.

not just the work around sexual violence, but even on myself.

I had not really dug into like healing.

I don't even know if I had that language yet, right?

I was just still trying to figure it all out.

And

I meet this baby, and I'm giving her what was given to me.

I love you.

I care for you.

You can trust me.

And this moment comes where she says, puts me to the test, essentially.

She's like, oh, you love me?

I can trust you.

Well, here, I need you to hold this for me.

And she

begins to privately tell me about being molested by her mother's boyfriend.

And the thing that it, it just, so by this point, you have to know, I don't talk about my stuff at all.

People in the camp, when I was younger, I had talked about theirs and had come forward.

None of it compelled me to be like, oh, me too.

Nope.

I was just like, wow, that's really messed up, you know, and I would just be quiet.

And so now I had this little child who was

as courageous as people accuse me of being

in real life.

She was,

she did what you're supposed to do, right?

She believed.

I told her the innocence of believing because I said so.

And when she tried to get me to hold this for her or just be in community with her, just to hold it with her, I just couldn't do it.

I couldn't do it.

I couldn't do it.

It was just too much.

And,

you know, there are a few things worse than disappointing a child.

You know,

I mean, as parents, we do it all the time, right?

Yes.

Just be honest, right?

We do it all the time.

But I mean, that kind of deep disappointment, not like, no, you can't go on a school trip, but like

just really this deep disappointment that I read in her eyes.

And whatever little progress we had made in a few days and the week that we had known each other, just kind of all, I just knew it was all over.

She's like, you just like everybody else.

But even in that, even when I saw the disappointment, it didn't move me enough to be like, wait, wait, wait.

Because this thing I've been holding was much bigger than this 12-year-old.

And,

but, but what it did tell me after the moment had passed, but it did tell me,

it was a chin check for me that said, like,

if you're going to do this, you have to do this.

I was really also kind of intrigued and curious to how did she so freely just say, hey,

this happened to me and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?

I thought I had been safe in other places and I probably was safe enough to say it, but there was something else that needed to happen because I had not told myself.

I had not,

I could not talk about it to other people because I just, I didn't even want to talk about it to myself.

And so.

The heaven situation forced me, I think that's, oh, we talked about it earlier.

That's when I, I was like standing in the bathroom in the mirror, talking to myself,

shaking in my boots like I was talking to some stranger, but having to push through that.

And she gave me the courage to do it.

Cause I'm like, if this baby can do it,

I can at least tell myself.

And it really,

the other part was like,

I watched these little girls tell each other these stories.

We would have sister to sister sessions and they would be talking about what happened to them.

I had made the the choice that I wanted to work with little black girls.

So I'm like, if this is what you want to do, this is what you're up against.

You're going to run from everybody.

You're not going to be able to do this work well.

So

yeah,

I had to

get my, you know, balls out my purse, as they say.

And then when did that turn?

When did, because

the scene was actually your life,

the scene where you look in the mirror and you tell yourself the truth.

How do we get from that moment where you're finally letting the truth stand outside of your body and you don't die?

Yeah.

How do we get there to Me Too?

How do we, when does the Me Too?

So, so that, the year literally that happened was 96.

So there was still 10 years between that and the founding of, you know, know, solidifying of Me Too.

What did happen

in the

quite like a few years later, maybe two years after that,

I did the work of Me Too without a name for many years.

Exactly.

That's what I'm trying to get at.

Yes.

Oh, yes.

Not Twitter, Me Too.

I mean,

and not even, not even my Me Too.

Like, I mean, I started doing work with girls and survivors before I had the name Me Too or before we had Just Be even.

It was just, I wanted to shift focus so like one of my i did an interview the other day and they go really deep and so they asked could they interview somebody from my past and they interviewed um this she's a young woman now i still call her my little muff oh i mentioned her in the book my little muff

and so they interviewed her and um

And she talked about how,

so I met her in 98.

So somewhere around 98 or 99,

she talks about how

I was the second or third person in her life that she ever told what happened to her.

But I was the first person to believe her.

And what we were doing then, I was trying to also be a little more responsible on the sister to sisters.

So we

created space for her and talked her through.

you know, what she had experienced and told her all the things, you're not alone.

So I'd started doing that kind of work.

But for me, it was still part of the leadership development, right?

It was still part of being responsible and doing the leadership development.

Fast forward maybe to about 2002,

2002, 2003, we started Just Be Inc., which was the organization

that started for black girls, black and brown girls.

It was not all black girls in it.

And that was amazing and it worked so well.

And we started with high school girls and we took them through rites of passage and it was wonderful, but we still kept running into sexual violence all the time.

And the truth is, whenever we gathered a group of girls or a group of women together, it reared its head some kind of way.

There was a, and a lot of times with my girls, it wasn't confession, it wasn't disclosure, it was just stories.

You know, it was just happenstance.

And that's why my very first workshops were about giving them language.

I had a situation with one of my seventh graders who, you know, my program was middle school.

It was high school and then we moved to middle school.

And I happened to stay late at the school one day.

And one of my middle school kids, seventh graders is standing outside.

I'm standing.

I said, who are you waiting for?

And she's like, oh, I'm waiting for my ride home.

We're just chit-chatting like normal.

She said, I'm waiting for my boyfriend.

And then I'm thinking it's some little kid going to ride up on a bike, some scrawny little seventh grader, you know, is going to come rolling up.

And a car pulls up.

And what I am clear is a grown man is in this front seat, some 20-something-year-old grown man.

This is a 12 or 13-year-old kid.

And so I'm like,

this better be your uncle or your brother.

And she's like,

you know, it turns into a whole thing because I had to send him off and like threaten him within an inch of his life to stay away from these children.

It was a whole thing.

But you know what?

The next day, when we were back in school, she was hot fire burning mad at me.

You in my business, that's my boyfriend, blah, blah, blah.

And nobody had ever said, just in a very clear way, this is statutory rape.

This is the definition of it.

This is the definition of molesting.

Like nobody had ever given them language.

And I often talk about like

the importance of language.

We cannot underestimate that.

You know, when Kaya was a baby, I tell this story about how when Kaya was a baby, I rushed them to the hospital once because they had like 102 fever.

And I was, you know, a young mom and I was like, oh my God.

And they were fine.

But Kaya, being the inquisitive child, they were like three years old, was like, why are we at the doctor at the nighttime?

You know, like, what's the matter?

And I said, you were sick.

You had a fever.

And, you know, I tried to explain it.

For like months after that, every time something happened, Kaya would stub their toe and say, oh, mommy, I have have a fever in my toe.

Or they would get a scratch and say, I have a fever on my arm, right?

And it was so adorable.

But the reason why I think about it is that because they didn't have the language to describe the actual pain, what was actually happening to them.

So they used whatever language was available.

And that's what my girls did.

They didn't have the words.

I don't know that

this 12-year-old was comfortable in whatever position she was being put in by this boy.

But does she have the language to explain to me that I'm uncomfortable?

I don't like it, or I think that this is, I have to do something like this.

So, that work started off trying to fill in the gaps.

Yes, you talk about that so much and so beautifully in the book that nobody was saying the thing to you.

Everybody, it's this open secret talking around him.

Is he messing with you?

Is someone messing with you?

Is someone bothering you?

Is he,

but never like, this is just saying this might happen, and this is wrong, and this is

And if it does, just say it.

And if it's already happened to you, you're okay.

You're going to be okay.

Healing is possible.

You are not the sum total of the things that happen to you.

These things don't define you.

All the things.

Honestly, I did not, I was so scared starting this work because I'm like, I'm not a therapist.

I'm not a

social worker.

I don't want to.

mess up.

But what I had was my experience.

Right.

What would I, what would 12-year-old, what could somebody have said to me at 12 that would have changed the trajectory of my life?

Just

not

any of those things.

You are not a bad girl.

It's not your fault.

Those things sound so simple when you hear them now because we kind of see them on like lifetime movies.

you know, we hear it all the time, but it really is as simple as hearing for a 12-year-old.

It's not your fault.

You didn't do anything wrong.

You're not a bad girl.

And this thing hurts and it's okay that it hurts, but it's not going to always hurt.

You know, like those things are important.

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You said something to Kaya that my sister is now saying to Alice at night.

Can you, sister, can you talk about that for a second?

We're going to have to let Tarana go in a little bit, but I want to end by talking about Kaya and you and mothering

and how we are mothered by our parents and everybody does the best they can.

And

I am utterly obsessed with this one thing you talk about when it comes to motherhood, which is capacity versus desire.

You say,

there is no question that self-hate severely limits one's capacity to love fully and wholeheartedly.

Capacity and desire are not the same thing, especially in discussions of love.

I was an adult with a child of my own and a trail of mistakes behind me before I could say with certainty that my mother loved me.

The clarity came from being faced with my own limited capacity.

No matter how deep my desire was to love my child, I was still encumbered by the ghosts I had tried to bury.

Can you talk to us?

Abby and I have talked this to death now.

Can you talk about how we can have the desire, but not the capacity, and how those are two things that can exist at once?

Absolutely.

I think they often exist at once, right?

And I think what happens is that either people conflate them or they don't acknowledge that they're both existing at the same time.

And

we set our expectations

based on desire, not on capacity.

And And it often leads to deep disappointment.

It's expected as a child, right?

And the reason why I added that part in is because I didn't want to just spill about what my 12-year-old mind understood about my mother and our relationship and the decision she made.

I may never understand the decision she made or why she, the posture she took, but I do understand that that had to come from a place of limited capacity.

She gave what she could in that moment.

I've been in that position where I'm even clear that my child needs more than what I'm giving, but I just literally don't have it.

The difference is that because of my experience with my mother, I was determined with Kaya to expand my capacity, to figure out

what I need to do, what therapy I need to go to, who I need to talk to, what I need to change in my life to give me more capacity.

But the reality is some people just don't have it.

No matter what you try to do, it's like trying to, if you have two people and one is an eight ounce cup and one is a 12 ounce cup, it does not matter how many times you pour over and over again.

You can't fill that cup.

You just can't.

So

I think it was so helpful to me.

And I think other people have said this too, it's been helpful to them to frame this.

to reframe my understanding of my mother.

My mother did everything she could for me.

Everything.

I don't know the traumas that she went through.

I have some idea.

I don't know how those things impacted her.

And I also know that generation was not privileged to have what we have.

So I'm laughing and joking about the secret and the y'all and all the rest of that, but we are the self-aware generation, right?

We're the generation that grew up with those things that know that we have to, I should probably take a step back here.

Let me take a beep.

Am I being this?

You know, like we ask ourselves these questions as almost second nature.

My mom's 71.

That's not second nature to her.

And so

she was using what she was given to do the best that she can, she could.

And I just, I think it would,

I think it would help a lot of people to think about the people in their lives because it feel to love them, right?

Because it feels weird.

It feels like, I think you love me, but you keep doing this.

Yes, I do.

You say you love me.

And I'm not talking about abuse, right?

I'm not talking, I think there's some real clear lines that we can see the difference in, but in some of these relationships that feel complicated.

And the other part is when you find out that somebody has limited capacity, it doesn't mean you have to stay and just put up with the capacity they have, it just helps to settle your spirit, right?

To be like, oh, I get it now.

I still got to separate myself from you because you just, you just cannot meet this capacity.

But I understand, I get why.

For me me and my mom it was what allowed me to build on our relationship and approach and like engage her from a different place and and and re level set my expectations yeah um

it was life-changing once i i kind of got that realization and and then allowed you to not take it personally yeah

it's not about you

sister let's end with you telling tarana what We decided that you, all of our little ones, need to hear forever.

Well, I just thought it was life-changing for me to hear what you said, um, to Kaya when

you were reaching out to them to share with you.

And when you said, You, you know, baby, there is nothing that you can ever say to me that will separate you from my love.

Um,

and

um,

sorry, um, I just think that that is,

that's just so beautiful and so important.

And

now I say it to both my kids like every night.

And they're like, yeah, I got it.

But they're like, can we just go brush our fucking teeth?

Oh, God.

But I just, to me,

God,

it's the whole ballgame because it's like you.

needing to separate from yourself so early because you thought that that made you not worthy of love and of living, and are kids to just know that there's nothing that can separate us,

them from our love.

I'm going to tell you, and I feel like I can have this conversation with y'all because sometimes I feel like when I talk

about being Christian or about God, people are like,

okay.

You know, it's like, it's a nice hobby you have.

I want to be like, I'm not one of those Christians.

But

two things about that moment.

One, I really do believe God put that in my heart

because,

and sometimes we don't have the words and they come to us what feels like magically and you're like, oh, thank you.

Because I knew, I knew when I tell you, I knew in my bones from the time Kai was five that something had happened.

And I had asked over and over and over and over, and I kept asking the wrong way.

Did somebody bother you?

Did somebody mess with you?

Are you, you know, and not even recalling my own experience that I didn't feel like that?

I felt like I had done a thing.

And that's exactly what Kaya was holding.

And

kind of, I guess, pulling on like what I would love to hear at that time myself.

that that came to me.

And when I tell you, you talk about spreading the gospel, I have emails still of when I was emailing my other friends, like, hey, y'all, I discovered discovered something.

Say it this way, you know, like, let's stop right now saying,

you know, interrogating our children in this way.

It really is about creating all the love and safety around them that's possible so that they feel the kind of comfort they need to come forward.

And that was it.

That was it.

That was it.

And if you ask Kaya now, again, to your point, Glenn, and when the kids use it again to you, Kaya will sometimes be like, I thought you said

it was nothing i was like kaya

but it is our thing it is it is our thing and i'm so i'm so happy to share that with other people and i it is really like one of the things i'm like yes please say this to your children please let them know that there's because those other people the people who mean to harm them get

burrow in their brain and will will like that's what grooming is right Systematically separating you from your parents and the people who love you, and making you feel like that's not a real thing.

And I needed Kaya to know without a shadow of a doubt, there is nothing,

there's nothing that will ever separate you from my love, and that's how God is for me, right?

That's where that comes from.

It will, there's nothing, what could separate me from the love of God?

What's going to make God stop loving me?

And that's sort of what we replicate in our

or try to replicate in our relationships.

Oh, Amanda, you're making me emotional now.

But yeah, I just,

I'm so glad that part resonates and you share that with your children.

And I'm going to tell Kai.

Kai's going to get a kick out of that.

And I need to just say, because of your gospel was so generous, you're suggesting to write it down that.

Alice was able to disclose something to me that she was not able to say.

It is outside of this particular thing we're talking about, but a traumatic thing for for her that she couldn't say because of your writing down,

inviting your kids to write it down if they can't say it out loud with the words.

I mean, those two things are going to save a lot of people,

give a lot of people life.

So thank you for that.

Tarana, you are a fucking miracle.

Yeah.

Seriously.

Like you have changed, not to center myself or my two.

beautiful, beautiful, beautiful hosts on this show.

You are a fucking miracle, and you have changed us.

Like these last couple of weeks, just like digging into your book, and you deserve every little bit of success, and it just is going to keep coming back to you because you're doing God's work.

I don't care what kind of faith they're talking about.

I love you so much, and I just like you've opened up so much of my eyes.

And just sharing your story is giving us language to talk to our daughters, and by the way, our son about some of this.

That's right.

You You are just a fucking miracle.

Thank you so much for existing.

And we want to say to all of our

beautiful, we can do hard things.

Your next right thing is to get this goddamn book.

Okay.

I don't know what else.

It has to be on your shelf.

It has to be.

And also, you need to have it on hand when someone comes to you who shares with you.

And you don't know what the next right thing is.

The next right thing is to have unbound.

The next right thing is to put it in people's hands.

Tarana, you know, I've said this to you, but I just, I imagine all of the little girls, little black girls who I know you wrote this book for, who are you're, they're Maya, Angelou now.

Like they're seeing you as, and they're seeing your pain, but they're seeing your joy.

I hope so.

We love you so much.

I love you all.

I do.

I can't tell you how much I appreciate just the kind of support and even just the freedom to have this conversation because I can't have quite this conversation with everybody.

So I appreciate it so much.

I really do.

Go rest and please give Kaya a big hug for us.

I will.

I will.

I love y'all.

I love you.

I love you.

Unbound, people.

Unbound.

Get it.

Get it.

Bye, y'all.

Bye.

Bye, everybody.

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