34. UNBOUND with Tarana Burke—Part 1

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I walked through fire.

I came out the other side.

Hi everybody.

Thank you for coming back to We Can Do Hard Things.

Today is a very special day.

You are going to be happy you joined us for this one because today we are talking with our dear friend and hero, Tarana Burke.

You should know that we talk in this episode about sexual abuse and trauma and some heavy things.

And so if you need to protect yourself from that, please do.

But also please know that this conversation is one of the most joyful, energizing, and hopeful conversations you'll hear.

It's like the paradox of the prophets, right?

It's the flip side of carrying pain is this extraordinary gift of holding and spreading joy.

And there is nobody

who

shows us that gorgeous paradox more beautifully than Tarana Burke.

So you can do hard things.

You can share in this hard, joyful, soul witnessing, heart-expanding conversation.

For more than 25 years, activist and advocate Tarana J.

Burke has worked at the intersection of sexual violence and racial justice, fueled by commitments to interrupt sexual violence and other systemic inequalities disproportionately impacting marginalized people, particularly Black women and girls.

Tirana has created and led various campaigns focused on increasing access to resources and support for impacted communities, including the Me Too movement, which to date has galvanized millions of survivors and allies around the world.

Tirana is my personal hero.

Her new book, Unbound, is out now.

And I'll tell you that after this conversation, my sister texted me and she said, does the J in Tirana J.

Burke stand for joy?

It has to.

I said, no, it doesn't, but in our heart, it does.

Let's jump right into our conversation with Tarana Burke.

Okay, everybody, welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things.

I need to tell you first off that your small little loving team of Abby, Amanda, and I have been losing our damn minds about the interview we're doing today.

If we do interviews for the next 20 years, there will never be a more important interview.

There will never be anyone whose work is more important to us and to the world than the person we're interviewing today.

I know that with every bone in my body.

And so that's why we were and are freaking out.

That's why I'm wearing a very small tank top because I'm already sweating.

There's this idea

that

what you do is you look at the world and there's this like power in the middle in the center.

And then if you keep going out, you go towards the people that are the least protected and you stand with those people.

Because if you stand with those people, then you, by definition, catch everybody else.

Tarana Burke spends her life standing with

black girls in America who are some of the least protected people in our culture.

And she has been doing it for 25 years and she does it with grace and power like I've never seen before.

And I just think she's the most important effing person on earth.

So Tarana Burke,

thank you.

You can do hard things, Tarana.

Man, listen, Glennon, I need to carry you around with me so that you can, I can have a little drum roll and then Glennon comes out.

I matter of fact, I'll just tape it because I know you're busy.

That's what I can do.

She could be your highest.

I am.

She could be your height.

I am.

That's what I'm doing.

I love it so much.

I love it.

Before we get into this brilliant freaking book, Unbound, which

I mean, we all knew who read it before it came out that it was going to be a huge success.

It's already broken into the top, the number three on the New York Times list, right?

And Oprah's crying over it over and over and over again.

People are comparing it to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which I'm sure is just no big deal for you at all, right, Trana?

Good God.

I'm like, guys,

you know,

how are you?

How are you?

I am.

Have you?

Um, I don't know if you've seen many spikely movies, but he has this thing that he does in a lot of his movies where the characters just sort of float like this.

I feel like I'm floating in a spikely movie.

It's, it's a very strange,

I think you described it when we we were talking the other day about like almost out-of-body experience.

Like I'm watching it happen, but I'm also over here, like, oh, that's happening.

It's very strange.

It's hard to explain.

And then I have these moments when I look over and I see my name really big on the book, and I'm like, oh my God, I wrote that.

I was like, oh my God, you wrote the hell out of it, is what you did.

You wrote the hell out of it.

And

well, let's start at the start.

Let's start at the beginning of Unbound

and parts of the beginning of your life,

which is, you know, sort of where the origin of all of your work begins, which is when you were sexually assaulted as a child.

Abby, can you read that passage for us?

I had no real grasp of the gravity of what was happening, but I knew it wasn't right.

It made me feel nasty and dirty and wrong, not realizing that he was wrong and that he was the culprit.

I thought we were wrong.

And later you say, the only clear memory I have is running through the litany of rules I had broken.

Never go off without permission.

Never be out of sight when you're playing outside.

Never come upstairs late.

Stay away from the grown-up boys.

Never, ever let anyone touch your private parts.

What I know for certain was that I was in big trouble.

I hardly ever broke rules, and certainly never this many.

You later write, I began to put away the memory of what the boy had done to me because of what I thought it said about me.

My inside strained to accommodate this new information, but they couldn't.

And so they split.

In the place I'd tucked away from Mr.

West and my mom was the real me,

the bad me.

On the outside, I would pretend I was good.

Now, Tarana, I need to know, what was that like as a kid?

For you to be abused and then to believe it was your own fault.

I tried my best to explain it in those kind of details because

I'm a worrier by nature, right?

Like my.

I'm always thinking ahead, something good happens, I'm thinking about the next thing, what can go wrong, right?

That's been since I was a kid and

and probably stems from this i just felt like i was constantly it's like baggage i was constantly living with a secret and i was so so so afraid that somebody would find out and on a small scale would be like you know if you got like a stain on your dress or you know a mark on the wall or something like that that you were trying to hide i've done that too where i've like rearranged the furniture in my room so my mom couldn't see that i got a big skid mark on the wall and then you're like afraid every time she walks past that part of the room like i'm gonna get caught that's that's what it felt like it felt like i was constantly in fear of being found out

um

and so it made me anxious and it made me um learn to perform really really early right i could I could and who knows where I pulled that from, but I just learned to, I showed up and I was just everything

I thought

good girls would be like.

And the funny thing is, it's who I was, right?

It's who I was prior to this.

And I was like, I'm just going to pretend to be that person again because

apparently I must be this bad person, but I'm going to keep pretending to be who I had already been being, if that makes sense, right?

Um, it was just the fear of constantly being found out until you know

I found some coping mechanisms.

And even that wasn't really helpful.

But

what do you think?

How do we, because so much of what I read about in that part is the rules about you never doing things, the rules about girls never doing things.

Yep.

Leads then little girls to when they get abused thinking, oh, it's because I broke the rules.

It's not because they

did something wrong.

Switch that.

That is, I, you know, I used to talk to parents about this when I did these workshops that I understand, particularly in communities of color, but I think all little girls have this.

It's a thing that we do to

children, particularly little girl children, that

adults don't realize you're setting the child up.

We take rules seriously as kids, you know?

You don't run with scissors.

You don't cuss.

You don't, you know, like those things are reinforced over and over and over again.

And we also know as children, there are the spoken rules and then there are the unspoken rules.

So you may have been, you may have been told to say please and thank you and not to run with scissors, but there's something about that room that you know you don't go in that room when the door is closed, right?

Nobody's ever said that's a rule, but there are messages, messages that we get from adults that kind of sit with us as children.

And so I had that little litany of rules, but I also had there were other sort of unspoken messages that you got.

And

what adults neglect to do is they neglect to say, if one of these rules are broken, meaning those those like, don't let anybody touch your private parts or don't go off with boys, older people, or anything like that.

They neglect to say, but if that rule is broken, it's not your fault.

If somebody breaks that rule, it's always the adult's fault.

Yes.

Right.

You get these messages that you get ingrained in your brain that says, oh, God, I did something wrong.

I shouldn't.

Nobody told me about who else.

was wrong in that equation.

And so I think that's the problem with a lot of, what happens to a lot of little girls that they,

girls are just riddled with rules and, and, and protocols and pre, you know, I can think of so many times when I've been told or I've seen other little girls be told, who are fully dressed, go put some clothes on because a man comes in the house, right?

I could have a short set on, a tank top.

I'm a child, right?

With a short set and a tank top on.

And it's like, I'll never forget, this is a little bit of a hood story, but I'll never forget going to visit my uncle in jail when I was a preteen.

I must have been like,

I don't know, maybe nine or 10 or something like that.

And we got to the prison and they made my grandfather turn around.

I couldn't go in.

I'm a kid, a little kid, but because I had a spaghetti strap tank top on, they said it would be a distraction to the other prisoners.

Oh, jeez.

The other inmates.

Yeah.

And I, and I like.

You just get those kind of messages from different places, right?

The school dress codes, codes, you know, all of these different places, girls get these messages that we are the guardians of our bodies.

And if somebody is attracted to us, we're, it's our fault because we didn't do enough to protect ourselves.

That's right.

So that's where that stuff came from.

And that they can't control themselves.

Yeah.

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I thought about this when I was reading.

You know, there are so many parts where if things had been different,

you may, in a certain situation, you may have been able to share the truth.

But the way things are set up for you and for so many girls, there's nowhere safe to share.

You know, I was thinking about your parents, the

amazing Mr.

Wes, who just, oh my God.

I mean, wait till you guys read this man.

But there was one moment where you were walking down the stairs of a of a building and you ran into a woman that you

miss Davis, right?

Who you loved.

And you had a moment where you thought about telling her.

something that had just happened to you with the boy.

And she said,

these little boys can't keep keep their damn hands to themselves, my baby.

You got a daddy who will go to his grave to protect you.

So be careful because we need Big Wes around here.

And that, I mean, I think that is, that was a very important part for me to include because it was important for when it happened to me because it just brought me, and I was 12 when that happened.

It brought me back to being seven and it's like, right, that's what I knew.

That's what I knew.

I do not want anything to happen to Mr.

West.

So I'm just going to, I'm going to leave this alone.

And I think in a lot of instances, there are people who experience some sexual violence and don't tell because they don't have a support system.

They think they won't be believed.

That happens a lot.

I actually had the opposite problem where I did have a support system.

There was no question that Mr.

West and my mother.

or my grandfather, whoever would believe me.

It was just what would happen if they did, which brings me to another thing that adults do and we don't realize it.

You see this every year.

It drives me crazy during prom.

You have the girls who get ready for prom and the father or brother or uncle with the shotgun or the, you know, or the big, you know, bullying polls and saying, you do something to this girl and I'm going to kill you, whatever.

A lot of us grew up with parents who said things like, who did say, if somebody touches you, it's not your fault.

But the way they said it was, if somebody touches you, I'll kill them

something happens to you you come to me i will i will bury them i heard that over and over again i'm my mother i don't play about my child i've done it right

what that did was now make me responsible for them yes yeah not only am i responsible for my own protection of my body but now i'm responsible for the adults oh my god i i want to tell because i know something is not right here

but if i do my dad is going to jail and it will be my fault for something something that I did.

I broke the rules and I made my father go to jail.

And it just, this is me at seven.

These are like,

we underestimate how human children are.

We are watching all these things.

You're taking it in like a sponge.

We are little human.

Those are little human beings.

And one of the things I knew because I did live in an urban community that was over policed and under-resourced.

is that I knew what consequences were.

I knew what jail was.

I knew what the police did and how they operated in our community.

And I knew it was never good news when they came around.

So I didn't want to,

no, not for me.

So it's just, it's just, we have to be super careful about the messages that we give, that we pass on to our kids, because little kids are little worry warts.

They don't want mommy and daddy to be hurt.

You know, just, it's just, it gets complicated for us, for us meaning children.

I'm just speaking as my small Tirana self.

and that was really your reality i mean it wasn't a perception of yours it was a real responsibility that you bore because one of the things you do so beautifully in this book over and over is that you portray impeccably these kind of double binds that you're in and

i feel like so many girls and women go through this particularly um black and brown girls and most suffocatingly black and brown survivors is that it's like the protection provided by your community is what saves you, but the need to protect your community is what silences you.

Exactly.

At the very same time,

it's a, it's a, ooh, that, that's a very succinct way to put that.

And it's exactly what it is.

And you are just caught in the middle.

Like we did a PSA once for,

I was just talking about this last night, but this Honduran woman was talking about being assaulted by her uncle when she was was 16 and didn't say anything because the uncle was the citizen and her family was undocumented.

And she did not want to involve any law enforcement in their lives.

She didn't want any police to come around at all because it put her whole family at risk.

And the uncle, knowing that he had the privilege of being a citizen.

and could change their lives anytime, held that over their head.

And so a lot of times in black and brown communities, there is a whole set of other things that are being thought of on top of the shame that you're carrying, on top of the guilt and all of the things that come almost automatically when you experience sexual violence.

It's compounded.

And then Tarana, for that message, especially because you work so closely, you work with little black girls.

But like for a little girl to hear that from Miss Davis, so her message was you're.

the little boys can't control themselves.

Your dad won't be able to control himself.

So you have to control your truth.

So you, you at this young age is all on you.

You know?

And, and I took that very seriously.

Okay.

Yep.

But our little, our little bodies only can hold and deal with so much.

And so that starts coming out in other ways because it's got to.

Yeah.

And then we have the church.

And I can't, I will never, ever stop laughing about reading about little Tirana

in in Catholic church because, because

you know we have a different background.

I was a little white girl but I also lied in confessional over and over again or made up sins to cover up my true badness.

Tirana says I would go to confession regularly to confess a cover sin

lying, swearing or something else instead of what I really held inside.

I'd quietly ask God for forgiveness for lying.

And then I'd redeem myself by doubling whatever penance the priest gave.

But what I need to tell you, my favorite part is that when little Tirana would go outside to say her double penance, she would only say the first couple because you have to understand that when you're a Catholic kid, other kids are watching.

Watching, that's right.

And so if you're sitting your ass in the pew for a long time, they will know you did something really good.

What did you do?

Tarana's doing three rosaries.

We know what's up.

Because in school, in Catholic school, most kids, I loved confession, but most kids want to just get through it.

So you come out, you do your rosary, your 10 Hail Marys, four fathers, whatever.

In my mind, I had to do like 20 of them.

So I'm just like, our father,

who art in heaven, everybody look at me.

And then, and then I'd be like in the lunch line, like, here, Mary, full of grace, love, grace.

It was, and it's a, it's a, it's such a banana's way to live, though.

I'd be like

confession time, I liked it, but also it was so weird because it would take me like two days to get through what I thought.

I had to, sometimes I'd write it.

You know how you have to write in detention, I will not talk.

I will not, I would just like write out Hail Mary's or Our Father or the Apostles' Creed or whatever.

Because I'm just like, I got to get through.

You remember, right?

I was like, in choosing to do wrong and failing to do good.

And then, and then also, I was like, I was like one of the pips.

When we got to that part, I'd be like, I have sinned against you and your church.

You're like, you don't even know how bad it is.

I have sinned against you and your church.

And it would be like, ooh, I get to say that out loud, right?

I was, I was,

I talked about in the book, I mean, Catholicism both saved and ruined me in some ways, you know?

But in that moment, I do, I really wanted to talk about that because it was such a saving grace for me because that, speaking about what you were saying, that duality that I was holding felt like, it's like putting on a fur coat and jumping in a pool.

You know, and you get it.

It's just this heaviness that you always have.

And so when I, what I had with confession and this relationship that I wanted with God was, I know you know who I am.

I'm just going to keep apologizing.

Like, I

know that you are merciful and I know that you are generous with with your mercy and abundant in grace.

And I just, can I please, please, please, if I keep praying, will you just keep giving it to me?

That was,

it was a real savior for me as a child, because if not, then I would have been buried in just the guilt and the shame with no release for it.

So there's a lot of criticism about Catholicism, I know, but

that.

I don't know that I would have made it

through that time period without it.

So there was something liberating

for you in that.

Absolutely.

Speaking of Catholicism, it was while you were preparing for the sacrament of confirmation,

your grandfather prioritized passing down to you the, you know, racial theory and black liberation texts, which seemed to me, as I was reading your story, a sacred sacrament sort of in your life as well.

Of its own.

Yes, exactly.

It allowed you, it equipped you that even you say, even when you were a young girl, you could smell white supremacy from a mile away because of that framework that you had,

that you had been reading and internalizing.

How vital was having that consciousness that was so subversive to everything that you were being told, you know, in all the schools and all around you to the person that you'd become and the work that you would do?

I think it was, it was critical.

And I think both of those things were critical.

I'm so glad that I was grounded in my faith really, really early.

I really, really enjoyed being Catholic.

Like I did.

I just,

all the things I did my, you know, I was baptized at like seven or eight months, but I did my communion and my confirmation and I did all the things.

But I'm also really glad that my grandfather came in at the point that he did, because, because of how much I enjoyed being Catholic and because of the release that i got from confession and that kind of thing i probably was very close to to slipping into being um

obsessive probably right and so what what bringing this consciousness did was help me balance some of that out and and see a broader view of the world.

So it's not, I don't, this is not the only thing that's liberating.

It began to feel liberating to me to understand who I was in the world and like have something else to think about besides my sins, right?

Because the flip side of the liberation is that Catholicism makes you think about your sins all the time, right?

Just all the time.

You sin, sin, sinny, sin, sinner.

And, you know, and everything's a mistake.

I would, I would like, I don't know if y'all do this, but you know how you walk in front of a church, you're supposed to make the sign of the cross.

I have ran back a block.

Oh.

Okay.

Yes, we do.

And and you're like wait did i yeah and so now i'm in front of the church just doing this like i mean just stuff like that i know and then you're like wait is this faith or superstition because it feels a lot like superstition

i'm like why did jesus kick over the tables in the temple for me to run a block back to make sure that i make the sign of the cross just in case just

but also right

but also i'm gonna do it just in case okay

and so i think that

I would have gone down a rabbit hole with Catholicism if I didn't have this thing to interrupt that and

balance it out.

The grounding doesn't go anywhere.

And it gave me

being Catholic early gave me,

set me up for my faith later, right?

I'm Christian, but I don't identify, I'm not Catholic anymore.

I was able to pull the things that I needed, the good stuff, and figure that out later on.

But at the point, my grandfather came in and I started understanding, it helped me shift and like sort of focus on something else.

It's a bigger thing in life than like sins I might have, you know, done and things like that.

And so I'm really glad.

And I don't, he didn't know what was going on, like

and behind closed doors, but I think he was looking at me like, this ain't no.

And I found out, this is a small tidbit.

I found out later.

So my grandfather, I found out later, so I put in a book that he went to a,

he was in a Catholic boy's home when he was growing up.

And so he had a really sour view of Catholicism.

But he believed in letting his children choose their own path.

And my mother chose to be Catholic, much to his chagrin.

And then I did.

So I guess he was like, I'm about to put it.

I'm going to have to intervene somewhere.

Well, thank God he did, though, Tarana, because you just kind of, you took what you wanted from the Catholicism, but his framework became part of your faith too, right?

I mean,

your faith is so social justice, so,

you know,

it's like those two got smushed together and you left behind what you didn't want of Catholicism and it became who you are now.

It's so beautiful.

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Somebody said this to me, but it made so much sense.

And now I'm sorry if that person's listening, that I'm not crediting you, but somebody said something to me about,

do I think that my love of confession, do I ever think about how my love of confession ties to the movement and the work and how that is sort of grounded in confession to some degree?

And I said, oh, that's really profound.

I had not thought of it, but I've been thinking about it ever since they said it.

And it does make sense that that.

that nugget stayed there is something liberating about getting that getting truth out of your body, right?

Getting it out of your system and confessing not to the world, even, even if it's to God, if it's to yourself, it's if it's in, I tell people if it's in your journal, whatever, there is something, the, the part that felt liberating, I also feel like I held on to that and it helped me be a truth teller.

Like,

I really do enjoy telling the truth, right?

I just enjoy it.

It's really, really feels good, good, you know?

Well, when you say that, it reminds me of the

first time you

sat

in front of the mirror and you said it was after heaven,

right?

And you said,

I was raped.

They molested me.

I didn't want it.

I didn't like it.

I'm sorry.

Confessional there.

And then you said, it was out of my body for the first time and I was still alive.

I was still standing with my truth on the outside.

Yeah.

I mean, I think we all know this feeling of

the thing that we're holding, regardless, it could be anything, but the thing that we're holding that if you articulate it, it makes it true.

And we're more scared of that thing being true out in the world.

And I had that thing had balled up inside of my body.

And,

you know, I talk about it being in the pit of my stomach for so long that I was just scared.

Like it would come up.

And I could think it, but I couldn't say it like out loud.

And I think some part of me thought, if I say this out loud, I'll die, right?

It's over.

I'm just, this is it.

Or I don't, I don't know, just whatever dramatic thing might happen.

And I forced myself to say it.

to look at myself while I said it.

And I was like, oh, look at me.

I'm still here.

And then, you know, I have that other thing that happens later on in a book,

which Oprah calls, you had a dark night of the soul.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Did y'all say the same thing?

Absolutely.

I had to go look.

I've heard that term so many times in my like throughout life, but I had to actually go look it up when she said it.

And I was like, oh.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

That sings dead on.

It's incredible.

What an incredible part of the book.

I loved the way you talked about yourself as a teenager so much, Trana.

I thought the parts where you really talked about what it was like to be a teenage girl kind of protecting your hurt with this ferocity, right?

was so amazing.

And those are some of my favorite parts.

But after sort of a few incredible passages about your teenage years and about some violence and fighting

that happened,

You say,

it's the trap in which so many black girls find themselves, either performing our pain or performing through it.

I couldn't quite, this is a little bit later, I couldn't quite grasp the shame, grief, vulnerability, and emotional pain.

I didn't understand anxiety.

So I had no way to explain the fluttering in my chest and rock hard feeling in my stomach that paralyzed me at any given moment.

I didn't understand why I had to keep these things to myself.

I just knew I had to.

I had to keep performing.

And there was no air for me, a dark-skinned black girl who had been damaged and used.

There was no air for me to be anything but what they said I was.

Girls like me didn't get the air to cry, the air to release our shame, the air to say, I don't want to fight you.

I don't even know why I'm so mad at you, except for that you look like me and who the fuck am I?

We didn't get the air to be reborn and handled warmly.

So that last line is from Nsazaki Shange book for colored girls.

And

I wanted to kind of bring it full circle because I'm talking about that line.

I used to say there was no air.

And

That's the best way I can think about when I would see other people, when I would see other girls who were prettier than me or more popular or just what, from my estimation, seemed free.

It just felt like the air was rare for them, right?

It was just they had, like they breathed a different air.

They lived a different life.

And girls like me just didn't have it.

We couldn't.

And it also spoke to like.

this feeling.

I get it.

I'm having it, not having it now, but recalling it now, like this feeling of just not being able to have a full breath before.

And it was always something, whether it was a thought or an action or a thing, there was just always something.

And it didn't allow you to breathe in and breathe out and just like live.

And

anger and rage felt really, really good after

performing good girl for so long.

It just felt like,

fuck it.

You know, like, I'm just going, I'm just going to, I don't know what to do next.

And I think this is how we cycle through coping mechanisms, right?

I tried the good girl thing.

It's not, it's not helping.

I still feel this way.

Let me try this other thing, you know?

And I was fortunate because that could have been, I tried drugs,

you know, to cope.

And, or I tried alcohol and let me try drugs now.

Let me try, you know, like there's so people don't realize what brings people to those coping mechanisms.

We just look at the end result.

So, oh, that's an alcoholic.

That's a drug addict.

That's a bad girl.

So, I'm a teenager who will bite your head off, who will fight anybody who steps to me and says anything crazy.

But not a single adult says, what happened to your heart?

How did you get here?

I'm still a child, but we don't get seen as children.

You just go from whatever small person to this now adult, mini adult,

and I'm only held accountable for the consequences of the things that happened to me,

but not the root cause of them.

Nobody is digging into the root cause, and so you get what you get.

And I was giving out,

I was dishing it out as quick, early,

and often.

For years, you thought that the assault on you wasn't something that someone did to you or even

something that happened to anyone else.

And then one day

you snuck Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from your mother's collection.

You wrote, when I read about what happened to a young Maya Angelou, I was able to to read her as innocent in a way I didn't allow for myself.

Maya was decent and nice, and it seemed egregious that God would have allowed something so horrible to happen to her.

It was the first time I ever realized a little girl like her could have gone through what I went through.

I finished the book and kept what was now, in my mind, our secret.

To my 12-year-old self, Maya Angelou was just another name on my mother's bookshelf.

She wasn't Dr.

Maya Angelou, the esteemed poet, author, activist, and all-around legend.

She was a lady who wrote a book that shared my secrets.

She was my confidant.

I no longer felt alone.

Yeah, that was, it's like having a, uh, uh,

what do they call those?

Like your ghost pile or your secret pile.

What kids call that?

Imaginary friends.

Imaginary images.

Yeah, it's like, it's like having that.

And I don't know, I don't know that I didn't think it only happened to just the two of us, but I was just, I didn't know anybody in real life.

nobody ever talked about it or said anything like that until i was much older so it was like oh my god this is

but it was the feeling that she talked about right it's always the it's not the details ever it's the feeling like it was her fault and not wanting to speak words because what happened to him now was her fault and all of those things kind of sat with me and i was like

This is amazing.

I have a friend, even though my friend is in the book.

But I mean, I thought, you know, I read Judy Bloom, you know, and Tiger Eyes, and I thought those were my friends, too.

So I was just that kind of kid.

Same.

Same, Tirana.

And then she became not so imaginary friend.

When you first, when you first

heard her.

But that was so amazing, Tirana, because I just, that part just, I mean, just knowing you, right?

Because

you have this heartbreak and pain that started your work in your life.

And then you have this ferocious joy that is why the whole world falls in love with you.

And so

to see you experience Maya Angelou first as somebody who was hurt like you,

and then to read in your book later you experiencing her in high school.

right?

Your high school honors English class,

where your white man teacher put on

Dr.

Maya Angelou reading Phenomenal Woman, performing it.

And you had the most beautiful experience where you saw her power

and her joy.

And you say,

as I sat tuning out my teacher, my mind returned to what I had just seen.

How had a woman who had been through what I'd been through been able to claim such confidence?

and pride.

While I was

finding newfound comfort and anger, she was smiling.

While I was lashing out, she was laughing and reciting beautiful poetry.

And then later you say, more than anything, I contemplated the question that eventually became central to my healing.

If what I saw was real, how could a body that holds that kind of pain also hold joy?

Can you talk to us about what that meant to see her?

in all her glory, knowing that she was your friend who experienced what you experienced.

It was,

oh,

it was life-changing, but it was also like, wait a minute.

You know, you know how sometimes you have like little kid notions in your mind and then you find out the adult real thing.

And it was, it was that moment of like, I thought,

okay,

I thought that, I thought, I thought that what we were doing.

Maya, Angelo, and I, we were faking it until we make it, essentially.

I didn't have that terminology, but it was like, you,

sure, she writes books.

I'd never seen her.

I never

saw her on television or anything.

I'd only read her books.

So, in my mind, it's just like,

I don't know what I thought in my mind, but I didn't think that.

And when I saw, and you know, she had this eloquent way that she spoke and

was so confident, and it all felt real.

And I was like, oh my god, I am not real.

I am not a real person.

I am a shell of a person.

Like,

everything I'm doing is performance.

I'm not, I don't even know.

I mean, this, I don't know that I had this deep of a thought like this at 15, but essentially, I am just

piecing together what I can to live.

I'm just trying to survive, right?

I'm just trying to get through these days and hope nobody finds out who I am.

But she's like, ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Look at all of this joy.

My name is Maya Angela.

I was just like, yo, how do you do that?

And what I know, what I knew for myself was that this person, this body that I had was constantly felt like it was in pain.

When I calmed down, when I wasn't running track or in Honors Bowl or doing something to impress some people in my quiet time, I felt pain all the time.

I felt sadness, a really, really deep sadness.

And so I was searching for that sadness in her face.

I was searching for it in her voice, in her something.

I thought I'll be able to see it.

And I just couldn't.

And I'm like, okay.

Does the sadness go away?

Does the pain go away?

Does the joy and pain, I have the journal at the top.

I just wrote joy, pain, question.

Like,

this is, how does this work?

But what it did, because, and I thank God for curiosity because

I was also just very curious, honestly.

Like there was the, I want to feel better thing, but it was also like, yo, how does this work?

Let me, maybe I've been thinking about this wrong.

And I just became very curious

about the coexistence of those two things.

And I would do, I mean, I do write about the joy journal in my book.

I'm so crazy that I don't even remember it.

I don't write about it.

So,

I'm the person who kept a joy journal at some point in my life when I was in my early 20s because I wanted to document what joy looked like in my life like

i thought it was unfair this is the part the part of me that's like wired like i said wired to to respond to injustice i was on this like quest right this was around the time of like

deepak chopra and

you know what's the other guy's name eckhart tolle oh yeah you know

ian levonzan and all of the the the the the help remember the help

No, not the help.

The secret.

The secret.

The help.

You're trying to manifest, right?

Right.

Yeah.

Right.

I was, I was like, okay,

I don't know.

I didn't have quite the language yet, but what I did have was a job that didn't pay me shit and a child to take care of by myself.

And the secret cost like $119.

I will never forget watching that whole infomercial

and getting to the end and being like, seven CDs for 100.

I can't afford that.

That was the secret.

That was the the secret.

Exactly.

You know, you can buy the book.

You know, I just, everything, every message that I got during that time, and I'm not trying to disparage any of those people or things, but for me as a single woman, single mother, every message I got said,

joy is right out there somewhere.

If you can just get your coins together to put, you know, to get it.

It's just right beyond your reach.

It was always outside of you.

And I was like, so what about people who can't afford it?

We just don't, we just don't get joy.

We, I was like, that can't be right.

There's no way that God set up in a world that joy is for the rich

or the privileged.

I just don't believe.

It ran up against what I believed.

Speaking of what you were saying, Amanda, about how those things mesh together, it ran up against everything I believed about

who we are and what we deserved and how power and privilege work.

I bought a book from the dollar store.

Go to the goddamn dollar store and buy a journal.

Go in your house and dust off one of them 17,000 journals that you got that you fall in love with

because it's pretty and that you don't use.

And you fill out the first page.

Right.

You fill out the first page, right?

Rip out that first page or fold it and fold it to the back and write joy at the top.

And you got a joy journal.

But my point in saying that is that I am the person who

wrote down, I wanted to document what felt like joy

because I felt like if I can quantify it, then I don't have to afford what they're selling because I got it.

That's right.

And so the book had things in it like,

I've told this story before, but I can't believe I didn't put this in the book.

I just, whatever, next book.

But

I used to pick up Kaya from daycare.

And, you know, I wear my bracelets.

Everybody disliked my signal.

I've always wanted my mother gave them to me.

And so Kaya would hear my bracelets as soon as I hit the door in the daycare.

And Kaya, every single day when I got over work and I get Kaya, you would hear Kaya say, my mommy's here.

Oh, Steve.

And then you hear,

you know,

running down a thing.

And I'd be waiting at the end of the hallway.

And Kaya would just, and I would write that down because that was my joy.

That was the most joyous part of the day.

I felt.

Even if it was for 10 minutes, I felt so good.

I felt nothing bad, right?

It was stuff like I would get on the phone with my girls and I would laugh until my stomach hurts and I had tears coming out my eyes.

You can't pay for that.

It didn't stop me from being triggered.

It didn't stop me from feeling sad, but it existed in the same body.

And once I started to document that and I was like, okay,

you can't sell me shit no more.

I'm not buying any of your, I might buy your book.

and read it, but I'm not buying them CDs.

I'm not taking, saving up my money to go.

I'm not doing that.

I can't afford to.

And it almost became like a part of my ministry to talk to my personal sort of ministry, not like religious,

to spread that as a, as a word, like, yo, we have joy.

We have to name it.

The problem is that other people tell us what we find joyous is not, doesn't qualify.

Right.

So a bunch of black girls sitting together laughing or white girls, even if you, I'm sure you all, because I can tell from your personalities, have had people tell you, y'all are too loud.

Yes.

You laugh too too loud.

Y'all are too silly.

You know, women are always too something.

You get a group of a group of women together laughing, cackling, and somebody's like, oh my God, it's so unladylike.

You know, you get a group of black girls together talking.

Why are you all so loud?

It's so ghetto.

I like to be fucking loud and it breathes me joy.

Yes.

Yes.

Yep.

Great.

Yeah.

I'm sorry.

I'm getting off topic.

Put that in your journey.

None of that is off topic.

No.

It's the most on topic thing.

It's the most on topic thing.

The fact that you can have both of those exist in your body at the same time, and you don't have to be all pain, and you don't have to be all joy all the time.

No,

no, that's not possible.

No, it's not even possible.

You know, it's just, it's just, yeah.

So, but, but it started for me with that Maya Angelou clip and watching it and that question.

And I, it took me a long time to get to like to answer that question,

but it planted a seed of like, huh, something else is possible.

Yeah.

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Then you went off to college and sister is dying to talk to you about this one part

that you wrote, this one sentence that you wrote, which maybe we've talked about for 13 hours.

There's no way you thought about the sentence as much as we've thought about the sentence, Trember.

Well,

it goes back to what you were just talking about of in the same body.

Okay.

So

this is,

I have to,

to me, it might just seem like a, you know, sexy as hell little interlude, but to me, it blew my mind.

Okay.

So you're talking about you and Rob.

They never, oh, always right.

Oh.

They never played the music music for long, maybe two songs, but whenever they did, we found each other and let our whatever pent up sexual energy we were both trying to ignore.

We danced like no one else was there, like it was a mating ritual and we had fire in our bellies.

I loved every minute of it.

It was the first time in my life that I got to safely explore my sexuality with no demands on my body.

Can you talk about this?

Because I feel like

it's another double bind that you talk about, which is that for so many survivors, it's the very same bodies that are the portals through which we access this pleasure and sexuality are the same portals that were poisoned by our assaulters with shame and hypervigilance.

And it's like being told to run and have fun on a playground full of landmines.

Like, how,

how does that

explore safely in the midst of trauma?

Like, when do women ever get to do that?

Just how?

Let me say this first.

This part is first, first of all, you're the first person in the thousands of interviews I've done to bring up this part

and to bring up Rob, whose name is actually Ciotis.

I had to change it in the book.

I'm bringing him up because he just recently passed away.

I know.

And it's, and it, it is,

I'm still really

raw behind it because he was one of my first loves.

And we remained friends up until his death.

He died in June, on June 1st.

And

he will never know.

I wanted him to read this, right?

I really wanted, I wish I had given him, anyway, it doesn't matter.

But I really wanted him to read this because I wanted him to know how important that relationship.

had been to me and had remained for so long.

He and I,

you know, later on we dated and actually for real dated, but he was my friend.

He was so respectful.

And everything I knew about

relationships, including the boyfriend that I had at the time, there was always pressure.

And it was always tenuous, right?

Either there was the forced situation, which obviously was terrible.

But even after that, and I think this also happens to a lot of survivors, is what you're talking about you have you have a some you experience some kind of sexual assault in college and high school and you know before then elementary school and then you're trying to live your life the way people say you're supposed to live you're supposed to get a boyfriend you're supposed to date you're supposed to do whatever

and there's the regular world of like maybe not rapists but harassers and and people who

who think it's okay to touch you without consent or these really like situations that we get entangled in where consent is on a sliding scale it seems like and i had all of these other things that had happened too

it was so important to me

and i think people listening will understand this i never stop i developed like a normal child right i had went through puberty which meant i had the hormones which meant i felt sexual and I wanted to explore.

I could not explore in the way that everybody else could.

I actually thought, and this was part of my downfall, I thought the first person I have sex with is who I got to be with for the rest of my life.

This is it.

And it happened to be my daughter's father.

So

that's it.

I'm stuck with him.

If he turns out to be a bad guy, I just have to put up with it because you put out, you know, so that's some of the Catholic stuff, but it's also some of the like,

this is the only way you can be a good girl.

You're already bad enough, right?

Don't be out here.

Now you're going to be a whore.

I mean, that's just really, you know,

do you want God to literally come down himself and just tap you on the shoulder?

Right.

And so I thought that's the way to deal with it.

And then I met him

and

I'm Caribbean.

We love, I love reggae.

I love to move my body.

I love to, you know, to be that way.

And I would do it at home in my room.

You know, you'd be, I'd be practicing and doing all of that.

But with an actual boy, I couldn't go to the places and he allowed me to go to those places.

We'd finish dancing and that would be it.

And it was, it was just like,

and then there was a part of me that was kind of like, don't I owe you something?

You know, it's the other message that the girls are giving and

what all the trauma does to you as well.

I'd be like,

I thought you were supposed to know.

You know, I had to cycle through that.

We went through our whole freshman year.

I mean, I had a boyfriend at home, even though he was cheating on me and having a baby by somebody else, but

I was trying to be loyal.

And

yeah, we went through our whole freshman year.

We did not kiss, we did not date, we didn't touch outside of the way that we danced on that dance floor.

And it allowed me to understand my body as a sexual being, as a person who can feel pleasure.

And that pleasure does not have to be balanced with trauma of some sort.

And it was just another form of liberation.

It was so beautiful.

And that's how he was.

Even when we dated,

he was

super sensitive to the things that had happened and super sensitive to my needs in those ways.

He's just, he's a wonderful person.

It just, you know, it didn't work out that we would be together, but he was still a wonderful person.

I'm sorry that you lost him.

May he rest.

Yeah.

Okay, listeners, this is going to be sad.

Okay.

We're going to have to pause this beautiful conversation right there, but we're going to pick it back up on Thursday.

So in the meantime, pick up Tirana's book, Unbound.

It's out now, and the book needs to be in your hands and on your shelves.

And then come back here in two days and we'll hear more from Tirana.

You're not going to want to miss part two of our conversation.

In the meantime, until then, when life gets hard, we're going to remember that we can do hard things.

And we're also going to remember to rest.

Okay.

See you soon.

I give you Tish Melton and Brandy Carlisle.

I walked through fire, I came out the other side.

I chased desire,

I made sure I got what's mine.

And I continue

to believe

that I'm the one for me.

And because I'm mine,

I walk the line.

Cause we're adventurers and heartbreaks on map.

A final destination.

We've stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to belong.

We'll finally find

our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives

bring,

we can do a hard pain.

I hit rock bottom, it felt like a brand new start.

I'm not the

problem,

sometimes things fall apart.

And I continue to believe

the best

people are free.

And it took some time,

but I'm finally fine.

Cause we're adventurers, and heartbreaks are map.

Our final destination

we lack.

We stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain that our lives

bring,

we can do a hard thing.

We're adventurers and heartbreaks on that.

We might get lost, but we're okay with that.

We've stopped asking directions

in some places

they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to belong.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives

bring,

we can do hard things.

Yeah, we can do hard things.

Yeah, we

can do

hard

things.

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