The body relaxed, the body breathing, your senses open, your mind open, meeting the world.

[gentle music] I step into the backyard and feel the thick, cool grass beneath my bare feet.

My skin is immediately sticky in the heat of a Louisiana summer.

Across from me, I see three long picnic tables strung together end to end.

Each one's covered in newspaper like a makeshift tablecloth.

The rich, earthy aroma of Cajun spices and fresh seafood fills my nose.

I can almost taste it, the smell of a crawfish boil.

What was it about them that excited you? What would it be to allow yourself a bit of their energy?

Mm-hmm.

I lead women, so that's, my community is almost entirely women.

And so I spend a lot of emotional energy dissecting the narratives we were handed as little girls, um, helping us unravel some of these, um, tropes that we were expected to just fall in lockstep with.

But being a mom to sons who are now 17, 18, and 23, I am dead serious, the narratives handed to boys, just as destructive.

Right.

Like, as we look at all this pent-up rage and trauma and absolute suffering that people are walking around with, turns out sharing it with people is a pretty low-hanging fruit solution.

And-

TotallyA lot of women stay in situations way longer than they should.

Emeshia is guilty of it.

I am more than guilty of it.

Mm.

And a lot of them are listening right now.

What do you want them to hear? Oh, man.

Oh, my God

Yeah, business, friends, family, everything

...

it will repeat.

One thing I'm working on with my therapist right now, and this is hard for me, I didn't realize this was hard for me, is I'm incredibly judgmental, deeply judgmental of myself.

When I have a thing come up, I am judgmental of my own response.

I ha- am learning, I, I prefer stability.

Wow.

You know what I mean? I can soften the blow of a really serious letdown quickly, and be like, "But here's the silver lining.

[laughs]

I mean, I know for me, growing up both in my generation and sort of in the religious environment that I was raised in, the banner over girls was selflessness.

That was our t- that was our North Star.

And I mean, if you caught a whiff of selfishness, boy, the, the, the k- the kickback was fast and furious and predictable.

I swear to God, I'm 51 years old.

To this day, I will sometimes say something out loud that I mean with my full chest, and it is true and good and right, and I will still catch a w- a, a little whisper in my brain of, "That sounds selfish," that, "You said the word me one too many times in that sentence." The rot is set on that mindset, for sure, and it takes intentional work to reverse that.

But there is a cost to living like that, and so when we decide that we don't want anybody else around us to ever pay their own cost, we will pay it for them.

Yeah.

I love it.

When I lost my marriage, I realized, "Oh my God, I'm terrified of everything." I cannot ...

I was in such a poisonous loop of fear in my brain, the what ifs.

I would take to the ends of the earth and then start back over again.

Oh my God, there was ...

It was literally endless.

And so, you know, I took that into therapy and just went, "I need you to teach me how to live like a scared person.

"... from these things that keep me alive." Can you talk a little bit about that part of your book?

(laughs)

Um, second of all, I just sat straight up in bed.

And I, I understand that I deal in hyperbole but, like, the truth is, that was, that was the line.

Like, there was a before that moment and an after that moment.

Like, everything was...

That was it.

That was the end of my life as I knew it.

Mm-hmm.

... you've just swapped one set of beliefs for another?

Yeah.

Yeah.

There is that possibility.

And I would say when I think back to Jen Hatmaker of, like, [inhales] 20...

Like, 16, 17, 18 even, that's pretty recent history, I was absolutely still an evangelist.

I was just an evangelist for different [laughs] ideas.

Uh-huh.

Is there ever any part of you that wonders if in embracing more progressive ideas or what your critics would call wokeism, you've just swapped one set of beliefs for another?

Yeah, yeah, there is that possibility.

And I would say when I think back to Jen Hatmaker of like 2016, 17, 18 even, that's pretty recent history, right? I was absolutely still an evangelist.

I was just an evangelist for different ideas.

I mean, I never met a fight that I was invited to that I didn't accept wholeheartedly.

I mean, I fought with everybody.

I fought with everybody on Twitter.

Story? So what are those things?

(laughs) Oh, v- vaguely.

What a year.

(laughs) What a year.

Um, I had been embedded in sort of the very early, and on my end, when I say this word, it's, applies to Jen Hatmaker, very sloppy work of anti-racism back then.

And I was n- I was e- young in it, I was green in it and new to it, so I was just such a mess.

But s- nonetheless, it was on Front Street and that was not a w- a welcome conversation in my community.

So I was already starting to hemorrhage the people.

Yeah, yeah.