COURAGEOUS AF

Welcome to COURAGEOUS AF

Being Human Takes Guts

In this episode, Kyle shares about the aftermath of being sexually assaulted by a family member, and how that event's impact plays out in her behavior, her appearance, and her beliefs about herself. She also talks about yet another big life change that would open a whole new chapter for her, in a new state, with a new "mother."

Warning: This episode talks about sexual assault, suicide, and parental loss, and may use strong language. Please use care while listening.

To follow and learn more about Kyle, visit:

www.instagram.com/courageous_af_podcast

book with Kyle: https://calendly.com/kylecreative

www.kyle-creative.com

Welcome to the courageous AF podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Hollingsworth. This podcast is not just about having courage. It's about the human spirit, creativity, resilience, and what's possible no matter what life brings in this space. I share my own journey of healing. of rediscovering my voice, my power, and my passion after four decades of living a life riddled with trauma, abuse, and pain.

In my heart, I believe we are all courageous AF. And being human takes guts. We're in this together. Hey y'all, I just wanted to hop on and give a little warning that in this podcast I do cover some very difficult subject matter, including suicide, drug use, abuse, and things of that nature. So I would ask that you take care while listening.

Hello everybody. It's Kyle. It's time to talk about, well, it's time for episode five, kids don't tell. So in the last episode, you'll remember that I explained a very difficult and traumatizing moment with my uncle and what followed that was a lot of internal chaotic thinking around what was wrong with me.

Why my mama had left and why my uncle had touched me in this way and why I wasn't safe. As soon as that had happened, I remember just instinctively knowing that I could not tell anybody. I mean, look, kids don't tell. It's very rare for a kid to tell. And I think that's really important to acknowledge, because the truth of the matter is, I held it for a long, long time.

And some kids hold it forever. And, um, You know, that can be very scary as a parent to think, what has my kid experienced, but I'm not really here to make people afraid. I'm a parent and I understand what I'm trying to invite is the realization that kids will hold a lot. And, you know, at the end of the day, I guess the most important thing I want to say is when they do come out with it, believe them.

Please for the love of God. Anyway, so, but I didn't come out with it for decades. So we'll, we'll come back to that. But here I am walking around in my body feeling very, um, weird and disturbed and upset by, you know, what had happened but understanding down to my bones that I better not tell anybody. I first of all didn't think anyone would believe me and second and even more important and significant is that I thought it was my fault.

I was the one staying up late. I was the one in a nightgown with no panties. I was the one. I was the one. I was the one. And so I just took it on. You know, I, I took responsibility for it whether I realized it or not. I just felt like it was my fault. I was still at this point. You know, obviously even more having nightmares, having all kinds of different challenges.

And I was challenged in school. I was challenged around adults. I just was noticing a harder and harder time just kind of being normal, if you will, like what a normal kids do. I didn't really know because I had this internal world that was very different from the way things looked outside. As I said before, my dad had basically dropped the bomb on my grandparents and then them subsequently on us that he had remarried and he wanted us to go to Georgia and live with them.

So there wasn't a lot of conversation or frankly there was no conversation around what we wanted. It was like, your daddy wants you. He had married this lady named Rachel and she had a daughter named Sophie and they wanted us to all live together. You know, one big happy family, I guess. And so we packed our stuff and my grandparents drove out and met my dad and Rachel and they took us to Georgia.

As I remember, we had this kind of halfway meeting place. It was called Warm Springs, Georgia. You know, you remember back then, like, we would ride in cars, but there was no seatbelts, and we would ride in the back of my grandparents, I don't even know what they had at this point, but I remember it being kind of a big car, but we would, I guess it's so hard to say because it's so dangerous, but we would lay in the back windshield.

Like in the, so in those cars, like behind the back seat, there was this space, at least in their car, behind the seats, like right behind the headrest, that was sort of a little indention. And then there was the window. And so it formed kind of like a V, like a 45 degree angle or something. And I would get my little pillow and I would lay in that window.

Crazy. But I never died. Obviously, I'm here telling you this story, but it was nuts. But anyway, so we would drive hours and meet them. And then they took us to Georgia. They took us to our hometown, where we were born, called Gainesville. We immediately went to their apartment. We met Sophie, who was really little.

I think she was about three. And they showed us the house. It was all decorated. It was an apartment. It was like a small house. Three bedroom apartment and it was all decorated and everybody had been living there and it just felt so weird because we had obviously not been living there. We did not know her.

We had not met them. They had had this whole thing, this relationship and they got married and then we were just sort of like put into the situation. So another really big change and I remember like it was yesterday and I was just like Wow, Rachel's so pretty, you know, she was young and beautiful and blonde and just to me seemed very glamorous and her daughter was super, super cute.

Sophie was really little and sweet and my dad seemed, you know, happy and he had no idea who we were. He did not know us. He had not spent very much time with us, but I will go back and say that when we were in Alabama and I mentioned that we would go see my dad like on the weekends or whatever, I think it was honestly, I'm going to just throw out that.

I think it was about once a month that we would go. We would drive and meet him. We'd go home with him for like a few days, probably like a long weekend or something. I want to talk about that a little bit because the conditions under which we visited him were informative about the whole picture I was painting, about who I was and what the world was like and what things meant.

We would be in the house with my grandparents, with my, my nana and grandpa and As much as we, you know, ate lots of junk food and watched TV and did all the things, there was some sort of, um, you know, there was at least some sort of stability there. Okay, so we would go and spend time with my dad, who at the time was living in an apartment.

Now, if you can imagine, this is the 70s, late 70s. I'm gonna paint a little picture for you here. My dad was this cowboy boot wearing western shirt with pearl buttons. Uh, wannabe cowboy. something. He used to watch a lot of Charles Bronson films. I have this picture of him I'm thinking about right now where he's just kind of sitting with his hip out and he's got jeans on and a big buckle and he's got like a denim embroidered shirt with pearl buttons on it and he's got his boots on, his cowboy boots, and he's holding a gun.

You know, and granted, He was still pretty young at that point, but we would go to his apartment that he shared with his best friend and roommate, and I'm going to call him Bob. So him and Bob had an apartment together, and it was not suited for young kids. We loved it because there was all kinds of dangerous, weird stuff everywhere, like there was tons of knives and guns, and you know, I remember vividly that I would go to the bathroom in my dad's bathroom and behind the toilet on the back of the toilet would be a stack of magazines and these were magazines that had naked women on them and in them and they were Playboy and they were whatever other magazines were out at the time.

I don't honestly remember the names of all of them. What I remember is that every time I had to go to the bathroom I would sneak a peek at them because they were right there in my face and I would look at these pictures of these women and I would think oh my gosh All of this was happening right alongside me being, you know, molested by my uncle.

I was putting this idea around in my head, like putting all this information together. I'd see these crazy cartoons of all kinds of sex and just, you know, you know, you know, and. And I would sneak and look at this every time I was in the bathroom. And I remember one day my dad just walked in on me while I was peeing, but I wasn't peeing, I was looking at the magazine.

And he caught me. And he just laughed and he shut the door. And I remember another day, I was over there and he would feed us like Chef Boyardee. I don't even know if they make that shit anymore, but it's basically just carbs and sugar. And this one day, I remember it very clearly because this was something that he then did, you know, kind of regularly.

He offered us some beer. So I think I was probably, I must have been 10, 10 something at this point, and he comes out with one of these little cups, it's like, we used to have them in the bathroom, they're called Dixie cups, and he asked me if I wanted some beer, and I said sure, and he poured me a cup full, and that was the first time I had alcohol.

I feel like it was probably like, I don't know, Miller Lite or Coors or Budweiser, one of those. One of those beers that was really popular in the seventies. I had certainly smelled plenty of it cause he drank plenty of it. But I remember this little tiny paper cup in my hand. Well, it didn't feel that tiny cause I was pretty small and it was about halfway full of beer, maybe three quarters of the way full of beer.

And I remember the first sip of it and I remember it tasted kind of funny and it tasted kind of bitter and it was bubbly. And I can't say that I felt like I liked it, but I did drink it all. One to a, Um, yeah, that was the only way I knew how and the other out of curiosity, and I knew I was getting away with something.

I knew I was doing something wrong. He let us do stuff that was wrong. And so of course my, my little young mind was like, Oh yeah, I want to try this weird thing that I'll never tell anybody I got to try. And so, yeah, I tasted it and it was, It was a thing. I honestly don't remember about the effects of the alcohol on me at that time.

I just remember very vividly taking that cup from him and me drinking it. And it was like it was nothing. You know, he just gave it to me, didn't think anything of it. I think he was kind of amused if I'm honest. because he seemed to be amused by all of this like the fact that we would find his dirty magazines the fact that we were fascinated with his knives and you know their apartment was like bachelor city so it was just a very interesting thing and I look at these photos of myself back then and I was in like jeans and a t shirt and covered with all these little fake like sticker tattoo things and just you know I I did like being there I think it's because I felt Well, I wanted to be close to my dad, you know, I naturally loved him because he was my dad.

But I also wanted to be in his world and understand this, this adult thing that people did. I don't remember a lot of love. I don't remember a lot of appropriateness. I remember a lot of things that he and Bob would say. I remember a lot of cussing. I remember a lot of talking about women. I remember a lot of bragging.

I remember a lot of showing us guns and knives and, and just watching TV and that kind of was it. That was my relationship with my dad. He wasn't really a dad to me. He was just this man who was very focused on women and very focused on himself. Okay, so we'll put a pin in that narcissism and we'll talk about that more later.

It was kind of weird when he wanted us to come live with him, but he was married now. He had this new wife, so we were in this apartment and I, I never shared anything with him. I never shared anything with Rachel. I didn't share anything with my sister. But here we were, you know, the five of us living in this apartment.

And so that began this next chapter. And I can tell you that almost from day one, I got very clear that whatever was going on for me internally, in my mind, in my life, I needed to not tell anybody because It was made very clear to me pretty quickly that Rachel did not seem to necessarily like us all that much.

And she certainly didn't seem to trust us. I mean, right out of the gate, she would tell me that I was lying about things and I would go into the bathroom and I would have a bath. Simple enough, right? I'd bathe myself and I'd come back out and she'd go in before the water was done draining. She's like, I don't see soap in there.

You didn't get clean. Do it again. And so she'd make me have another bath and she'd sit there and watch me, which was, you know, frankly, humiliating. I was 10 years old. But this sort of kind of created this pattern of we were lying, we were sneaking around, and she would punish me for things I didn't do. So the relationship that I had with her was sort of built on this, she'd never met me before, she didn't know anything about me.

I didn't know anything about her. She was very young. So I'll just say she was in her late 20s at this point when she became our stepmother. And while she had a young child, I don't think she was in any way, shape, or form equipped to understand the minds of young girls who are just about to be, you know, teenagers in a little bit.

I noticed almost immediately that I had to kind of dance around her and sort of cover my ass, if you will, and that I was frequently, you know, accused of lying. And this was something that started and then continued for many years. But in particular, another situation I remember is, I'm now recalling that I was either sharing a room with her little girl, with Sophie, or at one point we were sleeping in the same room because, look, I mean, from Sophie's perspective, she's this little three year old kid.

What the hell's going on in her life that these two girls now are her sisters? What is that? So all of us were just adjusting to this, this whole thing. And so, I mean, I don't, Blame her at all. In fact, we're quite close but at three years old, I must have pissed her off and she decided to pinch herself really hard one night.

She pinched herself like I was just watching her like, what are you doing? And she's just making this weird face and just pinch, pinch, pinch, pinch, pinching her arm. She pinched it to the point where it bruised. She pinched it to the point where it was very red. Like instantaneously like red. And she screamed.

And Rachel comes running in the room, and she said that I pinched her. And my stepmother immediately believed it, and immediately just scooped her up, was hugging her, and yelling at me, and left the room. Of course, I was punished or spanked or what have you, but it was like, I just want to point to the gaslighting and the mindfuckery that was happening inside my head, because I had not lied about these things.

I was not doing any of that. At this point, I quite frankly could not have been more innocent, and she was assuming the worst about me. And it just did nothing but increase my feeling of feeling very separate from everybody and very, um, isolated. At this time, in the wake of what happened with my uncle and moving to this new state and all these things, I had cut off my hair.

I had gained weight. I looked like a tomboy. I initially had talked about, you know, turning to food a lot. Well, after, after he had his hands on me, I absolutely bloated up. And I'm sure now that it was to protect myself, I'm sure now that it was some sort of unconscious act of self preservation. In a lot of ways I was this very awkward, very in the middle, kind of in between, not a kid, not a teenager.

My mom had died, I had this molestation occur, and now I was having this very strange relationship with my stepmother where she didn't believe me. And I was getting punished for things I didn't do, and I was getting blamed for things that I was innocent of. While we lived in that apartment, I would not sleep at night.

I would lay awake and just stare in so much fear, and when I did sleep, I would have nightmares. I would be so terrified that something terrible was going to happen, and all of this just increased more and more. So I'm going to stop there and pick up in the next episode. And I just want to say that if you followed me this far, thank you very much.

I appreciate you listening. Thank you for coming along on this journey with me. As my story unfolds here and I open up more and more vulnerably. I also feel more purposeful about continuing to share, and I'll know down the road when the time is right for me to shift a little bit, but right now, just, we're in the thick of this together, and let's keep going, because there's a lot to talk about, and I think that touching on these different milestones and on these different experiences is important for lots of reasons, not just for me, and not just for you as the listener, but Also, for those of you who may have experienced any of the myriad things that I went through so that you can understand sort of who you're listening to and what I'm aware of and what I've learned from and, um, and just to be in it together, you know?

So as I say every time, thank you so much for listening. And if you are willing and able, if you could share this with people, If you could subscribe, download, rate, review. These things help me so much in the podcast world, getting the word out and getting my message to as many people as possible. So I'd be grateful for that.

This is just me, a person behind a microphone in my house doing this. I don't have a team. It's just little old Kyle. Um, so I appreciate any help you can give me and I look forward to connecting with you next week. I release a new episode every Wednesday and we'll continue to do so. I love y'all. I appreciate you.

Stay courageous. Talk soon. Bye.

Welcome to COURAGEOUS AF

Being Human Takes Guts

In this episode, Kyle talks about the immediate aftermath of being returned to the family in Alabama, and about a terrifying moment when she stayed up late one night.

Warning: This episode talks about sexual assault, suicide, and parental loss, and may use strong language. Please use care while listening.

To follow and learn more about Kyle, visit: linktr.ee/M_Kyle_Hollingsworth

www.instagram.com/courageous_af_podcast

book with Kyle: https://calendly.com/kylecreative

www.kyle-creative.com

Welcome to the courageous AF podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Hollingsworth. This podcast is not just about having courage. It's about the human spirit, creativity, resilience, and what's possible no matter what life brings in this space. I share my own journey of healing. of rediscovering my voice, my power, and my passion after four decades of living a life riddled with trauma, abuse, and pain.

In my heart, I believe we are all courageous AF. And being human takes guts. We're in this together. Hey y'all, I just wanted to hop on and give a little warning that in this podcast I do cover some very difficult subject matter, including suicide, drug use, abuse, and things of that nature. So I would ask that you take care while listening.

for listening. Okay, y'all. So hi, welcome to episode four. This one's not easy. I had the thought earlier today that maybe I should go and tell a little fun story or something before continuing on with this journey. So I will preface it by saying that we had some really nice things happen at my grandparents house in Alabama where we were living now.

I enjoyed walking in the woods by myself. We had a trampoline, which was really fun and awesome. You know, there were good times. So, I definitely want to both honor and highlight that. I don't want to just gloss over the good times. You know, my grandmother was very, very sweet. My granddad, he would sit me on the kitchen counter and I would eat watermelon out of our garden.

He had a little watermelon patch. God, we're so southern. Anyway, He would feed me watermelon and I would sit there and talk with him. And then a lot of times at night, you know, my sister and I would perform for my grandparents, ever the singer and performer, I would pretend like their fireplace stoop thing was a stage.

And I'd put my little record player on and sing along or whatever, you know, and I have some photos of me at that age, just kind of being really adorable. Actually, the photos I have, I think, are, I was earlier before mama died. After mama died, I don't really have a lot of photos now that I'm thinking about it.

So I'm kind of learning, figuring this out and remembering it live with you. But there's this one photo and it was about six months after we moved with my grandparents and I was on one knee in the front yard, which was just dirt in these handmade clothes my grandmother had made me holding their dog, their little Chihuahua.

Tiger, I remember that was just such a strange time because mama had died. I was having all these nightmares. I was feeling really confused about who I was, what was happening. And at this point, this is a kind of touchy time to say this, but I mean, I'm going to be honest and that's the whole point. I was having some weird stuff happen at night, like some different like apparitions and different things happening.

And I was just like, Oh my God, the narrative in my mind at this point began around you're crazy. Like what is going on? You're crazy. So I'll shift to, yeah, so we were taking dance classes. There was cartoons and TV and kids stuff and toys and singing, and that was all very present. And how do I say this?

So I don't want to like go too deep down the rabbit hole of describing who everyone is in the family, but I had an aunt and I liked her a lot and she had a daughter who was just a little bit older than me. I'm going to call her daughter Teresa. Again, these are not the real names. Teresa was somebody that I just thought was like the most coolest chick ever.

I thought she was just incredibly amazing. She was a teenager, I wasn't yet, and she wore these platform shoes, and she just wore these jeans with embroidery, and she was pretty, and I can remember looking at her and thinking, oh my god. God, she's fantastic. You know, she lived at home with her mom and dad, my aunt and my uncle and I and my sister, I think I'm pretty sure my sister was there.

I'm not actually certain because this is such a unique experience to me, but we went over to spend the night with them. I'm sure my grandparents needed a break or had something to do or whatever. It doesn't really matter, but my cousin Teresa had gone out. I don't know what she was doing, but she was out for a while.

My aunt was in bed and. If my sister was there, she was in bed and I stayed up late and I watched this horror film that I should not have watched because to this day I cannot even think about the title of it without getting the heebie jeebies. What was it called? It was called Trilogy of Terror with Karen Black.

It was very scary. It was about this little, crazy, like, um, voodoo doll thing that this woman buys and it takes her. terrorizes her and kills her or whatever. Anyway, it was ridiculous and I should not have been watching it. So bear in mind that this was months after my mom had died. I was nine years old.

So when, when mama died, I was eight and change. And so I had turned nine pretty certain about the age on this. So I'm sitting in their living room at night watching this movie and I would have gotten in trouble if anybody knew I was watching it. Believe me, I was absolutely sneaking and watching this movie because I knew I wasn't supposed to watch it and everybody else was in bed.

So it was just me in the house. And the front door opens and it is my uncle. What am I going to call him? Woo. I'm going to call him Steven. So Steven comes in. Now I know what was happening with him at the time. I had no idea what was happening with him, but he kind of stumbled in and he kind of staggered around the room and he sat down really heavy in this chair that was across from me.

This was a tiny room, tiny house. And I was sitting on sort of a sofa. There was a table in front of me. There was a TV to my right. And he sat in this chair opposite me and he was like, his eyes were half closed and he was sunk into the chair. And he said to me, come over here, darling. I remember it like it was yesterday in terms of what I looked like and what I was wearing.

I had this like polyester sort of nightgown on and it was pink and white. And it had almost like sleeves of like a baseball shirt. You know how that style is? So on the white front of it, there was a little girl who was standing under an umbrella. So the umbrella covered up everything except the bottom of her skirt and her boots.

And so I think I really loved that nightgown and I just had that on no panties or anything, just the nightgown. Being the good girl that I was and not knowing what was going on, I got up and walked over to him and he pulled me in front of him where I was standing right in front of him. Ooh. Um, I don't know what he said, but I know that his breath stank and I know that I recognize the smell.

I can now tell you that that was whiskey. The only thing I know was that I felt his hands sliding up the sides of my legs. And I can tell you that his fingers and hands were rough. And I felt him, oh it's so weird to talk about this, I felt him pulling the nightgown up. And I felt him sliding his hands between my legs.

And I'm pretty certain at this point I was absolutely frozen like a deer caught in headlights and I was just staring at him and trying to figure out exactly what was going on. No one had ever touched me in this way before. I knew something was wrong and I also was absolutely paralyzed. And so as I felt his fingers going into my body, um, I suddenly just, uh, something snapped and I, I don't know if it was my mom helping me.

I don't know what it was, kids, but I suddenly was overtaken with this wisdom I just suddenly knew what I needed to do to save myself and I put my hands on this guy's shoulders and I suddenly summoned, I suddenly summoned the sexiest expression I could possibly muster. I think I was absolutely embodying my mom and I looked at him and I said, Hey, just give me a minute.

I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'll be right back. Okay. And he goes, okay, darling. And he let me go and I ran as fast as I could to the bedroom. Um, And I jumped in bed with his wife, my aunt, and I thought how do I save myself? He could still come and get me. How do I save myself? And then I suddenly screamed out and grabbed my aunt as if I was having a nightmare.

And she woke up and said, are you okay, baby? And I said, I'm sorry, I had a nightmare. Can you hug me or whatever? Whatever I said. I honestly don't even fully remember that. I remember the moment standing in front of him and this otherworldly wisdom that I should never have had sinking into my being and me just getting out of there.

Whether it was me or whether it was my mom or whatever it was, I'm so fucking grateful that I did that because that could have gone so much worse. Not that it wasn't bad enough. I'm actually just having the memory of a boyfriend later in life who was like, Well, yeah, but he didn't rape you, so. Um, listen, a nine year old's body, keep your fucking hands off.

Right? So anyway, this thing occurred. I slept, I went home the next day and now I had to hold this because I was terrified to tell anybody. And so we're clear because I may or may not mention this again. I did not share this with 21 years old. Okay. So I held that all that time and it fucked me up. It definitely laid the groundwork for a belief that men could do what they wanted with my body.

even relatives. And so it really kind of twisted my perspective of, yet again, you know, my perspective around physical safety and all of that in the world. So it did a number on me. And I share that with you because, like, the morning of my mom's suicide, this moment also was incredibly defining for me.

There was a lot of these moments, but this one was also incredibly defining for me. And it was, you know, you heard me in the last episode, talk about gaining weight. It was after this event that I really started to gain weight. Shocking, right? It's kind of textbook, but yeah. I just started to eat my feelings and to eat my fear and to eat instead of talking about this.

Because as far as I was concerned, this was my uncle and he was close to my grandparents and no one would believe me or they'd be mad at me somehow. So I just took it on and let it be my fault. And I never went over there and spent the night again. So that's how I managed it. That's how I handled it.

It's a sad state to be able to say that I know so, so, so many women and so many young girls who this happens to. It's not that unique. It's not that, I don't know, I mean, it's, it happens a lot and it breaks my, breaks my heart. Because it's not so much, oh, from this man's perspective, he was drunk, he did a thing, he probably never remembered it the next day.

But it marked me for life. That's the impact that this kind of stuff has. And so, It just stacked on top of my mom dying. Was that my fault? Now this was my fault. You know, who was I defining myself to be? Who was I, who was I believing that I was? What was I believing about myself? This kind of moment on a timeline of somebody's life is so defining.

And so after that day, it was just like another layer of safety was taken away and I'm feeling stumped right now as to how to move forward from that. But I did move forward from that. I did continue my life and all the things. And those stand out as two really big things that happen really close together at a really young age.

I'll tell you, it was like, as soon as we got used to living with my grandparents and this thing happened and the yelling and screaming and the drinking and all the different things were happening, at least we had. In the strangest way hit a stride and our life made sense and we knew what to expect. We were getting our bearings.

If that translates, like we were getting our bearings like, okay, this is our house. We live in Alabama. This is what we do. This is our circumstances. These are the people who we live with and these are the rules and this is what it's like. And so we made sense of all that in our heads and it took some time I'm trying to recall exactly how long we were there with them.

And I might come back and clarify that, but at this moment in time as I'm talking to you, I'm not certain if it was a year, two years, three years. I'm not sure of the exact time frame. And quite frankly, I barely remember seeing my dad during this time. We probably did. I think maybe my grandparents would drive us and meet my dad halfway or whatever.

He was still in Georgia and he would take us back to his place on the weekends. We'll, we'll talk about that. That was a whole other, wow. During this interim time, my dad was off living his life. It was never even a question whether he would take us. He was not going to take us. He's not going to do it. He couldn't do it.

Whatever, you know, whatever the arrangement was. I never really was clear on it, except that my dad did not desire or feel equipped to handle us. And so my grandparents did and that's it. Um, so yeah, so my dad, um, would take us in for a weekend and I think it was every once in a while he would see us and he would take us in and he was by no means fit to be a full time dad.

So that worked out really well in our benefit, I'm guessing, that of the scenarios that were possible, even though the one we had was a little different. you know, screwed up, at least it was better than what we might've had, had we gone and lived with him full time. So there we are with that. As soon as we did get this rhythm with my grandparents and as soon as we did feel like, okay, I mean, I personally was like, I was still having terrible nightmares.

I was still afraid all the time. Nothing had changed, honestly. However, things had normalized, whatever that means, like things had normalized. And then all of a sudden one day, My grandparents sit us down and tell us you're going to live with your daddy. He got married. So, I will continue with that. I think it's a good time to stop there, so I'm going to because, yeah.

Thank you for following along. I just want to reiterate that this is something where Uh, these first bunch of, you know, initial episodes are really deeply about me and my story and I, I'm, I'm gonna commit to that and stay with it because hard as it might be to hear and hard as it was to live through, I feel like it's incredibly important to lay this foundation.

I feel like it's incredibly important to understand the scope of the life that I was living and the experiences. It's the experiences that I had and the circumstances that shaped me because it's an integral part of my journey and it will all come together and make a lot of sense as we go through this.

So I hope it's trackable all of that stuff and I will keep going until I feel like this, this part of the book is complete with you so that you understand. And yeah, so to that end, I'll say more about that in the next episode. I appreciate you guys so much. If you're still listening, God love you. Thank you.

And I would be super honored wherever you're listening on Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever it is, if you would leave me a rating and review. It's not for my ego, I swear. It's really honestly, because I've understood through my, my lessons and learning and coaching from people who do this kind of thing, that That is the way to make it so that it gets out to more people.

I didn't invent it. That's just the way it is. So if you would be willing to do that, it would be meaningful to me and I would be very grateful and I look forward to sharing more with you next time. Next week. Again, these are launched every Wednesday. Thank you so much. Stay courageous. Love y'all.

Welcome to COURAGEOUS AF

Being Human Takes Guts

Kyle shares about being taken in the night to another state in the wake of her mother's suicide.

Warning: This episode talks about suicide, and parental loss, and may use strong language. Please use care while listening.

To follow and learn more about Kyle, visit:

www.instagram.com/courageous_af_podcast

www.kyle-creative.com

Welcome to COURAGEOUS AF

Being Human Takes Guts

In this second episode, Kyle continues her story from Part 1 and goes deeper into uncovering events surrounding her mother's death.

Warning: This episode talks about suicide, and parental loss, and may use strong language. Please use care while listening.

To follow and learn more about Kyle, visit:

www.instagram.com/courageous_af_podcast

www.kyle-creative.com

Warning: The first three episodes cover the subject of suicide. Please reach out for help if you or anyone you care for is in need by dialing 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, Available 24 hours.

Transcript of full Episode 2

Welcome to the Courageous AF podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Hollingsworth. This podcast is not just about having courage. It's about the human spirit, creativity, resilience, and what's possible no matter what life brings. In this space, I share my own journey of healing. of rediscovering my voice, my power, and my passion after four decades of living a life riddled with trauma, abuse, and pain.

In my heart, I believe we are all courageous AF. And being human takes guts. We're in this together. Hey y'all, I just wanted to hop on and give a little warning that in this podcast I do cover some very difficult subject matter, including suicide, drug use, abuse, and things of that nature. So I would ask that you take care while listening.

Hello everybody, it's Kyle and this is episode two of Courageous AF. If you tuned into episode one, you got the beginning of my story and today I will continue that and tell you what happened next. Before I do that, I want to thank you for tuning in and tell you how much I appreciate you for listening.

This is a very big endeavor for me to do this podcast. It's been a long time coming and it's very dear to my heart to be able to share myself and my story in this way. So thank you so much. Okay, so let's get going. I believe the last thing I shared was being at my mother's friend's house and being a little bit in a daze, not really sure what was happening.

Something in my mind just kind of kept me, maybe kept me safe by just keeping me confused and, and otherwise focused. I was playing while my sister Lisa was resting because the whole thing took such a toll on her. Okay, so I want to actually go back and say that prior to Valentine's Day I remember a lot of good things about living in that house with my mom and my sister.

I remember Lisa and I shared a bedroom and we would jump on the bed and pretend to have microphones in our hands. We had one of those four poster beds, you know, with the little wooden sort of end caps that would come off. And I remember so vividly using them and singing. And I remember having friends in the neighborhood and playing and you know, just being kids, right?

And I also remember my mother really struggling and having a lot of emotional upheaval and drama between her and her boyfriend, um, Howard. And she had dated lots of different men and throughout our childhood, I remember each of them so vividly, but she also in those relationships and in her own. world.

She struggled a lot, and I, and I do remember her crying. I do remember her having emotional outbursts, and so that paired with the otherwise sort of, you know, normal playing of children. She got angry. Sometimes, and she could be a little scary, and I know now that she was incredibly unhappy, of course. So, let's go back to where I left off, and I want to just say that I mentioned in the previous episode that I had noticed a couple of things, and so I want to call attention to those and kind of continue to explain.

One of the things that I noticed when I got out of bed that morning as I crossed the hall and glanced into Mama's bedroom was that there was a bottle, like a pill bottle, like what a doctor would give you, a prescription, on her bedside. And I just noticed it and I noticed that the covers were drawn back.

Those were two things that just kind of burned into my brain. And what I did not mention before is that My sister and I, whilst we were walking through the house and looking for the bad guy or trying to figure out what was happening, we did go into the other bedroom. So, again, this is my memory that there were three bedrooms in this house.

My mother had one, my sister and I had another, and then the third was, at this point, empty, I think? It had been taken by my mother's brother? And he had lived with us for a period of time. I absolutely do not remember if he still lived with us at this point. I don't think so. But on the bed in that bedroom was a piece of paper, like an eight and a half by eleven legal pad.

And on it was my mother's handwriting. And we read that note and it was not something that my eight year old mind could understand. And it's part of what confused me because the note was her apologizing and telling us who to call and talking about wishing that she'd been a better mama. And I started making up things in my head, like, did she go on a trip?

Is she, where does she go? Why is she sorry? But it didn't, I wasn't able to piece it together. Again, this is probably why Lisa started getting really explosive and upset when it all came together for her. So, the note was her suicide note and she gave us very explicit instruction about who to call and what to do.

And when Howard had busted the bathroom door open and she was lying there, she was gone. And the whole thing still feels so confusing and so strange and so surreal. All these years later, right? All these many years later, I still find myself sometimes just thinking back and trying to piece things together more.

This isn't something that I give a lot of thought to at this time in my life because I've done so much work around it and I, I feel my mother in so many ways with me today, but when I am reminded of it, when I do go back and think about that morning, I try to piece things together and make it make sense still, you know, because it was so confusing and it was very confusing for a long time.

I haven't even glanced on what happened years later, you know, Wow, so what I had, what I knew was that mama was in the bathtub. I thought she was probably asleep. There was this strange note from her. I thought maybe she went on a trip and there was this pill bottle and there was this crazy weird haunted look on Howard's face when he came in that morning.

And I remember when we were in the bedroom after he had said to us, she won't be hurting anymore. And I was sitting there trying to understand what that meant. I heard what I know now to be police, I'm assuming the coroner, on walkie talkies outside of the bedroom and I feel like I remember one of them asking if there was water in the tub.

I don't really remember much else. It was mostly just crackles and just murmuring, and it was all very, very confusing, as I said. So, I know that I felt super alone, and I felt super lost. And, other than Beverly, whose house we went to straight away, there wasn't really I have no memory of any adult sort of taking my hand or hugging me and saying it's gonna be okay.

I'm so sorry or I, you know, I love you, any of that kind of stuff. What I remember, what I feel when I think about it, that period was feeling very alone, very abandoned and my sister was Experiencing her own sadness and her own grief and her own processing of what had happened and we were almost two years apart in age, her older than me, and so she was able to understand, I think, much more easily than I was what was happening, even though I'm sure it was its own super special kind of hell for her.

Mine was that I just didn't understand. I did not understand that my mother had died. I did not understand that my mother had caused her own death. And so I was in this weird fantasy limbo, like, waiting for her to show up. And so three days later, I think this again, it was kind of a blur. We were in a, I remember having these, this dress on, I remember having these uncomfortable patent leather shoes and being in a truck with my mother's mother driving.

And I remember asking her, are we going to see mama? You know, and I'm not sure what else I said, but I remember the feeling was, Oh my gosh, I'm finally going to get to see her again. Oh good. Oh, we're going there. I'm dressed up. This must be it. And so while we were in the truck driving down the road, I was waiting for this answer and she looked at me in this very flat way and said, your mama's dead.

We're going to her funeral. And somehow even that didn't diminish my hope. I, I heard what she said. I was trying to make sense of it. There was no further explanation. There was no comforting. There was no anything like that. It was just this very flat, this is what's happening. And I remember looking out the window of that truck and feeling completely I just hate to keep using the word confused, but that's what it was.

I didn't, I did not know what the fuck was happening. I'm this little eight year old kid and I have no idea what's happening. And so we go to the funeral home and my family just kind of, we sat down and there were people there and there was all this commotion and no one was really checking in on us. No one was really making sure we were okay.

No one was really policing us. And I remember at one point I got up. So let me just stop and say that this was an old, this was 1975, this was a funeral home, lots of like red carpet and drapes and white lilies and you know, that kind of musty, dank vibe that only an older funeral home like this could have.

And so at one point I got up and I remember wandering and I wandered down the hall. I don't know if I was trying to find a bathroom or what I was doing, but I remember wandering slightly down the hall and there was another room that was open. It was kind of like, almost exactly like the room that we were in, and this other room was open, and I saw this open casket, this really ornate, shiny wood casket, and there was a woman in it, and she had blonde hair.

I remember that moment looking at her and thinking, that's what they mean by dead. Okay, she's dead. And then I walked back into the room where my mother was, in a closed casket. Another. Dark brown shiny wood casket with these as I remember it these gold handles Maybe I don't know but it was closed and in my mind because remember I had no adults around me checking on me I had no adults that I could really ask for explanations in my mind All I could think is isn't she scared isn't she afraid of the dark?

It must be scary in there if she's in there the funeral Was the biggest thing that stands out in my mind are these freaking white lilies that just smelled so strong and as I'm trying to piece Everything together and I'm looking and I'm at this box at this casket and I'm thinking about mama and how scary that must be I hear this wailing sound just this wailing like just incredibly I'm shivering as I'm talking about it this just crying crying crying and I turned around and it was my dad And there were two people sort of holding him from either side, he was barely walking like, or as I remember it, his feet were almost dragging on the ground, and he was just wailing, sobbing.

I'd never seen him cry, I'd never seen him like that, and never saw him again like that. Not like that. And it was terrifying, because this was the only other parent of mine, and he was incapable of even noticing us. He was incapable of comforting us. He was incapable of acknowledging us. All he could do was wail and Grieve and it was I think there was something that happened in that moment where I knew I couldn't look to my dad for comfort I knew I couldn't look to my dad for for safety or support And I really didn't feel like I could look to anybody else.

I felt very much on my own And I remember leaving that funeral home and going to the, I think, I want to say we did three things. I want to say we were at the funeral home and then we went into a church. Her casket was in this church and it was covered with flowers, and there were a flower wreath and just flowers, flowers everywhere.

And I do remember people saying, I'm so sorry about your mama. I do remember some people saying that. Not family, but other people who knew her. Then I remember being outside and them lowering the casket into the ground. And I remember having an opportunity, I think, to put a flower. And the whole thing was just so incredibly surreal.

And I was still trying to make sense of it, and what were they doing, and why was this going in the ground, and what was the dirt going on top of her for, and what was happening. And that sense of confusion and that sense of abandonment and that feeling of being utterly alone in the world cemented itself in me that day in a way that I carried and lived in for decades of my life.

This moment, this moment of having the woman who gave me life take hers and this moment of realizing that I was absolutely alone in the world. It was incredibly intense and very traumatizing. There's so much to say about what happened next and the wake of this, this event and all of the chaos that ensued from the moment she was found by us to the following weeks and months and I'll share about that in future episodes.

I will continue to talk about all of that. It's just a lot to say on one. I will say that the next chapter in this story was finding ourselves in a car at night, in the dark, being taken to another state, and being yet again even more confused about why that was happening, and why we didn't get to say goodbye to certain people, including my grandparents on the other side, on my dad's side, including my dad.

And I'll share more about that in the next episode. But I think right now what I really want to say is this was the critical turning point for me. And it was the beginning of a very long journey. And the more I understand now about myself and the more work that I do to heal these things and forgive and accept all of it, the more I grow and the more peace I feel.

But this was a devastating experience, as you can imagine, I'm sure. And any of you out there who've ever lost anyone that you love to suicide, this is a very complicated and incredibly difficult thing to live through. I'm gonna stop the story there and say that I take a great deal of concern and care when I talk about these things, and that I did put a warning in the notes, because it can be very challenging to hear about suicide, it can be very challenging to talk about it.

One of the things that's been most important for me in my own growth is to be able to get to a point where I can talk about it. Because God knows when it happened, as I was older and older, I was desperate for people who understood. I was desperate to hear stories from people who got it, who'd had similar things, because I felt so completely different from everybody.

So, I just want you to know if you've experienced suicide in your life, if you've experienced the loss of a loved one, a parent, a sibling, a friend, it's all the same. I feel you. And I'm holding you, and I have a great deal of compassion. And I want to be living evidence that it's possible to go on, and that it's possible to unlearn some of the limitations, the limiting beliefs, and the ideas about one's safety in the world that happen.

I can say that at the time that I'm telling this story, I absolutely felt as if I was falling through space. I did not know how I was supposed to live without my mother. I had no idea how I was supposed to do that. It took a long time to figure it out. I look forward to sharing more about all of it with you.

If you are a first time listener, it might help to go back and listen to episode 1. This is part 2 of my, what I'd like to think of as my trauma origination story. It was sort of the genesis of Some of the things that as a little child got burned into my belief that I carried through life with me and that caused some challenges for me and that left me feeling very alone in the world.

And so there's a lot more to say, there's a lot more to share, but this for now, episodes are definitely in a linear order, so. Listen to episode one. If you haven't, and if you've come back and listened to episode two, I appreciate you. I'm happy that you're here. I'm grateful that you're here. It means a great deal to me to have people tuning in and I would really appreciate a rating and review.

Just if you feel that this is something that's giving you any benefit or interest at all, if you could please give me reviews, that is absolutely how people find out about podcasts. It helps us so much in the world of podcasting and I look forward to sharing more with you next time. I appreciate you. I love you and stay courageous y'all.

Thanks so much. Bye.

Welcome to COURAGEOUS AF.

Being human takes guts.

In this intro, I share why I created this podcast and what I hope to offer to you with each episode. Join me to learn more about living a more courageous life. Love y'all.

Welcome to COURAGEOUS AF

Being Human Takes Guts

In this first episode, Kyle shares about who she is, why she's here, and part one of the story that changed the course of her life when she was just eight years old. She talks about the importance of finding courage, and why creating this podcast matters so much to her. To follow and learn more about Kyle, visit:

www.instagram.com/courageous_af_podcast

www.kyle-creative.com

Warning: This episode uses strong language. Please use care while listening.

The first three episodes cover the subject of suicide. Please reach out for help if you or anyone you care for is in need by dialing 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, Available 24 hours.

Transcript of full Episode:

Welcome to the Courageous AF podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Hollingsworth. This podcast is not just about having courage. It's about the human spirit, creativity, resilience, and what's possible no matter what life brings. In this space, I share my own journey of healing, of rediscovering my voice, my power, and my passion after four decades of living a life riddled with trauma, abuse, and pain.

In my heart, I believe we are all courageous AF, and being human takes guts. We're in this together. Hello. Hello. I'm Kyle. This is Courageous AF, and so am I. I'm here to talk with you about so many different things, all of them having to do with living a more courageous and creative life. It's something that's very important to me.

And for this first episode, I really want to just talk about who am I? Why am I here? What do I know? I made a big decision to finally launch this podcast on Valentine's Day. And the reason I did that is not because I'm a great celebrator of Valentine's Day. It's not because I think Valentine's Day is like so sweet and perfect and all that.

It is because, um, my journey, my trauma journey really began wholeheartedly on Valentine's. day when I was eight years old in 1975 and the event that happened that day basically redirected the entire path of my life. It impacted me in ways that I still am uncovering and discovering and healing and it set a tone for decades of difficulty, challenges, heartbreak, just never really feeling as though I was safe in the world.

Never really feeling as though I fit in the world or belonged in the world. And it has taken a lot of work for me to get to the point where I can wholeheartedly say, I'm courageous as fuck. Yeah, I am. And now that I've discovered that courage and that I continue to grow around this idea of being wholly completely expressed creatively and living a courageous life, Facing fear, pushing through the things that scare me.

I really want to be here to shine a light for other people. I really want to be a lighthouse for those people who maybe aren't on their path where I am yet because God, I needed it. I needed people who could help me, who could show me what was possible and who could help me to see that I could survive and I could change the story of my life.

I could break the family, the generational stories and the trauma. You know, that's such an overused word. But the truth is I'll use that word a lot because I haven't found a better one for it. And you know, I used to wear my trauma like this big heavy weighted cloak and it was, I was heavy. I would walk into the room and I would feel, I think I exhausted people to be perfectly honest with you.

But over the years I've done this just a tremendous amount of work and with every new step toward my healing that a layer of that cloak has peeled away and it's lighter and lighter and lighter. And I want to help share stories and I want to talk about how I got to this point and continue on my journey.

And honestly, another thing that I want to say is that I think I feel like it's so important, especially for women, for us to speak up and to share our truth and to share our stories. Because when we do that, those of us who can do that, it gives permission to our sisters and brothers. It gives permission to others to be brave and to speak their truth and to share their stories because it's by sharing that we can find connection and we can remember that we're not alone and we can remember that we're all going through things, you know, and some of us.

Have a lot more to handle than others. That's true. Yes, that's true. Absolutely. So I just want to be here and be as authentic and courageous and honest and fucking forthright as I can. Because I think it's important. It's important for me. It's important for my continued growth to speak my truth and use my voice in the ways that I can.

And it's also important because I know that somewhere out there, there's someone who needs to hear something that I'm saying. So I'm trusting that and I'm stepping forward with courage into doing this. Podcast. I can tell you that I've actually stalled for almost two years. I wanted to do it for a long time and I kept second guessing myself and kept putting it to the back burner.

And I was going through a huge life going through a huge life upheaval last year. And I finally got to the point where I'm like, Kyle, what are you doing, girl? Like get out of your own way. Cause that's all it is. I'm the biggest obstacle in my own life. Of all the challenges I've had in my life and of all the obstacles, whether seen or unseen that have been in my way, I am the biggest of them, honestly, especially in this stage of my life, like it's the beliefs that I have.

It's the limiting beliefs that I have. It's the second guessing. It's the fear, right? That keeps us from speaking out and from doing the things that we're called to do. I love speaking, and I love storytelling, and I just, yeah, I felt this was something I wanted to do for a long time. So if you're here for this first episode, I'm really happy to have you here.

I may be for you, I may not be. I'm not for everybody, and I, you may find value with me, and if you do, I hope you'll stay. I hope you'll also give me ratings and reviews and all the things that will help me to create something magical with this. For now, I'm just going to share with you, and I think it's really important that I start at the beginning.

So I'm going to tell you the first part of a story. That began on Valentine's Day of 1975. I was eight years old and my sister was nine and a half and we lived with my mom. We called her mama. We lived with mama in the South in a little brick house and my mother and dad had divorced five years prior.

Actually, we had moved around a lot. We had bounced around a lot and at this point we found ourselves in this little brick house on a little road in South Carolina. At that point, cartoons were this amazing, magical thing that only happened on Saturdays. You know, there was no internet, there were no cell phones, there was no like 300 channels, there was a few channels.

And so Saturday was the day we waited for all week. Saturday was like, that was the super exciting thing is to wake up at like six or seven o'clock in the morning on a Saturday, go get a bowl of cereal and plop down in front of the TV and watch Scooby Doo or Josie and the Pussycats. There was So many.

So Valentine's Day had happened on Friday and what made it special this Valentine's Day in my mind was mama gave us each a box of Whitman samplers. You know those little tiny ones that have six pieces in it with the yellow and the flowers and all the things and I remember thinking that was amazing and I ate a piece.

I might have eaten two, I'm not sure, but we put them in the refrigerator so that we could have the rest the next day and we went to bed. I got up first and I would walk from my bedroom that I shared with my sister. I would walk across the hall and use the bathroom and then I would go and either wake her up or just go to the kitchen by myself and fix myself a bowl of cereal.

And so on this particular morning I woke up and I noticed as I crossed the hall that my mama was not in her bed. Just a notice thing. I had to pee and I walked toward our bathroom, but the door was locked. This is the bathroom my sister and I used that was across the hall from our room. My mother had her own bathroom in her bedroom.

So the light was on and the door was locked. And I had this really weird feeling. And I went back into the bedroom and I got my sister and I woke her up and I said, Hey. I can't find Mama and the bathroom door is locked. And so she got up and we came into the hall together and we were at the bathroom door and suddenly got really afraid and I think our imaginations just were really running wild and I thought there was somebody in the bathroom.

Maybe they had Mama. So I remember going and getting a knife. I'm going to stop here and actually say, now, these are my memories and I know memories aren't always exact. So everything I share on this podcast, I'm going to be sharing from the perspective of my own experience, my own memory. I'm not speaking for anybody else.

Okay. So I remember having a knife in my hand at one point. I remember Lisa and I walking room to room and looking behind the doors and there was a real fear developing because this was very strange. Our mama was not up. or in bed or in the bathroom. And I noticed also something else. There was something on her bedside table and I'll come back to that, but I just am noticing again.

And so we kept going throughout the house and we ended up back at this bathroom door and we're now we're knocking and we're calling out to mama like, where are you? You know, who's in there? And I just remember this look going back and forth between us. And then I remember the front door opening. And you could see the front door from where we were standing outside of the bathroom.

And you could also, I mean, there was a clear line so we could see each other and the door opened and it was my mother's boyfriend. I'm not going to use any real names here either. Just so we're clear. I'm going to call him Howard. So Howard was standing at the door and he had this ghostly look on his face and we were both talking at the same time.

Oh my gosh, where's mama? We can't find her. The door's locked. And it was like a millisecond, it feels like, and he was at our side, he was right there next to us. And he asked us to step back, and he tried the lock, and then he backed up and he busted the door open. It was very loud. It was very dramatic. And I looked in as he stepped into the bathroom, and we saw Mama in the bathtub.

And I remember her looking so beautiful, actually. She was lying with her head off to the left side. And she looked like she was sleeping. The light in the bathroom felt really bright and he ran to her. It was so fast that he turned around and he just took both of us and he ushered us across the hallway to our bedroom and said, wait here, shut the door.

And we're just in there and it feels like forever. And anyway, within seconds, even though it felt like forever, I guess it was seconds. I don't know. This is one of those things, you know, he came back in the room. And he sat down on the bed. And I remember he was sitting on my left and my sister was sort of standing to his left and I said, is mama okay?

Is she hurt? Is mama okay? And he said to me something that if I were older, I probably would have made immediate sense out of. But because I was eight and because I really didn't know any better, I didn't understand it. What he said was, she won't be hurting anymore. And that landed very differently with me than it did with my sister.

And so I was just looking at him with these wide eyes and I had no idea what he had just said to me. I really didn't understand, but he closed the door and he said, stay here. And so I'm sitting there with this piece of strange information. I don't know what that means. My sister at this point began really crying and screaming and pacing back and forth through the room.

It was very intense. And suddenly, like it seemed again, like moments later, I could hear people talking in our house. There were people in our house. And I heard like this kind of crackling sound. I heard like a walkie talkie and I heard footsteps down the hall and it felt like there was a lot of people in there, like there was a lot of people.

And I heard some of the things that they were saying and there was murmuring and questions and all of that. And this felt like it went on for a really, really long time. And I don't know how long we were in that bedroom. And I don't know how long it took for everyone to do what they did. But I know that when we finally came out of the bedroom, Mama was gone.

And I know that I think probably within about an hour or so of that, one of her friends, I think it was Beverly, came and picked us up and took us to her house. And I remember kind of going into this sort of catatonic kind of place where I just, I just was playing and just checked out. I'm struggling to come up with a name that I'm going to call my sister so that privacy is respected.

And I think I'm going to give her the name Lisa. So Lisa had to have some sedative so that she could sleep because she was absolutely just traumatized and yelling and screaming and crying and so, so, so upset while I was kind of oblivious and confused and playing with. Beverly's Kids. I don't know what I was thinking exactly.

I just know that I was in this very strange, stunned, and confused place. And it felt like it lasted for a while. And I'm going to stop there and continue in the next episode where I'll explain a little more about what happened and then the next event that immediately followed this. It was Wow. It was something I couldn't even talk about for such a long time without absolutely sobbing, and I'm just so grateful to be in a place where I can share it because I think it's, I think it's important, and um, I want to tell you more, and I also want to keep this first episode brief enough that it's digestible and not too drawn out.

I do want to say that if you continue to listen to these episodes with me, I do cuss a bit. I do share topics that are really difficult. I will find the courage to share and talk about things that might make some people uncomfortable and I will try to preface the podcasts. I'm going to give a little bit of a warning that some of the subject matters in there.

I'll put that in the notes so that you can have discernment when you choose whether to listen to an episode and I'm not here to stir anything up or upset anyone. I'm also not here to share these stories as a way of seeking attention or even sympathy. I don't need it. I'm good. I'm really, really good.

And what I'm doing is sharing my stories because I can remember over and over again looking for someone who'd been through what I'd been through, who'd experienced what I've experienced. And it's a lot. And when I could find people who'd survived it, it was like I could look to them and go, okay, I can see that what's possible.

It's like seeing a, an island out in the middle of the ocean, right? You can see. If somebody else survived what happened to me, what I experienced or worse, you know, then so can I. And so I think it's just so vital to have that. And I find it very important. I find it a high calling for myself to, to be able to, to share these things.

And so before I go, I'm also just gonna, I'm not going to have any sort of set order. I'm just talking y'all. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself, who I am today, where I am in the world. My life has been incredibly rich and diverse, but it's always been driven by creativity. I've been an artist since I was a child.

I bring creativity to everything that I do. And as a friend of mine describes me, I'm compelled to create. So every day I'm doing something creative every day, all the time. And one of the ways that I've had to find courage over the last I am a multi passionate, multi faceted, neurodivergent person who has a lot of different talents and a lot of different gifts.

And to be clear, there's a shit ton of stuff I don't know how to do and I make a lot of mistakes and I am not the wisest person in the world. I am just a person who has Lived through some of life's biggest losses and experienced some unbelievable traumas. Who's not had the courage, I'm not gonna say that, because I didn't always have it.

I was scared to death. I found the courage to go through those dark hallways and to look at the things that had happened and to heal those wounds and to grow from it and to literally change the direction of my life. And as I say that I'm imagining this huge cruise ship and I'm having to turn it. And it's taken me 12 years, 13 years of real.

work to get to the point that I am now and I'm such a student and I'm always learning and there's so much more to do and to be and to learn and to heal. But let's do that together. I feel like now's the time to do that with community. And I will also say that the podcast name Courageous AF that came from a Facebook group that I have.

I currently have a group there that's private, which you are more than welcome to join where I share my stories and I share my learnings and I share some live videos and I talk about my journey. I'm not sure how that group will evolve now that the podcast. is coming out, but I think they'll probably go hand in hand a bit.

So you're welcome to join me there. And in my life right now, this podcast is very important to me. My art is very important to me, my family, my husband, my dogs. And the other thing that's very important to me is personal growth and transformation and my journey as a Reiki practitioner and as an intuitive, as a medium.

Um, as a sound healer, as an illustrator, as a fine artist, as a speaker, as a teacher, as a workshop leader. All these things are alive in me, and they're all driven by this real deep desire to create and to help others. It's so important. So I'll bring a lot of conversation about all of it to this place, as well as my stories, as well as what I've learned, as well as ways that I've found healing and ways that I have found growth and ways that I've been able to learn and grow from some of life's biggest challenges and also how in the hell I've come to a point in my life where I can embrace all of it and accept it and choose it.

I think that's the most courageous thing I've ever done was to finally make peace with all that occurred in my life and to. To choose it, to not want to change it, to not want to make it any different, because that was causing me a lot of pain to want everything to be different, including this thing that happened on Valentine's day with my mother.

I'll say more about it on the next episode. I have a commitment to keep these easy to digest, at least for now. So I'm going to sign off for today. If you listen to this, And you want to come back for more, please do join me for episode number two. I'm going to be releasing these podcasts once a week on Wednesdays, and I am grateful for anyone and everyone who's listening.

I appreciate you and I'll figure it out as I go, right? That's what we're doing here. Stay courageous. Love y'all.