When we are faced with the loss of someone we love-a partner, a friend, a parent, a child, even a beloved animal, something in us shifts.

What happens in that moment? Grief raises questions were rarely prepared for. What happens to the people left behind? The ones who must continue living while carrying the weight of someone’s absence.

And how does life change when a presence that once stood beside you, is suddenly no longer there?

But I want to bring in some light. Grief exists because love existed. We don’t mourn what didn’t matter. We don’t ache for what never touched us, and we don’t feel hollow over something that never filled us.

The size of our grief reflects the size of our love. Maybe grief isn’t something to cure or rush through. Maybe it’s something to carry, because it tells us that what we had was meaningful.

Today we are talking about grief and about mourning.

About what it means to continue living fully while carrying love for someone who is no longer with us

And most importantly, how we learn that moving forward does not mean leaving the ones we love behind.

Because love doesn’t end when a life does. It changes form, and we learn how to live within that new shape.

Did you know that talk therapy is barely more than 100 years old?

For most of human history, if you were suffering mentally, you weren’t asked how you felt, you were restrained, hidden, silenced.

The idea that one could sit with another and speak honestly about your memories, your fears, your inner life and this alone might be healing is a relatively new invention.

Sigmund Freud once wrote:

“Words were originally magic, and to this day words retain much of their ancient magical power”

At the heart of this idea is something deceptively simple: Being honest with oneself -out loud in the presence of another person can alter what we are carrying.

And that’s what we are talking about today. How therapy can be a turning point. How sitting across from someone who is trained to listen can change the way we understand ourselves.  It is about what becomes possible when we stop carrying everything alone. How naming what happened can loosen its grip and when speaking honestly can shift the direction of your life. And sometimes moving forward doesn’t require answers. just the courage to speak, and someone willing to hear us.

Have you ever sat down and began to write your life story?

Putting your life onto the page means asking your memory to cooperate, and memory doesn’t always behave. It wonders, it pulls you sideways. You perhaps start with one moment and end up somewhere you didn’t plan to visit at all.

Writing like this isn’t just remembering what happened, it’s recounting who you were in that moment. The choices you didn’t question at the time, and the meanings youassigned only years later.

There is something vulnerable about deciding which moments get to live on paper. Once they’re written, they stop being private. They become part of a record, not onlyof what happened, but of how you see yourself now

Today we’re talking about what it takes to write your autobiography.

Priyanka's book Angekommen didn’t come from a single burst of inspiration. It took time-real, deliberate time. carved out of a life already full. It meant returning again and again to moments that aren’t easy. We’re going to talk about the process

That kind of dedication matters, because writing a life story isn’t just about honesty, it’s about endurance.

Sitting with your past long enough to give it language, and deciding deliberately what story you’re ready to tell.

 Siblings are often the first people we learn how to love, disagree with, protect, and sometimes misunderstand. They see us before we know who we are, and they remember versions of us that no longer exist.

This podcast begins with the relationship between a sister and her brother. It's rooted in Priyanka's life and her transition, but it isn't only about gender or identity, it's about siblinghood.

About what it means to grow up together in the same household, shaped by the same parent or parents, the same rules, the same fractures, and still walk away with very different experiences of the world.

We talk about the allyship between siblings. About what happens when one of you changes or finally becomes who they've always been, and the other has to learn how to meet them there.We talk about distance, emotional and physical, and how growing up can mean growing apart, even when love remains.

And sometimes growth is met, not with understanding, but with silence. Not all sibling stories resolve in reconciliation. In Priyankas life, reaching out has been met with silence. The absence of response and repair is something many siblings know. Whether the rupture comes from identity, belief, family roles or time itself.

Today, we will sit with that discomfort and ask what it means to keep growing when the person you grew up with cannot or will not grow alongside you.

 A couple of weeks ago, Priyanka did something that completely stopped me in my tracks.

As we were walking back from our weekly run. She looked at me very genuinely, very intentionally, and asked me if I would officially be her friend.

And in that moment I felt this mix of surprise and tenderness because it wasn't a joke and it wasn't casual.It was deliberate.

I could feel the weight behind it, the kind of weight that comes from someone who hasn't always been able to trust easily.

It made me realize the importance of friendship when you've had to protect yourself over and over again just to move through the world.

I have to admit, from the very beginning, I felt that we were friends right from day one. There was something simple and clear between us, a sense of connection, a shared understanding, and a genuine fondness.

These feelings naturally meant friendship in my mind. Without the need for anything more formal or explicit.

However, this made me think about friendship. When you're a trans woman moving through the world, that doesn't always make trust and connection easy.

What it means to feel safe enough to ask for closeness and what it means on the other side to be invited into someone's life. With that kind of clarity and intention. It made me realize how big of a deal friendship can be.    

So today that is what we're talking about. What friendship means, how it's built, why it's protected, and why that moment on our walk mattered so much.

Oh, I'm really glad you're here for this one. So let's get into it.

This conversation begins on something both ordinary and complicated at the same time.

Being a woman often means sharing a dialogue where bodies come up. Periods, hormones, mood swings, changes in the body, and the quiet calculations we make about pain, blood, desire, shame, and pride.

These conversations can feel casual, even bonding, because they’re so familiar to many women.

However, for a trans woman, being inside that circlecan carry a different weight. There can be belonging, but also absence, recognition, but also grief. Listening to stories your body doesn’t hold, while still feeling them matter deeply.

What does it feel like to sit among womenand share womanhood, while knowing your experiences of biology are not the same? And yet your emotional, social, and personal relationship to being a woman is profoundly real.

Today’s conversation opens up a space for thatquestion. Not to argue definitions and not to smooth over discomfort, but to listen closely to what it means to live as a woman whose body and history don't always align with stories and experiences being told around her . To sit with this complexity, and to hear what it means to live honestly inside it.

Last November I attended Priyanka's book reading at Axel Springer Verlag, one of Germany's leading publishing houses. Most book readings follow a bit of a formula: a few words of introduction, a short excerpt, maybe a Q&A at the end . Nice, tidy and predictable
But Priyanka completely transformed that. After being introduced by Niklas Friedel, a representative from Queerseite, her reading felt more like a performance or honestly, a duet between her words and an instrument called a Gayageum, played by HyunJeong Parks. The fusion of music and reading was soft and deliberate, neither one overwhelming the other. Instead, the music moved in and around her voice, blending so naturally that you sometimes couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.
Priyanka moves between languages beautifully. As the book is written in German, it was clear how much care and respect she had for the German language. Then, when she spoke about her process and around her stories, she switched into her native English, and that mix of precision and warmth just pulled everyone in.
The whole evening had this cozy, almost intimate feeling — the kind of energy where people leaned forward in their seats without realizing it. TheQ&A at the end was just lovely. The audience asked such thoughtful questions, and Priyanka responded with that same calm creativity that shaped the rest of the night.
It wasn’t just a reading — it was a whole experience. One that lingered.
Let’s go back to that evening together.

https://queer.axelspringer.com/de/

Welcome to the PR podcast!

We welcome you to our space for stories told carefully and with intention. Each episode explores lived experiences, memories, and the meaning through intimate conversation with reflective outcomes. At its core, it's about identity, life, and how we exist in the world.