Hey Reader.
Has it ever happened to you where you think you're doing a really crappy job, but your friends are really positive and complimentary about that very same thing?
This happens to me... a lot.
Because I'm apparently in a super deep, self-doubting season of life. Can you relate?
In the face of all that is going on in the world, where so many people are suffering in so many different (and similar) ways, everything feels horrible. I'm constantly criticizing myself about how much I'm not doing, how much better I could do the things I do do, and how maybe none of this matters anyway. Ugh.
But I've got wonderful friends. Oh gods, do I have a set of wonderful friends. I'm so grateful that I've been fortunate enough to be loved by these gorgeous people. And I'm so glad that I have made it a practice to do the work of cultivating and deepening these relationships.
Because when I feel like nothing is going well (and I'm feeling that *so often* right now), I've got this small group of folks around me that I can reach out to, share the heaviness that I'm feeling, and be gently gathered up and encouraged.
This is the beauty of community built around care and compassion.
But, even when we love others well and want to care for them, we can sometimes cast the doubts that we are feeling in our own lives on them, if we mean to or not.
Because, the truth is that sometimes we don't have capacity to examine ourselves or stay in the discomfort of the mess that we are in at the moment.
And there's nothing inherently wrong about that.
But, we do need to find ways to bring ourselves back to that self-examination and practice doing it again and again.
This is something I've been practicing myself recently (because OMG my liiiiiiiiife!!!), so it's been on my mind a lot.
Thus, in the quiet of tidying my kitchen one morning, I had some thoughts and decided to share them with you in this newly released podcast episode, Come Back to Yourself.
I hope you enjoy it... because I almost didn't release it (hello critical self!).
And if you do give it a listen, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Just reply to this email and feel free to share what came up for you while you listened, if it resonated for you, or even if you disagree with your whole chest (because there's space for that, too).
I'll talk to you soon, lovely.
In love, liberation, and solidarity,
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Thank you so much for being here!!!
Sent with big fat love from a messy desk and a neurodivergent mind.
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With a decade as a body liberation facilitator and a lifetime of lived experience as a fat, biracial, queer, neurodivergent person, Tiana Dodson is well-versed in what it is to exist in a multiply-marginalized body. As an active co-creator of the Syllabus for Liberation, her work addresses how personal, community, and global liberation depend upon each other. Through her consulting services, group offerings, and public speaking, Tiana highlights the ways these systems of oppression are bound together and how we can push back against them.