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Summary

In this conversation, Adrienne shares her journey through divorce, personal awakening, and the challenges of world schooling her children. She discusses the impact of psychedelic therapy on her mental health, her experiences traveling with her family, and the complexities of co-parenting. Adrienne reflects on the implications of travel in a post-colonial context and the emotional challenges she faces, particularly around her past, experience with adoption and advocacy for change.

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Read the Transcript:

Adrienne Miller (00:00)
Hi everyone, I just wanted to give a little update about my life and things that have been going on with the divorce and with world schooling and our travel and what my future plans are. so, okay, here we go. We separated over a year ago. So Joe originally asked to separate first, which was like a total shock for me and really triggering obviously and he built like a wall downstairs so that we would have like a separate trade off on and off downstairs every other week and honestly that was the first time I had had a real parenting break or like any kind of break whatsoever in my life and I really, really needed that to happen. I don’t think I would have ever taken a break on my own. I’m really bad at doing that or have been in my life. So that was like a real awakening moment for me. And I was really triggered and suicidal for the first few months until I started really utilizing those weeks to be with myself and sit with myself and go to therapy and go for walks and just really focus on me.

And then we kind of slowly started, things started getting better. I started healing more, I started just, you know, coming into my own more, having a break from the kids, from cooking, from cleaning, from all of that, delving into starting my own businesses and earning my own income. And then we slowly started kind of reintegrating. And, you know, then things would go up and down and over the year it you know got to the point where I was like my gosh I don’t know what I want to do because I don’t necessarily want to be married but I don’t really want to get divorced yet either and just like really really at a loss for what to do.

Then last fall I had an MDMA session so it’s like a psychedelic assisted therapy sessions I had two therapists in my home and I took MDMA and then just spent eight to ten hours just like emotionally vomiting to them, which was phenomenal. I cannot recommend it enough if you’re looking into something. I did a whole podcast episode about it early on, so you can find that. And I shared some thoughts about it too on Instagram, so you can look at that highlight. But essentially what it allowed me to do was talk about trauma for a very long time without getting dysregulated because it essentially just stops, you know, fear and stops your nervous system from going into fight or flight and just floods you with all these happy hormones. So I’ve been going to therapy for years and years and done on and off things with EMDR and lots of different practices and nothing has had the effect that psychedelics have had. So if that’s something that you’re interested in, I highly recommend looking into it. I know it’s not legal everywhere. It’s not actually legal here either. So you definitely have to find like kind of underground places by referral. Obviously, you don’t wanna just meet up with anyone. I had watched a documentary called Dosed and there’s a number two as well, that’s excellent, but in that one they talk about inner realms, which is a center that is in my hometown of Vancouver and so I hooked up with them to do a session of DMT which did not go well. I just puked it all up right away and through them, I found my therapist who does MDMA assisted therapy, which I really, really loved. But anyway, I did that right before we went traveling. We decided to go traveling together because I was kind of in the mode of like, hey, we don’t know what’s going to happen in this world. I had talked to a homeschooler whose kid had been diagnosed with cancer and she was really concerned that they weren’t keeping up with their homeschool work through chemo and I just kind of had this epiphany moment of like, I don’t wanna be that family who, you know, waits until someone gets cancer to go and do something and do what they really wanna do. I was really struggling here, I struggling with my family. I always struggle with the weather and so I thought, you know, if we’re gonna be separated anyway, like why don’t we just travel also? Which is like such an ADHD thing to think and Sagittarius thing to think. But anyway, that’s what we did. So we went to Southeast Asia. Vietnam was truly, truly chaotic in like a beautiful and really messy kind of way. So it was very raw. The infrastructure is lesser than that of, you know, where we went to next, which is Thailand. I was super dysregulated in Vietnam.

We were always, we couldn’t afford to stay in two separate places. We were always in like a one bedroom, maybe a two bedroom if we were in luxury. And I just, it was a lot. The weather wasn’t great. There was lots of garbage everywhere, garbage in the ocean, rats on the beach, just like not an ideal situation and the kids were really struggling. We were kind of bouncing around so weren’t meeting up with lot of people. The one worldschooling hub in Hoi An we couldn’t even get to because it was flooded and it was just a ton of rain. We went right after the typhoon hit which we did not know was gonna happen obviously. So anyway, Vietnam was like beautiful and chaotic but also really dysregulating and just a lot.

So by the time we got to Thailand on an island called Koh Lanta, which I had found from, so there are lots of like world schooling Facebook groups and in there people are always like, hey, where should we go? And then Thailand kept coming up. And so I joined the like world schooling in Thailand specifically Facebook group. And then in there this Bliss hub kept coming up as well. And I was like, what the hell is this? And it was a free hub, which is like, unheard of every other hub especially with places like boundless life are super expensive and completely out of our budget and we’re, you know, definitely a family who would rather have a six month long world schooling adventure in not great conditions than like a two week long vacation where we have all the luxury. So anyway, we are doing everything that we could to stretch our budget as much as we could and finding a free hub was amazing and they have a few hubs over Southeast Asia and it’s essentially a WhatsApp group and they have different channels so like a tween channel and a teens one and a sports one and arts and crafts and pool parties. So all these different channels set up with activities all throughout the week and cooking classes, you know, you’d pay a little bit for that or like a Muay Thai kickboxing class. So some of them required some very, very reasonable payments and others didn’t. They were more just meetups and our kids were enthralled. I had never, ever been in a community like that before, my homeschool community where I live is very small. There were over a hundred of us in this hub on Koh Lanta. All the activities were free. We were spending, you know, 12 to 16 hours outside a day, which is unheard of where I’m from. And it was just such a good place for me to be regulated. You know, with the sand, the ocean, the sounds, the colors, the food, the people, all of it was just very chill, very relaxed. And even if I did get triggered, which was rare, I could regulate almost immediately. The kids were so happy. I was able to meet other like-minded homeschooling and worldschooling adults and friends and was making connections from all over the world. So I was in this like idyllic, like heaven-like scenario.

Over time, I got to a place where, two things happened. One, I was so regulated that my body was able to tell me what it needed. And immediately it was divorce. Like, I cannot explain it because beforehand it was always me going back and forth and thinking of the pros and cons and trying to be all logical about it and like, how do I really feel? And I just couldn’t do that in the state that I was in at home. When I was in Thailand, away from my family when I was regulated on a consistent basis, which just doesn’t happen in my normal life at home. I was able my body just like screamed it and over the course of those months I could definitely feel the MDMA working it’s magic. And so that’s another thing that doesn’t necessarily happen in therapy is MDMA is constantly working on your brain. It’s all of that integration work that happens after much more so than just the initial like eight hour session. It is, you know, helping neurologically and helping actually change what’s going on in your brain. And I could really, really feel that. And so it was just without a doubt, without question, my body was like, you need out of this, you need to be your own person, you need your own space, you need to like physically, emotionally, everything be out on your own. And I started having all of these epiphanies and I started thinking about things that I’d never thought before. Like, Adrienne, are you even straight? Like you’ve never been able to explore that because you’ve been told that you’ve you’re cis and straight your entire life and so start exploring those things and you are turning 40 and you’re going through perimenopause and you are starting to care less and less what people think and you’re starting to shed the weight of all these things and I just it was like a giant breath of fresh air and a huge weight lifted off my shoulders and for the first time it was so clear and so immediate that this is what I needed and what my not even what I wanted. This is what I needed. One of the first times I’ve been able to listen to my body so clearly and hear it so clearly and be so connected to my body. I had, you know, zero responsibilities there. We weren’t cooking for ourselves. We weren’t cleaning for ourselves. We weren’t doing laundry. There was no giant house to maintain.

My income didn’t need to be as high because of where we were, all of these things. The kids were so happy. I was barely caring for them in a sense because they were just with friends over the moon all the time. And Joe and I were able to have talks freely all the time because the kids were occupied. Linus’ anxiety wasn’t right there being like, what are you guys talking about? Are you guys fighting? Are you crying? What’s happening? Because he was so preoccupied.

And his anxiety levels went down and you know, Merin’s ADHD wasn’t a thing because she was out all day, every day doing whatever she wanted and you know, running amok and being feral and it was amazing.

And so that did not land well with Joe because he had thought we were getting to a place where things were going, being a lot better and in his mind, and I still think in his mind, he feels that if I just heal enough, that then I will want to be in this marriage again. And I got to a place where I was like, no, no, this isn’t actually necessarily about Joe at all. And I get this question a lot, so I’m gonna answer it. It’s like, if Joe changes though, like what does he need to do for you to want this marriage to work? Or like, what if he came around or what if he read enough books? And I am like not in that place anymore. I think I was where I was like.

Okay, if he just does this and if he like is equal with chores and equal with homeschooling and if he like gets into feminism and all of this stuff, like if he just starts to care about social justice more, like sure, that would be great, but I’m not waiting for that or counting on that and that is really not what is driving this divorce. This divorce is 100 % about me and what I need and listening to my own body, not centering Joe. This is de-centering all men. This is decolonizing my life. This is stepping away from the patriarchy, from Mormonism, from marriage, from anything like institutional or mainstream or anything that I’m supposed to do. So this is very, very much about for whatever reason that my body needs. I’ve never been alone. I’ve always had boyfriend or a husband or been reliant on my dad or you know other father figures so I’ve always been dependent on men I’ve always centered men. My mom and I have a terrible relationship so I’ve never thought really highly of women or had like a lot of strong women relationships in my life until recently and this is all just like this brand new chapter in my life of realizing that what I need is like

and I need healing and I need women and I need to be really leaning into like feminine energy and all of that irrespective of Joe. So like I this really isn’t about not wanting to be with him as much as it is wanting to be with me and wanting to love love myself and

give myself what it needs away from men, away from a man. And really away from anyone else. I can’t say I’m looking for another relationship or to be with another woman even right now that is so far off my radar. I just want to be with myself and I just want to sit with myself and connect with myself and you know heal in a way that isn’t for Joe. For years I was healing for him because it was his idea that I heal and you know him for better or for worse. Like I truly believe he had genuine intentions but it was still okay well if I heal then I’ll be a better wife or if I heal then I’ll be a better mom or a better partner or a daughter or friend or whatever and now I’m really at the point where like this is so much more about me and healing my gosh healing for myself and my own well-being because I am getting to a place where I just want to love myself for the sake of loving myself and not for anyone else.

Okay, that happened. The other thing that I wanted to talk about was while we were there in Thailand, after the honeymoon phase kind of wore off of what a great worldschooling community it was and everything like that, I got to a place where I was like, you know what?

This is just a group of rich white people traveling the world, exploiting the fact that we have colonized everywhere and all those countries are now poor and affordable to us and we are going there, finding ourselves and it’s essentially neo-colonialism and now I can’t unsee that and so now I’m in this really weird place with travel. For a long time I thought, you know what, there is no better way to educate my kids on diversity and racism and poverty and classism and elitism and colonialism and world history than to take them traveling. I feel way less guilty when we’re traveling because I am like, hey, all the learning is here and there’s language arts, there’s currency, there’s art, there’s history, there’s culture, there’s everything at our fingertips and when I come home I’m always in this weird mode of like, am I doing enough? And I live in a town that’s like 90 % white and there’s hardly any diversity and I just really thought that travel was the answer. And in true like Sagittarius, AuDHD, which I’m pretty sure I am, social justice form, I just cannot unsee things now and unhear things and unfeel things the way I have with traveling. And so I feel really conflicted about it. I feel like eco travel just isn’t a thing because airlines, infrastructure, CO2, pollution, just garbage, all of it. I just don’t actually think there’s a way to travel sustainably as much as people want to, you know, perpetuate that movement. I also feel like the people who can afford to travel are all wind demographic and we kind of just stick to ourselves. And while we were there, you know, we had women’s circles and healing circles. I was like, this would be so good for me. But of course, it’s led by, you know, skinny British white women who charge for it and who bring white sage and completely appropriate the sacred indigenous practice. And not to mention the cultural appropriation of yoga. And I just, I felt so icky about it and I couldn’t go. And I just, it just didn’t sit well. And so, yes, on the one hand, we had this incredible experience. My kids want to go back and Joe absolutely loved it. He wants to go back and it’s like nothing else that we have ever experienced ever. But I, once again, just like find colonialism everywhere and white supremacy everywhere and Western capitalism everywhere and I can’t let go of it and I can’t separate those things and I can’t reconcile those things and so I don’t actually know what travel looks like for us in the future, but coming back here where I am immediately dysregulated and immediately thrown back into my childhood dynamics environment with my family, but I’m not ready to cut that off and the kids love their cousins and I haven’t been warm since we’ve been home. I am like cold all the time. That’s also something that was so helpful while we were gone. Just my body being, not being tense, like physically being warm. I realized this like is such a crucial part of my wellbeing and being in sunshine and just being able to float in the ocean. And I am sorry, but I am like not a cold plunger. I, you know, take scalding hot showers and it just have to be the perfect temperature all the time, which does not happen here. need sunshine, which does not happen here. You know, we get two months maybe of sunny year and the rest of the time it’s just cold and windy and it’s just brutal and dark and gloomy and I get that that’s why it is green and beautiful and I just feel like I’m a giant walking contradiction because I look outside and I’m like, the Pacific Northwest, the most beautiful place on earth. And I also absolutely hate it here at the same time. And I love traveling and I’m a total wanderlust soul and I want to experience new things all the time and travel and bounce around but

I also need slow travel and my body cannot be in that chaos. And I wanna be in these world schooling hubs and these communities with like-minded families. And I also want to be traveling like culturally, authentically and being in really raw places that are not destroyed by tourism. And, but I’m that white person doing that, you know, thing. So like I just cannot reconcile anything in my life and it’s really hard for me to live you know with that alignment in travel and I I really don’t know what we’re gonna do because I don’t feel at home here. We’re on stolen land here also like I’m also a settler colonizer here and so it’s not like being here makes that problem go away either.

I need that like urban community and diversity and the festivals and the protests and people who are not all the same, but my body physically hates that. I hate concrete jungles. I hate noise, pollution and traffic and cars and everything that urban life brings. So I just am in this back and forth all the time of what I want and what I need.

I have definitely gone to a place of new things that I am dealing with and adapting. So let me go into our life here a little bit because a lot of people are asking about the divorce and the separation and what’s gonna happen. So we’ve kind of gotten to the point where I’m like, okay, divorced or married, like that’s essentially a piece of paper. We’re gonna have whatever relationship we wanna have. We have this home that we, you our whole marriage and life led up to building this home for ourselves where we have Airbnb in the bottom so that the kids have a place to live through college or, you know, if they get divorced or the job market is crazy or whatever. So we built that space. We also built it with those rentals in mind to pay for, you know, a good chunk of the mortgage so that we didn’t have to work as much because we want to be with at home with the kids as much as possible.

We built this house to be able to earn income in other ways. So I started my photography business with the house is also my studio. I started the venue rental business of my house. I also rent out to people for weddings or wellness retreats and yoga retreats and photography workshops and all these other things so that I can earn income in a way that’s not teaching, which I cannot stand. I’m not a nine to five person. I’m 100 % an ADHD need to work for myself, need to work eight different jobs, which I do. And this home is a big part of that. So us selling this home and both being in much more dire financial situations, me losing a good chunk of my income, which, you know, Joe’s had 15 years to build up his career that’s irrespective of the house and he can take it anywhere and work remotely and it’s on his phone and his computer and I don’t have that luxury. A lot of my income is very much attached to this house and but neither one of us has the capital to buy out the other person which is a heck of a lot of money. Which I hear myself I know that I’m complaining about privileged things but I’m being honest and raw and transparent and it is what it is. This is my reality. I have some financial options with my dad and my parents which come at a huge emotional cost. There’s a lot of financial abuse there and manipulation and toxicity with those relationships. So yes, just like I have caregiving from my parents, but it comes at a huge cost because there’s a lot of toxic relationship there or it comes, you know, with favors owed or passive aggression or manipulation, lots of different things. So there’s a hundred percent there’s privilege there, but it is not clear cut and it is not entirely void of its own pros and cons. So we’re currently living in the same house. We are currently separated. Taxes and finances and all of that will kind of determine whether or not we go through with an official divorce, but a separation agreement is really all we need.

I’m not looking for relationship. I have certainly encouraged Joe to go do that if he’s interested in that. He hasn’t said that he is. He is very much into our family of five and making that work with whatever that looks like, even if it’s unconventional. And I’m all for that. So we switch one week on, one week off with the kids, which, like I said, we’ve done married, we’ve done separated, can do divorced like that, the nature of our relationship really doesn’t dictate that. And I heavily encourage anyone who wants some more like equal partnership to look into that, whether or not you are married, separated or divorced, because just being able to split all of that, that income, that caregiving, that the housework, the you know, the labor, all of it, it makes it so much more clear cut and equal when we started splitting everything 50/50 and being default parent 50 % of the time. It has taken the kids, you know, like I said a couple years ago is when we got separated. And so it has taken time and energy and effort to get them used to this idea. It obviously wasn’t easy at first. Summer was only three or four, so it was a lot harder with her for the kids to understand, especially going from me being the default parent for 15 years to all of a sudden it changing. That was big for them. so just giving ourselves a lot of grace and a lot of time and patience with ourselves and with the kids and understanding and being flexible and being organic. So it was not hard and fast and just like…

No, no. You know, we’re not being inflexible. That’s ridiculous. So sometimes it meant having some really hard conversations with the kids. So being really open and honest about it. I’ve always been open with them about my needs and my boundaries and all of that. And so continually having those conversations was really helpful and explaining that, you know, I need breaks just like they need breaks. And they really understood once I started talking about fairness and how, you know, it’s dad’s turn to do this and dad’s turn to do that. And I’m working now so that I can have my own income and we’re trying to make things a lot more fair. So that really appealed to Linus who’s, you know, my equality Libra and my oldest and just like okay mom needs more help okay that makes sense yes she needs more help and his anxiety has actually gone way down since we finalized that we’re getting separated instead of the back and forth and not knowing what was going to happen. And he definitely got to a place where he’s like, Mom, like you’re so much happier. And now I can relax because I know what the rules are and what the boundaries are and what, you know, the future is going to hold kind of thing. So I would say it was a lot harder on all three of them, but especially him when we were going back and forth and when we weren’t totally sure about what was gonna happen between Joe and I. And so if that gives you any hope for being worried about how your kids are gonna handle it, my lived experience is that everything got a lot smoother, particularly our fighting went way down and our disagreements and our like heavy ups and downs now that we have a very clear path that’s settled in once I made my decision from a very regulated place, everyone’s just taken this collective like sigh of relief. And so from my personal experience, the hardest part about this split is actually the months and years leading up to it of all the arguing and all the intensity and all of the fights and silent treatment or like the heavy emotional upheaval and roller coasters before the decision, not the actual decision to split up. My middle is kind of, okay, well, one of you get a house in the suburbs, that would be great because I really want to live closer to my cousins and I really want a road where I can ride my bike. And so she’s like, very matter of fact nonchalant about things. Obviously she has deeper feelings and we’ve talked about it, I, you know, she can see she’s like my total bullshit meter child and she can definitely feel that things are better. So she’s like, great, this is way better. And then my youngest is five turning six, She’s definitely gotten the best version of me as a parent and of our, just my ability to love her and handle things and handle my own triggers in a way that I wasn’t able to with the older two. So she certainly has had the most like stable childhood and regulated nervous system and her emotional intelligence is just through the roof. And so it’s actually been okay with her as well. And because she was Joe’s kid, it was between like her or a dog, could not, three kids was gonna be a lot and I said to Joe, if you want a third child, can do this, but she definitely needs to be your baby, which means you’re co-sleeping. You are feeding her, you are gonna take the lion’s share of that responsibility, because I just don’t have the mental and emotional capacity to do what I did with my first two, which was a lot. And he did, and their relationship is fantastic, and the most equal between all the kids, right? Like Summer does not lean much more heavily toward me the way the older two do. So anyway, it’s been fantastic for her. This is kind of regular for her.

And she has a very close relationship between the two of us. Anyway, where was I going with that? I was saying our current situation, the default on off, I highly recommend even if you’re living together and you’re happily married and all of that, being able to turn off and be like, I’m not cooking this week. This is dad’s week. I’m not worrying about meals. I’m not worrying about caregiving, setting up play dates, any of that, I get to fully focus on myself. Now, Joe and I work for ourselves. We have that privilege. Again, it has taken us 13 to 14 years to get to this point. It took a lot of debt. It took a lot of sacrifice. It took a lot of effort. It took like a huge toll on our marriage. But that was something that we needed to make happen and that we really wanted to make happen because we wanted.

Like, we were dying, both of us, at our jobs. We were in survival mode all the time. I hated being a teacher. Joe hated working at the bank and at his financial institutions that he was at. We wanted to be at home with the kids more. We wanted that option to be like entrepreneurs, all of that. And so…

Yes, there is always privilege. Everything I say and do is going to be from a place of privilege because of my skin color, because of my access to resources, any of that. So just take from a very default position that I am a privileged person. It doesn’t mean that we didn’t sacrifice or make massive efforts or that it wasn’t hard or that it, you know, was handed to us. It just means that we have opportunities that not everyone has. So we both work for ourselves. We have the opportunity to be that default parent. However, even if you don’t, even if you are at a nine to five, you don’t have that flexibility to work remotely or on your own schedule or whatnot.

Or even if you’re the stay at home default parent and your partner is the one sole income earner and working full time. That doesn’t mean that outside of those hours, you can’t make this work. You know, splitting that evenly outside of the nine to five, I highly recommend trying to have that conversation and trying to make that work. It makes such a difference. It models for the kids more equality and fairness. Our whole family, their whole well-being is better because of this split and this arrangement.

I now have a week to pursue hobbies, to rest, to earn an income, to essentially do what I need to take care of myself, not only to show up better for myself, which is amazing, but to show up better for the kids and just in life in general.

That is working out really well. We’ll continue to do that no matter what our relationship is, but as I said, I have no interest in really being married, I think to anyone ever again, I really can’t see myself sharing a space. So this is for sure, this is unsustainable that we will live in this home together forever. But I will say having those boundaries, setting those boundaries around our space, around chores, around labor, around the kids cooking, cleaning, all of that has been a huge help and taken a lot of triggers way down. Having those boundaries around our relationship and knowing that I get to exist in this space without having to prioritize him or our marriage or our relationship or date nights or any of that is a much better way for me, for my well-being to be in the same space as him. I think if Joe would have presented this option from the beginning I would have not gone for it, but we have been through so much. We have tried so many different things and we have looked at many options, right? Like I could go back to teaching and the kids could go to school and we could… I could afford a place on my own. So like there are just variables that I’m much more willing to deal with than not if that makes sense. Okay, so that’s kind of my life update. Last week was my birth son’s birthday.

Last week was my birth son’s birthday and birth mother’s day and I have not been handling it super well as usual. Every year in April, my anxiety builds up to the beginning of May. There’s also just like a lot of family birthdays in May which adds to it but I have so many mixed feelings around the birth and around the adoption. So I’ll just talk about that for a little bit.

I have a highlight on Instagram and I share my thoughts and feelings there as well, but usually I just have a really hard time. He’s turning 15 this year. It’s a lot. We don’t have the best relationship with the adopted parents. My kids don’t even remember that they have a half brother because that relationship is so limited.

It’s so draining that I never have anything left by the time it’s Mother’s Day. And so I feel like it’s so unfair every year. Like I had this huge roller coaster of emotions the week ahead or the week before and then have nothing left for my own kids. And I never even know what I want. I don’t necessarily want to be alone, but I don’t necessarily want to just pretend and fake that I’m super happy with my kids either. And it’s really unfair to them because they just want to celebrate me. Joe is like a shit gift giver and a shit like holiday celebration person. So he has dropped the ball every single year around Mother’s Day, Birth Mother’s Day, Christmas, my birthday, like all of it, but specifically around this time of year. And so that’s always super painful. And so yeah, just, last week was really rough and I…

I’ve just started in the past few years to really lean into whatever my body needs. And if that’s being alone, that’s great. If that’s crying, that’s great. If that’s, you know, distracting myself, that’s great, too. So just really not forcing myself to feel any certain way about it. But essentially, I’ve, you know, been watching this kid grow up from afar. And it’s this piece of me that lives outside of me in a different way than my kids do because I get to actually heal with them and like be with them and truly watch them grow up and know things about them and have core memories with them and have a real bond and with my son. It’s really superficial and really curated and always supervised and just really inorganic and disingenuine, which my soul can’t handle. I’m bad at small talk in general. I’m bad at like inauthenticity and I just don’t know how to have a relationship when it’s so heavily controlled and it’s also really hard because he looks exactly like his dad and his dad was really abusive and it’s hard to not see that. And so on the one hand, I want this relationship so bad. And on the other hand, it’s super triggering, like just as physical appearance is triggering. But obviously I’m never going to tell him that or even his parents that. And so it’s just this thing that I hold inside secretly and with 20,000 of you. But anyway, that’s how I’m feeling. It always makes me really angry at the Mormon Church. It makes me really angry at my parents. It makes me really angry for anyone who blows up abortion clinics and stands outside in protests and just tells people to choose adoption when they have no clue what adoption is like and the havoc that it wreaks on people and the trauma that ensues and I just, wish people who don’t have lived experience with being a birthing person or having any experience with adoption, just they shouldn’t have an opinion on it and it just is so heartbreaking to me that other people want to force that choice on others. And when it’s not their body and when they have no clue what that’s really like. So it’s why I’m so pro-abortion and it’s why I work so hard to advocate for, you know, people’s rights, human rights, consent, bodily autonomy, all of that. So anyway, I’m gonna leave you with that. I will do some more of these episodes more often. I think it’s really nice to just like share what’s going on in my personal life. I try and be really open on IG stories anyway, but it’s kind of just nice to talk to you guys. Anyway, I hope you’re all doing okay. Obviously the world is on fire and none of us are doing okay. But maybe try and remember that if you’re not doing okay you should be proud of that because it means that you care and it means that you have a heart and you’re not a robot and you’re not a fascist and that you have real empathy. And so if your heart is breaking at what’s going on in the world for people, you’re in good company and you know, there is place for sacred rage and anger and grief. And I just,

wish for all of us to be able to feel that more deeply and lean into that and really not feel afraid to feel uncomfortable and feel really hard and difficult emotions, because not only is it part of just life, it means that you have a deep sense of humanity and that you’re connected to your body and that you’re genuine and that you know you are decolonizing by doing that and getting in touch with the earth and yourself and nature and all of that I just cannot cannot recommend enough anyway love you all I’ll chat soon okay bye