I asked Brittany what she would say to the version of herself standing by her father's hospital bed. She said you get to tell the story. You get to not know things and still tell it, and you get to hold the good memories from when you were little right…
Brittany Perham wanted to call her father. She was still afraid. The full story: https://youtu.be/6pFGIVmKDEI
Content note: this story includes addiction, estrangement and the death of a parent. Brittany Perham stopped answering her father's calls in college. His drinking had become frightening, and she needed distance. The silence lasted almost fifteen years. In the last year of his life, she found herself back in a…
Brittany Perham had a childhood her friends still call perfect. And underneath it was a father whose drinking nobody in the family talked about. By college, things had gotten scary enough that she stopped answering his calls. The silence lasted almost fifteen years. In his final year, she got a…
Brittany was in college when her parents were divorcing and her dad started calling her crying and drunk. Then her brother had an asthma attack out of nowhere and spent a year in and out of Mass General. She remembers thinking, I have to get myself a therapist. It was…
Chloe spent most of her life behind a persona she built to stay safe. Now she says it feels like she is not in prison anymore. The full story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ndMwNbBtZY
Please note: this story includes gender identity, transition and a mention of past struggles with mental health. Chloe Kelly was 45 when she understood she was trans. She had spent decades building a persona to blend in, and years of quietly wondering why life felt so heavy. Then one lunch…
Chloe was asked what she would say to the person she used to be. Not a lecture. Not a shake. Just a hug, because that person got her here.
Chloe is traveling the world, writing a memoir, and living by her own rules now. She got joy tattooed on her back in Buenos Aires. She means it.
Chloe talks about what self-love actually looked like once she stopped performing and started living as herself.
Chloe spent decades earning what she calls man points, playing a role so well that even she could not see through it. This is the short version of a very long story.
Chloe talks about carrying a secret from childhood into adulthood, and what it took to finally stop being ashamed of it.
Chloe talks about what shifted in her friendships once she started living as herself. Some relationships fell away. New ones opened up in ways she did not expect.
Chloe describes what it felt like to live inside a quiet sadness for years, even with a good job, a good home, and a partner she loved. It's one of the most honest descriptions of that feeling I have heard.
Some of us carry a weight for so long that we forget it isn't supposed to be there. Chloe Kelly spent 35 years being very good at being someone she wasn't. She learned the rules early. Play sports. Earn man points. Don't stand out. Never let anyone see. She got…
Chloe pressed a button on a face filter app during her lunch break and could not look away from what she saw. This is the moment everything started to shift, in her own words.
Jeff found an unexpected way to calm his nervous system, just sitting and watching his chickens. Sounds small. Clearly wasn't.
Jeff has a line about letting go of conversations you're never going to have. Simple, and it's exactly the kind of thing I keep thinking about.
Jeff talks about finally finding a therapist who actually understood what he was describing, someone who'd worked with combat stress and first responders before. That's where things started to shift.
Jeff spent twenty-five years believing he had to carry everything himself. Here he talks about learning it's okay to let someone else carry part of the weight.
Jeff calls self-acceptance the wall that has to come down, no matter what job or title you're hiding behind. This might be my favorite moment in the whole conversation.
Jeff talks about the panic attacks and nightmares that followed him even on vacation, before he found real help. This is the harder part of the story, and he doesn't soften it.
Maybe you know what it is to be the steady one. The person who shows up, holds it together, and makes sure everyone else is okay before anyone thinks to ask about you. Jeff Abbott has been that person for more than 25 years in emergency medicine, most recently as…
Jeff spent twenty-five years running toward chaos for work. The hardest part turned out to be learning to sit still with his own mind. He gets into breathwork, meditation, and finally quieting the noise.
