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Grandmama: The Rage She Held and the Voice She Gave Me | Episode 13 · The Brain Dump

• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to the brain dump with Sandy Boone.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: I am going to call this episode Grandmama.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: The rage she held and the voice she gave me.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: My mother likes to tell a story about the day I was born.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: She says that I came into this world screaming my head off.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Her words, not mine.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: And she looked at my dad and said, She has your mother's temper.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I've been thinking about that story a lot lately.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because I don't think she called it wrong because she was wrong about me.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think she called it wrong because nobody had language yet for what she was actually seeing.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: That wasn't temper coming through.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: That was rage.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Specifically, it was my maternal grandmama's rage.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: The rage of a woman who graduated at the top of her class and couldn't go to college because she was poor and it wasn't expected of her.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: The rage of a woman who was brilliant and powerful and spent her whole life pouring that brilliance into a world that had already decided what she was allowed to be.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: It came through me the day I was born.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it took me most of my life to figure out what to do with it.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what this episode is about.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: I need to tell you about her before we go any further.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: As I mentioned, she was my mother's mother.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: She graduated at the top of her class.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: She was a reader, the kind of reader who didn't just move her eyes across a page, but who wrestled with ideas and turned them over and came out the other side having actually thought something new.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: She was a studier, a critical thinker.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: She had a mind that in a different time or a different circumstance could have gone anywhere.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: But she was poor and she was a woman, and the world had already decided what that meant.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: So she became a wife, a mother, a housewife, and by all accounts, she was phenomenal at every single one of those things.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: She loved her family with everything she had.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: She built a home, she raised children, six of them.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: She did all the things.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I have thought about her so many times over the years, really sat with her story and wondered.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Did she long for more?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Did she lie awake at night thinking about the books she hadn't read, the ideas she hadn't gotten to pursue, the version of herself that never got a chance to exist?
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: We never talked about it.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe she made her peace with it.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe she found genuine fulfillment in what she had.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: I want to believe that.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: But I also know what it looks like when a woman holds something.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: When she takes all that power and all that fire and all that capacity and she folds it down quietly into the shape that the world can accept.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: I know that look.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I think grandmama held it a lot.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what happened next.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: The generation that came after grandmama, my mother's generation, and then mine, we got a different message.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: We were told the rules had changed.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: We were told we could go to college, we could have careers, we could be independent, we could do it all.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And we believed it.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: We showed up, we worked hard, we bootstrapped ourselves because that's what Gen X does.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody handed us anything.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: We figured it out.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: But here's what nobody told us.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean nobody sat us down and said this clearly.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: You can do it all.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: You will just also still be expected to do everything you were always expected to do.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: The career got added to that list.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: The independence got added to the list.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: But the list never got shorter.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: We were still expected to manage the household, to carry the emotional labor, to take care of children and the aging parents and the relationships and the mental load of approximately 10,000 invisible tasks that nobody sees until they don't get done.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: And we were still operating inside systems, healthcare systems, workplace systems, educational systems, legal systems that were designed with a particular kind of person in mind.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that person was not us.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: So we built our lives on a foundation that was sold to us as solid.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And we were capable enough and determined enough and frankly stubborn enough to make it work most of the time.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: But capacity has a limit and systems fail.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: And one day, for a lot of women in midlife right now, something happens that makes the math undeniable.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: We have been handling everything.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: We were never actually free, and we are furious.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: I was in a meeting recently with another therapist who's doing research on what she's calling middle-aged rage.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to tell you, that conversation lit something up in me.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Because we started naming what's underneath it, what is actually making midlife women so angry right now.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't just one thing, it was a whole architecture of things that had been accumulating for decades.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Being expected to handle it all without acknowledgement, without support, without anyone noticing the weight, the loss of autonomy, the slow erosion of choices that were supposed to be ours, systems that were designed to keep us safe that failed us anyway, failed us quietly, failed us while we were following the rules and doing everything right, missed opportunities because of societal expectations, the things we didn't pursue, the versions of ourselves we didn't get to be, because the world had already decided what we were supposed to want.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: And underneath all of it, the Gen X inheritance, the bootstraps mythology, the idea that struggle is character building and asking for help is weakness, and if something is hard, you just need to try harder.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's not liberation, my friends.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's just a different kind of container.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the body knows it, especially now, when hormones are shifting and the nervous system that held it together for 30 years is finally loudly presenting the bill.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: The rage is not irrational.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: The rage is accurate.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: It is the emotional mathematics of decades of unacknowledged labor plus systemic failure, plus the realization that some of what you sacrificed, you can't get back.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: I want to tell you about the moment I stopped being fully, quietly furious and started being loudly useful.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to be careful here because this isn't just my story to tell, but I'll tell you what I can.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: There was a moment in my life when someone I love, someone I would move the world for, encountered a system that was designed to protect her.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it failed her.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Not because she did anything wrong, not because we didn't follow the rules.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: We followed every single rule.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: We did everything we were supposed to do.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: We trusted the process.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: We believed that the system, for all its imperfections, would ultimately do what it existed to do.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember sitting in the middle of that failure, this specific, grinding, infuriating experience of watching something unjust happen to someone I love while institutions that were supposed to intervene looked the other way.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: And feeling something clarify inside of me.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: This was not a moment for quiet strength.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: This was a moment for the voice.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: So we fought.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: We did not accept what we were handed.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: We pushed back through every channel available to us.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to be honest, there were moments when I doubted myself in ways that I don't think get talked about enough.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Was I making her carry this fight when maybe she just wanted to heal and move on?
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Was I pushing my rage through her story?
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Was this about her or was it becoming about something bigger that I needed to resolve for myself?
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: I sat with that question hard.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: I sat with it out loud with people I trusted.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: And my friend Reagan said something to me that I have carried ever since.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: She said, She will be glad she fought this fight when she's 40.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I held on to that, not as certainty because I couldn't know it then, but as a reason to keep going.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because I knew one thing with absolute clarity.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: I was not going to let her lose her voice.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Not on my watch.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Not after grandmama held hers for a lifetime.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Not after my entire generation spent decades navigating systems that were supposed to serve us and instead wore us down.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: We fought and we prevailed.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I can tell you now, she is already glad she fought.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't have to wait until she was 40, thank God.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: She already knows.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: I keep coming back to my mother's voice in that delivery room.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: She has your mother's temper.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: And what I want to say now, from where I'm standing, having lived the life I've lived and fought the fights I've fought, is this.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Mom, you were close, but you had the wrong word, and you had the wrong grandmother.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Temper is reactive.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: Temper is uncontrolled.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Temper is the thing you're supposed to apologize for and learn to manage.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: What came through me that day was something older and more intentional than temper.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: It was grandmama's voice.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Finally finding somewhere to go.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: She held it for a lifetime.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: She folded it down into the shape the world could accept.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: She poured it into her family and her home and the quiet, powerful way she moved through the world.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: And somewhere in that holding, in all those decades of compressed, unexpressed, brilliant, furious potential, she passed something down.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: To my mother, to me, to my daughter.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: And when the moment came when the system failed and the rules didn't protect us and the institutions looked the other way, we didn't fold it down.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: We used it.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: That is what the rage is for.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Not to burn things down for the sake of burning, not to be reactive or uncontrolled, or the thing that gets called temper when it shows up in a woman's body, but to stand up clearly and loudly when something unjust is happening to someone who deserves better.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Grandmama didn't get to use her voice the way she deserved to.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're just tired.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: A particular kind of tired that goes all the way down.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: First, I want you to know that the rage makes sense.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a character flaw.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a hormonal imbalance that needs to be managed away.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's not your mother's word for it.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Temper, too much, difficult.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's information.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: It is your nervous system telling you that something is out of alignment, that you've been giving more than you've been receiving, and that a system failed you, that a version of yourself didn't get to exist because the world had already decided what you were supposed to be.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that's worth being angry about.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: The question is, what do you do with it?
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: And what I've learned the hard way through years of carrying it, misdirecting it, and finally learning to aim it is this rage aimed at the right target in service of someone or something that matters is one of the most powerful forces there is.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Find what yours is protecting.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Find the voice it is trying to give back to someone.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: Find the fight is asking you to take up.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then fight, not quietly.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Grandmama graduated at the top of her class.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: She never got to go to college.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: She never got to find out the full measure of what she was capable of, at least not in the way the world might have recognized.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: But she passed something down.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Something that moved through generations quietly, looking for somewhere to land.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: I was born screaming.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: My mother called it the wrong thing, and I've decided to forgive her for that, because she didn't have the language yet either.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: None of us did.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: But I know what it was now.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: It was grandmama's voice finding me, waiting for the moment I would know what to do with it.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you find yours.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for being here.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: If this episode hits something in you, if you're carrying rage you haven't figured out what to do with yet, or if you're navigating systems that are failing you, or in your you're in that midlife moment where everything is clarifying in uncomfortable ways, this is the work that I do.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Helping women understand what their bodies and their nervous systems are actually telling them and figuring out how to move forward with it instead of against it.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: If you're curious about coaching, about neurofeedback, or about what support could look like for you right now, I'd love to talk.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for being here.