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Voices Still Carry: Facing the Truth You've Buried in Midlife · Butterfly Days w Tami Jorden

• 0:10
  Tami Jorden (00:02.22)
• 0:13
  Welcome to my realm. I'm Tammy Jordan, and this is Butterfly Days, the podcast that proves you're not past your prime. You're living in it right now because women don't have expiration dates. Butterfly Days is a celebration of the extraordinary potential of Gen X and Boomer women. Throughout history, women have shared wisdom to uplift and empower one another. And you're about to learn hard-earned wisdom and best-kept secrets.
• 0:17
  From interesting, inspiring women. So if you're ready to embrace your butterfly season with confidence, find joy in the present, and create a legacy that matters, you're in the right place. No more holding back. Let's spread our wings now. Here we go!
• 0:24
  Tami Jorden (00:58.316)
• 0:27
  Welcome to my realm. This is Tammy Jordan, and you're listening to Butterfly Days. Picture it. Late 1980s. I'm rocking a spiral rap perm. My best friend, she favors Madonna lace gloves and a stack of bangles. Can you see it? We were raised conservative, the two of us sweet and a little naive about the world. She had taken a job at one of those stores you
• 0:31
  Paid for the thing at the display and then stood in the back and waited for somebody to bring it out from the warehouse. And anyone with the gumption God gave a gopher could see that this is a losing idea, but I digress. She was making friends with her co-workers and one cute guy caught her eye and she hit it off with his best friend, which got her invited to hang out with the group after hours. So she waited, she hoped, she even learned his cologne was Paul Sebastian, found a sample,
• 0:38
  And pinned it to the corkboard over her bed like a little prayer. I was rooting for her to get asked out. Meanwhile, I'd started a new job too, and several of my coworkers were gay and I adored them. We laughed our way through hours of tedious work. But one day the talk turns to what's hot in the clubs in the big city, and somebody said, my god, obsession is on its way out. Paul Sebastian is the only thing that you should be wearing now.
• 0:45
  And something flipped in my head. I went home and I told her, I think he's gay. He never makes a move. He wears the cologne. He's got a Frankie goes to Hollywood pin on his members-only jacket. I think this means something. And she said, and I'll never forget, he's never said that. You can't know because he's never said it. He never said it. Well, of course he was. But it's her line that stayed with me all these years.
• 0:52
  The idea that we're only allowed to count what's spoken, that we aren't permitted to know a thing until someone says it out loud. And I was baffled because so much of what I know about a person, a room, a relationship, I was never told. It's in the clues, the hints, the behaviors, you know, the thing under the thing. Now, I want to be careful here. In that era,
• 0:59
  Tami Jorden (03:24.426)
• 1:02
  A young man not saying out loud wasn't dodging the truth. It could be for his survival. I respect that. His silence was armor. Hers was something else. It was a quiet rule that a lot of us learned young. Don't say the thing, and maybe it won't be true. Two different types of silences, and this episode is about the second kind.
• 1:06
  Here's what I've come to believe. What we don't say doesn't just sit there quietly and wait. A truth you won't speak is often like a wound that you keep covered and not clean. And in the dark, under the bandage, it doesn't heal. It festers. Left long enough, it doesn't stay in one place. It will go systemic. It gets into how you sleep, how you trust, how you love, how you should for everything else in your life. Silence like that.
• 1:13
  is its own slow kind of lethal. So please hear me, because the dark itself is not the enemy. I'm not addressing that. Listen, good things grow in the dark, a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb. But those are things that are growing toward the light, on their way into the air. The thing that we're hiding isn't growing towards anything. It's sealed away from the light, buried to keep it safe. Same darkness
• 1:20
  Opposite job. One is gestation, the other is rot. Know what I mean? I know you do. So here's my challenge to sit with today. Does keeping your secret covered actually protect us? Or does it just let it rot where we can't see it? Because you know what? By our age, we've lived long enough to know that those two are not the same thing. And we can waste our own life by what we cannot face.
• 1:27
  I'm not gonna hand you something tidy and cliched. I despise that. But I would say this. Please understand, cleaning a wound is not gentle. Airing out a thing you've kept sealed for years can be some of the most excruciating work there is because you finally have to feel it. This isn't a crack the window and you're free. The light doesn't spare you the pain. The light comes in through the pain.
• 1:34
  Tami Jorden (05:53.35)
• 1:37
  as you tend your wound, and that's the actual deal. It's so worth it. But it might not be easy. And I don't want to mislead you any differently. But there is a catch and it's a sneaky part. The things we hide don't feel hidden. They don't show up wearing a sign. They wear the face of the thing you already decided was going on. He's just shy. It doesn't matter
• 1:41
  He had a really tough childhood. The lid fits so well you kind of forget it's a lid. You don't miss the truth because it's far away. We miss the truth because it's under the story that we already believed. So the skill, and this is one we can actually master in midlife, finally, isn't staring harder at the surface. It's catching that like little flicker, that little
• 1:48
  Wait, that memory, is there's something more there? And instead of waving it off, you follow it. When you see smoke, you go looking for fire. So let's go back to my friend and her cork board. The smoke was everywhere. Cologne, the relax pin, the fact that he never once made a move. She had all of it, but she thought he's never said it and put the lid right back on.
• 1:55
  So that's one way we can do it. Let's talk about the same move, but if you turn it inward. My friend Cindy lost her dad. He died, and and he'd remarried and had been living in another state years ago. So she and her sister have this complicated history, but as grown women, she was trying, really trying to build something good with her. Not long after their father died, the phone rings, and it's her sister. She's on a road trip.
• 2:02
  She's taken their mom to collect some of the things the second wife offered up to her. And she's almost to my friend's state on the drive home. Wouldn't it be fun if we stopped by? And Cindy says, Of course, and hangs up and just stands there, stunned. Because she wasn't told about this trip. She wasn't asked. She wasn't included in going to gather her own father's things. And as that sinks in, right on cue.
• 2:09
  Tami Jorden (08:19.256)
• 2:12
  She tells herself it doesn't matter, doesn't don't don't make a fuss, don't make a fuss. That's her flicker. That's the smoke. And there's the lid going right back on. So she instead worries about their long drive and she makes them sandwiches to take. When they arrive, the sister lets her choose a couple of things from what's left over apart from her own hall, and Cindy is grateful just to have anything. She wonders quietly what else in that house?
• 2:16
  What might have meant something to her was left behind in rooms that she didn't get to walk through. But there's no time for that. It's a pit stop, everybody waves and off they go on some scenic tour back home. It didn't sit right. But to say it, to ask, well, why wasn't I included? He was my dad too, just felt impossible. There'd be reasons given, justifications, and somehow she knew it would end up being her fault and
• 2:23
  Her problem, her drama for bringing it up. Best to be a good team player, best to keep the peace. It would be years until that memory came back and she let herself feel it. What it actually cost her to be handed Cinderella status in her own family. She's told a few of us dear friends since the pain of it, the loss, but has never actually been spoken of inside the family. She tried to be a good person. She tried to show she was not a problem.
• 2:30
  She made sandwiches, and now that's become code for us when we don't use our boys or realize that we managed everyone else's discomfort instead of our own. So she recently took the lid off and saw she was a person who made sandwiches, and that gave her room to forgive herself and to create healthier boundaries for the future. You know what's critical here? Nobody in that story had to change for her to be free. The sister doesn't, the mother doesn't.
• 2:37
  The power to step out of the Cinderella story was never in their hands. It was in hers. The moment she let herself see it plainly, until she saw what she'd done in context, she couldn't get out of it. Naming it just to herself was the escape hatch. Did it make her mad? I think so. Sad? Yeah. But mad and sad aren't the enemies here. They aren't the destination. They're like ingredients.
• 2:44
  Tami Jorden (10:44.6)
• 2:47
  They're what the recipe for healing and freedom actually call for. You don't generally skip them, you just cook with them. Gloria Steinem said it best. The truth will set you free, but first it's gonna piss you off. So the heaviest version of this isn't some family trip. It's the one many of us know from the inside. You know, being with someone who's verbally cruel or maybe violent and
• 2:51
  Quietly becoming the woman who cleans up after him. Nobody saw that. You didn't see that? You didn't see that? Clean up on aisle five. That was my MO once, a long time ago. And covering for him was the smaller lie. The bigger lie was the thing that I wouldn't say to myself. That's what I'm trying to encourage you for today. So why don't we look? Why do we keep the lid on? Sometimes for years, sometimes for good. You know what?
• 2:58
  Because there's a story running underneath, usually one that we can't quite hear. And it's something like this. If it turns out to be true, if I really let myself know it, something terrible happens, I get hurt. Someone I love gets hurt. It all blows up. So not knowing can start to feel like safety, even when we don't notice we're doing it. The craziest thing is that fear is running, that whole fear is.
• 3:05
  Is running on old information. Yeah, think about that. When we were young, maybe that calculation was right. We had less footing, less power, more to lose, and a fewer ways to catch ourselves if we fell. The story, I can't handle what happens if I face this was back then sometimes simply true. But look at what you've carried since. Look at what you've already survived that would have flattened the woman you were at twenty-five.
• 3:12
  You are so much stronger than you ever given yourself credit. Not the brash cavalier nerve of the young, that magical thinking that insists, it'll all be fine, it'll all be fine. This is different. Yours now is earned. It's wiser. It's the strength that knows exactly what things cost and says, listen, it might cost something, but I can handle that. That's not fearless. That's proven. And that's where you are now.
• 3:19
  Tami Jorden (13:09.814)
• 3:22
  So now I finally get to bring in Oz, because if you know me at all, you know I can't stay away from it long. When Dorothy is desperate to get home, Glenda tells her the truth. She's had the power all along. She just had to learn it for herself. That is this. The truth was always inside you. The power to face it was always yours. Nobody has to hand it to you. You just hadn't let yourself know you were already holding it.
• 3:26
  When you do finally pull the curtain back on things that you've been dreading, more often than not, they're smaller than the dread made them seem. It's not painless, it's not nothing, but smaller, more human, something you can actually stand in front of and look at. The terror has always mostly been in the not looking. Now, I'm not telling you to be careless or reckless or to go blow your life up on a Tuesday because a feeling flickered. Fallout is real.
• 3:33
  And it deserves your respect. But facing the truth doesn't mean you tell every hard thing out loud to every person. Whether and how you say it out loud, that's a wisdom call and you've earned the right to make it. But facing it, letting yourself know it, that part isn't optional anymore. Your fear of fallout doesn't get to be the deal breaker. You can handle this. Remember, Cindy?
• 3:40
  She got there. Took her years, but she got there. Years spent because she couldn't let herself look. And here's why I'm telling you this today. While you've still got so much road ahead, you don't have to wait for years later. The strength you're waiting to feel is already in your own hands, in your own heart. Facing your dark closet now doesn't just set you free, it redeems all the years you'd otherwise spend repressing.
• 3:47
  And that's the gift of doing this in the middle of your life, instead of at the end, where you have no control. Meaning, healing, freedom, the three things we're all really after, they're on the other side of the thing you won't look at. And I'm encouraging you to open your cage door and fly. Helping women fly free is work that I care about most. It's why Butterfly Days exists. At butterfly days,
• 3:54
  Tami Jorden (15:36.002)
• 3:57
  I say the buried thing out loud so the light can reach what matters most inside us. Because a truth in the dark just runs you. But a truth in the light, you can finally do something with it. And it's no accident that this show is called Butterfly Days. Days. Daylight. The light was in the name the whole time. So here's what I'll leave you with. Somewhere in you.
• 4:01
  There's a flicker that you've been waving off. An old story you've called fine that maybe isn't the floor. Maybe it's a trapdoor to deeper feelings. You don't have to do anything dramatic about it today. Just let yourself notice. Maybe he is really self centered. Maybe she doesn't love me quite how I thought. And don't let anyone tell you.
• 4:08
  That it's a small thing to notice it for yourself. Because looking is the brave part. Just say the one true thing out loud, even if the only person who hears it is you. Maybe especially because the person who needs to hear it is you.
• 4:15
  So here's my benediction for you. May you courageously seek clarity about your life experiences in service to your own potential. May you see how strong you are despite all that's happened to you. May you no longer choose to look away, but live freely in the truth because that upgrades you for the next chapter that you most want. And remember, I'm rootin' for you.
• 4:22
  Have a great week remembering that whatever you did can be faced, forgiven, released, whatever you need. You're an age now where it's safe. Look back only long enough to run forward now. You have so much ahead of you. Join me next week for another great interview. And until then, remember, I'm rootin' for you.
• 4:29
  Tami Jorden (17:46.284)
• 4:32
  I'm so grateful you listened to this episode. I hope it was a real value to you. If there's a sister in your life who needs this message, please share it. Just like women have done to lift each other up over the centuries and across cultures. Women lifting each other is so important. It's why I do this work. And to avoid FOMO and keep up leveling your own life, make sure you don't miss the next episode.
• 4:36
  You may be losing hormones, but your life has given you powerful perspective. And I believe you have something to give that no one else does, that the world needs. So remember, I'm rooting for you. Let's go.