The Big Ask
A few weeks ago I gave a talk about the shiny objects I'd spent a lifetime chasing, the borrowed sense of importance that came from brushes with celebrity throughout my life. Afterward, a man came up to me and said it was lovely, but asked for something different. Not the polished version. The real one. What actually happened behind the scenes to get from a child who needed the world to validate her to a woman who no longer does.
I don't think he understood the size of what he was asking. In this episode, I sit with that question honestly, out loud, for the first time in this way. I trace the chapters I've circled for years without ever fully telling: years of my own life I can barely remember, situations I had no business being in as a teenager, an experience I woke up from with no memory but its evidence, a relationship that couldn't survive what I couldn't yet name, decades spent in rooms built for exactly this kind of reckoning. I trace the cost of building something and losing it because I didn't yet believe I was worth holding onto it, and a body that has, in its own way, been trying to tell the truth even when my voice couldn't.
This episode isn't a resolution. It's an honest accounting of why speaking these things has taken this long, and why I know, more than ever, that I have to keep doing it anyway.
On Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fierce-gravitas-with-delphine/id1892183013
On Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3Zc3Cj7eNLmEf4IGyLA8xZ
This is FierceGRAVITAS with Delphine. The podcast for the woman who is done asking permission and ready to remember what she already knows. Who trusts her body over her brain, her gut over her game. Her instincts over her intellect. Who knows her power lives in her mettle, not her manners. Who stops asking permission and starts remembering her belonging was never up for debate. This is primal. Untamed. And deeply, dangerously wise.
When you keep circling the same thing and can't quite land on the truth of it, reach for The Inside Out Oracle. Not answers from outside you. The one question that lets you recognize your own truth, undeniably. Book your reading.
Full Transcript:
A couple of weeks ago, I recorded an episode called Shiny Objects, which was about my perceived self-importance as a result of the relationships I had, or simply the people I had met, and how addictive that sense of importance that came from outside of me had become, because I didn't know, didn't trust, didn't believe in what was underneath that.
I ended up doing a talk about it live just last week, and created a gorgeous PowerPoint presentation to go along with it, where I illustrated my brushes with celebrity throughout the years, from an actor in The Brady Bunch all the way through to Stevie Wonder. As a result of relationships with people in the television and music industry, I had access to this proximity that meant zero about me, but again was this borrowed sense of self-importance. What I acknowledged in that talk was that this was in fact a false sense of self-importance, and that the only true shiny object in this whole equation, relative to me, was and is myself, particularly my child self. And it's only when I acknowledge that, that I am truly in alignment with what is real.
After I gave this talk, a man came up to me and said, “you know, that was a lovely, name dropping, TMZ style presentation. What I'd really love to hear is the Barbara Walters version, the version of what went on behind the scenes to get from the place of being that child who felt she needed externalized validation, to the reclamation of that today.”
I don't know if he had any concept of what a big ask that was. A big ask relative to vulnerability. A big ask relative to truths I have been avoiding speaking of all my life. And while I've danced around the edges, and I've pointed in particular directions, actually speaking those things I was forbidden to speak still today presents a fear of exposure and vulnerability, and I don't doubt that it carries an entire lineage of threat around speaking truth.
As I sat with his request, I wondered, where do I even begin? Which chapter of that story do I tell?
Do I begin with the lack of memories I have of grade school and high school, because I was so disassociated during that time that, while I remember a few people and scenes here and there, for the most part I have very, very few memories of that time. And it's not an age related thing. I haven't had them for decades.
Do I start with the theater where I worked, and met adult actors and assistants and bodyguards that I had no business spending time with at fifteen and sixteen?
Do I begin with the fraternity formal date who left me passed out in my apartment, with evidence of but no memory of what had happened the night before?
Do I start with the boyfriend who didn't understand why I didn't seem to be able to fall in love, and started reading me symptoms from a book called Secret Survivors, that I had to stop because I couldn't listen to it anymore?
Do I begin with the decades of therapy, and the confrontations, and holding center, and truth, through an entire movement that was labeled false memory syndrome?
Do I start with the multi-million dollar business that I built and then sold, and then lost everything I had gained, because I didn't have the capacity, the belief in my own worth, to hold it?
Do I start with a journey of a hundred and eight moves in a period of four years, in an attempt to find home?
Do I start with a physical incapacity created by an inability to breathe, that is very likely the body keeping the score, an attempt to prevent me from speaking what had gotten me burned, hung, and beaten as a result of speaking my truth?
So it is a big ask, and I know that it is a big part of how I am being asked to show up, and the level of trepidation I've had around speaking these truths further underscores the importance of doing so.
Because I know that this is a major part of my purpose here. Because I know this is a major part of claiming my own fierceness and gravitas.
Because I've spoken these words before, it only serves to underscore just how important it is for me to speak these truths. And going forward, I will continue doing just that.
