Speaker #0Welcome to the first ever episode of It's Both, and thank you for being here. My name is Nicole, and I am so excited to be kicking this off. And before we get started with our first guests, I just kind of wanted to spend a few minutes telling you a little bit about my experience, who I am, and also why I made this podcast. So if you're just tuning in, It's Both is all about the messy... the complicated and the beautiful contradictions that I think we all experience day to day. And so I want us to have real unfiltered conversations with people to hear their stories about those times when it wasn't just this or that. It wasn't either or. It wasn't black and white. It was both. It was all of that in the gray area. Those times where we're not just feeling or experiencing or thinking one thing. We're thinking so many things. And the tension and the stress and the anxiety that we feel when those conflicting things are happening all at the same time. And oftentimes we don't even realize that's the source of a lot of our anxiety, that you feel this conflict internally. And that's what I want us to talk about. Because as over the last few years, as I've started to realize that that was one of the biggest sources for me of stress was not knowing. When I know something is right or wrong, or I know very clearly I am feeling this way and only this way, which means I need to do this, when it's that clear, it's a lot easier. I'm not saying we don't feel the same or we don't feel as much, but it's easier for me when it's clear. We like clarity. We like things to have names. We like to put them in boxes. It helps our brain. It helps us. navigate the world. And especially in America and Western culture, I think we have this central idea around this and that, black and white. You see it in politics. You see it in how we look at careers. You see it in relationships. You see it everywhere. And yet that's not real life. I mean, how many times have you had something really wonderful and exciting, a new opportunity come up And you are so excited. You have so much joy. You're so ready. You have so much passion around it. And then you're terrified. You're scared. You're anxious. You want to go and hide. You end up self-sabotaging because it's too much for you to take a chance on that, right? That's an example of those moments where we're feeling all the things. Like it's both. It's not just one thing. And I think all of us having that simple awareness around that. can be transformational, can be life-changing, even in the smallest of ways. The more we become aware of it, the more we can process it. And the more we can process it, the more we can make changes in our life that support us in a way that we need. And so that's what I want to do. I want to talk to real people about real experiences with what they are going through that's both the tension between multiple truths, the multiple realities. And It's going to look different each week. Sometimes I'll have a guest. Sometimes I'll have a few guests at the same time. Sometimes it will just be me. And sometimes the conversations will be very deep and we'll get into really tough conversations around loss, around grief, around marriages that don't work, around infidelity, around faith, around questioning faith, around body image. And then sometimes we're going to just have fun and talk about The ridiculousness that we're experiencing right now, whether that be in our relationships or as a parent or at our jobs, whatever it might be, we're multifaceted. And I know I change second to second, day to day. And so a lot of this podcast is going to reflect that. It's going to look different. And I love that. And sometimes we'll have people like experts on to help us navigate, like, what are the best practices in relation to things like, I don't know, relationships and grief? But this also isn't a podcast specifically about bringing people on who are, quote, experts to tell us what we need to do. I want it to be about real stories and real experiences. And sometimes that will include experts. But we're going to have a multitude of stories, a multitude of conversations, some fun, some light, some really heavy, and some really deep. And so I hope that you'll join me on this journey because I really believe that the more we talk about this, the more we bring light to it, and the more we get used to sitting in the tension of the both. we really are learning to hold multiple truths. And I think that that will help us be better people and show up more authentically, more ourselves, and it will hopefully reduce the anxiety and the stress that we feel from not knowing what the right thing to do is. Because honestly, oftentimes there's not just a right thing to do. And I think even acknowledging that is so powerful. I know for my story, that's not... going to be the first episode. In fact, my story will not be just an episode. You will hear a lot about my story in bits and pieces throughout all the episodes. And we'll dive in a little bit deeper as we go. But I wanted to just kind of give you an overview of how this has shown up in my life and how those moments feeling the tension of both have shaped me. And so even when I go back childhood. And I think about growing up, I grew up in a space where my parents were divorced at a very young age. I think I was maybe one or two, and it was a very contentious divorce. There was a lot of, it was constant fighting, constant contention. There were some serious, you know, allegations involved in the divorce as well. And As I grew up in that, that lasted, you know, maybe eight years. I remember not knowing as a kid who was right. And I think that always sticks out in my mind. I'm like, well, who's right? Who's right? Who's wrong? What, like, what's the truth? I don't know. I don't know who to believe because the two stories are so vastly different. And it really, what I came to realize in my teen, late teen years, maybe early twenties, is that it doesn't, ultimately, I had to come to a point where I said, it doesn't matter. It matters, but it doesn't. And I'm never going to know what the truth of what happened in those early years is. I'm not going to know. There's no way for me to know. And so if I want to be able to move forward and have a life with both of my parents, I'm going to have to accept that both of their truths happened. And also both of their truths didn't happen. I know that doesn't make any sense. But really what I had to come to was I have to live as though both of them are telling the truth to some degree and accept the fact that I can only speak to what is happening now. And I do have all these memories of two very different stories, conflicting memories. And I know how fallible. memories can be. I know how unreliable they are. And so I can't rely just on memories, especially when they are so clouded. They're so cloudy. But I really do have two distinct experiences of childhood at the same time. And they are both in conflict. And one is definitely much stronger than the other. But ultimately, this is my first and major experience with sitting in that tension is I'm never going to know. So I have to live in the both. Fast forward to my adult life, and there were so many other situations where this occurred, but fast forward to my adult life when I was married at 18. I had been dating somebody since I was 14. He was 20, which yes, that's a story in itself. If you even just hear the age difference, I mean, yeah, it's a lot. We got married at 18, you know, knew from the get-go this was not a good relationship. This was not a relationship I should be in. But for many reasons, which again, I will talk about at a later date, I decided to get married, especially with the culture that I grew up in. That was what you did, especially given the circumstances that we were under. So I got married young. It was a very toxic, very unhealthy relationship. And I knew it wasn't right. I knew I shouldn't. be in it, in my gut from the beginning. But I thought I had to. I thought that's what I had to do. And we were married for, gosh, six or seven years. I don't really remember at this point, but we were married for a while. And the entire time, there was love for this person. There was never romantic love though. I think anytime you're close to someone, you create love for them. You have love for them. And yet... I felt so taken advantage of. I felt so... manipulated, and I felt so used, but I didn't know those words at the time. I just knew in my gut something was wrong. I knew even though I couldn't articulate what was wrong and why. And when I tried to, he is a very intelligent person and he would convince me out of it with logic. He would logic me out of it. And this went on for years. It was kind of stuck in the fog of feeling both things. In my gut, something... I'm sick. Something is wrong. This isn't right. But everything I've been raised to believe is that you have to stay no matter what you stay in a marriage. And there was love, right? There was some version of love there, even if this person was, I know this is a strong word, but abusive or manipulative. And he was, he really, really was. There was a lot of damage that was done from that relationship to myself. And yet I felt that tension for so many years of feeling both. And eventually I ended, again, I'll get into more of this later, the shame and the guilt I felt in ending it, but the freedom that came too, all wrapped into one. The freedom and going, oh, this is right. But somehow I'm still feeling shame and guilt. Fast forward to many, many years later, I'm married again to my husband now who is wonderful. I'm in love. It's my best friend. We have three kids. And in becoming a parent, there was another huge shift into this experience of both again, right? I'm exhausted. I'm so tired. This is so hard. Parenting is overwhelming. I don't have the capacity. It's lonely. It's isolating. And yet it's so amazing and wonderful and life-giving and I wouldn't give it up for the world. And I'm feeling all those things at the same time. And then I'm feeling guilt that I'm feeling the quote negative things. And that's a constant for me now. That's just the phase I'm in when you have kids. There's no turning it off. It's just it's there all the time. And so the both is always there, always. And so these are just a few of the biggest examples of how in my life I first experienced the gray. well, not first experience, how I experienced the gray from the time I was a child to now. And so again, if you're connecting with any of this and you want to learn more about how we can live in the gray and hold the multiple truths and find our way when things aren't clear, then please stick around and listen to the stories and let's learn together. So thank you for being here with me. Thank you for tuning in. Please remember to subscribe, to like, to download, to share this and join me as we jump in. We'll see you next time.
