We always talk about how we want to look, we don't really talk about how we want to feel.

If you don't know how tall I was and you just heard a woman, it was 238 pounds, you're like,

oh she's bad as shit.

But that's what we tend to do is like we hear a number and we just like, you shrivel up at it like oh my gosh it's a lot of weight

but you don't understand everybody carries weight differently. I would engage in

things without any feeling because it didn't mean anything to me and I probably did that as a I know I did that as a defense mechanism so that I couldn't get my feelings hurt.

I learned that I could present myself in a way that is comfortable to me versus trying to meet up to the expectations of other

people who I'll probably never ever see again.

This is the secret lives of black women.

I'm Lauren.

I'm Charlotte and today we're talking bodies

You know what I'm really excited about today's conversation

because I feel like I got a lot of I got a lot of thoughts

Especially like I feel like as a young girl people just felt the need to just comment on like my body that definitely inform the way that I looked at myself so like can you think of like I can think for myself of being like in fourth grade and

my dad was really sick so that summer my grandma just gave me like baked potatoes every day and like talk about

eating your feelings and then I went back to school and like my dad was dying of cancer and I remember a teacher

telling me oh my god you've gained so much weight over the summer.

Nice nice and I was just like it was the first time that I felt like I was super conscious of like,

oh, I exist now in a fat body and that's not good.

And only as an adult can I take on like the layers of the that's not good. Yeah.

And only as an adult can I take on like the layers of the other like how

fucked up that is because you're like maybe you just are sensitive to a kid who

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