Welcome to Dear Prudence. I'm Your Prudence, Janay Desmond Harris. Today we'll be answering

letters from someone trying to decide whether to invite two friends who hate each other to a party,

a CPA, trying to determine how to climb the corporate ladder without a defined job title,

a daughter contemplating hosting a sober Easter to account for her mother's inappropriate drunk behavior,

and a listener very afraid that she might become the de facto babysitter to her pregnant sister.

Here to help me out is Darya Burke.

After a 20-year career in beauty and fashion,

most recently as chief marketing officer at Just Fab, she has written an amazing book. Her memoir of

my own making was published last month. In it, she writes about being raised in Detroit in

extreme poverty as the child of two parents who struggled with drug use.

She had a front row seat to the way addiction shaped her mother's life and experienced things

that no child should. But a powerful insight she shared in the book after doing a lot of work

is that this wasn't the life her parents dreamed up for themselves either. That is just one of

many revelations and moments of clarity she writes about. The book

isn't just about career success or pulling yourself up by your bootstraps to have a great job

and change your circumstances. It's about all the years she spent learning about the human brain,

studying epigenetics, neuroplasticity, and the impact of adverse childhood experiences.

She even had a brain scan on herself.

And it explains how she integrated all of what she learned into an exploration of her trauma and how this understanding has brought her a peace and allowed her to live the life she knows

she deserves despite it all.

Welcome to the show, Darya.

Thank you so much. What an intro. I'm so happy to

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