Welcome to the Black Girl Burnout podcast, Kelly here. And today we're going to talk about daydreaming.

One of my favorite things to talk about. Here's a fun little fact about me.

You all get to experience the therapeutic version of Kelly. And there is also other sides to me,

like the extremely irreverent and sarcastic at times. I love to laugh and I love cracking jokes. Never

necessarily in a cool or mean spirit, but I love, love, love, love to crack jokes. And I'm

very kind of, I'm known in my friend's groups for being funny, but also kind of serious.

But underneath all of that, I am a giant daydreamer. I love daydreaming. It is something that has

gotten me through tough times in my life. And at times, there's this new concept called maladaptive

daydreaming. I'm sure I engaged into that a lot of times during my teenage years, but I have always seen

it as a protective factor that I do believe that daydreamers live a happier life and that

I think the biggest gift you can give yourself is the ability to dream.

I talked about this on another podcast that I did with a fabulous and incredibly thoughtful public figure in the space,

Resma Menachim. On this podcast with him, I talked about, he asked me, how do I know when I

worked with clients that they were healing from burnout? And I said they were able to dream again. That to me, the final healing

that occurred, and it wasn't just with people who were burned out, I met people who had

engaged in significant trauma. I worked with people who had significant sexual trauma, who had significant combat, PTSD.

And for me, when I knew that they were truly on a path to healing, I mean, you never perfectly get there when you have significant things happen.

But when I knew that they were okay is when they dreamed, when they had possibility back in their life.

And if you remember in the last episode, we talked about the importance of being able to

opt out of cynicism by opting into curiosity, and part of curiosity is knowing the possible.

But a huge part of that is daydreaming, is being able to dream up worlds and lives and moments in your life.

And for a long time, daydreaming is something I hid from people.

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