Welcome to the Black Girl Burnout podcast. Kelly here. And today I want to start off by asking a couple questions. The first one is, do you consider yourself a generous person? And then the second

one is, how do you define generosity? I want to spend this episode peeling back the layers of what

often gets mistaken for generosity, how to make sure that we are not generous to the point

of struggle and getting ourselves stuck in struggle again, and how to cultivate a life of generosity

that leads to more joy in our lives. So let's first unpack what generosity isn't and what I feel like

generosity has been marketed to black women in a way that is really just sneaky,

struggle living that we're calling generosity. This is really important to me because I feel like

if you ask me at different points in my life, I would always say I was a generous person. I love giving

gifts. Actually, it does bring me a lot of joy. I love treating people. I love the people I love and the way that I show that is with gifts or

with giving of myself. But if I'm being honest or now with the gift of hindsight, when I look back

at some of the ways that I was quote unquote generous, it really just kept me in a pattern of struggle.

I would gift things when I didn't necessarily have the money to afford the gifts I was giving.

I would make myself available at all times of day out of a spirit of generosity, but really it was tied up in my own issues about

my self-worth, about making people like me and feeling validated, and less about generosity.

And the true joy that comes from giving versus taking.

So for us as black women, we have to be careful that we're not mislabeling generosity

when really it's just struggle living.

And oftentimes when I see people thinking that they're generous, particularly women, it is rooted in a lot of cultural lies.

It is rooted in the belief that you have to give to depletion.

You have to give from an empty cup.

You are not giving or being available for people. Generosity is

often mistaken for self-sacrifice. And I don't think that those two things are the same. And I think

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