Welcome to the Black Girl Burnout podcast, Kelly here.

And today I want to do an emergency check-in podcast.

I had already, if you've been listening since Monday, had laid out what we're going to talk about for the week.

And I just decided the last couple of weeks have been hard.

And rather than sticking to our regularly scheduled programming, I felt the need to check in with all of you all and really talk about how to opt out of despair in these times.

I felt like this is a conversation we need to have

and we need to have it now, not tomorrow, not next week, right now. I probably need to do it

yesterday. And so I want to talk about how to do that, how to opt out of despair when you

feel like it can't get no worse. And maybe you feel like 2024 has been an incredibly challenging year.

And it's limping to the end, feeling kind of hopeless.

I definitely want to check in.

I feel like I am the person to talk about this because I have had a very challenging year.

In fact, honestly,

I would say 2024 has been the most challenging year, if not the worst year of my life to date.

And yet, I have talked about gratitude all this month. I have kept an attitude that has pretty even keel despite some very disappointing world events and life events.

I'm navigating grief. All of these things are happening all at once. And yet, I would not categorize how I feel about my life as despair.

I would say that it's been challenging, but I still have hope.

And so how do we create hope when things feel so dark or so heavy?

And that's what I want to talk about, how I'm doing it and how I think you can do it.

And you can just take my example. This is going to be a me focused episode in the sense of like,

I'm just going to tell you how I'm doing and what I'm doing and invite you to create spaces to

share with the people you love or with me at Black Girl Burnout.

...