Welcome to Black Girl Burnout.

And today we are back with our second part of our three-part conversation with Dr.

Jennifer Gomez.

This portion of the conversation is going to be all about joy.

We talked about how to opt out of struggle around the issues of abuse in the black community.

But now let's switch to talking about joy.

I'm going to spend a lot of time talking to Jennifer about how she experiences and opts into joy in her professional life, even if on the surface it may seem like that would be a challenge given the nature of the subjects that she studies.

All right.

Let's jump back in to the conversation with Dr. Jennifer Gomez and learn about how she brings joy into her

professional life.

All right.

So we have talked about opting out of silence and opting out of struggle.

That's one of the themes of the podcast.

But it's critically important that I always talk about opting out of struggle

means opting into something else, right? If we're leaving something behind, we've got to pick

something up. And as I said, that I do believe that there are cultural myths and historical

lies that make black women feel that they are, that their legacy truly, that their inheritance is one

of struggle. And that the truth is, I believe that our inheritance and our legacy is one of joy.

It is one of community. It is one of abundance. Like that is in our DNA. And that is not something

that we talk about. And so we have to opt out of that lie and opt into a life that gives us those things because that's our actual inheritance. That's a legacy. And so I like to talk about folks about how they do that. And we're going to talk about this professionally because one of the things I'm always interested in, and as someone who's done this work for a while and before that I was a clinical

therapist, full transparency. I was not always opting into joy when I was working with folks at

PTSD and when I was doing the work with sexual trauma and people talking about, you know,

...