Learning to love ourselves and our messy and complicated truth is hard enough.

But what happens when you have that feeling of otherness just hanging over your head,

where you don't feel understood even within your own tribe.

How do you confidently grow into your own skin or maybe even grow out of it when the road to acceptance

and healing is so rough and bumpy.

Hey there, it's Zach.

Welcome back to In the Deep stories that shape us.

I hope you've been able to catch our past episodes, especially part two of our conversation with Leon Ford.

If you haven't checked it out, I really, really recommend it.

It's the powerful story of a man that is shot by the police, left paralyzed, but uses his experiences to help men the relationship between the police and his community.

Take a listen.

So today I want to talk about those people that reach us, that represent us, that

are a reflection of us without ever having met us. Today's guest feels like that to

me because of how his work has impacted how I look at myself in the world

and also how I look at that very same world. You've probably seen Yolo Akely Robinson's writings

about mental health or maybe even heard of Beam the Black Emotional and Mental Health collective.

But after reading his work and following him, I wanted to learn more about the person behind it all.

I wanted to hear his story because before he became the resource to so many people that he is,

Yolo was hurt a lot by people that he loved. And like most of us, he has had to learn how to pick himself up, how to heal from sexual and emotional abuse,

and how to forgive those in his life, not an easy journey for anyone.

But to get to that, we have to start at the beginning, his early life.

I was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

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