Welcome to Balance Black Girl. I am your host Les and I am honored to be sharing this space with you today.

For today it is just you and me. I'm coming at you with another solo episode. I have been incorporating a lot more of these into the show lately.

You are enjoying them. Actually in 2020, I did not do very many solo episodes. Now that I'm thinking about it, I probably did three, maybe four? Definitely less than five solo episodes all year.

And I was doing some reflecting on that and I was really sitting with that and sitting with why that was.

And I realized that 2020 for me was a year of hiding. That was when I went really deep on interviews for the podcast, which I mean I love.

I love interviewing people. Interviews are my favorite part. The conversations that I get to have with our guests are my favorite.

But I was also looking at the other ways that I started hiding more. You know, a lot of the posts on the Instagram account over a balanced Black Girl podcast back in 2020.

I was nowhere to be found in 2020 was when I released the rebrand and the new podcast artwork that no longer had my photo on it.

And I was thinking about all of these things and how they all happened within specific year or container in time.

And I realized how intentional, intentional, but also not intentional. It was at the same time.

A lot of that resulted from me hiding. I really, really wanted to hide because 2020 was a year of incredible growth for balanced Black Girl.

That was when the podcast really started to pick up. That was when it really started to take off and I started getting really afraid.

I got really afraid because I knew the bigger the audience gets, the more exposure you have while there can be some goodness and blessings that come with that.

There can also be, you know, some things that are not so good that come along with that.

And more criticism and more exposure to maybe people who didn't like me or people who didn't like my message.

So I wanted to put as little of me into it for people to criticize as possible.

That's still pretty hard to do because even in an interview when I'm interviewing someone else that's still my voice, I'm still driving the conversation.

But if people didn't like it, if people had something bad to say about the podcast or the platform or the work that I was doing, I didn't want it to feel personal.

And honestly, it happened anyway.

I spent most of 2020 hiding, most of 2020 trying to remove myself from this platform for fear of not wanting to be criticized or fear of people not liking me.

And I still got some of that.

And that's okay because not everybody is going to like anything that we do.

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