Who do you become when there's nothing to hide?

When there's no part of you that deserves to be covered up or shrouded in shame?

When everything that you are can be accepted and more than that loved, who do we become

when we do that for each other?

Shame motivates so many of our actions.

It's a socializing force.

One we're taught to shape ourselves to belong.

We're taught to change what is unsightly, and if we can't change, hide, and if we can't

hide enough parts of ourselves, we can't belong.

We enforce these standards of shame on people all around us.

We enforce them around complexion, around race, around weight, ability, creating more

and more others.

What Vanessa Rochelle Lewis is proposing in this episode is such a radical shift away

from everything that we've come to understand about how we should relate to ourselves and

how we should relate to each other.

She poses the questions, what part of me doesn't belong?

Who doesn't deserve love?

Vanessa is a queer, fat, black, femme, performer, facilitator, educator, writer, activist, healer,

and is the author of the upcoming book, Reclaiming Ugly.

In this episode, Vanessa meditates on ugliness and how we are trained to uglify ourselves

in each other and proposes a new way of relating that is based on abundant acceptance and love.

It was a joyful, challenging, playful, revelatory time being in conversation with Vanessa.

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