What up my homies! Alright today we've got such a special and exciting episode. We are taking on the biggest lies sold to women. And we're actually flipping all of them on the head and we're calling out the truth and actually challenging the societal norms that have been pushed against us our entire lives. Now this broken amazing mind blowing woman, Jamila Jamil, the actress, the activist and the podcast host is dropping truth bombs and such profound insights. That let's just say she ends up sometimes wobbling some feathers but she is here and letting me tell you this woman is unapologetic and freaking fire in the most beautiful, first way possible. together we're actually pulling back the curtain of person in your life. Guess who that is?

Yes, yes, it is you.

I'm your host Lisa Villu and guys, this is Women of Impact.

Let's freaking unlock those shackles together and take control and get our power back with

my girl, Jermila Jermil.

So many of us women have been brought up to believe the things that we should be doing.

Like we should get married, we should have kids, be skinny, be quiet, be a servant to other people. And what I love about you is that you didn't succumb to that. And I actually have a quote of yours. You said, I've gotten rid of the shackles of the standard of perfection that women are held up to. And so for any woman listening right now, if they want to actually also unlock those shackles, how can they start to do that, starting with maybe the lie that we've all been told that we're not complete unless we get married? I think, first and foremost, you should make a list of what it is that you think your shackles may be because often you don't recognise them when they're on you. You know what I mean? So many of the things that we do, we do almost subconsciously because so much of the narrative that's telling us what to do is so pervasive, it's insidious, it's seeps into our songs and our TV shows and our movies. So when I was starving myself to be skinny enough for society, I thought I was doing that for me when I was spending hours getting ready. I thought that was for me. I was told by all the magazines that I would be empowering myself. When I was being quiet, I thought that's what I'm supposed to do and that would allow me to have a more peaceful life and in some ways it dished. But it also meant that I was very repressed. So I think it was when I had a nervous breakdown when I was 26 that I had to actually make a physical list of why am I so unhappy? What is holding me back? Why do I want to end my life? What would be enough motivation for me to stay? And I started from there and part of it was the fact that I couldn't speak out, couldn't speak my mind. I was full of repression at rage. My depression came from repression. And I realised that I was still stuck in like so much self-loathing. And for who? We're told so much of this is a choice, but how can it be a choice when everything we see is bombarding us with a subliminal, or not even subliminal, sometimes aggressive instructions as to who we should be. And I never had the feeling to be honest that I should tie my worth to love. I didn't grow up in a household where I saw that as a model, you know, of loving parents together. So that was never something that I had, you know,

pinned my hopes on.

I just always wanted to be happy,

but I didn't know how to get there,

and I didn't really believe that I had the right to be happy.

Or if I did, it would have to be as long as everyone else around me

is happy first.

And then maybe I'd be allowed to some crums of happiness afterwards.

And so I really had to go at this as a kind of crash test dummy experiment of like, can I actually save my own life? And how drastic is my change going to have to be? And it was fucking drastic. And it meant recognizing that I have a lot of people in my life who are really toxic, who make me feel terrible when I'm around them. I'm almost at a point where my glands are swelling because I'm so stressed. I'm almost having an allergic reaction to these people. Am I fulfilled in my job? Does anyone actually know that I really am behind the kind of mask that I've been wearing since I was a kid? Can I live with this level of self-loathing all the time and this fear of the mirror and this fear of weighing scales and this fear of my own body. I was just, I had no pleasure, I didn't really feel like I was, I had the permission to have any, I didn't really feel like I had permission to feel joy. And so it meant cutting people out of my life. It was the great cull of 2014 and ending a relationship and moving to America and starting a fresh because it's very hard to completely transform yourself around people who've known you your whole life because people naturally want to cling to the person that you were. Because that's the person that they bonded to

and I understand that, but sometimes you have to just get away

for a bit.

You have to just, and I'm very lucky because I didn't have

children, I had the ability to just up and leave

and it was only me I had to look after.

But I just was like, I'm starting again from scratch.

I started EMDR therapy, which is eye movement

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