I'm Nora McEnerney and this is Terrible Thanks for Asking.

And before we start today's episode, I want you to think about the things that make you

you.

I want you to think about the elements that formed you, the relationships, the places,

the experiences that created the version of you that is listening to this episode today.

Our selves are hard to define and hard to calculate.

We are who we are because of some kind of mostly unknowable formula, some total of our relationships

and experiences and our DNA, but for some of us there are obvious elements.

Unexpected arrivals, unmet expectations, points on our timeline that we can identify

as something important, a necessary ingredient for who we are.

And today's guest has that kind of story, a story about an identity that was shaped

by what was present and what was missing and what came to take that place.

This is the Nidra, who grew up in Mancato, Minnesota.

So Mancato is what I would call rule, it's small, it is predominantly white.

You know, I think that most of the people would fit into white middle class families.

I know that my black family was definitely the minority and all of the neighborhoods

that we lived in.

And it was my mom, myself and my three brothers.

And we moved around quite a bit throughout Mancato.

There are four elementary schools in Mancato and I attended all of them at one point or

another and the moves were due to, you know, lack of payment of rent.

My mom's mental health and substance use and I took on the parenting role for my younger

...