EP. 183 — Love & Truth in a Black Mirror World with Kelechi Okafor

IWEIGH-183-KelechiOkafor-Transcript

Jameela: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another episode of I Weigh with Jameela Jamil, a podcast against shame. I hope you’re well and I hope you’re ready for a very different type of chat. Uh, we go into some of the areas that we normally would around social justice and race and love and social infrastructure, but then we pour out into ayahuasca and spirituality and poetry and learning how to understand ourselves and learning how to love ourselves and the world and it all becomes very philosophical and existential and I felt very challenged and pushed by my guest. It is the absolutely inimitable Kelechi Okafor who is an amazing social commentator and now a author and podcaster and human extraordinaire who I’ve admired for a really long time online. She is one of the most outspoken voices in Britain, and I think one of the most important voices of our generation. Someone who I have been intimidated by the brain of for ages, so it took me years to ask her to come on the [00:01:00] podcast because I, uh, was nervous that she’d say no or that she might be someone who doesn’t like me, uh, or she might think I’m a stupid twat, but it turns out she was incredibly warm and kind and gracious and came on to the podcast and really shared her soul and delivered such a beautiful conversation about so many massive important things in life and deeply personal, relatable, intricate things. And she talks about her book, The Edge of Here, which was published on September 14th, so it’s out now. And it is such a fascinating collection of short stories around love from all these different unexpected angles that takes us back through history and forward into kind of science fiction. There’s no way for me to be able to fully describe it as well as she’s going to in this episode. And also you should just read it because I think it’s going to be a very important piece of work. I hope it gets turned into TV shows and films. I think that this is the beginning of a very cool new chapter for Kelechi, and so if this is your first [00:02:00] time getting to know her, I’m so thrilled to be a part of that journey, and if you’ve been following her for ages like I have, then enjoy. She is as fabulous and straight talking and inspiring as ever. This is Kelechi Okafor.

Kelechi Okafor, what an honor! Welcome to I Weigh! Hello!

Kelechi: Hello.

Jameela: Hi, how are you?

Kelechi: So lovely. I’m good. I’m good. Thank you for having me.

Jameela: I’m so happy to see you. It’s really lovely to have you face to face. And it’s weird to have you actually interact back with me because I feel like so much of my relationship with you has been pretty much entirely parasocial and me just watching you on screen. So, and I’ve always felt like you’re talking to me, but now you actually are, so, uh, yeah.

Kelechi: Likewise.

Jameela: How have you been?

Kelechi: I’ve been [00:03:00] busy. I’ve been busy and I’ve been a little bit numb or maybe overwhelmed with all of the busyness, but I’m here. I’m here.

Jameela: And this is because you have a new book out. It’s called The Edge of Here. And it’s a book that I think a lot of people didn’t expect you to write. And so has there, has there been a lot of explaining yourself because people know you for one thing, which is a lot of kind of social justice and social commentary. And then you’ve written this book and, and in when you are talking about social commentary and social justice, especially when it pertains to black people, black women, women. You have a very direct approach, one that I very much so resonate with, and you, you don’t pull any punches. You, you’re known for not pulling any punches and yet this book is, is deeply soft and deeply romantic and deeply loving. And so I think people didn’t expect it. What’s that been like?

Kelechi: They didn’t. Yeah, it’s, it’s been, I think it’s been refreshing, I think that for so [00:04:00] long people hadn’t met all of me and they still are yet to, I’m yet to, you know, but this part of me has always been there for like friends, family, you know, romantic partners. This side has always been there. I feel like when I come on social media, it’s a job. There was a point where social media just became a job, not necessarily because I’m being like paid per se, but it’s like I go on there for a specific kind of function and I do that thing and then I’m out. So the more tender parts of myself, I guess I saved it for my quote unquote, real life. Um, and so it’s nice to be able to write something that I care about and for it to be something that’s so deeply intimate to me. And yeah, a lot of people didn’t expect it. Maybe they expected a collection of essays about how, you know, how much of, you know, a disarray the world is in and all of these things and how terrible everything is. But I believe so much in a transformative nature of love that that is what I [00:05:00] wanted to put forward as my first kind of foray into, you know, writing things, you know, being published. I wanted it to be that.

Jameela: That’s really lovely. And also, I, I think I, again, deeply resonate with the fact that the public so has one side of us because you kind of, whatever you first become known for is what people start to seek out in you and that’s where you find yourself to be the most helpful and also you kind of need a guard up because social media is so fucking intense especially if you’re a woman especially for women of color and so people start to think of you as this very harsh version of yourself, which is the armored version you have to present in order to survive online because you kind of feel like if anyone senses any weakness or softness in you, that they will take advantage of it and rip you to pieces. And we see that happen to our peers time and time again. That vulnerability gets often used against you. It’s so weird that we live in a culture that so encourages people to be hyper specific and hyper vulnerable and overshare every detail of their lives, and yet you will then [00:06:00] be torn limb from limb for that. And so I think you and I probably presented a much harder edge and yet have much softer sides.

This podcast has been an amazing outlet for me to kind of have this technically not private, but it feels like a private space of people who don’t hate me. Uh, where I can actually be myself, but I love the fact that you’re getting this opportunity now to let more of yourself out.

Before we get into the book, can we talk a bit about how you got into the kind of social justice and social commentary space? Because it’s been quite a ride and some people here might not be familiar with you yet.

Kelechi: I would say I sort of fell into it almost like I wouldn’t even refer to myself as an activist. Maybe in the beginning when other people are sort of giving you labels, you go, “I guess so.” But after a while, realizing sometimes the backlash that one gets from even holding such a title, I just thought to myself, you know what? I’m good. I don’t need that to do what I do. I’ve always been outspoken, probably not speaking or [00:07:00] saying all of the right things or doing it the right way. But I’ve always been outspoken from a young age. Well, I’d say from about maybe like 17. And so, um, I have a friend who, years ago, she said to me, “Oh, you should come to one of these black feminist meetings that take place in central London. You should come with me.” And that was the beginning of everything. Going to that meeting, you know, reading the literature that was suggested, learning so much more about the language that I needed to explain the experiences I was having. That was phenomenal to me, so that was around like 2014 that things started to shift for me. But obviously, I’m coming into the whole thing with a lot of anger, a lot of rage at not having had the words previously and needing to articulate all of these things. And I think as time goes on, you soften because, you know that, sadly, a lot of these things aren’t going anywhere yet, so the kind of aggression, and I’m using that loosely, [00:08:00] being a black woman, you know, using that about myself, but using it very loosely. The aggression I came with in addressing these issues, I realized that I could ease off a bit, you know, and, and still talk about the things, but talk about it from a space of, you know, I can’t change everything overnight.

Jameela: That’s so interesting. And I am going through a similar thing in the last few years of learning how to refine my tone and recognizing how much of my pain was bleeding out, and my frustration, uh, was bleeding out through my words. And I don’t think any of that frustration that you or I or many of our other peers had was uncalled for. I just think that delivery doesn’t do us any favors. And you and I were talking on the phone yesterday about the fact that there was no, we had no practice for this, like, no one ever listened to women before, no one ever listened to minorities and women who are minorities, like, you know, at best, we were asked for our skincare [00:09:00] routines, at best. We were, we had this mic thrust in our face and we were expected to speak so perfectly and intricately about these complex social and intersectional infrastructures. And, you know, we had our own trauma that even allowed us to understand these issues that we were speaking about whatsoever. And we were expected to perfectly divorce from those traumas and speak about it as well as, or as you said yesterday, better than politicians.

Kelechi: Yeah, and I think that even that is a tool of white supremacy, you know, a white supremacist ideology that in the midst of navigating our trauma, we are still meant to articulate it in a manner that is palatable to those who are, um, experiencing us, perceiving us. And initially, when I started on social media, I was talking to my friends. I didn’t imagine that I was talking to a large group of people, [00:10:00] so it blew my mind when over time, more and more people started following me because I was talking to my friends. And I think that that mode of delivery hasn’t actually changed. I still sort of talk as if I’m talking to my group of people. So, sometimes it does catch me unawares when somebody responds in a very abrasive way. And I think, well, I wasn’t talking to you, but the page is public, so you’re essentially talking to everyone. And now that I understand more of the sort of reach that I have, I do think that sometimes when I phrase things now, I phrase it with, you know, that in mind that I am now speaking to more people than when I first started on social media. But that doesn’t make it, yeah, it doesn’t make it any easier. It doesn’t.

In terms of like having mics given to you and things like that. It’s interesting to me because I think mainstream media couldn’t help but [00:11:00] pay attention to me after a while. I think that they tried for a really long time to, you know, not even silence me because I was doing my thing anyway, but to just not pay any mind to what I was doing and what I was saying, um, because I was saying it in a manner that wasn’t seen as like polite and they couldn’t.

Jameela: Palatable.

Kelechi: Yeah. So, yeah, it just so happens that eventually they couldn’t ignore me because people were coming to my page to get my sort of take, my lowdown on the things that were happening in society.

Jameela: And I feel like, well, part of it for me was Meghan Markle and me talking about the racism issue in the UK and us starting to push back against, like, the classic, uh, problematic, patriarchal, white male pundits that we have in the UK. And and then kind of being dragged into a bit of a shit slinging match with those people by the media, which I can’t speak for you, but I engaged in sometimes because I was petty and inexperienced. And I, I think that that was like a big kind of [00:12:00] turning point for me was when I called out the media for being racist, which I know you also did. A few of us did. And I think that’s when things became stratospheric because we were kind of, being given a platform by the media technically because they were, you know, pushing our words out, but they were also very much so using us for race baiting.

Kelechi: Yes, absolutely.

Jameela: They were very much so using us to piss off at least half of their fan base. And I couldn’t really see that at the time because I was very naive. So at first I was just like, good, good. Like I want the media to know I think they’re racist and I want, I want this opinion out there, but I wasn’t aware of the way in which I was being toyed with. And then suddenly it felt quite overwhelming as to what it was that I was receiving back. Uh, and so I think there was a bit of a trauma that came from that for me, which is fine. I’ve managed to find my way through it, but, uh, how has that been for you? Because again, we don’t talk about the, we hear about the trauma of actually being in the situation of being a black woman in [00:13:00] the UK or anywhere in this world, but the trauma of then being used as this kind of like, race baiting weapon for the media. What’s the impact of that been on your mental health? Because you always present as so incredibly strong and together.

Kelechi: I think that, funnily enough, it wasn’t mainstream media that was my issue, or that, or they weren’t the ones, or that I found, um, the most trauma inducing. It was more, um, of an intra communal conversation in terms of community, in terms of Black people in the UK getting on board with what I was saying, because then I had to start understanding the intricacies of internalised anti Blackness where I’m saying something that is for all of our good. Like, I’m saying something that benefits us all. Yet, because we’ve been brought up in a way and socialized, indoctrinated in a way to never put our heads above the parapet, to not say too much, to be respectable Black people, to be the good [00:14:00] Black, there were people who would out, you know, outright try to verbally attack me online, like go on really wild campaigns online to discredit and undermine me. And I feel like that was the most heartbreaking. It wasn’t specifically black men or specifically black women, you know, it would change depending on whatever that subject was. But to watch that happen time and time again. And I remember, I think it was two years ago. It must have been about two years ago, I think, where a group of men, it might have been last year, who they thought that they were in a Twitter community group and nobody could see what they were writing.

Jameela: I remember this.

Kelechi: And they suggested, right, and they suggested that I should be exterminated. And that’s when, you know, the Kelechnekoff alias aspects of me had to come out because I’m not scared of telling anybody about themselves or dressing them down. And that’s still one of my most listened to episodes. I didn’t want to have to do it, but it just really pissed me off.

Jameela: That shit was the craziest thing I’ve ever [00:15:00] heard. That episode, I had goosebumps in places that I didn’t even know exist. You were so, it was like the phone call that Liam Neeson makes at the beginning of Taken. You know, do you know what I mean? That was the exact energy you brought, where you came for these men so hard, and you had receipts on their private lives.

Kelechi: Yes!

Jameela: On their private lives! You were throwing each one of them under the bus, in a way. I remember just being like, I was terrified you were going to get murdered, like, after that episode, genuinely. I was so scared for you and what you did, what you did was so empowering, like, I personally found it empowering to watch a woman fucking snap back, that, you went in, harder than they came for you. And I loved it. I loved it so much. And here you are thriving and glowing and still here. And, and it’s that, you know, we’re told that bullies respond to strength and obviously it’s not always safe for everyone to do that. And [00:16:00] It wasn’t even necessarily guaranteed to be safe for you to do it but the fact that you did it and successfully shut them down and shut them up and I, I haven’t heard much from them since.

Kelechi: None of us have. None of us have.

Jameela: It was a true castration. It was, it was mad and how you, how did you even have that many receipts on these people?

Kelechi: But this is what people forget that as much as I’m doing this public facing stuff, people will still bring me tea like they will still be my DMs, like giving me things that I don’t necessarily need to use. You know that when you feel, you see somebody talking wild online and you’re like, but you don’t even know what I’ve been sent. Like you don’t know how this could all go for you, but I choose. I choose to focus on institutions and not individuals, which is the saving grace for a lot of people and they don’t even realize. But that situation, I felt like it needed to be said in real time. Like, look how I, as a black woman, am being treated in the UK when I’m speaking about things that actually benefit these men. Because while they’re [00:17:00] spending all of this time talking about me, when we’re being dragged for knife crime or the knife crime rates being sensationalized and not talked about in a way that holds empathy and compassion. I’m the one that goes forward onto the news and puts my head again above the parapet to say, this isn’t how we talk about all of these things. And when it’s stop and search, it’s me yet again that’s talking about these things. Yet, they sit online talking about exterminating me. So to me, I felt like the damage had already been done. And it was more of a case of everybody else noting that in real time they were watching this happen and they were saying nothing.

Jameela: Yeah, and, and watching a black woman stand up for herself against a group of men, I think was incredibly empowering for so many people, but I knew in that moment, I’ve always, I’ve always admired you and, uh, I’ve always been, uh, like a fan, but I knew in that moment, I was like, I will never in my life come for this, I will never, I mean, I wouldn’t have any way, but I was just like, if I ever know anyone who’s [00:18:00] got a problem with you, I will be like, back up. It’s not worth it. She’ll kill you. It was a murder. We witnessed a murder on that podcast that day.

Kelechi: Someone literally wrote that. They were like, can I report a murder? But, um, I’m still like, whenever I go out now, women around the age of 22, probably between the ages of 22 and 27, 29 will come up to me and they’ll be like, thank you for that episode. Thank you for that episode. That makes me so happy that they felt empowered, that they felt like finally the bullies can leave us alone because it’d been a reign of terror online for years.

Jameela: Anyone listening to this right now is now going to want to go and listen to this episode. What is it titled?

Kelechi: All My Sons.

Jameela: All My Sons. Fucking amazing. Go and listen to that episode for the most empowering time of your life, truly. I, I, I, the second you dropped it, I listened to it and I, I sent it to everyone I knew.[00:19:00]

There is a specific pain to that being inter community because it’s the very people you’re trying to fight for. I, I very much so have said many times on this podcast that it’s often like liberal women who come for me the hardest of everyone, more so than white supremacists or, uh, I don’t know, the incel community. And I don’t mean that. I mean that literally not in a derogatory way. Like I, uh, It’s, it’s, it’s really, um, disheartening because then you’re like, should I still be fighting? Do they want me to still fight?

Kelechi: Absolutely that.

Jameela: And so what is it that compels, I know what compels me to keep going, but what is it that compels you?

Kelechi: The power of Christ. No, it’s not that.

Jameela: Not after that episode.

Kelechi: No, um, it’s love. It is love. You know, writing Edge of Here was my, it really helped me to hone in on, aha, that’s why, that’s why I did it. If I didn’t [00:20:00] love myself, this world, my community, all the communities that I’m involved with, that I participate in, that I’m a member of, if I didn’t care so deeply, I wouldn’t feel the need to say, hey, this needs to be better. This world needs to be better for all of us. And then the more that I learn about different cultures, I’m like, well, why are you going through that? How’s that fair? And trying to connect the dots as to like, why is it that we can go to different countries and find that women or various, like, marginalized people or minoritized people are experiencing similar things to what we are experiencing? Why are we just taking that to be standard? Why is that normal?

Jameela: Yeah, why is the bar so low?

Kelechi: Yeah, why? This isn’t normal. We’re in a weird fever dream of, you know, um, a white supremacist. Like, we need to wake up.

Jameela: Yeah, the hyper normalization of, of the oppression of so many different types of people all over the world feels like a terrifying nightmare.

Now speaking of [00:21:00] the, the book and the love that you have, this book is not just, you know, tales of fantasy and tales of sci fi and tales of love. This is also your way of communicating some of the same stories that you’ve, not stories, but some of the same issues that you’ve spoken up about, but in a way that is potentially more palatable to some people because it’s easier for people to take in information through the guise of fantasy, where they get to find their own way to their resonance with the subject matter, right?

Kelechi: Absolutely. You see, I found it fascinating watching people watch The Handmaid’s Tale. I found that really fascinating when, you know, women would say, primarily like liberal white women, would say, Oh my God, we don’t want this to happen. You know, what Margaret Atwood has done here is that we never want this sort of thing to happen. And I was like, guess who it has happened to? Who they were forced to birth, um, in order to keep up, um, a particular structure. Black women, that’s the whole point of chattel slavery. It has happened. It’s [00:22:00] not a new concept. It’s only new in essence, kind of, because it’s happening to women in white skin. So I thought, okay, then, so if we’re doing that, I’m going to present some things. I’m going to present some thoughts, some observations and present them in a way that’s dystopian and to see if that lands more deeply or if that resonates more deeply than me just simply telling you what the issue is. And I guess so, I guess it’s working.

Jameela: What has the reaction been like so far?

Kelechi: Afua Hirsch, she’s such a babe.

Jameela: I love her.

Kelechi: She put up a video yesterday and she was like, I’m having nightmares. She was like, I’m, she was like, I’m having nightmares because I resonated with what was written so deeply because it seems far fetched until a little detail is dropped in and you realize, oh, this is actually happening now. I just didn’t think about it in this way. And so if this is happening now, then that also means the outcome of this is possible. So as much as [00:23:00] she loved the story, she loved the romance in it, she was acutely aware of the danger that I was trying to say, “Hey, we need to wake up to this before it becomes central to our lives.”

So one of the stories, I think the most chilling one is uterus star. Um, the protagonist is called Aaliyah. She’s 19 years old. She wakes up early one morning. Her friend Beth calls her to say, Oh, you’ve won. you know, uterus star of the month. So throughout the stories, there’s a chip that exists. Initially, it started off as the ally chip, um, that would go into people’s brains and allow them to feel what those who experienced racism, what they feel when they’re experiencing it. And instead of this solving racism, it just means like a lot of people who are in privileged positions start praising themselves for having the chip installed in the first place. So once they realize that the chip can’t work to solve racism, they change up what the chip is able to do, and they start using it, they repackage it, and it’s called the homeostasis chip, which means it checks homeostasis, your water levels, [00:24:00] your, all of the things that happen in your body, it can check it. A private company called Plant Acon, they design an app called Uterus Star that links with the homeostasis chip and it measures your nutrition, how much you exercise, basically to check the health of your uterus and the more you look after your uterus, the more points you get. And Aaliyah, she’s really active, she eats, she, she eats well, she does all of these things, and so she’s getting all of these points, and she wins uterus star of the month. The prize is you get whisked off to, um, an island, uh, paradise, you know, as your reward, and you get to move to the next stage. So she wins, the shuttle picks her up, little does she know that it’s actually basically an incubation farm. They don’t want the white race to die out. And so they were using this tracker to check for healthy uterus, um, or healthy uteri. Check for them to bring them to this facility away from their family. Make them believe that, oh, they’re on a vacation somewhere and impregnate [00:25:00] them and never let them go.

Jameela: It’s fucking Christ. What’s wrong with your brain? What’s the matter with you?

Kelechi: And so without spoiling it, that I wrote, I wrote that the day that Roe v. Wade got overturned. And I thought to myself, you can’t legislate over our bodies in this way. What are you doing? What if? And I was like, and then that was it. Then I started writing it.

Jameela: And there are tiny little nuggets of truth within that story and the way you write it that make it suddenly feel like it, it, it doesn’t feel so far away.

Kelechi: No.

Jameela: No.

Kelechi: I mean, we’re, we’re, we’re right now we’re just going, oh yeah, well, they’re legislating over our reproductive organs. Yeah, sure. They’re taking away abortion rights. Yeah, sure. So how much will they need to do? How much will the government need to do before we go, oh, wait, that’s too far.

Jameela: Yeah, and reproduction, uh, justice and race have always been so heavily intertwined. I mean, a lot of the ways in which Planned Parenthood gets [00:26:00] discredited is the fact that originally it was created by a white supremacist who wanted to inhibit the numbers of black people being born in America and make sure that we didn’t like have black people overtake white people in the population, so that’s why she wanted to make sure that abortion was available. Obviously, it has changed completely as an organization since then and now is something that is a huge service for everyone from every background and it’s very much so a social justice movement for all people with uteruses. But

Kelechi: Yes.

Jameela: It’s uh, genesis was one that was very disturbing. And so you there are these, like, not too distant historical moments in which race and reproductive rights and reproductive ability, uh, intersect. A lot of what we know about gynecology, uh, a lot of people don’t realize, yeah, comes from the testing that was done without consent on Black women in America. And I don’t know, in the UK as well?

Kelechi: Primarily in America. And that, that really gets me whenever, whenever I go for my smear test, like [00:27:00] we’ve got this invention of the speculum and it could only or didn’t only exist because enslaved black women had it tested on them by this man continuously, and in, you know, without anesthesia, all of that is well,

Jameela: And it also, by the way, explains why it’s still so fucking painful and insane when they, when they say to you just like just a small pinch or just a sharp scratch and then actual torture happens. That is heavily linked to the desensitisation of the, it heavily led, sorry, it heavily leads back to the way in which they dismissed the sensitivity and threshold of pain of black women.

Kelechi: Yes, and continue to now when we see like maternal mortality rates for black women in the UK. what, four to five times more likely to die during childbirth in comparison to white women. So the health care system is still deeply misogynistic and, um, when we talk about and [00:28:00] deeply anti black and when all of those things collide, we’ve got something very wild. So I, but talking about it in the way that I talk about it when I make my, um, Instagram videos is one thing, but I knew that in, in book form and written form, I had to deliver it differently.

Jameela: And so with a story like Uterus Star, do you feel comfortable sharing the kind of message you hope people take from a story like that?

Kelechi: Yes, um, it’s simply that, like, have to reclaim our uterus. And I make a point of even saying in there when I talk about uterus star, I don’t go into gender. I even make a point of saying that this isn’t, we’re not doing that because that’s ridiculous. We’re not doing that. You know, if you have a uterus, as far as this ship is concerned, it wants to know what you’re doing with that uterus. Are you doing this? Because,

Jameela: And it’s the period tracking apps being used, used to,

Kelechi: Yeah. Right, right.

Jameela: Right now, here in America.

Kelechi: And we’re just giving all of this data over. We’re giving all of this data over, not thinking, not considering [00:29:00] about where it’s going, and can we trust these companies to hold onto this data in a way that is ethical so that yet I’m seeing all of this budding conversation of even about AI and, you know, the strikes and everything. We are headed somewhere and I don’t know where it is, but I know that we’re at the edge of it, so it’s just figuring that out.

Jameela: Yeah, I, I genuinely think that some people will in a misguided way, think this is a book that is just for Black women or Black people. And while it is predominantly written as an ode to the nuance of the Black experience, this is a book that I think everyone will find compelling and fascinating and, uh, relatable and terrifying. But also we focused on literally the scariest possible element of the book. There’s so much love and romance, which again is something that’s so important for black women, like all my black friends in the UK especially, like so much of what they’re, and in America as well, so much of what you see, [00:30:00] uh, and this is with every minority, the stories that we see in the mainstream media are ones of so much trauma and so much pain and so much terror, a little bit like the one that we just heard. Uh, but there are also stories in here that you wanted to put out there that were of love and experiences that have nothing to do with the oppression of. white people, you know, the interference of white supremacy or patriarchy, just a woman’s experience, which obviously always loosely somehow related to those things. But just the nuance of a woman’s love and experience and, and mental health experience. Can you talk a bit more about the importance of that?

Kelechi: Yes. Another story that’s in terms of mental health specifically is Blue. And Blue, I remember being in a therapy session with my therapist on Zoom around 2020 and just wondering, like, where do you put that grief, the grief that we bring to you in our sessions, all of your clients, like, where does it go? I didn’t ask her, but it was just something that was in [00:31:00] my, you know, in my head. And then I created this character, Ibi, who, um, embodies that. Somebody that has to guard grief. And when you’re guarding grief and you’re guarding it so diligently, what space do you make for love in your own life? Because without intimacy, we can’t really know love, right? And she wants to experience a deep love. And people love her romantically. She, you know, she’s been in love at one point with a woman, and currently she’s dating this man. Both of these people, we see them really trying to get to her, really trying to love on her. But there’s this guard up because she’s guarding something. And I wanted to explore, I’m like, I wanted to explore that. Like, what are we willing to put down in order to have the greatest love story ever? Like, what are we willing to, you know, relinquish in terms of our grief and, and our memories and the things we carry that, in essence, make us fearful that we can [00:32:00] truly be loved. And I think that that’s, like you say, that transcends blackness, that translates, transcends black womanhood. That is a notion that we all know or have come across at some point as women. What are we willing to do to experience the love that we claim that we want to feel? And not just in the Hollywood romance type of way, like deep love and, you know, in The Watchers, which is another story, I talk about these soulmates or like twin flames who find each other in every lifetime or most lifetimes, and when we see them in the present day, they are going on a date to the slavery museum in Liverpool, but then we see a past life of theirs where they met in West Africa, where the slave ships were coming in. That’s just the backdrop. As you rightly say, all of these things that I mentioned in terms of societal things, they’re backdrops to love stories and to deep questions about our yearning and our longing and our desire to be deeply known and to be deeply loved.

Jameela: Mm. [00:33:00] Have, have you been through your own journey? You know, you’re in a committed relationship. Have you been through your own journey in recognizing what you’re willing to relinquish when it comes to securing love?

Kelechi: I feel like I’m still on that journey. I went to Peru earlier on this year and took part in four Ayahuasca ceremonies. And I learned so much about myself. I learned so much about, so ayahuasca is considered to be plant medicine. It’s derived from a vine that can be found in the Amazon. And so when I went to Peru, they take this vine and they strip it and they boil it, they boil it and they pray over it. So it’s a rather spiritual experience and what the, it’s hallucinogenic and also it purges you. So you throw up, you do this, you do that, like you, um, all of these things. Um, so

Jameela: Do you shit yourself?

Kelechi: Yes. But hopefully you don’t shit yourself right there and then like you can make it to the bathroom.

Jameela: Okay sorry.

Kelechi: Um, but they usually, you usually,

Jameela: Sorry, the intrusive thoughts just won. I’m so sorry, [00:34:00] go on.

Kelechi: Should have said, but um, yeah, so you do all of that, but what it’s meant to do is give you or allow you to have all of these visions or have access to your subconscious. And so for me, it was really rewarding in that way of seeing this older woman. And as soon as I saw her, she lived in a tree. As soon as I saw her and she was like, oh, I’m glad you made it back. And I said, I’m just so tired. I’m just so, so tired. And I burst into tears. And I was just crying a lot of the time. Um, and she, she said, she, you know, then she reached out for the sun and she was like, drink the sun. I was like, but it’s going to burn. And she’s like, no, drink it. And there are so many layers and metaphors to that, but what I understood about it was that the love that I’m seeking is all around me all of the time, but more importantly, it’s already within me. So I needed to go within because my intention that I set was, I want to know a love unlike any that I’ve experienced in this physical realm. Um, and I really, truly [00:35:00] understand unconditional love for myself. And so there were stages to these things that I saw, but that was just like the first stage of what I saw.

So I’ve come back now with a multilayered understanding of what I’m looking for. I say that because when we talk about love and we talk about romance, Toni Morrison said one of the, most dangerous things that was offered to us as a society was the idea of beauty and the idea of romance, because both are deeply, deeply necessary for capitalism. They don’t actually serve us as individuals. They always leave us wanting more. When you look beyond beauty and romance, what is it that you’re looking for? Because when you know the answer to that, I think that is probably easier to find that.

Jameela: Your own personal vision of beauty and romance.

Kelechi: Yes.

Jameela: Yeah. I, uh, also remember you saying that one of the things you realized during taking the ayahuasca is that no one’s coming for me, but that’s okay because I’m here. Like I’ve got myself.

Kelechi: Yeah.

Jameela: No one’s coming to [00:36:00] my rescue.

Kelechi: Yeah, no one’s coming to save me. And I think that the little girl in me, that, you know, trigger warning, experienced sexual abuse as a child around the age of seven, and didn’t really speak up about it until I was about 16 and told my mum. And even when I told my mum, she was just like, um she was really sad. And she said, “Yeah, but you know, if we, you’ve spent so many years being so sad and nobody knew what was wrong with you. Um, but if you spend more years being sad, like what should the rest of us do who have had maybe uncles or this person or that person, this man, that man do it.” And my, my aunt who has passed away now, but she was there, my mom’s sister. And she said, “Exactly. You’re not experiencing anything new.” And in that moment. So when you asked me earlier about what propels me or compels me to do what I do, it must have really been in that moment. I said, I will never allow for somebody to come up to me, a girl to come up to me and say, this has happened to me. And I basically say to her, well, that’s the way that it is. They didn’t mean it in [00:37:00] harsh way, but they had no solution.

Jameela: Oh, it’s conditioning, especially for ethnic minorities, like, especially from people from where we’re originally from, genetically, you know, like that’s so in my culture that it just wasn’t a shock to anyone when I, in fact, I was kind of blamed, you know, for going through something similar. And I was five, you know, you just can’t, you can’t possibly blame a child for something like that. But it’s so, it’s a survival mechanism of, you know, remember like during the Me Too movement, there was this like, really unexpected pushback from the older generation around Me Too, one that was really strong coming out of France, but also we had one in England. We had Jemaine Greer saying that, you know, like, you know, don’t tell women it’s rape, tell them it’s bad sex. It’s just easier for them to process. And while I understand the technical logic of that, uh, it, it doesn’t, it doesn’t change anything. And what it does is just allow for the system of destroying women’s lives to continue and thrive because we’re [00:38:00] gaslighting ourselves out of what happened. And so I think that’s what happened a bit with with my family, at least, and maybe with yours is like, I think they just didn’t want to think about the terrible things that happened because then they’d have to actually process it. They’d rather just keep it down and take it to the grave because they don’t have to deal with that instant pain of recognizing that someone took something from you. But what I think we never talk about enough is that when you don’t process that pain, when you don’t just purge it and face it and get it out, it’s like death by a thousand cuts. It comes after you in these tiny little micro ways, maybe it’s an eating disorder, maybe it’s dysfunctional behavior, maybe it’s nightmares or bad health. It comes for you, so you may as well deal with it head on, but they were just too afraid to. And so I think that’s, it was never intentional to, you know, diminish what had happened to us. They, I think they thought they were protecting us.

Kelechi: Yeah. And, and, you know, keep emboldening us and saying, don’t, you just keep going. Don’t let that bring you down. You just keep going. And, you know,

Jameela: Don’t be the victim.

Kelechi: Right. And the little girl in me has always [00:39:00] been looking for somebody, I guess, to say that shouldn’t have happened. I should have come to save you. Somebody should have saved you. Right. And it’s only through going to Peru, all the years of therapy, fantastic, but it didn’t give me that insight. And so understanding that nobody was coming to save me allowed me the space to grieve that and also understand with elation that I’m here for me. I’m the adult that my, the little girl in me needed, and I will be that adult for any other little girl that requires it, you know, that is in proximity to me or that, you know, knows of me and needs me in that way. There’s a responsibility to waking up or being enlightened in that way and seeing things differently. Um, but it’s freeing. I feel like since then I’ve come back and I feel free. Some days I feel very sad for the pain of the world, but I’m like, okay, what can, what, what can I do? After I felt all of this, given it time, what am I going to do?

Jameela: So can I ask you some questions about it? Um, and [00:40:00] I’m so sorry if I sound a bit thick when I ask this, but I, I’m not, I don’t have like a poetic mind at all, right? You speak in a way that is just so incredibly poetic. And I don’t mean that in like a pretentious way. I mean, you see the world through a type of prose and poetry and the, the imagery that you conjure when you’re talking about things. Like when you were talking about, you know, things in your book and things that I’ve read from your book, it’s, I can’t even imagine how anyone comes up with these concepts. And this isn’t me sucking your dick here. I’m just saying that if someone like me, who’s like a very literal, slightly dense person sometimes, were to see these visions that someone sees in ayahuasca, you know, the way that you took the, the analogy of the sun and then, sorry, the way that you took the vision of the sun and then turn that into this incredibly deep analogy that I would never have been able to come to myself, not that I think.

How does one process these slightly abstract ethereal visions and take literal meaning? Does that just happen because of the ayahuasca? Do you just have a deep understanding naturally, or do you have [00:41:00] to have the type of brain that can connect the imagery to a deeper I’m sorry, I know that’s a

Kelechi: No, no, I see that.

Jameela: An intense question, but a lot of people I think are wondering about ayahuasca because of the way that it’s, it’s drawn. And I’m, I’m, I’m like a little bit afraid of it, but I’m also like, is it going to be wasted on me because I, I might not have the, the the depth to understand what it means.

Kelechi: I see. Yeah. And you know, when I went, because of the amount of like spiritual practice or the spiritual work I was doing prior to going.

Jameela: Like what?

Kelechi: Um, in terms of Yoruba spirituality, so decolonizing my sense of spirituality and going back to the indigenous practices of my mum’s people and, and learning about that and having a different way of understanding my connection to all that is. That opened me up to thinking more laterally, um, or in a more abstract way about certain things. But, when other people that were there, [00:42:00] it took them a bit longer to come to certain realizations. Some just left, one guy just left, you know, he made excuses that he needed to make and he just went. Some, I believe that we know ourselves better than we think we do. And the messages for us will make sense to us. It’s a deeply personal journey, which is why even on my podcast, I didn’t go into too much detail about what I experienced because I just felt it would rob other people of what they were going to experience. They’d think that it was going to be just like mine. No, it’s, yours could just be like you’re sat in a room, but it’s going to make sense to you. You’re seeing yourself just sat in a room, you know, so it could be anything.

Jameela: That’s mine, yeah, that is probably what my vision will be is that this is my purpose to just sit in a room.

Kelechi: To sit in a room.

Jameela: It’s so true what you say [00:43:00] about the fact that we know ourselves so much better than we give ourselves credit for. Like I, it always sounds a little bit tin hat when I, when I say this, but I do think that there is a strong element of the fact that we have extraordinary gut instincts and I think almost especially as women we are attuned because we have always from the beginning of time been more endangered and more vulnerable. I think we have immense survival instincts and that, that drop in your stomach when you’re on a date with someone strange or when you are in the room with someone or in a particular place. I think that we are very, very instinctive and instinctual. And I, I think that we are deliberately bombarded with constant distraction to draw us away from that gut instinct in which we know ourselves. Like, I think so many of the beauty practices, the things that we put ourselves through voluntarily, the things that we’ve been taught is a choice or empowering. And I’m not saying that it isn’t, but I’m I’m just curious as to how much of a choice anything, like I was talking about it today about um, online about injections and fillers and Botox, like I totally get that it’s a choice. [00:44:00] But can any of this be a choice if we’re not given any counter messaging? If we’re always told, well this is actually how you have to be, otherwise you’re going to be left behind. I’m not saying one way or another, I’m just questioning, what is free will if all of the commentary and conditioning is telling you to do one thing otherwise you are bad and wrong and might be otherized and left out? Um, but I think that we are so bombarded with constant messaging from every different direction about so many different things about how to behave, about how to smile even when you don’t feel like smiling. All of the constant like harassing about how to be and how not to be is a way to make us constantly intellectualize, which draws us away from our spirit, from our gut.

Kelechi: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Second guessing ourselves. So that means that when something does happen, you know, unfortunate, something unfortunate might happen, you start doubting whether it did. You know, some, I went to a party a few months ago and something [00:45:00] happened where a man just did something, and almost instantly, I was like, did that happen? Did I imagine it? Am I, what? And it’s so fascinating how quickly you start to break down your own reality and start to question yourself as to whether what you felt was a particular way was actually that way. So I love that you say, you know, are what you that you’re asking questions, because to me, curiosity is the beginning of liberation. The moment we start to go, what, why, how, that is when we’re, we know that we’re headed on a path of saving ourselves, because if we’re just taking everything as it is, like, oh, well, it’s the way it’s always been. I don’t, I don’t know who that serves.

Jameela: Well, we do know who it serves. And they’re deliberately nameless and faceless, and there’s like 12 of them, and they run the world. And they own all the big companies that own all the big companies that own all the smaller companies that we buy from. And it is a massive tenant of capitalism for us to be constantly [00:46:00] distracted and in chaos because I don’t think that we would buy or spend time on half the shit that we do if we were actually in tune with our gut instincts. You know, when I leave Los Angeles or get away from my phone or get away from my industry, I completely change and I find out who I am and that is someone who doesn’t need to consume constantly. That is someone who isn’t constantly anxious and worried and navel gazing. I become part of community. I stop, I stop like indulging in like hyper individualism, which is so normalized in the West. And I think that that’s really telling as to how much of this isn’t actually a choice. It’s just whatever I just, yeah, I blend in with whatever I get soaked in. And, yeah, and, And I think that it’s really beautiful that you were able to have that moment with yourself. Do you feel like that’s been maintained post-ayahuasca, that you feel more in tune with yourself? Is it something that only happens there when you are with your live subconscious, or does it happen [00:47:00] beyond that, that now you feel like you trust your gut a bit more. I know that that thing happens, you know, with the guy at the party since the ayahuasca, but I was just curious.

Kelechi: Yeah, that even that was really good because I, you know, in that moment where I was like, did that what? And I was like, yep, it did.

Jameela: And you caught yourself second guessing.

Kelechi: Yeah, yeah.

Jameela: Right.

Kelechi: And, and so with ayahuasca, the, I mentioned about the four ceremonies, but life is the ceremony, life, integrating what you learn into the ceremony of your life, that that’s the actual journey. Drinking the tea, hallucinating, whatever the case may be for however many nights for however long, that’s the beginning of it, I guess, but that’s not it. It’s what you take from all of the things that you learn and you go back into interacting with the rest of the world, most of which haven’t done what you’ve done. They might have done different things, but haven’t done what you’ve done. How do you then relate? It’s like, you know, people talk about, oh, you go to therapy so you can deal with the people who won’t go to [00:48:00] therapy. It’s that sort of thing. So, so, um, ayahuasca for me, integrating the whole process of integrating what I’ve learned, that’s the process, but understanding that I feel just so much more free now, understanding that everything’s a performance.

There was a point, I think it was the penultimate day when I just thought, I don’t miss the world. I don’t, I miss my son, but I don’t miss the world. I don’t miss this, that, you know, the thing that we have to do in the industry when we, everything just felt like a massive performance. And I was like, no wonder I’m tired because I keep saying, I don’t want to participate in this. And this is how I see this. And people go, “Oh, well done for seeing it that way or seeing it that way. Come and do this performance instead.” Whatever you, whichever way you look at it, whether you’re an activist, whatever, you’re performing something and you’ve just got to realise or decide where does the performance stop and where does your life begin.

Jameela: And then what do you do? What do you do when you realise so much [00:49:00] of your life has been a performance? I guess that’s kind of where I’ve been in the last few years of like, who am I when I remove the mask, when I stop the performance that I’ve done for survival? Who am I? Who do I love? Who actually loves me for me when I’m not performing? What do you do with that if that’s been, you know, what your identity has been based around?

Kelechi: And that’s the trick, isn’t it? Because it we went, we go to the do like, even when I mentioned, you know, you sit with the emotions and then what do I do next? We move from a space of solely doing or primarily doing and into a state of being. Being is so foreign to us because we’re so used to doing that when someone says, says, “Just be,” you’re like, “Oh, fuck how?” But it’s exactly that, just be.

Jameela: Well, we better learn soon because AI is coming for everyone’s jobs.

Kelechi: And they’re going to be more than we’ve ever been.

Jameela: No, not just that, but also we’re not going to have those jobs anymore, so us having been trained in the last few hundred years of the industrial age, [00:50:00] us being trained to think that our entire identity is centred around what it is that we serve to the world as a means of how we make money and, you know, what our service is. That’s all going away. I think I read a statistic that something like in the next five to ten years, a third, uh, or more of jobs in America are going to go to AI. As you sit there for a second, you’re like, fucking hell, what are we gonna do with our time when that happens? I mean, my industry is currently on strike because AI is going, trying to completely replace literally every department. People think it’s a bunch of wanker multimillionaire actors asking for even more millions. It’s not. It’s the fact that the people at the very, you know, the, the kind of, the, the least privileged part of this industry will be completely replaced because they don’t have platform and they are technically replaceable. We’re all going to be replaced. And so what a human being is going to do when we’re all on a universal basic income, and we don’t have a, we don’t have the old purpose anymore. [00:51:00] We’re going to have to figure out who we are when we aren’t hiding at work. And I think it’s going to be a fascinating time. And I feel very relieved and grateful that as weird as this journey is and hard as this journey is to figure out who I actually am when not in context of other people. I’m glad I’m doing it now before.

Kelechi: Right, when everyone, but then a lot of people, quite a few people had that reckoning during lockdown. Lockdown, I, I, of course it was catastrophic, the number of people that died, but for me as an individual, lockdown was really useful for me.

Jameela: Same, it was my catalyst.

Kelechi: Yeah, like I just, you know, would wake up in the morning, the roads were clear, and I would just run. I would just run and run and run until I got tired, then I’d turn around and run back home. And I loved it. I loved having that space and I loved the space to contemplate and to observe. And that’s where my post run videos were born off because I had space off the running to go. Okay, [00:52:00] now I understand what this thought is that’s been trying to formulate in my head. And I could share it. And so many people resonated with it. I sort of missed lockdown for the way that we were able to connect. Like you saw how many people got out to march and you saw how quickly things changed when people got out to march. So we would actually be able to use our energy and our souls, our spirit, our life force to confront the government. That’s why we’re being distracted a lot of the time, I feel, because then we don’t, we’re so exhausted that we don’t have time to say, “Hey, what you’re doing isn’t fair.”

Jameela: Well it’s a massive part of why I think that reproductive rights are being taken away. It’s like if you saddle people with uteruses down to have to, specifically women, because they are who this is a targeted attack against, it can impact anyone with a uterus, but women won’t be able to fight for their rights if they are exhausted and struggling to survive, and struggling to keep a child alive, or struggling with pregnancy, or they’re sick, or [00:53:00] dying from it. Like if you take, if you disempower people and take their eye fully off the ball because it’s a, it’s survival once you become a mother for a long time, then they don’t have energy to march. Who’s going to look after the kid when they go off to march? Like, what are they going to do?

Kelechi: Well you bring them along, I went to one the other day, you sort of bring the children along, but even that is a whole logistical thing.

Jameela: Yeah.

Kelechi: But it’s interesting when we think about, um, reproductive justice and all of these things, it’s more so to, quite frankly speaking, encouraging white women to have children. So there is, there are more white people, right, in order to maintain white supremacy or, you know, white dominance. That’s, that’s the real thing because black women aren’t being encouraged in the same way to keep their children because when they have the children, they’re gunned down in the street, like, so.

Jameela: Yeah. Although ironically, it’s, it’s the, it’s the areas with the, are the most densely populated with black people that happen to [00:54:00] also being targeted, the most with the reproductive rights being taken away to also further disenfranchise those people.

Kelechi: Right. Disenfranchise, but also to have more workers,

Jameela: More workers and more people in prison because of the socioeconomic problem for all of those people.

Kelechi: It’s not from, it’s not from a place basically is what I’m saying. It’s not a place, from a place of care. It’s not from a place of, “Oh, don’t do it. Morality.” It’s not, it’s it’s it’s very strategized why these things are happening and depending on the demographic of women we’re talking about is happening for different reasons or slightly different reasons, so it’s, it’s interesting to me.

Jameela: But it, it does. It stipulates why we need to focus so much on our gut instinct and why we need to step away from any programming, listen out for any programming that feels like it’s trying to indoctrinate you. Because with our gut instinct, we are going to be able to, as we did with lockdown, be able to collect and organise and give, have space to give a shit [00:55:00] about ourselves and each other more. And I think that

Kelechi: Language. Language is important. Like, like language is is important. And it’s funny though because notice how a lot of corporations have taken on revolutionary language, but they’re not revolutionary at all. They’re not planning to revolutionize anything, but they talk about, we come together, we fight for the common goal with dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Meanwhile, all they want you to do is buy face cream. You know, like that, it’ll be presented in such a way that it’s meant to galvanize you and to conflate real movements from just whimsical sort of, I don’t know, capitalistic, um, you know, strategies. Audre Lorde, I believe it was, that said in a litany for survival that we were never meant to survive. A lot of us that are here, um, who are the global majority, but racially minoritized in the West, we weren’t meant to survive, and yet here we are. So after survival is living, right? So we have to [00:56:00] prioritise living and I just hope that we do sort of get there at some point.

Jameela: You mean going beyond survival to thriving and having the joy and the love. And the things that you write about in this book and the things that you talk about online, you want us to expand into more multifaceted experiences beyond barely making it through the fucking day.

Kelechi: Yeah, and just being exhausted. I want us to love, I want us to feel the euphoria of love, like love of self, but also love of community, love of a, you know, a partner, partners, however the case may be, the love of family, like just love. Because if we love, then all of this stuff we’re talking about, even with climate justice, because we love, we will have to love our environment, and we wouldn’t want our environment to go to shit. Everything is literally linked.

Jameela: And so, the therapy that you’ve had, the experience during lockdown, the space you’ve given yourself, the ayahuasca, you seem like a very happy and whole human, like, [00:57:00] and you’ve been through a lot throughout your life and even a lot publicly in the time in which I’ve been aware of you. Do you feel as good as you look?

Kelechi: Not every day.

Jameela: No.

Kelechi: Not every day. Not every day. I, I’m, somebody asked me the other day, like, are you winning? And I had to look at it and I was just like, you know what, in a grand scheme of things, I’m absolutely winning because I love myself. My God, like, I love me to have come this far from all the things. There were points where I just didn’t literally want to be here. I didn’t know that I would make it this far, so, to me, it’s a victory to still be here, but that doesn’t mean that some days I’m not like, “Oh, well, fuck this,” you know, those days, but those days are few and far between now, because I’m in a space where I’m like, you know what? I carved out this life for myself. I decided that I was somehow just going to have a career as Kelechi and it’s [00:58:00] going to make sense and life will make space for me. The world will make space for me to do me and be paid for doing me. It shouldn’t take remuneration to go out on me, but I don’t have to confine myself to a role in order to have a living. And I want that for more people. If they, if, if where they want to be is not where they are, I want them to be where they want to be.

Jameela: And so what’s the message you most hope people take from your book and your work?

Kelechi: Oh, I love that. Ultimately, it’s that you are more than the body that you inhabit. But while you have this body that you inhabit, use it to experience the world with all of your senses or like, let this experience on this rock that is spinning, like hurtling through infinity, let this [00:59:00] body allow you to have the most sensual experience that you can have because you deserve it. Why else are you here? Why else? What if we’re here to experience pleasure? What if?

Jameela: Such a revolutionary thought, isn’t it? I’ve truly only just come to the conclusion that I’m here not just to constantly serve others, but also to experience some joy and pleasure. Otherwise, my tank is just gonna run empty, and I’m not gonna have anything, any love or joy to give out to anyone after a while. Like I felt I was running out and turning into quite an embittered, angry, empty, exhausted person. And the more love I have been able to, not just like self love, I’m amazing, but like the more pleasure, the more, uh, love of everything around me, the more croissants I’ve eaten, like the more cuddles I have had, the more fun I’ve had, the more laughs I’ve had has made me a more loving person. And I think of better service to the people that follow me online. Like I think that [01:00:00] people respond to me better now. I think they sense that I’m more whole and

Kelechi: I love it. It’s love.

Jameela: It really does. It really does. And I, I so appreciate that you and I as two like quite divisive lightning rod figures in British media and on the internet in general have both at such a similar time in such different ways come to a very similar conclusion that hopefully is a reflection of what’s in our general consciousness.

Kelechi: Absolutely, absolutely.

Jameela: That hopefully more people are going, we have to swing back from this much hatred and division. We have to, and, and I personally feel as someone who did use to be extremely divisive in my rhetoric, but it’s my responsibility to clean up a little bit and make sure that like, let’s soften. Let’s soften the approach and let’s call each other in and let’s put a bit more love and a bit more grace for growth out in the way that I needed grace for my own growth. I’m now learning better how to extend it to others. Um, I think you’re fucking great. Everyone should go out and buy [01:01:00] your book and follow you and definitely listen to All My Sons, the greatest podcast episode. I can’t believe you didn’t win like a Peabody, uh, for that. The speed at which you speak is the most threatening thing I’ve ever heard. I love it so much. But, um, thank you for joining me today, and before you go, I would love to ask you, what do you weigh?

Kelechi: I weigh my grief. I weigh it because yeah, I weigh my grief because I think to myself you never want to have too much, you know, you can’t help because it’s a natural human experience, but I don’t need to have too much. So I’m always having to just weigh that.

Jameela: Keep an eye on it. Make sure it doesn’t tip the balance. You’re a total fucking star. I hope that we get to meet again, but [01:02:00] congratulations on the book and everything that you’re achieving internally and externally. Lots of love.

Kelechi: Love to you too, you baby girl.

Jameela: Thank you so much for listening to this week’s episode. I Weigh with Jameela Jamil is produced and researched by myself, Jameela Jamil, Erin Finnegan, Kimmie Gregory and Amelia Chappelow. It is edited by Andrew Carson and the beautiful music that you are hearing now is made by my boyfriend, James Blake. And if you haven’t already, please rate, review, and subscribe to the show. It’s such a great way to show your support and helps me out massively.

And lastly, at I Weigh, we would love to hear from you and share what you weigh at the end of this podcast. Please email us a voice recording, sharing what you weigh at iweighpodcast@gmail.com. And now we would love to pass the mic to one of our listeners.

Listener: I weigh being a big sister to an amazing little brother. I weigh having a close [01:03:00] relationship with my older sister. I weigh giving back to my mom for everything that she’s given me. I weigh the trauma that I experienced when I was younger. I weigh the activism that I am currently a part of and various activism that I have been a part of from a young age.