Shirkydra Roberts interviewed by Cheryle Gail

00:03 All right. Hello. I am Cheryle Gail from Murphy's, California. I am 59 years old. I am here voluntarily interviewing Sharika. And tell me where you are in your age.

00:22 How you doing? I'm Shirkydra Roberts, and I'm 33 years old.

00:28 And you're in Virginia right now?

00:30 Yep, in Virginia. Norfolk, Virginia.

00:33 All right. And you're here voluntarily?

00:36 Yes.

00:37 Yeah. I haven't brought you kicking in and screaming.

00:41 Okay. Voluntarily to be interviewed by you.

00:46 Yeah. Because, you know, it really is a very niche market who have done the work, who are happy putting their name and face. This is just an audio recording, but they do take our photo. Right. That want to share the details of the harm that they experienced as a child, you know, And Brave Voices is committed to breaking the silence that has perpetuated childhood sexual abuse for generations. So we know we're going to learn from each and every experience, and this is going to be documented and put into the Library of Congress. And, you know, I equate it to the evidence that we have of the Holocaust. We have first person experiences. And because childhood sexual abuse has been ignored, covered up, not spoken about, we know that the reported cases, 1 out of 3, 1 out of 5, those are reported cases. And we know the numbers are so much higher. So here's to learning.

02:03 Yes. And I love it. Like, Brave Voices, just when you say it is, it conceptualizes, like, why we do what we do. We. We are brave so that others can see that they can be brave, too. We tell our stories so that other people can know you can tell your story, too. Everybody might not buy in. Everybody not, might not agree. But guess what? They can tell their story whenever they're ready. It's your story to own and to tell it how you want to tell it from your truth, you know? And so I think that does take bravery. We talk about the military. Courage, honor, and commitment is our three pillars as a sailor. And courage is speaking up for the things when nobody else wants to do it. Doing the things when nobody else is looking and paying attention and doing it the right way. What makes it right from you. So I love just the mission behind what Brave Voices is doing. When I looked at it, I'm like another platform for a resource for somebody to look and say, I am them and I can do what they're doing and I'm okay to do it.

03:09 Yeah. Awesome. And so what I find is amazing. Human beings that do not want to have their face and name associated with their lived experience because they fear that people will stigmatize Them and change their thoughts about who they are and see them as a victim. I hear that over and over and over again from people who, yeah, I love what you're doing, but no way am I gonna put mine. So I'm super curious to know, how did you move into a position of not caring how or what anybody thought. Thought about you speaking up, about the harm that you experienced as a child?

04:06 For me, it was. I. I literally sat and kind of in my own thoughts of, people may have something to say when I speak up, but nobody's saying anything while I'm silent. Nobody's asking if I'm okay, Nobody's ensuring nobody's wondering. Nobody's, you know, perpetrating the. The smoke, smile or, you know, the. The looking for the acceptance from people. Seeing all of the surface things that may come from trauma or abuse that has been proven to be kind of the. The reflection of, hey, there's something wrong here. Nobody was saying anything. So it's like I. I heard kind of the same thing as you as. I don't want to be seen as a victim. I don't want to see as I haven't healed yet or my story's wrong or any of these things. But it's like. But to be honest, how many of our abusers or even the people that we're talking about, how many of them really listen to our story? How many of them really want to hear what we have to say? If anything, the guilt makes them run away from it. They don't want to hear it. They don't. They're not listening to it. If they are, they're not going to tell us that they listen to it or tell us that they're observing for a difference for. So for me, when. The first time I ever told my story, I was at a conference in Japan, and when I got up, it was so many women after me that got up and spoke. And I start seeing that as a pattern. That when I got up and just said a little bit, women in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s was like, I never said nothing until today. That's when it was like, it doesn't matter what the naysayers say. You know, as a woman of faith, Jesus had naysayers. He still did ministry. So for me, it was like, I didn't want to let the naysayers suppress me because it's not their story to tell.

06:02 Fantastic. That's. That's what I see over and over again. When I am honest about what happened to me, people feel comfortable to share And I hear that all the time. I've never said anything to anybody. And. And so we're breaking the silence over and over again. It's so inspiring to me. So I'm just going to ask you to describe to me your experience of being a child and the observable evidence of what happened to you. Thinking about if a video recorder was playing or an audio recorder was playing, what would have been seen and heard.

06:49 I think for me, fear, you know, silence, Nothing. You wouldn't probably hear anything because at that place, and kind of sometimes our culture is. You don't talk about what happens in this house. You deal with adversity and silence. You deal with pain and silence. It was. Maybe this is the norm. What did I do to deserve it? It's those things that kind of ran across my mind as a child. And then seeing it done to other family members, it almost made me feel like it was normal for a moment like this. This is so unreal. I don't want to say anything. It's so unreal. I don't even know what to say, you know? And so when I look back now, and it was like silence was planted during the trauma. Not even just after the trauma, but during the trauma. Because while it's happening, a lot of us, we're not saying nothing. It's just we. We deal with it in the moment. We. We mentally try to find an escape, but it's. We're silenced then. So I think looking back, if people saw me then they will still see me laughing, me smiling, me finding my way, being mute, probably in school and very talkative at home, getting in trouble a lot, like just trying to get my mother's attention in different ways, you know, to say, like, hey, I don't even know how to have this conversation. Mine started like, it's early, like before I was 10 years old. So it was. I don't even know how to explain to you, mom, what's happening.

08:35 So who was it and how old were you when you first experienced.

08:44 Mine was inside. Inside of my household. It was a family member that was inside the household that was living there. And my first encounter was five. Around five years old. And it went to about. I was 14. It went to when I was around 14 years old. So constant, sporadic but constant. I kind of eventually got not used to it, but I knew when it was coming, how it was coming, what was going to happen. And I eventually, you know, I poured into sports. I poured into everything I could so that I didn't really kind of have to go home and deal with it. But. But again, when you are in an environment where these people are supposed to be loving, these people are supposed to be caring, you know, these people are supposed to take care of us. They're supposed to look after us. This is them, you know, and then the trauma happens, and it's like, well, now I'm confused. Do I still love them? Is this love is what happened to them? And now you think, oh, this is love. This is emotions, this is feelings. This is just what I have to deal with because they love me, because they care. You're so young and ignorant to what shouldn't be happening at that age. It's like, no, I knew what pornography was. Oral sex was Male and female parts of, you know, I. I knew what they were before I was introduced to them in school. So now that makes you, you know, based on just research and talking to different individuals, you end up going towards sexual behavior away from it. I was a person. I went away. I was anti, you know, for years, even in my adult life, like, anti. Don't. Don't flirt, don't touch, don't do nothing that. That reflected anything sexual. I'm okay, and I'm good. I don't want to be touched. I. I barely want to be liked. I don't. It's. I spent most of my life wanting to be comforted, wanted compassion, wanted to be nurtured. Not really intimate. So that was kind of not destroyed, but I. It would deter the vision of what an intimate partner was. Growing up, it was just like, well, I don't want that, because I had that early. No, thanks.

11:17 And so in trying to understand the picture of how the harm occurred. Were you left alone with this person?

11:30 Yeah, it was left alone because my mother was a single mother, three kids, you know, and growing up, she, you know, we struggled. There was times she just didn't have. She worked. I woke up and walked my mother outside, you know, to work, and we knew she wasn't coming home till it was late. No matter who she dated, who she was married to, A lot of the men that she dated, they. They were at home with us because she. She worked so hard. So I kind of looked at it like, you know, I. It. It impacted my own view of marriage and when I wanted to have kids, because I'm like, man, I work hard too. What if my kids, you know, because as much as we think we know people, you don't. You don't. You don't know that your spouse experienced sexual abuse as a kid. Too. You don't know that they were beat. You don't always know everything. And so it was like, you know, nobody's safe. For me, it was like, nobody's safe. I had a dad who was not present. He was absent. So I already felt abandoned and neglected. And like, if you was there, this wouldn't have happened. Or, you know, you, You. You get all these emotions like my parents, you know, but my mother worked so hard for me. She made sure we didn't eat. It was times where we didn't have a home. We was living in and out of hotels. We. We needed, you know, certain meals to carry us all week. We knew what it was like not to have the bills paid, getting evicted. Just growing up in the struggle life, it was so common for me, my friends. You were, you know, before we moved into better neighborhoods, everybody knew, you know, drugs, gunshots, you. You just. You knew what the hood was, you know, and what was, you know, part of being in those type of environments, like sex, Ray, all that stuff was like, that's not, you know, it was normal. It was like this environment, produce. Can produce that. And just kind of seeing that early and understanding. Like, I didn't want to tell my mother, not because she didn't give me the opportunity to. It was more so. Seeing her struggle so much, I was like, I don't want to add to her problems. I don't want to add to her struggle. I don't want to make her feel like she's a bad parent. I don't want to make her. I put on my cape early, and then I never took it off. I never took off my cape until it was like, I can't wear this cape no more. I can't protect everybody's feelings, thoughts. I can't do it anymore because I'm killing myself doing it. And along that cake journey, it was like I got to high school and I was pulling into sports, and then I. I was feeling so much inside that I wanted to inflict another pain to get rid of the emotional pain. So I started cutting. And then that was different, you know, because it's like, where did this come from? The thought, the behavior, anything. It was just out of nowhere. And that's where I understood, like, if you don't take care of this pain, you'll try to take care of it in another way, an unhealthy manner. And that comes with healing when. When you understand that hurt people, hurt people, if you remain hurt, you may not hurt people the same way, but that don't Mean, you won't hurt somebody. And that was a big motivator for me to heal, is I don't want to be part of anybody's trauma story. It may not be sexual abuse, but I didn't want it to be emotional abuse, physical anger. I didn't want it to come out in a way where I couldn't control it.

15:15 And what, what happened for you internally to move from a place of protecting your mother to somehow breaking the silence with her.

15:33 I got tired of not sleeping at night. I was probably about 25, 26, and I had issues with falling asleep at night. Bad dreams, you know, the incidents replaying in my nightmares, wondering if I'm being attacked all the time. I had an issue with nighttime, like, just so many things that came from the experience. And in my head it was like, well, what does it take for all this to like, me to start working on this? And it was like, I got to say something, I got to say something. And I think it was probably like midnight, maybe close to one in the morning when I call my mom was like, oh, yeah, we got to talk. And I just told her, I told her what happened. And of course it broke her heart and it crushed her. And trying to reassure her, like it wasn't, you know, nothing you could have done, you know, in a sense from. You did not know that person, you did not know they were capable of that. They didn't present that. The fact that you just, you worked hard, you just wasn't there because you worked hard. And so I had that understanding before. I never really kind of blamed my mother or felt like it was her fault or none of that. It's just the life that we had required her to work super hard, which means that we, other people was around us, other people, we grew up, we were self sustained, you know, self sustaining, self proficient early. We wanted to take care of ourselves while our mother was gone. So we had interaction with other people, other people, siblings, family members, no matter what. So it was me feeling like the only way to start healing, I had to start talking. That's what it was. To start healing, I had to start talking.

17:29 And that was just an internal drive that you had. Was there some outside influences? Did you read a book? Did you watch some. Was it Oprah? I mean, how did, how did you get. It was just internal drive. I've gotta, I've gotta share this. I gotta get this out of me.

17:48 It was, it got. Yeah, because I hadn't started. I didn't know about the, the. Even the, the word Incest. I didn't know about programs. I didn't know about Me too. None of that kind of stuff. It was all, like, I didn't read. I didn't start hearing about Oprah and Joyce Meyer and just different people in the Me Too community until after I opened up. When I started, like, once I told my mom, I'm like, oh, I'm free now. Because a lot of times I didn't say anything because I hadn't told my mom yet. And I published my first book. It was called what's the Word Worth? Where it was just me talking through poetry. And if you could read in between the lines, you could kind of see it. But that was just a taste of what would it be like for me talking about it. And so many people. Some people contacted me and knew, and it was just like, okay, if I can do this, what's the next step? Actually saying it. Not poetically speaking, but just talking. Just tell my mom. And that's when I told my mom. And a couple of years later, I wrote my second book, Just Unwrap It. And it talks about, you know, having a gift that's wrapped in pain, that's sitting on the shelf. And it was like, some of our gifts are under pain wrapping paper. But you don't realize that they go, the treasure that's in that box until you really unwrap it and start talking and having those tough conversations. Yeah.

19:24 And how did you get to the place of writing this book? Were there different kinds of therapy that helped you get there? Or was it from writing your poetry that you got there? Or was this gift of writing just internally in you?

19:42 I believe God. God saved me at 20 years old. So remember, I didn't tell my mom I was 25. God saved me at 20 in Japan. And so I had already had some biblical principles of, you know, stories like Job stories like the. The one who bled. You know, just different people who. Who had adversity and challenges and still served and still honored and still kind of work through life. So before I heard about, like, the human stories, I had biblical stories, Paul. Like, just. You saw imperfections being used. And so I had already submitted spiritually. And a lot of my healing process was understanding the future of the spirit God. You know, even though I had a skew view because one of my abusers was a fake person and talked about God, loved God, shared God. So at first, I'm like, was everybody like God? Like this? Because this can't be right.

20:50 Yeah.

20:51 But I had. I being African American, I was already around people who felt like God's not for us because people used it during slavery. And I'm like, you know, I used to have a conversation, well, just because they misused it doesn't make it wrong. Say I took that same concept with my situation. Just because they love God and they use God or whatever, I can't blame God for their inconsistency, for their sin, for their wrongdoing, for their mentality, they didn't yield. And so I'm still able to grow my faith and grow my relationship with God. And those principles kept me abreast. It kept me from the hatred, it kept me from the unforgiveness. It didn't suppress it, but it allowed me to feel it, say it, embrace it and work through it versus some religion kind of silence you sometimes depending on what background some religion will keep you from talking and saying. So I was very careful with my walk and making sure that I wasn't like, you know, this too sh. I wasn't so over religious that I didn't heal. But I had already five years of taking that spiritual journey. So I kind of like were right already because that's how I talk to God. You know, poetry was a thing for me, so it was just me putting thoughts. Like when I read my books, they're exactly how I talk. There's no, you know, well thought out like storyline. I would, I would have the ideas in my mind, the chapters on how it went and I would just write to it. Published, right to it published. And surprisingly I didn't commit to like a 12 week. My first 12 week program was last year. I went through cognitive behavior therapy and that is what my third book was about. Dear brain, you have my attention going beyond the hill part. I felt I did the emotional and spiritual work, but the cognitive part was there and that's where the triggers, the nightmares, the am I going to get attacked in my sleep? You know, just having those conversations with myself. I needed to unlearn some self taught beliefs, self talk concepts and cognitive behavior therapy stared at us. For me it was one of the biggest helps that I had. I understood the difference between counseling. Seeing a counselor, therapist, psychologist, it showed me how they all play their part in your healing journey.

23:30 Wow. So I just want to slow it down a little bit and go back and ask a few questions a little bit about God. Like how the heck does, how does that happen? You know that you, that, that, that there's help with God, you know, so that's one question. And, and you didn't blame God. And you know, for me personally, everything about God is a heat. And I translate it in my brain. But boy, does it take a lot of he, he, he, he, he harmed by a he. And I mean so, so share whatever comes up for you about, yeah, God.

24:22 I was in Japan and I remember just going to the service that kind of changed my life. And I was in a dark place. I had tried everything. I used to drink seven days a week, smoke. I tried every everything thinking like, this is the fix. Nothing was fixed. And I had ran from God for a while. I grew up in church, but of course, like I said, once this started happening, I wasn't trying to do church. But that seed was still planted. And no matter how we see it, the seed is there. We never stop believing in God. We just get mad, we get upset, we get angry. And I knew that that was normal. I am mad, okay? I am. And I learned that he knew I was mad, but I had to get back to learning him for myself. So when he saved me, it was like I didn't start reading and studying the Word based on what the church was doing. I read it based on like, where is my story in here? You know, thinking about the woman at the well, like, where is my. And I tell people I talk a lot about Job because Job didn't do anything to encounter what he did. It was more so because God was showing how faithful Job was even through adversity, through the challenges and the impact. So I never was focused on, well, God, you created him, why you didn't make him perfect. I already understood that there was no such thing as perfect and that God was a gentleman and he can offer goodness, but everybody's not going to take it. He's going to offer righteous, but everybody don't want to choose, right? He offers it like salvation, but everybody's not going to take it. And so I had to understand that just because people talk God know the know the scripture and all these things, Satan does too. That's how he tried to tempt Jesus. So I had a bigger picture of knowing God doesn't mean that people are going to always choose godly things, because I don't. So I might not do what they do, but I have other sins that's listed up in this Bible that I know that I do. And so when I start learning, like, there's no respect to sin, all sin is forgiven self blessing of the Holy Spirit. I start being like, well, if I need God to forgive me every day, then they probably need Him. To do it the same. I start looking at like spirituality in the sense of hope, you know, love, kind of. I was just deep into if as a, as a woman of faith and Christian, how do I align with God? Not religion, but God himself. How he created me to be this person probably distorted me. But that doesn't mean that I'm damaged goods. Like God said, I have a purpose and I have a calling that he. That I'm fearfully and want to be made and I'm the head. I should feel these things like this how God feels about me. He created woman and man and called it all know he created the heavens and the earth and abs and caught it all. Good. So no, what you did to me can't alter what the Creator made me.

27:48 Yeah.

27:49 And so because of that, it helped me be like, it's not that God did it.

27:55 Yeah, yeah.

27:57 But I do know that he's going to help me through it.

27:59 Huh.

28:00 And so I never stepped into that because I think I already had like sees place it. Like I never went into every, you know, everything's perfect in the world. I never saw the world that way. I never saw that everybody chose morals and values. Like, I just knew that good people did bad things.

28:23 Yeah.

28:23 But it's all a choice. It was just like to me how Christians are like, Christianity is a choice. There's so many religions can choose, whatever. If I don't need to bash another religion to follow Christ, I don't need to bash anybody else. It's like, but if I'm going to do this, this is what I'm going to do. And a lot of my healing was healing so that I could. I knew God wanted me to be an author and a speaker, but I couldn't deliver messages from a broken place. Nobody's going to receive it if it's built on hatred and anger and strife and vengeance. Who wants to listen to someone that they can sense that? You may not sing it, but people can sense brokenness. If you're preaching, if you're speaking from a broken place, it's hard for people to move past brokenness.

29:16 Yeah, yeah.

29:20 Still going through it. Easy. Cool. But it's, it's different when you're trying to say not how do we get over it, but are we. Are we. Are we still walking forward? Are we still going through? Or are we just standing in the same room, the same darkness, the same spot, the same space and repeating ourselves and going back to that space every time you tell your story, are you still in that dark space or Are you telling the story and you looking behind you?

29:49 Yeah. Yeah.

29:50 Where are you viewing your story from? Yeah, and that's kind of how I took it because I look at everything as a process.

29:59 So I've got two questions for you here.

30:01 Okay.

30:02 One is, is there actually stories of incest or childhood sexual abuse in the Bible?

30:10 Yes.

30:10 You were trying to find yourself in the stories. And so.

30:15 Yeah, I, I looked at stories back in the Old Testament. Even we look at, I don't say it's Abraham where his daughters were having sex with him or you saw so many. Yeah.

30:27 When you look at everyone having sex with his daughters because they were trying.

30:31 To complete the lineage. And I want to say, I want to say, if I'm not mistaken, it's Abraham. But in the Old Testament, it talks about how siblings and dads and kids, like incest has been around for so long, but back in the day, they were doing it thinking that they were fulfilling the will of God, and they were not. It's just like when you look at Abraham's wife when God said, you're going to have a baby, it's going to be, you know, and she said, sleep with the, the, the kinds. Mistress if it. That's. He didn't need your help. But it happened. And then Abraham's sons did the same thing. Their wives was, was not supposed to be born a child, but they end up trying to fulfill God's will on their own. And so, so many things were happening back then where it. It. I didn't look for me in those specific stories. I just saw that this thing was rooted way before my time. This thing was rooted so far back. And we talked about slavery and how kids were like, it was so normal in the toxic dynamic that now we can report it and it's bad and it's illegal and we're talking about it. But before, it wasn't talked about because it was normal. It was how things went. It was how, you know, reproduction was happening in a toxic manner. And so you look back in those stories in the Old Testament, look how those lineages happen. Look what sons were doing and kids were doing in those times to keep, you know, assets and, and what was the promise in their lineage? And when I saw that, I saw that this is deep root, this is deeper than me. It's about now telling people, hey, this is not normal. So when we're speaking, it's not just about my story. It's telling the people, this is not normal. Incest is not normal. If they probably looked at it Back then, like it was a thing, it ain't a thing now. You don't have to do this anymore. You don't have to be solid anymore. You don't have to tolerate it anymore. It's not normal.

32:47 Yeah, yeah, it's common. Yeah, it's, it's, it's. I mean, I call it an epidemic. It's. You know, I cycled across the United States in 1994. And every day of my life, no matter where I was, across the country, somebody told me their story of having been harmed as a child over and over and over again at, in the middle of a park, in the middle of the country, everywhere. So, yeah, so it's, it's, you know, when you say it's not normal, is not normal, but it's, it's common. Yeah, very common. And, and, and, and over and over. I mean, look at the, the challenges that you went through emotionally in your life. You, you drank, you smoked, you cut, you avoided sex or int. Right? This is the pattern that most of us go through is, you know, it's suffering. It's, it's. And, and it's suffering due to the, the harm that we experienced. And this is why we're speaking up, because we don't want future generations of children to have to suffer throughout their life. Then my other question is, how did God help you through it?

34:12 Understanding. When you understand that God doesn't. God is not there to stop our wrongdoing. He's not there to fix everybody, that he's not going to make people do anything. Not, you know, even though he, he created us, he set our paths, people still have a choice. He gave people free will. Choice.

34:38 Yeah.

34:38 And so that was the biggest thing for me is understanding that God didn't stop it, but he let them choose it. You had a choice, you could have not done it. But the choices that you make, you will have to answer to that one day. And so for me, it was him teaching me like, hey, I got, I'm gonna use everything that happens in your life for the greater good of the kingdom for me. And not a sense as, hey, you're going, this is going to happen to you. So that, but it was like, your life doesn't stop because this happened. This person made a bad choice and a bad, you know, bad decision on your part. And so bringing me understanding and showing me what forgiveness looks like. And I always talk about Jesus and Judas, how at this, the. When they was at the supper that day and Jesus said that he was going to feed and, and Serve the person that was going to set him up, send him up to Calgary. And it was Judas. He, Judas was on his right side. He fed Judas first, knowing Judas was going to be the person that sent him to the cross. Judas went out and told the people where Jesus is going to be. Judas betrayed him. Judas, you know, yeah, it was all for purpose, for God's purpose. But Judas, too many of us would have been like, if you upset somebody, if you set me up to die, why are you in my life? You, I don't want you around me. Yeah, God served him. God still fed him, gave him wine, gave him food. You know, Peter, who, he said, you're going to deny me in front of these people, still fed them. So it was bringing me just understanding of what he means when he says, you don't think the way that I think. And you can't fathom how I love people. You won't. I just, you just can't. Because human mind says if it's not good, it's not love. If it doesn't feel good, it's not love. If you're wrong, it's not love. Like, we try to humanize God when he's not. He came down in human form, but how he thinks is just, it's beyond us. And so as I learned him, not just everything in the Bible, but I learned God, like Christ, I started always, I always tell people, I started the Gospels, I learned him for myself. Then I branched out to how he made his mark. So I, I really didn't get over religious with the do's and don'ts. I went into it with, I'm trying to understand God, like God, I'm trying to understand you. I'm having a hard time. I got hatred, anger, unforgiveness. I got all these things in my heart. But I'm sitting here with you. I want to build a relationship. How can I understand you? Not you through my situation, but just you, the Creator. And then that helped me be like, where did he stand and when all this was happening. But sometimes we try to understand people or God through our situation versus let me just understand the entity, let me understand this and then branch out from that. And so it was really just understanding him, seeing him as God and not as the person who didn't stop my trauma, didn't stop what happened to me. I, I didn't, I didn't go into it with that mentality because, well, you'll never find the right answer.

38:06 Thank you. And so when you told your mother, it was very Very hard because you didn't want to hurt her. And how did that resolve? How did that. After you told her, what was the relationship like between the two of you? How was it moving forward?

38:28 It changed because now I knew that she might feel guilty, she might feel distant, not knowing what to do, what to say, because my mother wasn't abused. And so I didn't really. You know, I always talk about respond to release and don't, you know, speak to release, don't speak for a response. I had already been like, hey, no matter how anybody responds, I'm speaking to get this out of my head. If I speak for a response, I'm going to re victimize myself if people don't respond how I want them to, because, yes, I can want everybody to respond and react, but each one of these people are their own person. They may not respond how I want them to, and I need to be okay with that. So I already kind of like. Like I said, I had started this spiritual journey, which kind of helped me understand how to deal and handle people. So with my mom, it was just like, she's hurt, probably feel guilty, she's going through her head, she's going through therapy about it. So it was a lot for her. So it kind of like now I was in that state where now I told my mom it's time for me to go be the best person I could be. Now, like, now I've released it, I've told the most important person in my life that started my journey. So it didn't create distant, but it was just like, okay, now, you know, I gotta let you go through your process and I gotta go do now what I know that I'm causing it.

39:57 Awesome. Like, really clear boundaries.

40:00 Yes, clear.