Emotional Bravery--From Pain to Purpose: Charde Young part 2
Jan 29, 2024Season 2Episode 2
Ann and Charde
Vulnerability equals strength. Authentic, emotional bravery vs. societal pressures of concealment. Charde Young, also known as Love Freely, as we discuss how our toughest moments can lead us to profound growth and authenticity fosters genuine connections.
Destiny vs. Choice. Was your path chosen for you or do you choose your path. Can we find life's purpose amidst the chaos. Charde and Ann discuss the lives that were given them and the paths that they chose to change their trajectory.
The two discuss the narratives that we inherit and the ones we write for ourselves. They get pretty personal as they unlock their diaries so they can rewrite their stories.
Join us for this intimate exchange where the personal becomes universal and self-discovery becomes a transformation.
Vulnerability equals strength. Authentic, emotional bravery vs. societal pressures of concealment. Charde Young, also known as Love Freely, as we discuss how our toughest moments can lead us to profound growth and authenticity fosters genuine connections.
Destiny vs. Choice. Was your path chosen for you or do you choose your path. Can we find life's purpose amidst the chaos. Charde and Ann discuss the lives that were given them and the paths that they chose to change their trajectory.
The two discuss the narratives that we inherit and the ones we write for ourselves. They get pretty personal as they unlock their diaries so they can rewrite their stories.
Join us for this intimate exchange where the personal becomes universal and self-discovery becomes a transformation.
Welcome to Real Talk with Tina and Anne. Thank you so much for joining us. Today we continue this three-part series with the beautiful Chardae Young, also known as Love Freely. We have been blessed to have her wisdom on this podcast and I have been blessed to call her friend. You will hear more about doing it afraid, doing it with shame and making the best of this thing we call life.
Speaker 1:
We want to make a difference here on Real Talk with Tina and Anne, and we can't thank you enough for listening. Please join us every week. Either you can listen to us on wdjyfmcom every Sunday from 11am to 12pm or you can listen to us wherever you get your podcasts. We drop new episodes every Wednesday at 10am. You can visit us at Real Talk with Tina and Anne, on Facebook and also at our website at RealTalk with Tina and Annecom. Leave us a message and we will get back to you. Spread the word, spread the love. Remember there is purpose in the pain and hope in the journey. Here is our interview with Chardae Young, also known as Love Freely. You know, one of the things in that Mariska article that I read is that you can be vulnerable and be a badass at the same time. I love that man. I was just like that's me. I think that that might be you as well, because I kind of catch that with you a little bit.
Speaker 2:
I think my vulnerability makes me a badass, if that's making sense. I think a lot of us just being vulnerable is simply being you. I think once you get to a place where you're no longer identifying with your parents, you're no longer identifying with the religion you were raised in, you're not identifying with the job title you have, once you strip or detach yourself from all the things that you do and realize they don't equate to who you are, that makes you vulnerable. That, to me, makes you a badass, because you have the courage to stand up in the room and just be you. You're not attached to anything else, it's just you shining your light. I think I see vulnerability as like yeah, that's confidence, that's badass, especially in the world where we're trying Most people are trying to.
Speaker 2:
We wear masks. That's what I tell my children. I do a mask.
Speaker 2:
Most people you meet are wearing a mask and trying to be who they think society wants them to be, to be accepted. Then if you take the mask off, on the inside of that mask they're uncomfortable really, or confused. They don't really want to be tied to the person that their mother wants them to be, their father wants them to be or the person that pain calls them to be. There are others trapped in survival mode too, behind every mask. If you take the mask off, that's the real person. That's the person that the world needs. That's the person that God or source whatever you're calling it sent to Earth to make a difference, because we all are here for a purpose. A lot of us don't know what our purpose is, because we're trying to appease the masses of people around us, or who we think we're supposed to be. The only thing you're supposed to be is you. I think that makes you a badass, just waking up saying I'm just going to be who I am and knowing that that is enough.
Speaker 1:
Being able to connect with people you can't connect with people. With all that on there, especially the masks that we wear when we take those off, we're finally able to connect with other people.
Speaker 2:
That's true, you can connect with people, but they won't be the people you're supposed to connect with. They're going to be associated with that mask you have on. You'll find yourself in this constant loop of meeting people, hanging out and realizing you have nothing in common with them. You go through this inner turmoil every time you're with these people is because these aren't your people. You can't connect on the soul level with anyone if you're pretending they're connected to the person you're pretending to be, just completely be yourself, and then you have interactions like the one we had. We met organically, based upon our energy. If I was pretending, it wouldn't be because you would be like, okay, no, this is not who this person is.
Speaker 1:
We can pick up on that pretty quickly when we know that somebody is fake, just keep it surface and I move on.
Speaker 2:
That's all you could do. Granted to go back to my childhood. I want to speak on this because every person you meet has a story. Every person you meet has experienced the feelings of what you felt while you were going through it. It may not have been abuse, but everyone has felt neglected, everyone has felt sad, everyone has felt other at some point. Everyone has felt joy. We've all went through anger. There are human emotions. Now it may appear to be different for others, but it's all the same feeling.
Speaker 2:
That's the pain. You see, I've been through a lot in my life. A lot of it happened, more so when I went to college, like 18 and up, I experienced a lot that would be considered pain and traumatic. To be honest, it was something that I had to grow through. A lot of it came down to just not knowing who I was or what I wanted. That's what caused a lot of pain for me. It allowed me to attach myself to different people and environments that did not serve me. I went through a lot doing that. So what you see on stage is an overcoming like really just someone who had the courage to just be themselves and not feel like they had to be who they might want it to be who their church expected her to be. It's just I am me. This is how.
Speaker 1:
I come. You were really speaking the truth when it comes down to being able to translate that pain, being able to learn from it, being able to get up there and being able to let other people and draw people in. I don't know if it was you who said this, but you did say about being confident. I am. This is what I got out of. I think it was you that might have said this to me a while ago. I am not confident, but I'm courageous. That's me. I say that all the time and I have. I wrote that down and I was like man, I am going to live by that. Yeah, it's that do the phrase that we're talking about and so many times I go into even this podcast, everything that I've done that's been new or whatever, and it's the unknown going into the unknown. And anytime we grow, we're stepping into the unknown and we don't feel that confidence when we're always stepping outside of our little box.
Speaker 1:
And every step that we take. It's that we're not doing it necessarily with confidence, but we're doing it because we're courageous. That's it.
Speaker 2:
That's what a lot of people stop me and say I wish I had your confidence and I might be careful what you wish for, Because if you had my confidence it would be a little slim. I'm more courageous than anything. I'm not scared to take a risk. I'm not scared to look crazy, sound crazy. I'm not afraid of like the pushback of taking a risk, Like if I take a risk on something and it doesn't work, I can always go back to doing what I was doing.
Speaker 2:
That's how I look at everything. I have mastered survival. So if I take a leap of faith and it doesn't work, I know I'm going to survive, I'm not going to be, I know how to take care of myself, so why not take the chance? And it's just courage. That kind of appears to be confidence, because you can be courageous and really not be that confident about it Because you, like you said, it's an unknown territory. It's like I don't even know what I'm doing, but I'm doing it because this is what I want to do. And then in the doing you learn and in the doing it gets easier, just like your podcast. When you first started it you had to figure it out like how you wanted it to look.
Speaker 2:
What did you want to talk about, like how to even get it uploaded to different sites? These are things you did not know until you did it. You know, and now you can just fluidly do it. You know how to follow a script. You know how to find the people you want to speak to. It becomes a flow. But it would have never happened if you didn't have the courage to start. So just do the things. Yeah, that's what I tell people Just do the things and figure it all out on the other side. But as long as you're on this side, nothing's going to get done.
Speaker 1:
You know, one of the other things that has really talked to me is my shame, and you know, being able to feel shame and allow it to hold you back versus, you know, just pushing forward and turning that shame around and being able to move forward. You know that's man.
Speaker 2:
That shame has taken me out. That's one of my biggest things. Shame, well, to me, is like a silent killer, because I've had that experience. It was like something I did at 19 that stayed on me until like last year and I'm about to be 38. And I went to therapy and it made sense to me.
Speaker 2:
I was beating myself up for nearly 20 years for something I did when I was a teenager, when I didn't even have the mindset to realize that what I was doing was wrong. So I have to first you have to like learn to give yourself grace for the things you didn't know. You know, because what we do is we get to a stage in our life where we, I guess, a point of realization, like we realize how to be a good person, and then we go back and we nitpick it all the times we weren't and we carry that like guilt of what we did 20 years ago with us on and on and on. No, just give yourself grace, speak to that child. And I have to go back and say you were a child, girl, you didn't know. You have to just let that go and move forward. And you don't even realize that it is that shame because it morphs into other things over time, like I didn't realize that I was holding on to shame until I went to therapy two years ago for something.
Speaker 1:
I did when I was 19.
Speaker 2:
I had no idea that that was causing me to act in certain ways in different areas of my life, simply because I was holding on to the shame. I was putting up barriers and holding myself back from things that could and relationships that could have been very successful. But I was ashamed of who I was and then I had to realize I'm no longer that person. I've been like five different people since then.
Speaker 1:
And it's allowing yourself to deserve it. Yes, that's huge, because after my dad passed away, there was so much abuse going on in my house and my mom gave my sister who wasn't really my sister, but my cousin who was living with me as my sister for several years, and anyway she was given back into the system and she was lied to and I was told that I was never allowed to ever tell my sister she was going into the system.
Speaker 2:
Oh, my goodness.
Speaker 1:
And it was a really, and my sister ended up blaming me for many, many years after that for it happening to her, even though I was only 11 and she was eight, and I owned it, I owned it and I constantly. I think that that was one of the reasons why I would stop short of success and allowing myself to be able to deserve to be, able to move forward, to move on from that. So we have to give ourselves permission to move on away from some things that we have, whatever's happened.
Speaker 2:
I'm adding that I always say give yourself grace, but you have to give yourself the permission to let that go, because you were 11. Yeah, just think of that 11 years old you know, what we were told to do.
Speaker 1:
My oldest well, my oldest son he's going to be 11 coming up and I look at him and I'm like, oh my gosh, I was a baby. Yes, you were a baby. I think of myself at that age and I think that I was like this grown person with all these major responsibilities, because I did have a lot of responsibility back then.
Speaker 1:
And I have allowed so much from my past to be able to affect my decisions today and not allow myself to move forward and not allow and I wouldn't give myself the permission to be okay and to move forward.
Speaker 2:
You were robbing yourself from joy and happiness.
Speaker 1:
You were robbing yourself, yeah, and look at how many of you you said 20 years. Look at how many of us don't give us permission to be able to move on from something that we did so long ago and we are completely different people now and we're not that person, or maybe circumstances just happen the way they do and 20 years later we have to be able to rewrite our story.
Speaker 2:
There it is. You are the author and finisher of your fate. So, like this is, I try to look at my life like it's a movie and I know this sound crazy to people when I say it. I'm the main character, and then there's other sub characters and then you have, you know, all these different people you have characters in and, just like movies, they have sequels and characters Change out. It's okay because you're writing the script. You get to choose what your?
Speaker 2:
character is and remember. A lot of us forget that we are the main character in our life and what we do is allow circumstances and people to make decisions for us and tell us who it is. We're going to be in our movie. This is my movie, so, and I'm writing the script. So if I want to be Princess Tiana for the next two years, that's who I'm going to show up as, and if you don't want to be in this movie, someone else could be in here. I can bring another character in to be my sidekick or whoever you know. This is just. Life is but a dream, it's a play, and we make it.
Speaker 1:
You know you're speaking to my poor. I just absolutely love it. You know, one of the things I was going to talk about was you know if you think that you choose your own path or if your path is chosen for you. That's good. That's a good question.
Speaker 2:
My God Partially. Now I choose my path and also I think it was chosen for me. It's a weird combination. I feel like we come this is just my belief system Before we got here. I feel like our path was already written for us. And then we get here and we don't remember our path because you know you have.
Speaker 2:
You're born into a family. They believe what they believe in. You don't choose that, like no one chooses to be born into an abusive family. I didn't choose to be in my family, necessarily the religious background or everything. You don't choose that innately, you're just born into it. And I think then you have to also think about the world and all the problems within it. And that's when it becomes chosen for you, especially as a child. That's why I always try to remind children like it's okay, like this world innately is created for you. Now You're doing whatever your mom or dad is telling you to do, and then you have those years between like 18, when you get 18 up, where you kind of can create it on your own. You carve out your own path.
Speaker 2:
But I feel like our God given purpose is given to us before we even hit the earth and it's our job to remember what that is amidst all the chaos that we experienced, and I feel like once we it's fast for me. The older I get, the more I see that I have it's power in my tongue and my energy and I've just felt like I am here to be a light and to show people that they can do it Like I'm just like everybody. I walk past. I'm no different from you. I go to work, I come home, I have children, but so many people tell me I'm an inspiration to them and it's like you can be an inspiration to someone too If you just walk in your light, you know and then talk about it until other people to do it. I feel like that is my purpose now.
Speaker 2:
So I feel like in some cases your path is chosen and where it's like by the higher power, I feel like the higher power kind of knows what they have you here for. And then if you allow the world to like, if you don't think for yourself, then your path is chosen for you. Like, if I allow my environment to dictate who I am, if I allow my past and my home environment to define me, then my path is not really chosen for me. My path now is attached to whatever people think I'm supposed to be. Like. Let's say I was a bully in school and I did a bad thing. Let's just use that. Let's say, at 12 year old, 16 years old, a young boy stole some candy from the store and he went to a detention center. He can allow that to be his story for the rest of his life and is chosen for him.
Speaker 2:
Or he can flip the switch and say that was something I did at 12 or 16 and I'm carving a new path. So it depends on to me, your mindset, whether your path is chosen for you, or if you choose it yourself.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, that's really good because there were so many negative things that happened to me. But when I reached a certain point and I allowed those negative, abusive things that happened to me in my past, as a child growing up, to affect me into my adulthood, and what ended up happening was it was just this cycle where I kept putting myself into the same situations, creating the same feelings within myself, and finally I woke up one day after I was living in an apartment by myself at this time because of all these things that had happened, and I said you know what? I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.
Speaker 2:
Let's go.
Speaker 1:
And I turned it into a master's degree in helping people and I got more out of helping people than I ever did, trying to get help for myself.
Speaker 2:
That's major. That's, to me, is what the masses need to hear. In helping people, you help you. Like the affirmations that I say on stage, I'm saying them to me, I tell people all the time I'm talking to me first, because every time you help someone, you're helping yourself. Every time you speak light into someone, you're speaking light into you because you hear your voice first, right, right. So giving is always going to be the way you receive. And in helping other people, you also realize that there are people out here who went through far more than what you went through, or going through far more than what you're going through.
Speaker 2:
And it will help you see the light in your own situation.
Speaker 1:
Right, and when I held hands with some women that had been raped or some little girls that had been molested when they were in the hospital and things like that, it was like being able to be stripped down and being able to connect with that pain with somebody else and it just really.
Speaker 1:
I think it's healing for both individuals when something like that happens and that takes me back to the Olivia Benson or the Mariska Hargitay coming back and what she has fueled into that show and what she's gone through in her life 30 years ago, by the way and that's another thing is being able to acknowledge your pain, because so many times and then when we go to acknowledge it, there are people who want to shut us up or say you weren't over that yet, my god, so many years ago, why are you still hanging onto that? And it's like I'm just trying to be real here and you're trying to rob me of that and we just get stuck. And so it's being able to just be authentic and be able to connect, and when we are willing to talk about it or able to talk about it, we have that freely to be able to do. It's so important to move on.
Speaker 2:
It's very important and you being with the victims and being a victim yourself, you can see that you're not alone. A lot of times, especially as children, you feel like this is happening to me and no one else. Why is this happening to me? And you realize that it didn't only just happen to you. A lot of people have experienced the same thing and it's an odd type of I don't know what the feeling to call it. When you meet somebody who went through what you went through, it kind of it takes the burden of the isolation you put yourself through, like, oh, this just happened to me, so I am defiled. No, this didn't just happen to you, it happened to her too.
Speaker 2:
And now I have somebody who relates to the story that I'm able to tell, cause sometimes we are trying to share our journey and our pain with people who don't care, and that is the problem. We open our mouth, even your gifts. Sometimes we are trying to share big news with people who don't want to see us win. So those aren't the spaces for you. You go in the spaces where someone is welcoming you at in totality your pain, your joy, all of it. Right, you know, and a lot of times we're, and that could be the pain addiction. A lot of us are addicted to pain. That's why we can go through these cycles. These cycles because it's what we know, it's what we've been used to is being hurt. So that's why you keep meeting the same stranger is what I like to call it. You keep meeting the same person, just in a different body. The same person in a different body, and it's a lot of. It is because we're kind of comfortable with the pain after a while, because this is what we know.
Speaker 1:
It's easy.
Speaker 2:
I can figure this out. I know what this looked like. I know how this feels. I know exactly what this is and that's why we get in these cycles of pain with so many different people with different faces. It could be businesses, jobs, relationships. It's the same feelings. It's because we're we're innately comfortable with it and we don't see it as that. And then it's like the unknown and scary when we go out and say, hey, I'm tired of this, you're going into a world that you don't understand, because all you understood was pain Right.
Speaker 1:
And so then, when I felt, when I felt myself getting closer to success or healthy connection, I was sabotage.
Speaker 2:
Yes, I was just going to say that Self-sabotage I'm creeping in. I've been through that a lot. The one thing I did experience was as a child was when my father and my mother split and what. I got from that and my father would take me with him to cheat on my mother.
Speaker 2:
Now, at the time I didn't know that it affected me, but until I started having relationships of my own. So what I thought of men when I first started dating is that this is what they do. And as a girl, I was a daddy's girl, so he could. He would have told me this guy was green, that's the color I would have told the world this guy was. So that's. And then I realized as an adult oh, I'm dating my father because this is what I know a man to be.
Speaker 2:
So I found myself in all of these basically tragic relationships because it was what I was used to, is what I knew, this is what I experienced. So I thought that this is what relationships were supposed to be, until I was introduced to men who weren't like that. So when I got into a relationship that was love I saw sabotage it because I didn't know what to. I didn't know what to do in that space, even though I kept saying I deserve love, I want love. I did not know what to do with it. And it was a wow experience for me.
Speaker 2:
And that's when I realized like, okay, maybe I do have like trauma behind this and I need to deal with it and I have to go to therapy because I'm just going to continue to date my father and think that it's okay and be hurt by men and not understand how to receive true love. This wasn't okay, sharda. This will happen to you you being around and basically lying to your mother for your father. That wasn't okay. So I had to see like that wasn't okay. And it's not okay that I'm dating him continuously, just dating him, dating him. It's not okay. It's not okay to self-sabotage actual love and care. So let's figure out how to love yourself whole. Know that you deserve a real love. I didn't think I deserved it, to be honest. I thought that I should get the type of love relationship my mom had Now?
Speaker 1:
did you blame yourself for keeping family secrets like that? Because I blamed myself I did.
Speaker 2:
A lot of my shame came from that and I eventually had a conversation with my mother and she was just like you were a child. I was like 10 years old, nine and 10 when they left and I was like Mom you know, I'm sorry, I think I was like 18. And like I knew dad was cheating on you and he was manipulating me as a child. So for me I just feel like, oh, I just basically messed my mother over. I wasn't being a good daughter because I knew that this was happening. I could have told her. But yeah, I carried a lot of shame and guilt behind that and I didn't realize until I was older that I had trauma behind that, seeing my father cheat and being over these women's house. I didn't realize that it was traumatic for me. I just started with life until I started dating and then it hit me like, oh, I have like daddy issues and I have to fix this or I'm going to keep dating the same man over and over.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, yeah, well, you know, my dad died so, and he was. He was my adopted dad.
Speaker 1:
So, you know and it's really mixed the feelings I have about my biological dad. I actually got to connect with my siblings, which I've never talked about this on the podcast before, which is really interesting. But I have been able to connect with my biological siblings on my dad's side so and it was actually kind of a good connection. But I did find out that I was conceived in rape and I did find out that he wasn't a good man. I really did. I had been told this through my biological mom's side because she didn't even want me at her death. I was a memory, I was a bad memory, yeah. And so when you're told that you're nothing but a rape, you know it really sticks with you for years.
Speaker 1:
Well, after my dad had died, I went and I actually did have a relationship that was very small with my biological mom and I initially had thought that my dad was somebody else, later to find out, no, it was this person over here. So you know that was a little confusing, yeah, and you know, I did the genetics, the DNA test or whatever, and then I did end up finding some of these people that were on my biological father's side, and he wasn't a good man, he was an awful man actually, but you know that's another whole layer to this is not owning who our parents are or what they did and we're not. Them we're not, and that's another whole part of rewriting our story and not letting others define us.
Speaker 2:
It really is. I tell my I do affirmations with my children, and one of them is I am not my parents Right, Because it took. It takes us a while to separate ourselves from that.
Speaker 1:
We're going to cut off the interview with Chardae Young right here, but stay tuned next week because it is going to continue and she has so much more amazing things to say. Thank you so much for listening and see you next time.