Afua Hirsch: “Nobody gets to police our bodies!” How to reject beauty trends

0:00Hello and a massive welcome to Happy Place with me Fern Cotton. This is the show that helps you question if you're really living the life you want. Today, I'm chatting to Afuwa Hirsch. My professional life, I analyse social structures, social injustice, systems of race, narratives about history, all these big ideas that kind of exist outside of me. And then I realised when I turned 40 that I hadn't been doing that same work on my ideas about myself. I was applying those very same colonial and racist ideas to my body, to things as intimate as my figure and my sexuality and my relationship to my body hair and my skin.

0:45Do you know what? This chat is one that I was really, really keen to have, especially because it revolves around body image. And look, I know that many of you listeners, not exclusively, but many of you will be women suffering with body image issues. and that's of course not to exclude the lovely men that listen to this podcast and who I would heartily encourage to listen to it more tell your friends chaps who also suffer with body image I know that it can feel a really female centric topic but of course there are so many men who are going through absolute hell with this one as well so do stick around men if you think this chat isn't for you bloody well is it's so fascinating and you know I've obviously been there I've had I had eating disorders in my 20s and I can still sometimes dip into having a sort of slightly warped view of what I look like.

1:32I think most people, most humans do on this planet because we are constantly bombarded, you know, in the most obvious way with imagery and what is acceptable and what is not. and what this chat is really about is not just sitting there ranting and raving about it, it's dissecting the history of these narratives, how we've even got them in our subconscious. It is incredible and also may I add I'm slightly obsessed with Afua, want to be her best friend and might have been a bit try hard about it at the end of the chat. Anyway, we'll get to that. Now if you follow me on Instagram you might have also seen that I did a roundup of books recently.

2:13One of them was Afua's. It's called Decolonising My Body. Afua is an award-winning storyteller and, by the way, a former barrister, as if she couldn't be any more impressive. Her work focuses on culture, identity and social justice. This book is mesmerising. It examines beauty and rituals and ancestry as an approach to radical justice. It's full of storytelling. It's full of Afua's own thoughts and history but also as I nodded to earlier it really unpicks things that I had no idea about that I actually feel slightly ashamed to have not known about with conclusions that end up being very liberating and I think you'll feel exactly the same and it's got some beautiful photography in there too you will love this book we talk about so much body hair being one of them we haven't even talked about body hair on happy place and we've been going guys for nearly seven years.

3:07We also discuss and dissect why many of us have got to a point where we're all loathing things about our bodies, including periods. Why do we hate being on our periods so much? Why do we only talk about it negatively? I was just literally on my period at the weekend and I caught myself out moaning about it, going, oh, bloody hell, it's so inconvenient. This chat changed all of that. And that's why I caught myself with that one and stopped in my tracks. and I think you're going to feel the same. I hope you feel the same. And by the way, we talk about so much more. So stick around.

4:02Upwork.com now and find your freelance expert. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Post a job for free and get started today. Hi, this is Knox from the Popcast with Knox and Jamie. And maybe like us at the Popcast, you also know people who have been smokers or vapors. And Zen is the one product it seems like everyone is talking about. Because there are many good reasons to make a change to Zen nicotine pouches. Reasons like Zen nicotine pouches are still America's number one choice for smoke-free, hands-free nicotine satisfaction. And you can choose between 10 varieties, each variety available in either 3 or 6 milligrams.

4:35Check out zen.com slash find to find zen at a store near you. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Dr. India Woods here. As a veterinarian, I demand a lot of my scrubs on the job. That's why I show up in figs. Figs are made for the sometimes crazy situations I find myself in. It doesn't matter if I have to squat, sit, bend, or even chase after one of my patients. FIGS moves with me and keeps me comfortable in the highest pressure situations. FIGS gives me one less thing to worry about. Get 15 % off your first order by visiting wearfigs.com and use code FIGSRX at checkout.

5:12That's wearfigs.com, code FIGSRX. Did you know that parents rank financial literacy as the number one most difficult life skill to teach? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app for families. With Greenlight, you can set up chores, automate allowance, and keep an eye on your kids' spending with real-time notifications. Kids learn to earn, save, and spend wisely. And parents can rest easy knowing their kids are learning about money with guardrails in place. Sign up for Greenlight today at greenlight.com slash podcast. Right, let's crack on with the show. And you join me and Afua in the middle of one of my favorite topics, the joy of writing on paper with a gorgeous little pen.

6:05so

6:16i make like handwritten notes on the book that's literally like how i is that what you did so look We've unofficially started the podcast, guys. We're in because we've just started talking. But, I mean, you will see here. I actually, that's eyeliner because I couldn't find a pen and I was in bed. So I've underlined some of it in eyeliner. My books all look like that. Pencil, pen, eyeliner, whatever I could get my hair. I love it. But I love making notes. And after this book, Decolonising My Body, I mean, I loved it so much. And I believe that a true compliment only really lands if you give reason to the compliment.

6:52So I'll tell you some of the reasons. Please. One of the reasons I love this book is because you so effortlessly switch between your incredibly thorough investigative writing to describing a London winter's day like you're writing a poem. and it's a real skill I think to do that to write something that is heavily steeped in wisdom and fact but is so beautiful to read and also entertaining to read it's not like you're going oh Christ more facts that I need to retain it's just beautiful I love it I really appreciate that it was just a joy and I keep thinking about it I keep telling people about it referencing it in conversation it's That's the highest point for me.

7:43If you feel like, you know, it comes up or it's something you think could reach other people, you know, because that's really why I write is to make it easier for us to navigate this society that we live in. And I really feel more and more with age, we have not been equipped to understand the systems around us, to understand our relationships with ourself, our ideas about something as intimate as our own bodies. Like we still, you know, I'm in my 40s and I'm still having to work it out. And I just think each generation shouldn't have to find it this hard. So everything I do is designed to try and make that a bit easier for us.

8:16Well, you call it an offering, which it very much is. That's the start of the book. And I was like, oh, yeah, this is an offering. This is something that I would gift somebody this. I felt like it was a gift just reading it. And I know for you, this didn't start out necessarily as, I'm going to write a book and it's going to be about this. This was a journey that you wanted to go on. You reached 40. I mean, I had a really similar thing when I got to 40. Because we're the same age, aren't we? We're the same age, exactly. I wrote a book called Bigger Than Us, which is sort of just looking at like, what is bigger than just this experience that I'm having as a human being?

8:49And I think it is a cliche turning point where you start to sort of unpick everything you think you know and what you think you know about yourself and the people around you, and like you say, the systems around you. At what point did this become a book? When did you think, oh, actually, there's something in this that I can offer other people or at least start to write down? I got a tattoo when I turned 40 and there's a whole story behind the tattoo, but it was the conversations that my tattoo prompted. I found myself having conversations in the same theme with so many people and those conversations alerted me to the fact that everyone was thinking along the same lines, asking themselves the same questions, but didn't have the knowledge to really answer those questions.

9:34And that's when I started to think, because when I got my tattoo done, And I wrote an article in Vogue, a feature. And as far as I was concerned, I was done. I'd had this experience. I was on this journey. I wrote this article. And then those conversations made me think, maybe there's more to this. It opened my mind to a whole space. And the idea behind the tattoo as well really made me realize, basically, I've been living this kind of like double life. because my professional life, I analyze social structures, social injustice, systems of race, narratives about history, all these big ideas that kind of exist outside of me that affect us in the world.

10:18And then I realized when I turned 40 that I hadn't been doing that same work on my ideas about myself. I am the first person to identify and critique a colonial or racist idea when I see it outside but I was applying those very same colonial and racist ideas to my body to things as intimate as my figure and my sexuality and my relationship to my body hair and my skin and that's when I thought if I have these massive blind spots and this is basically what I do then we all must need to think about this a bit more so that was the thinking and then once I started thinking that way you couldn't stop me and it's always like that with my books once I once I really get into it like even if I couldn't get a publisher and I didn't think anyone would read it I will write that book and it will write itself because it's in you it's already there and I mean I want to talk about everything that you've just mentioned we can maybe start with a tattoo because it is absolutely gorgeous I love that you chose to have it on your hand because you're a writer I love that thank you and it's so beautiful so tell us the story behind it because obviously the actual design and pattern has got deep meaning connection to your lineage and something that you were really keen to explore and learn more about it really was so it really started with a friend who had her abdomen tattooed it was it's the most beautiful tattoo and she was saying that she's one of these women that basically always had an effortless six-pack just for the record I'm not that person but she is it was and she to the point that she used to think what are all these other chicks complaining about like what's the deal you know you just do a couple of sit-ups every now and then and she had a child and bounced straight back but then she had twins and then for the first time in her life the way she described it she wasn't that happy about the way her stomach looked and then she started thinking as I think we all do about well maybe I could get a nip and a talk and a procedure or some liposuction.

12:19And it really surprised me because she I see her as quite a radical, self-loving feminist. And it really surprised me that she would even think about doing something like that. But instead, she decided to have her stomach tattooed with a pattern that channeled her heritage, her African ancestry, and turn it into a kind of place of worship and joy instead of trying to change it, like really embrace what it is and adorn it in a way that made her fall in love with it again. And I just thought that was such a beautiful idea. And it made me think more deeply about my attitudes towards skin, bodies, tattoos.

12:57And my family, my mum's family comes from Ghana. And Ghana was colonised by the British. I would say my family were quite early and enthusiastic adopters of colonialism. They were converted to Christianity in the 1700s, which is really early. And as a result, I think I have been conditioned with some of these quite Victorian Christian ideas about purity and virginity and holiness. And I always disliked tattoos. And I thought it was quite an original thing. I just like clear skin. I just like really pure skin. And when I had this conversation with my friend and saw how beautiful her tattoo was.

13:39It made me question that and think, why do I associate tattoos with something so negative? When I started to research tattoos, I realized that millennia of women in my family tattooed and used scarification to adorn their bodies. It was a way of celebrating aging, marking rites of passage, just adorning yourself with the reality of being on this earth, surviving, serving your community, finding your purpose, delivering children, healing other people, whatever it is your skill was, there were ways that in actually all indigenous societies share this in common. It's incredible how much continuity there is.

14:15If you go to the Arctic or the Amazon, Middle East, Africa, Asia, all of these societies have quite similar traditions, especially where women would adorn themselves with scars or tattoos as a way of really celebrating their body. And I just had this epiphany, right, where I realized I thought it was completely normal for a woman my age to go and have a surgical procedure done go under a general anesthetic have some man probably cut her open with a knife but I thought it was kind of barbaric to have these kind of adornments scars tattoos things that generations of my ancestors did and it really landed that I had this very colonized mindset the thing that's very natural and celebrates your existence and your belonging I thought was taboo and the thing that is representing your self-loathing and adhering to beauty standards you didn't create, I thought was completely normal.

15:07And that was when it landed. I was like, this isn't who I am. And that's when I decided that I was going to get a tattoo and I was going to try to, in a way, circle back to 300 years to my female ancestors before they were converted to Christianity. Because it was really missionaries who persuaded people in countries like Ghana that their traditional practices were bad, that they were backward, they were savage, they were pagan, that progress and civilization was behaving more like Victorian English women. And so they abandoned huge swathes of their culture, so many traditions, so much knowledge and power that has actually kept them alive and innovating for so many millennia, literally.

15:48And I just started to think about so much that had been lost. And I, in a way, this was going to be my act of reclaiming some of the lost heritage to try and find what were the practices my female ancestors did before they succumbed to these Eurocentric ideas that have actually been quite bad for us. Because if you have a society that worships youth, the one thing that's guaranteed is that all women especially will feel bad about themselves. Yep. Because we're all going to age. Yes. Such a set up. I mean, this is the thing that I just loved. I mean, so many things from this book. But when we look at age specifically, and you look at so many different cultures around the world that still put on a pedestal their elders they are called elders for a reason they are there and they are entrenched with wisdom and storytelling and information they can pass down and in western society now it's just like oh she's looking a bit old and it's like oh my god we're missing so much i mean i i'm a big believer in intergenerational friendship i've got really good female friends in their 70s i had a friend in her 80s who sadly died a couple of years ago and the storytelling and the stuff they would pass down.

16:59I'm not going to get that from someone in their 40s the same age as me, someone in their 20s who's younger. We're just losing so much. And I think what I was obviously aware of but have learned so much more about from loving your work but certainly reading this book is how colonisation has so directly impacted women specifically, globally, in every sense, whether it's looking at beauty standards, you know the the missing facts about periods and hormones and and menopause and and puberty all of this all of these beautiful sort of rituals and wisdom and tradition that has been completely wiped out has left all of us slightly free-falling and going I don't know what I'm meant to do at this stage in my life because nobody's told me do you know what's sinister about it though is how much it's been by design so it's interesting actually like we're sitting here in London I I mean, Europe was actually one of the oldest cultures of these tattooing and scarification practices.

17:57The oldest female mummies with these kind of tattoos have been found in the Alps, in Eastern Europe. There are examples in the British Isles as well. And all these indigenous cultures, it's not just elsewhere, also here, had similar ideas. Because this is foundational to humanity, the need for rituals and rites of passage, the need to venerate elders. to it's a matter of survival, keeping wisdom and valuing it. And the people who have the knowledge to keep your society alive and thriving have been elevated throughout the ages. And it was only really in the last 1500 years with the advent of a very European relationship with Christianity.

18:38It's not even Christianity, because actually, if you look at Christianity in the Middle East, Coptic traditions or Ethiopian traditions, completely different. But the way Christianity evolved in Europe felt very threatened by the power that women had in these indigenous societies. And we all know about the burning of witches and lots of these practices that basically demonize the very women who should have been being venerated. Older women who were repositories of indigenous knowledge and connection to the elements and to herbs. These were the people who were persecuted. And these practices of women celebrating their body, owning their sexuality, understanding their power was very threatening to a patriarchal order.

19:14And it had to be stamped out. And I think those practices then got spread throughout the world because Europeans colonized the world. But actually, women in Europe have suffered maybe more than anyone from those ideas because they've been victims of them for longer. So, you know, I growing up in the late 20th century, there was this idea of progress. You know, you just kind of move forward, new technology, space exploration, globalization, capitalism. I think now we're in a different moment where we're recognizing the catastrophe those ideas have wrought, the climate destruction. All of these ideas of industrialization have completely put out the future of our race at peril.

19:50We are facing the possibility of extinction because of those ideas. And one of the things that's been lost in this race to just follow European ideas about progress and industrialization is all of these knowledge systems that existed for millennia that allowed people to live in harmony with the planet, in harmony in communities. These ideas about never accumulating excess, about respecting the cycles of nature, literally sustainable living. You know, it's been rebranded as some like new American idea. It is how people lived for almost the entirety of history. And in a way, one of the silver linings of this really difficult time is that it opens a space for us to say in a bigger way, what else have we lost?

20:37What has been swept aside in this thing we were told was progress? And it's been bad for so many of us. It's definitely been bad for black people. You look at, you know, the way colonialism has rested on racist ideas. It's been so bad for women. It's been so bad for people who don't fit into gender binaries. Like all of these indigenous cultures had much more fluid and intuitive understandings of how life and sexuality and age and seasons and cycles work in our bodies as well as outside. And I really started to feel the more I got into this, how much had been lost. Our ancestors knew this and they practice it.

21:15And now we're having to struggle to work out the things that were worked out for ages.

21:23Hi, this is Knox from the Popcast with Knox and Jamie. And maybe like us at the Popcast, you also know people who have been smokers or vapors. And Zen is the one product it seems like everyone is talking about. Because there are many good reasons to make a change to Zen nicotine pouches. Reasons like Zen nicotine pouches are still America's number one choice for smoke-free, hands-free nicotine satisfaction. And you can choose between 10 varieties, each variety available in either 3 or 6 milligrams. Check out zen.com slash find to find Zen at a store near you. Warning, this product contains nicotine.

21:54Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

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23:03That's why I show up in FIGS. FIGS are made for the sometimes crazy situations I find myself in. It doesn't matter if I have to squat, sit, bend, or even chase after one of my patients. FIGS moves with me and keeps me comfortable in the highest pressure situations. FIGS gives me one less thing to worry about. Get 15 % off your first order by visiting wearfigs.com and use code FIGSRX at checkout. That's wearfigs.com, code FIGSRX. The storytelling stopped and that is a huge shame. You know, I'd love to be able to go back several generations and say, you know, tell me what you know about how the female body works or how you are honouring it.

23:42And I think one of the most obvious ways and something you explore greatly in the book is looking at the female menstrual cycle and how, I mean, it's still shrouded in shame and it feels so bizarre to think in this day and age we're still shoving tampons up our sleeve and shuffling to the toilet in an embarrassed fashion and and completely mortified and often shocked and surprised when we come on our period because we don't know when the fuck it's going to happen it seems absurd that we're still or actually it's getting worse and and you know you you dive into it's a plethora of reasons as to why we're in in this situation one obviously is this lost wisdom and and the rituals and the um and the empowerment that we've completely forgotten that comes along with periods and also just looking at the basics of advertising and that we see these you know sort of women ice skating on their period and then you go oh yeah we've got to crack on i've just got to that was the marketing i mean that we grew up with it was like on your period don't worry put this up you exactly that was that was presented as a massive success if you can hide it yes mask it nobody knows it's happening it's like all discretion discreet this discreet that it's all colored pink and told telling you that you can be a boss you can be in the c-suite as long as you wear like an ultra tampon and you can't and and take some some specially pink packaged period painkillers yeah and actually when you are in pain your body is telling you something when you have no energy your body is telling you to rest and I was the worst.

25:10I was that person who was actually proud of the fact that I cracked on. Never took a day off, never slept late in bed, no matter how bad my period was, I'll be in the gym and I'll be at work. And I thought that was some kind of achievement. And it's taken me till this big age to realize actually what I was doing was learning to ignore my body. And that doesn't just apply to your period. You know, that might be how it starts, but in general, it's cutting yourself off from a source of intelligence that's uniquely designed for you. about what is happening to your own body. And it's understandable because we live in a society that doesn't give you menstrual leave.

25:45So what choice do you have? If you have a job and you have to be there, you have to put in a tampon, take a painkiller and keep it moving. And it's just another reminder that none of this has been designed for us. None of this has been built around our needs or facilitating our thriving or our genius. It's all built for a model that we've been shoehorned into at whatever cost. and so in a way this is also a book about the cost like realizing after a lifetime of living that way yes we can do it but I now see the cost and actually I'm going to choose a different path yeah I mean you talk about um you know having friends who you know much like myself have been through the menopause and there's an element of grief you're losing something it's the the acknowledgement of your fertility is over and you're not having that cycle every month and actually getting to that point and thinking I didn't realize that they were a really powerful important part of who I was as a female for from the age of whatever you know for me it was probably 12 13 to when you finish your periods how do you suppose we start really honoring them rather than because we've been conditioned it's not an inherent feeling that periods are awful we've been conditioned to go god they're embarrassing god they're awful they're so inconvenient and you know Yes, there can be pain and there can be discomfort and they can be inconvenient.

27:06But I think a lot of it has been it's conditional that we've been told all of these things. Whereas actually, if we can slightly shift and see them as this miraculous, beautiful thing that we get to experience as women, then I think we can change our mindset, how we move through the world. We probably can choose rest at times over just pushing through. but I wonder how we start that shift how we can start to think of our menstrual cycle as something beautiful and powerful rather than just like fuck I don't want to come my period do you know how it started for me and it's it's interesting isn't how life is sometimes like this when you do something for someone else it ends up helping you so um when my daughter started her period I wanted her to have a puberty initiation because again this is something that almost all cultures did for young women and we've lost I mean I don't know about you when I started my period my mom was like here's a sanitary towel kind of correct keep it moving yeah and that's what her mother did for her and at some point this practice of really initiating girls and teaching them that this is now they're stepping into a new phase of power and also responsibility is something that was totally lost so I wanted to restore that for my daughter so I worked with some amazing women who I write about in the book called Laurence um she's incredible if you look her up I'm so glad you said Laurence because I was going to call her Laurence at some point.

28:24And actually she's changed her name to Sackley. Sackley. Yeah, Sackley. Yeah, she's incredible. And I'll put her link on my Instagram if anyone wants to follow her. But she is initiated into the highest order of priestesses in Benin, which is one of the ancient centres of this kind of knowledge. And she did a puberty initiation for my daughter. And, you know, it's so funny because you invite other women to be part of this circle surrounding your daughter as she goes into this phase. And, you know, I'm thinking this is for the young girls. You know, this is this is for my daughter and her friends and cousins to really understand this phase they're entering.

29:00And, you know, we'll just be there for support. The girls were completely like chill. We were the ones in pieces. It was the women my age who were like on the floor because the initiation ceremony is telling these girls you are entering a phase of incredible power. and here's how to hold it. Here's how to use it. Here's how to harness it. And we are at the other end, you know, coming towards menopause, realising that after basically a lifetime of having that power, we didn't use it. No, we didn't know we had it. We didn't appreciate it. We didn't use it. We just saw it as like a mess that needed to be cleaned up discreetly.

29:37And one of the things that Laurence explained was that if you don't use that power when you have it, you will find yourself grieving for it at the menopause. And that really resonated with me. I was, you know, I've I mean, I think it's a different story. If you haven't had children, there's a different kind of grief that you can face when you lose the chance of fertility. But for me, you know, having had my child being really happy about that, I still felt this this loss, this loss of a power that I hadn't harnessed. And it's never too late. It's honestly never too late. And, you know, entering menopause is not a loss.

30:11It's also a rebirth into a new phase where you have new powers. so just having someone who can guide you through that and and not we're not inventing it from scratch we don't need to make it up or work out for ourselves like there is such a body of knowledge and wisdom to tap into but I'm still a work in progress I mean one of the things you're meant to do is to like perform a ritual with your menstrual blood and I'm like still super squeamish about it like I've had a lifetime of just trying to make it go away so for me to like collect it and then want to kind of like pour it into the earth and do something with it is still quite hard.

30:43I heard of someone on one of their last periods before menopause took the blood and quite literally smeared it over their whole body in a really confronting way you know as you say we've been taught that this is icky this is gross I don't want it near me and that was an act of absolute rebellion they were going to smear this blood one of their last bleeds all over their body and when I heard them talking about it I was like bloody hell and then I you know you have to check yourself like why am I so freaked out by this. It's like ass you so crazy I mean I don't know if you've seen but there have recently been quite a few examples of women running marathons who either decided to free bleed or started their period while they were running and like are they gonna throw away months of training just because they know they keep going and basically a woman who is menstrual has a period like breaking news yeah it shouldn't be a big story but half the planet the reason i know about it is because it was a big story it was all over the news it's like this radical act of your actual blood coming out of you and being visible and it made me think like on the one hand And it was so empowering to see these women unapologetically just being in their actual bodies and doing the thing they're trying to do.

31:49But at the same time, I thought, how is this radical? Like, why is this some big story? This shows how far we've come from some kind of sensible attitude. But the most human thing, we're so far from it. And I think the notion of having a ritual to mark whatever it is, whether it's menopause, puberty, whatever, there's something so brilliant about it. And again, you know, due to colonisation and a whole myriad of reasons, we've just lost ritual. The world is so fast. We're like, next thing. What am I doing after this? And you just race through your day, your week, your month, your year without these really important markers for you to stop and take heed of what's going on and really honour it.

32:30And I had this really amazing experience where I had this practitioner come to my house. I think it was after my second child. And this was not my idea. It was presented to me and I was all for it. And I did a Mexican bringing the bones back together ceremony after birth. And I was bound. It was so great. I was bound in swathes of cloth, my whole body, to the point of sort of absolute claustrophobia. You know, I just had mouth and nose holes. I couldn't see anything. My eyes were bound. And I was left in the room. This is really giving me view. Honestly, it was unbelievable. what I was left in the room for maybe half an hour they came and checked on me every now and again and I just lay there and and they asked me to really think about the bones coming back together and my ribs closing in and everything coming back to me from that big moment of you know giving and giving birth and giving life and everything and you know with my first child I just sort of went back to work and I didn't you know as we do we've been programmed again you know get back to work as quick as you can or get back to cleaning the house or whatever the thing is that you're meant to be doing every day and it and that really stopped me in my tracks and I just think it's so worthwhile for any of us to go and do our own bit of research as to what have we in our lineage lost what culturally have we lost that people would have done hundreds of years ago to mark these moments it's simple stuff like you say but it gives us time to stop and really think about these huge things that are happening to us that we're just we're just racing through it all exactly in Ghanaian culture when you have a baby you're not allowed to see anyone for seven days like heaven you're supposed to just stay and and you know they believe that the the soul doesn't fully come into the baby until seven days after birth and then you give the child a name on the seventh day you have a naming ceremony but you can't call the child by a name until then it's still kind of like inhabiting its place on earth and you are still recovering and in Chinese culture it's a month I think the mothers stay home their mother comes your mother is supposed to come and look after you for the first month you don't go anywhere you don't see anyone the baby stays inside like you just recover this understanding that there's there's like a physical element of exhaustion and rest that's needed but there's also a spiritual element of you know the precious nature of that time the kind of intimacy of bonding with this new person and bringing them to earth and protecting them from the craziness of our world.

34:55And like all of these different traditions are so they're so practical. They serve a really practical purpose at like protecting a woman who's just been through a massive physical and emotional deal and giving a baby time to just settle and have some peace and stability. And I think about, you know, I was like on day two, like with the bugaboo trying to like get out and see people and show off the baby and then trying to make sure that the house was immaculate. And it's complete madness. It's madness. What are we doing? Like, it's absolutely insane. I mean, the other part of the book that I sort of, I loved and I was laughing at myself throughout parts of it was the body hair section in the beauty section.

35:33Because again, we've been so conditioned. And I think my naive assumption was that we had been conditioned through advertising in the 50s for razors. But this goes back, back, back, back, back. I was actually thinking about that just now because I don't even think it's in the book. It just came back to me. Like one of the stupidest, craziest things I ever did was about, and my daughter was overdue, like two weeks overdue. And about a week overdue, I went and had a bikini wax. Brilliant. Like full Hollywood. Everything off. Our generation were like, we were the Hollywoods. We were the Hollywoods.

36:08I mean, I've got like not much going on down there. No landing strip, nothing. Yeah, just get it off. And I was like, I don't want someone looking down there and it being hairy. Yeah. That was literally my mind. And do you know I nearly passed out? Because when you're that pregnant, it's really bad for you to lie on your back. Oh, of course. It cuts off the blood supply. You can't lie. So I was lying on my back with this overdue baby and lie in so much discomfort. I mean, what are we doing? Why do I think that whoever's going to be looking down there and delivering my child cares about whether I have pubic hair?

36:41Because we've been told that we shouldn't have any hair anywhere. I mean, that's our generation, especially. We're really that. I think when you're sort of a young person in the 90s, it was like, just get rid of all the hair. Have none. It was like body hair and cellulite were the two evils. The two evils. And if you had them, you were finished. And I'm so glad now I've got, you know, younger cousins and they've got fully hairy armpits. And I'm like, oh, this feels exciting. This is cool. This is really great. But let's go back to Charles Darwin, quite frankly, which I was ignorant to. and I'm so glad that I know about this.

37:15So tell us about this vital bit of info. I assumed that the body hair thing, again, it was like this kind of 20th century. The 50s, Zags or something, yeah. I mean, that is part of the story, but the origins are much more sinister. So in the late 19th century, when Darwin came up with the origin of the species and also the descent of man, and it's actually that book, The Descent of Man, which is a bit less well-known, but really critical on this point, there was this idea, well, first of all, it was obviously really shocking to people in Victorian society, this idea that humans were descended from primates.

37:46It was very controversial. It was like anti-biblical. It was a source of kind of like moral panic. And so people, especially from European societies in North America and Europe, wanted to distance themselves from any connection to the animal kingdom. And they were at the time developing these pseudoscientific theories about the hierarchy of races. And basically, this descent of man theory fed into that, that basically hairier humans are the missing link between primates and homo sapiens. So depending on how hairy you are shows how your proximity to animals versus the less hair you have, the closer you are to whiteness, civilization, sophistication.

38:30And that's where these ideas about the undesirability of body hair really arose. And before that, you know, it was actually considered desirable to have body hair. I mean, first of all, women were so covered up, you couldn't see their bodies anyway. And for men, it was actually a sign of health. If you had like full facial hair, it showed that you weren't suffering from, you know, any of the diseases that were so prevalent at the time. So it was a real shift change. And then what happened, particularly in America, was industrialization. So there was this idea that you wanted to get rid of body hair suddenly.

38:59But as they started industrializing meat production to meet the needs of urban populations, especially in America, all of these workers now flocking to these huge cities, wanting to eat meat, earning more money where they could afford meat. They invented the modern abattoir where you are killing animals on an industrial scale. And especially to slaughter pigs, they started to develop chemicals that could strip the hair off pigs, making it easier to skin them. So all of these ideas were happening at the same time that were creating a demand to remove body hair and then creating the technology to make it easier to remove body hair.

39:35And then, of course, some clever marketing, some clever capitalists and entrepreneurs realized that there were opportunities here to create new lines of hair removal products. So that led directly to the modern hair removal industry and this idea that if you have body hair, it's somehow barbaric. It's somehow primitive. And that if you want to be, especially as a woman, ladylike and sophisticated, you need to get rid of all traces. And it was just so interesting for me because I, you know, I've studied a lot about Darwin and pseudoscientific racism and these theories that categorize humans hierarchically and always put black Africans at the bottom.

40:10And I obviously like utterly reject them and spend a lot of time critiquing them. But the idea that my own body hair removal practices were a direct descendant of that ideology was so shocking to me. And it really was another moment where I realized how colonial my own mindset was. There were so many things that I couldn't question because I didn't know where they came from. I kind of thought it was a fact. And again, I had a narrative. Oh, I just like skin. I just like clear skin. Oh, it's more hygienic, you know, if you don't have any body hair. It's easy to put deodorant on. It feels nicer to wash.

40:44And, you know, actually what I was doing was retrospectively justifying something I'd been brainwashed to believe in and so have a generation before. We've all been so brainwashed. I mean, you talk about going to Ghana and going to a wedding where the bride has a hairy chest and it's seen as this magnificent thing to show off. She actually had her wedding dress was actually fitted specifically to show off the chest hair. It was like a feature. And that was another moment where I really realised that my views were culturally subjective. Because I thought all women everywhere don't want body hair.

41:18But when I went to that wedding in Ghana and I realised that it was the centrepiece of her bridal look, and this woman's a lawyer. I mean, she was highly educated. It was a beautiful wedding. They had money. It was, you know, we weren't like in a village somewhere. This was like a really sophisticated wedding in the capital city. And everybody agreed that the chest hair was just so beautiful. And it was one of those moments where I really started to see my cultural programming. I thought it was a universal idea. And then in that moment, I realized, no, this is a European idea that I have been programmed with from birth because I grew up in the UK.

41:50And in Ghana, leg hair, chest hair, chin hair on women is considered really attractive. Yeah. And I find it so liberating to hear these stories because we can start to unpick everything and actually go, do I think this or have I been told this? And I think the scary thing about today is, and probably also because we're in our 40s, we can see the different iterations over the years of these. They're trends, essentially, what we're told. And now, you know, you talk about the sort of cyborgian face that we're sort of seeing where, you know, because of Instagram and TikTok, we've got all of these new visuals that 20 years ago we wouldn't have been privy to.

42:26But now we're bombarded with this imagery and it's giving women more hang ups, more things to worry about. And it's but it's changing. So then you follow one trend and then in 10 years time, we're on to a new popular look at women who like had all of these butt implants that now try to get them removed. or had these fillers and now trying to get them dissolved because the thing is trends change. These are marketing trends that are driven by capital. You know, it's not based on who you are or what works for you, what's good for your health or your self-confidence. But we are at the mercy of these ideas.

42:59And, you know, with this book, it was a kind of delicate thing because the absolute last thing I'm doing is judging women. I believe powerfully nobody gets to police our bodies. We get to make our own choices about our bodies. So I'm not trying to shame people who've done any of these things. And as I said, I've been doing loads of them myself for most of my life. It was more me realising that I couldn't make an informed choice about what I want for my body. What is my aesthetic? What is my preference and taste? Because I was programmed. I was brainwashed. So until you start to have information about where these ideas come from, you can't make informed choices about which ones suit you, serve you, appeal to your taste and which ones don't.

43:40So really my message is understand where the ideas come from and then you can choose them for yourself. But a lot of these things like body hair, the ideas now about like the way that faces should look, about masking any signs of aging, about having a certain body shape, whether that's a big butt, big, thin. Everyone's on his end pick now. So like butts have got out the window again. They are not necessarily designed to serve us. They are in service of an idea that none of us would have invented if we were given a blank slate. So that's really my thing. And then with these like cosmetic procedures, there's another layer because, you know, and I wrote this quite casually because it was really obvious to me.

44:18But so many people reacted to this part of the book that I just want to mention it. You know, if you get a nose job or change something about your face, in a way you're erasing part of your ancestry, right? You got your face from somewhere like that's someone's nose that you've inherited. That's someone's chin. That's someone's eyebrows and forehead. and if you change it you are kind of removing part of that identity and like that's quite obvious because you know you got it from somewhere and you're changing it to conform to what is seen as desirable right now but when the response I got to that the number of people really tearful and emotional who said you know like I got a nose job and now I really regret it because that was my grandfather's nose or you know this is the nose from the region that I come from and it never occurred to me I was so busy trying to fit this beauty standard that it never occurred to me that I was losing something and yeah I think that's really sad because the people who are dictating that beauty standard don't know or care about your grandfather or your heritage or what people look like in the region that your ancestors came from no I mean that I used to hate my nose I've got a characterful nose I'm now in a place where I'm pretty happy with my nose and it's because it's my dad's nose like you look at mick cotton i've got his nose it's the same nose but i spent all of my teens and 20s just going oh i wish i had a cute little disney button nose that was just all perfect and sweet and it's not i've got you know from the side is pretty big nose but i'm i like my nose now and i think maybe that's come with age experience and i i love looking into these subjects so yes i can look at what i've been told and where that data comes from but i I think the bigger sort of, is it a question or is it a, is what I'm trying to say is how do we get to that place of understanding the data, where that information comes from, what we've been told versus what we feel and define what beauty is to us?

46:11Because I think it's almost impossible in this day and age. We are bombarded with who looks good, who doesn't, what looks right, quote unquote, what doesn't. I think you've got to be a pretty secure and strong individual to go I reject or not even reject but I see all of this but I'm still going to say that my my version of beauty is this how do we even start to walk down that path yeah it is hard and one of the things that's difficult is that I think you get closer to being able to do that with age yeah when you're at the most pressure to start changing stuff about your appearance is when you're young and you know some of the people who responded to my point about erasing your ancestry were people who at a really young age had had stuff done before they were even thinking that way.

46:55I think there is no substitute for knowledge, for understanding and making really informed decisions. And the reality is, you're not going to have that knowledge unless you seek it. It's not on your school curriculum. It's not in the media. You have to go and find books or films and documentaries that explore these ideas. And there are so many books that have been written about it over time, but I hadn't actually read them. It just wasn't something that I really thought about. So I would say seek out the information because there's no substitute for knowledge. And you might have a false sense of being informed because you're constantly being programmed with ideas.

47:31But like seeing stuff on TikTok and Instagram and what your friends are doing or even what your mum might be encouraging you to do, because we get some of our most misguided ideas from our mothers. Like, you know, I love my mum. She's amazing. But like also had been programmed by the same thing. In fact, when I was writing this book, my mum told me how in the the 60s, she went to a doctor saying she wanted to lose a bit of weight and he prescribed her amphetamines. I mean, it's and she was like a size 10. God, I mean, imagine like, yeah, they grew up in a equally toxic era when it came to body shape.

48:01Everyone wanted to look like Twiggy, who is a specific person with a specific set of genes. Not everyone is not meant to look like that. So I think there is no substitute for doing your own research and understanding where these ideas come from.

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49:54I loved your conversation with your mum about waist beads because, again, that was so interesting that waist beads were something that was very much in your lineage and your heritage, but something that your mum had really rejected through her own conditioning because that was the era she grew up in. But waist beads are something that you now wear every day. It's become such a, well, you tell me, what do they mean for you to wear? Yeah, I mean, they're so simple. It's just a string of beads you wear around your waist or multiple strings of beads. And they serve, like most of these traditions, a very practical as well as a spiritual purpose.

50:31the practical purposes in the past they were used to suspend underwear sanitary products and they also help you monitor your weight gain like early detection of pregnancy just understanding what's going on with your body and again these are cultures that in which there's no taboo about weight gain you're not trying to stay thin so monitoring your weight gain isn't like feeling bad about yourself it's just knowing what's happening it might be something you really welcome but the point is you know what's happening because you can feel it and the more spiritual role they serve is really a celebration of your shape and your femininity and your curves.

51:06And these are cultures that really prize femininity, fertility, the female form. And they're not for other people as well. It's not to show off like when you wear a midriff or a bikini. It's for you. It's something that is you honoring your gender, your sexuality, your body. And that's the really transformative thing. When I first started wearing waist beads, I was actually filming in Nigeria and there was an amazing waist bead maker so I ordered some and the producer I was working with is this young black British woman and she'd had an operation and so she'd like a while ago but she'd not been able to go to the gym and she felt really out of shape and I said to her I'm gonna get you some waist beads and she was like oh I would love that like maybe in six months when I've been able to get back in the gym and you know and I was like that is completely not the point the point is whatever body you have now that is the body to celebrate like that's the body you have it's not about conforming it's about honoring what you have so and it's also part of the puberty initiation that's given to girls like as you're coming into womanhood you can wear this and feel your sexuality and your femininity is for you it's not for other people you wield the power of what to do with it it's really interesting because it is such a simple thing how different it feels to wear them like it's just an investment in yourself something you do a conversation with yourself about your own body and I found it really profound and it's funny because I did as you said mention it to my mum and she said oh no nobody wears those anymore and I was like I'd just been back from Nigeria with this amazing like kind of catwalk show way speed maker had made me some and she said oh no no I mean when I was a little girl maybe in the villages you know and where they were still a bit backward they might have worn them but you know nobody educated would wear them And then I told her, like, actually, they're enjoying a resurgence because people are now starting to seek a way of getting back to all these things that have been lost.

52:59And it really made my mum reflect. And she said, you know, actually, when I think about it, like, we were so quick to abandon that in favour of, like, Marks and Spencer's knickers, which we thought were the most sophisticated thing. Because Ghana was colonised by Britain. One of the points of the colonies was to pump British goods and British ideas, create new markets for British manufacturing. they weren't thinking about what indigenous knowledge systems they were destroying. They were just trying to make money. So, you know, that mental colonization of assuming anything made in Britain is more sophisticated than your millennia old ideas that serve all these different purposes is a real example of colonialism.

53:37And my mom was born in a colony. This is such recent history. Many of us have been raised by people who were deliberately programmed by colonial ideas. So even wearing waist beads, in a way, is an act of resistance for me and reclamation. And also this beautiful sort of tangible connection to your ancestors, people you will have never met, but are in your blood, in your fibers. Yeah, whose names that I don't necessarily know. I know, I love that. I'm always so fascinated by that. I think we get so concerned with just like, here's me and my brother and my mum and my dad and I knew my grandparents, but not anyone past that.

54:08But there's this whole backstory of incredible people that did things that we'll never know about. and it's in us in some way. And you know, I think we are all fascinated by that. I mean, like the rise of programmes like Who Do You Think You Are? and in America, Henry Louis Gates has a similar show. People are so hungry to know. And I actually like coined a phrase in the book. I called it ancestral deficiency syndrome. Written it down because I just thought it was fucking great. Oh, thank you. I just was like, I think we're all suffering from some kind of deficit, like where that kind of inheritance should be, that sense of continuity because of colonialism or just migration and globalization.

54:44So many of us have been displaced from the site of those stories and that inheritance. And I think we're all searching. That's why people do all these DNA tests. And as I wrote in the book, actually, like Airbnb had partnered with 23andMe so that now when you find out where your DNA comes from, you can book a holiday to the destination and connect with your ancestors. I mean, it's becoming big business. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But underneath that, I think, is something really much deeper, which is this sense, again, of like all the things that have been lost. And, you know, this isn't like nostalgia.

55:15I'm not saying if we could just undo the last 2000 years, everything would be rosy. I'm not trying to live in some prehistoric time. There's lots of developments and innovations since then that have been great. But the point is that we threw away everything. We didn't just say which are the things that are useful and which are the ones to discard. We got rid of everything because of prejudice because we thought that it was savage or backward. and we can look back now and find the things that serve us find the things that we do need that we yearn for find the connection with our ancestors that speaks to something about our modern life we get to choose so I just want to take control of that and say actually I don't reject it because it's old on the contrary I think that our ancestors had a lot of wisdom that we could do with now so much and it's just so interesting like what a brilliant thing to do to to look into your your family's backstory and to and to try and you say sort of recover and reclaim some of that storytelling and some of that wisdom and tradition it's such a beautiful thing another phrase that i wrote down that i absolutely loved as well as ancestral deficiency syndrome is spiritually ripped which i've never heard before i hadn't no directly came from the wise mouth of oprah winfrey which i know is a story you've told before but it's a brilliant story and actually seems to have been a big impetus for you to yeah not necessarily write this book but this new tone of your work because you know anyone that's followed you your work we know that you've been out there researching and doing this investigative work so that we can all learn and and discover you know things that we've lost or things that we desperately need to know about in today's culture but actually oprah saying that to you spiritually ripped changed i sort of see it as the tone of what you were doing that was perhaps more um sort of calming for you a bit of self-preservation in the work that you were doing because it's tiring doing the work that you're doing so so tell us about how Oprah's words landed for you yeah it was a real turning point and it was the message I needed at the exact moment I needed it so I went to this film premiere it was for a wrinkle in time and I at that time was really struggling with being a news reporter because I just felt that the news was becoming really toxic for me it was really negative I was immersed in it I was constantly just like having to go deeper into things that made me feel very depleted and then I was also in an atmosphere in newsrooms where I was like also having to justify my existence you know and having to kind of take on racism there's like really dangerous false equivalents like oh oh, here's a racist.

57:52Let's wheel you out to debate with them so that it's balanced, you know? And I'm like, this is not balance. It's not up for discussion. It's not a debate. I'm not going to try and persuade you of my humanity. Like if those are your views, I don't see why you have a platform in, like in a society that claims to value equality and human rights. So it was like all very draining. It was tiring work just objectively, but on an emotional level, I felt like I was having to dig really deep just to do my job. And I also felt ambivalent about modeling that behavior because I, you know, I've always had younger journalists I mentor or young people who I know look up to my work.

58:27And I was thinking, what message am I sending them? If I do this, I'm kind of legitimizing it as something they might have to do. And I actually don't believe it's right. So I was grappling with all that and I was feeling quite depleted and also had this like instinct that I had so much more to give. You know, the news is something that's reacting. It's like something's happened. You cover it. it's very responsive sometimes I felt like if you gave me a blank slate I could create something new something that could be enriching instead of just like responding to the crazy stuff over which we have no control so that was where I was at in my headspace and I went to this film premiere you know just quite innocently with a friend and there was a Q &A with the cast and crew afterwards and Oprah produced that film and I just found myself like found my hand going up found myself asking question.

59:11She picked me first question. And I just said, I just basically asked her her advice. I basically explained that. I said, I believe the work I'm doing is useful and important. Like, I think it's important that a voice like mine is part of the conversation, but I'm feeling really depleted by it. What should I do? And her answer just really got to me. She said, forget about what you think they need forget about what you think your duty is your only job is to build yourself she said you need to build yourself spiritually you need to become spiritually ripped yes and everything else will be effortless and it would just like landed I mean I like you had never heard the phrase spiritually ripped it was such an amazing metaphor for the kind of work and you know all my work was external again I was like going out and fighting these poisonous narratives and these dangerous ideas and this fake news and racist policies and I wasn't working on myself like my resilience filling myself up understanding my purpose and my values and what I wanted what I could create so it really got to me and it was funny because after that Q &A there was this like after party and I went there and you know I was just minding my business at the after party like this tap on my shoulder and I turned around it's Oprah and she was like you need to become spiritually ripped she's like tracked me down she wasn't finished there's a picture in the book that is so like and you're sort of beaming it's the best picture so good it was so good she was like i'm not done like i have more to say and i felt so seen in that moment like she realized that i wasn't just like trying to hear the sound of my own voice in a q a i wasn't just like i've got a question i was like i actually need help right now i think she saw that in the way I asked her that question and the way I received her answer and so she just came to me and I just will never forgot that never obviously you wouldn't forget that but it really it really resonated on a deep level and when I kind of then went on this journey I saw that in a way as an origin story the moment that I stopped thinking that that external deserved all my attention and I started to think like what when I look within what what do I see one of the things I saw was like these really colonial ideas and that was really why i wrote this book i mean so after after a phrase a very beautiful concise phrase like that lands with you and i'm sure it will with other people listening to this like oh yeah you know people that you know have got a passion in life or a message or it could be anything they're doing and but they realize that they are depleted they are drained because of this work what is the first step in becoming not even spiritually ripped but just taking care of yourself because I think it feels so overwhelming.

1:01:57You've got all these ideas and things you want to do, messages you want to spread or people that you want to create a community but you are absolutely on your knees. Where do you even start? I think you have to take a step back because if you'd met me then during that period where I was depleted, I still would have told you, like, I believe in what I'm doing. It's really important. There's all this racism. There's all these like far right wing ideas like somebody has to counter it and, you know, we need voices like mine. We need diversity in the news. We need people who investigate. I still believe that.

1:02:25But the point is, and that was true, but there was also something else at work. And the other thing at work was this idea that your value to the world and humanity is directly correlated to how much you are grinding away, how much you're exerting and pouring yourself out. And I was raised like that. Like you work hard and succeed and get acknowledged and get recognition and advance up some kind of career ladder. And then you're being a useful, hardworking, respectable person. And again, there is a very... I feel that deeply in my bones when you say that. I think many of us have been raised with that idea.

1:03:05And on the surface, it sounds good. Like you're working hard, you're doing something that you believe in and people value. But are you doing it because you discovered that that's who you are and that's how you're meant to live? Or are you doing it because you were programmed to believe that to be useful is to grind? And, you know, when you think about the way that narrative applies to women, women become exhausted. You know, they have children. They're often the main carers of children or elderly parents. They have the majority of duties, domestic work in the home. now we're also going out and trying to grind in the outside world and climb and produce and exert and guess what get to a certain age you've got nothing left you're burned out and crucially you've not had time to really connect with yourself you haven't had time on your period to rest and listen to your body you haven't had time when you have an idea to really sit with your imagination you haven't slept enough you know there's an incredible book that i write about Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hirsi, which talks about rest as a portal.

1:04:05It is a portal through which your imagination takes you to another world, new ideas, a different future, possibility. And this whole culture of grinding prevents you from ever really tapping into your real potential. And, you know, when I started to think about that and understand it, I realized I was like a bot. I'd been programmed to just go, go, go, go, go. I wasn't necessarily doing it because it was what was right for me I was doing it because it was again what I'd been brainwashed to do yes I had this exact epiphany it felt like an epiphany because because you're so used to just like you say you go go I was brought up in a working class family where there was no choice you just work your tits off until you can't anymore and I realized at the end of last year now I had a bit of a health thing going on anyway but I was like all I'm doing is working parenting working parenting there's no room for anything let alone rest but socializing nothing yeah and then this year I'm like I'm gonna have fun yeah I'm gonna like let go a bit and it might be a bit of a mess but that's okay it is and just trying to rebel against that grinding culture that we're all so used to everything's now you know who can achieve the most do the most who's the most successful and I think like you say specifically for women there's some stat that I don't know so I'm not going to give a specific but disproportionate amount of autoimmune diseases are from women because we're all so completely burnt out and trying to do so and it is a disproportionate percentage that I can't remember like let's say it's like 80 percent or something wild and we know these stats we're not doing anything about it when you think of it on a system level our economy requires our labor they measure economic performance by productivity productivity is a way of saying you are like a unit whose output can be measured and and to the extent that we are extracting the maximum output from each member of society the more successful an economy we are and like that's not designed for your well-being or your health or your spiritual balance that is designed to enrich someone who owns the means of production which by the way is never us so when you understand these systems and you know trisha hersey's book is so powerful because she's from a lineage of women who were enslaved in America, whose bodies were literally like ground until they dropped dead, like working, you know, they would give birth in the fields on a plantation and then be expected to get straight back to work.

1:06:26They would literally work to death like farm animals. And when you understand this is the same, nothing's changed in our economic system. It's the same model that was capable of doing that to a human being. You realise that it's not here for us. It's doing what it does. The point is only we can look out for ourselves and ask ourselves, is that how I want to be? Is that how I want to be measured as like a unit of production? Or do I have something deeper to offer? Do I value my success, not just in like my output, but also my wellness, my balance, my sense of purpose, my connection to my community, my ability to contribute, my ability to be there for people who I love, who might need me, like whatever it is for you, I guarantee nobody is just a machine to grind.

1:07:11And you have to take control of that because every message around you is encouraging it. And our financial system will reward it, right? You have to grind to stay alive in many cities where it's so expensive to live. So it's not an easy solution. And Patricia Hershey writes about this because she's not coming from privilege. She's like working class black communities in America, where the thought of rest was considered a luxury for rich people. How can they create radical communities of rest within the community, not just like disappearing to some unaffordable retreat, like in communities, in family?

1:07:43How can we build a culture that respects and more than respects, like demands rest? But if you're not even asking that question, there's no hope that we'll get there. No, none at all. I mean, crikey. It's just it's all it's so much. There's so much to unpick. It's just it's insane. But I think the thing that this book has given me is so many launch pads for like more questions that I've got now. More things that I want to dive into, more research that I want to do into just my own family lineage and also just and my friends' cultures and their lineage. And like, what can we all gather, collate and look at and learn about?

1:08:22It's all so exciting and liberating, as well as, you know, the bleakness that we know exists because of these systems and colonisation and the amount of suffering and loss that there's been. I think it just feels like there's just so many questions that I now have from reading this book that I feel excited about. And as I said, the very start of this conversation, it's just brilliant. And also, if you haven't read it, you must read it because it's not only beautifully written, but there's all these gorgeous pictures and quotes and little snippets of poetry you've used. It's just, it's a joy. Thank you, Matt.

1:08:54Yeah, beautiful photography. It's a joy to read. And I'm going to finish on, where is your happy place? Heat. Yes. I'm saying this in December. The opposite of what we're experiencing. I'm really, you know, I used to think that weather was like a superficial thing. People were like, oh, I like sunshine. I was like, how shallow. Really getting a sense of what kind of person I used to be. Very annoying. It's not shallow. It's not shallow. It's a necessity, quite frankly. It's not shallow. I feel like a different person in the heat. My body just loves it. I come alive. I have more energy. It's easier to create.

1:09:29I sleep more deeply. My skin glows. My hair grows. Nails are great. It's everything. Everything works. And over time, just come to accept that heat is really important to me. So when I am hot, I feel so happy. Like when I'm hot in a, in a, like I feel nurtured by the elements. There's a way in which that makes me so happy. I'm with you on that. And I've just loved talking to you. Thank you, Afua. You are the best. It's been a really wonderful conversation. I've loved every minute. Thank you so much. Thank you. Oh, Afua. Oh, Afua. If you're listening to this, can we be friends? Like genuinely. We've got a mutual friend, Reggie Yates.

1:10:14I could go via him. That feels creepy. Let's hang out. I just love Afua. That was, as I've said before, a chat that I keep referencing again and again. I keep going back to the book and telling people to buy it. I keep thinking about it. I keep thinking about all the time I've wasted hating my own body and hating my periods. And all of that is changing for me. Much of it, thanks to Afua. What things that you've always taken as truth are you starting to unpick and relearn? Because I'd love to carry on this chat on Instagram during the week. We're at Happy Place Official. We're also on Instagram with our book club, at Happy Place Book Club.

1:10:51Come on over and read with us. That's where we read a different book together each month and have some really great chats about its themes. We're about to start a new book. March's pick is Broken Country by Claire Leslie Hall. Oh, this book. Let me tell you about it. Beth was 17 when she first met Gabriel, and over an intense summer, he made her think and feel differently. Understandably, she thought it was the start of her great love story. But then Gabriel left and it was Frank who picked up the pieces. So what's going to happen when Gabriel comes back? Oh, my God. I love this book. I really loved it.

1:11:27Everything Beth thinks she knows about who she is is about to crumble. Is this a possibility for a second chance at first love? This book has got some big plot twists, guys, as well. Come and read with us. All right. Back here next week for a podcast. and I can't wait. In the meantime, a massive thank you again to Afua, to the producer Anushka Tate at Happy Play Studios and to you, I adore you.

1:12:11you

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1:13:18That's wearfigs.com, code FIGSRX. Did you know that parents rank financial literacy as the number one most difficult life skill to teach? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app for families. With Greenlight, you can set up chores, automate allowance, and keep an eye on your kids' spending with real-time notifications. kids learn to earn save and spend wisely and parents can rest easy knowing their kids are learning about money with guardrails in place sign up for green light today at greenlight.com slash podcast