I Like You As You Are

On roller skating. On neighbor-hood. On love.

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Episode Transcript

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What we value most, what it cost war Hi. Before
we get started, I wanted to give you a heads

(01:05):
up that this episode contains brief mentions of trauma, abuse,
and suicide. I want to ask you if Fred Rogers
were here today and you could sit down with him,
and he sat across from you and said, Hi, actually,
it's nice to meet you. I'm Fred. I want to

(01:25):
know what you would ask him. I mean, it wouldn't
be one question. I would want to sit and listen
to Fred Rogers talk about the people who he's loved
in his life. I think there's so much to learn

(01:46):
from listening to people talk about the people who make
them feel a certain way. This is Ashley c Ford
in our first episode. I talked to her about a
very bad day, a bathtub and rediscovering Mr Rogers as
an adult. I would love, love, love for him to

(02:08):
talk to me about his love of his wife, his
love of close friends, of pen pals, how he appreciated
the parts of them that you know, it's not just
set them apart, but gave them joy. I feel like
Mr Rogers never really needed anybody to to be different.

(02:31):
In an interesting way, he understood that we are fascinating
creatures all our own and there are people who when
they speak of passion, when they speak of themselves at
their best, you learn so much about what happiness can

(02:53):
create in a person. It's so beautiful and it's so wonderful.
And I think that very few people appreciated and respected
the concept of love like Fred Rogers. There's so many

(03:17):
things to know and to wonder about in this world,
and there's so many people who want to show and
tell you all they can, people who want to help
you to learn and to be brave and strong and
interesting and loving. That's the best part of living, loving,

(03:43):
and I love being with you. I'm Carvil Wallace and
this is Finding Fred, a podcast about Fred Rogers from

(04:05):
Fatherly and I Heart Media in partnership with Transmitter Media.
We spoke to Ashley Seaford in our first episode because
she reminded us that as adults, it's possible to return
to Mr Rogers and feel affirmed and accepted. But then

(04:26):
she also took time to consider what Fred might have
been asking of her as a small child, and might
still be asking of her now. I've been following her example,
wrestling with what grown up things there are to learn
from this children's entertainer for a long time, I've been

(04:47):
trying to talk about feelings in a serious way, and
I think at times I've been dismissed because of that,
and definitely a thought of as soft or lacking and intelligence.
And I think that what Mr Rogers in the Cultural

(05:10):
Conversation is doing right now is offering a lot of
people a chance to reparent themselves in one way or
another by listening and realizing that while their feelings aren't facts,
their feelings are powerful, and feelings change things whether or

(05:34):
not we want them to. And we're not going to
solve anything, change anything, um progress on some of the
issues we want to progress on if we continue to
act as if emotions and feelings are not having real

(05:56):
consequences in our society and in our culture and in
our everyday lives. We define love differently all across this country.
Like for me, love includes accountability. There's no such thing
as love without accountability. And some people think of love
as active and some people think of love as a

(06:19):
nothing emotion. Like what what could love possibly add to
this conversation? What could love possibly help in these trying times?
We aren't talking about what love means, and we are
acting like figuring that out isn't a worthy conversation, and

(06:39):
we're going to pay for it, And so the idea
that love would be useless. Right now, I'm like, oh no, oh, no,
Love changes everything. For a long time, I thought love
was just a stronger version of like. But Fred said

(07:01):
love is an active noun, like the words struggle. To
love someone, he says, is to strive to accept that
person exactly the way he or she is to accept
ourselves as we are right here and now. That has
nothing to do with liking people. It's about something else,

(07:21):
something requiring time and patience and quiet, things that may
seem hard to come by today. Time and patience and
quiet seem especially lacking in the place where many of
us do most of our noisemaking. Online. The Internet is
a kind of manic modern neighborhood where outrage changes to

(07:43):
laughter changes to vanity, all in a few seconds and
seemingly out of our own control. That's when I start
feeling like a video game and somebody else has the joystick,
and in that case, all the people on my timeline
have the joystick, and I'm let them move me in
different directions, and I've lost the plot. I've lost control,

(08:06):
and I don't like to feel that way. I was
talking to my therapists in the early stages of making
this show and thinking out loud about what makes Fred
Rogers interesting and important today, and she stopped me and
she said, the thing I've always thought about him is
that he leads with self. This, of course, made no

(08:29):
sense to me. So she broke out the markers in
the paper and she drew a big circle, and on
the outside of the circle, she labeled all of these selves,
these roles that we take on when we interact with
the world. The protect herself who makes sure that nobody
is hurting me or my family, the self that needs
to prove its worth, the fearful self, the prideful self,

(08:51):
the needy self. She wrote all these selves around the circle,
and I pointed to the empty center of it, and
I said, so, then, what's that? And she said, that
is what we are. That isn't anger or fear or
shame or worthlessness or a loneness. That is the true self.

(09:16):
And when I watched Mr Rogers, it's clear that this
person has done the work necessary to lead primarily with
that self. The other parts are there, but there in
the back seat. He can be in dialogue with them,
but they don't run the show, or, as Ashley would say,
it's the true self that has the joystick. I recently

(09:40):
went and saw Celene Dion perform UH in concert and
one of the first songs she sings is the Power
of Love. Now, I remember when it came out. I
used to go all night skating with my cousins and
my brother at roller Down South in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
And when I was kid at all night skate rolling

(10:02):
around the skating rink, and the Power of Love would
come on right to skate two, and I would just
throw my hands back behind me and skate as quickly
as I could. And there's that part that she gets to,
you know that cauzagnya led and I when she would

(10:26):
get to that part, that's when I would stop skating
and I would just let the momentum of my body
push me forward with my arms back and my eyes closed,
singing at the top of my lungs. And the DJ
would get on the microphone and would say, Ashley Ford,
once again, this is a couple's skate and I could

(10:53):
not care. I was going to skate to that song.
I feel like the person I was in that moment
was and is my core self. I feel like there
was this deep understanding of myself in that time of

(11:17):
what I wanted, what I valued, how to just feel
my body and enjoy it for what it was doing,
for the movement, for the fun, how to like dream
about big love and what love could be like, and
be surrounded by people and still feel like I was

(11:39):
my own and I couldn't care what they thought about me.
I couldn't care if I was going to be in trouble.
All I could think was who I am right now
is like good, Like this is good. And it wasn't
good because I was doing anything for anybody else, And
it wasn't good because I was trying to be anything else.
It's about a way of and putting myself at the center,

(12:04):
not because everybody else should put me at the center,
but just because I am worthy of being at the
center of myself. I'm glad I'm the way I am.
I think I'm fine. I'm glad I'm the way I am.
The pleasure's mine. It's good that I look the way

(12:28):
I should. Wouldn't change now if I could, because I'm
happy to be me. Aren't there times that you feel
that way? But you're just glad you're the way you
are good for you if you know those times, Yes, sir,

(12:55):
I'm proud of it when you can feel that way.
Hope for ourselves and hope for our relationships our communities
depends on our ability to find our center, to stay
in touch with it, and to act from it. Fred

(13:17):
Rogers spent his life creating television for children that was
shaped in part by this new understanding of what we
need in order to flourish. Mr rogers Neighborhood was less
about learning a B c S and more about sorting
through and managing the enormous feelings that move through you
as you grow. And Ashley says he did that by

(13:38):
making time and space for the little feelings, just listening
to them, and that is something a lot of us
have forgotten. The problem is is that we think the
extreme feelings are the only feelings that should motivate action.

(14:00):
And I think that we have to stop relying on
the idea that certain feelings will compel us to act
a certain way, and instead notice our feelings, no matter
how mild they are, and choose to do something with
them and I think, unfortunately what we've done is encouraged

(14:21):
a real lack of imagination for what can be done
when you feel something that is not as strong. I
think it's a lack of imagination. The first time we talked,
one of the questions that people seem to really respond
to is and want to ask you, what do you

(14:43):
do with the mad that you feel? And in this conversation,
we've talked less about mad and more about love, And
so I'm going to ask you what some may think
is the inverse of that question, though I don't know
that it is, what do you do with the love
that you feel? Keep what I need and I spend
the rest, and there's always more. It's it's abundant. I

(15:08):
I'd like to honor people and love people with my
presence and with being president with them, because not enough
of us get that, and I'm good at that, And
if that's the gift I got to give, then that's
what y'all gonna get. Hi. My name is Lisa, and

(15:30):
I've never all this for a show before, but I
was fired by you guys. We asked you, you who've
been listening to share stories about people who showed you
how to be helpers. But that's really a question about
love too. Hi, mom, that we each walk around with

(15:51):
okay of flowers and walk down the street. If somebody
says hi to you with files and there, give you
a flower, and then you have a choice. You can
smile back and say hi, give them a flower back,
or you can just pick the flower of them. And
so the trick is to keep your okay healthy. And

(16:13):
so if you're always giving away your flowers and not
accepting other people's flowers and return, you're going to run
out of flowers. Whereas if you're always accepting other people's
flowers but you're not keeping out yours, and you're gonna
find them with a little huge out of sorts, okay.
So the trick is, you know, to find that balance.

(16:37):
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(18:10):
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Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Ashley says

(19:48):
she takes the love she needs and gives the rest away.
That feels most natural when we're giving it away to
our family or our friends. But when we give it
away to stray rangers. We're not doing it because we
think we might get something back. We may never even
see them again. We're doing it because we want to

(20:08):
be good neighbors. Hi Carvel, my name is Benny Delgado?
What a profound question. Who taught me what it means
to be a helper? And you know, I distinctly remember
my mother. We were driving down the road. It was snowing.
It was really cold that day, and we're coming down

(20:32):
a busy street and there was a mother and her
children that were walking against the wind with the snow
hitting them and carrying bags with groceries and uh And
immediately she pulled over, rolled down the window and offered
to give these people a ride. And immediately she asked

(20:56):
us to move over. There was several kids and the
mother and mother got the front season we all squished
into the back. She got out, help get the groceries
in to the trunk of the car and took them
to wherever they were going, way past our house. And
you know that that memory is ingrained in my mind. Hello,

(21:16):
my name is Justin sweeton Um from Texas and two
thousand and sixteen, I was homeless and on drugs and
he needed to make a change in my life. So
I had walked to uh Conro, Texas, met a man
there by the name of Luke Readis. He invited me
into the men's Transitional home called the Freedom House. He

(21:41):
basically just instructed me on good ethics through the lens
of Christianity. A few months into the program, the guy
who was running the Corner House of Prayer he was
stepping down after seven years. I just felt the urge
that I wanted to step into that position, and I
wanted to be a part of this, this community to

(22:01):
help homeless people get back on their feet. And Luke
was absolutely on board with it. He gave me a
key to the church. He gave me basically all authority
over the place. You know, somebody who had only been
sober for a few months. And for the next two
years I impacted people's lives like I wouldn't believe. You know,

(22:24):
I went from someone who was in search of health
to suddenly giving help. It was the most important two
years of my life. Hi grovel Um. When I was
in the third grade, I was a painfully awkward kid
and had glasses and I had a big backpack, and

(22:48):
I got picked on a lot by this one girl
in particular. I was just I was so afraid of her.
And I had this teacher, Mr. Lebron, who paired us together.
So we had a writing assignment and he said, she
needs some help, and I think you would be really

(23:09):
good at helping her with this writing assignment, and you
need some help with your presentation because you're not good
at speaking up. And she's really brave and really strong,
and it it changed my whole life. I became friends
with this girl. We realized that we needed each other.

(23:29):
She taught me how to speak up for myself and
how to not take bullying from other people. And it
helps me relate to people that I wouldn't otherwise relate to.
And I just Mr Brown, if you're out there, I
think value all the time and thank you so much.

(23:57):
When I was in my twenties, I went through a
crip ling depression. It was as if all the unprocessed
trauma from my childhood just showed up on my door
one day and moved into my apartment. I began to
feel like it would maybe be better if I didn't
bother being alive at all. I didn't think I had

(24:18):
a lot of value to the world. I didn't think
that I was equipped to deal with life. My closest
friend at the time saw my struggle and gifted me
a pass to this African American meditation retreat in northern California.
It seemed random at the time, but I had nothing
else to lose. On the way up, I volunteered to

(24:41):
pick up one of the meditation teachers who was flying
in from New York. I had always been told that
when in pain, just find one simple act of service
that you can manage and do it. The teacher I
picked up that day was the Reverend Angel Kyoto Williams.
She was the first real and Buddhist I ever met,

(25:01):
and she was nothing like the movies told me and
ordained zen practitioner would be. She was black and queer
and had the no nonsense demeanor of a born and
raised New Yorker. And when I attended her Dharma talks,
I was mesmerized. Here she was talking about a liberation
beyond liberation. She talked about love as a form of practice,

(25:25):
resistance to oppression as a spiritual calling. She talked about
meditation and quiet as a path towards the full realization
of the self. I didn't understand all of it, but
I trusted it. Something about a woman who grew up
in Queens teaching me love and understanding just hit me.

(25:46):
We became friends and over the years. I sometimes have
practiced with her often and sometimes not so often. But
the way she has looked at me and seen me
and loved me, it did for me what Fred Rogers
did for me. It gave me this very quiet, very
subtle sense that I have value, that I matter just

(26:12):
as I am. In some way, Angel might have saved
my life. She's written some books, including Being Black Has
Then In the Art of Fearlessness and Grace and Radical Dharma,
Talking Love, Race and Liberation. She's the founder of the
Center of Transformative Change in the Spiritual director of the
meditation based New Dharma Community. As long as I've known her,

(26:36):
her work has been about freedom, freedom from oppression, freedom
from anger and hate, freedom from suffering, freedom for all
of us. I could not talk about the work that
Fred Rogers did without talking to the person I know
who most directly aligns with Fred's philosophy, even though she
came from a very different place than Fred did. Angel

(27:00):
was a young activist in New York City. She knows confrontation,
so I asked her how she managed to overcome the
fear and anger that can come with that. She told
me a story about what it was like to return
to New York after years of practice in California. I
got off at Penn Station, as one as one does,

(27:23):
and I left the relative space of being on the
train and I entered into the sea of people that
is the life of New York. And in that moment,
like I felt this release of like, oh so good.

(27:50):
And it became super clear to me in that moment
that what happens in that space of confrontation is you
can see it as confrontation with all of these other people,
but if you're open to it, you recognize that it's
actually what it is as a confrontation or a meeting
with yourself. M And when it's a meeting with yourself,

(28:14):
then all of it is profound. Every single person, every
single person is a meeting with yourself like velcro. Right,
it's like if there's nothing to rub, it just all
like smooths by. But if you've got a little like
stickiness there, it's like a little you know, then people's
hooks get on that your that those fuzzy like gnarly

(28:37):
places in you, and so then it's an opportunity instead
of you know, you're in my way, you get the
hell out of Right, it wasn't that it was. It
was this like oh yeah, oh there, I am. Oh right,
it's like and and that that was very very clear.

(28:59):
Remember once described sitting meditation as a kind of curiosity,
and that really struck me. I remember right after you
found a profound curiosity. I remember sitting after that at
this retreat with that in my head, and it was
kind of hot and there was a like a beat
of sweat was just down my face, and I was
really annoyed by it. And it was this embodiment of

(29:20):
something that I felt like, I think I know what
she's talking about, what it means to just sit and
be curious as opposed to constantly trying to manage and control.
But but again I wonder, I wonder, like, okay, so
I just I say people to people in the podcast,
all right, everyone being curious, domainage and control, thank you, goodnight?
And then what keeps people from going off and doing that?

(29:42):
In other words, how does one it's one thing to
know something and a different thing to live it and
embody it. How do you cross that gap? I think
you could. I mean I think that's where practice comes in, right,
we practice our way into contact with three reality a
more truer reality until it is familiar enough to us

(30:09):
that we recognize the other thing is false, so that
a bead of sweat is just a bead of sweat.
It doesn't have to be an annoyance. It could first
just be a feeling. Angel practices meditation in the neighborhood.

(30:29):
Fred helped kids get there by showing them how to
slow down and get quiet. There were long pauses on
the show and moments when Fred would ask us to
stop and reflect on a song or an image or
just breathe. That kind of slowing down becomes really useful

(30:51):
when we're hurt or overwhelmed, when someone makes us angry,
that's when we really need to understand our emotions to
be able to get space from them. My practice is
having the space right, carving the space out, and I
mean just that is a monumental feat in a world
that is like constantly moving, and it moves maybe I

(31:13):
would say about three or four times as fast as
it did when I was younger and entered into this practice.
Just the mental commitment to carve that kind of space
out in a society that's so much about doing, to
say like I'm not gonna actually be doing anything. I'm
not going to be accomplished anything or producing anything. And

(31:34):
I think as a as a black person in particular,
it frees me from the notion that I am defined
by what I'm producing and for people that were brought
to this land to to produce and have in so
many ways organized ourselves and many of the campaigns organized
for us by our leaders and no shame or blame,

(31:58):
but have been organized around our our value in relationship
to producing things. Uh. And I'm fond of saying these days,
you know, I'm like, get us jobs, Like I mean,
we have worked all we have need to work for
the next We don't, you know, we don't need You

(32:18):
don't need to teach us how to work job skills.
That's it, Like, that's a that's an oxy moron. Like
our evidence of our job skills is this country. That's
they're not ready for this one. They're not ready for
this conversation. So um. And so what I saw is

(32:43):
these very particular opportunities to be a fugitive from this construct.
So I think it's really it's it's really profound that
just the act of the choosing of the silence, and
and I get to defy some things, right, And I
think what we're talking about is defying. Yes, we are

(33:04):
talking about defying, I mean, and that is the thing.
I mean. Their defiance is a really great word to
bring into this conversation because I feel like when I'm
talking about the power of someone representing love in the
way that Fred Rogers represented it, and the way that
that love, the way Fred Rogers said to kids, you
matter in a way that maybe no one else in

(33:25):
that kid's life was telling them. It's tempting to think
of that as a kind of affirmation and a kind
of and that's what's that's what's made fun of when
we make fun of Fred Rogers. But the more I
think about it, the more I think of it as
an act of denial, an act of resistance, denying this
what he saw encroaching on kids and what then proceeded

(33:46):
to over the next because he started so the world
was similar in some ways but wildly different in other ways,
and that he wanted to deny this. What he saw
was this encroaching idea that your value was only based
on how how much you please people, or how much
people like you, or how much money you earn, or

(34:07):
if you could wrap them all up. You can earn
a lot of money. Then people are pleased and they
like you maybe get that all together. But really, what
Fred Rogers was talking about, seen through certain lens, was
a kind of resistance to the to the momentum of
our culture. And that's where I think of him as
like an incredibly strong person. No, I think that his

(34:31):
his his active resistance was fairly um demonstrated and strong
and persistent and you know all of the things that
make a warrior a warrior, right, Like not a war monger,
not a soldier, right, but a warrior. What is that difference? Um,
I think of soldiers is following instructions, you know, I

(34:52):
think as I think of warriors in the heroic sense
of warrior, as people that are charged right there, charged
with a cause. I think the power and the potency
of him, like any true teacher of wisdom, is that
he he was talking to you at each and every

(35:15):
single time. And maybe he would turn his attention and
he would talk to him Mr McFeeley or you know
whoever else or you know, um, but there were those
times when he turned directly to the camera and he
spoke to you. He spoke to me, and so that
held ness, especially for those of us that were made

(35:40):
to feel as if the society wasn't constructed for our
sense of belonging unless we vied for that belonging, unless
we quote unquote earned that belonging, to have someone turned
to you directly you and say, just as you are,
You're loved, just as you are, exactly as you are

(36:02):
in this moment, not another moment, not a moment to come,
not a promised moment. Right even even our religions were
selling us on a promised moment to come one day,
and he was saying, no, right now, like right this
particular moment, which I think of, as you know, as

(36:23):
Howard Thurman would say, is like the religion of Jesus,
not the religion about Jesus right doing the work of Jesus.
That was to like hold love right there in the space.
And you know, when we say this word love, people
are probably turning to their warm fuzzy feelings and looking
for that. And I'm not talking about the warm fuzzy feelings.

(36:45):
And if it generated warm fuzzy feelings for you, great,
but I think what it generated from me is space, right,
It's the space it was the space to be me.
I didn't look at Fred Rogerson go oh, my god,
warm and fuzzy. I love him, you know. In fact,
I didn't think much about him, and I think that

(37:06):
that is the most profound love is. It didn't make
me think about him and how I felt about him.
It made me think about how it felt about me.
How do you feel about you? What is your value?
How do you even know? Above my desk at home,

(37:28):
where I write this, I have a small reminder that
says you are enough. I look at it all the time,
not because I believe it, but because I actually don't.
I mean, I am enough for what, for you, for

(37:48):
the world, for me. In my forty or five years,
I've had a lot of experiences, but maybe the most
defining one is the experience being shown in married ways
that I'm not enough, that my life doesn't matter. Many

(38:09):
people have had this same experience. My mother and I
were homeless for a time, often hungry. I was violently
sexually assaulted at the age of seven, and it wouldn't
be the last time I was called racial slurs by
classmates and even occasionally by teachers. I grew up to
watch people who looked like me, beat and shot on

(38:31):
television while unarmed, only to have the justice system decide
time and time and time again that no wrong had
been committed in the eyes of the law. I've looked
down the barrel of guns just because people thought my
mother and I didn't belong in the neighborhood that we
lived in. Am I enough? Do I have value? Does

(38:58):
my life really matter? I can tell myself that it does,
But what does it take for me to believe it?
Of course, not believing that I am enough? It's not
just a personal problem. It's a collective one, because how

(39:20):
can I believe in your value if I don't even
believe in my own. In this life, people like me
and maybe like you, we've had to find our own value,
our own worth. And one voice, like the voice of
Fred Rogers telling me that I am enough is powerful
and it is beautiful, and I want to believe it.

(39:41):
I love believing it. But his voice alone is not
enough to undo an entire history. I wish it was,
but it's not. But his exam ample the way he

(40:02):
lived now that has impact the way Reverend Angel lives,
That has impact the people in your lives that you've
called to tell us about that has impact. Fred Rogers
lived his life in service to something greater than himself.
Let's call it love, and not warm feelings. I like

(40:22):
you a lot. Love, but love in the way that
Ashley defines it as action, as accountability, Love in the
way that Reverend Angel defines it as space. Space to
see others, to understand others. This was not his only devotion,
but it seemed to be his primary devotion, and I

(40:43):
don't think he could have done this work without it.
Fred was devoted and disciplined. He swam every morning, He
rose early, and studied and prayed and meditated on how
he would be an active force for good every day.
A producer for his SHOWOW told us that each time
he entered the TV studio he uttered a small prayer,

(41:06):
Dear God, let some part of this be yours. He
famously made sure that every one of the hundreds of
letters he received each week was thoughtfully answered. His dedication
was to loving us, accepting us, showing up for us
every day for nine episodes forty years. Through the television

(41:30):
neighborhood he created, he showed us how to love like
that too. That was Fred Rogers way of making the
world better. So what is yours? There is no one

(41:56):
sentence I can say, or that Fred Rogers can say
that solves all of our problems. Our freedom, our love
for ourselves, our care for one another does not come overnight.
It is something we build bit by bit, one action
at a time, maybe even one moment at a time.

(42:20):
But I do not have doubt. I believe in your
ability to imagine and live something better than this because
I am learning to do it myself. I'm proud of you.
I'm grateful to you, and I love you. Here's the

(42:46):
sweater going into the closet, Here's the jacket going on.
Me will be the nighttime, and then I'll come the

(43:12):
new day, and that's when you and I will be
together again. Thank you for listening to Finding Fred. Our

(43:43):
show is produced by Transmitter Media. The team is Dan O'Donnell,
Jordan Bailey, and Maddie Foley. Our editor is Sarah Nicks.
The executive producer for Transmitter Media is Greta Cohne. Executive
producers at Fatherly are Simon Isaacs and Andrew Berman. Thanks
to the team at I Heart Media. Yeah special thanks

(44:04):
to all of our guests. Many thanks also to Fred
Rogers Productions, to Joe Negri and to the studio engineers
at UC Berkeley. Extra special thanks to Tim lieve Barger,
who runs the site Neighborhood archive dot com. It's a
listing of every song, every episode, every character on Mr.
Rogers Neighborhood. It's been an amazing resource for our team.

(44:28):
Rick Kwan makes the show sound beautiful. Theme music is
by Blue Dot Sessions and interstitial music by Alison Layton Brown.
That's it for our show. You can come back and
listen to all of our episodes and tell your friends
to do the same. I'm Carvel Wallace, thank you for listening.

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