I Like You As You Are

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

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi. Before we get started, I wanted to give you
a heads 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,

(00:22):
it's nice to meet you. I'm Fred. I want to
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

(00:42):
in his life. I think there's so much to learn
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

(01:03):
an adult. I would love, love, love for him to
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

(01:26):
Mr Rogers never really needed anybody to to be different.
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

(01:52):
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

(02:16):
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,

(02:42):
and I love being with you. I'm carved a Wallace
and this is Finding Fred, a podcast about Fred Rogers

(03:04):
from 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

(03:25):
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

(03:46):
trying to talk about feelings in a serious way, and
I think at times I've been dismissed because of that
and definitely thought of as soft or lacking and intelligence.
And I think that what Mr Rogers in the Cultural

(04:09):
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

(04:33):
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

(04:55):
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

(05:18):
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
we're going to pay for it, And so the idea

(05:42):
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
love is an active noun, like the words struggle. To

(06:04):
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,
something requiring time and patience and quiet, things that may

(06:26):
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 laughter,
changes to vanity, all in a few seconds and seemingly
out of our own control. That's when I start feeling

(06:49):
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 letting them move me in
different directions, and I've lost the plot. I've lost control,
and I don't like to feel that way. I was

(07:11):
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
sense to me. So she broke out the markers in
the paper and she drew a big circle, and on

(07:33):
the outside of the circle, she labeled all of these selves,
these roles that we take on when we interact with
the world. That 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,
the needy self. She wrote all these selves around the circle,

(07:56):
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.
And when I watched Mr Rogers, it's clear that this

(08:18):
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

(08:39):
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 nights skating with my cousins and
my brother at roller Dome South in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
And when I was a kid at all night skate

(09:00):
rolling 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, because I'm y'allt and I

(09:24):
when she would 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

(09:49):
I could 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

(10:15):
time of 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

(10:38):
was 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 being

(11:00):
and putting myself at the center, 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.

(11:24):
It's good that I look the way 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 that you're
just glad you're the way you are? Good for you

(11:50):
if you know those times, yes, sir, I'm proud of it.
When you can feel that way. Ye. Hope for ourselves
and hope for our relationships our communities depends on our
ability to find our center, to stay in touch with it,

(12:13):
and to act from it. Fred 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 Actuley

(12:36):
says he did that by 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

(12:56):
feelings that should motivate action, and I think 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,

(13:17):
unfortunately what we've done is encouraged 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

(13:38):
questions that people seem to really respond to is and
want to ask you what do you 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?

(13:58):
I keep what I need and I spend the rest,
and there's always more. It's it's abundant. I 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

(14:19):
the gift I got to give, then that's what y'all
gonna get. Hi. My name is Risa and I've never
called it 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

(14:41):
be helpers. But that's really a question about love too. Hi,
mom saw that we each walk around with a bokay
of flowers and walk down the street. If somebody says
hied you with smiles and there giving you a flower,
and you have a choice. You can smile back and

(15:03):
say hi, give them a flower back, or you going
to take their flower of human And so the trick
is to keep your okay healthy. And 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

(15:25):
not getting out yours, and you're gonna find them with
a little huge out of sorts. Okay, So to tricking,
you know, to find that balance. More stories from you
After a quick break, h Ashley says she takes the

(16:41):
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 strangers,
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 to be good neighbors, high carvel.

(17:05):
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 a busy street and

(17:26):
there was a mother and her children that were walking
against the wind with the snow hitting them and carrying
bags of groceries and uh and immediately she pulled over,
rolled down the window and offered to give these people
a ride. And immediately she asked us to move over.

(17:48):
There was several kids and the mother. Mother got in
the front seat and we all squished into the back.
She got out, help get the groceries and its the
trunk of a 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, my name
is Justin sweeton Um from Texas and two thousand and sixteen,

(18:14):
I was homeless and on drugs and needed to make
a change in my life. So I walked to uh Conro, Texas,
met a man there by the name of Luke Reatas.
He invited me into the men's transitional home called the
Freedom House. He basically just instructed me on good ethics

(18:36):
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 and I wanted to step into that position,
and I wanted to be a part of this, this
community to help homeless people get back on their feet.

(18:56):
And uh 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. I went from someone who was

(19:18):
in search of help to suddenly giving help. It was
the most important two years of my life. Ki 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 I got picked on a lot by

(19:42):
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. We had a writing assignment and
he said, she needs some help, and I think you
would be really good at helping her with this writing assignment,

(20:03):
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. She taught me how to speak up for

(20:24):
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 mister Brown, if you're
out there, I think value all the time, and thank
you so much. When I was in my twenties, I

(20:50):
went through a crippling depression. It was as if all
the unprocessed trauma from my childhood just showed up on
my door one day and moved in 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 a lot of value to the world. I

(21:11):
didn't think that I was equipped to deal with life.
My closest friend at the time, I 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,

(21:31):
I volunteered to 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 Zen Buddhist

(21:52):
I ever met, and she was nothing like the movies
told me and ordained Zen practitioner would be. She was
black and queer and have the no non since 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

(22:15):
as a form of practice, resistance to oppression as a
spiritual calling. She talked about meditation and quiet as a
path toward 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. We became friends, and over

(22:40):
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,

(23:01):
that I matter just as I am. In some way,
Angel might have saved my life. She's written some books,
including Being Black and 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

(23:22):
the Spiritual director of the meditation based New Dharma Community.
As long as I've known her, 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

(23:45):
with Fred's philosophy, even though she came from a very
different place than Fred did. Angel was a young activist
in New York City. She knows confrontation, so I asked
her how she managed to overcome the year and anger
that can come with that. She told me a story
about what it was like to return to New York

(24:07):
after years of practice in California. I got off at
Penn Station, as one as one does, and I left
the relative space of being on the train and I
entered into the sea of people that is the life

(24:28):
of New York. And in that moment, like I felt
this release of like, oh so good. And it became
super clear to me in that moment that what happens
in that space of confrontation is you can see it

(24:52):
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 conference tation or a meeting with yourself. Hmm.
And when it's a meeting with yourself, then all of
it is profound. Every single person, every single person is
a meeting with yourself like velcro, right, it's like if

(25:15):
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 places in you,
and so then it's an opportunity instead of you know,
you're in my way, you get right. It wasn't that.

(25:40):
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. Remember you once described sitting meditation
as a kind of curiosity, and that really struck me.
I remember right after you profound a profound curiosity. I
remember sitting after that at this retreat with that in

(26:03):
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 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,

(26:24):
I wonder, like, okay, so I just I say people
to people in the podcast, all right, everyone being curious,
domag and control, thank you, goodnight? And then what keeps
people from going off and doing that? 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, I mean,
I think that's where practice comes in, right, we practice

(26:47):
our way into contact with reality, a more truer reality,
until it is familiar enough to us that we recognize
the other thing is false, so that a bead of
sweat is just a bead of sweat. It doesn't have

(27:12):
to be an annoyance. It could first just be a feeling.
Angel practices meditation in the neighborhood. 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

(27:40):
slowing down becomes really useful when we're hurt or overwhelmed,
when someone makes us angry, that's when we really need
to understand our motions to be able to get space
from them. My practice is having the space right, carving
the space out, and I mean just is a monumental

(28:01):
feat in a world that is like constantly moving, and
it moves maybe I would say about three 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 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

(28:22):
accomplished anything or producing anything. And 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

(28:43):
and many of the campaigns organized for us by our
leaders no shame or blame, but have been organized around
our 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

(29:04):
we have, need to work for the next We don't.
You know, we don't. You 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 the man. They're not ready

(29:27):
for this one, they're not ready for this conversation. So um.
And so what I saw is 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

(29:51):
to defy some things. And I think what we're talking
about is defying. Yes, we are talking about defying, I mean,
and that is the thing I mean, they're 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

(30:13):
said to kids, you matter in a way that maybe
no one else in 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

(30:37):
and what then proceeded to over the next because he
started in nine, 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

(30:57):
or how much money you earn, or if you could
ap 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 lends, 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.

(31:21):
I think that his 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

(31:41):
soldiers is following instructions, you know. I think as I
think of warriors in the heroic sense of warrior, as
people that are charged, right, They're charged with a cause.
I think the power and the potency of him, like
any true teacher of wisdom, is that he he was

(32:04):
talking to you each and every single time. And maybe
he would turn his attention and he would talk to
Mr mcpheeley 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

(32:30):
that were made 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, your loved, just as you are, exactly

(32:53):
as you are 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

(33:15):
you know, as 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. And if it generated

(33:37):
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 that is the

(33:58):
most profound love is it to 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, where I write this,

(34:21):
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 the world, for me.

(34:44):
In my forty or five years, I've had a lot
of experiences, but maybe the most defining one is the
experience of being shown in myrriad ways that I'm not enough,
that my life doesn't matter. Many people have had this
same experience. My mother and I were homeless for a time,

(35:06):
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 television while unarmed, only to have
the justice system decide time and time and time again

(35:30):
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 my life really matter? I can

(35:54):
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 can I believe in your
value if I don't even believe in my own In

(36:17):
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. I love believing it.
But his voice alone is not enough to undo an

(36:40):
entire history. I wish it was, but it's not. But
his example, the way he lived now, that has impact,
the way Reverend Angel lives, that has impact the people

(37:01):
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 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

(37:22):
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 don't think he could
have done this work without it. Fred was devoted and disciplined.

(37:42):
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, Dear God, lets some part
of this be yours. He famously made sure that every

(38:06):
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 neighborhood he created, he showed us how
to love like that too. That was Fred Rogers way

(38:30):
of making the world better? So what is yours? There
is no one sentence I can say, or that Fred
Rogers can say that solves all of our problems. Our freedom,

(38:56):
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. But I do not have doubt. I believe
in your ability to imagine and live something better than

(39:22):
this because I'm learning to do it myself. I'm proud
of you. I'm grateful to you, and I love you.
Here's the sweater going into the closet. Here's the jacket

(39:50):
going on. Me hmm. There'll be the night time and
then I'll come the new day, and that's when you
and I will be together again. Thank you for listening

(40:33):
to Finding Fred. Our 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 Gretta Cohne. Executive producers at Fatherly are Simon
Isaac's and Andrew Berman. Thanks to the team at I
Heart Media. Special thanks to all of our guests. Many

(40:57):
thanks also to Fred Rogers Productions to show Negri into
the studio. Engineers at You See Berkeley. Extra special thanks
to Tim lie 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

(41:17):
resource for our team. 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 Carvil Wallace.
Thank you for listening.