Africa Brooke: Reclaiming Truth and Overcoming Addiction

On this episode, Africa Brooke, an internationally recognized speaker, writer, and consultant, shares her inspiring journey of overcoming addiction and reclaiming self-sovereignty. She delves into her experience growing up in an alcoholic family, her path to sobriety, and her mission to help others break free from self-censorship and fear.

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Because for me, the moment that I had one zip,
I'm thinking about the next one, creating some kind of
strategy of how I'm going to get the next drink
in a way that doesn't make it obvious that I
need that next drink. So there was a everything would
be strategized around the alcohol, and then other drugs came
in over time, whether it's cocaine or Ketman and DMA,

(00:20):
et cetera, et cetera. So I fourteen years old. I
wish I could say that it didn't start off that
bad and then it got worse over time. But it
started bad and only got worse. I wrote that I
am twenty four years old, and I've found myself in
the clutches of alcoholism, and I don't know what to do.

(00:42):
And I wrote it out loud to no one specific.
I had no idea that, you know, everything that's happening
now nine years later would have happened. I just desperately
needed to get well, and I knew that if I
didn't take some kind of public accountability for it, I
would relapse again and know and would have to find out.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
Today on the Sino Show, we are joined by a force.
A woman straight up Litstene, What I think you're like?
What I wrote about you. A woman who has made
it her mission to proclaim truth, sovereignty, and radical self
honesty in a world that's forgotten the power of both.

(01:26):
Africa Brook is an internationally recognized speaker, writer, and consultant
who helps individuals and organizations break free from the grip
of self censorship, addiction, shame, and fear. She's lived it,
she's healed through it, and now she's teaching others how
to live unapologetically awake. This isn't a conversation, ladies and gentlemen,

(01:50):
it's a homecoming to your highest self. Please welcome the brilliant,
the bold, the beautifully human Africa Brook.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
Oh wow, oh my god, what an introduction. Thank you
so much. That's the energy that I need this afternoon.
Thank you so so so much.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Oh beautiful beauty, So oh my gosh. I have so
many things I want to talk to you about. I
thought I was gonna break it up in three parts.
And of course, you know, we're just gonna you and I,
we're just gonna riff. We're gonna make some beautiful jazz here.
But I thought the first part would be growing up
in an alcoholic family, Okay, and then work our way
into your own recovery, your own journey, and then your business.

(02:34):
You're consulting who you are, your books, you're messaging what
we're learning. How does that sound?

Speaker 1 (02:40):
That sounds wonderful? And you know what, before I dive in,
I would be so curious to know how you found
me and how you came across my work and my voice.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah yeah, so so somebody sent me a real of
yours and immediately it just dropped me. It's like, first off,
your sober sister. You know, I've been sober thirty eight years,
and there's a fierceness in your message. But there's so
much warmth and love. And I knew that it wasn't

(03:14):
something that you learned at Yale. This is something that
you know what we know, They don't teach it Yale,
and you came care of this hard earned and it
was powerful and it really I was like, I need
to reach out to this person. And that's how it
went down.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
Yeah, wow, thank you so much. My name is Africa
and my you know everything that leads me to the
business side of things, all of these worldly labels that
I wear in the world, be it writer, consultant, speaker,
et cetera. Even the platform that I have. All of
it has been so accidental. In many ways, it's been purposeful,

(03:52):
but it's been so accidental. My journey starts in twenty sixteen,
when I was twenty four years old and I just
needed to get well. And that's where the addiction piece
comes in, which I'll elaborate on a little bit later
as we go, But I think laying that groundwork is
very important in truly understanding who I am as a
person and why I really have this conviction and fierceness

(04:16):
when it comes to people speaking courageously, people pushing back
against things that don't make any sense, you know. But
if we go back a little bit more, I was
born and raised in Zimbabwe. So Zimbabwe is in the
South of Africa, right next door to South Africa, and
I grew up there and until I was nine years old.

(04:38):
And my story in Zimbabwe is a very important one
because obviously people's childhood shape a lot of who they are,
but especially those who have grown up in homes where
domestic violence is norm which is the home that I
grew up in, and all of that was held together
by my father's alcoholism, and at the time we didn't

(05:01):
really there's no language, you know, in my culture like alcoholism.
Maybe there is now, but at that time there was
nothing like that. It's either just Maxwell, my father's name,
Maxwell drinks a little bit too much, but so do
his brothers, but so do all the men around them.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
You know.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
It's just the norm, and because of the whole that
religion has. And of course religion can be a wonderful thing,
but it depends on how it's used or how it's weaponized,
you know. So from the culture that I'm from, if
you are experiencing any hardship, especially in relation to abuse
or addiction or any offshoots of that, you don't speak

(05:39):
to anyone. You pray it away. You go to church
and you pray it away, and you say absolutely nothing.
So my father suffered a great deal because of that,
because of the culture. That was just the norm at
the time. But what I didn't realize for myself was
that I would end up following my father's footsteps. And

(05:59):
it didn't take that long for me to end up
doing that. So he was very very abusive, physically abusive
to my mother, but also me and my siblings. We
just never knew what version of my father we were
going to get. You know, sometimes depending on what kind
of drunk he was. I always think of this very
specific time where he was happy drunk, which was very rare.

(06:24):
But he was happy drunk, and he came home with
his briefcase after work. And he used to work at
a paper company, and they had these pink papers, sheets, worksheets.
They were pink, so they were very attractive to me
and to us as children. And on this day he
was very very happy for whatever reason, maybe it was
payday or maybe he just felt good within himself, and

(06:45):
he opened his briefcase and he gives us these papers,
and he tells us to draw him something nice, you know,
draw me something nice, which was very rare for my
dad to be so just so and sort of giddy
and childlike. But he said, draw me something nice to
all of us. So we drew, We drew. We spent

(07:06):
hours drawing. My mum was very happy, but she was
also curious, is my dad sure that he wants us
to be drawing on these papers? But you know, he's sure,
he's sure, he's insisting. And the next day it was
a weekend. He wakes up and he remembers absolutely nothing

(07:28):
about coming home, opening the briefcase, insisting that we draw
him wonderful pictures. What my dad saw that morning is
that we had disrespected and disobeyed him, and that we
are just absolutely vile children who don't know how to

(07:48):
behave How could we do this to his work because
we had drawn and scribbled, and you know, the aftermath
of it was right there in the living room, and
we got beaten quite badly for that. So that's just
an example of we never knew what version of my
father we were going to get. Can we even trust
his joy? Can we even trust the happiness? Or are

(08:10):
we going to be punished for it in some kind
of way. So that created the home that I grew
up in, where there was just so much hyper vigilance
and so much paranoia. But what that also created for
me as a young child is compulsive lying because I
learned how to lie so that I could manage my
father so that I could, you know, and when I

(08:32):
but that comes outside of the home, it follows you
to school, and it follows you everywhere, and then you
realize the benefits and rewards of lying and never really
telling the truth. And for me, it started with embellishing
who my father was not in terms of status or
anything like that. But I would tell other kids that
my father was so wise, that my father was so kind,

(08:55):
that my father was so loving, all of the things
that he might have been, but I never experienced much.
I sort of exaggerated his character, and then I started
to exaggerate other things. So I'm speaking about all of
those dark things. But at the same time, you know,
I'm so grateful to have grown up with siblings because

(09:17):
we got to create a world off our own amongst
all of that. And I'm also so grateful to have
lived in a country like Zimbabwe, where we had space
and we had land, and you don't need to be
rich or to have money. It's just the way things
are in that country, you know. So we could just
play and play and climb trees and just create so

(09:37):
many wilds off our own within all of that, and
it was the norm. You know that you get beaten,
sometimes you get hit, you do something wrong, but also
you have days that are really lovely where you get
to play. But alcohol was omnipresent within the home. My
mom never drunk. She has never touched a drop in
her entire life, and she was quite religious as we

(09:58):
were growing up, and my father also resented her for
how religious she had become, because she wasn't always. So
there were so many different things, you know, that underpinned
his own addiction. But I really got to see the
duality that I speak about a lot in my work now,
which we'll get to you a little bit later on.
I got to first experience it within my home, where

(10:20):
I had to hold I always say this, but it
really was a way for me to learn how to
hold multiple truths about people. I had to hold multiple
truths about my father because there were very rare moments
where he could be so patient and so kind and
such a good listener, so I had to hold that,

(10:42):
but also hold how he was the majority of the time.
So I would say, actually, without even realizing it, that's
where my curiosity for the human shadow took form, in
really understanding the many layers and multiple truths of people,
that people are not actually all good or all bad,
you know. But then I actually got to see what

(11:02):
alcohol can do to people. And we left Zimbabwe when
I was nine years old, so this was all happening
before the age of nine. I would say this, it
took its darkest turn with my dad in the way
that I experienced it from about six to nine years old,
so three years, which feels like a lifetime when you're
a child, you know, because you have nothing else to

(11:24):
do but focus on what is happening. We left Zimbabwe
when I was nine years old because of the economic decline.
This was in two thousand and one, and my mother
needed to escape my father, but also in our culture,
you don't really divorce, so the plan was for her

(11:44):
to come to the UK with us the kids and
to start a new life, and then my father was
to follow on a year or two after That never
transpired because he ended up dying because of alcohol. He
ended up dying back in Zimbabwe. And you know what,
I didn't say this out loud until maybe a few

(12:06):
years ago when me and my sister sat down to
talk about it. I have never felt relief at hearing
about the death of someone, but I can quite clearly
remember as a ten year old the relief that I
felt when I heard that my father had died. And
not because I hated him, but I knew that we

(12:28):
were finally going to experience peace. I knew that I
would no longer have to walk into his room and
to cover my nose instantly, because it got to a
point where, even though my father was a beautiful, beautiful man,
it got to a point where the alcoholism was so
bad he wasn't washing himself anymore. He would put on
his suit and go to the civic center, which is

(12:51):
pretty much kind of like the town center, and he
would just sit there all day and just drink, and
we would even see him when we were walking back
from school and just not tell people that this is
my dad. So the relief that I felt was that
I was never going to have to see that again.
I was never going to smell the smell of that
room again, because it got to a point as well

(13:12):
where he wasn't going to the bathroom. He would just
urinate in bostles and just leave them in the room,
you know. So the decline was very, very visible. But
again I didn't realize the true evil of alcohol, the
true evil of the spirit. I as a child, you
don't quite understand it. And then we moved to the

(13:36):
UK and my father passed away, and then life continued,
and then I discovered alcohol for myself when I was thirteen,
thirteen or fourteen, and my goodness, it's amazing the way
patterns work. You know, you don't realize you're in a
pattern until you see it for the first time. And

(13:58):
usually you see it when you you've either burnt everything
to the ground or when someone is telling you that
you're burning things to the ground and you can't quite
see it. But for me, at fourteen is when I
started replicating my father's pattern. What started as just a
way for me to connect with other children because here

(14:19):
in the UK, I don't know what it's like where
you are, but in the UK it really is seen
as a rite of passage, especially binge drinking. Binge drinking
is just seen as just something you do when you're
around twelve and and you know, some people get over it,
and it's just the way that it is. So my
addiction hid in plain sight from the age of fourteen

(14:42):
up until twenty four, and my addiction truly made me
believe that I wouldn't be able to experience peace or
intimacy or connection or sex or humor or anything anything
anything without it, without alcohol, without binge drinking and blacking

(15:04):
out was the norm For me, from the very first
time that I drank, I blacked out, and I just
thought it happens to everyone. I honestly believed everyone blacked
out until I got sober at twenty four. I believed
that everyone blacked out because that's what happened to me
almost every time. I didn't know the concept of just

(15:26):
one drink sounded absurd, and it only stopped sounding absurd
to me maybe six years ago and I'm nine years
sober now, because I just couldn't fathom the idea that
someone could just have one drink or a few SIPs
and put it down, because for me, the moment that
I had one sip, I'm thinking about the next one,
creating some kind of strategy of how I'm going to

(15:48):
get the next drink in a way that doesn't make
it obvious that I need that next drink. So there
was a everything would be strategized around the alcohol, and
then other drugs came in over time, whether it's cocaine
or ketman and DMA et cetera, et cetera. So I
fourteen years old, I wish I could say that it

(16:10):
didn't start off that bad, and then it got worse
over time. But it started bad and only got worse,
you know, especially when we take into account that blacking
out was the norm, binge drinking was the default. It
didn't matter where I was. I could have been at
a baby shower. I could have been at a work meeting.
I could have been at a rave, I could have

(16:30):
been at a wedding. It was all the same. I
drunk the same in every format. There was no there
was no discernment. There was no my addiction, and I
don't think addiction has any discernment. It doesn't give a
shit where you are. It's going to be the same
every single time. So that's where I can sort of

(16:52):
take you in terms of my upbringing, the context of
my life where I grew up, the presence of alcohol,
and kind of taking you to the tell end of
where I then needed to get sober.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
So let's I also think you had a love of
cocaine as well.

Speaker 1 (17:08):
Correct, yes, yes, but you know what, you know what's
interesting about that, though my love for alcohol was the
strongest where cocaine came in. And this is always I
always laughed myself when I think about this. When cocaine
came in, I relapsed from nineteen I realized that there

(17:29):
was a serious problem. And how did I know this?
I knew this because I was waking up in strange
beds sometimes being able to feel that I've had sex,
if you know what I mean, Because there's a physical
you can feel something, you know, you can feel that
something has been done to you, but you don't know
what the details are. I had normalized that experience in

(17:50):
my mind. It doesn't matter what's happened to my body.
I just have to figure out how do I get
back to West London. How do I get back to Elin.
That's the most important thing. It does matter what has
happened why, because I don't even remember it anyway, so
I don't have to think about it. I don't have
to talk about it. I'm blacking out pretty much every
single time. But I'm waking up in strange locations. I'll

(18:13):
go out for lunch and then three days later I'm
waking up in Surrey, which is the countryside. So let's
say the lunch happens in London, the city. How the
fuck have I ended up over there? But again, these
experiences were plentiful to the point of the repetition created
a normality, so it wasn't until it started to graduate

(18:33):
to bruises, until it graduated to me losing a front tooth,
until But again, it didn't make me stop. It just
made me think, Okay, I need to work with this
a bit smarter. I just need to be a little
bit smarter, that's all. But don't need nothing needs to change.
Let's just work with this in a better way. But
there were way too many of those incidents in collection.

(18:54):
So I tried from nineteen up until twenty four to
get sober, and I relapsed seven times, specifically within that timeframe.
So where cocaine comes in is because more than a
few times I remember saying to myself, seeing as alcohol
is the problem, I'm just gonna stop drinking and do

(19:14):
coke instead. That was the new strategy that I started trying.
I was like, I was like, let's I was like,
let's get on the coke because coke is not the issue.
I can put that down and let's just put down
the again. It's like Africa, Africa, what are you saying?

(19:36):
What are you saying? So I when it came to drugs,
other drugs, I could put them down. There was just
something about alcohol. There was something and It wouldn't be
surprised me. It wouldn't surprise me if there was some
kind of spiritual agreement that I made with my father
when I would watch him drink the way he was drinking,

(19:58):
it wouldn't surprise me. And I wonder what you think
about things like that, you know, the spiritual aspect of
all of this, and the kind of silent agreements and
commitments we make to the people in our lives and
end up committing to their same passion, you know. So
that was my relationship with the drug for the decade,

(20:22):
and then I again. Seven times I tried to get sober,
but it just would not stick. I would be so
before a month, three months, six months was the longest
that I did. It would be two months sometimes and
there would just be this itch for destruction and chaos.
Sometimes people might think I relapsed because I really missed

(20:43):
the booze. It wasn't. I realized now that the booze
for me was more of a vehicle for something else.
It was a vehicle for a piece, but a piece
that was tied with like chaos. There was something exhilarating
and something that made me feel alive when I was
surrounded by destruction. You know, when I had the adrenaline

(21:06):
to figure out how to get back home, the adrenaline
to figure out who did I upset? What have I done? Okay,
if I apologize, I know that I'll be able to
get away with it this time. This constant figuring things out,
you know, and getting rewards from it, and then you
get away with it and you do it again. So
there was more of a deeper addiction for me that
was beyond the thing itself.

Speaker 2 (21:29):
So yes, wow, beauty, Okay, God, there's.

Speaker 1 (21:33):
So much there.

Speaker 2 (21:34):
I know.

Speaker 1 (21:35):
I know.

Speaker 2 (21:35):
No, no, no, no, no, no, I want I want
a lot there.

Speaker 1 (21:37):
No.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
You you're my kind of alcohol, alky too, I really,
oh you're my kind of ALKI yeah, yeah, time, I
just I just, you know, bench drinking at twelve, you know,
all the crazy ideas, I'll just drink wine coolers. I'll
just do this, I'll just try this. It's not that bad.
But the main thing that you said I didn't. I
didn't drink double long Island. I tease because I love it.

(22:01):
I did it to shut my fucking head off because
I hated myself so much. Right, that's to get down.
I don't love Grete wine. Just need a break from
that loud fucking world right now. So let me ask
you this Africa, what was and thank you for mentioning
that you tried seven times? What was the moment? What
was your second tired moment? Walk the audience through when

(22:23):
you tapped out, and you know, thankfully you remain sober
since then. So tell me about that day or night
or weekend or Yeah, there.

Speaker 1 (22:32):
Was no one moment in the typical sense in that
there was something more extreme that I did that kind
of shook my world up and suddenly I'm awake. And
you know, it wasn't really like that for me, that
collection of incidents that I'm talking about from the age

(22:54):
of nineteen, there was just more and more. Just imagine
a backpack you're constantly carrying on your back, and you're
adding more things, more things. You're adding more resentments, You're
adding more confusion, You're adding more anger, You're adding more cheating,
You're adding more kleptomania, which was a thing for me
at the time as well, to just gain a sense

(23:16):
of control. When I would be in these binges, I
would kind of just take things I remember I would
have and anytime that I would have sex with a man.
I would steal a book from his house, you know,
and it would it would get me so excited. I would.

Speaker 2 (23:34):
Oh my god, I've never treated anybody with that cake before.
But that's a good one. Oh I got his Joseph Campbell, but.

Speaker 1 (23:46):
Oh my god, I got his Wall Street. He loved
that one. You know. It was just just just all
just all of these things that I was carrying and
carrying and carrying and carrying, and I just couldn't. I
just couldn't run away from it anymore. So I had
lost so many people in my life because when you

(24:07):
come with an addiction like this, especially depending on the timeline,
as in the age, people are moving on. The party
stops at some point. People are getting jobs, people are
in relationships, people are starting families, people are thinking about
where are they going to live. Adulthood is kicking in.
You know, the party has to stop at some point.
But I hadn't realized that the party never stopped because

(24:30):
it was always on for me, you know, So people
dropped off. I only had two people in my life
by the time that I got sober, my ex and
my best friend. And so when I think of that
final day, on November seventh, twenty sixteen. There was nothing
massively profound that had happened, although a week before that

(24:51):
we had all gone out, the three of us, we
had all gone out, and I had got into a
blackout again. I think I hadn't drunk for about month
at the time, so it was almost this thing of
catching up. So I always used to feel like, oh,
I can play catch up now, you know, because I've
been good for a couple of months. So it was
one of those things. And I left my boyfriend and

(25:14):
my friend at the place that we had gone to together.
I got in a car with strange men. I ended
up in one of them's bed. I was fully clothed,
So I don't think we ended up having sex because
maybe he thought I was too drunk, or maybe we did.
I wouldn't know, you know. But even though that might
sound very extreme to someone else listening to this, this

(25:35):
was the norm. And I remember getting home and my
boyfriend was there and he was so broken. He was
so broken. It's almost as if I could finally see
the level of disrespect that he had been wearing for
two years. I could finally see it. I'd never seen
it before because I was so deep in my selfishness

(25:58):
and my ego where everything is about me and what
I want to do, and we were living together. We
were living together, but there was no sense of care
or consideration for anyone else but me and my binges,
and that is it, you know. And it was one
of those moments where in my mind, my manipulative mind,

(26:20):
I'm thinking, Okay, I can just apologize and say that
I'll never do it again, and I can go on
another sober stint and he'll forgive me, but for the
first time. And I always tell him he's still in
my life as a friend. I always tell him how
grateful I am for the ultimatum that he gave me,
because he was the first ever person to do it.
He told me that either I stop this today or

(26:44):
this has to end. And I couldn't afford for that
relationship to end because he was the only person in
the entire world that fully accepted me for who I was,
The only person, not even my mother, not even anyone
at the only person that was in full acceptance and
not in a passive pushover wayh but someone that accepted

(27:06):
both my shadow and my light and was willing to
tell me that, but they were just not willing to
put up with this anymore. But again, even that ultimatum,
it didn't really register. I was like, fine, I'll stop
drinking for another two weeks and then we'll get a
nice bottle of wine and then we'll know again again,

(27:27):
you know. And then I decided that I was going
to try this thing again so that I could shut
him up, and I could shut my best friend up,
and I could just give my body a break because
I felt shame from what had happened the week before.
And then I went to a couple of AA meetings
again just to say that I'm trying, you know. I said,

(27:50):
I'm trying, so I'm gonna go. And then something just shifted.
It wasn't even like a big, profound shift, but some
thing subtle yet loud shifted. And then I stayed on
the path for another week. And then I started my

(28:10):
Instagram account, the same one that I have today. Every
single post is still there from day one, November seventh.
You can scroll. I don't have too many posts, so
you can scroll and see. And I wrote that I
am twenty four years old and I've found myself in
the clutches of alcoholism, and I don't know what to do,

(28:31):
and I wrote it out loud to no one specific.
I had no idea that, you know, everything that's happening
now nine years later would have happened. I just desperately
needed to get well, and I knew that if I
didn't take some kind of public accountability for it, I
would relapse again and no one would have to find out,
no one would know.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
What that's fascinating? What was it about the public holding
you accountable? Where did that track? How did that come
to your conscious?

Speaker 1 (29:00):
Yes? I think it's because I've always been a writer.
Since I was nine or ten, I've always written. That's
where I found kind of my safety and expression and
fullness in writing. And the reason I say that is
because as I was growing up, I did several And
I would also say the kind of generation that I'm from,

(29:22):
it wasn't as severe as it is now in terms
of people putting everything online, but people would blog, people
would share things. So I was in that kind of
generation where people were blogging and storytelling and it wasn't
even an overly thought out thing. But I just knew
I had to share it publicly in some way, So
I just started this Instagram account, and it wasn't my

(29:44):
real name. It was under the Monika Blackout bell because
I used to blackout all the time. So of course
I had to make it romantic, right, And I had
so many photos of alcohol on my phone, so many
beautiful photos of cocktails and blah blah blah, just dressing
up the disease, you know, just putting it in a

(30:05):
fancy bow and tie. So I thought, I have all
of these photos of alcohol, I don't want to share
my identity just yet. So it was anonymous for the
first three months. So I would post a photo of
a cocktail or some kind of booze that I've taken
a photo of, and then i'd write a caption about
what I was experiencing. If I felt like I was

(30:28):
going to drink something or snort or fall back into
promiscuity or anything, I would just write about it. But
I was writing into the void. It wasn't about community building.
Social media was a very different place. But within three
months I felt a very strong itch to drink again
because I started to think I've done enough time, I've

(30:49):
been so good, I've shared this publicly. I just one
more drink, maybe, if it's not a spirit. Maybe if
it's a good wine, and I've done that before, massive
it's a fucking good wine or not, you know. But
the rationalizing started, and then I revealed my face because
I knew that in order to not buy into this lie,

(31:13):
I need to not be anonymous because if I drink
and I'm anonymous, no one, no one will know, you know.
And then three months in when I revealed my face
and kept on sharing, that's when my story was picked
up by the UK media and then everything sort of
took off from there.

Speaker 2 (31:31):
Wow, so what what happened? That's so interesting? So the
disease was telling you it's not going to be that bad,
shifted on maybe different wine. And then this article? What
was it about the article that what shifted you into
consciousness again and to stay sober? What pushed you through?
Was it this like I have an opportunity, Now I
have a shot. This spill's good? What was that moment?

Speaker 1 (31:54):
So two things happened. I've written two open letters in
my life that have completely transformed everything. The first one
that I wrote was in late twenty It was in
January twenty seventeen, and I posted it to my Facebook
it's when I was getting that itch three months in

(32:16):
and I'm getting that itch to self destruct again. Just
go back into chaos. No one has to know. You
can get back on the horse again. You've done it before,
you can do it again. Just have one drink, you know.
That was the narrative in my mind. And then I
wrote a very long open letter which I posted on
Facebook where my friends and family could see it, and
I owned up fully to the addiction. I owned up

(32:37):
to the promiscuity, I owned up to the kleptomania. I
owned up to the cheating and the manipulating, and I
just everything everything. I just brought it to the four.
So I freed myself in that way. It was my
first It was my, I would say, my first big
act apart from starting that account and sharing. It was

(32:58):
my first big act on doing self censorship. Because I
remember my boyfriend's mum at the time. I showed her
the letter before I posted it. She loved it, she
said it was great, but she thought it was a
form of self flagellation. She thought that maybe I'm just
punishing myself and maybe I don't need to share this.
I can kind of just you know, when you do
those uh wellness rituals of writing the thing you want

(33:22):
to say and then you burn it and then you
sort of release it, you know. She suggested that maybe
I do something like that, and I said, no, this
needs to be public. So I shared it and my
friends and family saw it, and finally, for the first
time they knew what I had been experiencing for the
past ten years. So that was the first thing that
I did, and then I continued to share on social

(33:43):
media and then a one of the biggest national platforms
te on TV called ITV. They found my open letter,
I believe, and they found my account and at the time,
I'm twenty four years old. I'm sharing in this very
raw and open way, and anyone listening to this you
can go and see everything, and it can allow for

(34:05):
you to see that the person that I am now,
the Africa that I am now has been in training
for a very very long time. And it was a
very compelling story. And also the immigrant angle off it,
it was a compelling story, you know. So they I
got a segment for Dry January on ITV and then

(34:27):
that just took everything just sort of expanded from then.
It gave me a sense of purpose because finally I
realized that, oh my goodness, this thing that I've been
told I can only talk about in the basements of churches,
you know, this thing that I can only talk about
behind closed doors, people actually want to know. People are

(34:51):
experiencing this. People that don't quote unquote look like addicts
are experiencing the exact same thing that I am. People
my age and younger are trapped by binge drinking and
they're being told that it's a rite of passage and
that it's normal. I found the voice that I always had,
but that voice had been in the shadows, you know,
and I just hadn't realize that voice had been in

(35:13):
anonymity for three months but ten years really. So everything
just sort of took off from there, and that's when
I went deeper into understanding, wanting to understand the nature
of self destruction and why we get addicted to chaos.
That's when I found out about union psychology and the
human shadow. That's when I was able to stop moralizing

(35:36):
my addiction. It didn't make me a bad person. There
was something that I was experiencing that I could look
at in an objective way and still take accountability and
still take responsibility for it. And I think I've always
had a gift of talking about things that are supposedly
shameful without shame. There's nothing that I'm ashamed of. No

(35:57):
one walking on this earth could ever show, especially because
I'm more than happy to own all of it, even
in its finest details, you know. And I think at
the time and maybe even now, that was just very rare,
especially in a non performative way, because again, I just
needed to get well. I didn't give a shit about
a community, didn't give a shit about followers or a platform.

(36:19):
I still don't. I just needed to get well and
understand the human condition. So that's that's how that next
sort of phase.

Speaker 2 (36:27):
So you basically did a public four step yes.

Speaker 1 (36:33):
Yes, which is quite you know.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
Some would say insane, some would say no, brave, some
would say it was God's purpose. I'm assuming you'll tell me.
In doing that, people are going thank you. Somebody's finally talking.
How I'm feeling there? You got right there, like wow,
my God, and it I'm assuming it gave you purpose,

(37:00):
It gave you. I'm not so alone it gave you.
It sounds like a mantra, and like I have to
keep doing this. Is that accurate?

Speaker 1 (37:07):
Yes, absolutely, it helps me stay sober. It gave me
a level of accountability that went beyond me because now
that sense of community started to find its way to
me for the first time, you know, because although I
went to a few AA meetings, I didn't really connect

(37:28):
with it. And now when I look back, I realized
I didn't really connect with AA because again, I'm from
a culture where you pray things away, you don't speak
about it in public in that way. So I think
I forced myself to find an alternative. But I ended
up finding that alternative through writing. Ended up finding that

(37:48):
alternative through my community, but also through other people's testimonies
and stories and friends of mine who were in AA,
who would tell me about the different steps and the
different things you can do. And I like, I got
so much from people. I didn't do it alone. You know.
I think it would be so easy for me to
sit here and talk about my will power and I

(38:10):
did this and I but it's no, no, no, no.
I truly don't believe that you beat addiction alone. I
think most of us just don't realize the many hands
that have played a role in us getting well. You know,
even that person that still humanized you and loved you
and told you that you were not broken, and told
you that you're not a fuck up. You're doing fucked

(38:30):
up things, but you're not a fuck up. Okay. There's
been so many people along the way that have contributed
to my sobriety, but that level of visibility quite early
on and personal accountability and just writing, you know, it
really helped me stay on path. It really did.

Speaker 2 (38:48):
So you got onto that show, a lot of you know,
things started to popping. You're twenty four, You're right, You're
people are noticing you, and what kind of walk us
through kind of where you got to where you're at
today a little bit, and then I've got a bunch
of questions about your journey.

Speaker 1 (39:05):
Yeah, yes, absolutely so, I would say from then about
twenty four, I was still working in I was working
in advertising at the time. I had been in hospitality
up until getting sober. But again, even hospitality itself was
a way for me to hide my drinking because you
can drink, you can do all these things and no

(39:26):
one would really know, you know, and drugs are a
huge thing, especially cocaine, very big in hospitality. So my
addiction could go under the radar for a very long time,
but when I got sober, I shifted completely in terms
of what I was doing. So I was a receptionist
at an AD agency, and I think after about four months,

(39:46):
I applied for a job to actually join an AD team.
So I had a full time job that allowed me
to be responsible for the first time in my life.
But everything that I was now doing under my Africa
brook right now. Because I changed the blackout bell name,
I stopped hiding and I was like, Okay, let me
just fully own who I am and be honest about

(40:08):
the part that I'm on. So I was getting booked
to speak. I was doing a lot of things for free,
you know in the beginning, which I think is really
important because you find your voice in that way. And
I think it just allowed me to kind of understand
my story, to understand what resonates with people, but what

(40:29):
is actually the important message here? What is that the
core of what I'm trying to explore. But it also
gave me enough space to get trained in very specific things.
So I ended up I think from about twenty five
I started training in developmental coaching because I realized that
although I don't want to be coaching people in terms

(40:51):
of addiction, because I think there are way more, very
very knowledgeable experts who can work and support people in
terms of addiction and trauma, etc. I knew that I
wanted to do work that explores the human condition. I
knew that I wanted to do work that understands the
human shadow. I knew that I wanted to explore the

(41:12):
nature of courage and audacity and bravery and shame. So
I knew that there's kind of like there's a nuance
to what I want to study and what I want
to look at. So I got trained as a developmental coach,
and then I got trained in different aspects of union
psychology so I could really understand it on a granular level.

(41:33):
So I just equipped myself with as much knowledge as
I could before I was even working with anyone until
I got accredited as a developmental coach a few years
down the line, and then I started my coaching and
consulting firm because I realized that I could also fuse
different things that I was learning and advertising. I could

(41:54):
create something that I'd never seen. Essentially, because I hadn't
seen a consultant or a coach that specializes in union psychology,
but can also look at it from a business perspective,
a personal perspective. They can also look at addiction. And
I had to create the very thing that I had
never seen before. So that started taking off on its own,

(42:19):
and then I went full time into everything that I
do in about twenty eighteen, I believe it was and
I knew that the pillars that I want to be
looking at in my work and everything that I commit
to for the rest of my life is self sabotage
and self censorship, because those were the two things that
it had a complete grip on my entire existence before

(42:42):
I got sober, and even after in different ways as well.
But when I was able to look at so many
people's ills and troubles and even their points of conflict,
it always came back to self sabotage in some way,
or a censoring of desire, a censoring of truth as
centering of something, and a rejection of the self. So

(43:03):
I knew that these things can allow me to explore
so many different things, and I guess my work has
just evolved in that way where I know what the
foundational pillars are to what I do but I can
explore it from so many different angles, which is what
then allowed me to when I started to notice the
level of intolerance in our society about five years ago,

(43:26):
especially in twenty twenty, because I had been studying the
shadow and self sabotage for such a long time, I
was able to see that what we call counsel culture
is a form of collective sabotage. You have people that
are so deeply embedded in their own individual states of
self sabotage that they come together as a group and

(43:47):
they work against their own best interest and the interests
of other people. So I was able to see that
everything that has stemmed from my journey with addiction, even
though it's been very unconventional and even stranger times, I
can now see it reflected in the collective. So that's
when I started studying woke culture and counsel culture and

(44:08):
intolerance and the repression of expression and speech, and it
sort of led me to the past five years of
really wanting to understand what has happened to us culturally
where we've become so afraid of our inner most thoughts,
not even what we externalize, but even in our own minds.

(44:29):
We have made ourselves so afraid of the mob, you know,
So I would say all of that has led me
to this point where I now look at things on
a much more wider level. I still do the personal,
but the collective I currently find very fascinating.

Speaker 2 (44:47):
Okay, I love it, And congratulations. I'm so excited to
see what you're going to be doing. Talk about those
early consultant jobs you're getting your first clients. Also, you
had a very interesting relationship with money that I want
you to talk about because I think it's really important
right about you know, it was okay to do it

(45:08):
for free, but when it came time, so, you know,
can you talk our listeners through that? It's powerful?

Speaker 1 (45:14):
Absolutely so. For me, money has always been an interesting
one because growing up, we didn't we didn't really have it.
We had it, but we we didn't really we were
in we were in such a state of survival that
there was never really any excess, even though my mother
particularly always tried her best if it was a birthday

(45:36):
or Christmas, she really really tried her best, but excess
was never the norm, and conversations about money were never
really had unless they were overheard conversations about us not
having any money or there being financial stress in the home.
So abundance, financial abundance was just not really a thing.
So I had to work through my own spiritual, emotional, sight,

(46:00):
logical relationship with money from the age of twenty seven onwards, because, again,
exactly as you put it, I was so comfortable with
doing things for free. I expected even to do things
for free or at very very low cost. I remember,
actually I think it was yeah. I was twenty seven
at the time, and I was doing my first ever

(46:22):
workshop and it was on how to overcome self sabotage,
and it was going to be for about fifty people,
and it was a three hour session, three and a
half hour session actually, and I was charging twenty pounds,
and I was so scared. I thought I was robbing
people off their money. I was thinking, who am I

(46:43):
to charge twenty pounds for people to come and learn
from me for three hours. I had an entire complex
about it, and I remember even calling a friend and
asking is this too much? It was I couldn't even
fathom the idea that I could be paid to do
something that one came so easily to me to speak

(47:05):
and to work with ideas, especially ideas that are objectively
quite abstract. I really do believe that I have a
gift for taking things that are quite complex but putting
them forward in a way that is easy to understand,
you know. And I think because I've always written and
read from a very young age, I just know how
to work with language and speech and what so a
lot of these things come to me quite easily. I've

(47:27):
had to refine them and work at them, but they're
kind of innate skills, you know. So I've really had
some deeply embedded beliefs about you only get paid if
things are hard. If things are easy, you don't get paid.
You do it for free, And that is one of
the biggest lies that so many of us buy into.

(47:48):
Even those of us that are making good money, we
still have that underlying belief. So we can never really
enjoy our finances. We'll sabotage them unconsciously because we believe
that it needs to be difficult. Who am I to
be making this kind of money? You know? And I
was saying, who am I to make this kind of
money with twenty pounds twenty pounds, so by the time

(48:12):
I was being offered to speak for five hundred pounds,
and then it became one thousand, and then two thousand.
Now it's five thousand, Now it's ten thousand. Now it's
more than that. Now it's you name what it is
that you want Africa. I didn't know what to fucking do.
It was too much. My nervous system had not caught
up with the objective reality of what life was like now.

(48:34):
And I always say this to people, but you have
to make sure that your internal world is prepared for
the bigness that you want to hold externally. Otherwise you
will sabotage yourself over and over and over again, and
you won't even realize why you're doing it. So the
reason that I was feeling so deeply uncomfortable was not

(48:56):
necessarily because of the figure amount. The reason I was
feeling unco comfortable in the beginning financially is because my
mother is a nurse. As a nurse here in the UK,
especially at that time that I would be referring to,
she would have been getting paid maybe oney eight hundred
or at the most maybe two thy one hundred a month, okay,

(49:18):
and this is working even fifty sixty hours a week
as a nurse. Because she could work as much as
she wanted to, and she was working for people here
in the UK, but to send money back home. So
the way that it worked for me, and it's so sneaky.
I invite anyone listening to this to think about where
this might be showing up for them. I wouldn't accept

(49:41):
any gigs that meant that I earned more than my mother,
and I was doing this so unconsciously in the beginning,
So unconsciously I would just delay replying to the email
until they find someone else or until I know it's
going to fall through, and then respond that I, oh,
I didn't see it, but it was a way so

(50:01):
that I could not get paid, because who the fuck
am I to make five thousand pounds in half an hour? Right,
that's the narrative, Who are you while your mother is
working fifty hours a week for one thousand, eight hundred
pounds a month, you know. And it didn't even allow

(50:22):
me to entertain the idea that actually, it's important that
I break the generational patterns of poverty in our family.
It's important that more money comes into the hands of
good people that are generous and can give more. We
actually need good hearted, community led people to be rich
and wealthy. Yes, we do. We absolutely. It didn't allow

(50:45):
me to realize that money means more options Africa, you
have more options. Your mother won't have to work fifty
sixty hours a week. If there is abundance in the family,
the babies that are being born into the family will
see that it's possible for people like us to live
with ease. It didn't allow me to see that. It
was just who are you to be making this much?

(51:07):
You know, so I would sabotage those opportunities. So it
wasn't until I did again, coming back to shadow work,
which is essentially looking at these repressed aspects of self.
So I had repressed any possibility for abundance or wealth
or resourcefulness, to look at it and to ask, why,
what silent agreements do I have to poverty? What silent

(51:29):
agreements do I have to people in my generation where
maybe I feel like I will be leaving my family
behind if I live well. So we all need to
be at the same level together, you know, look at
that and interrogate that. So I started doing that level
of money work in twenty seventeen twenty seventeen eighteen, and

(51:51):
that allowed me to actually create a company that was profitable.
It allowed me to make sure that even when I'm pricing,
I'm not charging my worth and tying it to my
sense of self. No, I'm charging the worth of the
services that I provide. I'm charging the worth of the
impact that I can make in sitting with someone for
half an hour or even twenty minutes. I'm charging for

(52:14):
the investment that I have made in my education and
my intellectual property for the past decade. That's what I'm
charging for. I was able to just look at it
in a very very, very different way. But I couldn't
have done that. I couldn't have done that level of
strategy without looking at my emotional and spiritual relationship with money,
which I had to do urgently, urgently.

Speaker 2 (52:37):
So what's your belief about money now?

Speaker 1 (52:39):
Oh, that's a good one. My belief about money now
is that money means more options. And I think that
one for me is a very very important one, because
there's so much hopelessness in the world, and a lot
of it is because people don't realize the options that
are available to them, and especially depending on where you're from,

(53:01):
that's a deeply held belief that I don't have any option.
This job that I have. I have to hold on
to it for the next thirty years. I have no
option but to do this when actually, even if you
just turn just a fraction, you will see something else
that is available. So for me, I think I've really

(53:22):
had just ideas about what it means to be rich.
You know that it means that you're greedy, That it
means that you're selfish, That it means that you're a hoarder,
That it means that you have a love of money.
You know, people misinterpret the word in the Bible, which
is actually the love of money is the root of

(53:43):
all evil, but people have turned it into being money
is the root of all evil. So people believe that
to be a spiritual person you need to reject money.
But it's just an energy, it's an exchange. It returns
in the same way that it leaves. It allows for
choice and freedom options. So that is my belief. Now

(54:03):
it's a very open hearted belief instead of a restrictive,
sort of cynical view.

Speaker 2 (54:10):
Beautiful, what at twenty seven years of age made you
think I could do a course on sabotage. We're not
just here to be sober, We're here to take risk.
We're here to change the narrative. We're here to bet
on ourselves, and I want to I want to understand
what made you bet on yourself that day.

Speaker 1 (54:24):
Oh that's good, you know what it is. And I
love that you mentioned the word risk because I think
it underpins all of this. I think it's so easy
to hear some of the things that I'm talking about
and to think that it was just I just decided
to be courageous. I just decided to be brave. I
just decided to be audacious. Yes, I decided to be

(54:45):
those things. And it was fucking terrifying. I was scared
and I faced rejection. I had so many times of
putting things out and nothing happening. Because I'll tell you something,
there's a difference between people pressing like and people parting
with their money. You have to face right.

Speaker 2 (55:05):
Amen's God, that's beautiful.

Speaker 1 (55:09):
Big difference, big different, and it can be very it
can be very humbling. But you know what, if you
are truly entrepreneurial, if you're truly committed to risk and
to change and admission, you show up again. You show
up on Instagram live, which is what I did from
twenty sixteen twenty seventeen. When there's one person in the

(55:29):
room and you speak as if there are a thousand
people in the room. That's what I did again and again.
And even when that one person leaves because they accidentally
joined that they didn't actually mean to be in there,
they just are, oh shitka, you stay, You stay, and
you deliver the class and the talk as if there's

(55:49):
a there's an auditorium of people looking at you and smiling.
I have done that over and over and over again.
I have spoken when my hands were literally shaking and
continue to speak, and maybe my voice was even shaking
a little bit, and I continued to speak. I created
things that maybe didn't land with people so well because

(56:09):
they just weren't ready for it. Because again, the conversations
that I'm having, I'm not telling people to just love
themselves and manifest. It would be easier if that was
the conversation that I'm having. Just be confident, But I'm
asking people to pretty much undertake and undergo as spiritual excavation.

(56:32):
I'm asking people to be extremely uncomfortable and to do
a level of self inquiry that most people just won't
fucking do. I know that my work goes against the
grain in so many ways. But I'm so in it
for the long haul. And I think that's the mindset
that I've always had. I am so in it from
the long haul. I'm not This is not a flash
in the pan for me. This is not just a

(56:53):
moment in time. I take so many moments to sit
back and to observe. I don't just add shit into
the noise and to see how much money can I
make from this. I make very good money for very
good reason, and it's because I'm in it for the
long haul and I'm so committed to mastery. I am
stupidly committed to mastery. So I've had moments of needing

(57:17):
to ask myself, Africa, are you really in it for
the long haul? If you are, then this one person
in the room is one hundred people in the room.
If you are, then your hands shaking. They're not shaking
because you're scared. You're excited. That's why they're shaking. So
I think there's a way of reframing that I've always
done and I still do. I still do because I
still have to do it. But so I think there's

(57:39):
a level of humility that I've always had as well,
and still have. So that's a lot that kind of
answer your question. But that's those are the different things
I would say.

Speaker 2 (57:48):
Oh I love that Young was a big influence in
your life.

Speaker 1 (57:51):
Oh my god, absolutely absolutely.

Speaker 2 (57:53):
Talk about talk about Carl Young is in your how
it's been applicable for you and yeah, i'd be curious.

Speaker 1 (58:00):
Yes, for me, it was actually when I came across
the term self sabotage in early sobriety, and I swear
to you that term it freed me so much because
for a long time I thought the thing that I
was dealing with was really a moral failing. I thought
that I was just truly a fucked up person, and

(58:21):
it was just the reality of it.

Speaker 2 (58:23):
You know.

Speaker 1 (58:23):
Removing the alcohol was one thing, But as I'm sure
you know very very well, that's when everything actually floods you.
That's whenever, that's when you see the truth of what is.
Because I know, we think I just have to put
the vice down and then I'll be good, and then
all of this is going to go away, and then
I'm suddenly going to be reliable again. I'll never lie again,

(58:46):
I'll never cheat again, you know, and I'll never steal again.
I will never have the desire. It was all the booze,
it was the coke, it was the thing, right. So
we outsourced, we outsourced, and I was so looking forward
to finally having peace. But guess fucking what, it wasn't
time yet. It wasn't It wasn't time. I had to
earn that piece. So when I found the term self sabotage,

(59:09):
and I always describe this in my book. I talk
about it as it's essentially when you're the one poking
holes in your own ship. You've been looking around thinking,
who the fuck where are these holes coming from? Oh,
it's oh, it's me and this knife. It's me that
is just poking holes in the ship, and I'm thinking
no one else is doing it, you know. So when

(59:30):
I came across the term self sabotage and understood that
there is this thing we do where we don't believe
that we're worthy of certain things, so when we actually
start to gain them or attain them, it scares us.
It feels very unfamiliar. There's a level of uncertainty there.
So we prefer what it is we know, even if
it's destruction or chaos, or even if it's just pulling

(59:53):
the plug on yourself in the most profound ways. So
coming across that just allowed for me to go into
it as an area of study, which is then when
I discovered the concept of the shadow, the idea of
we have our ideal self that we present to the world.
So maybe you present to be a very calm and

(01:00:14):
patient and loving person, but actually behind closed doors a
lot of the time, you're extremely judgmental, you're very impatient,
you're very manipulative. You have all of these shadow traits
that you allowed to come out to play when no
one else is watching, and then you present this version
to yourself and other people. You know. So it allowed

(01:00:37):
me to understand the kind of split. Jackal and High
is the perfect example of this. You know, we have
so many references in the world of art that point
to the human shadow, but for me giving those examples,
we all have it. We all have a shadow. By
the way, it's not a case of I have one,
I don't have one anymore, and you know we all

(01:00:58):
have one. But it's just learning how to understand it
and work with it so you can integrate it so
you're not living in a fragmented way, so you can
accept all facets of yourself without pretending you're any one thing,
including if you truly believe you're a bad person. You've
cast your good traits into the shadow. You've cast out

(01:01:18):
the joy into the shadow, the pleasure, the play, and
the curiosity. I think it's so easy to think shadow
is the dark, nasty things, but also it's the beautiful
things that were cast into the shadow, and we forget,
we forget, you know. And this mainly happens in adulthood,
when people grow up and they become cynical and jaded

(01:01:38):
and bitter, and they cast out their playfulness. You know,
I don't have time for that. I'm not a child.
I can't play. I'm too busy, you know. So we
cast out so many other things. But Young was and
is very inspirational to me because he allowed for me
to understand myself, but also he has allowed me to
understand the world because the teachings just continue to be

(01:02:02):
more timeless and timeless and timeless.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
Right amen. Amen. My favorite Young quote I think you'll
appreciate this. I wrote it is until you make the
unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will
call it fate.

Speaker 1 (01:02:19):
Oh it's oh, oh, oh, it's good. Isn't it. I
love that it will direct your life and you will
call it fate. You know what that makes me think of?
It makes me think of that thing people do of
This is just who I am, you know, when people
double down on their persona, This is just who I am,

(01:02:42):
And we affirm all of these things in a very
rigid way, when actually it's your wounding, it's your trauma,
it's the generational patterns you've picked up without even deciding.
They were just handed over to you like a piece
of cloth, and you just took it and wrapped it
over yourself and said, this is who I am. You know,

(01:03:02):
and you become so convicted so that idea of it
directing your life and your decisions and your choices so unconsciously,
and you're just calling it fate. This is who I am?

Speaker 2 (01:03:14):
You know what. Let me ask you this, walk me through.
You have a very big life, a busy life. When
the world gets loud, when darkness is running some jive
on you, when some bullshit happens. How do you ground yourself?
What's your mantra? What's your routine? How do you come
back to center? How do you start your day over?

(01:03:36):
I'd love to hear about what you do, Yeah, what
your process is.

Speaker 1 (01:03:39):
Yeah. So what I will say is that I live
a very honestly, I live a very spacious life. If
you were to spend the day with me and we
were just hanging out, we'll just be hanging out. There
would not be much happening, and that's a good thing.
I would be going for very very long walks. I

(01:04:01):
love a long walk and I love a hike. I
would be having my tea ritual, which I have every
single day Chinese loose leaf tea, so it's like a
ceremony that I have for myself every single day. I
would be reading. I would be napping. I nap every
single day between three and five, so I'm due a

(01:04:21):
nap very soon. I what else do I do? I
spend a lot of time with. I live a very
beautiful and simple life, and it's very spacious. And that's
because and I want to turn this around to you
to the question, but it's because I was in so
much chaos for ten years, ten very essential years from

(01:04:43):
fourteen up until twenty four, where I'm supposed to be
transitioning from girlhood into conscious womanhood and being in relationship
and learning my body and my mind and my spirit.
I was an autopilot. I was not here and I
was in and when I was, you know, feeling something tangible,

(01:05:04):
it was just chaos and destruction and shame. And sure
there was fun. There was a lot of fun along
the way. I will not lie. I've had a lot
of fucking fun in my life. I think that's why
I don't miss anything, because I've had enough fun for
all of us. But there was no spaciousness. There was
no rest, there was no ease. So even though I'm

(01:05:25):
running a company and I do several things, it's really
organized in a way that honors the spaciousness. That is
something that is so non negotiable. For every single project
that I do, everything that I say yes to, there
needs to be inbuilt spaciousness into that. So that's kind
of how I live my life. I go to the
cinema quite a lot, the theater. I love art. I

(01:05:47):
also write screenplays and playwriting. I'm working on a play
right now. I want to fictionalize aspects of my work.
So I'm very obsessed with the idea of when your
public self takes over your private self. So I want
to fictionalize that and write something about that. So that's
kind of my Yeah, that's my life.

Speaker 2 (01:06:09):
I'd say that's a heck of a life you have. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's great. Well okay, yeah, yeah. You know, listen, the
great teachers, the great healers are always laughing.

Speaker 1 (01:06:21):
Hmmm mm hmmm.

Speaker 2 (01:06:22):
Because if you're heavy, you're not free us.

Speaker 1 (01:06:25):
It's so true.

Speaker 2 (01:06:26):
And you gotta you gotta goofin yourself. Yeah. So okay,
let's talk about.

Speaker 1 (01:06:32):
Can I can you tell me? Can can you tell
me what it looks like for you? Because I'm just
so curious just from our conversation and from your energy,
I'm curious for you. How do you create a level
of rest and spaciousness in your life, which I imagine
is quite demanding in so many ways too.

Speaker 2 (01:06:50):
It is. Well, I have a couple of beliefs that
I think you'll appreciate. One is, the world doesn't need
a change. I do.

Speaker 1 (01:06:56):
Mmmmh gosh. Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:06:58):
And the only person I suffer from a scen on
McFarlane Okay, and it's unacceptable to do blame. And we
have a door, a sign on the door here which
I hope you can come to urshell no shame aloud. Okay,
and a lot of billionaires that I'm blessed to work with, okay,
want to be me. And I say that humbly because

(01:07:20):
they don't know the art of riding the bike, just
having a bicycle ride and the beauty of a three
dollars street taco and jumping in the ocean for free.
So part of my practices and I'm not perfect by
any means, is I never forget where I came from.

Speaker 1 (01:07:37):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:07:38):
Else Yes, And to work with people, to have their
trust that they pay me their hard earned money, to
crack their hearts and let them fucking light in is
the greatest honor. And so I better fucking bring it.
And for me to bring it, I have to be
at the ultra high frequency, so I can't get caught
up in dumb shit. Yes, take it, gut, and so

(01:08:01):
I gotta. I just have to. And I'm crazier than most.
I have to work harder than the most, and I'm
cool with that. So I have a whole morning thing
that I do that gets me centered that I will
no matter where I'm at in the world, I won't
go off it.

Speaker 1 (01:08:14):
Wow, thank you for shit. I feel so deeply inspired
by you and I'm glad that I asked you that question,
and I resonate so much in the sense that I
never I'm always in a state of gratitude, and I
truely believe that sobriety is the foundation of all of that,
because life could be very different even for both of us.

(01:08:36):
We wouldn't be sitting here. We might not even be here,
you know. I just I can never, ever, ever take
it for granted. So even when I'm very similar to you,
the caliber of people that I work with, even people
that I grew up watching on TV and Zimbabwe, people
that I was listening to on the radio back home,

(01:08:58):
you know, on my Gramma's farm in Gueru, it blows
my entire mind. And I wouldn't be able to do
the work that I do as effectively as I do it,
as thoughtfully as I do it if I didn't allow
for rest and simplicity and a beautiful simplicity, which is
exactly what I hear you talking about the freedom that

(01:09:20):
comes with simplicity. You know. Oh, I love that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:23):
I want to talk about forgiveness and why forgiveness this
is so important. Tell me your process, and I love
the what you talk about in your writings with your
father and what you adic.

Speaker 1 (01:09:34):
Yes, yes, you know that. I'm so glad you bring
that up, because it means that it comes to the fore.
Even for me on a personal level, forgiveness is still
something that I'm working through and with in real time
right now, because I as I get older, so I'm
thirty two. Now, as I get older myself, I start

(01:09:56):
to understand my parents just in a very different way.
I start to humanize them, especially my father, who I
was the most similar to. I've just started to humanize
him in a way that I I'd never done before.
You know, he died when he was forty one, so

(01:10:16):
I'm getting closer and closer to the age that he was,
and I realized just how young he was, and the
things that were on his shoulders, the responsibility that he
had as a man, and the cultural context of where
there's just so much that I understand now. You know,
he didn't choose, He made his choices, but he never

(01:10:39):
would have thought, you know, as a small boy that
when I grow up, I want to be an addict.
He never would have thought that, you know. So there's
a level of humanizing that I have been doing for
quite a while. And forgiveness has been part and parcel
of it, because I know that to live a truly
free life where I'm not holding any resentments, I choose forgiveness.

(01:11:04):
And it's not that I have to forgive. I don't
have to do anything, but I choose forgiveness. And that's
happening because I'm learning how to humanize my father. So
it's something that I'm experiencing in real time and have
been in process with for i'd say a few years now.

Speaker 2 (01:11:19):
Wow, beautiful you I want to talk about intimacy, reclaiming
your body. Yes, you talked about beautifully, eloquently, vulnerably about
you know you were grouped. You know there's no birds
in the bees conversation. You were groomed on your pornography, yes,

(01:11:40):
and how you and sobriety and your elevation and what
you've learned and about that. I'd be fascinated for our
listeners to hear your process on that. Please.

Speaker 1 (01:11:48):
Yeah, of course, I mean sex and alcohol for me
were so intrinsically linked. So we're talking from thirteen fourteen,
right before that, at ten years old, ten years old,
ten years old, twenty twenty two, thousand and two. Pawn

(01:12:09):
was my first teacher. It showed me what intimacy was
quote unquote supposed to look like, but it mainly showed
me what a woman was supposed to perform. And that
word perform is very, very intentional, because that's what I
learned to do until I got so but even just
a bit after that, I would say sex for me

(01:12:31):
started to not feel like a performance from the age
of maybe twenty six or twenty seven, because finally I
learned what it looks like to actually relax in my
body instead of trying to contort my body into all
of these positions for the malgaze, which was exactly what
I had seen and had learned in porn. But it
also allowed for me to realize that, oh, my goodness,

(01:12:53):
my pleasure is also mine. I get to ask for
what it is that I want. It's crazy to know
just how much painful sex I had put up with,
and especially women and girls, because they believe that they're
supposed to be performing enjoyment, they're supposed to be performing excitement,
that if they say that something doesn't feel good, then

(01:13:16):
they're ruining the moment, you know, because in paorn, no
one says a woman doesn't say she's uncomfortable. She doesn't
say this doesn't feel good. She gets into whatever position,
does whatever is asked, rarely even asked. You're just put
into a position and then you just accept it and
you perform enjoyment. So all of these things that I

(01:13:37):
had to unravel and realize that porn was making its
way into my most intimate moments. And I've been looking
at this through the lens of self sabotage for a
long time, in the context of we're sabotaging true intimacy
and true vulnerability and connection. And it's from both sides.
It's not just women, it's not just meant, it's all

(01:13:59):
of us, you know. So pawn is seeping its way
into our most intimate moments and we're not even asking
ourselves is this truly what it looks like to be
intimate and in connection with someone. So for me, when
I realized that it had been a part of my
life for nearly three decades, that shocked me because I

(01:14:22):
hadn't even realized it's kind of the norm. You normalize it,
you know, which is why now if that was the
case for me in two thousand and two, where it
was much harder to get hold of. It was mainly
videos or DVDs or magazines. There was a bit of friction, right.
I cannot imagine what it's like now when every single

(01:14:46):
child has a smartphone. Every single child has a smartphone.
It is so accessible. There aren't any barriers, there's no
need for ID. There's just a question are you eighteen?
Even if I'm of course I'm going to say I'm
eighteen because I need to. You know, there's no friction whatsoever.
So I've just I'm so grateful that again coming back

(01:15:10):
to sobriety, because I truly can't give this awareness. I
can't give credit to anything else, but you know, it
could be God and sobriety. But if I hadn't realized
the impact of pawn on my sex life, I still
wouldn't be free within myself today. I really wouldn't be.
I would be sober from the booze, but I would

(01:15:32):
still have something else as my master. I would still
have something else as my master.

Speaker 2 (01:15:38):
Let me ask you this, If you could whisper one
thing to every person who's trapped in self doubt right now,
what would it be?

Speaker 1 (01:15:48):
I would just say something that is quite simple, actually,
and something that I remind myself of often is that
I need to be willing to be by myself, be
willing to be surprised by yourself. We underestimate severely, actually
underestimate how courageous we are severely. And for me, that

(01:16:14):
very simple mantra and mindset has allowed me to do
some of the bravest things that I've ever done in
moments where I've been flooded with nothing but doubt and
couldn't make any logical sense of it. To me that
mantra of Africa, be willing to be surprised yourself by
yourself in this moment, I find to be so powerful.

(01:16:35):
So that's that's the small little thing, small little seed
that I would pass on.

Speaker 2 (01:16:40):
What's your prayer for the world right now?

Speaker 1 (01:16:42):
My prayer for the world is that we learn to
hold our own contradictions so that we can become better
at holding the contradictions of others.

Speaker 2 (01:16:55):
Amen, thank you for cracking my heart today. Thank you
for your time, thank you for your experience, Thank you
for your inspiration. God bless godspeed. It's a real treat.
I know God loves me so much that he brought
you into my conscious for the show today. Thank you.

(01:17:16):
The Sales Show is a production of iHeart Podcasts, hosted
by me Cina McFarlane, produced by pod People in twenty eighth.
Ab Our lead producer is Keith Cornlick. Our executive producer
is Lindsey Hoffman. Marketing lead is Ashley Weaver. Thank you
so much for listening. We'll see you next week.