August 25, 2023 • 38 mins
We’re back this week to provide you with another page-turning addition to your bookshelf. Grab your reading glasses, find somewhere cozy, and get into this week’s TBG library pick, Dyscalculia by Camoghne Felix. In Dyscalculia, Camoghne recalls various heartbreaks experienced throughout her life and connects them to her childhood experience with dyscalculia, a disorder that makes it difficult to learn math, using it as a metaphor for the consequences of her miscalculations in love.
Camoghne joins us today to discuss the process of writing a vulnerable memoir, what lessons about heartbreak the book has to offer, and her hopes to start an intergenerational conversation around mental illness and Black women. Please note that our conversation does include references to self harm so please support yourself in whatever way is best while listening.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Welcome to the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast, a weekly
conversation about mental health, personal development, and all the small
decisions we can make to become the best possible versions
of ourselves. I'm your host, Doctor Joy Harden Bradford, a
licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information or to
(00:32):
find a therapist in your area, visit our website at
Therapy for Blackgirls dot com. While I hope you love
listening to and learning from the podcast, it is not
meant to be a substitute for a relationship with a
licensed mental health professional. Hey y'all, thanks so much for
(00:57):
joining me for another special TPG live episode. We'll get
right into our conversation after a word from our sponsors.
Which friend are you? And your sister circle? Are you
the wallflower, the peacemaker, the firecracker or the leader? Take
the quiz at Sisterhoodhels dot com slash quiz to find out,
(01:18):
and then make sure to grab your copy of Sisterhood
Heels to find out more about how you can be
a better friend and how your circle can do a
better job of supporting you. Order yours today at Sisterhoodheels
dot com. We're back this week to provide you with
(01:38):
another page turning addition to your bookshelf, Grab your reading glasses,
find somewhere cozy, and get into this week's TVG Library
Pick Discalculia by Komone Felix. In this Calculia, Komone recalls
various heartbreaks experience throughout her life and connects them to
her childhood experience with this calculia, a disorder that makes
(02:02):
it difficult to learn math, using it as a metaphor
for the consequences of her miscalculations and love. Cimone joins
us today to discuss the process of writing a vulnerable memoir,
what lessons about heartbreak the book has to offer, and
her hopes to start an intergenerational conversation around mental illness
(02:22):
and black women. Please note that our conversation does include
references to self harm, so please support yourself in whatever
way is best while listening. If something resonates with you
while enjoying our conversation, share it with us on social
media using the hashtag TBG in Session, or join us
over in the Sister Circle to talk more about the episode.
(02:45):
You can join us at community dot therapy for Blackgirls
dot Com. Here's our conversation. Thank you so much for
joining us today, Comone.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Thank you so much for having me. I'm extremely happy
to be here.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Yes, I'm honor you took some time to chat with
us today. So you are a writer, a poet, and
an essay is known for Build Yourself a Boat, and
your work in The Cut, New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and
many many more places. What attracted you to writing and
poetry as a medium.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
When I was a little girl, I spent a lot
of time in my head and I would make up
stories about the things that I wanted to see happen, like,
for instance, if I had a crush on a boy,
I would be up until four in the morning literally
designing what I thought my relationship with this boy would
look like, and through storytelling that I used to like
(03:37):
soothe myself. I just found it to be really special
and cool to be able to use words to paint
pictures and explain what I was thinking.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
And that has translated you and been a through line
throughout your career.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. For most of my career, I
have continued to think up wild stories, and it's always
been very exciting to think about how to put those
stories both true stories and fictional stories into words and
language that help other people make sense of their own lives.
(04:13):
It makes sense of the world around us. I just
really wanted to be the kind of maker who brought
people closer to the truth of their own lives and
the truth of what it means to exist in the
world at this time. So all the writing that I do,
the poetry writing, the nonfiction, and the essay work is
all towards that goal in some way shape or form.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
M You know, you are one of my favorite nonfiction writers.
I always love seeing like a not fiction piece from
you because it feels like it always has some of
this storytelling element. Can you talk a little bit about
the differences, maybe for inspiration when you're writing like a
non fiction piece, maybe for The Cut versus your fiction
and poetry.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Yeah. So when I'm writing for The Cut or any
other magazine, I'm thinking about the topic at hand, whatever
story they want me to write, and trying to figure
out what is the way to maximize the context here
so that other people can find themselves in the story. Right,
if I'm going to talk about, for instance, and mobiles,
(05:16):
if I'm going to write about her, what could it
be about her life, about her story that might be
relevant to all of these readers who are coming to
it right and always trying to think about what is
the unique angle, the thing that hasn't been discussed before
that or the thing that hasn't been discussed enough that
I could bring to life in that story. And I
think it's not too different from what happens in poetry
(05:40):
and in fiction. I think constantly when I'm writing poetry,
I'm trying to think, what is the innovative, unique way
that I can tell this story that I'm about to tell,
and what is it that I can say to people
that hasn't been said before? And in fiction, I think
it's a little bit less about trying to say something
that hasn't been said before, more trying to double down
(06:01):
on a fact or a way of thinking that's already
been established and trying to bring people a little bit
closer to it. Right. So, if you already believe for
the kind of person who believes that housing should be
a human right, that people should have access to mental
health care, then how do you write a story that's
shaped around that ideal, that doubles down on that and
(06:24):
makes people believe it even more.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
H I love that, Thank you. So let's dive into discalculia.
So can you share what discalculia is and why it
was so meaningful for you to explore and address your
learning disorder in the book given the same name.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Yes, So, dyscalculia is a learning disorder that is similar
to dyslexia, except that it applies in a mathematics context
and it prevents an individual from being able to do
basic arithmetical computation. So when you were in third grade
and you were learning how to do fractions and put
(07:01):
together a graph and do those calculations, I struggled significantly
with learning those things. It just didn't make sense to me.
It was like word salad, Like I couldn't figure out
where to even put a number or a figure to
make a computation make sense. And this was really important
(07:21):
for me to think about and to bring into my
work because it is a not very well known disorder
and it's definitely not a disorder that people associate with
black women. And it's also a disorder that can in
some ways not necessarily be triggered by trauma, but can
(07:42):
coincide with a trauma trigger and sort of happen at
the same time as a young person is trying to
process trauma, or any person is trying to process trauma.
And as I was trying to process my childhood trauma,
math and the ability to do it just left my mind.
I just wasn't able to do mathematics in the same
way that I had been able to do before, which
(08:05):
I think has a lot to do with the trauma
that I experienced and was brought on by it. And
I wanted to highlight some of those connections and bring
the conversation both into a mental health context as we
were talking about trauma, and also bring it into a
physiological context. Right, bringing trauma into a physiological context, how
do we talk about the way trauma affects the body
(08:26):
and the mind, and then how do we talk about
the way the body and the mind are affected by trauma?
That was really important for me to highlight, and I
wanted to write a book that did all of that
and told a really good story and told a story
that everyone could relate to, which is about heartbreak and
(08:47):
trying to navigate what it feels like to have your
heart broken while trying to understand the sort of mathematical
equations that create the decisions that you make, or inspire
the decisions that you make, and inspire the decisions that
the people around you make.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
And was this something that was diagnosed for you when
you were younger.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
This wasn't diagnosed for me until I was much much older,
and it was a wake up call. I had always
been the kind of person to say like, Ugh, I'm
just not good at math, or don't give me the
check at the table, I'm not splitting the bill. But
I realized once I got diagnosed that these were things
I was telling myself as a way to mask and
(09:30):
hide behind a real disability. And there was a part
of me that knew that I was struggling with a disability,
especially because when I was younger, before third grade, I
was actually really, really good at math. My mom had
bought me a bunch of math games and computer games
and I was excelling at all of them. And then
(09:51):
at the same time that a significant trauma happened to me,
I lost the ability to do those things. And when
I was diagnosed as an adult, I realized that none
of those things could be understood in isolation, not the trauma,
not the disability that I had to look at them
all through the same lens, or at least try to
(10:12):
understand them through the same lens, and that was really
empowering for me.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
I thought it was a very innovative. And you've already
used that word approach to writing to connect these traumatic
experiences to math in a way that I think I
hadn't seen kind of written before. And the memoir really
goes from early childhood to it seems like more recent
days detailing heartbreaks and like in a nonlinear form. Can
(10:36):
you talk a little bit about some of those heartbreaks
and why you felt important to write about them.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Yeah, Well, first of all, I'm so grateful that you
said heartbreaks with that s on the end, because that's
exactly what they are to me. There are systems of
heartbreaks in that book, everything from the assault that I
dealt with as a child, to falling out of love
with Math, to some of the conflict with me and
(11:00):
my mom, and then the larger macro heartbreak that happened
with a young man that I was involved with for
a long time. I really wanted to point to the
fact that heartbreak can be any scale, right, that heartbreak
can be small heartbreak can be medium sized, it can
be huge and devastating, but that they were all valid
(11:22):
and that felt important because, at least in the world
that I live in, black girls in particular aren't validated
in their pain. We go through heartbreak, whether it's small
or large, romantic or familial, cultural, and we're told that
we need to get over it. In the book, I
(11:44):
highlight some of the conversations that I had after my
breakup where people around me were just like, Oh, you'll
be fine, just work harder, don't think about it, and
it'll go away, And it didn't at all consider the
fact that I was genuinely not okay. I was already
disrupted in a way that was going to prevent me
(12:04):
from moving on in the way that they thought that
I should. And I wanted people to start to think
about their own heartbreaks and about the ways that the
world breaks their heart and consider whether or not they
should be taking their heartbreaks more seriously, that they should
be tending to them more carefully, right, giving themselves more
(12:25):
care Yeah, you.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Know, I think it's important to think about heartbreaks, even
if the content is not the same every time. It
is in a lot of ways peeling the scalpe off
of a wound that was there, like every additional heartbreak,
and so I really appreciated you talking about how this
felt in cumulative in a lot of ways, because it
really is scratching at that wound all over again, exactly. Yeah. Yeah,
(12:49):
So in the book, you also talk a lot about
your diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Why did it feel important
to write about that as a part of this story.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Being bipolar is something that I've been struggling with all
of my life, but only just was diagnosed with in
the last six years. And in the book you see
a lot of my behavior right, especially from being a
child onward. But I wanted to kind of show the
(13:17):
world what a bipolar black girl could look like, not
to make myself the sort of poster child, because there
are so many different ways that bipolar affects any one
of us. But as a person who struggled significantly in
childhood with behavior stuff, with access to resources, who was
(13:38):
hospitalized many times, it felt impossible to tell the story
of heartbreak without talking about the way mental illness has
facilitated some of those heartbreaks in my life. And if
not mental illness as an abstract thing, then maybe mental
health care and the mental health care system the way
(13:58):
that I had been abandoned, and it took me a
really long time to get the correct diagnosis, even though
all the evidence was there from the very beginning. It
feels like bipolar is as much part of my story
as dyscalculia is, especially because the two of them are
actually coexisting, and so for many people with bipolar disorder,
(14:21):
they struggle with dyscalculia or dyslexia, and that connection was
really eye opening for me to recognize it. As a kid,
I was already struggling with manic episodes and struggling with
depressive episodes, and the way that it was affecting my
brain triggered the dyscalculia and made it harder for me
to show up for myself and show up in the
(14:43):
way that I would have liked to intellectually. And yeah,
I wanted to talk about it because I haven't seen
many books written by black women about bipolar disorder, and
I just felt like there needed to be more out there,
especially for young bipolar people, to be able to know
that like one, You're gonna be okay, and two life
(15:04):
looks good on the other side.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Yeah, I would say. Besides, I'm lying, but I'm telling
the truth. I can't think of any others that talk
about black women. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Actually want to talk about that book for a second
because I think it's so important to look at lineage
like Bassie. It has been inspiring me since I was
maybe fifteen years old, watching her poetry, seeing her at
the New yorreekan Poet's Cafe, which is a big part
of where I got my start, and really just admiring her,
not knowing what she was struggling with, and when she
(15:36):
came out with I'm lying, but I'm telling the truth,
I felt a sense of freedom of validity because she
was talking about it, and because she was being open
about it, I felt like I could talk about it
and I could be open about it. And I just
think that lineage is so important. It's so critical to
know to be able to see in the world work
that mirrors your life, because it gives you permission to
(15:58):
take it a little bit further, to tell a different story,
but something that's just as connected. I really love Bassie
and I'm very grateful for her.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
I appreciate you sharing that more from our conversation after
the break. Have you gotten emails or private messages from
readers talking about seeing themselves and their stories in your work.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
For sure. I've gotten so many messages on Instagram and
on TikTok and on Twitter, people just saying like this
has been my story. The most popular message I get
is like I have discapulated, and I've never seen anybody
write about it. I've never even seen the word outside
of a mental health context, and that's really gratifying and special,
(16:49):
because I think that's what makes writing feel so important,
is knowing that there are people out there who are
going to be able to see themselves in your work.
And every time I get one of those messages, I
get a little emotional and I have to kind of
like avoid it, like I'll look at it and then
put it down really quickly so that I don't get
(17:10):
overly emotional. Because to know that there are so many
people out there, so many black girls in particular, especially
those with bipolar disorder and dyscalculia or just who are
working through heartbreak and just got their hearts broken, I
just kind of want to hug them all. And this
book feels like my opportunity to do that to just
hug them and send them some love.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
So what do you feel like you learned about yourself
by transferring your experiences to the memoir.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
I feel like I learned that I'm very flawed, that
I don't always make the best or healthiest decisions for myself.
And I also learned that I'm really strong, that I
have the ability to advocate for myself and to articulate
(17:58):
who I am and articulate what I need and honestly
like one of the biggest takeaways for me in the
process of writing was how I relate to my mother.
Reading the story back and seeing how she's portrayed just
made me have a lot more not respect, because I
(18:18):
obviously really respect my mom, but a lot more affection
for the way that she raised me and what she
had to sacrifice so that I could be a kind
of self affirming person who could make something like this
and put it out in the world. I feel like
I don't always understand how I've been mothered, but looking
(18:42):
at this book and reading this book helped me understand
how my mother mothered me and like what her style was,
and helped me understand why it turned out to be
probably a lot better off than I could have been.
And I'm not a mother, and I don't think that
I intend to be, but it does inspire me to
think differently about what we expect of moms, especially of
(19:03):
black moms dealing with mentally ill children who are likely
mentally ill themselves. Yeah. I just felt like she really
showed up in this narrative and I learned a lot
about her.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Have there been conversations with your mom since then that
have been difficult to have?
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Not so much difficult. She hasn't read the book. When
I started writing poetry when I was sixteen, my mother
was like, your poetry is morbid and put it down,
walked away. She was just like, I don't want to
be sad when I read your work. But I have
sent her some screenshops of passages of where I'm talking
about her, and pretty much almost everything that I've sent her,
(19:43):
she's just confirmed. She's like, Yep, that's exactly how it happened,
That's exactly how I felt. You got that spot on,
That's exactly what I taught you. That's exactly what I said.
And it is validating because I think often when we
try to retell the stories of our child. We realized
somewhere along the lines that like the story we're telling
(20:04):
ourselves or the stories that we're telling others, is not
necessarily the same story that our parents are telling. And
I feel like she continues to give me confirmation that
we actually are on the same page, that it did
happen the way I thought it happened, and that I'm
not making it up, and that's been really empowering.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
We already talked a lot about, you know, some of
the content, but it is incredibly transparent, Like you, I
feel like, don't really hold back much in the book.
So you even shared about your experiences with heartbreak and
being cheated on? Was there any trepidation for you as
a black woman author writing about that or why did
you feel like it was important to share that?
Speaker 2 (20:44):
There was some trepidation, But honestly, the reason why I
felt important to share was because when I was going
through it, I texted my then best friend and was like,
are there any books that you've read by black women
that are about heart break and being cheated on in
this way? And she could recount maybe three of them,
(21:07):
And even when I went to those books, it wasn't
exactly what I needed like it got me close, but
it wasn't exactly what I needed. And I remember her
saying to me, like, listen, you know what Tony Morrison says.
If you can't find it, then you have to write it.
And once I started writing it, I realized how much
(21:29):
I needed it and how much I needed my candor,
and I needed to be honest and generous. And by
the time I finished it and sort of realized that
other people would be reading it, it felt senseless to
try to scale back or to limit what I put
on the page, since what I gave to myself was
(21:50):
exactly what I needed and I could only assume that
someone else might need it. And I just feel like
there are so many times where a black woman is
going through the world with no support in the situation
that she's dealing with, and I didn't want to create
another book that left her hanging. So if I can
(22:12):
have candor, and if I could be honest and be
generous in my depiction of my own pain, then maybe
that meant that she could have relief in her own
And that felt more important to me than the anxiety
of feeling embarrassment or feeling like I said too much.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
So tell me a little bit about the process, because
it sounds like this work came about because it was
what you felt like you needed to read at this
particular moment in your life, So you weren't necessarily setting
out to write this. This kind of came from experiences
in your life. What were you on task to write
as your next book?
Speaker 2 (22:48):
I was just writing poetry. And when I started, I
wrote most of this book in my phone because at
first I just started writing small passages to my and
it was originally titled I Think Twenty Ways to Lose
Your Girlfriend or something like that, and it was a
poem that had these small stanzas that were sort of
(23:11):
dancing all over the page, and the poem format just
like didn't fit. I couldn't get honest enough. And in
the process, when I started writing these short paragraphs in
my notes, I realized that there was something there, something
like readable and generous that I just wasn't able to
(23:35):
get at with my poetry. So I just kept going
mainly for myself because I just felt like I needed it.
I needed to, but also for an assumed reader, right
like I was like, if my little sister were reading this,
would I want her to read this series of poems
or would I want her to read these like generous
(23:56):
and honest paragraphs. And yeah, one thing turned into another
and we have the.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Memoir slash poetry book.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yeah. Yeah, the poetry book is like hanging out now
begging me to be written. So I'm trying to pay
attention to her. And it's also going to be about
mental health, so they're all working in the same theme.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
So there's a moment in your story where you can
fide it in your boss about your breakup and challenges,
and she suggested using work as a coping mechanism. Tell
me a little bit about why you think romantic breakups
don't carry the same weight and seriousness as other griefs
that people experience in their lives.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Yeah. I think it's because it's something that everyone experiences.
And I know that that sounds a little contradictory because
you would assume that because it's something that everyone experiences,
everyone would take it seriously. But I think that because
there isn't death involved, right, and it's not as final
as death, and because it means that someone had to
(24:57):
make a choice, and because that happens to everyone at
some point in their lives. We all just fall into
the trap of like, that's life, right, Life is falling
in love and getting your heart broken, and every one
of us goes through it, and every one of us
has to endure, so you'll just have to get over it.
I think we see its ubiquity as a sign that
(25:21):
it can't be that serious because everyone experiences it, which
is different from the death of a parent or something
like that, where we all experience it, but it only
happens to you one time, right or twice, and it
usually happens at the end of your life. And it
does have a lot of material gravity, right. It changes
(25:42):
the materiality of your life when a parent dies, and
in the way that we grieve, But we don't think
about the materiality of a breakup and the way that
it changes the system of the life around you. And
I think we have a lot of as a societ.
We have a lot of distractions. There's a lot of
(26:03):
ways to avoid processing your heartbreak and processing a breakup.
We have hookup culture, we have happy hour culture. Right.
There are so many ways that we set up that
we think allow us to move past heartbreak, when really
what we're doing is masking and hiding, and yeah, I
just think we undervalue it because we have that.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
Access more from our conversation after the break I appreciate
you sharing that, and you know, I talk about that
as well in sisterhood heels around how romantic breakups, you know,
I feel like there's even more even though still not
(26:48):
enough support there. But friendship breakups are worse in a
lot of ways.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Yeah, for sure, I've definitely had a friendship breakup that
to this day, I'm still in therapy trying to process.
And this person and I fell out maybe four years ago,
and I feel like, even more so, there's even less
space in our society to talk about what it feels
like to lose a friend, especially if you lose them
(27:17):
in a traumatic way or whatever. I feel like that's
a story I want to write.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
We'll be looking forward to that one. Yeah. So, based
on the support you feel like you did not get
around your breakup, what message or advice would you have
for your younger self related to romantic relationships ending, or
what advice would you like to share with people who
might be enjoying our conversation.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
I would tell myself and anyone listening to call out
of work, especially if you can to turn the lights off,
to drink water right, to watch the sad shows, cry
as much as you want, eat as much ice cream
as you want. Literally, allow your brain and your body
to do the healing that it needs to do so
(28:01):
that you can come out on the other side of it.
And don't force your mind and your body to go
straight into survival mode in order to process it. Let
your body take care of you. It wants to do that, right,
even if that means indulging in thousands of calories. Whatever
their calories, you can burn them later. I just wish
(28:21):
that I had given myself the chance to grieve within
the time that I had, because not being able to
grieve meant that it came out in this book later, right, which, like, yes,
it's a lovely book, and I'm very proud of what
I put out, But the anxiety and the pain that
I went through in trying to understand why I needed
(28:43):
to write this book, in trying to understand the care
I needed to give myself, could have been avoided if
I had just let myself feel what I needed to feel.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
That's powerful advice, very very good stuff there. So what
do you feel like you learned about love by writing
the book.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
I learn that love is a system, and that our
actions are calculations and we make choices based on what
we consider valuable and what we consider important. And I
learn that you don't always mean to hurt someone, but
(29:21):
that you may cause harm anyway, and that it's really
important to be accountable to that harm in whatever way
you can. And finally, and most importantly, I think I
learned that heartbreak doesn't necessarily mean that there is a villain.
Sometimes the victim and the villain are the same person,
(29:43):
and trying to sort of blow up that binary really
allows us to understand our own behaviors and to understand
how harm happens in love. And I take that into
the relationship that I'm in now. There are choices is
that I get to make every day, and there are
some choices that allow me to love this person a
(30:05):
little bit more and choices that get in the way
of me loving them. And I want to make the
choice that allows me to love them more. So I
have to think really hard about my actions and control
my impulses, and if I can't control them, at least
evaluate them, like why do I have the impulse to
do this thing versus the other.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Yeah, I'm curious. Come on, how if in any way
did you work with mental health professionals as you were
writing the book.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
Yeah. I don't think I was in therapy as I
was writing this book, but I was medicated at least
for half of the process half of writing it. And
I think what I've learned about therapy and just mental
health care in general is that like for the most part,
you may not always, but for the most part, you
(30:54):
know what you need. And I knew that I needed
to process this in this book. And that's not to
say that I couldn't have used a therapist or that
it wouldn't have been useful to me, but that the
way that I needed to be therapized was through this
creative process. And so I was being medicated and making
sure to avoid episodes. At least in the latter half.
(31:15):
I've medicated to stay present. But I also wrote this
book as a way to talk to myself and to
do similar work that I knew I was hungry to
do with a therapist. And now that I'm back in therapy,
I see that book as a two year process of
me writing down everything that I needed to talk about
(31:39):
with a therapist and getting clarity on where I was
confused and what I've been frustrated with. And my therapist
now is like so proud of me and has been
a huge help as the book came out in helping
me navigate what it would feel like to have all
of these people engaging with the text and reading things
about my life. And I've learned that the process doesn't end.
(32:03):
There's so much work that I have to keep doing
in therapy and with my therapist to be able to
continue to show up for this book and show up
for myself and show up for everything that I'm going
to write in the future. And I really just like
I love therapy, I really do. And there's a part
(32:23):
of me that wishes I had been in therapy while
I wrote this book, Like I wonder what the book
would have looked like. I think that if I were
in therapy, that dynamic would have made itself into the book,
Like I would have been talking about my therapist and
talking about some of those conversations, which frankly could have
been really interesting. But yeah, that's pretty much how I
engaged with it.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
And have you used any passages from the book with
your therapist as a like, here, this is evidence of
what I was talking about or what I've experienced, or
do you just share based on what you've written in
the book.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Yeah. I share with her what is in the book
and the things that I've said, and she takes it,
holds on to it, and is like, yes, I see
this in how you work. Now let's talk about what
we can do so that either this doesn't happen or
you avoid these impulses like going into an episode and
(33:16):
cheating on my ex. Right, Like using that as an
example of how scary it can be when I'm in
an episode and her helping me navigate why that's happening.
What is it that I'm running away from or attracted
to while I'm in an episode that causes me to
(33:37):
lose impulse control? Right? But I talk to her a
lot about the sort of life around the book. So
I'll tell her when I have an event or if
I had a conversation, like I'm definitely going to tell
her about this because I know she'll be excited, and
she's just like the best cheerleader. She's just so like, yes,
I'm proud of you. Keep going and it's crazy you
(34:00):
never realize how much you need that from a therapist
until you have it. I just did not know that
I needed my therapist to be so caring, like genuinely caring,
And now that I have her, I don't want to
go back to dealing with therapists who maintain that distance
that doesn't allow them to really get to know me
(34:20):
or for me to feel loved by them. Frankly right,
it's obviously like professional boundaries that are set up and
that are necessary. But I think that there's something so
special about feeling genuinely loved and liked by this person
that you spend money to hang out with once a
week and tell all your problems too.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
So if there was one thing your readers of this
calculata could walk away learning, what would that thing be?
Speaker 2 (34:44):
I think the one thing it would be is that
never let anyone tell you that learning information about yourself
is harmful to you. The more information you have about
who you are, about how you work, about how your
brain works and how your mind interacts with your body.
The more information you have about that, the more you
(35:04):
understand what you need, how you need it, and how
to that show up for yourself and the world, and
if that means going to therapy, getting a diagnosis, trying
out different sports, going to the doctor for full body
workups once a year, just so that you know all
the information that you could possibly have about yourself is
necessary to hold close to chess.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
And besides your book, what other books or TV shows
or documentaries or any other kind of media do you
feel like do a really good job of addressing heartbreak?
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Fleishman Is in Trouble is a TV show on Hulu
that is based on a novel by Taffy prodesster Acnor.
And it's about heartbreak, but it's also about mental health.
And I think the way that it's handled is really
really careful and really interesting. And I think even though
the mental health aspect is pretty implicit, it still does
(35:59):
everything that a good TV show about heartbreak does and
a good TV show about mental healthcare does.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
I had not heard of that one. I definitely won't
add that one to my list. Thanks to check out.
Thank you for sharing it. So where can we stay
connected with you? Kimon? What is your website and any
social media handles you'd like to share? And where can
we grab a copy of the book.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
You can grab a copy of the book at any
place that books are sold bookshop. If your online is
a good place to get books, especially from independent booksellers,
please take a walk into your local bookstore and order
it there. Support local indies for sure. You can find
me on social media at my name, which is Camo Ngne.
(36:43):
I'm very active on Instagram. I love it there, so
if you can find me there, that's probably where you
get the most updates. I don't have a website yet,
but when I do, it'll probably just be my first
name and my last name dot com, so keep a
lookout for that.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Perfect will we short to include all of that in
the show notes. Thank you so much for sending some
time with us today. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Thank you so much for having me, doctor Joy.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
You're welcome. I'm so glad come one was able to
join us today to chat about Discalculia. To learn more
about her work, or to grab your copy of the book,
visit the show notes at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com,
slash Discalculia, and don't forget to text two of your
girls right now and encourage them to check out the episode.
(37:30):
If you're looking for a therapist in your area, check
out our therapist directory at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com
slash directory. And if you want to continue digging into
this topic or just be in community with other sisters,
come on over and join us in the Sister Circle.
It's our cozy corner of the Internet designed just for
black women. You can join us at community dot Therapy
(37:50):
for Blackgirls dot com. This episode was produced by Frida Lucas,
Elise Ellis, and Zaria Taylor. Editing was done by Dennison Brad.
We'll be back next week with another regular episode of
the podcast, but until then, take good care of yourself.
(38:12):
Which friend are you and your sister circle? Are you
the wallflower, the peacemaker, the firecracker or the leader? Take
the quiz at Sisterhoodheels dot com slash quiz to find out,
and then make sure to grab your copy of Sisterhood
Heels to find out more about how you can be
a better friend and how your circle can do a
better job of supporting you. Order yours today at Sisterhoodheels
(38:34):
dot com.
Welcome to the Therapy for Black Girls Podcast, a weekly
conversation about mental health, personal development, and all the small
decisions we can make to become the best possible versions
of ourselves. I'm your host, Doctor Joy Harden Bradford, a
licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information or to
(00:32):
find a therapist in your area, visit our website at
Therapy for Blackgirls dot com. While I hope you love
listening to and learning from the podcast, it is not
meant to be a substitute for a relationship with a
licensed mental health professional. Hey y'all, thanks so much for
(00:57):
joining me for another special TPG live episode. We'll get
right into our conversation after a word from our sponsors.
Which friend are you? And your sister circle? Are you
the wallflower, the peacemaker, the firecracker or the leader? Take
the quiz at Sisterhoodhels dot com slash quiz to find out,
(01:18):
and then make sure to grab your copy of Sisterhood
Heels to find out more about how you can be
a better friend and how your circle can do a
better job of supporting you. Order yours today at Sisterhoodheels
dot com. We're back this week to provide you with
(01:38):
another page turning addition to your bookshelf, Grab your reading glasses,
find somewhere cozy, and get into this week's TVG Library
Pick Discalculia by Komone Felix. In this Calculia, Komone recalls
various heartbreaks experience throughout her life and connects them to
her childhood experience with this calculia, a disorder that makes
(02:02):
it difficult to learn math, using it as a metaphor
for the consequences of her miscalculations and love. Cimone joins
us today to discuss the process of writing a vulnerable memoir,
what lessons about heartbreak the book has to offer, and
her hopes to start an intergenerational conversation around mental illness
(02:22):
and black women. Please note that our conversation does include
references to self harm, so please support yourself in whatever
way is best while listening. If something resonates with you
while enjoying our conversation, share it with us on social
media using the hashtag TBG in Session, or join us
over in the Sister Circle to talk more about the episode.
(02:45):
You can join us at community dot therapy for Blackgirls
dot Com. Here's our conversation. Thank you so much for
joining us today, Comone.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Thank you so much for having me. I'm extremely happy
to be here.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Yes, I'm honor you took some time to chat with
us today. So you are a writer, a poet, and
an essay is known for Build Yourself a Boat, and
your work in The Cut, New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and
many many more places. What attracted you to writing and
poetry as a medium.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
When I was a little girl, I spent a lot
of time in my head and I would make up
stories about the things that I wanted to see happen, like,
for instance, if I had a crush on a boy,
I would be up until four in the morning literally
designing what I thought my relationship with this boy would
look like, and through storytelling that I used to like
(03:37):
soothe myself. I just found it to be really special
and cool to be able to use words to paint
pictures and explain what I was thinking.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
And that has translated you and been a through line
throughout your career.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. For most of my career, I
have continued to think up wild stories, and it's always
been very exciting to think about how to put those
stories both true stories and fictional stories into words and
language that help other people make sense of their own lives.
(04:13):
It makes sense of the world around us. I just
really wanted to be the kind of maker who brought
people closer to the truth of their own lives and
the truth of what it means to exist in the
world at this time. So all the writing that I do,
the poetry writing, the nonfiction, and the essay work is
all towards that goal in some way shape or form.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
M You know, you are one of my favorite nonfiction writers.
I always love seeing like a not fiction piece from
you because it feels like it always has some of
this storytelling element. Can you talk a little bit about
the differences, maybe for inspiration when you're writing like a
non fiction piece, maybe for The Cut versus your fiction
and poetry.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Yeah. So when I'm writing for The Cut or any
other magazine, I'm thinking about the topic at hand, whatever
story they want me to write, and trying to figure
out what is the way to maximize the context here
so that other people can find themselves in the story. Right,
if I'm going to talk about, for instance, and mobiles,
(05:16):
if I'm going to write about her, what could it
be about her life, about her story that might be
relevant to all of these readers who are coming to
it right and always trying to think about what is
the unique angle, the thing that hasn't been discussed before
that or the thing that hasn't been discussed enough that
I could bring to life in that story. And I
think it's not too different from what happens in poetry
(05:40):
and in fiction. I think constantly when I'm writing poetry,
I'm trying to think, what is the innovative, unique way
that I can tell this story that I'm about to tell,
and what is it that I can say to people
that hasn't been said before? And in fiction, I think
it's a little bit less about trying to say something
that hasn't been said before, more trying to double down
(06:01):
on a fact or a way of thinking that's already
been established and trying to bring people a little bit
closer to it. Right. So, if you already believe for
the kind of person who believes that housing should be
a human right, that people should have access to mental
health care, then how do you write a story that's
shaped around that ideal, that doubles down on that and
(06:24):
makes people believe it even more.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
H I love that, Thank you. So let's dive into discalculia.
So can you share what discalculia is and why it
was so meaningful for you to explore and address your
learning disorder in the book given the same name.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Yes, So, dyscalculia is a learning disorder that is similar
to dyslexia, except that it applies in a mathematics context
and it prevents an individual from being able to do
basic arithmetical computation. So when you were in third grade
and you were learning how to do fractions and put
(07:01):
together a graph and do those calculations, I struggled significantly
with learning those things. It just didn't make sense to me.
It was like word salad, Like I couldn't figure out
where to even put a number or a figure to
make a computation make sense. And this was really important
(07:21):
for me to think about and to bring into my
work because it is a not very well known disorder
and it's definitely not a disorder that people associate with
black women. And it's also a disorder that can in
some ways not necessarily be triggered by trauma, but can
(07:42):
coincide with a trauma trigger and sort of happen at
the same time as a young person is trying to
process trauma, or any person is trying to process trauma.
And as I was trying to process my childhood trauma,
math and the ability to do it just left my mind.
I just wasn't able to do mathematics in the same
way that I had been able to do before, which
(08:05):
I think has a lot to do with the trauma
that I experienced and was brought on by it. And
I wanted to highlight some of those connections and bring
the conversation both into a mental health context as we
were talking about trauma, and also bring it into a
physiological context. Right, bringing trauma into a physiological context, how
do we talk about the way trauma affects the body
(08:26):
and the mind, and then how do we talk about
the way the body and the mind are affected by trauma?
That was really important for me to highlight, and I
wanted to write a book that did all of that
and told a really good story and told a story
that everyone could relate to, which is about heartbreak and
(08:47):
trying to navigate what it feels like to have your
heart broken while trying to understand the sort of mathematical
equations that create the decisions that you make, or inspire
the decisions that you make, and inspire the decisions that
the people around you make.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
And was this something that was diagnosed for you when
you were younger.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
This wasn't diagnosed for me until I was much much older,
and it was a wake up call. I had always
been the kind of person to say like, Ugh, I'm
just not good at math, or don't give me the
check at the table, I'm not splitting the bill. But
I realized once I got diagnosed that these were things
I was telling myself as a way to mask and
(09:30):
hide behind a real disability. And there was a part
of me that knew that I was struggling with a disability,
especially because when I was younger, before third grade, I
was actually really, really good at math. My mom had
bought me a bunch of math games and computer games
and I was excelling at all of them. And then
(09:51):
at the same time that a significant trauma happened to me,
I lost the ability to do those things. And when
I was diagnosed as an adult, I realized that none
of those things could be understood in isolation, not the trauma,
not the disability that I had to look at them
all through the same lens, or at least try to
(10:12):
understand them through the same lens, and that was really
empowering for me.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
I thought it was a very innovative. And you've already
used that word approach to writing to connect these traumatic
experiences to math in a way that I think I
hadn't seen kind of written before. And the memoir really
goes from early childhood to it seems like more recent
days detailing heartbreaks and like in a nonlinear form. Can
(10:36):
you talk a little bit about some of those heartbreaks
and why you felt important to write about them.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Yeah, Well, first of all, I'm so grateful that you
said heartbreaks with that s on the end, because that's
exactly what they are to me. There are systems of
heartbreaks in that book, everything from the assault that I
dealt with as a child, to falling out of love
with Math, to some of the conflict with me and
(11:00):
my mom, and then the larger macro heartbreak that happened
with a young man that I was involved with for
a long time. I really wanted to point to the
fact that heartbreak can be any scale, right, that heartbreak
can be small heartbreak can be medium sized, it can
be huge and devastating, but that they were all valid
(11:22):
and that felt important because, at least in the world
that I live in, black girls in particular aren't validated
in their pain. We go through heartbreak, whether it's small
or large, romantic or familial, cultural, and we're told that
we need to get over it. In the book, I
(11:44):
highlight some of the conversations that I had after my
breakup where people around me were just like, Oh, you'll
be fine, just work harder, don't think about it, and
it'll go away, And it didn't at all consider the
fact that I was genuinely not okay. I was already
disrupted in a way that was going to prevent me
(12:04):
from moving on in the way that they thought that
I should. And I wanted people to start to think
about their own heartbreaks and about the ways that the
world breaks their heart and consider whether or not they
should be taking their heartbreaks more seriously, that they should
be tending to them more carefully, right, giving themselves more
(12:25):
care Yeah, you.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Know, I think it's important to think about heartbreaks, even
if the content is not the same every time. It
is in a lot of ways peeling the scalpe off
of a wound that was there, like every additional heartbreak,
and so I really appreciated you talking about how this
felt in cumulative in a lot of ways, because it
really is scratching at that wound all over again, exactly. Yeah. Yeah,
(12:49):
So in the book, you also talk a lot about
your diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Why did it feel important
to write about that as a part of this story.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Being bipolar is something that I've been struggling with all
of my life, but only just was diagnosed with in
the last six years. And in the book you see
a lot of my behavior right, especially from being a
child onward. But I wanted to kind of show the
(13:17):
world what a bipolar black girl could look like, not
to make myself the sort of poster child, because there
are so many different ways that bipolar affects any one
of us. But as a person who struggled significantly in
childhood with behavior stuff, with access to resources, who was
(13:38):
hospitalized many times, it felt impossible to tell the story
of heartbreak without talking about the way mental illness has
facilitated some of those heartbreaks in my life. And if
not mental illness as an abstract thing, then maybe mental
health care and the mental health care system the way
(13:58):
that I had been abandoned, and it took me a
really long time to get the correct diagnosis, even though
all the evidence was there from the very beginning. It
feels like bipolar is as much part of my story
as dyscalculia is, especially because the two of them are
actually coexisting, and so for many people with bipolar disorder,
(14:21):
they struggle with dyscalculia or dyslexia, and that connection was
really eye opening for me to recognize it. As a kid,
I was already struggling with manic episodes and struggling with
depressive episodes, and the way that it was affecting my
brain triggered the dyscalculia and made it harder for me
to show up for myself and show up in the
(14:43):
way that I would have liked to intellectually. And yeah,
I wanted to talk about it because I haven't seen
many books written by black women about bipolar disorder, and
I just felt like there needed to be more out there,
especially for young bipolar people, to be able to know
that like one, You're gonna be okay, and two life
(15:04):
looks good on the other side.
Speaker 1 (15:06):
Yeah, I would say. Besides, I'm lying, but I'm telling
the truth. I can't think of any others that talk
about black women. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Actually want to talk about that book for a second
because I think it's so important to look at lineage
like Bassie. It has been inspiring me since I was
maybe fifteen years old, watching her poetry, seeing her at
the New yorreekan Poet's Cafe, which is a big part
of where I got my start, and really just admiring her,
not knowing what she was struggling with, and when she
(15:36):
came out with I'm lying, but I'm telling the truth,
I felt a sense of freedom of validity because she
was talking about it, and because she was being open
about it, I felt like I could talk about it
and I could be open about it. And I just
think that lineage is so important. It's so critical to
know to be able to see in the world work
that mirrors your life, because it gives you permission to
(15:58):
take it a little bit further, to tell a different story,
but something that's just as connected. I really love Bassie
and I'm very grateful for her.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
I appreciate you sharing that more from our conversation after
the break. Have you gotten emails or private messages from
readers talking about seeing themselves and their stories in your work.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
For sure. I've gotten so many messages on Instagram and
on TikTok and on Twitter, people just saying like this
has been my story. The most popular message I get
is like I have discapulated, and I've never seen anybody
write about it. I've never even seen the word outside
of a mental health context, and that's really gratifying and special,
(16:49):
because I think that's what makes writing feel so important,
is knowing that there are people out there who are
going to be able to see themselves in your work.
And every time I get one of those messages, I
get a little emotional and I have to kind of
like avoid it, like I'll look at it and then
put it down really quickly so that I don't get
(17:10):
overly emotional. Because to know that there are so many
people out there, so many black girls in particular, especially
those with bipolar disorder and dyscalculia or just who are
working through heartbreak and just got their hearts broken, I
just kind of want to hug them all. And this
book feels like my opportunity to do that to just
hug them and send them some love.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
So what do you feel like you learned about yourself
by transferring your experiences to the memoir.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
I feel like I learned that I'm very flawed, that
I don't always make the best or healthiest decisions for myself.
And I also learned that I'm really strong, that I
have the ability to advocate for myself and to articulate
(17:58):
who I am and articulate what I need and honestly
like one of the biggest takeaways for me in the
process of writing was how I relate to my mother.
Reading the story back and seeing how she's portrayed just
made me have a lot more not respect, because I
(18:18):
obviously really respect my mom, but a lot more affection
for the way that she raised me and what she
had to sacrifice so that I could be a kind
of self affirming person who could make something like this
and put it out in the world. I feel like
I don't always understand how I've been mothered, but looking
(18:42):
at this book and reading this book helped me understand
how my mother mothered me and like what her style was,
and helped me understand why it turned out to be
probably a lot better off than I could have been.
And I'm not a mother, and I don't think that
I intend to be, but it does inspire me to
think differently about what we expect of moms, especially of
(19:03):
black moms dealing with mentally ill children who are likely
mentally ill themselves. Yeah. I just felt like she really
showed up in this narrative and I learned a lot
about her.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Have there been conversations with your mom since then that
have been difficult to have?
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Not so much difficult. She hasn't read the book. When
I started writing poetry when I was sixteen, my mother
was like, your poetry is morbid and put it down,
walked away. She was just like, I don't want to
be sad when I read your work. But I have
sent her some screenshops of passages of where I'm talking
about her, and pretty much almost everything that I've sent her,
(19:43):
she's just confirmed. She's like, Yep, that's exactly how it happened,
That's exactly how I felt. You got that spot on,
That's exactly what I taught you. That's exactly what I said.
And it is validating because I think often when we
try to retell the stories of our child. We realized
somewhere along the lines that like the story we're telling
(20:04):
ourselves or the stories that we're telling others, is not
necessarily the same story that our parents are telling. And
I feel like she continues to give me confirmation that
we actually are on the same page, that it did
happen the way I thought it happened, and that I'm
not making it up, and that's been really empowering.
Speaker 1 (20:25):
We already talked a lot about, you know, some of
the content, but it is incredibly transparent, Like you, I
feel like, don't really hold back much in the book.
So you even shared about your experiences with heartbreak and
being cheated on? Was there any trepidation for you as
a black woman author writing about that or why did
you feel like it was important to share that?
Speaker 2 (20:44):
There was some trepidation, But honestly, the reason why I
felt important to share was because when I was going
through it, I texted my then best friend and was like,
are there any books that you've read by black women
that are about heart break and being cheated on in
this way? And she could recount maybe three of them,
(21:07):
And even when I went to those books, it wasn't
exactly what I needed like it got me close, but
it wasn't exactly what I needed. And I remember her
saying to me, like, listen, you know what Tony Morrison says.
If you can't find it, then you have to write it.
And once I started writing it, I realized how much
(21:29):
I needed it and how much I needed my candor,
and I needed to be honest and generous. And by
the time I finished it and sort of realized that
other people would be reading it, it felt senseless to
try to scale back or to limit what I put
on the page, since what I gave to myself was
(21:50):
exactly what I needed and I could only assume that
someone else might need it. And I just feel like
there are so many times where a black woman is
going through the world with no support in the situation
that she's dealing with, and I didn't want to create
another book that left her hanging. So if I can
(22:12):
have candor, and if I could be honest and be
generous in my depiction of my own pain, then maybe
that meant that she could have relief in her own
And that felt more important to me than the anxiety
of feeling embarrassment or feeling like I said too much.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
So tell me a little bit about the process, because
it sounds like this work came about because it was
what you felt like you needed to read at this
particular moment in your life, So you weren't necessarily setting
out to write this. This kind of came from experiences
in your life. What were you on task to write
as your next book?
Speaker 2 (22:48):
I was just writing poetry. And when I started, I
wrote most of this book in my phone because at
first I just started writing small passages to my and
it was originally titled I Think Twenty Ways to Lose
Your Girlfriend or something like that, and it was a
poem that had these small stanzas that were sort of
(23:11):
dancing all over the page, and the poem format just
like didn't fit. I couldn't get honest enough. And in
the process, when I started writing these short paragraphs in
my notes, I realized that there was something there, something
like readable and generous that I just wasn't able to
(23:35):
get at with my poetry. So I just kept going
mainly for myself because I just felt like I needed it.
I needed to, but also for an assumed reader, right
like I was like, if my little sister were reading this,
would I want her to read this series of poems
or would I want her to read these like generous
(23:56):
and honest paragraphs. And yeah, one thing turned into another
and we have the.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Memoir slash poetry book.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yeah. Yeah, the poetry book is like hanging out now
begging me to be written. So I'm trying to pay
attention to her. And it's also going to be about
mental health, so they're all working in the same theme.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
So there's a moment in your story where you can
fide it in your boss about your breakup and challenges,
and she suggested using work as a coping mechanism. Tell
me a little bit about why you think romantic breakups
don't carry the same weight and seriousness as other griefs
that people experience in their lives.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Yeah. I think it's because it's something that everyone experiences.
And I know that that sounds a little contradictory because
you would assume that because it's something that everyone experiences,
everyone would take it seriously. But I think that because
there isn't death involved, right, and it's not as final
as death, and because it means that someone had to
(24:57):
make a choice, and because that happens to everyone at
some point in their lives. We all just fall into
the trap of like, that's life, right, Life is falling
in love and getting your heart broken, and every one
of us goes through it, and every one of us
has to endure, so you'll just have to get over it.
I think we see its ubiquity as a sign that
(25:21):
it can't be that serious because everyone experiences it, which
is different from the death of a parent or something
like that, where we all experience it, but it only
happens to you one time, right or twice, and it
usually happens at the end of your life. And it
does have a lot of material gravity, right. It changes
(25:42):
the materiality of your life when a parent dies, and
in the way that we grieve, But we don't think
about the materiality of a breakup and the way that
it changes the system of the life around you. And
I think we have a lot of as a societ.
We have a lot of distractions. There's a lot of
(26:03):
ways to avoid processing your heartbreak and processing a breakup.
We have hookup culture, we have happy hour culture. Right.
There are so many ways that we set up that
we think allow us to move past heartbreak, when really
what we're doing is masking and hiding, and yeah, I
just think we undervalue it because we have that.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
Access more from our conversation after the break I appreciate
you sharing that, and you know, I talk about that
as well in sisterhood heels around how romantic breakups, you know,
I feel like there's even more even though still not
(26:48):
enough support there. But friendship breakups are worse in a
lot of ways.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Yeah, for sure, I've definitely had a friendship breakup that
to this day, I'm still in therapy trying to process.
And this person and I fell out maybe four years ago,
and I feel like, even more so, there's even less
space in our society to talk about what it feels
like to lose a friend, especially if you lose them
(27:17):
in a traumatic way or whatever. I feel like that's
a story I want to write.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
We'll be looking forward to that one. Yeah. So, based
on the support you feel like you did not get
around your breakup, what message or advice would you have
for your younger self related to romantic relationships ending, or
what advice would you like to share with people who
might be enjoying our conversation.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
I would tell myself and anyone listening to call out
of work, especially if you can to turn the lights off,
to drink water right, to watch the sad shows, cry
as much as you want, eat as much ice cream
as you want. Literally, allow your brain and your body
to do the healing that it needs to do so
(28:01):
that you can come out on the other side of it.
And don't force your mind and your body to go
straight into survival mode in order to process it. Let
your body take care of you. It wants to do that, right,
even if that means indulging in thousands of calories. Whatever
their calories, you can burn them later. I just wish
(28:21):
that I had given myself the chance to grieve within
the time that I had, because not being able to
grieve meant that it came out in this book later, right, which, like, yes,
it's a lovely book, and I'm very proud of what
I put out, But the anxiety and the pain that
I went through in trying to understand why I needed
(28:43):
to write this book, in trying to understand the care
I needed to give myself, could have been avoided if
I had just let myself feel what I needed to feel.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
That's powerful advice, very very good stuff there. So what
do you feel like you learned about love by writing
the book.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
I learn that love is a system, and that our
actions are calculations and we make choices based on what
we consider valuable and what we consider important. And I
learn that you don't always mean to hurt someone, but
(29:21):
that you may cause harm anyway, and that it's really
important to be accountable to that harm in whatever way
you can. And finally, and most importantly, I think I
learned that heartbreak doesn't necessarily mean that there is a villain.
Sometimes the victim and the villain are the same person,
(29:43):
and trying to sort of blow up that binary really
allows us to understand our own behaviors and to understand
how harm happens in love. And I take that into
the relationship that I'm in now. There are choices is
that I get to make every day, and there are
some choices that allow me to love this person a
(30:05):
little bit more and choices that get in the way
of me loving them. And I want to make the
choice that allows me to love them more. So I
have to think really hard about my actions and control
my impulses, and if I can't control them, at least
evaluate them, like why do I have the impulse to
do this thing versus the other.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Yeah, I'm curious. Come on, how if in any way
did you work with mental health professionals as you were
writing the book.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
Yeah. I don't think I was in therapy as I
was writing this book, but I was medicated at least
for half of the process half of writing it. And
I think what I've learned about therapy and just mental
health care in general is that like for the most part,
you may not always, but for the most part, you
(30:54):
know what you need. And I knew that I needed
to process this in this book. And that's not to
say that I couldn't have used a therapist or that
it wouldn't have been useful to me, but that the
way that I needed to be therapized was through this
creative process. And so I was being medicated and making
sure to avoid episodes. At least in the latter half.
(31:15):
I've medicated to stay present. But I also wrote this
book as a way to talk to myself and to
do similar work that I knew I was hungry to
do with a therapist. And now that I'm back in therapy,
I see that book as a two year process of
me writing down everything that I needed to talk about
(31:39):
with a therapist and getting clarity on where I was
confused and what I've been frustrated with. And my therapist
now is like so proud of me and has been
a huge help as the book came out in helping
me navigate what it would feel like to have all
of these people engaging with the text and reading things
about my life. And I've learned that the process doesn't end.
(32:03):
There's so much work that I have to keep doing
in therapy and with my therapist to be able to
continue to show up for this book and show up
for myself and show up for everything that I'm going
to write in the future. And I really just like
I love therapy, I really do. And there's a part
(32:23):
of me that wishes I had been in therapy while
I wrote this book, Like I wonder what the book
would have looked like. I think that if I were
in therapy, that dynamic would have made itself into the book,
Like I would have been talking about my therapist and
talking about some of those conversations, which frankly could have
been really interesting. But yeah, that's pretty much how I
engaged with it.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
And have you used any passages from the book with
your therapist as a like, here, this is evidence of
what I was talking about or what I've experienced, or
do you just share based on what you've written in
the book.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Yeah. I share with her what is in the book
and the things that I've said, and she takes it,
holds on to it, and is like, yes, I see
this in how you work. Now let's talk about what
we can do so that either this doesn't happen or
you avoid these impulses like going into an episode and
(33:16):
cheating on my ex. Right, Like using that as an
example of how scary it can be when I'm in
an episode and her helping me navigate why that's happening.
What is it that I'm running away from or attracted
to while I'm in an episode that causes me to
(33:37):
lose impulse control? Right? But I talk to her a
lot about the sort of life around the book. So
I'll tell her when I have an event or if
I had a conversation, like I'm definitely going to tell
her about this because I know she'll be excited, and
she's just like the best cheerleader. She's just so like, yes,
I'm proud of you. Keep going and it's crazy you
(34:00):
never realize how much you need that from a therapist
until you have it. I just did not know that
I needed my therapist to be so caring, like genuinely caring,
And now that I have her, I don't want to
go back to dealing with therapists who maintain that distance
that doesn't allow them to really get to know me
(34:20):
or for me to feel loved by them. Frankly right,
it's obviously like professional boundaries that are set up and
that are necessary. But I think that there's something so
special about feeling genuinely loved and liked by this person
that you spend money to hang out with once a
week and tell all your problems too.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
So if there was one thing your readers of this
calculata could walk away learning, what would that thing be?
Speaker 2 (34:44):
I think the one thing it would be is that
never let anyone tell you that learning information about yourself
is harmful to you. The more information you have about
who you are, about how you work, about how your
brain works and how your mind interacts with your body.
The more information you have about that, the more you
(35:04):
understand what you need, how you need it, and how
to that show up for yourself and the world, and
if that means going to therapy, getting a diagnosis, trying
out different sports, going to the doctor for full body
workups once a year, just so that you know all
the information that you could possibly have about yourself is
necessary to hold close to chess.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
And besides your book, what other books or TV shows
or documentaries or any other kind of media do you
feel like do a really good job of addressing heartbreak?
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Fleishman Is in Trouble is a TV show on Hulu
that is based on a novel by Taffy prodesster Acnor.
And it's about heartbreak, but it's also about mental health.
And I think the way that it's handled is really
really careful and really interesting. And I think even though
the mental health aspect is pretty implicit, it still does
(35:59):
everything that a good TV show about heartbreak does and
a good TV show about mental healthcare does.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
I had not heard of that one. I definitely won't
add that one to my list. Thanks to check out.
Thank you for sharing it. So where can we stay
connected with you? Kimon? What is your website and any
social media handles you'd like to share? And where can
we grab a copy of the book.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
You can grab a copy of the book at any
place that books are sold bookshop. If your online is
a good place to get books, especially from independent booksellers,
please take a walk into your local bookstore and order
it there. Support local indies for sure. You can find
me on social media at my name, which is Camo Ngne.
(36:43):
I'm very active on Instagram. I love it there, so
if you can find me there, that's probably where you
get the most updates. I don't have a website yet,
but when I do, it'll probably just be my first
name and my last name dot com, so keep a
lookout for that.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Perfect will we short to include all of that in
the show notes. Thank you so much for sending some
time with us today. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Thank you so much for having me, doctor Joy.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
You're welcome. I'm so glad come one was able to
join us today to chat about Discalculia. To learn more
about her work, or to grab your copy of the book,
visit the show notes at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com,
slash Discalculia, and don't forget to text two of your
girls right now and encourage them to check out the episode.
(37:30):
If you're looking for a therapist in your area, check
out our therapist directory at Therapy for Blackgirls dot com
slash directory. And if you want to continue digging into
this topic or just be in community with other sisters,
come on over and join us in the Sister Circle.
It's our cozy corner of the Internet designed just for
black women. You can join us at community dot Therapy
(37:50):
for Blackgirls dot com. This episode was produced by Frida Lucas,
Elise Ellis, and Zaria Taylor. Editing was done by Dennison Brad.
We'll be back next week with another regular episode of
the podcast, but until then, take good care of yourself.
(38:12):
Which friend are you and your sister circle? Are you
the wallflower, the peacemaker, the firecracker or the leader? Take
the quiz at Sisterhoodheels dot com slash quiz to find out,
and then make sure to grab your copy of Sisterhood
Heels to find out more about how you can be
a better friend and how your circle can do a
better job of supporting you. Order yours today at Sisterhoodheels
(38:34):
dot com.
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