Sep 17, 2025 | Episode Transcripts
Ep 7 – Audio Only – If You’ve Lived it, You’re Ready
(0:00 – 1:23)
A lot of movements just start with one person showing up to a meeting, speaking their mind, and then looking around the room and seeing other people nodding their heads. People living the problem understand the contours better than any outsider could, because people living within see the context. If you’ve lived it, you’re ready.
Maybe you aren’t cut out to run the whole movement, but you can mobilize yourself and maybe a few others to get things started to get things off the ground. It’s easy to feel helpless. It’s easy to feel hopeless, but you just have to get started.
And just because you are carrying the mantle right now doesn’t mean that you have to carry the mantle all by yourself forever. We’re wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in. I’m Tanya Kubo, and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet.
Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras, because around here, what makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point. What if the thing that broke your heart is the only credential you have been waiting for? Today, we are talking about a simple but potentially disruptive idea.
(1:24 – 17:40)
If you’ve lived it, you’re qualified to lead it. Maybe not everything. I’m not saying soup to nuts here, but potentially the next right step.
I’m not talking about turning you into a professional advocate where you eat, sleep, and breathe, becoming a change agent 24-7. I’m talking about community building as safety building, asserting a group’s right to be safe and seen. And in today’s I want to bust the I’m-just-a-insert-noun-here myth that keeps too many people quiet when they’re already the most qualified people in the room.
And you’ve heard this, right? I’m just a mom. What can I do? I’m just a student. What can I do? I’m just your average homemaker.
What can I do? And nobody is just in anything when they find themselves specifically called to step up in defense of a community or of a population. Community building takes many forms. One of them is advocacy.
If you haven’t already listened to episode six, which was my interview with Nikki James Zellner, I highly encourage you to do so. This episode is building off of that, but this episode works as a standalone as well. At its core, advocacy is really about creating safety.
It is recognizing harm, naming it, then asserting the rights of people to be safe from that harm, and then building the guardrails those individuals need in order to thrive. Okay, so while some people will sit back and wait for an expert to emerge, right, the answers actually are almost always found inside the community that is most deeply affected by whatever the issue is. People living the problem understand the contours better than any outsider could, because people living within see the context.
They see the nuance that no outsider could ever imagine, much less understand deep down. And my job, and maybe your job, isn’t to become the hero in any of these situations. It’s to help the people closest to the issue to be heard, to be equipped, empowered, and protected.
Now Nikki, who I interviewed in episode six, the title of that episode is not on my watch. Nikki didn’t wake up one day and say, hey, I want to change policy. I want to change policy at the state level.
Okay, she didn’t even wake up one day wanting to change policy at her kid’s daycare. She was a mom doing what a lot of moms in this country and around the world do, just dropping her kid at daycare. But the furnace malfunctioning, the lack of carbon monoxide detection in that daycare center, kids getting sick because the law didn’t require them to be protected, right? All of that happened regardless of her education level, regardless of what she had set out to do with her life, right? But that was the catalyst for her to stand up and say, oh, no, no, no, no, this is not okay.
Now the reality is that she could have just stopped at the level of keeping her kids protected moving forward, right? She could have said, you know what, come to find out there is actually no law in my state that requires carbon monoxide detectors to be in daycare centers. So what I’m going to do is from here on out, every time my child is at a facility where they’re going to be cared for in my absence, I am going to donate a carbon monoxide detector to that facility. I’ll have one for their classroom, I’ll have one for the building, right? She totally could have done that and made it a very, you know, private endeavor.
And I think a lot of people would do that, right? Put stuff in their kids’ backpacks, keep things on their kid’s person to keep their kid safe. But instead what she did is she started asking questions, you know, how did this happen? Why did this happen? Wait, what do you mean there’s no carbon monoxide detector in the building? Why isn’t there one? Did it break? You know, what happened? Figured out that there was a loophole in policy and because she found out that, okay, so policy adheres to the law, oh, there’s no law in place that says this, she pushed for a law change so that all kids would be safer because she recognized that it wasn’t just about her kid’s safety, it was about all kids’ safety. And that’s the difference between solving for an individual problem and then creating community safety.
Nikki took a very personal scenario that affected her, it affected others as well, and said, you know what, like, this is not okay. We’ve got to do something to make sure kids are protected moving forward. And so what she did, that decision to allow this to be bigger than just her, bigger than just her kids, widened that circle of care.
And what her story does, and again, I don’t want to rehash the episode specifically, just give you a little bit of background, but her story directly challenges that, we’ll call it a false belief of being just a mom, right? That, well, she’s just a mom, she’s not a professional advocate, she’s not a lawmaker, she’s not an elected official, there’s nothing she can do about this, right? So many parents don’t mobilize because they feel like they don’t have what it takes in order to make a change happen, right? They don’t go to the school board meeting, they don’t go to their elected officials and advocate on behalf of their schools or activities that their kids are involved in, or even their community. And so what I hope that Nikki’s interview does for you, what Nikki’s story does for you, is remind you that your lived experience is your qualifier should you choose to be a change agent in your community, or whether that’s a physical community or a more interest based expansive community. So again, what I would love to remove from the English language are these terms of just a mom, just a teacher, just a private citizen.
Because what that does is it diminishes, first of all, it diminishes the harm that people experience, but it also takes people who are closest to problems, closest to situations, and convinces them that they don’t have the qualifications to speak up about them or against them. And that’s not true. If you have lived it, you are qualified at the very least to lead the next right step.
Now, maybe that’s just the next conversation. Maybe that’s just doing a little bit of Google searching to figure out what the root cause is. Maybe it’s sending an email.
Maybe it’s generating a resource that helps people stay safe. You know, one of the early things that Nikki did was create an online tracker that tracked the instances of carbon monoxide poisoning in K-12 environments that were severe enough that they required an emergency medical response, right? Somebody had to call 911. Paramedics had to come out.
And that was it for a while because people challenged the idea that it was that big of an issue, that it was widespread enough or serious enough for it to warrant any policy change. So that was something simple that she could do. And that resource doesn’t just keep track of the number of incidents.
It helps people stay safe, right? It creates awareness. It provides a resource for journalists who may be covering this situation in their areas. Okay, you don’t, being an advocate doesn’t mean you have to do everything.
It doesn’t even mean you have to do whatever it is forever. It just means you take that next right step to expand the safety and belonging of the community that is affected. So I think when we talk about advocacy in general, and you know what, I think what moves me so much about Nikki’s story, aside from the fact that I’m a mom too, right? I have kids.
I’ve gone to daycare, all those things, right? I understand how much of my children’s lives now are lived 100% away from me, right? They are gone from my care for large chunks of the day. And so I understand that kind of powerlessness that comes with what happens to them when you’re not there. I also understand how important it is to feel that you can trust their safety.
It’s hard to work. It’s hard to keep your focus on what you have to do if you’re constantly worried about what may be going on with them. My own lived experience, there was no shortage of causes that I could devote my life’s work to.
I was raised by a single mom who was a hoarder, who was on public assistance. I was a first-generation college student. Right now, I live in a neurodiverse household, and I’m married to a man who’s on the autism spectrum and has ADHD.
I parent children who have ADHD, autism, and OCD, and all sorts of other like little, you know, they call them comorbidities. We just call them a little extra spice. In the mix of our family, we rescue animals, right? Like we are pet owners who have rescued every pet that we’ve ever owned.
As a former journalist, I believe in public information. I believe in the public’s right to know. I believe in sunshine laws, open transparency, like very open government.
My kids are in public school. My kids have been in charter schools. My kids have been homeschooled.
I’m a big advocate for education in general, and I’m also an advocate for educational choice. I work with private schools. I work with public schools.
I care deeply about all of these things, but when we want to talk about what really lights my fire, right, I am most passionate about supporting moms because I see and I have experienced that society has very different standards for mothers than they do for fathers, right? We have lived that in our household, and I also understand that motherhood is the nastiest competitive sport that most of us will ever play, and we play it for life. I am deeply, deeply passionate, and if you’ve listened to episodes two and three, you know this, deeply passionate in advocating for what I call my cluttery peeps, right, especially folks who have hoarding tendencies and the people who love them. As the child of a hoarder, I know the pain that hoarding tendencies and hoarding can cause for the people you love.
I also understand the mental illness that’s behind it. I understand that even on the clutter spectrum, right, it’s not really about housekeeping. It’s about these deep embedded emotions, and it is a daily struggle, and it’s one of those things that you can’t fix today and never have to worry about again, and that adds to the difficulty in overcoming it for good, right? So I love my cluttery peeps.
I love moms and supporting family units in general. I am a big advocate for people who are neurodivergent on any type of spectrum, right? I have raised my children from the time that they could walk and talk that different is not effective. I have a daughter who owns that to the level that she has her own like merchandise company where she has all these neurodivergent affirming messages, and she has a point of pride around how she’s wired differently, and she has an appreciation for what parts are her superpower and what parts are a little bit of a challenge for her, right? I am passionate about all these things, and I do everything I can in these very small sectors of the world to make change.
I didn’t go to school to be a therapist, right? So I’m never going to be able on a one-on-one environment to heal somebody from like the pathology that comes from hoarding or that causes hoarding, okay? I’m not a home organizer. I’m never going to be able to go into somebody’s house and solve their clutter problem. My degrees are in journalism and public relations.
My superpower is that I can take like deep, first of all, I love research. Second, I can take deep, complex information. I can synthesize it, and I can distill it into clear steps that people actually can use.
I can make it easy to understand for the average person. That’s my gift, and so I don’t need to lead every community where I’ve decided to plant my flag. The reason that I’m so passionate about community building and community strategy is because this is where I can make the greatest change by equipping other people to lead their communities effectively so that they can create change in their own sectors of the world, just like Nikki is writing a book about how to be a watchdog so that other people can benefit from her playbook where she created change in her state around carbon monoxide detection in schools.
Other people can take that same playbook and apply it to whatever they’re passionate about. Maybe that’s animal rights. Maybe that is safe sidewalks or safe communities.
Maybe that is more public lands for kids to play on. Whatever that could be. Maybe it’s repealing a gas tax in their state.
Who knows? It is not up to her to decide what people will do with the information. It’s up to her to create the playbook so that she can equip anybody who feels called to follow in her footsteps. So, like I said, I don’t need to lead every community.
My role is to equip people to lead theirs, and that’s how I choose to amplify my impact. Now, when you are somebody who is looking to make change, so if you’re sitting there right now and you’re thinking there’s a problem in my town, but I don’t know the first thing about it, and somebody should make a law about this, but I don’t know what that law should be or how to do it or whatever. What we don’t realize is we don’t have to create a non-profit.
Like, very few movements start with the creation of a 501c3. Very few movements even start with a petition. A lot of movements just start with one person showing up to a meeting, speaking their mind, and then looking around the room and seeing other people nodding their heads.
And so if there is something that you are experiencing right now that you feel should change, whatever that could be, you know, what you can do to follow in Nikki’s footsteps, what you can do to lead the advocacy of that is you can very simply just write a few things down, right? Write down from your perspective what’s actually happening, write down what you see working, and then write down what safer would look like to you and what’s the most immediate safety measure. As I say this, I think about when I was working for a research university, I came to the university about three years into a five-year research study, and part of this study they were looking at very, like, rural hard-to-reach communities and thinking, like, how could they improve the quality of life for people in these communities? And they had a lot of thoughts. The researchers had a lot of opinions of what these folks needed.
They thought maybe what they needed were better schools. Maybe they needed a local hospital because there wasn’t a local hospital there. They thought about maybe what they needed was access to cheaper food or a food bank satellite there so that they could get access to free and low-cost food.
(17:41 – 18:45)
And they had all these opinions about what folks needed, and they were trying to get grant funding and such in order to make strides toward this, to fund these endeavors. But when they sat down with the residents of the community to talk to them, they were shocked. What these individuals wanted were sidewalks because it was really hard.
They didn’t feel like they needed a car. They didn’t feel like the town was, like, that big to require a car, but they couldn’t safely walk their children to school because there were no sidewalks between where they lived and the school. They wanted stop signs.
They wanted controlled four-way intersections. They didn’t even want streetlights necessarily. They just want stop signs so that they would have an opportunity to cross a busy street with their children.
They wanted crosswalks. And it was one of those things, right? Without sidewalks, they couldn’t get crosswalks. And of all the ideas these researchers had, installing sidewalks in the community was actually the cheapest.
(18:46 – 23:00)
Sidewalks and crosswalks were the easiest, cheapest solution, and it was what the people who lived there wanted most. The people who lived there would not have been that excited about a food bank because they still would have difficulty getting to the food bank without the benefit of sidewalks. So really think about what’s actually happening, what’s working, and what would safer look like in your specific circumstance.
And then that right there can be the framework for a letter to the editor if you enjoy writing and that’s what you want to do to make change. It could be a great framework design for an online community if you feel like it would be easier to gather people together in a Facebook group or a Reddit thread or whatever it could be. It could also be a great outline for an article if you wanted to write an op-ed, an opinion piece, or a commentary for your newspaper, or if you wanted to write a letter to decision makers, whether that might be an elected official or maybe it’s an administrator if it’s a school issue, right? A simple just off the top of your head notes of what’s actually happening, what’s working, and what safer would look like could frame up a great persuasive argument that could be used in a variety of instances.
So now that I’ve given you kind of just a short way of like following Nikki’s footsteps because her book’s not out yet and when her book’s out we will definitely link to it in the show notes but until then what you can do is you can just follow these steps to try to make change for yourself. But if there is something that you’re looking to make change toward, I recently just started a non-profit to benefit the arts media and entertainment program at my daughter’s school because they don’t have anything other than school funding to rely on and without a non-profit that supports them there’s no way for them to get grants or additional funding. It can be a full-time job, okay? Making change, being a change agent or an advocate, whatever you want to call it, could be a full-time job.
It does not have to be a full-time job and so one thing that I hope you appreciate is that when you choose change over comfort there’s a price and it’s not a price that’s necessarily too high to pay if you go into the situation with open eyes and I think this is what causes a lot of people to say you know what somebody else can fight this fight it’s not for me. Some people won’t even throw their hat in the ring because they’re so afraid that the fight may be all-consuming. But the first thing is you recognize that if you really want to be an advocate, right, there is some relational aspects, right? Not everybody is comfortable with advocacy.
Nikki and I talked about the fear of being that mom, you know, you don’t want to be the mom who when she walks into the school everybody goes running or maybe you do, right? Maybe you do. If that’s what it takes maybe you’re like well why not me? Why not me? I am somebody I used to resist being that mom with my kids at their IEP meetings, right, which is a special education meeting. I didn’t want to be that mom but then I realized that I have resources available to me that other special education parents do not and by being that mom I can actually create change in school systems that benefit everybody even if they don’t know as much as I know.
And so I’m not afraid to be that mom in that case because I think it’s worth it but I’m not that mom for everything, okay? I’m not the mom that’s going to write a letter complaining that there’s soda at my kids campus. I’m just not. I’m not going to complain about the snacks that they have, okay? If they feed the kids PB&J or they feed the kid juice boxes I’m like okay if I cared that much I’d pack a different lunch for my kids but I don’t have a child with a peanut allergy, right? If I had a child with a peanut allergy I would feel very differently about after-school snacks including PB&Js.
(23:01 – 23:25)
So if I had a relative with a peanut allergy, if I had a close friend with a peanut allergy I might feel very differently as well and that may be the hill that I want to die on. There’s no wrong motivator. You just have to know, right? You have to be willing to be that person and have people understand and maybe some people will be uncomfortable by your advocacy efforts.
(23:26 – 27:01)
There’s time and energy involved in advocacy, okay? Nikki laid it out. I mean she spent a lot of time on phones not just with elected officials and decision makers as she was trying to change policy where she lived but other parents in other areas who were similarly affected who are wanting to make the same change in their areas. If this is a path you want to go on, right? It’s really about just establishing some boundaries.
Maybe right now you can give it an hour a day or maybe just an hour a week and that’s okay. Also advocacy comes with opportunity costs. There are things you have to say no to in order to say yes to other things.
We only have 24 hours in a day so you just have to decide how much time energy and effort you’re willing to spend, okay? You don’t have to kill yourself for any cause because chances are when you step in you’ll probably find other people who are just as committed as you or who maybe saw the same things you were but they didn’t know what the next step was and then together you can join forces to push things forward. So ultimately the reason that I am talking specifically about this piece of advocacy is because I think that there are a lot of problems in the world that could be solved if the people most deeply affected by them felt that they could change them, right? It is just so easy to feel that problems are too big and too maybe long-standing that just as one person what am I going to do, right? It’s easy to feel helpless. It’s easy to feel hopeless but you just have to get started and just because you are carrying the mantle right now doesn’t mean that you have to carry the mantle all by yourself forever, right? Nikki is no longer carrying this mantle all by herself.
She was able to get policy change in the state where she lived. Now she lives in a different state. She’s working on changing the policy there but meanwhile there are other people who have been energized by her work and who are able to take what she has already done and use that as a starting point to make similar changes in their areas.
Not just on this issue of carbon monoxide poisoning but in other issues that have affected them, right? Because that’s the thing is it’s not in a topic-specific endeavor. The ability to be a watchdog lies in us all. So consider this your permission slip.
If you’ve lived it, you’re ready. Maybe you aren’t cut out to run the whole movement but you can mobilize yourself and maybe a few others to get things started to get things off the ground. You can take the next right step that makes your people feel safer.
Now maybe that’s creating an online community. That’s my favorite way to mobilize individuals from different backgrounds and different sectors around shared purposes. Or maybe it’s four moms meeting at a coffee shop to discuss how they’re going to make the walk to school safer from their neighborhood to the school.
Maybe that’s all it is. It doesn’t matter. If you have lived it, you are ready.
(27:02 – 27:20)
That’s the takeaway here. That’s it for this episode of Find Your Freaks. To help more weirdos find their way here, subscribe, rate, and leave a review.
And if you’re craving connection, join the Freak Show at findyourfreaks.com. What makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point.
Sep 3, 2025 | Episode Transcripts
Edited Transcript
[Nikki James Zellner] (0:00 – 0:48)
That day I dropped them off, I did not realize that it was going to change the trajectory of the rest of my life. I think the biggest change comes from people who’ve personally experienced something, and it has changed the direction of their lives. It was something I hadn’t felt passion for ever, and all of a sudden my whole value system shifted to justice and advocacy, when that had never been part of my value spectrum before.
For me, stories are where it starts, because it’s the story that builds that momentum and that builds that energy for you. You probably have 30 things in your lived experience that you have an opportunity to change, it’s just whether or not you see yourself as being somebody who can champion that change.
[Tonya Kubo] (0:49 – 1:48)
We’re wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in. I’m Tonya Kubo, and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet. Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras, because around here, what makes you weird, makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point. We love to talk about community, how to build it, grow it, and sustain it, but today we are talking about what happens when you take your lived experience, draw a line in the sand, and say not on my watch. So today I have Nikki James Zellner, and she is professionally a brand advisor, a creative strategist, and the reason she’s here today, the story I want you to hear about, is that she is a fierce advocate for purpose-driven change.
And so Nikki, I am just going to have you jump right in and tell us who are your freaks and why do you love them?
[Nikki James Zellner] (1:49 – 3:01)
So I have to shout out my freaks. They are on every neighborhood watch, I’m sure. They are in every town in America.
They are most likely mothers, but they don’t have to be. So I would say my freaks are certainly parent activists or community activists that have lived experience in something and decided to take that lived experience and use it for fuel to create bigger change, whether that’s in their own neighborhoods, whether that was in their industry, or whether that’s in their communities, or the United States, or the world as a whole. These are people who didn’t set out to really become activists.
They didn’t set out to say I’m going to study political science and go into the government and start a non-profit organization. These are people who survived something that was likely traumatic or jolting to what they knew was the status quo, and they had to navigate systems, and they had to navigate red tape, and they had to navigate the way that people looked at them in public and say this happened to me. I’m not going to let it happen to anybody else.
Those are the people I love.
[Tonya Kubo] (3:01 – 3:38)
Oh my gosh. So what I’m hearing, it’s the people who show up at the school board meeting, the city council meeting, the ones who write the letters to the editor and are just bringing a voice to what they see that they don’t think everybody else is quite understanding the gravity of the situation. Yes, that is correct.
So let’s talk about how you got here because, you know, I just read off your list of professional accomplishments and movement maker, change agent wasn’t necessarily in there. So how did you land to be the voice for advocates, particularly citizen advocates, at this point?
[Nikki James Zellner] (3:39 – 7:34)
So for me, it was a quiet day in 2020. It was just before the pandemic closed the United States down. So this is February of 2020, and my two children were four and three at the time, and they went to Daypeer because I was a working parent.
My husband was active duty military, and we had to, we were one of the millions of people in the United States who had to put their kids in child care in order to have a dual income household. And that day I dropped them off, I did not realize that it was going to change the trajectory of the rest of my life. So I get a text at about two in the afternoon.
My kids had been there since about seven that morning that said, there’s been a gas leak, come pick up your kids. We’ve evacuated the building. And when I pull down that street, there’s fire department, ambulances, police cars, kids are not in the daycare structure anymore.
But when you walk into where they were evacuated to, you just see hundreds of parents of about 80 kids, you know, six weeks to six years old. And what it turned out to be was a carbon monoxide leak from a furnace that was faulty. It was a switch on the furnace that malfunctioned.
And because the daycare did not have carbon monoxide detection, because they weren’t required to by Virginia law, no one knew that the kids and the staff were being poisoned for over six hours until kids started passing out and people started calling 911. And so that was the day that everything changed for me. Instead of really being that freaked out parent saying this is a fluke, I instead was asking questions before the lawyer shut everybody down.
Them lawyers. I wanted to ask those young care providers, what was your experience? What was going on?
And see if I could get a common denominator of experiences. What time did this actually start? What time were the officials called?
What steps did you take to communicate with your staff and let them know that you think that there might be a problem? What symptoms were the kids experiencing? And so when you have young care providers caring for also young children, it’s very compartmentalized.
It’s not like they were in a big space where they all could see everything going on. It was individuals looking after 10 to 20 kids, maybe two individuals per room who were also being impaired by toxic gas. And so to me, there was certainly a couple of days there where I was in blame mode, right?
Where I was, whose fault is this? Who’s to blame for this? My kids could have died, et cetera.
But then there was a point, and I have a journalism background in terms of I worked in community newspapers for close to 15, 20 years. Me too. We’ll compare notes another day.
Exactly. So you kind of wear many hats. You know what to do when you get to the scene and you’re the person who happens to be at the newspaper that they sent out.
So I was asking lots of questions to get data before everybody got shut down. And what I learned is that there was no detection. And so for me, that was the weird part.
What do you mean there was no detection? I have to double wrap my breast milk. I have to fingerprint three times to get in the door.
What do you mean there was no carbon monoxide detection? And I found out that it was a loophole in the Virginia State Building Code that was the reason that this daycare was allowed to exist without carbon monoxide detection while having a gas appliance that could produce it. And so I thought to myself, like, that doesn’t feel right.
That doesn’t seem right. This seems like a safety issue. And so I called the governor as if he had nothing else to do during the pandemic.
[Tonya Kubo] (7:35 – 7:38)
Because we journalists are not afraid to pick up a phone.
[Nikki James Zellner] (7:38 – 9:30)
No, I will pick up the phone. That is one thing you can say. And I don’t start with the local team.
I mean, I just go up to the guy who’s in charge of everything. And they said, well, in order to change the building code for the state, you have to change the law for the state because the building code is based off of Virginia law. And so me, who avoided politics in school, have avoided politics for the majority of my life.
I’m a peacekeeper. I like to be a peacekeeper. I was a little bit mortified.
However, every single time I remember, I would look back at pictures or I would see a story, I would get more and more fired up. And I was like, no one is changing this. This has probably been happening for 20 years.
And nobody has taken the steps to change this. I know how to brand. I know how to pick up the phone.
I know how to pitch media. I’m going to take this on. What I didn’t realize is that it wasn’t just a Virginia problem.
It was a United States problem. It was an international problem. And I just happened to become the poster child of a mom who had a happy ending in the sense that my kids are okay now.
They’re nine and eight. They still go to public school. I still fight for carbon monoxide protection.
I still send in their school supplies a carbon monoxide alarm for every classroom at their end. I do that. That’s part of my school supply list because I don’t trust the school to have their back.
So I became that person who started paying more attention in the space, started understanding how budgets get spent and how people make decisions when it comes to school safety. And so I really found my people during that. I found the people that wanted to complain about everything.
And I found the people that said, this is a problem. How do we solve it? And I really saw myself in the second camp.
[Tonya Kubo] (9:31 – 10:40)
Oh my gosh. So there’s so much there because as you know, I’m a working mom as well. My youngest went to exact, actually both of my girls went to exactly the same type of daycare that you described, daycare and preschool.
I worked at a university. So they went to a university preschool and, you know, granted in their preschool, can we shut down the preschool for everything? Right.
That’s just kind of one of our things, but we were, you know, I was public information officer. So I remember controlling the flow of information. I know exactly what you mean.
When you talk about, like you can have a lot of conversations until the lawyers come in and then everything gets shut down. But one thing that I just want to ask about, because I don’t know if this is a nationwide thing. I know that very much this surrounds my peer group in California is there is this fear, and it might be because I’m married to a school teacher as well, of being that mom, right?
Like nobody wants to be that mom. We don’t want to be the mom that when the principal sees us coming, they want to duck and hide. We don’t want to be the one that the office talks about long after we leave.
And yet everything you’re telling me right now would not have happened or been possible without you being willing to be that mom.
[Nikki James Zellner] (10:40 – 16:03)
Yes. Agreed. I’d like to say that there are four groups, right?
There are really four groups of people in my change-making journey. And I’m writing a book about my experience because the question that I got asked the most was, how did you go create that change? Right.
You don’t have, I don’t have a college degree. I was just a mom. I, all of my business knowledge has been accumulated because of my roles in the business world.
It did not come from a proper schooling education. It has come from real life on the streets, right? And I like to say I’m street smart, not necessarily book smart.
You know, my husband had to explain to me all of the HVAC related things when it came to carbon monoxide so that I could truly understand it in order to explain it to somebody else. And so the more people were asking me, you know, I have this thing that’s important to me. What should my first step be?
I started realizing I wasn’t necessarily just the carbon monoxide lady. I was becoming the, how do you create change lady when you’re, when you see yourself as just this. Now, for some people, that’s becoming that mom.
In our world, we like to call it the Karens, right? The ones who complain about everything. Go to every coffee store manager and say, the kid next to me isn’t drinking anything.
He shouldn’t be here. You know, those people. So I like to say there are four groups of people.
When it comes to a problem that you could create change around, you’re either a lap dog. You’re not going to create change around that problem until somebody tells you to do it. Until it affects your paycheck or until it affects, you know, your boss is telling you to do this or your parent or your neighbor is telling you to do this.
You’re not going to solve that problem in any way, shape, or form. You’re just going to let that problem exist. You’re going to know that problem exists.
You’re not going to expense any energy towards it, positive nor negative. You’re just a lap dog, right? The second group is what I call the guard dogs.
Your guard dogs are the people who post things that are important to them on social media, but they never actually get up and create change. They’re assigned this position. What can we do about this guy that stands at the corner pedaling for change?
But they’re not actually thinking about, okay, why is the guy on the corner pedaling for change? Instead, they’re more concerned with how does this make our city look, that there’s a guy on the corner pedaling for change, right? They want to get rid of the guy, not get rid of the problem.
All bark, no bite, right? They are people who will talk about the problem day and night. You feel like the problem is very important to them, but when you ask them what they’re actually doing about it, it’s nada, big old goose egg.
They’re not actually doing anything that requires more than a click of a button, right? The third group is your attack dogs. This is what we know as the Karen.
This is the person who doesn’t play well in the sandbox. This is the person who films the bird watchers and starts yelling at them. They have no clue about empathy.
Everything is, this is happening to me, and I will fight people because it’s happening to me. It has nothing to do with their community. It has nothing to do with the well being of anybody else involved.
It has everything to do with they’re mad about something, they want other people to know that they’re mad about it, right? And they don’t always go about things the way in which would be most receptive to creating change. So you’ve got to think about those people.
Their heart might very well be in the right place. I can think about all of the directions I took during my carbon monoxide advocacy, and I can tell you now that if I would have taken the attack dog stance, I would not have gotten very far. Even though I had the story to go with it, I could not have created the change because nobody would talk to me, right?
So I had to come at it from group four. And group four for me is like, these are my freaks. These are my people.
They’re the watchdogs. These are the people who see something wrong and want to understand the problem before they start throwing out all of the solutions to solve it. I could absolutely say I want a carbon monoxide alarm in this building because my kids go here.
But what I didn’t understand is that this was a state problem. It was a national problem. And there were lots of nuances that I didn’t understand yet because I hadn’t had conversations with the right people to understand why that didn’t exist.
You know, so there are systems and there are rules, and if you take the attack dog stance, you’re not going to be invited to the table. And it’s going to feel very much like you’re constantly fighting a battle. But when you take a watchdog approach, when you can start asking questions and come at it from a place of, I’d like to understand your point of view, I’d like to understand why this doesn’t exist yet according to you, according to what problems you’re needing to overcome to make that happen.
That’s really where change can happen. And so I would say, yes, we want you to have the fire of that mom because that’s going to take time, it’s going to take energy, it’s going to take persistence and perseverance and grit. But I don’t want you to have the attitude and the walls of that mom.
You’re going to have to play in the box. And you have to do that through open communication.
[Tonya Kubo] (16:05 – 16:27)
Wow. I love this. So it’s lap dog, guard dog, attack dog, watchdog.
Correct. Okay. Making sure that I have that accurately summarized.
Because a lot of what you say, so it reminds me of another guest we had on the show, Rachel Allen, who ended up, she is quite, I would say, notorious, she might not say that, in the federal prison system as a result of her husband becoming incarcerated.
[Nikki James Zellner] (16:28 – 16:28)
Okay.
[Tonya Kubo] (16:28 – 18:11)
So similar to what you described, right, just live in life, how she lived life. And then one day, her husband is incarcerated. And there is the fact that she’s isolated from most of her community as a result.
But then, you know, she had no reason to know anything about the prison system until that point. And so then as being somebody who was there to visit a loved one in the prisons, recognized a whole bunch of stuff going on. And like you mentioned, sought to figure out why, sought to, then had to educate herself on what the law says.
Right. And then, you know, fast forward a few months even, and ends up having to testify in Congress in order to effect change. Because like you said, in her case, there was an aspect of changing law, but it was really about changing practice to follow policy and policy to follow law.
Right. But loopholes in the law allow practices that aren’t quite in alignment. Right.
And so one big difference between what you describe and what she described in her situation, she found herself surrounded by people who society would not pay any attention to. The other individuals in that visiting waiting room, right, are just people that society likes to bypass. And she, as a copywriter, was like, OK, well, I can tell a good story.
Yeah. So all I have to do, let me get to know these people. Right.
And I will tell their story for them. Whereas you have lived this experience and then said, you know, I would just argue I’m going to put words in your mouth and say you don’t have time nor energy to tell other people’s stories for them. So you have empowered people to tell their own story and to effect change that way.
Right. Was that intentional or was that just put one foot in front of the other? And here we are.
[Nikki James Zellner] (18:12 – 18:27)
So one of the interesting things when you go to change a law, typically people will only listen to you if you’re a constituent of their state or their district. Right. So when it comes to law changing and not everybody who wants to go change, wants to get involved in the law process.
[Tonya Kubo] (18:28 – 18:28)
Right.
[Nikki James Zellner] (18:28 – 19:49)
Another difference, I would say, between my story and hers is that I have the feel good end of the spectrum. Right. It’s kids, babies can’t take care of themselves where her experience is probably more like, well, they made these choices.
And so it’s, you know, this is what they get for making those choices. Now, I don’t believe that, obviously. I don’t think that these people should be bypassed, but there is a stereotype and a lens being used there.
I certainly think I was able to go farther because I was helping kids who couldn’t help themselves. Right. And I was speaking for children.
I was speaking for children’s safety and school safety is always a hot topic. My school safety isn’t relative to mental health or relative to intruders or shootings, but it is absolutely still in the school safety bubble. So I would say when it came to asking others to kind of take the steps forward, one of the things I initially wanted to do was, okay, who are the people that have been impacted by this in other towns and reach out to those parents?
It was very difficult to do because a lot of those parents were involved in legal disputes with their school systems. They can’t talk about it. I chose not to sue so that I could go out and speak publicly and create change.
[Tonya Kubo] (19:49 – 19:56)
Can you just explain that a little bit? Because I think, because I, because I’ve worked in a school system, right?
[Nikki James Zellner] (19:56 – 19:56)
Yes.
[Tonya Kubo] (19:56 – 20:03)
In PR. Yes. I totally understand the impact of the choice you made because it’s a big choice.
[Nikki James Zellner] (20:03 – 20:03)
It’s a big choice.
[Tonya Kubo] (20:04 – 20:08)
It is not as light as it just sounded as you pleasantly summed it up.
[Nikki James Zellner] (20:08 – 24:42)
No, I probably forwent millions of dollars to my own personal family that I probably would have used towards paying off debt and certainly probably still taking the steps to set up CSA schools and make that difference. But when you were involved in a legal dispute, you are not allowed to give public commentary to go on the news and talk about your situation. And these disputes can take years.
You know, it’s not something that goes away in two months unless you settle. And oftentimes during settlements, you’re asked for a nondisclosure. You’re not allowed to discuss the terms of the settlement and what happened.
And knowing that, you know, I just happened to have friends that were involved in lawsuits previously for medical reasons, and they weren’t allowed to tell their stories. My whole business is built around your story and your voice. And so for me, it was a natural progression of the story is important to tell.
The story is the most important thing to tell. I have to talk about this loophole. And I have the skill sets to do it in a way that can get more traction than, say, a normal person who’s never had media training or know how pitching works or knows people at the local newspaper to kind of pick up the story, right?
But what I will say is there came a point where it didn’t just become about carbon monoxide for me. It became about helping other people understand that these kinds of things happen to us all the time, but do we have blinders on as to that was my knock to make a change? We’re so busy going about our lives and we’re so busy about doing the grocery store run and dropping our kids off at practice that we don’t hear those little whispers that says, this is a change that could be made because of your lived experience.
You know, that ball going off the ball field and hitting a kid in the head and that kid having a stroke or having brain injury because there’s no netting on the ball field is a change you could have gotten involved in but didn’t. Now, granted, they might be the parent of the child with the brain injury and they might have a whole new amount of things on their plate that they didn’t expect to have to deal with, but there’s something to be said for I think the biggest change comes from people who’ve personally experienced something and it has changed the direction of their lives. So, whether it’s getting to the point in your life where you’re caring for your elderly parents and helping them navigate Medicaid or Medicare, it could be that you work in a local hospital and you’re constantly answering the question, where is the lab?
Because there’s not signage where it needs to be and the majority of people that walk through that hospital are elderly or limited mobility. You’re making them walk all over Grants Green Earth when you could just put a sign right at the beginning where they’re walking in the door. So, it doesn’t have to be this big landscape of change.
It can literally be, I want to start small in the place where it happened for me and then when you get those wins you start to realize I could ripple out. I could ripple out to the city. I could ripple out to the system.
I could ripple out to the world. You know, like whatever that is for you, wherever that time and energy lives and what I found as a watchdog is that I had the skills to keep going. I may not have had the time but I made the time and the energy really fired me up.
It was something I hadn’t felt passion for ever and all of a sudden my whole value system shifted to justice and advocacy when that had never been part of my value spectrum before. I had encouraged others to do it but I had never physically activated that within myself and then when I did I realized how empowering that was to feel like you could control something. Felt like you could be involved and help other people and that was a really great feeling that I don’t think we experience outside of a volunteer hour or two.
You know, it’s something we’re not necessarily involved in. It’s just part of our resume. You know, like my work puts deployment packages together for troops.
Well, you don’t necessarily have a troop member who’s involved. It is just something your work does so you get to say it’s part of your volunteerism but what if you took those hours and actually put it towards something you had lived experience with and how much more of a difference could you make?
[Tonya Kubo] (24:42 – 25:08)
Yeah, so you reference lived experience quite a bit and before we started recording you you said something that I thought was really powerful which is that if you’ve lived it you’re qualified to lead it. Yes. And having come from higher ed, right, like I know that there is a lot of pressure around but what’s your degree in?
What’s your education? What’s your skills? What’s your training?
And you know you reference that you don’t have all these letters after your name.
[Nikki James Zellner] (25:09 – 25:09)
No.
[Tonya Kubo] (25:09 – 25:18)
So I’m curious what did you have to unlearn in order to embrace that belief that if you’ve lived it you’re qualified to lead it?
[Nikki James Zellner] (25:18 – 28:27)
I think the biggest thing for me to unlearn was that there is room in the system if you actually are willing to get involved in the system. The big thing for me I think that I had the misunderstanding about is that people didn’t want my involvement in the system because they wanted to keep things status quo. In reality they didn’t want uneducated and by uneducated I mean people that weren’t familiar with the problem or people that couldn’t contribute to the dialogue of the problem.
Meaning you’re a recipient of their services or you’ve experienced something firsthand. They didn’t want Monday morning quarterbacks, people who were coming in and talking about something that needed to be changed, who didn’t have any relationship with the system as a whole. So for me what I had to unlearn was I have a relationship with this.
I absolutely deserve a seat at the table. My experience is one that they might not know about. Now I’ve been invited to speak at the National Fire Protection Association in Las Vegas in front of 90,000 something fire marshals.
It’s crazy. So for me the unlearning was there is a space for me. I need to respect the fact that there are processes that exist and that the work they do isn’t meaningless and it isn’t trying to keep me out.
It’s trying to protect that the steps that are taken are actually taken for the right reasons and not just because somebody comes in and says it should change. Why should it change? How long have they been involved in the process?
How are they affected by the outcomes that are occurring of our current system? And I feel like that’s where I really needed to unlearn something is I needed to share my perspective and understand where I fit in that and then to go in there and understand that my perspective isn’t the only one. I can absolutely feel like I’m right and this needs to happen but I also have to be open to the 360 view and that my little piece of the pie is this and I was not yet aware of all of that and I needed to understand how I fit within that.
How do I navigate and when I did that is where I could see where I actually wanted to create change instead of this big space which seemed very overwhelming. The big carbon monoxide safety space. No, I want to focus here.
Daycares, schools, college campuses and I want to focus on layman conversations. I do not want to focus on safety science and the technology and the you need a degree to come in and maintain. I want to be the person responsible for change in the space of the occupants.
The people that are inside these buildings who don’t know where they’re protected and where they’re not and I want to be responsible for making sure that they are educated and aware on where they’re safe, where they’re not and what to do when they experience these kinds of symptoms. That’s where I can make the most impact.
[Tonya Kubo] (28:27 – 28:41)
And so we’re back again to this is what makes a watchdog different than an attack dog, different than a guard dog and I think everybody listening already can understand where a lap dog is completely separate from the equation.
[Nikki James Zellner] (28:41 – 28:41)
Right.
[Tonya Kubo] (28:41 – 29:06)
But I do feel like when a lot of people are thinking in their mind they would confuse attack dog, guard dog and watchdog. Yes, they would. And so one of the things that I was thinking about when you were describing kind of those four groups is that the attack dog and the guard dog are highly visible but the watchdog makes an impact.
[Nikki James Zellner] (29:06 – 29:09)
Yes, there’s an action behind it.
[Tonya Kubo] (29:09 – 29:30)
Yeah and so I was just wondering if you wouldn’t mind expanding on that from the community perspective because so much of what you’re talking about is really affecting change at the community level and then having that go higher or in your case having to go top down because it varies. What do you think happens when people or communities confuse that visibility with impact?
[Nikki James Zellner] (29:31 – 34:12)
I feel like and this is also an introverted extroverted thing, right? Like if you’re the person that goes and listens to all of the public meetings but you never get up and talk. You’re gathering all of the data and you’re using that to be an informed citizen and make decisions as a voter and so where you want to make the impact is in the ballot box for you, right?
And in the educated I’m informed I understand what’s going on in my community so that I can better decide where I want to spend my volunteer hours and what’s going on where and how it’s going to affect my property taxes, right? What I will say to the four groups is that all of us are all four. There are certain times where we behave like one or the other or sometimes we’re blending the two and so what I want people to recognize is when am I behaving like a lapdog when I should be behaving like a watchdog?
When am I behaving like an attack dog? What are the things that turn me into an attack dog where I can actually say how can I think about this and reframe this in a different way so I can go about it the watchdog way versus the attack dog way? Road rage comes to mind, right?
There’s a certain point in which we behave differently than we normally would. If somebody’s clicking a pin I can become a little more testy than I can, right? The same thing is true with these groups and the visibility and the impact so I would say when you’re looking at the community and we’ll just use the public meetings for an example the guard dog is the person who’s sitting in the meeting and never speaks but they get back home and they say this is what happened at tonight’s meeting.
I think you guys should do something about this. Here’s the information. You’re just spreading information.
You’re not empowering it. You’re giving access to the information but you’re not taking any additional steps in any kind of way that’s going to make a difference. You’ve gathered the info.
You’re sharing the info but you’re not really doing anything else beyond that, right? So I would say like in the bar of action steps taken you’re pretty low on the bar of action steps taken. The attack dog is the person who goes to the meeting and they talk every single meeting.
It doesn’t matter what the topic is. They are the person who’s known as the bulldog of the community. They see themselves as the gatekeepers of what’s going on.
They say well if nobody else is going to stand up and talk well I’m going to make sure that I use that time for public comments and you’re the one that you hope the mic goes out goes out on, right? Like please let there be a technological problem and the lady not be able to speak or the man not be able to speak or the human beautiful human with the right intentions but the wrong energy the wrong energy direction and then the watchdog is the one who sat in the meeting got up to the platform and said this is my lived experience. This is the experience of my neighbor who can’t be here because they’re too old or they’re too frail who’s also having this experience.
This is the other person in the community I’ve talked to and shares their stories and says I would like to hold you guys all accountable because each person I named is in each person’s district not just my own. So that’s the difference, right? It’s not that you have to get up every time.
It’s that you can share kind of those impactful stories that really create change. For me stories are where it starts because it’s the story that builds that momentum and that builds that energy for you and the more you can get clear on okay what’s that story actually? Did the story happen to just me?
No, I was just the only one willing to talk about it because some people sued, right? But the story is happening all over the United States. It’s not just my story.
So my goal is to get other people sharing like this is also happening but I wanted to create the resource for you so that when it happens to you you’re not in the dark like I was. You now say here’s how I can write a letter to my local government. Here’s how I can provide an audit to my school where my children go and find out what the risk is in their local school.
So for me I was creating things like resources so that people could have more informed conversations and that has actually created change in communities I was not a part of in Wisconsin, in Michigan. Somebody used it in Louisiana. So for me like that’s where I get the feels is when a mom says I don’t know what to do and your resources helped me do that.
It’s not for monetary gain. It’s just so that they wouldn’t feel as alone as I did and I know that when we don’t feel competent in something we don’t speak on something.
[Tonya Kubo] (34:13 – 34:13)
Yeah.
[Nikki James Zellner] (34:14 – 34:34)
At least for a majority of us. We don’t want to look or feel stupid and if there’s any risk of that happening we don’t do it and so what I really wanted is for you to not look or feel stupid when it came to carbon monoxide so that that principle was the one who looked uninformed not you.
[Tonya Kubo] (34:35 – 35:11)
Oh my gosh. So I feel like you just drew a roadmap for the person listening who as you’re talking is going oh my gosh there’s this thing but I don’t know where to begin. You just gave them a roadmap of how to begin and what I think is most powerful is the fact that you can actually be the most informed person in the room.
Yes. Right and that you have resources to help people with that. Now I’m going to ask are those resources available on your website?
Do they have to wait for the book? How do they get access to those resources?
[Nikki James Zellner] (35:11 – 38:05)
So the book is what we’re working on now right so on nickijameselmer.com there’s a tab for the book which is the Watchdog Way. It lets you take the Watchdog Way quiz to find out where you are currently with how you address problems. It lets you let’s you take a little magical quiz to say am I a lap dog a guard dog an attack dog or a watchdog and then from there you can actually start to understand okay what is that thing that I need to focus on what is that one thing for me for some people it’s many things and what I tell people to focus on is focus on the thing that you truly will get fired up about it causes you emotional stir I would like to say not that you want to cry every time you talk about it but it’s something that’s like this is something I can set a boundary around and do healthily I can do in a healthy way if it’s something that you haven’t worked out with your therapist yet please don’t go try to attack it because you’re not ready you know you’re not ready to do that deep work yet where I met your friend Gwen was through heroic public speaking and we were she saw me still crying on stage talking about my kids being poisoned that’s how she met me as I was doing my very first speech learning how to do a keynote on my kids getting poisoned and by the end of that training it had turned into how to create change in your community and be a watchdog it was really through that process of writing my stories down and saying this isn’t about me anymore this is about other people and how they can do this and so the book is going to come out in early 2026 it’s called the watchdog way how everyday people can take small steps to create big change in a world gone sideways and it’s really for those people who don’t see themselves as activists they don’t see themselves going and starting a non-profit they might see themselves as a parent in a school line with a lot on their plate but really wants to make a difference and is wondering how do I spend my time and energy to do that in a way that is impactful in regards to something that is important to me so maybe you’re a child of a wheelchair user and you want other businesses to understand that you can only go to 10 percent of the businesses in your community because your child who uses a wheelchair can’t get into the rest of them maybe that’s your thing maybe your thing is this is what type 2 diabetes looks like or type 1 diabetes looks like in terms of access when something happens in the school system right so you never know what it is but I guarantee you you probably have 30 things in your lived experience that you have an opportunity to change it’s just whether or not you see yourself as being somebody who can champion that change my hope is that you can because there is something in there
[Tonya Kubo] (38:05 – 38:50)
it’s whether or not you want to take that next step to do it okay so thank you for the explanation because I do think it’s important for the person who is just new to the idea that this is possible yes that they have a path forward but now before we get to the end I’m going to ask you to speak to somebody else okay I’m going to ask you to speak to the person who is doing the work and they are tired right they’re in it they are doing the best they can but the stamina is waning because as you know as I know some laws the wheels move so slowly and the winds are so slight and incremental yes what would you say to that person who is doing the work but still feels like
[Nikki James Zellner] (38:50 – 44:45)
nothing is shifting so for me it was about reframing right so this incident for me happened right before covid and so during covid it felt like nothing was happening and that was when it had just happened to me so that was when I was most interested to talk about it nobody was willing to listen because because nobody’s going to school so it’s not a problem nobody’s going to school nobody’s going you know law sessions and congressional hearings weren’t happening you know because everything was being pushed back but what I would say is having done that and having kept doing that is for a lot of these people doing the work a lot of times they’re in the industry in which they’re wanting to create the change right so they work for that non-profit or they work for those things so I would say in those instances you know really lean on the resources available for healthy workplace culture make sure you’re taking care of yourself because you can’t leave it it’s your paycheck in my case it wasn’t my paycheck it was my passion project and so as somebody living with a chronic illness I was already very in tune with my body of what do I need to listen to how do I need to set boundaries around how I’m willing to move forward what does a win look like a win doesn’t mean I completely let the rest of my life catch fire while I’m working on this a win for me is I’m moving on with the remainder of my life as normal and I’m making time this little window of time to make incremental progress in this work that I’m passionate about for me the way that I could do that is these are the resources that can live I can spend a little bit of time sprinting and creating these resources that can live without me as soon as that resource is done and alive on a website I can move off of that and let Google take over right I can I can put a little bit of money if somebody says hey I want to donate to your cause what’s the best way for me to do that cool a monetary donation would be great please know that I’m not a 501c3 so this isn’t a tax write-off for you but I can use this directly towards ad spend to put this in neighborhoods where carbon monoxide has been a problem and make sure that these parents and families have access to resources and it was directing them to the website or I can buy carbon monoxide alarms for daycares so one of the things that I started doing was saying okay I now live in Alabama I originally lived in Virginia even though Alabama is considered a good co state in terms of they have a lot of regulations and laws around carbon monoxide not necessarily around public education so what I want to do in the state of Alabama it’s not about changing the law here it’s about making sure that the people who are on the front line really do understand the signs and symptoms that can happen in their environments and so I have a nice long list of all the daycares I’m starting with the daycares because their highest risk so I have a nice long list of all the daycares and then one by one I could visit one daycare a week and by the end of the year I’ve seen 52 daycares and have had 52 conversations with front line workers and put something in their break room and given them the resources to say this is what you need to know and help them audit their business while I’m there this is no charge this is something that I do but I had to start understanding the difference between taking credit and creating change I am not the person who takes credit for the changes happening in the co safety space I’m a part of that wheel I happen to use my story in a much more public way than some other people can but what I wanted to do is create the impact and so as people go on this journey doing the work you know facing the burnout take care of yourself because if you don’t take care of yourself you can’t create the change so think about these setting healthier boundaries whether that’s I will do this one thing a week and outside of that one thing I don’t do it if you need different themes or different seasons kind of schedule that out and say this is the season I’ll focus on this next season I’ll focus on that right so think about it like you would a business really you know me and you are business owners so we understand this right like I think about it like what am I doing in quarter one what am I doing in quarter two and I like to think about those small wins that lead to big change so everybody’s expecting that big win that’s not the way it works I happen to have a law change in year one that’s a miracle that’s a fluke it just happened to be we were talking about kids safety in schools all year long right the timing was right for me but what I will tell most people is it’s going to be about those little wins and so I like to take it if the big goal is out here I work backwards from that big goal and say how do I need to start to establish those mile markers in that big marathon race what is mile one’s marker what is mile two’s marker and so mile one might be understanding what I’m trying to create change around what are the rebuttals when somebody says these are the 10 most frequently asked questions or the rebuttals that I get what are my responses to those because you’re going to run into that yeah and if you fumble that ball you’re going to look like somebody who is not the most informed person in the room and I want them to be on their subject I want them to be the most informed do all the informational interviews find all of the data from credible sources really spend that first three months understanding and learning about the problem so that you can go out and make a bigger change at a later time it’s
[Tonya Kubo] (44:45 – 45:23)
not about making that big change immediately okay so that is excellent news because that’s the thing right is it’s focused on you know in the business world we talk about focus your goals on your output versus your outcome because you can’t control the outcome right you can’t control what you do right and if you do the action whatever the action is like you’re mentioning going to a preschool every single week or daycare every single week as long as you do that you can trust that at the end of the year some outcome has happened yes even though you can’t control that all you can control is which daycare you’re going to each week yeah and that’s an hour a week out of my time instead
[Nikki James Zellner] (45:23 – 45:39)
of I’m gonna go try and see every daycare on this list in three weeks and creating this giant overwhelming feeling instead it’s little by little and each time you do it you learn more and more about this is where I’m seeing more problems regarded to this regarding this thing that I’m
[Tonya Kubo] (45:39 – 46:03)
focused on yes yes I love this so before we let you go we’ve got a little quick round that we call freak flags fly and I’m eventually going to be able to say that without stuttering today is not that day though so it’s five fast questions no wrong answers just whatever comes to mind are you prepared sure let’s do this all right so finish this sentence you’re my kind of freak if
[Nikki James Zellner] (46:03 – 46:11)
you’re my kind of freak is you nerd out on things that you care about instead of things that you
[Tonya Kubo] (46:11 – 46:32)
don’t oh okay I like that so what’s something you love that your friends simply don’t get serial killer documentaries oh my gosh we recently had an interview with somebody who writes crime fiction she writes all about serial killers I love it so you guys could be besties
[Nikki James Zellner] (46:32 – 46:38)
it’s how I detox I get stress relief by watching serial killer documentaries
[Tonya Kubo] (46:40 – 46:51)
and I just happen to know because late at night I scroll social you’re in good company there are a lot of women who that is how they decompress okay so what community would you infiltrate
[Nikki James Zellner] (46:51 – 47:38)
just to understand it better MAGA I live in Alabama I am surrounded by very specific thoughts and feelings towards the world and I grew up traveling around the United States and have been ingrained in lots of conversations and communities I have not yet understood I don’t yet understand the point of view that they’re currently embracing and I would I don’t know that I would enjoy that process but I would I would want to do it just to understand it a little bit more and understand outside of how the media is reporting it right what is that frame of reference and frame of mind what is that end goal that is spoken like a true journalist right it’s
[Tonya Kubo] (47:38 – 47:56)
like like I don’t want the information filtered I want to go straight to the source yes I want to ask the questions I want to hear it with my own ears and apply my own filter my own lens yes okay what tool ritual or practice helps you stay connected to your people I mean I would say
[Nikki James Zellner] (47:56 – 48:20)
every time a carbon monoxide incident occurs it’s always reported on formerly twitter also known as the x and as much as I loathe the platform it’s absolutely where I can engage with journalists and make sure that they’re reporting the story correctly instead of giving the public inaccurate information from the loving PIOs
[Tonya Kubo] (48:22 – 48:43)
who have not yet told them the whole story it’s okay there’s nothing you could say about a pio that I haven’t heard personally so we get it we know the role we play on both sides okay finally before I let you go what is someone doing freakishly good work who you think deserves a bigger stage
[Nikki James Zellner] (48:44 – 49:27)
oh so I am a big fan of Dr. Amanda Crowell she is the author of Great Work and she has a podcast called The Great Work Podcast and I used this book tremendously during finding out like what is my great work now right and so Dr. Amanda Crowell she holds a PhD she’s based out of New Jersey she’s a fast talker and hand talker like me I just really love how she just pushes you out of your comfort zone and says what’s really important for you to ship go ship it right like go focus on it and go do it I love people that empower you to do something that you might not have thought of previously those are my favorite people yeah catalysts are such an important
[Tonya Kubo] (49:28 – 50:24)
aspect of our society so Nikki oh my gosh it has been a joy a joy to connect with you I just want to say thank you I’m thank you for your courage your perspective but also for lending your voice to the show so that more people can hear not just about the impact you’ve made but really about the impact that they can make in their own communities and for everyone listening I just want to say if you’ve ever been told you’re not qualified not credible or not enough please hear Nikki and hear this episode and let it put on your sticky note that if you’ve lived it you’re ready because your freak flag just might be somebody else’s lifeline yeah thank you again that’s it for this episode of find your freaks to help more weirdos find their way here subscribe rate and leave a review and if you’re craving connection join the freak show at findyourfreaks.com what makes you weird makes you wonderful normal was never the point
Aug 29, 2025 | Episode Transcripts
(0:00 – 0:09)
She made me feel like I mattered. And that, that’s what belonging is. It’s not about being included.
(0:10 – 0:57)
It’s really about being expected. It’s someone saying, of course you’re here. We have been waiting for you.
We’re wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in. I’m Tonya Kubo, and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet. Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras.
Because around here, what makes you weird, makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point. We all know what loneliness looks like.
The widow who never gets any visitors. The kid who eats lunch alone. That quirky guy who walks awkwardly into a room and instantly knows he doesn’t belong.
(0:58 – 1:12)
But here’s what we don’t talk about enough. People, by themselves, are not the answer. You can have proximity without presence, surrounded by people and feeling alone still.
(1:13 – 2:03)
Or like an outcast, you can have attention without connection. That’s a reality no matter where you live, what you do, or how much money you have or don’t have. Celebrity suicide rates alone prove my point.
And while I’m still here, I’ve lived that contradiction myself. I’ll tell you the whole story in a moment, where I was 29, in a hospital bed, a known community newspaper editor and columnist, visible and important-ish, but feeling like I could disappear without a trace. My name’s Tonya Kubo, and this is Find Your Freaks, a show about what happens when we stop hiding who we are, boldly own it, and start searching for the people who get us.
(2:03 – 3:25)
The ones who don’t just tolerate our weird, but recognize it. Maybe because it looks a lot like their own. I have spent most of my professional life helping people build community, online and off.
But I didn’t start out doing this work because I was Miss Congeniality. I didn’t get here because I was captain of the cheerleading squad or crowned prom queen. I got here because I’ve known the deep ache of feeling equal parts too much and not enough.
Being surrounded but still unseen. And once you have found that kind of invisible, you start paying attention to who gets left out. Who’s overlooked? Who’s maybe always invited, but never truly expected or welcomed? Who, when you look around, you don’t maybe notice they’re missing? So let’s rewind for a moment.
The year was 2007, and I was managing the editorial production of a small chain of community newspapers. I led a local support group. I wrote a lifestyle column that landed on 20,000 doorsteps every single week.
Strangers would stop me in the grocery store to chat as if we were old friends. But then I got sick. Emergency surgery kind of sick.
(3:26 – 3:48)
I found myself sliced open, stapled back together and recovering in a hospital about 90-ish minutes from home. But it may as well have been across the country. I was in pain, drugged up, scared, completely alone.
But not alone in the technical sense. Hospitals are always full. They’re busy.
(3:49 – 4:03)
They’re loud. You’ve got nurses and roommates and machines and the steady churn of checking your vitals and other types of care. And still, I had never felt more isolated in my entire life.
(4:04 – 6:49)
This wasn’t the first time, though, that I saw how powerful belonging could be or how easy it is to get it wrong. See, in college, I had this roommate who would DJ punk shows. So, like, I’m not cool, but I like to think I’m cool adjacent.
And she would book these scrappy bands who were willing to drive anywhere for a few hundred bucks, a floor to sleep on, and a stage to play on. In our apartment, it was the floor. Now, over the course of about a year, we hosted half a dozen bands.
Sometimes five or six guys stretched out across our living room, kind of like cats in their favorite sunspot. But here’s what shocked me. When she was making arrangements, the guys very rarely would ask if we had space.
They would find out she had a roommate, and they were very quick to be like, whoa, whoa, is she okay? Will she feel safe? Is she going to go someplace else because she’s not comfortable with us staying there? And, you know, this was, like, the 90s. Things were different then. But that kind of care and consideration even now still floors me.
Like, these weren’t guys who had some kind of trauma-informed care training, right? They didn’t have PR degrees. They weren’t involved in social work. They were tatted-up musicians living on whatever they could scrape together and the generosity of others.
And yet they understood something sacred. Belonging doesn’t mean taking up space at someone else’s expense. They weren’t just looking for where they belonged or what they could get.
They were trying not to rob anyone else of their place. And honestly, it was the most human thing I had ever seen up to that point. Didn’t happen in a church.
It didn’t happen in a community center. It happened in a meh apartment in a somewhat okay side of town. Now, fast forward a few years into 2007, and I’m stuck in that hospital bed, hours from home, no family in town, and friends and colleagues quite honestly too busy with their own lives to be able to make the drive out to see me.
And to be fair, I wasn’t really that much company anyway. But on day three, that drug haze cleared just enough for curiosity to set in. I posted to an online message board I favored in search of some information.
(6:50 – 8:07)
Had anyone heard of this hospital? What town was I in? What was near to me? The next day, I had more than a hundred replies. And I had one private message from someone named Debbie with two I’s. She lived nearby actually, and she asked if I was up for a visit.
The next day, she was in my hospital room. Bright red hair, loud laugh, blue eyeshadow, fuchsia lipstick, and a personality as big as the hospital itself. And such kindness.
She brought socks to warm my feet, lip balm for my chapped lips, and a water bottle for the one day we had hoped that I’d eventually be allowed to drink water. She didn’t know me. She didn’t owe me.
But she showed up, and she kept showing up my entire hospital stay. She’d wheel me through the halls, threatening to race my neighbors. She’d let me cry.
She’d let me not talk. I could sleep, doze off, wake up, pick back up the conversation. She didn’t just fill a seat in my hospital room.
(8:07 – 8:16)
She made me feel like I mattered. And that, that’s what belonging is. It’s not about being included.
(8:17 – 9:13)
It’s really about being expected. It’s someone saying, of course you’re here. We have been waiting for you.
It’s not about what you produce. It’s about who you are and whether people see you as someone worth knowing, even when you have nothing to give. That’s why you find affinity groups for members in large churches and employees in large organizations.
You’ll find groups for moms, for expats, for queer folks, creatives, caregivers, cancer survivors, even neurodivergent people oftentimes have their own communities within communities. Subsets of groups focused on specific identities, not because they’re exclusive, but because they’re trying to find each other. They’re creating containers where it’s safe to exhale, where they can take the mask off.
(9:14 – 10:59)
Because there are certain challenges mothers face that only other mothers understand. The same is true for cancer survivors, queer and trans folk, teens, empty nesters. When it comes to belonging, we as individuals are not looking for everyone.
We’re looking for our people, right? The right someones. And that’s what this show is all about. The search for the space where we can stop performing and start connecting.
Where our weird isn’t the cost of entry, it’s the common ground. Now this podcast is not always going to sound like this episode. Some weeks you’ll hear conversations with people who found belonging in unexpected places or who foster that belonging for others.
Many who live very differently from you or me. I’ll put on my curiosity hat and dust off my reporter’s notebook and start asking questions. Other weeks it’ll be just us exploring the messy beautiful mechanics of what makes connections stick.
Sometimes the stories will be funny. Sometimes they’ll be hard. Sometimes what makes them unique will simply be how very ordinary they are.
But they’ll always be honest. This show isn’t about brand building. It’s not about business or marketing.
It’s about being human and finding the other humans who see you. Now if anything I’ve shared has landed with you today, if you’ve ever felt invisible in a room full of people, if you’ve ever wanted to stop shrinking but didn’t know where to expand, you’re not too weird. You’re not too much.
You just haven’t found your freaks yet. But they’re out there. And I hope this show helps you find them.
(11:01 – 11:29)
Subscribe. Follow. Leave a review.
Share it with the person or people who get you. And if you’ve got a story of your own, I’d love to hear it. Find me at findyourfreaks.com or wherever you like to hang out online.
That’s it for this episode of Find Your Freaks. To help more weirdos find their way here, subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re craving connection, join the freak show at findyourfreaks.com. What makes you weird makes you wonderful.
(11:30 – 11:31)
Normal was never the point.
Aug 27, 2025 | Episode Transcripts
Listen to Episode 3 and locate all resources.
(0:00 – 0:50)
I know you think you are the only person on the planet who struggles with this issue, but once you get inside the group, you will realize you are in good company, my friend. So a lot of times when people join, they love to tell us how horrible they are. They’re lazy, they’re terrible, they’re a bad wife, they’re a bad mom, they’re all these things.
And the first thing I’ll usually do is come in and just say, well, well, well, when I say that we are the kindest corner of the internet, I’m going to have to insist that you’re kind to yourself. We’re wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in. I’m Tonya Kubo and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet.
Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras. Because around here, what makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point.
(0:56 – 3:51)
Hey, freaks, Tonya here. In episode two, I talked with Kathi Lipp, bestselling author, podcaster, and the co-creator of the Clutter-Free Academy Facebook group. If you have never met Kathi before, buckle up.
She doesn’t just help people declutter her home, she creates sanctuaries for people who have been shamed for how they live. And if you have already listened to the episode, you know just how powerful her voice is in naming the emotions most of us are too scared to speak, fear, guilt, and shame. Now today, I want to go a little deeper into that conversation, especially around the role of kindness in building real community, because what Kathi and I have built over in Clutter-Free wasn’t just a Facebook group.
It started out as a Facebook group, but it has become so much more, and it really has become a trauma-informed space before most people even knew what that phrase meant. So let’s unpack how that happened and why it works. Now, I would be remiss not to kick this off without saying that Kathi actually gets 100% full credit for the name of this show.
Because years ago, I was co-teaching with Kathi. She’d invited me to teach in like an intensive at a writer’s conference with her. And one of the things that she talked about at that conference was how when it comes to building your platform as a writer, it’s not about blending in with everybody else.
It’s not about pretending you’re not weird. It is about finding people who match your own brand of weird, people who are attracted to your weirdness. And what she said at that time, she says, you know, you just have to go out and find your freaks.
And I wrote that down. And several years later, when I was thinking about this show, about creating the show, I was like, that is going to be the title. If I ever get this podcast off the ground, I am going to call it Find Your Freaks.
And I talked with Kathi, and Kathi was like, yeah, I don’t actually own those words. Totally. If you want to name your show that go ahead.
I love it. But I think it’s important for you as a listener to know that she gets all the credit for the title of this show, because that is important. And part of why I think it’s so important, because it’s so much of who Kathi is.
Kathi doesn’t go around trying to change people. You know, if anything, she is a proponent for radical acceptance of who people are, what makes them unique, and what makes them wonderful. And when it comes to the Clutter Free Academy community, you know, that is the community that I have said for years, it was the first time one of my clients had come to me and said, I have this vision for a community.
(3:51 – 4:52)
But rather than trying to micromanage it, rather than me telling you all the things that you absolutely positively have to do to build this community, I want you to take what you know, as best practices, I want you to take what you know about the audience, and how online community develops, and what really does foster belonging. And I want you to take that I want you to build that and build it, you know, under my name, build it for me, but use what you know works. And she gave me free rein.
In fact, I remember at the beginning going, you know, it takes a lot of time, it’s gonna take like 45 hours the first month to get this off the ground. Are you okay with that? And she was like, if you’re okay with it, I’m okay with it. And I said, Okay, well, you know, part of fostering belonging is setting up space where people can be honest.
And sometimes what people say is not nice. It’s not all positive. It’s not going to be a PR machine.
(4:52 – 7:19)
And she was like, Yeah, hey, I trust you, whatever works. And so if you’ve listened to episode two, you know, then the Facebook group initially began as an online Bible study. And there’s a couple things.
So we started it on Facebook, because Facebook is a free platform. And you know, to this day, it is one of the few places where you can build a community that is fully featured, you’ve got all these different features and functions to foster that online belonging and community without having to pay for anything. And it’s also a great testing ground, right? If you don’t know if your community is going to take flight, if you don’t know how exactly you’re going to build it, or what’s necessary to make it thrive, you know, Facebook’s a great place to try that all out, because you’re not paying for the platform, you’re not paying for the features.
So that was part of the reason why we decided to launch it as a Facebook group. The other reason, however, is Kathi’s community is Facebook forward, I would say her base audience is probably over 50 now, but they didn’t always start that way. It’s just she got her start speaking at church women’s groups, and mom’s groups.
And so a lot of that was back, you know, say 15 years ago, when she started speaking to church group, these individuals were in their early 20s, to, you know, say, early 20s to early 40s. And they have, of course, now added 15 years to their lives. And so they have aged with her, and she is always attracting a younger audience, but probably not to the same extent.
Because, you know, like anything, the platforms come and go what’s in vogue today is not necessarily in vogue tomorrow. She has definitely leaned into video, she’s always been video first. So I think that’s part of why she even though she doesn’t speak at church events quite as often, mainly because we just don’t have as many in person events as we used to.
But part of that is that she’s so comfortable with video, that she is able to attract younger audiences even today. But that Facebook group, you know, initially, when we got it started, because it was the Bible study, it was easy to come up with core content for the group, right, because it was just around the Bible study. But what I knew, because I was part of her community, one of the things that I knew is the mindset of the individual who would come in.
(7:20 – 9:21)
And so we started off as a Facebook group, we started off as a private group, and we had some pretty high guardrails to come in. We had some entry questions people had to answer. And mainly what we were trying to do is we’re trying to establish a safe space for people who were cluttery.
And part of making that a safe space for them, really meant that we had to keep certain people out, right, we had to keep out the born organized folks, we had to keep out the folks who thought cluttery people were, I don’t know, a lab rat to be experimented on, examined, tested. Because what we knew, and this is what we know to this day, and this comes out in episode two of my interview with Kathi, is that while clutter looks like a stuff problem, it’s not. Now it looks like a housekeeping problem, even in 2025, it looks like a housekeeping problem to a lot of people, but it is not.
It is an issue related to overwhelm. It’s oftentimes perfectionism in disguise. Commonly, those who are cluttery, who are really just burdened by clutter, feel stuck on start, they feel like they lost before they even began.
And so that is the thought I had at the front of my mind as I was building this community for these individuals. Now, just happens that I kind of had a cheat code on the whole thing because I’m cluttery. If you listen to the episode, you know, but if you followed me for any length of time on social media, if you are one of my newsletter subscribers, you know, my mom was a hoarder.
My mom died in 2015. And a lot of what I say today, I never could have said while she was alive, because back to, you know, cluttery people are just burdened by shame and by fear. And, you know, to tell my mom’s secrets would have been a huge betrayal to her.
(9:21 – 12:09)
So a lot of the openness and the candor I speak on today when it comes to clutter and my cluttery history is not something that would have been possible when my mom was alive. But we, you know, launched Clutter-Free Academy in 2016. It was after my mom had died.
And so I could be honest about my journey with folks. And because I was able to be honest, I was able to lead with vulnerability, not from a place of pain, because I had already done a lot of therapy and a lot of healing about my own cluttery journey, I could really lead with compassion and hope. And so when we created this container for folks, it really was a little bit like your average recovery community, right? You’re a member because you say you’re a member, like, we’re not going to go into your home and examine whether you’re cluttery enough.
If you say you have a clutter problem, we believe you know, and if you say you have a clutter problem, and you post a picture, like there’s nothing we haven’t seen. And there truly is nothing I haven’t seen. I haven’t looked at a single picture of anybody’s home in Clutter-Free Academy and thought, oh, dear God, how could they live like that? Like genuinely, nothing I haven’t seen before, nothing I didn’t live in, at least when I lived with my mom.
So having this container set up where you can’t shock us, you can’t surprise us. And oh, by the way, and this is something I mentioned in the episode, I know you think you are the only person on the planet who struggles with this issue. But once you get inside the group, you will realize you are in good company, my friend, good, good company.
So part of what we had to do when we created the group, part of what I needed to do was acknowledge the fact that there was so much shame, the biggest barrier that we had to overcome for any of our members, if this group was going to get off the ground, is to let them know it was a safe place to come into and let them know once they came in, nobody was going to judge them, nobody was going to treat them with shame. And then I had to make sure we made good on that promise. So we started that community with really strong rules.
I don’t typically start communities with a rigid set of rules. I like to set up some what I call guardrails, right, some like written rules of engagement, and then let the community’s culture organically develop with some shaping and some guidance. I don’t like to overmanage or over moderate a community.
However, in this case, I needed to be a little heavier handed, because cluttery people are so mean, Kathi said this, they’re the meanest people in the world, but only to themselves. And so we had to establish like, this is the kindest corner of the internet, we started with that focus, this will be the kindest corner of the internet. And we will insist on kindness, not just on each other, but we will insist that you are kind to yourself.
(12:10 – 12:29)
So a lot of times when people join, they love to tell us how horrible they are, they’re lazy, they’re terrible, they’re a bad wife, they’re a bad mom, they’re all these things. And the first thing I’ll usually do is come in and just say, Whoa, whoa, whoa. When I say that we are the kindest corner of the internet, I’m going to have to insist that you’re kind to yourself.
(12:29 – 16:08)
Can we give you a little bit of grace? And they will try to talk me out of it. I don’t know. I don’t know how bad they are.
If I only knew and I’m like, surely, surely you can’t be nearly as bad as you say you’re painting yourself out like you’re some kind of serial killer. You’re not. And it takes a lot.
It takes a lot of grace and a lot of compassion for them to believe us, right? And they’re constantly waiting. They’re waiting for the other shoe to fall. They’re waiting for them to post the thing where we finally come out and say that’s that.
You are lazy. You are a terrible person. And I don’t want this episode, this conversation right now, though it is about the interview with Kathi, I don’t want it to just be about clutter, right? Because if you’re listening right now, granted, you know, Kathi threw out a very real statistic, which is over 60% of the women in the US identify as having a clutter problem.
So if you’re a woman and you’re listening, you’re either in the 60% or you’re at the 40%. But to make this all about clutter, I think ignores the real lesson that you can get from the Clutter Free Academy community when it comes to finding your freaks and letting them know that they are safe and they are welcome with you. And that is number one.
And this is something that Kathi said is whatever your focus is, whatever your theme is for the freaks that you are gathering around you, whether it is citizen scientists, whether they are writers or advocates, or I’m thinking of some of the other folks that have been interviewed on the show, even the ones that haven’t come on yet, whether they are performers, entertainers, the number one thing that you have to do is you have to take whatever the theme is that makes them feel like they are outcasts. In this case, it’s clutter, but in other cases, it could be cancer patients or victims of abuse or assault. It could be people who struggle with mental illness or chronic health issues of another sort.
You have to take whatever that very unique experience for them is and help to make it a universal reality. So in clutter, because there’s so much shame around clutter, you have to normalize it and say there are people whose houses look Pinterest perfect who suffer from clutter, and maybe it’s just not a matter of stuff. Like, you know, maybe they have an attic that you can’t even walk in, so it is stuff, or maybe it’s cluttered thinking.
You know, maybe they have a really loud inner critic in their head and 22 competing loud, boisterous thoughts going at any given time. Maybe their schedule is cluttered, like maybe they are overscheduled, overpacked, overburdened, right? For everybody in this group, the issue of clutter manifests in our home, but that doesn’t mean that other people don’t deal with other types of clutter. Be the same thing if you’re talking about the recovery community, right? I’m thinking specifically of alcohol, right? There’s a lot of people who can drink a beer once every four months and be good to go.
There are people who can go to a party and drink one beer and call it good, and there are some people who could drink a beer three, four times a week and call it good, or a glass of wine, or a cocktail, or whatever. And then there are people that one leads to 10. And those individuals could spend a lot of time and a lot of energy going, why me? Why can that person pick it up and drop it like it’s no big deal? And for me, it consumes me.
(16:09 – 17:55)
And that’s just not a very productive line of thinking, right? It’s like the why me, why can this other person live a life that I perceive to be of ease while I struggle so much? And so when you make it a universal issue, part of it is while other people may not struggle with the same thing you struggle with, they struggle with something, right? Everybody struggles with something. It just may not be this. Luckily for you, lucky for all of us, we have created this space for people who have this struggle.
And so that is what it means to create an environment, or at least to lay a foundation where whatever the topic or theme is of your group, you make it a universal reality. You’re not saying everybody has this problem or everybody has this problem to the same extent. You’re saying everybody has a problem.
Theirs may look different, but we know everybody has a problem. We have just created this space for people with this specific problem. So that is something that I would encourage you if you feel called to serve or help people who have a particular struggle, right? Whether it’s, you know, you feel called to create community for moms of young children, you feel called to create community for parents who have suffered loss, right? They’ve lost a child, they’ve lost an infant.
If you feel called to serve people who have escaped toxic or abusive relationships, whatever that could be for you. And maybe you simply feel called to create a community of people who want to pursue a different, a specific type of degree or a specific type of career. You know, it doesn’t have to be serious.
(17:55 – 27:37)
It doesn’t have to be a healing journey, emotional or physical. It can just be interest. But the first thing is, is to find a way to create or to at least paint a picture of a universal reality around it.
Because once you paint the picture of the universal reality, then you can go into this is specifically, so there’s the universal reality. Here is the specific of who this community is designed for. And so if you fit this specific subset of the universal reality, we’re here for you.
We have laid the foundation. Come on in, come into the living room, sit on our couch, have a cup of tea, have a cup of coffee, whatever it can be. The other piece that Kathi talked about, and I already alluded to this a bit is the importance of aggressive kindness.
When you are trying to build a community around something that is sensitive, that is particular people who’ve been treated poorly in one way or the other, aggressive kindness. Or I would even say a community of people who are surrounded by a lot of rules, a lot of pass or fail rules. So you see this a lot with parenting.
There are good parents, there are bad parents. And good parents and bad parent can get labels slapped on it. Everything from what kind of diapers you use, how you feed your baby, how you practice discipline, how you don’t practice discipline, where you send them to school, where you don’t send them to school.
I mean, parenting is a phase of life where you are surrounded by judgment from the moment somebody finds out you are going to be a parent, whether you are choosing to adopt or you are choosing pregnancy. And I don’t think it ever ends. My kids are fifth grade and 10th grade, and I know I’m still parked into the constant messages of what I need to be doing if I am a good mom versus a bad mom.
My husband doesn’t deal with it as much because here in the US, we don’t place the same societal demands on dads as we do on moms. But he still has some of it. You know, he gets labeled a good dad a lot of times because he goes places with his daughters by himself.
He participates in their activities with me and without me. And there’s not a lot of expectation that he would do that, but he does. So he gets the good dad hat a lot, where I get the, sometimes I get the good mom hat, sometimes I get the super mom hat.
A lot I get the barely hanging mom by a thread mom hat. And we’re okay with that. But if you think about the community that you’re serving or that you’re trying to build, if it is a population of people who are constantly fed messages that they are not enough or they’re being given a standard that is really hard to attain, leading with aggressive kindness is never the wrong move in how you build that community, how you let them know that they’re welcome.
Right? So when we talk about aggressive kindness, what we mean is like just normalizing the positive and the negative feelings and emotions and letting them know that every day that they keep trying is a day that they get to make progress. And it’s always progress over perfection. And I think that’s true no matter what the focus of your community is.
And the other thing that I would say, because I don’t want this episode to be super long, and I could talk about this seriously for years, because Clutter-Free Academy is such a great case study in what it takes to build a thriving, vibrant community, is understand that you’re not for everyone. Okay? If you’re doing it right, if you are serving your people better than anybody else can, if you’ve built this community that is tailor-made to this target population, you are ticking somebody off. Right? You are offending somebody.
You are repulsing somebody. You are excluding someone. And it’s not that you’re excluding someone from a place of elitism.
It’s just if you really want to build the perfect environment for your target population, you have to exclude others because not everybody’s in that target population. Kathi talked about, she had this post about how she doesn’t sort her laundry and people lost their marbles. What she doesn’t tell you about this, there was a post about years ago about whether to use a top sheet or not.
And I don’t use a top sheet. I haven’t used a top sheet since college. And people lost their marbles about that.
It was just like, oh, you’re sick. You’re dirty. You’re disgusting.
You have the grossest comforter. I’m like, no, I just wash my comforter every other week, like some people wash sheets, I guess. Right? But, you know, you’re not for those people.
If they’re criticizing, if they’re angry, I mean, just look at the criticism you get with an objective eye and go, okay, would my perfect person say this? Or would my perfect person say the opposite of this? And if the truth is that your perfect person would say the opposite, then you don’t worry about it. You don’t need to change what you’re doing to serve a critic who isn’t part of your freaks, right? They’re not coming to your freak show. And quite honestly, you didn’t build the freak show for them.
So that pretty much brings us to the end of what I wanted to talk to you about today. To quickly recap, I think the main takeaways from the interview with Kathi from episode two is in that specific situation, right? The real problem isn’t clutter, right? Clutter looks like a stuff problem, but it’s really not. So for you, it’s really looking at what is the universal reality you can tie the focus of your freaks or your freak show to, which helps normalize the situation, but also helps to establish that container or that space of belonging.
I think more than anything, the biggest lesson is that you cannot shame people into belonging, okay? Making people feel badly for how they are living, what they are doing is not, is not laying down the welcome mat for them. So I don’t care if you are in a health and fitness space. I don’t care if you are in a ministry evangelical space.
I don’t care if you are in a performance space, like, you know, maybe you want to help kids go get on Broadway or whatever. Shaming them is not the way to lead them to belonging, okay? In copywriting, right? Because I have a marketing background. In copywriting, we talk about how you establish a problem, then you agitate the problem so that the person reading or the person that you are addressing with your marketing is really hungry or desperate for a solution.
Using shame for that is not, it’s not the way to win. Let me tell you, it is not the way to win. So you want to make sure that you have led with kindness.
You want to make sure that you are fostering belonging because they need to belong before they can believe. Whatever message you have in your community, if they don’t feel like they belong, if they don’t feel like there is already connection and they are seen and they are valued, they’re never going to believe a single thing you have to tell them. And finally, I would just say if anything that I’m saying today resonated with you, you know, go listen to the full episode.
Listen to episode two where Kathi can get into how the group was formed, why the culture had to be so carefully guarded from her perspective as the leader. You know, I always say it’s her name on the door. I got to build it.
I got to be the architect. But, you know, it was all under her name and her brand. And that’s a different approach, right? Like on me building something for somebody else, but she had to be okay with what was being built under her name.
And I think there’s humorous parts, right? It’s not heavy. It could be heavy, but it’s not. And I just think you’ll really enjoy listening to how Clutter Free Academy developed.
And I think that if you are somebody focused on building community or even if you’re looking for a community that will welcome you in any regard, I think there’s some great tips and some great things to be thinking about that are presented in that episode. So, that’s it for today’s reflection. If you’ve ever felt like your mask, physical or otherwise, makes you unworthy of connection, I really hope you hear this loud and clear.
You are a human and you’re doing your absolute best and that is enough. So, go listen to episode three with Kathi and if you need a place where you can say the hard things and be met with kindness and clutter happens to be your issue, go find us at Clutter Free Academy. That’s it for today’s reflection.
If you’ve ever felt like your mask, physical or otherwise, makes you unworthy of connection, I hope you will hear this loud and clear. Okay, you’re not your mask, physical, emotional, otherwise. You are a human absolutely doing your best and that is enough.
And if you don’t feel like that’s enough, right, if you are surrounded by people who are giving you impossible standards to measure up to, I won’t go so far as to tell you to find other people, although I really think you should find other people, but keep listening to the show. Keep listening to Find Your Freaks because maybe what you will do is you will find a place for you to belong in one of our future episodes. That’s it for this episode of Find Your Freaks.
To help more weirdos find their way here, subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re craving connection, join the freak show at findyourfreaks.com. What makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point.
Aug 27, 2025 | Episode Transcripts
Listen to Episode 4 and locate all resources.
[Rachel Allen] (0:00 – 0:40)
How is it possible that it could be this bad and no one is like burning buildings down? Basically as soon as my husband went in almost every single person in my life dropped out of it. When it’s your loved one who’s calling you and their cellmate just died of a heart attack while the guard stood there and laughed.
Like that is the kind of thing that no one deserves to experience. And so when I had the resources again to look outside myself and to advocate for other people, I’m like I don’t ever want anybody to feel like I felt in those weeks and months after he went in. I’m like look on any given day I could be talking to an eight-figure entrepreneur or a homeless person and they are equally of interest and valuable to me.
[Tonya Kubo] (0:41 – 2:04)
We’re wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in. I’m Tonya Kubo and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet. Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extra. Because around here what makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point. We love to talk about community here.
How to build it, grow it, sustain it. But today we’re actually going to talk about what happens when you’re cut off from community by systems designed to rob you of your humanity. Today’s guest Rachel Allen is a writer journalist.
I feel like Renaissance woman would fit the bill. But most importantly to our conversation today, Rachel is the host of Beyond Broken, a podcast that critically examines the US federal prison system. And doesn’t just look at what’s going on inside of the prisons, but really invites us to rethink what we believe about who belongs behind bars, who doesn’t, and what rights they have and how we should protect them.
Rachel, I feel like we could just chitchat all day long because we have known each other for quite some time. But I want to get into it by having you tell me, who are your freaks? Why do you love them?
[Rachel Allen] (2:04 – 2:29)
That was such a lovely intro. Thank you so much, Tonya. So my freaks are anybody that somebody else would curl their lip at.
And that’s the best way I can describe it, because it’s like could be people who are incarcerated. It could be I do a lot of work with the evangelical community because I grew up in that and then left it. But I still understand it.
And I’ve always had a thing for that particular type of underdog where somebody else looks at them and they’re like, oh, gross.
[Tonya Kubo] (2:32 – 2:38)
As in my mind, I think of all the people who I go, this is gross, too. I know.
[Rachel Allen] (2:38 – 2:40)
And of course I do it, too. Right.
[Tonya Kubo] (2:41 – 2:51)
Well, and that’s what I love about your passion for the people that others like to other. And I’m just curious, like, where does that come from?
[Rachel Allen] (2:52 – 3:22)
So like everything, right? It’s probably coming from growing up feeling very othered in a particular community I was in. It was very deeply religious.
And while I tried to push my brain into that, it just didn’t work. It just I couldn’t make it fit. And so I felt just so profoundly othered in that.
And then it gave me a really soft spot in my heart for people that I see who are somehow deemed unworthy or less than.
[Tonya Kubo] (3:23 – 4:06)
Yeah, well, and what you’re talking about really is the concept of feeling that you are the square peg constantly trying to shove into a round hole. And what I love about the work that I’ve seen you do in full disclosure, you’re right. You’re my copywriter.
So by the time this episode airs, I hope the website is redone by now. But so, you know, we know each other pretty, pretty well. And the idea that, you know, what if you didn’t have to shove yourself into the round holes?
What if you could just go out there and find a square hole? And so I’m curious for you. Did you just like fall off a turnip truck one day and be like, this is who I am.
This is how it’s going to be. Or was there a journey to get there?
[Rachel Allen] (4:06 – 4:28)
There was definitely a journey for the longest time. I really thought I must have been psychotic or insane or just in some way unable to understand the reality of the world around me, because everybody else was like, it’s a and I was like, hey, no way. It just cannot be like, I cannot get that through my brain.
Yeah, so it was definitely a process was a process.
[Tonya Kubo] (4:28 – 4:38)
How long of a process? Because I really feel like there’s somebody listening who is like, can I just can you just tell me what the timeline is so I can like put up in a sauna task list for that?
[Rachel Allen] (4:39 – 4:51)
Speaking to my heart, I wish I could say it was six weeks of dedicated work, but it was really I would say it was really about 20 years and like two, three mental breakdowns.
[Tonya Kubo] (4:52 – 4:57)
OK, all right. So just count it by mental breakdown, I guess.
[Rachel Allen] (4:57 – 4:59)
Exactly. Those are your milestones, right?
[Tonya Kubo] (5:01 – 5:24)
And I love that in spite of all of it, because you deal with some really heavy, heavy stuff, heavy stuff in your work, heavy stuff in your personal life. You never seem to lose your sense of humor. Now, I’m curious if you’re like me, is it like do you actively try or is it one of those things where you’re just like at this point, it’s laughing or crying and crying never got me anywhere?
[Rachel Allen] (5:26 – 6:09)
Yeah, I think I mean, it’s a load bearing structure for sure. And I definitely have days and weeks and thankfully in the past months where everything has just felt so absolutely heavy that it’s like I don’t even know if I want to get up tomorrow. But I found like I just have this natural humor and I think that’s I’ve seen it help me survive for so long that by now it’s second nature.
And as you said, it doesn’t like the breakdowns are necessary and when they happen, they happen. But if you try to make a life there, that just makes a bad situation so much worse. So it’s like, you know what, let’s find something dumb about this to laugh about, because otherwise, what’s the point?
It’s true.
[Tonya Kubo] (6:09 – 7:08)
It’s true. So with that in mind, let’s take this really to what I know you’re passionate about talking about. And and it was something that, you know, it’s personal.
And we knew each other. I can’t remember how long we knew each other before you actually told me that your husband was incarcerated. And it was one of those things was a boxer message.
And you were like, oh, by the way, you were kind of talking around it, I think. Of course, I didn’t know that because I didn’t know anything. And then you said, well, I don’t know if you know this about me, but my husband’s incarcerated.
And I remember at one point thinking, oh, well, I hadn’t come up before. And then also thinking, well, that’s because it’s not my business, actually. Like, you don’t owe me that story.
But I’m curious what was going through your mind then? I mean, I don’t suppose you can remember, but I imagine you don’t lead with that in conversations for a reason. So just talk me through that, like maybe what has happened?
What is your fear when people find out?
[Rachel Allen] (7:08 – 8:11)
So funny enough, I actually do remember sending you that message because the reason that I finally was like, OK, there’s no way that I can talk to you in a way that’s not going to be weird. I was sending you a Voxer message at like two in the morning or something because I was driving back from Texas where my husband is and I live in Tennessee. And it was some sort of message.
And I was like, OK, I just need to get this out for Tonya because I’m going to be sleeping tomorrow and we have something we need to move forward with work. So I didn’t feel like I could just message you at two in the morning without being like, I’m fine. This is a little weird.
Also, here’s what’s going on. But another reason I remember it is because every time I have that conversation with someone, it’s really scary. Even if it’s someone like you who I know really well and who I’m like, I’m pretty sure is going to be chill about it.
You know, and most people are. But every single time I have that conversation and I start to bring it up, I’m like, I have this moment where it’s like, are we still going to be friends? Or are you going to decide you don’t want to know me anymore?
Because that’s what’s happened basically as soon as my husband went in. Almost every single person in my life dropped out of it.
[Tonya Kubo] (8:13 – 8:13)
That’s heartbreaking.
[Rachel Allen] (8:15 – 8:15)
Yeah.
[Tonya Kubo] (8:16 – 8:20)
And did you see it coming? I’m curious because I would I don’t think I would see it coming.
[Rachel Allen] (8:21 – 8:48)
No, I was completely sideswiped. I mean, this people I had known for decades, people that I considered to be family, people that I had worked with for, you know, five, ten years. And sometimes it was the big dramatic blow up of, oh, my God, I can’t believe you.
Like, I don’t want to know you anymore. And sometimes it was just the quiet, like, oh, yeah. I’m going to go with somebody else for this next project.
[Tonya Kubo] (8:48 – 10:23)
And then they kind of just, like, slipped away, just like sort of slink away tail between their legs, so to speak. So I have a lot of questions. But before I go there, I want to just point out how profound that timing was because, of course, you and me are all business all the time.
So when, you know, when somebody hires me, it’s the scope of the work and I don’t bring my personal life in. I don’t really even bring my other client’s lives in unless it’s pertinent to the project. And in my experience, you’re kind of the same way.
So, you know, what you didn’t know about me at the time is I was working for a nonprofit organization that was doing a lot of advocacy around a law that had passed in our state that allowed incarcerated women who gave birth behind bars to actually pump milk and provide milk for their babies who would presumably be in foster care. And so when you share that, I just happen to be deeply entrenched in humans’ rights issues around jails and prisons because the structures are very different and the laws that govern each are very different. And so when you shared it with me, I don’t know that if you had shared it with me three months before, I wouldn’t believe I wouldn’t have had a different reaction.
But I had a very different perspective because I knew things in that moment that I hadn’t known until I was on that project. And so I think I was like, I have all these questions and I don’t know if it’s appropriate to ask these questions, but I’m going to ask these questions anyway.
[Rachel Allen] (10:23 – 10:24)
Yeah.
[Tonya Kubo] (10:24 – 11:23)
And you were so gracious. And I think that is something that I see a lot of time by society’s weirdos, right? Is, well, we ask them inappropriate questions because they’re the first person who we felt safe enough to ask the questions to and never is it their job to educate the rest of us.
And yet nine times out of 10, I find they are so stinking grateful to have genuine nonjudgmental interest and curiosity. And I felt that from you, but I’m curious going back to those people who decided that they could no longer be part of your story. Like, I think for the benefit of the listener, we need to just come to terms with like, it’s not like you had charges against you.
This was entirely something involving your partner, independent of you. So it’s not even like they were like, oh, well, you ran drugs for somebody that wasn’t even that.
[Rachel Allen] (11:24 – 11:26)
That’d be so much cooler.
[Tonya Kubo] (11:26 – 11:38)
Yeah, it would be so much cooler. I’m curious because I think what was going on in that moment is really what laid the foundation for what you do now. Do you agree or disagree?
[Rachel Allen] (11:39 – 12:14)
Yeah, yeah, no, I absolutely agree. I had always had that, like I said, soft spot for the outsider or for the weirdo. But finding myself in a situation where I had just undergone one of the most traumatic events of my entire life, I was shattered.
And then having every single person pulled back from me in that moment was devastating. And so when I had the resources again to look outside myself and to advocate for other people, I’m like, I don’t ever want anybody to feel like I felt in those weeks and months after he went in.
[Tonya Kubo] (12:15 – 12:17)
All right, so tell us what you do to make sure that never happened.
[Rachel Allen] (12:19 – 13:10)
So I do, I guess maybe the most public facing thing I do is I created a podcast called Beyond Broken and you had mentioned it. So it’s a six part audio documentary where I go through what I found to be six of the main areas of experience that I’ve gone through in the past five years with my husband’s incarceration. So we start with intake and we talk about just what the process of that is like, because everyone thinks it’s like, oh, you just show up and they go in and like, it’s kind of a bummer, but everything’s okay.
Much more nightmarish, really horrific. I had no idea which state he was going to be in for over a month. He went in at the height of COVID, ended up being in the facility that had the highest COVID transmission rates in the entire country, and there’s no way to connect with them.
So you have no idea if this person you love is dead or alive. So we start with that. Then we go into family work, the guards and how this whole system perpetuates.
[Tonya Kubo] (13:11 – 13:12)
What do you say it perpetuates?
[Rachel Allen] (13:13 – 13:49)
Oh, how the whole system like keeps going. So my experiences. Yeah, my experience is once people get into this, they’re like, how is it possible that it could be this bad and no one is like burning buildings down?
And I was the same way, right? But I’ve been on the other side too, where it’s like, you know, we all watched Orange is the New Black. We’re like, well, that looks kind of bad, but oh, whatever.
Surely that’s exaggerated for drama. No, it’s actually really quite played down. So I spent an entire episode just unpacking.
Like, why is it like this? How is it structured to create these situations? Why does nobody do anything about it?
[Tonya Kubo] (13:50 – 13:55)
Do you have any answers? Because I’m like, yeah, yeah, why, why? Tell me more, Rachel.
Tell me more.
[Rachel Allen] (13:56 – 14:35)
I have 3000 words of answers. But the main elements, the main elements that I pulled out were, first of all, it’s structured to do that on purpose, right? It is meant to pull people in and use them as free labor.
That’s the direct descendant of chattel slavery. And it has a lot of the same characteristics. It’s obviously not the same thing, but it is designed based off of that.
And that is where the spirit of that lives on today. And just in case any of your listeners would think I were to be exaggerating like I would have been back then. I mean, actual for real slave labor.
So things like in the fields with hoes and horses type of slave labor.
[Tonya Kubo] (14:35 – 14:59)
Well, we can actually talk. I want you to get through the pillars first, but we can talk more about that because that actually just made headlines not too long ago with the Los Angeles fires. People didn’t realize the number of prisoners who were fighting on the front lines of those fires for zero compensation and not a whole lot of protection to their health and well-being.
[Rachel Allen] (15:00 – 15:19)
Yeah, I can look up the exact statistics, but people from the Bureau of Labor have done studies and they found, I believe it was in the nineties. Ninety percent of prisoners who have a job say they have not received training for it and they do not have safety equipment for it. And it’s manufacturing, you know, it’s the types of jobs that you need both training and safety equipment for.
[Tonya Kubo] (15:20 – 15:26)
Yikes. Okay, so intake. And then the second one was.
[Rachel Allen] (15:26 – 15:28)
Family. So we talk about visitation.
[Tonya Kubo] (15:29 – 15:29)
Okay.
[Rachel Allen] (15:30 – 15:39)
And how that’s such a core pillar of keeping recidivism rates down, but also just keeping people singing and helping families not implode while their loved one is away.
[Tonya Kubo] (15:41 – 15:50)
Do you want to share any, like, is the family aspects, positive experiences, negative experiences? Is it across the board or does it lean heavily on one side or the other?
[Rachel Allen] (15:51 – 17:38)
With visitation, it’s almost always negative. So I talk about this in the episode, but in primary focus is the Federal Bureau of Prisons. So the Federal Bureau of Prisons has a phrase that says, visitation shall be as pleasant as practically possible.
And I got really latched onto that because I was like, this is like, it’s a nightmare every time. And the burden is put on these people, primarily women, almost all, you know, very economically disadvantaged, who are destroying their lives to come and see these people over and over again. And it’s just, it’s horrible.
So to give you a little example of what a typical visit might be, I would show up at 7 30 to wait in a line for visitation that starts at 8 30 or nine. We sit in a waiting room for an indeterminate period of time when a guard decides to show up to work because sometimes they show up and sometimes they don’t. They will take our paperwork.
And so we have to fill out all this personal information about ourselves, show our ID, all that. Once they sort the paperwork out, which can take anywhere from 10 minutes to three hours, then we go through an airport security style thing where everybody has to go through the metal detector. Then we wait again for another guard to come and collect us from the visitation area, which again can take anywhere from 10 minutes to three hours.
And then we finally get back to the visitation room where we sit in hard plastic chairs three feet across from our loved ones. And we are very fortunate in that we can do a hug and a kiss at the beginning, but there’s no touching in between. And that’s it.
It’s this cold, horrible fluorescent lighting room and everything in your relationships takes place in those chairs. So all of our, our dates, our romantic relationship, our marriage with each other, all the like random things you have to talk about in a marriage, it all takes place from three feet apart in this horrible chair.
[Tonya Kubo] (17:42 – 18:28)
Okay. I have words and I have questions. It’s hard to know where to go from here because there is so much and yet not enough time.
Right. So I think what I’d love to do is leave the content of Beyond Broken in Beyond Broken and let listeners who really want to see that underbelly listen to the show. And what I want to talk about is so your loved one goes in and I think the fact that you’re married is important.
And because I do think that there are people listening to this show who still think married people and single people have different rights, right? Like you have different rights to access to your loved one if you’re married versus not married. So I think it’s important to say that you are married.
[Rachel Allen] (18:29 – 18:29)
Yeah.
[Tonya Kubo] (18:29 – 19:05)
You lost your community and like I feel like you are one of the most connected people I know because I met you after all of this. And so I’m curious how you found community in this new reality because it’s not like you moved away from everything you knew like you made a conscious choice to leave all that you knew and start over. That decision was taken away from you.
But I know you and you probably didn’t see that you had a lot of choices, but I mean, you really could have just shriveled up in a corner if you wanted to.
[Rachel Allen] (19:06 – 19:59)
And I did for, I mean, I did for a little while. I definitely did for about six months, six months to really a year. And then I started kind of getting myself back together, but I started reaching these tendrils of community out again after about like six, eight months because there were, I think four people.
That I had known like the entirety of everyone I had ever known from the before times and the after times, four people stuck around. And I figured if those four people were going to leave, they probably would have left in the six months where I had, yeah, where I had mostly just been like falling apart. And so I started to reach out a little bit to them and they were so gracious and so kind to have people continually checking in and being like, Hey, I know you’re not in the space to talk yet, but I’m here when you need to.
And so I started reaching out to them just a little bit and a little bit. And then it kind of grew from there.
[Tonya Kubo] (20:01 – 20:19)
And now somewhere online, I read something that said that how you’re moderately famous in the prison system. I want, because I feel like you’ve got community there too. And I’m curious how that developed and what it looks like.
Cause it doesn’t look the same as your business community, obviously.
[Rachel Allen] (20:21 – 21:05)
Yeah, no, it’s very different from a business community. That’s something I actually talk about on my personal website. Cause I was trying to explain the breadth of the writing I do.
And I’m like, look, on any given day, I could be talking to an eight figure entrepreneur or a homeless person and they are equally of interest and valuable to me. And so a lot of that came out of this community that’s built up around, I call it the visitation community because it’s all the wives and family members of people who show up for visitation regularly, like I do. And it developed slowly.
I think everyone there is a little bit cautious because again, you would think that people wouldn’t be very judgmental because we’re all sitting in, you know, the waiting room of a prison. But people do get judgmental or they get spiky or, you know, just unpleasant. It’s people going through the worst experience of their life.
It’s hard to make friends.
[Tonya Kubo] (21:06 – 21:09)
But yeah, well, and hurting people hurt, right?
[Rachel Allen] (21:10 – 21:34)
Yeah, exactly. And like, yeah, nobody’s in their best space at seven 30 in the morning, like in a fluorescent room stressed out. We would start talking and you see the people who kind of like know what they’re doing and you get to know the newbies and we try to shepherd them along because it’s incredibly overwhelming when you first show up.
But there’s a thousand rules and they change every single time. So it’s the feeling of like going through the TSA line, you know, but they change the rules and then everyone screams at you.
[Tonya Kubo] (21:35 – 21:49)
Oh, yeah. So your shoes can be on at this airport, but they can’t be on at that airport. And over there, the kids have to obey certain rules, but here the kids kind of can just do whatever they want.
Sort of same instability.
[Rachel Allen] (21:50 – 22:51)
And the stakes this time are not like you, you have to wait in line a little longer. It’s you get to see your loved one for the first time in six months or a year or three years. So it really matters that you get it right.
But it’s not written down anywhere. And you just have to kind of figure out as you go. So that that type of thing does make for strong community.
When you see someone, you’re like, hey, you can’t wear those jeans in here. Or like, by the way, they’re going to kick you out if you try to wear that watch. Make sure you like throw it in the trash or whatever.
And so we start talking to people, start building this up. And then as I started doing the podcast, I knew I wanted to have an episode specifically on family. And I wanted to interview other family members, because so many of the people who are involved in the system are the kind of people who nobody else would ever hear their voice.
And it was so important to me to be like, look, you know, I I have a more public face. I am more used to writing and being published. People know me, you know, in the very small way that I’m known.
But no one would ever hear Linda’s voice or Robin’s voice or the other people that I interviewed if I hadn’t talked to them. And that was really important to me to get their conversation out.
[Tonya Kubo] (22:53 – 23:01)
OK, and have any of them gone on to use their voice more or was it really just within the context of talking with you?
[Rachel Allen] (23:02 – 23:50)
A lot of them do a lot of private advocacy. So having someone in prison, it’s very easy to take on a full time job of fighting with bureaucracies, because that’s what you have to do just to help them survive a lot of times. So I know a lot of them are very, very familiar with their senators’ phone numbers.
And they talk to the Bureau of Prisons directors and stuff. But one lady that I was especially happy to connect with, her name is Heather. She runs something called the First Network, which is federal inmates requesting sanction treatment.
And she is incredible. She’s built up almost a unionization system where there’s different representatives on different floors of various prisons. And so when something happens, everybody reports it at once to their rep and then they can get, say, 400 complaints through to their senator at the same time, which makes a lot more of an impact than having them sort of dripped out.
[Tonya Kubo] (23:52 – 23:57)
OK, that sounds powerful. And how long has that organization been in existence?
[Rachel Allen] (23:57 – 24:26)
Just a couple of years. She started it after her husband was incarcerated and it actually started because there was no they had no snacks for visitation. And when you’re in there for eight hours and there’s no food, it’s really hard.
So she kind of being this sort of self-starter type woman was like, well, how come there’s no vending machines? And the guard said the old ones broke. And so she found the number of the vending machine company and called them and was negotiated a new plan to get them into the prison and got it fixed and kind of went from there.
[Tonya Kubo] (24:28 – 24:55)
OK, so I’ve worked for government, so I understand the bureaucracy from the inside. I really do. And yet it’s like it just took a phone call.
I mean, I’m sure there was more. I’m sure there was follow up and check with this person, check with that person. There’s some phone tag and everything.
But ultimately, it started with a phone call that like that’s not her job. She’s not paid for that. There are people who are probably paid to pay attention to the vending machine.
There are.
[Rachel Allen] (24:57 – 25:22)
But the entire attitude of, I would say, 99 percent of prison staff that I’ve encountered are if you don’t make me do my job, I’m not going to do it because you can’t fire me anyway. They’re very heavily unionized, which I’m normally super in favor of. But in this case, it’s not very helpful.
And yeah, it was somebody else’s job. And they actually actively impeded her as she was trying to get this done because then that’s one more thing that they have on their report that they didn’t take care of.
[Tonya Kubo] (25:24 – 26:09)
OK, so I know. Well, I believe I don’t know because I don’t actually know who listens to this show, right? Like, I don’t get those kind of stats.
But I imagine based on what I know about the U.S. and the makeup in the U.S., I think I can make a strong assumption that there is somebody who’s listening who says, so what? If they wanted their rights, if they wanted to be treated like everybody else, they should not have made the decision that got them incarcerated in the first place. And I think it’s important to address that question.
And I’m going to have you start it because I have some really stinking strong opinions about it and I want to make sure that my opinions don’t influence what you actually say. So what’s your response to that? Because I imagine people have actually said that to you.
[Rachel Allen] (26:10 – 28:25)
Yeah, they have. And it’s really hard, especially because it’s like, but if you only understood how bad it is, it’s not like, oh, this is moderately uncomfortable. It’s not like it kind of sucks.
It’s like people are actively dying in horrific and absolutely preventable ways. I could flood you with stats and stories, but I guess the best way I can describe it is anything that you’ve heard, like you think, oh, gosh, I really hope I don’t get locked up in whatever other place because you’re afraid that something might happen to you. I guarantee you something like that is happening right now to people in our prisons and in our jails.
I mean, just to give you the briefest of overviews, like heatstroke deaths, deaths from torture guards, literally torturing prisoners to death on such a scale that people actually pay attention. There’s a prison in California where people were gang raping women for decades before anyone did anything. So it’s not just like, oh, the food kind of sucked and I’m bored.
It’s you have a really solid chance of dying from this. And I know that some people do believe that there are crimes that merit death. But I would say, even if that is the case, I don’t happen to believe that.
But even if that was the case, that shouldn’t be for something like a low level drug charge that shouldn’t be for anything other than the very most extreme cases. And that’s just not the majority of people who are incarcerated. It’s very easy to think about this in the abstract, right?
It’s like, oh, God, like those people think of whoever you hate the most. Right. And you think, oh, man, those people, like, of course they deserve it.
How satisfying would it be if you could visit that vengeance upon them? Sure. And then think about if it’s you or your loved one and you, you know, maybe you got a bad lawyer and you don’t belong there.
There’s a lot of people wrongfully incarcerated. There’s a lot of people incarcerated for things people don’t even realize you can be incarcerated for anymore, like debt imprisonment. I didn’t even know that was a thing until I started researching this.
And I don’t believe anyone who can experience the system can then say, like, well, so what? Because it’s when it’s your loved one who’s calling you and their cellmate just died of a heart attack while the guard stood there and laughed like that is the kind of thing that no one deserves to experience.
[Tonya Kubo] (28:26 – 29:12)
Yeah. Well, and all I could think about is even for people who believe in the death penalty, right? Like like the states that have the death penalty.
There’s rules around how we get to legally kill people. Right. And one of those rules is they can’t experience undue pain, right?
Like you can’t make it more painful than it absolutely has to be. You can’t make it like you can’t extend suffering. Right.
And that’s why they have lethal injection. And, you know, some states allow an electric chair. Some states don’t.
And it’s all around how like even if somebody did something so bad that they deserve to die, we don’t kill them in a worse way.
[Rachel Allen] (29:13 – 29:43)
Exactly. And that decision is also not made by a guard who just had kind of a bummer of a day. Like we have processes for this.
But the way it’s happening now, I mean, and this is a horrific thing to talk about, but I’ve read well documented stories of people being pistol whipped into brain damage because, again, the guard had kind of a bad day. There was another guy who regards held him under scalding water until his skin started sloughing off. Like there’s nothing humane about that.
[Tonya Kubo] (29:44 – 30:19)
No, no. And back to your earlier point, right? We don’t know about this because the structure is like the system is closed until you’re incarcerated or you are somehow connected to people who are incarcerated, maybe an attorney, maybe a loved one.
There is no actual way for you to know. I mean, most of us are getting our information from television. Yeah.
Like I remember the first time I was ever introduced to the fact that prison was like really, really nasty and horrible was watching. I think it was a show called Oz.
[Rachel Allen] (30:20 – 30:43)
Yeah, which, you know, in and of itself, like it’s a drama. It’s meant to be this like over the top thing. And I think that puts us in the space where we’re like, OK, but like that’s just Oz like it doesn’t really happen.
There’s rules against that. Surely people, you know, don’t act like that. And of course, they don’t act exactly like they do on Oz, but they do act in horrific, permanently damaging ways.
[Tonya Kubo] (30:45 – 30:59)
Yeah. And so you’ve talked about this visitation sort of community. I’m assuming they’re primarily women based on what you’ve said.
Do you connect with them in between visits? Or is it really just who is in the room when you happen to go? However often you get to go.
[Rachel Allen] (31:00 – 31:31)
There’s about three or four of them that I connect with in between visits. You know, we’ll go out for lunch or a couple of them have very kindly offered to host me at their homes so that I don’t have to pay for a hotel when I drive all the way. I know it’s it’s incredible.
I’ve got a clothing exchange going on with one lady. We like trade clothes back and forth. But yeah, and then there is the kind of ones that you only see while you’re there and that’s all they want, you know, like maybe you trade numbers and maybe they’ll text you if there’s something really bad that goes on and they want to check it out.
But a lot of it is just kind of who’s ever in the room at the time.
[Tonya Kubo] (31:33 – 31:44)
I’m wondering, and you may not have an answer to this, but what does community look like for people who are living in the prison system, especially the ones who don’t have family like you or advocates on the outside?
[Rachel Allen] (31:45 – 32:40)
So it can go a couple of different ways for the people who don’t have family or advocates on the outside, which is, I believe the stats about 30 to 40% of people who are incarcerated will never get a visit the entire time they’re in. They just sort of stop existing for their family. And that can be horrible.
Either you make friends or you just put your head down and you kind of retreat inside yourself for however long you’re there. And you cultivate this kind of temporary insanity or, you know, you do drugs so you can check out and not have to experience it or you sleep all the time. I know in my husband’s case, he’s a big gamer, a big like TTRPG guy.
And so he plays endless games of Dungeons and Dragons and Settlers of Catan and all these stuff. So he is a nice community of like gamer dudes that have gathered around him. And then the other thing people do is they join gangs.
Sometimes they also call them cars, like in the federal system because they ride together. So they’ll join a car and your car is your family while you’re there.
[Tonya Kubo] (32:42 – 32:45)
So they can find community, but it’s not necessarily the most healthy.
[Rachel Allen] (32:46 – 33:26)
Yeah, you know, people can get you can get very lucky. You can meet cool people. In my husband’s case, he lives in he’s a veteran and he lives in a dorm with a bunch of other veterans.
And so they have like that other strand that kind of pulls them together. But it’s also I don’t want to spread misinformation and be like, it’s so dangerous. Everyone’s out to get you because that’s not the case.
Most people just want to do their time and get home. Like nobody wants to do this. But if you I guess if you have a habit of continually putting yourself in situations with bad boundaries or, you know, if you have something that you’re dealing with, like addiction where you have to feed a need, I think it is very easy to get in with people who don’t have your best interest at heart.
[Tonya Kubo] (33:27 – 33:46)
Yeah. And back to because it’s such a closed system, there’s really no checks and balances. There’s no there’s no outside perspective, really.
So you had mentioned that there’s a story you never get to tell. And I’m curious if you want to tell it now, because it was just it’s about a woman with a purse. So tell us about this.
[Rachel Allen] (33:47 – 34:23)
This is a woman I see a visitation. I’ve never spoken to her. We just have never crossed paths.
And I tried so hard to fit this into Beyond Broken, but it was just a little detail that I couldn’t quite shove in. But this woman, she’s, I don’t know, probably like a boomer aged lady. You know, like she looks like she lives in a nice suburb.
We can only bring in transparent purses. So she has her purse, but it has a strap that goes across her body. And I cannot imagine that she understands the implications of this.
But the strap says, Sue, run, pig. And it has a little picture of a pig on it. And I it must be a sports thing, right?
[Tonya Kubo] (34:23 – 34:55)
Like it has to be like she is either the bravest or most socially unaware person who visits that that system. Right. Or maybe her kids are in FFA.
Yeah. Or maybe she’s got kids in FFA and it was a fundraiser thing. I don’t know, but wow.
[Rachel Allen] (34:56 – 35:10)
Yeah, it just it delights me every time I see her. And she and her husband just look like the most like buttoned down, suburban white people you will ever see. So in my heart, I hope she’s a secret badass.
That’s my that’s my dream.
[Tonya Kubo] (35:11 – 35:20)
Well, I’m just curious. I don’t know that I could have like held in the giggle when I first noticed. Like, were you able to like poker face it?
[Rachel Allen] (35:20 – 35:37)
When I very first saw her, we were actually like back in the visitation room. And so Tommy, my husband’s name is Tommy. He saw my face go and he was like, what did you see?
And I was like, oh, my God, look at that purse, dude. So we did laugh about it, you know, but we didn’t want her to think we were laughing at her, too. So we kind of like kept it between ourselves.
[Tonya Kubo] (35:38 – 35:56)
Keep it on the inside. All right. Right, right, right to the last question I have is based on something you said before we started recording, which is understanding the difference.
Well, I’ll just actually say exactly how you did, right? Is how do we know who the right outlaws are to give grace to?
[Rachel Allen] (35:57 – 35:57)
Yeah.
[Tonya Kubo] (35:58 – 36:05)
Talk to me about that. And then if you can just give me like a one through five checklist on that, I would really appreciate it.
[Rachel Allen] (36:05 – 36:09)
Totally. Yeah, I actually have a downloadable PDF. We’ll link to it in the show notes.
[Tonya Kubo] (36:12 – 36:31)
Yes, I was hoping, hoping you would go there with me. All right. But back to the big question.
And no, there is no downloadable PDF with this. Only online business owners get that joke. But yeah, no.
All right. So how how do you figure that out?
[Rachel Allen] (36:33 – 37:30)
So in my case, right, I am inclined to extend everyone, at least hearing them out, right? And like, it’s like, OK, tell me, like, tell me what’s going on and I’ll see if I believe you or not. And I know that if I actually care about it, I’ll do some fact checking and really see.
And a lot of times, you know, you either get the sense where you’re like, yeah, that tracks or you’re like, all right, man, like, I don’t know what’s going on, but something about that’s weird. And I think you’re not telling me the truth. And that’s fine.
You don’t owe me that. But also, I’m going to take a step back because I don’t know what’s going on and I don’t know how to orient myself safely with that. And that’s where I start.
And I know it’s such a bummer because then you have to think about your own responsibility in it, where it’s so much easier to be like, well, they have that label, so they’re a bad person. So I’m going to stay over here as opposed to you’re a person. I’m a person.
How are we going to navigate this?
[Tonya Kubo] (37:31 – 38:02)
Yeah, well, that makes me think. And because I know you have evangelical background, right? It makes me think of the difference between grace and mercy, right?
I don’t know what you were taught, but I was taught like, you know, mercy is when you don’t get the punishment you deserve. And grace is unearned forgiveness, unearned benevolence. And yeah, the way I see it right is like, is grace ever wasted?
Even if they’re a terrible person, they were a really good liar and they like got you hook, line and sinker. Like, what’s the worst case scenario there?
[Rachel Allen] (38:03 – 38:41)
Yeah, no, I totally agree because I think where things get dangerous is when people extend grace and then do something they’re not willing to do or do something without understanding the possible consequences of it. There is a lot of fraud that happens with inmates defrauding people on the outside because they have a really good story and then people send the money and it’s the whole thing. And I don’t recommend that at all.
I guess the extent of my grace is there is nothing someone can do that makes me see them as less than human. And I’m always willing to listen to the story at least once and then see where I want to go from there.
[Tonya Kubo] (38:42 – 39:28)
Well, I think that’s a really, really great practice, right? Because you really are just out of time, right? Listen to the story once, see what happens from there.
Now, I’m curious. I’ve got a couple of things that I want to hit on before we close. So the first is if somebody is listening today and they’ve actually never thought about incarceration because they all have to.
It’s just not part of their worldview, not part of their lived experience. But they’re listening and they’re thinking, huh, I never really thought about humanity among prisoners or inhumanity, as it were. What do you think should be the first step?
Or what would you recommend is the first step that they could take to begin to undo that belief that those people over there don’t deserve basic human rights?
[Rachel Allen] (39:29 – 40:03)
I think the first thing and this is the question that I ask people when they come to me like this, I say, OK, what could you do to where you would truly deserve something like that? What could you do to where you would deserve not having food for multiple days in a row to where you would deserve living in freezing or overly hot temperatures like to where you would deserve a guard kicking your crutches out from under you? Not like, oh, I would take my lumps or like I would take the punishment.
But like, what would you do that in your heart? You would be like, yeah, you know what? I was bad enough that now I deserve everyone to hate me.
[Tonya Kubo] (40:04 – 41:03)
That’s powerful and requires a pretty extensive amount of self-reflecting. And I think sometimes those are the hardest next steps. Like you said, they’re uncomfortable.
I would throw in listen to be on broken first and then ask yourself those questions. Right, because right now it’s, you know, Rachel and Tonya talking about these things that happen. But when you hear it from the people who live it, it feels very, very different, I think.
Now, I want to flip it and say, what about those affected by incarceration? Right. Maybe they’re the spouse who lost everybody and is now so ashamed that they’re just shut in.
What could they do? Like, how can they reach out? What are maybe some resources available to them to find community or at least find a place where it’s OK to talk about this part of themselves?
[Rachel Allen] (41:05 – 42:13)
Yeah, this is such a hard one. My first move was to look for like an online community, right? And there’s just not really a great one.
There are things like there’s a prison wife subreddit and, you know, it is as you would expect from Reddit. It’s not where you want to be getting your emotional stability from. So what I recommend is finding one person who you can talk to about this and then look for groups in your area sometimes.
And in some areas, there’s a lot more people, a lot more groups. If you’re a member of a church or another religious organization, a lot of times they’ll have a support group for spouses. There’s no real national group I can recommend, unfortunately, or like a nice little link.
But what I will say, just as a reminder, because I certainly didn’t know this, but approximately 45 percent of Americans have a direct family member who’s been incarcerated. So if you think you’re alone, you are extremely not alone. It is so common, but people don’t talk about it.
Even if you don’t feel comfortable talking to somebody yet, you can be like half the country has experienced what I’m going through. I am not alone.
[Tonya Kubo] (42:15 – 42:32)
And now I understand why when you first experienced all this, you couldn’t understand why more people weren’t talking about it. I mean, 45 percent. Yeah.
Yeah. It’s not like, oh, this is this little niche population that affects 4 percent. And that’s why it’s a big secret.
[Rachel Allen] (42:33 – 42:34)
Yeah.
[Tonya Kubo] (42:35 – 42:49)
OK, Rachel, we will put all of that in the show notes. I would now like to have our freak flags fly segment. Are you up for some rapid fire questions?
It’s just five. We’ll see how fast we can get through them.
[Rachel Allen] (42:49 – 42:51)
All right, let’s do it. I’ll answer really fast.
[Tonya Kubo] (42:51 – 42:56)
OK, fill in the blank. You are my kind of freak if you are my kind of freak.
[Rachel Allen] (42:57 – 43:04)
If you can’t understand how anybody could look at people like you and be like, how can you not like us? We’re cool.
[Tonya Kubo] (43:06 – 43:14)
Yes, because we are our own stinking party, aren’t we? Right. Exactly.
OK, what’s something you love that your friends just don’t get?
[Rachel Allen] (43:15 – 43:25)
Oh, I’m really fascinated by World War One. And I know that it’s like such a strange thing and no one else gets it. But oh, my God, the psychology of it fascinates me endlessly.
[Tonya Kubo] (43:27 – 43:31)
OK, new to self. I will Google World War One because I’m like, yeah, I like the pond there.
[Rachel Allen] (43:31 – 43:32)
That was nice. Yeah.
[Tonya Kubo] (43:35 – 43:42)
OK, what community would you infiltrate just to understand it better?
[Rachel Allen] (43:45 – 43:59)
Oh, I feel like I have a little bit of a way in some of my clients work with ultra high net worth people. And I love just watching how they move through the world. I’m like, what are you doing?
So I feel like I’m already a little bit like a fly on that wall.
[Tonya Kubo] (43:59 – 44:01)
Oh, that sounds fascinating to me.
[Rachel Allen] (44:01 – 44:06)
Yeah, it’s incredibly strange. It’s incredibly strange and fascinating.
[Tonya Kubo] (44:07 – 44:11)
OK, so what tool ritual or practice helps you stay connected to your people?
[Rachel Allen] (44:12 – 44:22)
Writing. I mean, that’s that’s for me. Always is going to be writing.
I’ll do essays, whether it’s essays, whether it’s poems, whether it’s memoir. That’s the way that I really share my heart with people.
[Tonya Kubo] (44:23 – 44:26)
You’re the one who says words make worlds, right?
[Rachel Allen] (44:26 – 44:27)
Yeah, yeah.
[Tonya Kubo] (44:28 – 44:34)
Yeah, I like that. OK. Who is somebody doing freakishly good work that deserves a bigger stage?
[Rachel Allen] (44:35 – 45:10)
OK, well, this is going to sound like a ridiculous answer, but the first thing I thought it was you, honestly, let me. I’ll try to think of one that doesn’t sound quite as self-serving for the podcast. You know, who I’ll shout out is actually Heather Purdle with the First Network.
She’s doing incredibly powerful, very effective work. And there’s a Facebook group. So if you just Google First Network Facebook group or Heather Purdle, she’s brilliant.
And I want everyone to be able to work with her because she provides very easy, tangible, accessible ways to make a change.
[Tonya Kubo] (45:10 – 45:42)
Oh, my gosh, I love that. And definitely say, hey, Rachel Allen told me I should reach out to you. So, Rachel, I just want to say thank you.
Thank you for your courage, right? Because this is not easy stuff to talk about, not even in 2025. Just the way that you can tell stories that I don’t know how you do it, but it’s dark and yet it’s not hopeless.
And thank you just for being here, just being here. So thank you. And I encourage everybody listening to just check out the show notes and get in touch with Rachel.
There’s a lot of good stuff there.
Aug 27, 2025 | Episode Transcripts
Listen to Episode 1 and locate all resources.
(0:00 – 0:09)
She made me feel like I mattered. And that, that’s what belonging is. It’s not about being included.
(0:10 – 0:57)
It’s really about being expected. It’s someone saying, of course you’re here. We have been waiting for you.
We’re wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in. I’m Tonya Kubo, and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet. Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras.
Because around here, what makes you weird, makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point. We all know what loneliness looks like.
The widow who never gets any visitors. The kid who eats lunch alone. That quirky guy who walks awkwardly into a room and instantly knows he doesn’t belong.
(0:58 – 1:12)
But here’s what we don’t talk about enough. People, by themselves, are not the answer. You can have proximity without presence, surrounded by people and feeling alone still.
(1:13 – 2:03)
Or like an outcast, you can have attention without connection. That’s a reality no matter where you live, what you do, or how much money you have or don’t have. Celebrity suicide rates alone prove my point.
And while I’m still here, I’ve lived that contradiction myself. I’ll tell you the whole story in a moment, where I was 29, in a hospital bed, a known community newspaper editor and columnist, visible and important-ish, but feeling like I could disappear without a trace. My name’s Tanya Kubo, and this is Find Your Freaks, a show about what happens when we stop hiding who we are, boldly own it, and start searching for the people who get us.
(2:03 – 3:25)
The ones who don’t just tolerate our weird, but recognize it. Maybe because it looks a lot like their own. I have spent most of my professional life helping people build community, online and off.
But I didn’t start out doing this work because I was Miss Congeniality. I didn’t get here because I was captain of the cheerleading squad or crowned prom queen. I got here because I’ve known the deep ache of feeling equal parts too much and not enough.
Being surrounded but still unseen. And once you have found that kind of invisible, you start paying attention to who gets left out. Who’s overlooked? Who’s maybe always invited, but never truly expected or welcomed? Who, when you look around, you don’t maybe notice they’re missing? So let’s rewind for a moment.
The year was 2007, and I was managing the editorial production of a small chain of community newspapers. I led a local support group. I wrote a lifestyle column that landed on 20,000 doorsteps every single week.
Strangers would stop me in the grocery store to chat as if we were old friends. But then I got sick. Emergency surgery kind of sick.
(3:26 – 3:48)
I found myself sliced open, stapled back together and recovering in a hospital about 90-ish minutes from home. But it may as well have been across the country. I was in pain, drugged up, scared, completely alone.
But not alone in the technical sense. Hospitals are always full. They’re busy.
(3:49 – 4:03)
They’re loud. You’ve got nurses and roommates and machines and the steady churn of checking your vitals and other types of care. And still, I had never felt more isolated in my entire life.
(4:04 – 6:49)
This wasn’t the first time, though, that I saw how powerful belonging could be or how easy it is to get it wrong. See, in college, I had this roommate who would DJ punk shows. So, like, I’m not cool, but I like to think I’m cool adjacent.
And she would book these scrappy bands who were willing to drive anywhere for a few hundred bucks, a floor to sleep on, and a stage to play on. In our apartment, it was the floor. Now, over the course of about a year, we hosted half a dozen bands.
Sometimes five or six guys stretched out across our living room, kind of like cats in their favorite sunspot. But here’s what shocked me. When she was making arrangements, the guys very rarely would ask if we had space.
They would find out she had a roommate, and they were very quick to be like, whoa, whoa, is she okay? Will she feel safe? Is she going to go someplace else because she’s not comfortable with us staying there? And, you know, this was, like, the 90s. Things were different then. But that kind of care and consideration even now still floors me.
Like, these weren’t guys who had some kind of trauma-informed care training, right? They didn’t have PR degrees. They weren’t involved in social work. They were tatted-up musicians living on whatever they could scrape together and the generosity of others.
And yet they understood something sacred. Belonging doesn’t mean taking up space at someone else’s expense. They weren’t just looking for where they belonged or what they could get.
They were trying not to rob anyone else of their place. And honestly, it was the most human thing I had ever seen up to that point. Didn’t happen in a church.
It didn’t happen in a community center. It happened in a meh apartment in a somewhat okay side of town. Now, fast forward a few years into 2007, and I’m stuck in that hospital bed, hours from home, no family in town, and friends and colleagues quite honestly too busy with their own lives to be able to make the drive out to see me.
And to be fair, I wasn’t really that much company anyway. But on day three, that drug haze cleared just enough for curiosity to set in. I posted to an online message board I favored in search of some information.
(6:50 – 8:07)
Had anyone heard of this hospital? What town was I in? What was near to me? The next day, I had more than a hundred replies. And I had one private message from someone named Debbie with two I’s. She lived nearby actually, and she asked if I was up for a visit.
The next day, she was in my hospital room. Bright red hair, loud laugh, blue eyeshadow, fuchsia lipstick, and a personality as big as the hospital itself. And such kindness.
She brought socks to warm my feet, lip balm for my chapped lips, and a water bottle for the one day we had hoped that I’d eventually be allowed to drink water. She didn’t know me. She didn’t owe me.
But she showed up, and she kept showing up my entire hospital stay. She’d wheel me through the halls, threatening to race my neighbors. She’d let me cry.
She’d let me not talk. I could sleep, doze off, wake up, pick back up the conversation. She didn’t just fill a seat in my hospital room.
(8:07 – 8:16)
She made me feel like I mattered. And that, that’s what belonging is. It’s not about being included.
(8:17 – 9:13)
It’s really about being expected. It’s someone saying, of course you’re here. We have been waiting for you.
It’s not about what you produce. It’s about who you are and whether people see you as someone worth knowing, even when you have nothing to give. That’s why you find affinity groups for members in large churches and employees in large organizations.
You’ll find groups for moms, for expats, for queer folks, creatives, caregivers, cancer survivors, even neurodivergent people oftentimes have their own communities within communities. Subsets of groups focused on specific identities, not because they’re exclusive, but because they’re trying to find each other. They’re creating containers where it’s safe to exhale, where they can take the mask off.
(9:14 – 10:59)
Because there are certain challenges mothers face that only other mothers understand. The same is true for cancer survivors, queer and trans folk, teens, empty nesters. When it comes to belonging, we as individuals are not looking for everyone.
We’re looking for our people, right? The right someones. And that’s what this show is all about. The search for the space where we can stop performing and start connecting.
Where our weird isn’t the cost of entry, it’s the common ground. Now this podcast is not always going to sound like this episode. Some weeks you’ll hear conversations with people who found belonging in unexpected places or who foster that belonging for others.
Many who live very differently from you or me. I’ll put on my curiosity hat and dust off my reporter’s notebook and start asking questions. Other weeks it’ll be just us exploring the messy beautiful mechanics of what makes connections stick.
Sometimes the stories will be funny. Sometimes they’ll be hard. Sometimes what makes them unique will simply be how very ordinary they are.
But they’ll always be honest. This show isn’t about brand building. It’s not about business or marketing.
It’s about being human and finding the other humans who see you. Now if anything I’ve shared has landed with you today, if you’ve ever felt invisible in a room full of people, if you’ve ever wanted to stop shrinking but didn’t know where to expand, you’re not too weird. You’re not too much.
You just haven’t found your freaks yet. But they’re out there. And I hope this show helps you find them.
(11:01 – 11:29)
Subscribe. Follow. Leave a review.
Share it with the person or people who get you. And if you’ve got a story of your own, I’d love to hear it. Find me at findyourfreaks.com or wherever you like to hang out online.
That’s it for this episode of Find Your Freaks. To help more weirdos find their way here, subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re craving connection, join the freak show at findyourfreaks.com. What makes you weird makes you wonderful.
(11:30 – 11:31)
Normal was never the point.
Aug 26, 2025 | Episode Transcripts
Listen to Episode 2 and locate all resources.
[Kathi Lipp] (0:00 – 0:11)
60% of women say that clutter is a significant problem in their life. And so most people feel this way.
[Tonya Kubo] (0:12 – 0:22)
You deserve peace in your home. You deserve to have an open space to put your coffee mug down. You deserve to eat at your kitchen table, right?
[Kathi Lipp] (0:22 – 0:41)
Even if your family doesn’t want to eat there, you deserve it. And so those are the emotions, because we think, oh, I just can’t make a decision. No, but your brain is pinging in 75 different directions.
I feel fearful. I feel guilty. I feel shameful.
And that’s what is keeping us buried in clutter.
[Kathi Lipp] (1:09 – 1:28)
Today’s guest is someone who needs no introduction in my world. And probably in yours, if you’ve ever googled how to get clutter out of your house without losing your mind….Kathi Lipp.
Oh my gosh, Kathi, I cannot believe that you are on my show after letting me be on your show for so stinking long.
[Kathi Lipp] (1:28 – 1:36)
You’ve been on my show a hundred times. I don’t know that that’s an exaggeration. I think it’s probably been a hundred times.
We’ll have to count it up someday.
[Tonya Kubo] (1:36 – 1:41)
We will. And I think the only person probably who’s been on your show more than me is Roger, right?
[Kathi Lipp] (1:41 – 1:59)
Um, potentially Erin McPherson, because she was my original co-host and still one of my favorite human beings. But when you’ve been doing a podcast for 11 years to be in the top three, that’s a lot of shows.
[Tonya Kubo] (2:00 – 2:16)
That is a lot of shows that is a lot of shows and over 2.5 million downloads. My two point five, I knew it was over two. I did.
It’s over two point five. Yeah. It’s over two point five.
Not that I pay attention to stats or anything like that. We’re not competitive.
[Kathi Lipp] (2:17 – 2:19)
That makes me so happy. I can’t even stand it really.
[Tonya Kubo] (2:21 – 3:21)
So for the listeners who don’t know though, so Kathi here is a best-selling author. She is, uh, as evidenced by two point five million downloads, a beloved podcaster and the creator of clutter free academy, which is a podcast. It is an entire speaking platform, workshop series.
There are courses and a Facebook community that has become a lifeline to thousands of people who thought they were the only ones living with too much stuff and too much shame. But what makes Kathi really freak worthy is this. She hasn’t just built a place where you talk about clutter.
She has built a sanctuary for people who have felt like they didn’t belong anywhere else. And I can say this is fact because this is what she did for me. So we are going to get started.
I’m going to talk a little bit in a moment about how I got to know you, Kathi. But before we go there, you need to tell me your freaks. Why do you love them?
[Kathi Lipp] (3:21 – 3:25)
Who are they? First of all, I need to correct you because you’ve already said wrong things.
[Tonya Kubo] (3:25 – 3:27)
Okay, correct me, friend.
[Kathi Lipp] (3:28 – 5:54)
We built maybe I was the inception of this, you know, with the book clutter free. So some of that came before you, but for the past eight years, we’ve built this together. Okay.
So now I’ll tell you who my freaks are. My freaks are other people who have felt less than because of the state of their house, particularly the clutter of their house. And you know what has really illuminated this for me recently?
I am a monthly guest on a national radio show. It’s called the Dr. Nurse Mama Show. And this is like one of the most accomplished human beings you’ll ever meet.
She’s a doctor. She’s a lecturer. She’s a nurse.
You know, nurse practitioner, mother of four. Her husband is literally a rocket scientist. Not that his accomplishments or her accomplishments, but let’s just talk about the caliber of human beings she is.
And she also feels less than because of her clutter. Everybody else gets this. Why don’t I?
And it’s like, well, no, not everybody else gets this. 60% of women say that clutter is a significant problem in their life. And so most people feel this way.
And we are all running around before people come over stashing and dashing. And we try to look good to the outside world, but on the inside, we know we’re terrible. We know we’re failing.
We know we are the worst. And it’s just not true. If you’re a cluttery person, you’re probably creative.
And when I say creative, that triggers people. They’re like, I can’t draw. I’m like, neither can I.
I can’t even draw a stick figure. I think I said that. I was like, I think I said that to you once.
Would you call me creative? Are you a creative problem solver? Are you resourceful?
Are you responsible? Do you figure out answers to problems that other people wouldn’t figure out? That’s creativity.
And you’re kind. Now, I also say cluttery people are the meanest people in the world, but they’re only mean to themselves. That’s the only person they’re mean to.
And so we have all these strikes against us that don’t need to be strikes. And part of it is changing the thinking about ourselves, but also part of it is changing our habits.
[Tonya Kubo] (5:55 – 6:15)
Oh, my gosh. That’s so good. So thank you for packaging all that up.
And I just need to give a shout out to Dr. Nurse Mama, because her people, every time you’re on the show, we get probably 50 to 100 of her listeners that join the Clutter Free Academy Facebook group. And they are the most delightful women.
[Kathi Lipp] (6:16 – 6:16)
The best.
[Tonya Kubo] (6:17 – 6:50)
They are so delightful. And so, Kathi, I can speak to your community and what you have done for people who struggle with clutter for the last eight years. But as you pointed out, there was a time before I was in your ecosystem.
I came on board shortly after the launch of your book, Clutter Free. I was hoping that where we could start today is having you just explain how you got to there. Give us a little bit of that until you met me sort of stage, and then we can talk about what I’ve seen in your community.
[Kathi Lipp] (6:50 – 8:32)
Yeah. So I had published, I think, five or six books before Clutter Free. And I had one book that did really, really well.
It was a book about marriage, which I don’t talk about anymore. Not because I have a bad marriage. It’s because I have an easy marriage, and people don’t like that.
So here we are. And it’s okay. You know, I don’t want weight loss advice from somebody who has never struggled with weight loss.
So I get it. So they allowed me to write this book about clutter. And as you know, my dad was a hoarder.
My mom really worked hard to stem the tide, but it was overwhelming. And so I saw myself going in that same direction and thought, okay, this is not the life I want to live. And at that point, I was remarried to Roger, the easy one.
And we had 13, 14, 15, and 17-year-old in the house. And we lived in 1,400 square feet. Yeah, it was insane.
So clutter wasn’t a problem. It was a need for survival. And so I learned some things about myself, some things that were hard to face but true.
And I wrote this book. And I started to go and speak at these different events. And you had me come and speak to your church in Merced and did a fabulous job, by the way.
First of all, such a great event coordinator. Second of all, I’ll never forget. My book has a purple couch on the front.
And there were purple couch cookies at this event. I will never forget it for the rest of my life. I love those pictures so much.
[Tonya Kubo] (8:35 – 8:45)
That’s a credit to Niki and Kaci Gallagher. They made all those cookies themselves. And I think Casey even did a painting class for the women who wanted to help.
[Kathi Lipp] (8:45 – 9:24)
It was amazing. A level beyond. See, and this is such a great example of cluttery people.
Because we can work 10 hours on, and I’m not saying she’s cluttery, but it’s just such a great example. It’s easy to put in 10 hours making those cookies. Or it’s not easy, but it’s fun.
It’s doable. You probably spent 40 to 60 hours putting together that event. And at the same time, we’re at home struggling with clutter.
Like the most amazing, creative, generous people in the world. But we suffer because it’s hard. It’s just hard.
[Tonya Kubo] (9:26 – 9:47)
Yeah, it is. It’s so difficult. And like you said, right?
They’re the meanest people in the world only to themselves. I mean, I hear that. I feel that.
I see that every day in your communities. So before we get to kind of present time, I’m hoping you can share a little bit about what you think most people misunderstand about cluttery folks.
[Kathi Lipp] (9:48 – 10:44)
Oh, that they’re lazy. Number one. They are not lazy.
I really reject the word lazy. I find that very few people are actually lazy. Especially if you’re joining a group to declutter.
My guess is you’re not lazy. We love to point fingers at people, right? And say you shouldn’t have that because you’re not working hard enough.
And I really believe that most of us are not lazy. We are completely overwhelmed. We’re neurodivergent.
We don’t know where to start. We have these tapes running in our head. Why even start if you can’t finish?
Your house is never going to look the way it should. You’re a terrible person. Those are the tapes we have running in our head.
And lazy, I don’t see it in our community. I just don’t see it. I see defeat it.
That’s what I see.
[Tonya Kubo] (10:46 – 13:08)
Defeated. And also, to your point, when I fought back with you, when you called me creative one time years ago, right? Your response to me was, but do you ever have so many ideas you don’t know which one to take action on?
And I was like, yes. And you were like, that’s creative, right? Non-creative people have like one, two ideas in their head most.
Right. But creative people have all these ideas, right? And so it’s hard to move forward.
And then the other part that we see a lot, I know, is chronic illness, whether it’s physical illness, mental illness. We see a lot of that. And so I love where you started with the whole, what do people most often misunderstand about clary people?
Because first of all, I see that all the time, right? That laziness thing. Everybody thinks it’s a housekeeping problem.
I feel it, right? Because people, I hear people say it like all the time, social even, because people who meet us now don’t know what our past is or what my past is. But when I first read Clutter Free, right?
Kicking and screaming practically, because I had a six month old time, right? Six month old and a five year old. And the last thing I felt like I needed was to feel worse than I already did about my house.
And I also felt like the house was in such a state. I used to say, I was afraid that I’d lose the baby in the laundry pile. That it was exactly what I needed.
And what spoke to me in that book, every other book, magazine, article, program I had been in up until then gave probably the same basic three core messages, right? Just do it, right? They were always written from the perspective of somebody who like intuitively understood the ebb and flow of stuff in their home.
Intuitively understood organization. So they never met me where I was. But the other part that I think across the board was the ones that were written for married women, more about keeping a household because your husband works so hard.
He deserves to come home to a clean house. The least you can do is make the home a sanctuary when he walks in after a long, hard day. And we’ve always been a two-income household.
So I’d read these things. I’m like, but I work hard.
[Kathi Lipp] (13:09 – 14:59)
And Tonya, I love your generation got this way sooner than I got the memo. I always thought that my husband going to work. That was the ultimate thing.
That was the hardest thing that anybody could do because I grew up in conservative Christian circles. And that was I’m just going to say at the propaganda we were fed. And here’s the thing.
In an equal marriage, which is what Roger and I have, we both work really hard. And when one of us is tired, we get to rest. And so I think you figured this out much sooner than I did, that my husband goes to work eight hours a day.
And that’s a different kind of energy that’s being put out there that because I feel it too. When I was working, that was a different kind of, well, I still work, but it’s a different thing. I’m thinking about specifically those times when I was raising kids and I was doing the hustle of going back and forth to picking them up from school.
And I was working and I was keeping a house. It’s a different kind of energy. And the whole, well, he takes care of the outside.
I take care of the inside. Oh, you mean he mows the lawn once a week? You mean he goes and gets an oil change?
Okay. But when you’re doing dishes, sometimes three times a day, it’s not equal. And I was part of this propaganda machine at one point.
Let him put his feet up, bring him a cold drink. Yeah. So I love to do those things for Roger because I love him.
But this idea that Roger is working twice as hard as me, I reject that deeply. Because we’re all working hard. Everybody is working hard.
[Tonya Kubo] (14:59 – 16:00)
And in all fairness, I feel like Brian is a lot like Roger, right? We do not have the same marriage as a lot of women. And I think we can speak from a place of privilege that a lot of women can’t and we own that.
But when I read clutter free initially, what struck me, there are a few things that struck me. One was the message, it’s not a housekeeping problem. It’s an overall problem.
There was that the fact that it wasn’t about the stuff, it was about the core emotions of fear, guilt, and shame, which I want you to address in a moment. But the third was it never, never once was it my kids deserve, my husband deserves. It was always you deserve.
You deserve peace in your home. You deserve to have an open space to put your coffee mug down. You deserve to eat at your kitchen table.
Right? Even if your family doesn’t eat there, you deserve it. And it was the first time I had ever encountered anything about housekeeping clutter organization that told me I deserved better than how I was living right there.
[Kathi Lipp] (16:00 – 16:10)
That makes me so happy that that’s the message that came through. I need to remember that because, you know, I wrote that so long. Well, we haven’t recorded.
Yes. Yes.
[Tonya Kubo] (16:10 – 16:33)
Right. Well, and that’s the other thing is, right, is you wrote this in 2014. And I, you know, I appreciate the fact that you talked about coming from conservative evangelical circles, because that was before the “church too” movement.
That was before the what we what is now called ex-vangelical movement. I mean, you were really kind of before your time. I don’t know if anybody noticed it, but you told me.
[Kathi Lipp] (16:33 – 16:35)
Oh, the mean people noticed it.
[Tonya Kubo] (16:35 – 16:36)
Right. Because there’s a lot of people.
[Kathi Lipp] (16:37 – 16:42)
But no, I appreciate you saying that. Sorry, please go ahead. Keep telling me how ahead of my time I am.
[Tonya Kubo] (16:43 – 17:44)
Well, because the thing is, that is part of how I felt seen in the pages of that book long before I ever met you. It was that book, right. And how I felt that led me to invite you to speak to church, because I was like, wow, if she can make me feel this way, how is she going to make the women in my mom’s group feel?
How is she going to make the mentor moms feel right? Like I hear all these women talk about the state of their homes as if they’re the worst wife in the world, the worst mom in the world and that makes me so happy. And so that I mean, and I just want to say, that’s the power of a book.
We think books don’t do anything nowadays, but they really do. And I want to go back to that core message of the book, which is the fear. Now, this many years later, how do you see those three emotions still being valid in the space of clitering people?
And how do they keep them stuck?
[Kathi Lipp] (17:44 – 20:35)
Well, I just spoke, I guess it was almost two weeks ago at a big church. And I put up the emotions of clutter. And so the first slide is fear.
And then how does fear manifest itself? The next slide is I might need it someday. There’s an oo from the audience and everybody’s writing it down.
So it feels exactly the same. I’m going to keep that because I might need it someday. And I still battle with this myself.
I don’t want to be wasteful. We might need it someday. I think a lot of cluttery people are extreme thinkers.
What if I lose my job tomorrow and I can’t pay my bills and I have no food to eat? So I’m going to keep the can of spam. Now, if you like spam and I happen to enjoy spam, I hadn’t had it for 15 years and we just had some Korean food and we had some spam with it.
And it was a nice little treat. But you can’t keep things like that if you don’t know if you actually like them. Because there’s always going to be a different way to find food than to have to eat something that you absolutely hate.
So we now have a can of spam in our cupboard and it’s just in case and that’s fine. Or maybe someday we’ll come up with a recipe with it. But just in case thinking keeps us holding on to those pillows that we wouldn’t let a guest use.
It keeps us holding on to the earrings that hurt our ears. But what if I can never buy earrings again? Or what if I have the perfect outfit for this?
I could put them on just as we’re arriving and take them. You know, these are the extreme ways that we’re thinking. So that fear guilt is but so and so gave it to me.
So like my mom gave this to me or my child made this in kindergarten. So there’s that emotional attachment that says, if I get rid of this, it’s showing that person. I don’t love them anymore.
Or it’s showing me that I didn’t care about them as deeply as I thought. And then shame is this. I spent money on this.
And many of us as the granddaughters, great granddaughters, grandsons and great grandsons of depression era people. If you spent money on something, you need to keep that till you die. Because I really, really so.
No, it’s true. It’s totally true. And so those are the emotions because we think, oh, I just can’t make a decision.
No, but your brain is pinging in 75 different directions. I feel fearful. I feel guilty.
I feel shameful. And that’s what is keeping us buried in clutter.
[Tonya Kubo] (20:35 – 21:14)
It is true. Now, I’m wondering because part of why the purple couch has become iconic for the clutter free brand is you tell a story and you tell it on stage. You tell it in lots of different circles about serving coffee on the front porch because the couch wasn’t available.
And almost everybody who has ever entered our space of clutter free has a story about the couch not being available. They identify so deeply with that. I’m curious from your perspective, do you think cluttery people learn to isolate themselves or do you think it’s something that they have to do for survival?
[Kathi Lipp] (21:14 – 22:47)
Oh, I think it’s both. I really do. And it’s great now that we have so many third spaces that you can go to Starbucks.
You can go to the library. You can go to a park. That wasn’t really the reality for maybe our moms and grandmothers growing up.
And so that house, you wouldn’t think to say, hey, let’s meet at the park necessarily. So they would have to keep a portion of their house clean and then the back bedrooms and things like that. I’ll never forget I had somebody from a mom’s group come over and she goes, I want to see the rest of your house.
And I’m like, are you kidding? I about killed myself to just get this living room done. She wasn’t just insistent.
She was forceful. And then she went and told everybody in my mom’s group what a mess it was. And yeah, okay, I’m never having anybody over again.
I was heartbroken. I was heartbroken. Because here’s the thing about cluttery people.
We know the outsides of our house do not match our insides. But you can only judge so often on the outside. So I think we force ourselves into isolation because we don’t want to be hurt again because people we’ve trusted have betrayed our trust.
And we just know it’s safer. We just know it’s safer. And so we make our lives small because as much as I want a big beautiful life, what I really want is to protect myself.
[Tonya Kubo] (22:49 – 22:55)
Yeah. And there’s nothing more personal than how you live day to day.
[Kathi Lipp] (22:56 – 23:56)
It’s so true. And even if you’re coming from a place of clutter, it’s easy to judge somebody else’s clutter. Because my clutter is mine, right?
And your clutter is a mess. Like, why would you keep that? Here’s the thing.
I don’t live in a lot of clutter, but the area in my house that gets the most clutter is right where I’m sitting. Yeah, my camera is very strategically placed right now. And so I look at my desk and it’s like, well, most of this isn’t clutter.
And then I start to look at it. I’m like, okay, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It’s just decisions that have not been made. And so most of the decisions are, okay, throw it away. But it’s very easy to be very judgy about somebody else’s clutter.
People say, oh, you can’t come to my house because you’re the clutter free lady. I’m like, actually, I’m the safest person ever because I may be surprised when I first come in. But then within half a second, I’m like, oh, I get it.
I get it. You’re overwhelmed. I get it.
[Tonya Kubo] (23:58 – 24:14)
Well, and it’s funny is because I get the same thing. And my response is always like, you know, my mom was a hoarder, right? Right.
Like there is nothing you are living in that I haven’t actually gone to bed in and woken up in every day for over a decade.
[Kathi Lipp] (24:14 – 24:17)
Exactly. We are compassionate. If nothing else.
[Tonya Kubo] (24:17 – 25:15)
Oh my gosh. Yeah, we are. Yeah.
And I think that’s the other thing I love. And you said this shortly after we met because I do want to talk a bit about the Facebook group that came to be because I think that is just an extension of your perspective, but also the desperate need that you saw and that you invited me to fill with you. But that idea of other people’s stuff being like more trashy than ours, right?
Like you’re talking about your desk. And I don’t know. Do you have emotional support beverages?
Because I have emotional support beverages, right? I have like these two that I’m drinking from right now. I have a backup glass of water.
And then I have like yesterday afternoons tea that actually only has two inches of tea. And I’m not going to drink it, but I have these hopes that maybe I’ll get thirsty and I can drink it until Brian comes in and just says, Tanya, I’m doing this.
[Kathi Lipp] (25:15 – 25:38)
So Roger calls himself my busser. And so I have left things on a support dresser to be bussed. But also Tanya, I’m the freak who has the mini fridge up here in my office that has an array of beverages.
It’s the dream. I’m living the dream. If only I had my nugget ice maker up here too, then I would never leave my room.
[Tonya Kubo] (25:40 – 26:00)
You know, I know some people like their ultimate fantasy right is the TV in the bedroom and like a current, right? And for me, I’m like, oh, Kathi has a mini fridge. How do I work out of any fridge?
You know, keep in mind, I have a one story home, two bedrooms. Okay. I don’t need a mini fridge in my life, but it just sounds so good.
[Kathi Lipp] (26:00 – 26:12)
Don’t you? You know, they have those little mini fridges for storing makeup that all the teenagers have. I bet somebody’s gotten rid of one of those at a thrift store.
I’m just saying it could go right on your desk.
[Tonya Kubo] (26:14 – 26:17)
It could. It could. I didn’t even know people put their makeup in a fridge.
[Kathi Lipp] (26:18 – 26:38)
It’s very big in teenage land, like all their skincare because all these 13 year olds have seven step skincare routines, which by the way, I endorse. Go for it. You know what?
If you can buy the stuff cheaply enough, go for it. Sorry. Tangent.
That’s another thing. Cluttery. It’s okay.
Cluttery brain.
[Tonya Kubo] (26:39 – 27:54)
Yeah. Tangents. Everything connects in our heads.
I get it. So I would love to know sort of from your perspective, how the clutter free group came to be, because I know like my mindset and where I always go back to, right, is it was a pop up group. It was just supposed to be for the online level study.
And when you came to me to talk about that, of course, I was like, yes, because I was fresh off of the experience of having you come to speak about clutter to my church. And it was the second time you came to speak at our church. The first time we sold out in moments, it was the place where everybody wanted to be.
And the second time I was in the church foyer selling tickets and you would have thought I was holding drug deals, because people would like look over their shoulders, kind of act like they were going to the next kiosk, and then sort of quickly come over to ours and practically whisper to buy their tickets. And then after you spoke, everybody wanted the Bible study, right? And they’re like, Tanya, will you host it?
I was like, sure. I had a big sign up sheet. The church ordered 25 copies.
Not one person went to the office to pick up their copy.
[Kathi Lipp] (27:55 – 28:00)
So weird. But it’s so our people, right?
[Tonya Kubo] (28:00 – 28:18)
And what it came down to is when I talked to folks, they wanted it so badly, Kathi, but they couldn’t bring themselves to walk into the church office and out themselves as having a clear problem. They didn’t want the church secretary to know.
[Kathi Lipp] (28:19 – 28:23)
Yeah. They wanted the transformation, but they couldn’t be seen with the ticket.
[Tonya Kubo] (28:24 – 28:40)
Right. They didn’t want to go into the church the day of the clutter workshop and have everybody know what their house looked like. And we tried a BOGO deal on the tickets.
Oh yeah, that didn’t work either, because they were like, I can’t tell somebody that their house is a mess.
[Kathi Lipp] (28:42 – 30:02)
So what we have to do in situations like that is make it a universal problem. And I know that’s really tough, but to be able to say, everybody is dealing with this. And then I just interviewed somebody yesterday for our internship and she said, oh yeah, I don’t have a clutter problem.
And in my brain, I say, most people who don’t have a clutter problem have a clutter problem. They’re just more organized about it. And maybe she really doesn’t have a clutter problem.
But when all of your clothes are hung up, nobody would say you have a clutter problem until you look in the closet and you say, okay, but you haven’t worn 70% of this in over a year. So that’s a clutter problem. So for our reluctant freaks, we have to be able to position it seven different ways so they can see themselves in.
It’s not trying to over diagnose. That’s not what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to say the principles that is helping the person who hasn’t used their kitchen table in a year because there’s always stuff on it can help the person who has that wardrobe that goes on and on and on.
But they only wear the same three outfits because they’re overwhelmed by their choices. The same cure is for both of them.
[Tonya Kubo] (30:03 – 30:29)
Yeah, it’s so true. And so when you had asked me to build the Facebook group that would support the online Bible study, you know, I think we initially started, we said it was going to be 10 to 12 weeks because it was a six week study and we wanted some time to ramp up. And then we were thinking we’d have some time to like ramp down for people.
What point did you realize it needed to be permanent?
[Kathi Lipp] (30:30 – 30:39)
Am I the one who came up with that? I don’t know. I think you did.
You have a much better memory for these things. So let me interview you, Tanya.
[Tonya Kubo] (30:40 – 30:40)
I remember it.
[Kathi Lipp] (30:40 – 30:51)
When do you remember that we needed to take it from a, you know, encapsulated Bible study to an ongoing group? Tanya, give us your perspective.
[Tonya Kubo] (30:53 – 32:16)
Well, so here’s what I remember. I remember when we started me asking what the goal was, right? Because like I built communities strategically for years before that.
And, you know, and I think it was you and Roger who I had the conversation with. It was like, well, you know, a hundred people would be amazing because you guys knew how many copies of the study had been sold and yet not a lot of completion. And so you’re like, I think like if we got a hundred people in there, that would be awesome.
And we hit 500, I think a third of the way through. And halfway through, people kept posting like, this isn’t going to close at the end of the study, right? Like, this is going to keep going, right?
And because we weren’t, we were only committed for a certain amount of time. You didn’t know what it took to run a Facebook group like that because you had gone and done speaking engagements. And then, you know, they would send it for your newsletter.
They would email you afterward, but it was a different experience. And so about halfway through, I would say maybe week four of the study. I said, well, you know, I really want this to continue.
What do you think? And you were just like, well, that depends. Do you have capacity to continue?
Because I don’t think I can do this. And, you know, and I said, yes, but we had, I mean, we had a thousand people in the first six months.
[Kathi Lipp] (32:16 – 32:17)
It’s wild.
[Tonya Kubo] (32:17 – 32:50)
And the goal was just a hundred. And what I saw happen, and this is, so I’m going to ask you, but I want you to have time to think like what you feel like the group does for its members that they can’t find anywhere else. I will say that when it started, people would come in.
And I remember people’s biggest fear was that somebody they knew would be in the group. So one of the things that I used to say, and I still say it to this day, I was like, welcome to the group where you think you’re the only person who has this problem. And now you realize you have 16,000 friends just like you.
[Kathi Lipp] (32:51 – 33:23)
So I would say what the group does is we assault you with kindness. Because I grew up in the 90s with a program that was very militaristic and that used words like lazy and had sent me, I’m not exaggerating 30 emails a day to say, go do this, go do this.
[Tonya Kubo] (33:23 – 33:25)
Yes, I know because I was in the same group.
[Kathi Lipp] (33:26 – 35:33)
And I realized it worked for some people. But it didn’t work for me. So I needed a place where I could confess my deepest, darkest clutter sins.
And I knew I was going to be met with love. And so what that has meant, it’s an extra burden on the leadership team, i.e. Tanya, to say we don’t let naturally decluttery people in. We don’t let anybody in with an agenda who says, I’m going to teach you how to be decluttered.
And so you have some questions set up so that those people are not part of it. There are other groups where you can go do that. There are tons of other groups.
Our group is we are kind. The kindness is the first step to transformation. To say, I’m not a terrible person.
I’m not broken. And once I can start to believe that about myself and say, but I do have a problem that is inhibiting parts of my life. So this is a safe place to talk about it, to discuss it.
But we’re never going to shame you. And people and we don’t have to shame anybody. They are so self shaming.
So we don’t have to do that. So we come in and we start to de-program people. From what their parents told them, from what society tells them, from what social media tells them.
And I just love it because the most controversial things I’ve said recently on my page, which is open to everybody, is one I don’t sort my laundry. It’s deeper than that, guys. But yeah, I know people lose their mind.
They’re angry at me for not sorting my laundry. And that I had COVID and people are just they’re terrible. They’re terrible.
And there is none of that in our group. It’s such a refreshing place to be.
[Tonya Kubo] (35:33 – 36:32)
Yeah, and you know what? Here’s what I will say because you do such a great job of giving me so much credit. But the only reason I have been able to create that container is because you have given me the freedom and the time to get to know members on a deep enough level that I can speak to what they need.
Because not all of them, it’s like I’m not who I was 10 years ago. So I’m not always fresh in the mind of the beginner, but they are so good about communicating what they need because they have never felt so loved. I mean, because you’re right, they come in and they will tell you all the reasons they’re the worst person on the planet.
They’re the worst daughter, the worst mother, yada, yada, yada. And we always start with, okay, well, let’s give ourselves a little bit of grace. Sounds like you’re really hard on yourself and they’ll always be like, yeah, yeah, I am.
People say I’m a perfectionist. And I’m always like, and how’s that working?
[Kathi Lipp] (36:33 – 36:44)
By the way, we do that to ourselves. Like, there’s nothing you could say to hurt me because I’ve already hurt myself so deeply. And it’s heartbreaking.
[Tonya Kubo] (36:44 – 36:58)
And I do think it is a protective mechanism, isn’t it? Oh my gosh. Thank you for connecting those dots.
So I am going to put everything because like I could talk to you. Well, we have to have you back on the show.
[Kathi Lipp] (36:59 – 37:00)
Let’s just say that right now.
[Tonya Kubo] (37:01 – 37:51)
And because we could talk about fear, guilt, and shame separately for an hour each and how it relates to cluttery people. But just for the benefit of those listening, you can find the Facebook group at Kathi.link slash CFA. So that’s Kathi K-A-T-H-I dot link slash CFA.
You can go to Kathi Lippp, two P’s in Lipp.com, and click on podcast and you can binge on years, 11 years of episodes. So if you so choose. A lot of people, because the episodes are on the short side, a lot of people use those as an inborn timer for their own decluttering mechanisms, which I love.
But now, Kathi, before I let you go, I have a rapid fire segment that we call Freak Flags Fly.
[Kathi Lipp] (37:51 – 37:52)
Are you ready? Yes, please.
[Tonya Kubo] (37:53 – 37:57)
Okay, it’s five questions, no wrong answers, just whatever comes to mind.
[Kathi Lipp] (37:57 – 37:58)
I’ll do my best.
[Tonya Kubo] (37:59 – 38:03)
So finish this sentence. You’re my kind of freak if.
[Kathi Lipp] (38:03 – 38:17)
What a great question. You’re my kind of freak if you want to get past the surface and talk about real things with a little bit of a dark sense of humor. Yeah, okay.
[Tonya Kubo] (38:17 – 38:18)
I want to be that kind of freak.
[Kathi Lipp] (38:18 – 38:19)
Yeah, you are that kind of freak.
[Tonya Kubo] (38:22 – 38:26)
What is something you love that your friends just don’t get?
[Kathi Lipp] (38:27 – 38:57)
It depends on the set of friends. My kids can’t believe we have chickens. Not for dinner, but as livestock.
McDonald’s French fries. I’m sorry, they’re the best French fries. I don’t know.
I don’t know why people like in and out French fries. They’re cardboard and I don’t care what the process is. And boy, I’m getting really vulnerable here.
And McDonald’s Diet Coke. It is the superior Diet Coke and I’ll fight anybody who says something differently.
[Tonya Kubo] (38:59 – 39:03)
You know, you’re not the first person to tell me that, actually. I’m not a cola fan at all, but I’ve heard that before.
[Kathi Lipp] (39:04 – 39:05)
There’s a crispiness to it.
[Tonya Kubo] (39:05 – 39:05)
Okay.
[Kathi Lipp] (39:05 – 39:12)
And you know what? I don’t go to fast food very often, but man, I love those things very, very much.
[Tonya Kubo] (39:12 – 39:21)
Okay, so here’s the question that usually sucks people. I’m curious how you’ll answer it. What community would you infiltrate just to understand it better?
[Kathi Lipp] (39:22 – 40:00)
Okay, I’m going to put aside the highly controversial one. Tech Bros. I think, you know, with everything with AI, which fascinates me, by the way, my favorite podcast outside of what I normally listen to is Hard Fork.
I love it so much. But that culture fascinates me because they seem so progressive, but also so misogynistic. And so how does that work out in the day-to-day?
I find that fascinating.
[Tonya Kubo] (40:01 – 40:08)
Yeah, that’s a good one. Nobody’s answered that before. Okay, so what tool, ritual, or practice helps you stay connected to your people?
[Kathi Lipp] (40:09 – 41:07)
Tool, ritual, or practice. I would say it’s the podcast that’s my deepest way of connecting. And then one of my struggles, I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD, but I’ve got to be adjacent.
And so routine is really hard for me. But when I can get in the routine of really thinking about how to serve my cluttery people, that’s the mindset I have to be in. It can’t be, oh, I need to post something today.
Or, oh, I need to go ask an in-depth question. When I can really get in the place of how can I serve people today, that’s my best connection. And I’m also going to say AI is really helping me not to write what I’m doing on social media, but helping me farm what I’ve already said to be used on social media.
That’s been very, very helpful.
[Tonya Kubo] (41:07 – 41:08)
Okay.
[Kathi Lipp] (41:08 – 41:10)
And it’s just chat GPT. It’s nothing fancy.
[Tonya Kubo] (41:12 – 41:18)
So last question, who is someone doing freakishly good work who deserves a bigger stage?
[Kathi Lipp] (41:19 – 41:59)
Oh, that’s such a great question. I would say Dr. Vicky. Dr. Vicky is somebody, that’s her name everywhere online. And she’s come to our retreats writing at the Red House. And she does deep work on insomnia and sleep. She’s a lifestyle doctor, lifestyle medicine.
And I really feel like what she has to say is so life changing for people about how to get a better night’s sleep, which is so underrated in our society. So I’d say Dr. Vicky.
[Tonya Kubo] (42:00 – 43:12)
All right. All right. I will definitely look her up and put that in our show notes.
Okay, Kathi, it’s hard to believe the time goes so quickly. Yeah, I just want to say thank you though. Thank you for your courage.
Thank you for opening up your perspective on cluttery people and sort of what made you decide that this was a community worth developing. And to everybody listening, I just want to say that if you’ve ever felt like clutter disqualified you from community or that your mess prevents you from belonging. I hope that you’ll find us over in Clutter Free Academy because it’s a really awesome place to be.
But aside from that, I hope that what Kathi has shared today helps you to realize that you don’t have to earn anything. You don’t have to earn acceptance by cleaning up. It’s one of those things that you discover when somebody finally sees you and says, you know what, hey, just come sit here anyway, move the laundry aside.
That’s it for this episode of Find Your Freaks. To help more weirdos find their way here, subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re craving connection, join the Freight Show at findyourfreaks.com.
What makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point.
