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Summer:
This is eat the rules, a podcast about body image self worth, anti dieting and intersectional feminism. I am your host. Summer innan, a professionally trained coach specializing in body image self worth and confidence, and the best selling author of body image remix, if you’re ready to break free of societal standards and stop living behind the number on your scale, then you have come to the right place. Welcome to the show.

This is episode 312 and I’m joined by Caroline J Sumlin, author of we’ll all be free, how a culture of white supremacy devalues us and how we can reclaim our true worth. We’re talking about how the culture of white supremacy influences our self worth, the various ways that this manifests inside of us and in our culture, and how to start to break free from it in order to really find our true value. You can find the links mentioned at summer innan.com, forward, slash, 312,

I want to give a shout out to our inner rebel who left this review. Thank you summer for this podcast. It brings so much clarity, and it’s a great reminder to see my value beyond the size of my jeans. Thank you so much for leaving that wonderful review. You can support the show via ko fi, that is K O dash fi.com, forward slash summer in and in. And you can find that link in the episode info or in any of the show notes. And you can go there and make a monetary donation to the show. You can do a one time donation, or you can do a monthly contribution for as little as $5 a month that helps to keep the podcast going. And you’ll get my mini course conquering negative body talk. You can also support the show just by leaving a review or subscribing, and don’t forget to grab the free resources that I have go to the body image coach.com and you’ll get the free 10 day body confidence makeover. You’ll also find the body image coaching roadmap for professionals. So that’s for providers who also work with people who may also have body image struggles and want to know how they can best support their clients.

I’m really excited about today’s guest. I just stumbled across one of her posts on threads, and immediately thought, I want to interview Caroline for the podcast and read her book. We’ll all be free. It is so good as someone who has been teaching and speaking about body image for over a decade and talking about how it’s connected to self worth, and in more recent years, really looking at that from an anti oppressive standpoint, and looking at how systems of oppression influence our self worth and our body image. This, to me, was like, this is like the book that I wish I had years ago. It spells it out so clearly in terms of how white supremacy culture influences our sense of self worth. So I highly recommend picking up this book, and I think are really going to enjoy the interview today. Caroline J Sumlin is a writer, speaker and thought leader, bringing awareness, healing and transformation to those desperate to live a life that honors their humanity rather than fights against it. Caroline is passionate about how history, society and culture inform our thought patterns, characteristics and behaviors we have normalized. Through her research, she eagerly shares with her audience how living within a society that was built to dehumanize its constituents through oppression and marginalization has led to a normalized culture of dehumanization for all and how to choose a different way of living. Caroline is the first thought leader to bridge the gap between social justice, history and culture and self worth, bringing about true liberation for all who encounter her work, let’s get started with the show.

Hello, Caroline, welcome to the show.

Caroline:
Hi. Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor to be here.

Summer:
Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time, and I’m so glad that I was just scrolling through that threads that one day that you mentioned your book and and then I was like, Oh my gosh, this is exactly the type of stuff that I want to be talking about on my podcast. So I’m really happy to have you here today. Why don’t we start by having you share just a little bit about what prompted you to write will all be free. Like, what? How did you kind of connect these dots? Like, how did you get to this place where you wanted to write this book?

Caroline:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I started to connect the dots in my own when I say connect the dots, I should clarify between white supremacy, white supremacy culture and the way we see ourselves. In my own research about white supremacy, because I wanted to dive deeper into why we lived in a I shouldn’t say, lived past tense, why we live, excuse me, in a society for lack of better words. That just seemed to hate black folks I was, I was at that point, and I’ve been at that point before. This was a question that I had honestly asked myself throughout my childhood, really, because I had learned to essentially just accept racism, right? I think the way that my my parents taught me, which is probably the way that their parents taught them, was a lot of a lot of like, this is how this is how our country, this is how white people, this is how society sees us. It’s not true about us, but this is the reality. And so this is just how it is. And so this is how you play the game. And I got to a point where I was like, Well, why? Why? How? There has to be a reason. I was like, when did this start? When did all like, when in our in the creation of modern society, did we go from a world where there was no anti Black racism to a world where anti Black racism was the norm, and I began diving into the concept, the idea, the truth of white supremacy. Because if you, if you learn anything about white supremacy ever which most people don’t, most people in school history classes, unless you are choosing to study that at a collegiate level, aren’t going to learn what white supremacy is, maybe beyond white supremacist groups, right, which, of course, I knew about at a surface level, but I had never actually learned what white supremacy was as a whole, and when I researched that and dug deeper into the fact that it was not only systemic, but a culture that emerged from it and began learning about the traits, the characteristics of it all, these dots began to connect for me, like, oh, wait a minute. White supremacy is not just about ensuring that white people are at the top of society. White supremacy is about ensuring that whiteness is our only accepted norm standard. It’s a degree of excellence and superiority and exceptionality that in order to maintain systemic white supremacy.

Cultural white supremacy has emerged to ensure and to help aid in that maintenance of that right. And so the more I learned about the more I learned about the the traits such as perfectionism, it’s in individualism and progress being like bigger and better and more and and quantity over quality in and even began looking at the media and begin looking at how just all the white images were always dominating, all the commercials and all of the magazines and all of the idea of what the correct, the quote, unquote, correct body was supposed to look like. It just kind of began where it’s like, oh my goodness. This, this, this. This is why I’ve struggled so much. This is where my constant thought real, that play that has been playing in my head my entire life, comes from this idea that I have essentially been brainwashed to believe that in order to be worth anything in this world, I have to subscribe to this, and I had fallen right forward. I had spent most of my life really embodying most of the characteristics of white supremacy, including the idea of what I believed a perfect body should look like so that I could be what society told me was worthy. So when I connected those dots, that’s when my research began to shift. That’s when my writing began to shift. And then that’s when I realized that’s this is what the book is about. This is where. This is the meat of it. This is what people aren’t talking about. People beginning to talk about racism. People are oftentimes talking about systemic racism and how it impacts us, but very few people are talking about, how does white supremacy make us see ourselves? And that’s where that came from.

Summer:
Yeah. Amazing. Thank you for sharing that. And to that point, not a lot of people, if any, are really talking about how systemic issues influence our self worth, and specifically white supremacy culture, it’s predominantly seen as an individual issue and something that you self help your way to and that it’s, you know, it’s something that you I don’t want to say it’s necessarily your fault, but I think a lot of people believe it’s their own fault, like they believe there’s just something wrong with them, or there’s something broken, instead of looking at like, where did that come from? And I think what’s so great is you go back, like historically, to be like, Okay, well, let’s actually look at where this came from, across beauty, across hustle culture, across the school system and whatnot.

Caroline:
Exactly. And because, and that’s because I also I just like you mentioned, I felt like it was my fault, that there was something wrong with me in that if I if I wanted to beat this, I needed to fix myself. I needed to just be better. Just be better, very blanket, but just be better. Be be be perfect, not realizing that there were so many layers to unpack about what that where that was, was even coming from. So it was, it was so freeing for me, and I was hoping that in writing the book, it would be freeing for others as well, absolutely.

Summer:
So you mentioned there like to sort of like, be better, be different. Like, can you do you mind sharing just a little bit about I and you share a lot in the book about your personal story, about that, but like, just to kind of put it into context for people, like, how did that? How did that sort of show up for you? More specifically.

Caroline:
yeah, there’s, I mean, it depends on what camp you’re coming from, right? So if you’re coming from the camp of education, career, you know, income, capitalism, etc. I was always taught, especially as a black woman, like listen, you have to be two, three times as better as everybody else to get even, 5060, if you’re lucky, 75% of the success as your white counterparts. That was definitely a message that I heard growing up. So I had to make sure that everything I did in school was was perfect, if maybe, maybe I could be a little less than perfect sometimes, as long as that percentage still landed in the A range. Okay, I maybe it wasn’t 100% but I needed to be 95 and up with everything that I did there was it didn’t matter whether it was something that was difficult for me, whether it’s something I was struggling with, whether it was something I was interested in, it didn’t matter. And if I was struggling with educational concepts, it was, it was a me issue. It was, well, you’re not studying hard enough, you’re not trying hard enough. You have to play this numbers game. That was how I was taught. It’s a numbers game. If you want to get anywhere, you have to get the numbers. The numbers are the GPA, they’re the test scores.

So you have to play this specific game to get to where society accepts you as a worthy human being, because you contribute. You got your own money. You got your and and also, you know, there’s a lot of that too that come that stems from the fact that because especially black, black people have been held back from that success in our society for so long. It also looks different for us too, in that being able to say I got I did what I needed to do, and I got my money and I got my career, even though I live in a society that was meant to try to stop that from happening like it’s a pride thing too for our culture. So it’s really like hounded in you to be that, to be the best as much as you possibly can.

So I’ve always had that, that mindset, that mentality, and would always beat myself up if I wasn’t performing at the level that I believed. And it also looked at never being able to sit still. I was always involved in 1000 things. I always felt like the more that I could add to my resume, the more activities I was in, the more I was doing things that demonstrated leadership. Didn’t matter if I was interested in or not. I mean, in high school, I think at one point I may have been involved in like seven or eight organizations at a time. Is ridiculous. I’m in high school, I was getting the amount of sleep that a college student gets when they’re cramming for finals, and I was 16, that that’s what that looked like, and that that care, that’s still, honestly, that’s that’s still, I still wrestle and struggle with that, and we can talk more about that later, but it’s something that takes so long to kind of figure out, so that, you know, that’s one camp of it, another camp of it. Especially since I know, you know, we talk, you talk a lot about body image. Here was your body, you know, now I was lucky in that I wasn’t receiving that messaging in the home. It wasn’t receiving that. My mother was never giving me any type of, you know, your body needs to look a certain way, messaging, if anything, she would. She never understood why I struggle with my body? Because she looked at me and thought, I wish I looked like you.

So, you know, I don’t see what your issue is. But for me, especially, I grew up in a predominantly white suburban area, right? The TV shows, have you know, you see, you see the same, you see the same image of what’s considered to be beautiful, depending on what you’re watching, what you’re reading. The main characters in all of your books, it’s getting, you know, into into your brain waves as to what’s considered to be beautiful. Every single commercial the main character is, is, is the girl with the blonde hair. If you’re, you know, watching a TV show, it’s always the sidekick or the best friend or the or the bully, who was maybe a person of color, or, if not a person of color, could have been a person with a larger body size, that that imagery is always being portrayed, right? But who was always the main character, who. Always the one who was considered to be the best. They always looked a certain way. You saw it when you were, you know, walking down the aisles of target, and still to this day, right? Like every one of those, I would be obsessed with those women’s magazines or those teen magazines, Cosmo girl and even at that point, how to get your abs? Do you what what such and such celebrity does for a flat stomach, right? And I didn’t have a flat stomach. To this day, I don’t have a flat stomach. I’ve always had a bit of a belly, no matter how thin or large I have been in my because my body has varied in size as we are. All of our bodies has and no matter that my smallest or my biggest, I’ve always had a stomach, but I internalized that as a me problem, because society told me that if I didn’t want this, I needed to do this exercise. I needed to stop eating this I needed to to swap all of my food for this food. I needed to do that right, and especially because I grew up in a white area, being one of the only black girls. You don’t really get a lot of attention from, you know, if you, if you’re attracted to boys, which I was, you don’t really get a lot of attention from any of like you. The only people you really have to be attracted to, if you don’t go to school with any Black boys, are the white boys, right? But all the white boys are attracted to all the girls with blonde hair. And so you’re over here wondering what you know. You know, you know you’re the only one that looks like you. You know you’re the only one that doesn’t have hair that just sits the way that everyone else’s hair sits is before the curly hair movement for the natural hair movement, right? And so literally, all of that is just getting put into your brain waves. And you there you have it, you know?

So those are two large ways that it really affected me. I will also say that eventually, when I got to college, I when my disordered eating started to kind of take take place, because the nature of the first thing I talked about all that busyness and all of that trying to prove myself, it led to me not having a lot of time for meals, and I would miss the calf, I would miss the times, right? And I noticed as I only started having time for maybe one meal a day. I was in I was walking all around campus. I was actually dropping weight. I had never dropped before. I just never experienced that. I had been an active athlete all my all my life, but I always sat at one weight, and I just thought that was my weight. And even though I didn’t like it about myself, I had never actually changed or started to develop like a disordered eating until I saw what eating like, only like one meal a day was doing to my body. And I didn’t know that was possible to, like, be really thin. And I didn’t know that was possible for me. I just assumed it wasn’t. So I was like, oh my goodness, I should this is it. I will only eat one meal a day, and when I do, I’ll make it smaller. There were times where I would be like, I’m gonna only eat cereal today, or I’m gonna only eat a really small salad today, you know what I’m saying. And like I so it started to kind of catch up to me, and before I knew it, I was coming becoming obsessive with it, because once I saw a result that I never thought I’d see, I was terrified to go back to what I had always seen as inferior. So I got immersed in that, and that took over for quite a few years, really, until my, I would say, honestly, until pregnancy. And so I until I was like, let’s see 26 when I got pregnant. I think so. Yeah, you can see how long that that was an issue for me.

Summer:
Wow, yeah. I appreciate you sharing that, because I think it’s helpful for people to hear how this plays out, and so that it’s not just such this, like nebulous concept, that it’s like, these are the ways that it, you know it, it resides in us, and these are the thoughts and the behaviors and the and the outcomes as a result of white supremacy culture. But I actually want to take a step back and have you define white supremacy culture, because I think maybe for some people listening, that might be the first time they’ve heard that phrase. I think most people understand what white supremacy is, but often even then, the knowledge is, like you said, like white supremacist groups like the KKK or something like that. And so can you define, like, what white supremacy culture is?

Caroline:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, the first way to understand white supremacy culture is to first understand white supremacy, because white supremacy culture is essentially birthed from systemic white supremacy. So like you said, most people will see white supremacy, and they’ll think extremist groups. They’ll think, you know, specifically, a person or a group of people who believe that white people should be the dominant people in society. And a lot of times, even the most extreme might be, will be, excuse me, that they believe that white people should be the only ones in society, and that that does go to that extreme, but then usually that’s, that’s the that’s the end of it. That’s the end of what we may understand. The truth is, white supremacy is systemic in that the building of a society. Society where you’re going to create a caste system where white people are the dominant and the norm and the standard and the ones with the opportunity, the ones that that hold the majority of the material wealth, the resources, etc, and the society is created in such a way to ensure that it funnels in that way, that is white supremacy, right? But then, in order to ensure that white supremacy, especially in the way our society was built.

Of course, in the beginning it was it was it was it was obvious, right? You know, it’s clearly obvious with with colonization and the genocide and removal of indigenous peoples, and then also the chattel slavery of African American Africans and would later become African Americans. That’s that you can, you can, kind of, you know, read the history books, or even, you know, even during those times that the the supremacy of whiteness was was was obvious that terminology may not have been around, but it was clearly obvious that this, that they were, they were not hiding the fact that they were creating a country for them. They were not hiding the fact that they felt like this is our place, and the other people, so to speak, are only here to serve us and to serve our power and to ensure that we dominate, because that was their thought pattern and that that was not a hidden fact. As we progress, I guess, you know, or just kind of, you know, move throughout history and certain things change and enslavement ends, etc. The continuation of creating that systemic white supremacy ends up becoming, in some ways, hit, more hidden, and in some ways not, but in different ordinances and laws and but anything from as obvious is like redlining to as hidden for keeping within housing as HOAs, like the creation of HOAs, which were not outwardly like, Hey, this is racist. Black people can’t live here, Indigenous people can’t live here, etc. It was that in the fine print, right in the HOA, in the ordinance that this was not a community for for non white people, right?

So you may have, as you go throughout society, you’ll see the large, obvious examples of that, or you’ll see it in, you know, whether that be, you know, like one of the biggest ones that I can think of right now might be the GI Bill, where they, you know, ensured that, after the war, World War Two, I believe that the housing assistance that was that was happening for veterans returning from the war was essentially reserved for white veterans and not black veterans who also served in the war.

So there’s things like that, right? So you have all these things. You have that happening. You have that happening somewhat outwardly, but also somewhat kind of, you know, covertly and in that you essentially create this idea that even though you are the society and the people who are running in our ensuring that whiteness maintains in in a in A, you know, at the top essentially that the idea, or the narrative that’s being written is that, but it, but it’s because we’re better, it’s because we earned it. It’s because we have the education, it’s because we have the qualifications, it’s because this is the standard, right? So the standard of professionalism, when we think of that, and we think of like that white man in a suit and the way they speak, and is that in the other that’s only a standard because they said so, they decided that because they were the ones with the power to do so, right? That’s where that standard, so to speak, comes from. And if you do that because you want to make sure that a standard that you have is essentially untouchable, you make it harder for other people who may not have access to what you have access to, because you’ve been the one to restrict it. But then you say, what you literally say is that we didn’t restrict it. They’re just not good enough. They just don’t have it. They’re just not educated enough. They it’s not our fault. We, we made the money. They should make the money, right? Even though you’re literally stealing the wealth as you’re saying that. So it ends up fusing a culture where what’s normalized. Now we get to modern day society and our beliefs in what is standard or what is superior align with racist ideals and whiteness, but we don’t see it because it’s so normalized.

And that’s where that culture comes from. And it’s in literally every sector of society. You can see it in education. You can see it in beauty standards, in the way and it again, it’s everything from systemic so we restrict, at, let’s, let’s look at, let’s look at the healthcare right? We restrict access, we restrict access to quality food in lower income communities, quality grocery stores, food deserts, right? And then we we demonize, and we act as though it’s a cultural reason they’re just. Unhealthier, quote, unquote. And I’m using quotes there, unhealthier, right? It’s their fault that that statistics show that if you’re black, you have a higher risk of a, b, c, d, e, f and g. No, we have a higher risk of those illnesses because of not only the things I mentioned, like food deserts and access to health care being more restricted, but you also put the worst, the worst factories and things of that nature in our communities back in the day when, when we had more of an industrial society, you put those things in the black communities, and you would only allow for black folks to work in the steel mill or the railroad or whatever the case may be, and then you caused a whole bunch of health problems. But, oh, that’s because our culture, we just will look at what they eat, look at what they you see what I’m saying. So then you have this idea in your mind that, oh, if I eat, you know, a kale salad, that’s superior and that’s more healthy, but if I eat a plate of collard greens, that’s unhealthy, and that’s, that’s what makes them all so, you know, again, at risk for heart disease and blood pressure, because it’s all of them problem.

That’s how the narrative, that’s how it’s written in our society. And we just, we’ve just accepted it, because we don’t, we don’t see any different, we don’t know any different and and that’s, again, that’s, that’s where the culture comes from. I can go on and on, but essentially that that led us to all these different characteristics that are now our norm, individualism, it’s a you problem. You should fix it. It’s not our fault. Perfectionism, if you’re not perfect, then you’re worthless. The things that I mentioned earlier, all of that stems from all of these systemic and cultural ideas coming together to the point where, in our culture, these are just the things, these are just the characteristics and the standards that we just think are better in the even though we’ve never, we’ve never questioned why we think that way.

Summer:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, yeah. I appreciate you explaining that. I feel like I need to go back and listen to everything you said. You just said there again to like, really absorb it. But it was so it was so good. So, you know, let’s, let’s tie that, then to self worth, for people listening like, I guess maybe to start that is like, how do you, how do you define self worth? And then you’ve, I mean, you’ve mentioned your own personal story, and you’ve mentioned how white supremacy culture makes us feel like, you know, there’s, there’s something wrong with us, like, I guess just like, elaborate, a little bit more on, like, how, how that really influences self worth, yeah?

Caroline:
I mean, I think if you constantly, if you live in a society that’s constantly telling you why you’re terrible, how are you gonna love yourself? Yeah? I mean, quite simply, right? Yeah, exactly like we live in a society that constantly telling you that no matter how hard you try, no matter what you do, it’s not good enough. Because if you think you, even if you think you reach the bar, we gonna move it. We’re gonna move it because we want your money. We’re gonna move it because we want you. We want you to think less of yourself so you can constantly buy more things to kind of feel better about yourself for a second. But then you’re gonna, you’re gonna, we’re gonna move the bars. You’re gonna do it again. That that’s, you know, and that’s everything that’s even and I’m not anti College, and I’m a huge I went to college. I’m huge fan of college. All my kids go to college, if they choose. But at the same time, even college, right, the idea that you got to spend money to go to more prestigious institution, right, to be able to appeal. I had this conversation with my husband just the other day about, you know, the name recognition of certain institutions and how that plays a role in how society sees you like that’s all part of capitalism, and that’s all part of you really believing that you have, that you have to buy into what society says is a good, a good enough human, And you try to be those things. And then society says, No, I’m gonna move it. And then you try, continue to try. And then you wonder why you feel like you’re on a hamster wheel and you feel like you’re never enough.

The very fact that we have, I think, an epidemic of people that think they’re not enough. And the reason why I know is that because we, if we all, if the majority of us believe that we were enough as humans. We would not have so many people who write books and quotes in that circulate on the internet about you are enough, just reminding you, yeah, yeah. We would not have a you are enough movement if we didn’t live in a society that made us all feel like, no matter how hard we try, we’re not enough. And it all stems from everything we’re talking about, but essentially that’s what’s become our norm, is believing that, and it looks different for everyone. Everyone has a different story, a different vantage point, a different intersectionality in which they approach or in which they are receiving or interacting with this society. But it essentially comes back to the same this same idea, I’m not doing enough in what society do? In what other society do? People think I shouldn’t sit down and rest I feel guilty for this, right? And you know what I’m saying? In what other society are? Are people, you know, more praised more for the less amount of sleep. They get because, oh, you hustling, you you’re grinding, you’re, you’re showing you’re, you’re, you’re pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, you’re, you’re doing more and more and more. Those people that are doing more and more and more are literally chasing a concept of enoughness that society has essentially attached the most quote, unquote elite whiteness to and then put it way over here, like a dangling carrot, and then constantly moving it, yeah, to the point where eat like and this is the thing that I I always want people to understand from my work, is that it affects you, no matter who you are, no matter how you identify. It may you affect you again differently, or maybe not, as I don’t want to say severely, but just I don’t know differently, depending on, again, whether or not you exist in a marginalized body or not, or in and in how many ways you exist in a marginalized body, right?

Like we all have to understand our privileges and our marginalizations, right? We’re both women. That’s a marginalization. I’m a Black woman that’s a little bit more of a marginalization. I’m CIS het, though I’m not a member of the LGBTQ plus community. So if I was, that would be a further marginalization, right? So the more marginalized you are, unfortunately, the more you are further away from like this. There’s just like this wheel. I actually use it in my talks, and it’s like, at the very center of the wheel is like, you know, male, CIS, het, white, elite, educated, right? Well bodied, able bodied, all that, and then it kind of pans out from there. So the more you pan out from there, you know, the further you are from, like, that pinnacle of what society deems us to be the most worthy, but like, there’s literally almost nobody, except for the most elite, white, cis het men that are wealthy, that exist in that center. So all of us are trying to find ways, not even realizing we’re doing it, because I wouldn’t. I mean, someone will say, Oh, you really want to be a CIS, head, white, rich man. No, I don’t want to be that. But clearly, what society does is ensures that if I’m not that, that what I have access to, what I how I feel about myself, how I constantly feel like I’m never doing enough, that I don’t never have enough money, like all those things exist because I’m not that, and then, therefore feeding this idea in my mind, I must not be good enough, because then again, even though society is withholding that from you in so many ways, and telling you that you’re not worthy unless you are those things, society is also telling you And it’s all your fault, right? It’s like somebody stealing all of your money and telling you it’s your fault. You got it, got stolen? No, it’s not you stole it. So that’s yeah, I hope that answered. I don’t know if I feel like I just veered off on 17,000 different things, but

Summer:
no, that was really, really, that was really, really good. And the wheel is the power and privilege wheel we we use that in our… Yeah, they, just for people if they want to google it, because they can look it up and see where they sit on the wheel. Because, like, some of the things are more salient than others, but it’s a helpful for just understanding, like, your own, your own privilege and and like, whether you’re kind of sitting more in the mainstream or the margins. So I feel like there’s so, I mean, I feel like I could talk to you for like, three hours, awesome, but one and, and you go into it in, in, in your book, like, what, what the antidotes are to some of these things. Like, you know what this is? If perfection is the thing, like, here’s what we want to aim for instead. But I guess the question I have for you is, like, is it possible for us to thrive in these systems, like you mentioned earlier, your own, your like, that, you still struggle with it. So I don’t know if you want to come at this from your own personal perspective or just in general, what you think, but like, what do we? What do we do with this? Because obviously, I think we all want to work towards changing these systems, but that’s not gonna, I mean, that’s, that’s not the world we’re living in right now. And so, yeah, yeah. And so how do we what do we do with this information? And like, is it possible for us to still thrive or build up that sense of self worth despite being a part of this system?

Caroline:
Yeah, that’s such a good question. And it, like I’ve mentioned earlier, it is something that I struggle with every day. I mean, I’ve, I’ve been in the thick of it even more since writing the book, because I homeschool my children, and I feel like I wrote the book and then that was it through, and I threw it in the air, and it ain’t made no money, and nothing like I just, you know, every now and then I might get an opportunity, I might get a talk that I do. It’s not super consistent, because if you are going to be quote, unquote successful, the way that the world tells you to be successful. Society demands success from you. It goes back to that numbers game that my mom told me about when I was in high school. But I’m not able to play the numbers game if I’m, you know, being a mom and homeschooling or just even trying to be a freaking human being, right? You can’t be a human being and be a robot, but society wants you to be a robot, right? So you’re constantly wrestling with, oh, shoot, I should be doing more, getting frustrated with yourself.

And so the answer your question is, well, first of all, you said, Can we thrive in these systems, which I love the word, because it’s such an important word, we’ve gotten so used to accepting survival that we forget that. That we deserve to thrive. We don’t just deserve to survive. That isn’t that shouldn’t that. I mean, of course, there’ll be seasons where that is just, that’s it, and that’s great, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s life. Don’t feel bad if all you can do is survive right now, but never settle for just survival. Always know that a season of thriving is what you deserve, and that you and you and that you will get there. But I think we also, in order to get there, we have to decide that thriving for us looks different than what society says is thriving, right? And I’m not saying that means you throw up your hands and say, Well, I guess I’ll. Society says, in order to thrive, I must be a millionaire. And I, I, I, you know, I’m gonna throw my hands up and just not have any money like I’m not saying that. You know, money is, money is is is a universal thing. Currency is a universal thing. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just the way that our society deals with it is not the best. It’s dehumanizing. So I’m not saying, like you throw your hands up and you say, Well, I guess, you know, I won’t try anything anymore. I won’t have goals. Or, you know, considering this is a, again, a podcast about your your body, I guess I’ll just neglect my body like, I’m not saying that at all. Like you decide what does thriving look like for you? So in my body, thriving looks like how do I feel in my body today? And am I honoring how my body feels and not constantly thinking to myself, oh my goodness, I didn’t get a workout in today. I am bad. I must work out, right? It’s that it’s making those little shifts in I’m focusing on my body being my vessel, and so how am I honoring and taking care of that vessel today? Right? Thriving in other ways in your whether it’s in your parenting, whether it’s in your career, you’re gonna have to ask yourself, what does that look like for you? Does that look like more boundaries that you set in the workplace to make sure that you are not allowing yourself, even when you feel pressured to to succumb to that hustle culture. You know, it could look like sometimes giving yourself permission to play the game when necessary, and then backing up from that game when you’ve had enough. And because sometimes there is, there is survival, right? And literally, in my own experience right now, I’m not, I’m not kidding you, part of me playing the game I’m about, I’m about to start delivering for Uber Eats. Like that’s I gotta do. I gotta make a little extra cash, because we’re in a situation where we okay, we, you know, we need a little extra cash in this season. And my work, my being an author and being a speaker, is not making the money that I hoped it would make, and I need in order to continue homeschooling, we’re going to need a little extra cash every month, so I’m going to have to do some side hustling, so to speak, and drive for UberEATS a couple days a week, because that may be a season that I’m in where I may have to play the game, because there is a reality to the society that we live in. But am I going to put my worth on that, no, and that’s a daily that’s that’s a daily act, that’s a daily that’s journalism, that’s mindfulness practicing, that’s self care practicing. So that we, we detach our worth and our humanity from what society is demanding of us, and then we decide we have the choice in how we move throughout society and being okay with that looking different in different seasons.

Summer:
Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate that. And yeah, I think it is. It’s a daily thing. It’s not just something that you’re you’re done with. It’s like, it it’s insidious, and like, we have to be mindful of how it’s found its way into us, and bring awareness to those thought patterns and those beliefs to try to to choose differently for ourselves. And I think that’s your book does such a good job of of laying it all out with respect to the history, the different ways that it shows up, the different systems that that it has influence over and how that influences us, and then how to start to kind of, you know, think through that and notice how it’s showing up. And so I highly recommend it to people. I think it’s like a, you know, a must read. It’s one of those books that I feel like I’ll be recommending to everyone, because it just is such an important way to be talking. I don’t think we can talk about self worth and body image without talking about that. And so I appreciate your work so much, and I thank you for being here today.

Where can people find more of you, Caroline?

Caroline:
thank you so much. You can find more of me is a little intermittent right now because life is lifeing, but I spend most of my time on Instagram, so that’s just at Caroline J Sumlin, and like we met on threads, I spent a lot of time on threads as well, which is also at Caroline J Sumlin. My website is Caroline J sumlin.com all of the articles I write, a lot of articles. I haven’t written one in like a month, but I have a lot of articles about all these things that I’ve. Talk about, and you can find all those on sub stack or my blog, because I publish them in both places. So if you’re not on sub stack, you can go to my website, click Articles, and you can read a pretty decent amount of articles there, if that’s interesting for you. And of course, my book is available wherever books are sold that’s physical as well as audible and Kindle or whatever. However you you read your books or you can request at your local library, etc, etc.

Summer:
Amazing. Thank you so much. Caroline, it was lovely to have you here today. Rock on.

Caroline:
Oh, thank you. Thank you so much.

Summer:
I feel like this is one of those episodes that I even need to go back and re listen to, because there was just so much good information in it. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, and definitely go pick up a copy of will all be free. I think it’ll change your life. I will link to all of that in the show notes at summer innan.com. Forward, slash, 312, thank you so much for being here today. Rock on.

I’m Summer innan, and I want to thank you for listening today. You can follow me on Instagram and Facebook at summer innan, and if you haven’t yet, go to Apple podcasts, search, eat the rules and subscribe, rate and review this show. I would be so grateful until next time. Rock on you.