episode 207
new york times bestseller brit bennett on taking small steps to accomplish big wins and giving yourself grace in the midst of new experience
best selling author of the vanishing half and the mothers, brit bennett joins us this week on human2human with stacy ike for a conversation on the nuances of identity, the misconceptions of the creative process, and how fiction can help us explore lives other than our own.
SONG OF THE EPISODE | have mercy by eryn allen kane
BOOK OF THE EPISODE | the vanishing half by brit bennett
watch the video interview
“i used to sit down when I was revising and be like okay, i have to change all of these things in the draft, and this is going to make it better ...and now it just has to be 2% better. i don’t have to fix every problem. i just want to make it a tiny bit better than what it was.”
— brit bennett
EPISODE 207 REFLECTION QUESTION
QUESTION | what do we do with the traits that we inherit from childhood, and how do we deal with them once we’ve left that home behind?
STACY’S REPLY |
I love this question because it’s not something you can immediately answer. You have to sit in the question and in the experiences beyond this question to really answer honestly. Thankfully, I have had a few months to ponder my thoughts here and what I noticed is I took a lot of my upbringing to college (very normal) and started tweaking things little by little through the different people I met. We all have judgments about others and I believe most of that is rooted in fear, lack of understanding or lack of experience. When you connect with someone on a personal level it’s very different from judging them in your head. Every person I met that was “different” than me, challenged me in a critical way. I was either leaning more into my beliefs through a new perspective or deconstructing it. The third option I recently have fallen in love with is having the capacity to hold space for both, my experience and someone else's without judging either. That's where I have found the most love, the most understanding and the most progress. This is one of those questions, that our lifetime experiences will keep answering and I love it!
