Teddy Frank is a Licensed Master Social Worker, a Reichian Psychotherapist with a love for leadership facilitation and coaching in the corporate arena. Teddy works locally with scientists from Colorado State University that are looking at diversity, equity, justice, and inclusion within academia. Teddy works with collective trauma healing and ancestral healing, including her own, on what she names “The Hera’s Journey.” Throughout the recording of her Let Perfect Burn episode, I kept thinking, “She does THAT too?” Teddy’s passions are boundless, her convictions pure and fiery and her quest to understand and intuit humanity is unlike any other person’s I have experienced in my lifetime. 

Teddy grew up in a tumultuous and violent family where there was sexual abuse. But for Teddy, her homelife didn’t sink her, it activated her. “My awakening was at the age of 19 with the women’s movement. I mean, the feminist movement was in full swing. And I became a leader of grassroots community organizing, leading the whole on sexual crimes against women.”

Teddy is a healer by nature and so she couldn’t pass up the opportunity for us to be in dialogue together for this episode, creating a safe and grounded place for me to take a step toward. “I’m different than you, Tara, but you are also in me, and I am also in you.” We spoke about being a woman and a mother and that in society, staying good and staying quiet often leads to a wider acceptance. Daring to express pain and speaking truth to trauma rocks the boat, but it is an act that Teddy describes as ‘an awakening’ which is born out of “feeling the pain of not conforming, of questioning worth and value.” 

And what was so moving was that after speaking with Teddy, I started to realize that my ‘falling apart’ was something so universal to being human and that my strength to buck the norm of the ‘perfect woman’ was dare I say it, heroic. 

By the end of Teddy’s beautiful interview, I started using different words to speak to my mental health crisis, my hospitalization and my falling apart. 

“I am on the Hera’s journey, and I have had an awakening that has irrevocably changed my life.”

Highlights from Teddy:

"I remember five years old, my mother was very depressed. And I was sitting at the kitchen table across from her, and she was looking off to the side. And I looked directly at her and I said, 'Mommy, are you mad at me?' And she brought her gaze back, and she said, now finally resting in my eyes, 'No, honey, why would you think that?' And I said, 'I can't see myself in your eyes.' And in that moment, my five year old wisdom self said, 'My mom is not available to me.' And that's when we start to say, 'Okay, I need to take care of myself.'"

"So in a moment, our nervous systems get wired for survival and says, 'It's not okay to express my needs.' And so we develop these patterns that become the cracks in our psyche, the shadows in our soul. And that's what we then ride upon as nice girls, or as high performers in the world. Or, as you know, the sort of conforming to the female notion, which changes culturally but by Western dominant male standard says, 'You don't express your needs too strongly, because then you're aggressive. She's aggressive, she's angry.'"

Don't Miss a Beat.

My Website, Let Perfect Burn:
https://letperfectburn.com/

Follow my Instagram for news from me, Tara Beckett:
https://www.instagram.com/letperfectburn/

Connect With Teddy Frank:

Her Website:
https://www.humanenergetics.com/

Her LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/teddyfrank/

Comedian Antonia Lassar self-identifies as 60% Jewish, 30% Chronic Illness and 10% Bisexual chaos and recently their standup addressed embracing the term disabled. “Prior to this, I was like, ‘Yes, I’m exhausted all the time. Yes, when I lie down, I choke on my own stomach acid. Yes, I don’t poop.’ But that’s not because I’m sick. I was like, ‘That’s because I am morally inferior.’”

During this set, Antonia’s crowd laughed, but Antonia shines in their ability to take truth and push the envelope one more time. “And I know that you might hear all those symptoms and be like, ‘Obviously that’s an illness and not moral decay’ but you are seriously understanding my Jewish capacity for self-blame. Okay, I’m like, ‘What about my diet and lifestyle caused the Holocaust?’”

Before coming to LA to focus on their career as a comedian, Antonia toured college campuses addressing sexual assault with their work, Post Traumatic Super Delightful. Antonia is a victim of sexual assault and in their work they utilize comedy to challenge the expectations of the perfect survivor. “Trustworthiness is big. They need to have the education level that we believe that they are trustworthy enough to actually speak accurately about their experience. And a lot of my work really dives into this critique of our expectations of the perfect survivor.”

In their interview, Antonia takes us through the challenging, and sometimes devastating, path to create art after falling apart. “Suddenly, my body totally broke down and it was, to me, a message from the heavens being like, all right, this has gone on long enough. You're literally killing your body at this point. You need to get your art back together.”

Highlights from Antonia:

“For some artists and for some people like me who's mental health, when it deteriorates, it manifests as me stopping to produce. But just getting art and writing out of me is a health behavior. It keeps me healthy to keep getting art out of me. Also, physically, like when I'm unhealthy, I can't poop. You know, they feel very tied in my body. It's like, I've got to get my art out. I've got to get my shit out. It's all got to come out.”

“So, I mean, it was crazy. It was such an unusual experience to watch your body stop working, you know? And I started getting so malnourished, because I literally wasn't able to eat food over two years, that's how long this took. But I finally got to the point where I felt ready to put my work out into the world. I have been putting a lot of sketches and comedy content out on social media, which to the outside observer, I think just looks like any regular comedian putting sketches on social media. But for me, it's like the tail end of this epic healing journey. And, it's a really important step and it's been really healing just to finally get it out.”

“I just moved to LA which is also a big part of this journey. I moved to LA to fully invest in my career as a comedian and it's so exciting and also as soon as I got here, all of my physical and mental health flared up and I immediately felt all the old patterns come back. You know, not wanting to create, not wanting to put myself out there as well as just physically having a hard time. So, it is not linear. All these things are because I took this big next step on the path. It triggered this big kind of backslide. Yeah, it's not like a clean and simple process. It's taking a long time.”

Don't Miss a Beat.

Follow my Instagram for news from me, Tara Beckett:
https://www.instagram.com/letperfectburn/

And my Website:
letperfectburn.com

Follow Antonia Here:
https://linktr.ee/antonialastar

 Liz’s Website:
https://lizsweigart.com/contact

In this episode, I sit down with Emily Krempholtz, a writer, creator, and an all-around amazing human that I have the pleasure of calling my book coach as I write my memoir. In her interview, she takes us through her life going from doing what she thought she should, to now doing what she loves. “I knew that writing books was what I wanted to do for a living. I knew that working with stories was what I wanted to be when I grew up. And even knowing that, it took me a really long time. I let a lot of people talk me into going to college for a major that was a lot more practical than what I wanted to be doing, which was creative writing.”

Emily believes in the magic of the world, infusing it into her books and passion projects while also acknowledging the need to pay the bills with her non-fiction work. While her work that pays the bills is compartmentalized in one half of her brain, her creative work is where her heart lies. “And it’s hard, you know. You put your book out there to say, “here is a little piece of my soul, I’m giving it to you,” and then to have someone come back and say, “no thanks, this isn’t for me.”

Inevitably, pieces of Emily’s life became woven into her novels and she shares how important it is for writers to give themselves the grace of being a human being. “So suddenly I was writing a book about grief when I was kind of actively grieving and that was really difficult. And so I poured a lot of that emotion into this book and then I also had to put it down for a little while. And that's something I think not enough writers talk about is sometimes, you know, it's okay to set something aside.”

Highlights from Emily:

“I think we have these points where, in a perfect world, we'd be able to go back and edit our lives and edit the way we did things in the past, but we don't have that. We are slaves to time in the real world in a way that we aren't when we're writing. And being able to take the hindsight, to take the lessons that we learned from that first draft of our lives, and take that breaking point and say, okay.”

“There is no one right way to write a book. There's no one right way to do something. There's a lot of different schools of thought about how to create a book, because it is, it's this huge thing. It is multi-dimensional, it is complex, and when done right, you should never be able to just sit down and spit out a book without, and say, okay, this is perfect. This is exactly what I intended it to be.”

“Let Perfect Burn means abandoning those shoulds—abandoning that sense of this is what I'm supposed to be doing to get to where I am, focusing on the things that you can control and saying fuck it to the rest.”

Don't Miss a Beat.
 Follow my Instagram for news from me, Tara Beckett:
 https://www.instagram.com/letperfectburn/


Emily’s Website:
https://emilykrempholtz.com/

And.... we're back!

FINALLY.

I had no intention of being gone from the show for so long, but sometimes life is mess. Perfect is nowhere to be found within a million miles of my life right now, but then again, can't all of us say the same?

Season 1 of Let Perfect Burn was some of the strongest medicine I've ever taken because it made me feel so renewed every time I got to have intimate, rewarding conversations with my guests. These women on the show were real, they were vulnerable, they were raw, they were gracious, they were funny, they made me laugh (hard) and they made me feel so very alive every single time I stepped in studio.

And now... I get to do it again. Only it feels a little different this time. 

Season 1 I was still on the high of my inpatient psychiatric hospitalization— because I had advocated for myself for the first time in my life, I felt like my life was destined to only go up from there. 

YEAH. NO. 

Season 2 feels like landing back on Earth. And even though being on Earth doesn't have any of the self-actualization euphoria I felt before, I feel more grounded. Grounded in reality. Grounded as a woman speaking the truth— and as the great Ruth Bader Ginsburg would say, "Even if your voice shakes."

I feel honored that you are still with me and that you want to take the chance on a second journey around the sun. 

Welcome back to Season 2 of Let Perfect Burn. 

Here we go.

Only 9 months ago now, I was leaving a psychiatric hospital, the moment in my life that inspired me to create this podcast. The laughter and the joy during these months on Let Perfect Burn were moments where my depression lightened, because I felt full- I was having these intimate, rewarding conversations with my guests. 

These women on the show were real, they were vulnerable, they were raw, they were gracious, they were funny, they made me laugh (hard) and they made me feel so very alive every single time I stepped in studio.

And while we say goodbye (just for now) I want to leave you with every guest from Season 1 reminding us that when you let perfect burn, what’s left can be really, really, beautiful.

In this episode, I sit down with Christine Hamel, an artist, educator and author the book, Sounding Bodies: Identity, Injustice, and the Voice. Before she landed where she is, she studied art, critical theory, English, classical voice, and opera. She was even the first website designer for the Independent Film Channel. But at this moment, Christine feels like it may be time to knock it all down. “It’s getting to the point where I feel like just because I’ve found success or that people want me to do certain things, doesn’t mean I have to keep doing them. I really feel like it just needs to all fall apart.”

Christine thinks about her current life as petals needing to fall away to expose the core. Those petals may be hiding something bigger. She tells us that since the pandemic and since being in her later 40s, she just keeps asking, “Did I get a chance to try this thing? Did I get a chance to take a deep dive into that aspect of life that I found really meaningful or joyful? And did I do enough? Did I do enough good to alleviate suffering? Did I do enough to care for others?”

As the mother of a trans child, Christine must grapple with how to keep her child safe: “We are absolutely terrified about the world right now and absolutely terrified about what’s going on with anti-trans sentiment and legislation. We live in this fairly liberal community, but it’s not progressive in the ways that there’s definitely space to feel safe.”

For Christine, grieving is what letting perfect burn means for her. “It’s like a little bit of the Phoenix. It’s that sense of, “why hold on to that?” There’s time for other things now, but not for that."

Highlights from Christine:

"I'm ready to let go of some things. The pandemic was a catalyst for this understanding, which is that I don't need to do everything all at once. I'm tired of trying to hold up too many projects and too many obligations. And hopefully, I have another half of my life left, but when I really look at it, I think there are still things that I would like to be able to learn to do that I haven't done, or where I feel like I want to double down on things that actually feel like I'm making a difference in people's lives in a new way, in a profound or different and more, maybe more tangible way. "

"With the voice, we often use the word natural, as I mentioned, so our whole premise is just that our voices can't exist outside of culture, and they can't exist outside of politics and they're filled with identity, and that's a really good thing. And so, just to even conceptualize stripping the voice of markers of identity, like your race, and class, or ethnicity, or gender, to get to something neutral or natural underneath can do real harm."

"I think what I would like people to know is that it's really their issue if they can't interpret or understand gender diversity. Our kid, even if they are in a process of becoming, or iterating, who they are going to be, they also know themselves— they know what they need to be and they get it. It may not be fully defined, but their inner being is in a process that feels good and whole, and that the way you may be receiving our kid is really your own issue to work out."

Don't Miss a Beat.
Follow my Instagram for news from me, Tara Beckett:
https://www.instagram.com/letperfectburn/

Follow Christine Hamel on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/chwoodberry/

In this episode, I sit down with Alicia Hunt, a Commercial Pilot and Flight Instructor. Before becoming a pilot, Alicia had a 13 year career in film, commercial work and theatre in Los Angeles. Alicia found she could never stop looking for her next gig and never turn off her phone and risk missing a call from her agent. She burnt out and planned a trip to Asia with her best friend. But the trip didn’t rejuvenate Alicia, it confirmed her life needed to shift. She says, “I thought I would come back refreshed. And instead, I got back and felt a natural point of separation. It was a natural point to change my life. I was ready to find my next step.”

Alicia knew she needed something hands on and very “boots on the ground”. Alicia thrives on high intensity situations and those around her offered suggestions such as becoming a surgeon, a 911 operator or a police officer. There was a very consistent theme.

Alicia enlisted the help of a career counselor, and she provided some blunt analysis: “Alicia, you are a complex person. There will be no perfect fit for you. Whichever career you choose, you will be leaving large parts of yourself at the door.” During this time, Alicia heard of the pilot shortage— that there weren’t enough people to fly planes, let alone women and people of color. Through twists and turns along the way, Alicia got herself into the sky and now teaches others how to fly. Alicia works to recruit women to the field and mentors both women and people of color to secure scholarships for flight school.

Alicia, like other pilots, is critical of her landings. Asking herself these questions helps her to remember, perfect is not the goal: “Did you bend any metal? Did anybody get hurt? Did anybody die? No? Then it was a good landing.” For Alicia, being imperfect is part of the job.

Highlights from Alicia:

"I took a train all the way across China from the eastern edge of it all the way to the edge of Tibet, and made a lot of stops in between. It was incredible. And when I finished the trip, I thought I would come back and feel refreshed, it was the vacation of a lifetime. And instead, I got back and I was at a natural point of separation. It was a natural point of being ready to change my life. I was ready to find my next step."

"One of the things I knew I wanted out of a new career is I wanted something high demand. I was really tired of being in a market that was saturated. And where I knew I had so much to give in that field. But so did everyone else. And I was tired of constantly pushing and pushing and pushing to look for work."

"One of my favorite things about acting is how you must be present. You can't be anywhere else. You have to be completely immersed in your character in the moment and the scene and the dialogue. And it's the exact same when you're flying a plane. You can not be distracted with anything else. You need to be listening to air traffic control. You need to be ready to deliver your own line which is coming up soon. You know your traffic control talks then you talk and it's a script. Let me tell you, if you can do Shakespeare you can sure as heck can do air traffic control."

Don't Miss a Beat.
Follow my Instagram for news from me, Tara Beckett:
https://www.instagram.com/letperfectburn/

Follow Alicia Hunt on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/aliciahunt1/