Pilot Episode - The Tower

We're Taj and Kelley — and before you ask, yes. Our exes are together. Yes, we are friends. No, we don't fully understand it either, but here we are.

One of us grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where you learn early that life is not a soft place and neither are you. The other grew up in San Diego, where it's sunny and beautiful and apparently that does not protect you from getting your whole life blown up. Between us we cover both coasts, both vibes, and apparently the same terrible choices.

We found each other in the wreckage and did what any two reasonable women would do — we cried until we couldn't, then we laughed until we couldn't, then we opened the champagne, and tequila, we pulled tarot, we called a medium, then called a psychic just to be sure. Our mothers, who had absolutely no business becoming friends, now are. At this point we think the universe is just showing off.

We are not therapists. We are not gurus. We are two women who got handed the same terrible plot twist and decided to write a completely different ending — loudly, raw, unfiltered, with excellent spiritual support and questionable alcohol consumption.

We have cried in parking lots, laughed at things we probably shouldn't have, asked the cards hard questions, and slowly, stubbornly, built something that looks a lot like a life again.

Pull up a chair. Bring a drink. You're going to be okay — and we'll stay on the phone with you until you believe it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:22

Welcome to Between Two Fucks, the podcast where healing doesn't come easy.

SPEAKER_04 0:26

But honesty does. We are two women who never asked to meet.

SPEAKER_05 0:29

Not like this. Not because my wife and her partner.

SPEAKER_04 0:33

Uh was she really your wife?

SPEAKER_05 0:34

Thank God. No. But they decided to share more than just memories behind our backs.

SPEAKER_04 0:39

Our partners committed the ultimate betrayal, each other. And instead of burning it all down.

SPEAKER_05 0:44

Well, I mean, we did burn a lot of Palo Santo, sage, and we hope karma. And we sat with the pain.

SPEAKER_04 0:49

Then something surprising happened. We found each other.

SPEAKER_05 0:52

Not in bitterness or in competition, but in a raw, unexpected kind of solidarity.

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This is a podcast about betrayal, yes. But it's really about what comes after.

SPEAKER_05 1:01

The messy, human, often ridiculous road to healing, self-worth, and sisterhood.

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In each episode, we will unpack the hard stuff: grief, anger, boundaries, forgiveness. Talk to the guests who've helped us along the way to rebuild our lives through the quakes of heartbreak. So if you've ever had tequila for breakfast and a tarot reading for lunch, or spend $1,500 in the entire evening creating online dating profiles.

SPEAKER_05 1:25

Well, we're gonna have to talk about that one.

SPEAKER_04 1:27

Absolutely. How can we not? It's a podcast on its own.

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Or found yourself standing alone in your home with a visceral swirling feeling of wondering what the actual fuck just happened?

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You're not alone. Pull up a chair, we've saved you a seat.

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Between two fucks.

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Between two fucks. Abandoned by the same people, found by each other. At least someone has good taste.

SPEAKER_05 1:50

Our exes thought they were the plot twist. Jokes on them were the whole story.

SPEAKER_04 1:56

Rejected, redirected, and slightly unhinged. This is our healing journey. Otage, this is so good.

SPEAKER_05 2:05

I was on my hands and knees, scrubbing the floors in the place they were had just been fucking. My aunt had just died, and I should have been home with my family. Instead, I was fighting for a relationship that had already ended. I just hadn't been told yet. She knew, she knew everything, and she let me clean those floors. That's not a breakup, that's a crime scene. I was gaslit in my grief, and I cleaned those floors anyway.

SPEAKER_04 2:34

I threw a small wedding celebrating Pepper's lifetime milestone. The same year, we signed the papers on a third home. We just completed a home renovation. I was investing, seriously investing, and if anyone knows a Capricorn, big money. I was all in. At the same time, they were meeting in the desert at our home to take pictures for the listing. I thought they were just friends, childhood friends who had reconnected. I thought it was sweet even. I paid for the backdrop of their love story and called it a good year. I wasn't failing to pay attention. I was trusting someone who knew exactly how much that trust was worth, and they spent it anyway.

SPEAKER_05 3:13

For months before I knew anything, I already felt everything. Scarlet turned cold. Not all at once, that would have been too obvious. But slowly, methodically. The way you lower the temperature in a room so gradually, the person inside doesn't realize they're freezing until they can't feel their hands. She started picking me apart. My flaws, my failures, my everything. Everything I couldn't do right, every way I was too much or not enough. I was shrinking, apologizing, trying harder. That's what gaslighting does. It makes you so focused on fixing yourself that you never think to look at them. While I was doing that, while I was auditing my entire existence, Scarlett was busy, trips to the desert, back and forth to LA, a little break. She needed space to get perspective, that's what she said, which led her directly to Kelly's house in the desert that she had just purchased with Pepper. And Kelly and Pepper were halfway across the world. Perspective. It still gets me.

SPEAKER_04 4:21

Let me tell you about the night my body knew before I did. Pepper went to a concert. You'll find that to be a common theme overnight with our friend Scarlet. I stayed home, held down the fort because that's what I do. That's what I was good at, keeping things running while Pepper was moving freely through the world. I didn't think twice about it. I trusted Pepper. But my body, my body had other thoughts. Day one, panic attack. I chalked it up to stress, renovations, life, whatever. Day two, another one. Worse. I told myself I needed to breathe. Take a walk, drink more water. Get it together, Kelly. Day three, the floor fell out. The most severe one yet. The kind where your chest convinces you that you're dying, and the worst part is you're not sure you would mind. I told Pepper about it. Hey, I've been having panic attacks, and I'm not okay. Pepper responds, you should go get your nails done.

SPEAKER_05 5:20

Then my aunt died. Scarlett came home, and instead of holding me, instead of being my partner through my grief, she iced me out of bed that night. Our bed, her first night back. I was sleeping next to someone who had already left in a body that hadn't been told yet. I should have been with my mom. I knew it. Instead, I went down to our couch because I was committed, because I thought that's what I was supposed to do.

SPEAKER_04 5:46

So I did because I was trying, because I believed in us, because I had just thrown pepper a party, signed papers on our third home, and I was not the kind of woman who fell apart. I came home with freshly painted nails.

SPEAKER_05 5:59

Mother's Day came, my family was mourning, and Scarlet put on a full face of makeup. She was dressed up and walked through that day like it was a runway. She was heading to LA to pick up Pepper to go to a concert. She left, I stayed without her again. After the concert she requested me to come to LA. She put me to work, overseeing a previously scheduled deck renovation. I was on my hands and knees and sleeping in the sheets that she had just been in with Pepper. I made that bed, I cleaned that bathroom, I managed the renovation, and then she left, drove back south, and left me there, alone in a space that I didn't know had already been consecrated to something else. I went home, she set up a spa weekend, bought a plane ticket, flew north yet again to see another concert. Thirty hours with Pepper, brunch with the girls, back the next evening like nothing happened. I picked her up from the airport, I drove her home, and the next day something in me cracked. I looked at her and I asked, Is there something going on between you and Pepper? She said yes. And that was it. One word. I unraveled the thing that had been dismantling me for months, the cold, the cruelty, the trips, the sheets, the grief, the grief I carried alone. All of it. It all landed in that one word. Yes.

SPEAKER_04 7:32

Returning with my freshly manicured nails, I walk in the door to find Pepper standing there. Pepper hands me three pages. Three pages. A written dissertation. And I want you to sit with this. A prepared document about what a terrible partner I had been, how miserable the last decade of Pepper's life was, and how much Pepper had suffered. I had just had a panic attack. My nails were still wet, my hands were still shaking, and she handed me homework. Oh, and at the bottom, the very last line of these three pages was the admittance, the betrayal. It dropped like it was a footnote, like it was the least important part of the document. Like I should have been grateful for the transparency.

SPEAKER_05 8:20

And so I broke. And the next morning was my aunt's memorial. I finally passed out for maybe an hour or two. I got up, I got dressed, and I went again without her. I sat in that space holding my family's grief and holding my own simultaneously. And through my ring app, I watched Scarlett pack the car, load one of our three dogs, and leave. She didn't come back. She never said goodbye. She just left. And I sat in that memorial in the front row of loss, realizing I was mourning two things at once. My aunt, of course. And the person I called my wife and shared a life.

SPEAKER_04 9:05

I didn't even get to fall apart properly because two days later we were driving to the desert. My bestie was coming from Chicago to see our newly purchased desert home, spending four out of the ten days with us. The plan had been made. Life was still moving, apparently, even though mine had just been handed to me in three pages. So there we were in the car. One dog, two cats, and eight hours together. The tension was so thick you could renovate a house with it. And then something made me pick up my phone. I don't know why. Some instinct, some pull, I opened social media and I sent a DM to a woman I barely knew. And that was you. Something told me just reach out.

SPEAKER_05 9:47

I wrote back almost immediately. I too was in the car on my way to the desert.

SPEAKER_04 9:53

Yes, the same desert, the same weekend, two different cars, same disaster.

SPEAKER_05 9:57

That was the moment the universe stopped being subtle.

SPEAKER_04 10:00

We had been living the same lie at the same time, geographically, arriving to the same place simultaneously, and neither of us had planned it.

SPEAKER_05 10:09

They had. We hadn't.

SPEAKER_04 10:11

They didn't know they did. My body had been screaming at me for three days. Pepper had shown up with a three-page indictment, and then drove me directly to the woman who would eventually become my person, my co-host, and my best friend.

SPEAKER_05 10:27

The one who understood every single word without needing context, because the universe, it turns out, has a very dark sense of humor, as do we. And apparently, there are no coincidences, only synchronicities.

SPEAKER_04 10:42

So we were left in the fire. Let's talk about what it feels like to stand in a burning building that you didn't set on fire.

SPEAKER_05 10:50

You're disoriented, you're choking, you're gasping for breath, and everyone around you is asking how they can help, but you don't even know what day it is.

SPEAKER_04 11:00

We were broken, but not the kind of broken that makes for a good Instagram post. The kind of broken that makes you stand in your kitchen at 2 a.m. wondering if every version of yourself you had trusted was a lie.

SPEAKER_05 11:12

Our confidence gone. Because when someone spends months rewriting what's true, you stop being able to find the floor.

SPEAKER_04 11:26

Now we want to be clear about something. Neither of us is standing here claiming to be perfect. We were not perfect partners. We are not perfect people. We are two flawed, complicated, fully realized women who love imperfectly and show up anyway.

SPEAKER_05 11:41

But here's the thing about imperfect love or love at all. There's still a way to leave it with dignity. There's still a way to say this isn't working without first making someone believe they're the reason the whole world is broken.

SPEAKER_04 11:55

What was done to us didn't need to happen the way it happened.

SPEAKER_05 11:59

We didn't need to be dismantled.

SPEAKER_04 12:01

We did not need to be made to feel worthless so someone else could feel justified.

SPEAKER_05 12:05

And we certainly did not need to be gaslit into questioning our sanity so two people could buy themselves enough time to figure out their next move.

SPEAKER_04 12:15

And yet, here we were, two women in our 50s, not alone, but in our 50s, who had lives built, real lives, partnerships, homes, history, roots, standing in the wreckage of something we didn't choose to destroy, feeling like the most naive, foolish, pathetic versions of ourselves.

SPEAKER_05 12:35

Well, they were out reliving John Hughes movies like they were 16 again.

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Sneaking around, 80s concerts, coordinated lies, leather pants.

SPEAKER_05 12:45

The leather pants. We're not going to pretend that that still doesn't get us. The worst part wasn't even the betrayal. The betrayal was almost clean by comparison. The worst part for me, at least, was the crazy making. The months of being told you're too sensitive, you're too demanding, you're too broke, you're too broken. While the person saying it was actively breaking everything.

SPEAKER_04 13:10

Fighting for your relationship with everything you have while the other person has already emotionally checked out, and it's just waiting for a convenient exit.

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Pouring yourself into something that is quietly, deliberately being drained from the other end.

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And then being handed a document, three pages about your failures, like the problem was ever you.

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Like the problem was ever us.

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So what do you do when the floor is gone and the walls are gone and the version of yourself you recognize is somewhere and you cannot find her?

SPEAKER_05 13:39

You build new floors out of whatever you can find.

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We found each other first, which honestly should have been enough.

SPEAKER_05 13:46

And it it almost was. And then we found tarot and sound baths, meditation and astrology. Some of us found dating apps. God help us.

SPEAKER_04 13:56

Some of us, like me, tequila, and champagne, four-hour phone calls that started with are you okay? and ended at 2 a.m. having solved nothing and somehow everything.

SPEAKER_05 14:11

Journals. Oh, so many journals.

SPEAKER_04 14:14

So many. And so much sleuthing. An embarrassing amount of sleuthing. We are not ashamed. Maybe a little.

SPEAKER_05 14:22

We needed the truth. We went and got it ourselves since nobody else was offering.

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And here's what we actually learned. Under it all, under the tequila and the tarot and the 1 a.m. spirals.

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We learned that the story told about us was not true.

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We learned that being left doesn't mean that you're lacking.

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We learned that the confidence they took from us was never theirs to take in the first place.

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We learned that being cracked open while furious and grieving can build something extraordinary out of pure spite and fighting instinct.

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And we learned that sometimes the universe blows your life apart, not to punish you, but to clear space for something it couldn't fit before. We were not looking for a new best friend.

SPEAKER_04 15:02

Nor were we looking for a podcast.

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We weren't looking for any of this.

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We were just two women trying to get through a Tuesday without falling apart.

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And then we found each other, and falling apart became something we could do together.

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Which, it turns out, is completely different.

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A friendship we never knew we needed, never thought we'd have. Can't imagine living without.

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Built entirely in the ashes of something we didn't choose to burn.

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Turns out we're pretty good at building things.

SPEAKER_04 15:26

I'm pretty sure we always were.

SPEAKER_03 15:28

I think we should pull a card. Alright. I have a decrate here. So do I. So And potentially two barking dogs. Good place.

SPEAKER_05 15:46

And you know, it's part of what got us through all this. So I have my cards actually all shuffled. And what I normally do, whoever I'm reading, is I start to move through the cards and ask that person to at any point if they have an inkling, a little instinct, a moment to feel that and tell me to stop, and then I stop at that point. So I'm gonna ask you to do that, Kelly. And this is just gonna be like I don't know, the card of the podcast. What does that sound like?

SPEAKER_03 16:21

Sounds great. Okay moving through the deck. What a cool card.

SPEAKER_05 16:50

This card is the Hanged Man, which is it's many things, but it's also about perspective and sort of taking I mean, he's literally hanging upside down. And in that way, if you imagine like coins in your pocket and they might drop out, it's kind of like literally letting go and looking at something from a new perspective. And I said that that that could be interpreted as loss, and I don't mean that as lost, but it's literally like you have to let go um to see something from a new perspective. And I just feel like that's kind of appropriate for what we're talking about. If we just mentioned, you know, the thing that blows up your life can be the thing that like totally remasters it. And yeah, I know you were gonna pull a card too.

SPEAKER_04 17:37

So well, I did, and again, remember you're the one that has more of the innite like knowing of, but I pulled the magician.

SPEAKER_05 17:45

Oh my god, what a gorgeous card. That card. So the other thing is, and this could be appropriate, but today we're reading this on uh on a new moon, um, a Taurus new moon to be specific. But also the magician is really about having all the tools that you need to to do anything, to be anything, which when we are in our lowest, and maybe those times of like that precipice of like one reality and another, just to remember that we have everything that we need to change our reality, make a new possibility. Um but yeah, the magician is a beautiful card. He's actually standing with a table in front of him, and there's these tools on the table. And it's you've got the money, you've got the intuition, you've got the timing, you've got the tools, you've got the knowledge, you've got the experience. Um, and that's really what that I I mean, it could be a little pedestrian, my interpretation, but that's sort of the the essence of that card. Well, it sounds like we're in a good place. I love it. Either way.

SPEAKER_04 18:52

Yeah. Oh, the cards. So many cards we pulled this week.

SPEAKER_05 18:57

Well, I have, anyways, but oh well, yeah, me too. It's kind of a daily, it's a day, it's on the daily at this point.

SPEAKER_04 19:05

It's on the daily at this point.

SPEAKER_05 19:07

All right. Well, that felt good. Did it though?

SPEAKER_04 19:09

It felt something.

SPEAKER_05 19:11

I think it's just crazy that three years later we can still find pieces that we didn't even know were buried.

SPEAKER_04 19:17

That's the thing that nobody tells you about surviving something like this. The story keeps giving. Just when you think you've excavated it all, you find another room.

SPEAKER_05 19:26

Another nugget.

SPEAKER_04 19:27

Another, oh my god, I forgot about that part. Lucky us, the gift that keeps on giving. So here's what's coming. We're gonna start at the bottom, the underbelly, the four most painful months of our lives, uncomfortable, and every mortifying detail.

SPEAKER_05 19:43

We're not cleaning it up for you. We're not. You're gonna get you're gonna get the depths, the things we said in the middle of the night to each other that we probably shouldn't have, the decisions made that made sense at the time, but absolutely did not hold up.

SPEAKER_04 19:57

The sleuthing, the sleuthing for truthing, and then the real work, the healing, the humans who showed up when we needed them the most, the friends who came and sat on the floor with us, the spiritual guides and soul workers and healers who helped us find our way back to ourselves.

SPEAKER_05 20:15

The altars, the spiritual rituals, you never knew you needed until suddenly you're burning sage at midnight and asking the universe to send you a sign and genuinely meaning it.

SPEAKER_04 20:25

We're gonna talk about what it's like to rebuild your home. Or in my case, move into an IKEA-outfitted apartment at 50. Yep, set it again, 50, while owning three homes that you do not live in.

SPEAKER_05 20:38

I mean the audacity of that sentence.

SPEAKER_04 20:40

Uh yeah, it was humbling and somewhat humiliating.

SPEAKER_05 20:44

We're gonna talk about the dating apps. Oh God. What the world expects of you out there and what you expect of yourself, and maybe what might feel like the enormous gap between the two. We were not ready. Nobody's ever ready for that.

SPEAKER_04 20:57

And we went anyway.

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We're gonna talk about what it's like to hide under the covers with a tequila and champagne headache simultaneously, because why choose? And the people who came and found us there. And who wouldn't let us stay. Who reminded us the sun was still out, even when we had the blackout curtains drawn.

SPEAKER_04 21:19

The little trips we took just to give each other a hug in person, because sometimes a text is not enough, and you just need to be in the same room as the person who gets it.

SPEAKER_05 21:29

The extended family we never expected to meet. Friendships we never saw coming. The dog left behind by the baby man I dated for three months. Who is, for the record, the best thing to ever come out of that situation. The dog, I mean. Oh, I know. I know, I know.

SPEAKER_04 21:44

And the list goes on and on and on and on and on and on.

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We truly can't wait to tell you all of it.

SPEAKER_04 21:51

Here's the part we need you to hear, though. Under all the chaos and the grief and the absolute unhinged decisions we made in the name of survival.

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We came out the other side.

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Stronger.

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Softer in the places that matter.

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And more ourselves than either of us had been in years.

SPEAKER_05 22:07

This friendship, this completely unexpected, nobody could have imagined it. Friendship. Was the thing neither of us knew we were walking toward. We are better women for this story and for our experience. And we are genuinely deeply. Sometimes it still catches us off guard. Grateful for it. Because it led us here. To each other. And to you. We are beyond excited to invite you to this table. So pull up a chair or something good. And please stay. Well, that's it.

SPEAKER_04 22:39

And if it hit you somewhere you weren't expecting, well, it's supposed to. If any of what we shared resonates with you, text it to a friend who might relate to it. Or that one friend who might need it and won't ask.

SPEAKER_05 22:51

Leave us a review anywhere you're listening to this. It takes two minutes and it means everything.

SPEAKER_04 22:57

We are Kelly and Taj. And this is between two fucks.

SPEAKER_05 23:00

Between two fucks. Now go out there, heal something, break something, earn something, give zero fucks about what anyone thinks.

SPEAKER_04 23:10

And stop apologizing for taking up space.

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Because the next chapter It's the best one, we promise.

SPEAKER_00 23:56

I ask yourself. Are you well or well?

SPEAKER_02 24:00

I ask if I ask if we sell. Are you well or well? I ask if I'd rather be a contradiction than a night caught in conflict. What's up for all the night? This is not your type of paradise. You don't need to holler, yes, be stressed. I'm not gonna be there. So sisters bleedin' Yeah Sisters bleedin' skin's season, sisters bleedin' I ask him, are you well on well? I ask if we sell, I ask if we sell, are you well? I ask if we sell, are you well on well? I ask if we sell, I ask if we sell, I don't want to go, skip it up, I don't want to put up, skip.