The Healer: Remember Her, the Memoir, and Why Telling the Truth Changed Everything.

 The most honest thing Kendra Tamika has ever done was write it down. In this episode she talks about the memoir that started it all, what healing actually looks like from the inside, and how Remember Her Publishing became more than a book. It became a home for women's stories. If you have ever been in the middle of something hard and wondered if you would find your way back to yourself, this episode is for you. 

Layered Love Gourmet


Remember Her Publishing


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Transcript

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Hey, welcome back. Kendra Tamika here on Layered Love Universe. We have made it to episode three. The Healer. I have to be real with you at the top of this one. Of all seven episodes in this launch week, this is the one I sat with the longest. This is the one I kept finding reasons to write last and record last and think about more before I said it out loud, which tells you everything you need to know about what we're going to get into today. The healer is the part of me that picked up a pen and decided the most honest, most uncomfortable, most necessary thing I can do was tell the truth about who I was, about who I had been pretending not to be, about the version of myself I had been quietly abandoning for years while telling myself everything was fine. This episode is for the woman who knows what she feels like, the slow, gradual disappearing, the way you can lose yourself so incrementally that by the time you notice it has been happening for years, this one is for you. And I hope it gives you something real. Why I wrote Remember Her. Let's start there. I did not write Remember Her because I had my life figured out. I want to be extremely clear about that because I think memoir authors sometimes get perceived as people who have arrived somewhere. Like the book is the Vicky Lap after handling the healing is complete. That is just not how it works. That's not how it worked for me, and that's not how it works for a lot of people who write their memoirs. I wrote Remember Her from the middle of the mess. I was in the thick of the work, not on the other side of it yet. I was actively in the process of trying to figure out who I was underneath all of those roles I had been playing and all of the expectations I had been meeting and all the parts of myself I had quietly set aside because they did not fit what was required of me in the rooms that I was in. And writing was the only way I knew how to process something at that depth. Some people go to therapy, some people journal privately, some people talk it through with people they trust. I write. When I overthink, when I need to see things clearly, I put it on a page and just look at it. Sometimes I call it scripting, sometimes I call it just a relief. Some things I don't want to talk it out with people. I just want to put it down on paper and then just sit with myself and kind of read through it. But the problem with writing a memoir specifically is that you cannot fudge it. You cannot write a vague drug journal entry that lets you off the hook. You cannot write a memoir in that way only because it requires specificity. It requires you to put yourself in the scene to describe what happened and what you felt and what you did and what you wish you had done differently. It requires a certain level of honesty that I found genuinely terrifying at first. There were sections of that book that took me literally days to write. Not because I couldn't find the words, but because I could not find them and kept not wanting to use the words that I found. Because saying it clearly on the page made it real in a way that was harder to escape than the fuzzy version I had been living with. But here's what I learned about that kind of honesty. The thing you are most afraid to say clearly is always the thing that is costing you the most energy to keep vague. The moment you name it, like really name it, something shifts inside of you. Not everything, and definitely not immediately, but something real and irreversible shifts in the direction of freedom. I finished that book. I felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulder. I felt lighter in a way that had nothing to do with the weight of the manuscript, but everything to do with what I put down in the process of writing. Everything I was holding in, afraid to say, afraid. So let's talk about the shrinking specifically. Because what does shrinking look like? I think it is one of those things that is easier to recognize in retrospect than while it's happening. And I want to describe it in a way that might help someone listening right now see it in their own life. Shrinking does not usually look dramatic. It never does. It does not look like a single moment where you decide to make yourself less. It looks like a hundred of small decisions over a long period of time. It looks like not saying the thing you actually think in a meeting. You don't want them to think that you're difficult. It looks like downplaying an accomplishment so someone else does not feel uncomfortable. It looks like editing your excitement about something because the room is not matching your energy, and you would rather just dim yourself than sit uncomfortably in this mismatch. It looks like using a smaller voice than you actually have, laughing off something that actually hurt, agreeing when you mean no, making your needs smaller and smaller until they almost disappear. And here's the part that took me the longest to understand. A lot of shrinking I did was rewarded. I was told I was easy to work with. A woman who had made herself so small that she was no longer an inconvenient to anyone. But when she looked internally, she was an inconvenient to herself. That's not a compliment. That is literally life giving you a warning sign. So remember her was my way of going back through all of that and just naming it. Not to assign blame, not to be a victim, but to see it clearly so I can make a different choice going forward. So I can start axing. What would the unshrunken version of me do in this situation? What would she say? What space would she take up? What would she refuse to minimize? Those questions kind of changed my life more than anything else I'd ever done. And they are still the questions I come back to when I feel the old kind of people pleaser try to pull me back in and try to make myself smaller. Those are the questions I come back to. But what does healing actually look like? I want to be real about healing because I think it gets romanticized in a way that sets people up for disappointment. Healing is not a straight line, it is not a destination you arrive at, and then you are done. It is not a single breakthrough moment after which everything is different. That version of healing looks great in movies, and it's almost never how it actually works. Like literally never. Real healing is a practice. It is a decision you make again and again, sometimes daily, sometimes multiple times in a single day. It is a choice to face the thing instead of go around it, to feel what you have been numbing, to be honest with yourself when the uncomfortable lie is right there and available, and trust me, so much easier. And it's definitely nonlinear. You will have days where you feel like a completely different person than you were a year ago. And then you'll have days where the old patterns come roaring back, and you wonder if any of it actually stuck. It did. The bad days do not erase the progress, they're just part of the progress, part of the journey. Everything in life has ebbs and flows. For me, creating was always a part of the healing. Making something with my hands gave me a container for the things I did not yet know how to say out loud. A dessert is a control thing. I like to paint, I like to craft. You decide what goes into what you make. You control the outcome of whether it's the art on paper or the art in the kitchen. When everything else felt uncertain and out of my hands, the kitchen gave me back a sense of agency. The writing desk in this phase of my life did the same thing in a different way, but it did the same thing. I'm not prescribing my path for you because your healing will look different than mine's. But I will say this: find the things that give you a container, the thing that lets you process without spiraling. For some people, it is movement. For some, it is music, for some, it is conversation, for some, it is just creating. Whatever it is, give yourself access to it regularly. Not as a treat, but create it as a practice in your life. Let's talk about Remember Her publishing and what my bigger purpose is for it. So after Remember Her was published, something happened that I was not fully even prepared, even though I had hoped for it, but I wasn't prepared for it. So I had women start to find me through my book, women I've never met, women from different cities and different backgrounds and different life circumstances, who had read my words and felt seeming that. I recognized something in myself through these women who had recognized something in themselves. And in the moments, my story felt less alone. I received messages that I would carry with me forever. One woman said she read the book in one sitting and then sat in her car in a parking lot for 20 minutes just crying. She had never had words for what she had been feeling. I had a woman who bought six copies and gave one to every woman she loved. A woman who said, I did not know I needed permission to remember myself. Thank you for giving it to me. I said, I didn't give it to you, but I'm glad I was able to remind you. So those messages changed what I understood my work to be for. Writing had always been personal for me. I've been writing poetry since I was in my teenage years. Those messages made it clear that it was also communal. That the most personal stories, the ones we are most afraid to tell, because they feel so specific to just us, like we're in this cocoon and we're the only people dealing with that particular thing. Those are the ones that are often the most universal. The ones that reach the most people precisely because they are so specific and so honest. So remember her kind of grew from that understanding. I built it as an imprint because I believe there were more stories like mine that deserved to exist in the world. More women who had something real to say and needed a home for it. More readers who were looking for books that felt like someone actually meant what they wrote. And I mean, 15 titles later, I still believe that. Every book that we publish under that imprint exists because I believe your story matters. Because I believe the truth you are most afraid to tell is probably the truth someone else is desperate to read. Because I believe healing, real healing, happens in community. And books are one of the oldest and most powerful forms of community we have. But to close for day three, if you are carrying something heavy right now, I want to say this directly to you. You do not have to have it figured out to start. You do not have to be on the other side of the hard thing to begin doing the work. The healer in me started writing from the middle of the mess. Messy and honest and scared, devil scared. And that book became the became and that book became the foundation for everything else I've built since. Remember her. The woman you were before the world told you who you had to be, before the shrinking started, before the small became normal. Because she's still in there. She is waiting. And trust me, she is worth the work finding her again. Hopefully, you found value. Episode four drops tomorrow. We're going to be talking about the builder. And I'm going to tell you the full story of Laird's Love Gourmet, including parts that did not go right the first time. So come back for that one. I will see you then.