E5: OPI Don't Lie

Gina [: 00:00:00

You know, there's nothing like a fresh new bottle of nail polish The first time you use it, it's so satisfying. It's smooth, it's thin, glides right on, flowing beautifully with consistency. It just goes on so perfectly. No chunky stuff, no weird strings, no crust around the top. The brush is fresh, the bristles are smooth, and you don't have to shake the bottle like you're Dr.

Murray trying to revive a patient in the ER. It is untouched, pure, clean, a virgin little bottle of polish. No one has contaminated it yet. Then time passes. You use it a few times. Maybe so does your little sister and then her weird friend Ellen. You forget about it. You

Gina [: 00:01:00

leave it in a drawer. You open it months later, and now it's thick, sticky, crusty, and clinging to the brush like a gross cafeteria food spoon anyway, hi friends. Yes, I have missed you too. Welcome back to the GOAT of podcasts. This is your host, Gina Sullivan, and you are listening to Daddy Tissues

Most people, the second that bottle gets old and gunky, they just throw it out. But what does Gina do? Gina the fixer, Gina the rescuer, Gina who has a solution for everything and believes she can make anything beautiful again and restore it back to its original glory.

She does, in fact, not throw it out. She

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thinks, "Damn, I really like this color. I'm never gonna find it again. There's gotta be a way to use this until the very last drop." Then I proceed to dip the brush in nail polish remover, wipe all the gook off, pour a tiny bit of remover into the bottle, and shake the fucking life out of it until it's back to its original consistency.

Good as new, which is probably why I have polish bottles from high school still in rotation now that I think about it, yes, I said in high school, which was approximately ten years ago, give or take a few, but who's counting? Math is rude.

But the point is, it has always been hard for me to part with things. Yes, I am unfortunately a child victim of a parental hoarder. Anyone who grew up with a refrigerator that nobody has seen the back of in centuries knows what it's like to grow up like that. It's free?

Gina [: 00:03:00

We'll take it. It's cheap? I'll take ten.

Barb, pull the car around. On clearance? We'll just take all of it. We can give some to Rich next door. I mean, you literally cannot walk or think or breathe or even move, to be honest, and if you were one of my fellow victims of childhood hoarding abuse, then you know we barely made it out alive. I mean, that's what created the entire minimalist movement, for Christ's sake.

Material things, clothes, products, old jeans, old ideas, old versions of myself, old relationships, old men who should have been thrown out two, maybe three long, dark, and cold emotional seasons ago. I used to think, "What if I could use it again? What if bell-bottoms come back? What if turtlenecks come back?

What if this exact shade of nail polish never exists again? What if this man finally becomes the version

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of himself I know he could be?" So I hold on. I keep the jeans. I keep the bottle. I keep the fantasy. I keep the potential And then one day I finally decide, "This is ridiculous.

I'm not gonna wear these jeans again. I'm not gonna use this crusty polish again. I'm getting rid of it." So I toss it, and then naturally, because the universe is a petty little bitch, the next season everyone is wearing bell-bottoms again. This is why we hold on. We try to plan for everything. We try to make the best use of everything.

We try to find a reason to keep things for as long as we can, and some people are the opposite. Some people throw things out without thinking twice. They are fucking ruthless, detached, clean, free, blessed little souls. And when I look back at my

Gina [: 00:05:00

childhood, I know exactly why I am the way I am.

Because growing up, not one but both of my parents had the same exact mindset: You don't waste things. Waste not, want not. Finish your dinner, because there are children in Africa with no food. And listen, Mom, Dad, I understand the concept. I do. I get it. It totally sucks that we made all this food and there's extra.

If there were starving children in our backyard or we had some kind of NASA speed food drone that could deliver this chicken cutlet across the world before it spoiled, fantastic. Let's do it. But since we do not currently have that technology in our kitchen, please explain to me how it makes more sense to add this food to my ass than to the trash can.

How is me having a fat ass

Gina [: 00:06:00

helping these poor little children? How does this make any goddamn sense? My ass is not a fucking charity or nonprofit. No child in Africa is being nourished by me forcing down one more scoop of mashed fucking potatoes. And it wasn't just food. It was clothes, furniture, containers, plastic bags, random cords, boxes, Towels that have seen combat.

Everything had to be saved, reused, repurposed, fixed or justified. Here's what I've realized. All that stuff we hold onto isn't just taking up space in our drawers and our garages, our basements, our closets, our attic our sheds or our storage units. It's taking up prime real estate in our head.

Right next to the thought of why I don't just chuck the chunky old nasty nail polish and get a new one,

Gina [: 00:07:00

which sat right next to the thought of why don't I just chuck the chunky old nasty man in my life and get a new one? All that junk just sits lingering around in your subconscious, all of it. Hoarding is just another generational present we didn't ask for.

It somehow just gets passed right on down the line with the rest of the trauma. , I personally think it's just us trying to hold on to memories of times when we thought we were happier. But memories don't live inside boxes. They live inside of us. That's hard for us to comprehend.

We are so attached to the stuff. Anyway, at some point I realized I did not have the mental square footage for the bullshit anymore, so I started to purge. First it was all those daddies who didn't want to let go of their issues. First my baby daddies, then my own daddy and some other losers. Long story.

Gina [: 00:08:00

But , I was just done. Once I got rid of one, they all just started dropping like dominoes. All these people who I thought loved and cared about me. Apparently that's what happens when you choose you. People don't like it. Still don't understand why, but I tried, I swear, with everything I had.

Unfortunately, I had to finally accept I could not change anyone, so The only option I had was to change me. I had to choose me for the first time in my life I didn't have the space for these dicks anymore. I had no room in my brain for expired nail polish, six versions of the same black tank top, jeans from a body I no longer own, and a man I keep trying to thin out with emotional acetone.

And guess what? I felt so fucking free. It was incredible, like a bird let out of a cage to

Gina [: 00:09:00

fly again. Because we are under so much pressure, and we are so scared to make the wrong choice. But once you finally let go and you say it out loud, "I'm done," or, "I'm leaving," or, "I want a divorce," or you decide to make the move, whatever it is that you need to finally end it and decide to choose you.

At first, it might sting, but then it's like this giant weight is lifted off of you. I always laugh at my friend because she said one day something did it, and she finally just said to him, "I want a divorce." Then she left the house and went shopping , and was pushing her cart around, jumping up and down, clicking her heels in the air, singing to herself, "It's the most wonderful time of the year She obviously sings it much better than me, but she says she felt like she was in a goddamn Christmas

Gina [: 00:10:00

commercial. Cracks me the hell up. Anyway, at some point, we have to ask ourselves, "Am I keeping this because it still serves me, or am I keeping it because I was taught that letting go is wasteful?"

And the answer is, letting go did not come natural to me. My thoughts and my belief system were programmed into me by my parents, and that brings us to the main topic today, to the thing that controls us all: fear. Because a lot of what we call loyalty, commitment, patience, or not giving up is actually fear in a costume.

throwing something away and [: 00:11:00

A lot of us think the fears we have, we were just born with, like they came installed from the factory and we can't explain them. But the truth is, we're born pretty much fearless. There were some scientists that did an experiment where they put large snakes in a small room with babies crawling around playing, and surprisingly, the infants did not seem afraid of the snakes at all.

In fact, some of them were actually playing with the snakes. Some of these scientists' research suggests that we basically are only born with two built-in fears: falling and loud noises. Everything else we pick up along the way. A lot of fear gets taught to us through experience, through the reactions of people around us, and through what our nervous systems learn is dangerous.

We are not born afraid of everything.

Gina [: 00:12:00

We learn fear, and if we can learn fear, we can also unlearn fear So when it comes to toxic relationships, a lot of the time we are not just in love, we are acting out old wounds. We are acting out mommy issues, daddy issues, abandonment issues, approval issues, and childhood stories we didn't even realize we were still living inside.

And neither person actually knows what a healthy relationship is supposed to look like because if we did, let's be honest, we probably would not have been dating each other in the first place. I'm not saying this is everyone, of course, but for a lot of us, if we really look at our relationship dynamics, they feel very familiar, almost too familiar.

Sometimes we lean towards an emotional climate that is similar to the one we grew up in without even realizing it I read something once that stuck with me. If you had a parent

Gina [: 00:13:00

who didn't give you the love, the affection, the approval you needed as a kid, your brain literally goes out and finds a man or a woman who is just like that parent, and it tries to recreate the whole thing.

But this time you think you're gonna win. Some parts of us think, "Maybe this time I can be chosen. Maybe this time I can be good enough. Maybe this time I can love hard enough. Maybe this time I can perform enough, give enough, shrink enough, stay enough, explain enough, or forgive enough. Maybe this time I can finally get from this person what I never got back then."

But because this person is exactly like that parent, it doesn't work. You never get it. So you spend years chasing something you're never gonna catch, or you leave and then somehow end up in the same exact relationship again, and then again, and again, chasing the love you never

Gina [: 00:14:00

got from mommy or daddy.

But if that person is emotionally similar to the parent who could not give it to us, naturally, we usually don't get it, but we still stay chasing. We stay fixing. We stay pouring acetone in the assholes, maybe even literally. But we keep shaking. We keep trying to get that asshole back to the way it was when we first opened him up and let him just flow freely, when that flow was smooth and warm and pretty like the icing on a Toaster Strudel and full of sweet promises.

But sometimes that shit doesn't come back. Sometimes it's expired. Sometimes the color was beautiful like Funny Bunny or Alpine Snow, but now that creamy formula is all dried up. And sometimes the most loving thing we can do for ourselves,

Gina [: 00:15:00

and for our kids, is to stop trying to resurrect something that keeps making us sick Here's the part you need to say out loud so everyone can hear you.

I am not staying with him for the kids. I am leaving him for the kids. We are leaving because our children deserve to see peace. They deserve to see self-respect. They deserve to see a mother who is not constantly shrinking, begging, performing, and breaking.

They deserve to grow up believing love is safe, not chaotic. And if the other person does not wanna get with the program, then we have to do what we have to do for our babies, no matter how hard it is. Why? Because we listen to Gina's podcast, and because we are badass motherfucking bitches.

People talk about fear like moms have not already been thrown into the loudest, most chaotic survival training program on Earth. We crush fear daily.

Gina [: 00:16:00

Kick it right in the fucking face, knocking teeth out like it's our job. We conquered the two basic fears a long time ago.

Like falling? Please. We have fallen many, many times emotionally, financially, romantically, spiritually, in public, in leggings with a hole in the crotch while your fresh, untouched ten-dollar Starbucks flies up in the air, waving around like it just don't care.

In front of people who did not deserve the show without paying a pretty penny for the ticket And we got back up, maybe with a limp, maybe with a Target bag full of shame snacks, maybe sporting a new fragrance called White Mocha Latte, whatever. But we got back up. And loud noises? Well, that's a joke. Once you have kids, loud noises become basic background elevator music.

We can have an entire conversation, take a class, watch a

Gina [: 00:17:00

e iconic, legendary, original: 1996

She was killing it with that beautiful bob with bangs, the mulberry lip, the giant white cordless. girl was slay. First time I got to use that one. I'm a cool mom. Anyway, moms ain't scared of shit. For real, we should be running the goddamn planet. Honestly, mothers could end world hunger and negotiate world peace while on the phone with a girlfriend, standing in the shower shaving one armpit with two toddlers screaming outside the curtain because someone touched someone's leg.

Moms are legit superheroes, and we do not get enough credit, but we forget that. We forget because

Gina [: 00:18:00

fear gets loud. Fear tells us "You can't leave. You can't start over. You can't make money. You can't do it alone. You're too old. You're too tired. You already wasted too much time. You'll never find love again. You'll ruin your kids. You'll regret this. You will fail. But fear is not truth. It's a story our parents gave us, a story our relationship reinforced, a story our nervous system memorized, A story our trauma keeps reading to us at night like some evil little bedtime book. And just because a thought feels familiar does not mean it's true. Just because fear feels loud does not mean it gets to drive. Remember that experiment with the babies. It proves that fear is just an illusion.

Fear holds us back. It stops us from making decisions. It stops us from taking

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the risk, stops us from being our true authentic selves. Don't let a mindset you learned that somebody else programmed into you decide your whole life. Fear is just a story we tell ourselves. It stops us from living the lives we were born to live.

It prevents us from taking the necessary steps for growth. Don't let these jerk-offs control our destiny. Just like that fresh bottle of nail polish, we are born clean, clear, open, free, and then life happens. People come along and dump their fears and shit into our beautiful clean bottle, their anxiety, their shame, their expectations, their control, their criticism, abandonment, chaos, their mommy issues, daddy issues, their judgments, all their contaminated bullshit, and suddenly we are sticky. We are thick.

Gina [: 00:20:00

We are clogged. We have cotton ball fuzz stuck in uncomfortable places. We have cellulite, stress acne, and a nervous system that acts like a raccoon trapped in a trash can. But just because we accumulated other people's fear does not mean we are ruined and will be fearful forever.

I don't care how old you are. I don't care how long you've been stuck. I don't care how long that bottle of polish has been sitting in the drawer. It's never too late to shake that shit out, clean it out, smooth it out, to remember who you were before everybody poured their stupid ass fears into you. So this is your reminder. Do not let fear make your decisions. Do not let your parents' conditioning run your life. Do not let a man, a marriage, a breakup, a bank account, a custody schedule, a messy house, or an old belief system decide your destiny.

If you need to leave, then fucking leave. If you need

Gina [: 00:21:00

to stay and rebuild, then do the work and rebuild. If you need to rest, rest. If you need to throw the bottle out, throw it the fuck out, and if you need to pour a little acetone in, shake the hell out of it and bring yourself back to life, do that too.

You will figure it out. We always do. It may not be easy, but anything worth having usually requires us to do some hard shit remember, you don't need anyone but you. All the answers are inside of us somewhere. Challenge yourself. You might be surprised.

Grab your daddy tissues, girls, and dry your pretty little eyes. Take the crusty brush out of the bottle. Pour that fear down the drain. Shake your bouncy, beautiful ass back to life because Beyoncé know,

Gina [: 00:22:00

and deep down, we know, too. Who run the world? Yeah, that's right. Motherfucking girls, that's who. You just gotta wake up one day and realize that if Beyoncé can do it, so can we.

She ain't got nothing we don't have, except for, like, everything. But you get it. Till next time, my queens