Maybe Authenticity is the Way?

Have you ever had a lunch break completely derail you in the best possible way?

That's exactly what happened in Maybe Authenticity Is The Way? — the debut episode of While I've Got You. Gabby Turner sat down to eat, clicked on a podcast she had never heard, and eighteen minutes in found herself climbing into her closet to record because something had cracked open that couldn't wait.

That podcast was Les Alfred's She's So Lucky, and what started as a moment of "wait, is she making my podcast?" quickly became something else entirely. A mini spiral about carbon copies and competition that revealed itself to actually be something quieter and more honest — a moment of needing to see herself more clearly. Her aunt's Kroger and Publix wisdom helped. So did scrolling through the comments and recognizing that the same need was sitting in hundreds of other women too.

This episode moves through what it means to build something when you don't have a tangible product, when your vision is rooted in joy instead of struggle, and when you can see the shortcut but the shortcut isn't yours. Gabby connects Les Alfred's question about sacrificing vision for numbers to Issa Rae's observation on Emma Grede's podcast about the difference between content that makes you laugh for a second and content that stays with you for days. One is fleeting. The other is what she's building toward.

The throughline lands on Tabitha Brown accepting her first Emmy and closing her speech the same way she has closed every Instagram video for years. Not as a lesson. Just as a thing Gabby noticed that settled something in her — temporarily, incompletely, and exactly right.

Maybe authenticity is the way. Maybe. This episode doesn't answer that. It just lights the match.

While I've Got You is a short-form podcast with Gabby Turner about culture, identity, and the moments worth noticing. New episodes monthly.

Transcript

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Gabby 0:00

I'm Gabby, and you're listening to While I've Got You. Let's start the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the pod. Listen, While I've Got You, I have been noticing these moments happening to me recently where they're these just brief little moments where at like a drop of a hat, I'm about ready to break down in tears and cry because I find something so moving. Like in Princess Diaries 2, I just watched it recently with my roommate. And the part where Julie Andrews comes in and they're doing the like stair slide for Princess Mia's Bachelorette party. And Julie Andrews is like, Oh, I don't s I don't slide, but I've known I've been known to do some flying in my day. I was like, oh my god, she's talking about Mary Poppins. Almost got me right there. And then later in the movie, where the coronation at the very end, and Charlotte is like, the eagle is flying for the last time. I was like, oh my god, this is too much. I hope Julie Andrews is well, wherever she is. I've been noticing those moments happening to me so often, and it's actually spun me into this whole web of noticing that I want to share with you. It happened this weekend as well, and it was while I was listening to My Queen Dochie's Denial as a river, a song that I've listened to so many times that this reaction was just unwarranted. But the part where she says there's no time to stop, the charts need us, and they do. I as soon as I said and they do, it came out more like, and they do. And I just feel like it caught me off guard because maybe it's really high self-esteem that I have, but I feel like there are maybe not charts waiting for me, but there are rooms that are waiting for me. And I've just spent the last several months, probably several years, in this state of survival and not being in my preferred creative container. Hello, welcome to the container, this podcast, and just trying to find my way to get back there. I'm in this creative season right now of really learning to trust myself and know that I can show up consistently and get to manifest and bring into reality like my wildish dreams. Anyways, that brings us to today. Unscripted, unprompted. I'm gonna paint the scene. I'm at lunch. And by at lunch, I mean I've made lunch and I'm sitting on the couch, and I'm like, I'm gonna watch a little bit of the YouTube while I chill so I can take a break before I like pivot to doing some other work stuff. And I turn on Les Alfred's podcast, She's So Lucky, and it's my first time listening to the podcast, and man, the things that happened in the 20s I haven't even finished the podcast. I climbed into my closet and needed to record this right away. So she's starting off and she is immediately like speaking my language. She's talking about how she feels as a podcaster, as a content creator, that she doesn't have a tangible box. Like she doesn't fit in a box, she doesn't have a tangible product to offer people. She's come from a previous history, previous life where this podcast used to be called Balanced Black Girl. If you've been around for a long time, you know my first rendition of this podcast was called The Growing Black Girl. So that's point one, that connection. We have that same commonality of like having similarly named first renditions of a podcast. And then she starts talking about how growing up, the person that she wanted to be like most in this world is Oprah Winfrey. And she just makes that really good point of like she doesn't know what the trajectory is because there are people like Oprah Winfrey who have what we can now looking backwards see as this clear path, and she was doing that path in the 80s, the 90s. That's a little bit different than trying to do that past in the 2020s, the 2020s. But in the 2020s, the path is a little bit different, and what does it look like for her? So I immediately was like, um, how dare I be on this beautiful podcast looking stunning and asking myself these questions? It felt like I was looking at a future me bringing me problems that I just haven't even needed to walk into yet. And then I sort of went down that known trajectory of wait, am I readying myself to make a podcast that's already being done? And feeling like, God, am I a carbon copy? I kept thinking she's probably not funny. She's probably like really smart and grounding and soothing, but I bet she's not funny. And then she cracked a joke, and I was like, shit, she's funny. This has already been done. And I guess the more that I thought about it, I needed to be reminded that the mini spiral that I had wasn't about being a carbon copy. Because I know that her journey looks different from my journey. We're different people, so it's never we're never gonna come out with the same perspective, we're never gonna do things identically. And my aunt for my entire life has said, like, well, Publix didn't let, you know, didn't stop Kroger from becoming a thing, you know, whoever was first, I don't know. I'm not looking that up for that's not the kind of research I'm doing for this podcast. But she always says that like Kroger didn't stop and say, Oh, rats, there's already a Publix. And if you're not from the South, you pick your two grocery stores and and flip that analogy. And I knew that even if I was doing a podcast that's already been out there, it wasn't gonna stop me from doing the podcast because again, really high self-esteem, I just assumed that it was I'd have my own perspective and it would be okay. I realized though, scrolling through her comments on this video and hearing her talk, that when those moments come up, that for me they just they're not so much of like an imposter syndrome or uh oh no, I need to overthink everything that I've ever done in my life. They are opportunities and moments for me to self-focus and to refocus and be reminded of who I am and use those as an opportunity to like speak life into myself and say, Hey, I'm really funny, I have a unique perspective. These are the things that I do that are true to myself that make us not the same. While I'm like thinking about that, I am reminded that for so long, and what has kept me from coming back to again my preferred creative container of this podcast has been feeling like I needed to teach something, having something that's tangible, or being a thought leader or voice of reason, or the person you come to for X, I think that kept stopping me. I am never gonna be the person you come to for makeup tips. Never gonna be the person that you come to to learn how to do curly hair. I'm probably never gonna be the person that you come to because you need to know how to manage your finances like a baddie. It's just not me. And because I'm somebody that is always so deeply in process, it's not authentic to me to teach you to do something or to create a podcaster on teaching you to do something. I could do a whole series on boundaries, the importance of boundaries. I could probably find really great therapeutic tools to give you, and I am not perfect at boundaries, and so it feels inauthentic to me to give you a mold and present myself as perfect when again I'm always in process, and the source of truth of me is that I'm always learning and I'm always noticing and I'm always trying to expand. Um, the more that I got into this podcast, less Alfred talked about how she's on this journey of not knowing what her path is supposed to look like, and seeing these opportunities kind of pass her by because she doesn't have necessarily the numbers that could get her into the rooms. You know, those roomslash charts that Doji was mentioning, or that I mentioned that Doji mentioned? We're there, we're together, come on. She's talking about that and how the way to get those numbers, that she knows the way to get those numbers. Clickbait. Like, do the performative thing show up in a way that might feel relatable, but is more of a I'm down bad, I'm crying on the internet every day, or I'm telling scandalous, juicy information, and that's what the algorithm likes. That's what makes you visible and accessible. But how do you stay on the path if your vision is not scandalous? If your vision is to create a community that is based on a joy and light and being in process, how do you stay on that path when you know how to shorten the runway? And the way you shorten the runway is to essentially get rid of the purity of your vision. When you're asking someone this, the default response is no, don't sell yourself, don't sell your soul. But it's much harder when you're sitting in the in the thick of it. Into the thick of it? When you're in the thick of it, it's a lot harder to not say, How do I blow up quickly to get to where I want to be? How do I stay true to this? I see the vision, I see what she's trying to say, I I could see her frustration. And on cue, like nobody's business, I remembered a couple weeks ago, maybe about a month ago now, I was listening to Emma Greed's podcast, and she's interviewing Issa Ray, the only one that you know, and she is saying that she, like everybody else, scrolls, she enjoys scrolling, and she is slowly getting tired of the moments where yes, she's scrolling, yes, that was funny, ha ha ha, it cracked her up or made her go, oh, interesting, and then she scrolls again. And when she puts her phone down and she walks away, she can't tell you what just made her laugh, or she can't tell you the thing that just made her go, oh, okay, cool. Because there's such fleeting moments that don't hold any water. And thinking about that and hearing her say that she is interested in and is waiting for like the resurgence of deeply rooted, authentic conversations, things that stick with you or shake you up or spark something in you for days to come, to see her name that, and to then hear, do we abandon authenticity for the fast track was such an interesting thing that happened in my mind today. And this morning, before I connected this moment of listening to Denial as a river, before I turned on Les Alfred's podcast, before I connected the dots with Issa Ray's comment, I watched Tabitha Brown accept an Emmy. And at the end of her speech, she says, I hope you have a good day. But if you can't, don't you dare go messing up anybody else's. We've seen her close out IG videos, YouTube, just quit coming on stories. Like we've seen her close out so much of her content and her personal journey with that same thing for years. Not a couple weeks, not a couple months, for years. We have seen her say this, and then she was on a stage in that same authentic vein. No, uh authenticity is not the fast track, but it is the sustainable one. It's the through line that is going to get you, me, us, them, everybody from where we are to where we're supposed to be, where we're called to be, on time and in time. So I'm not saying that I have this amazing answer of stay authentic, just be true to you, boo, and everything will work out. That's not this podcast. It's probably never gonna be this podcast. I am not here to teach you anything, I'm just here to notice. Um, yeah, that's all I have. F Tabitha sign off. I have this lunch break sitting in my closet, stretched out over shoes that are digging into my ass. And I have the rooms that I believe are waiting for me. And I guess that's enough for today. Like and subscribe to my YouTube channel. I'll talk to y'all later. Bye.