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VOICES ON THE SIDE
Welcome to VOICES ON THE SIDE
Voices on the Side with Leah Kim is a podcast centering marginalized identities as an antidote to oppression and supremacy. We invite a variety of guests to be in conversation together, from revolutionary thinkers, writers, and artists to folks and friends sharing stories rooted in their personal history.
We share our hope in imagining a freer and safer future for all — an existence that is rooted less in individuality and more in community. Our themes include collective liberation, creativity, and decolonization. We explore narratives to remind us of our shared humanity.
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CHA
WITH LAURA AND LEAH
Welcome to Cha!
Welcome to 차 with Laura and Leah! Cha is a podcast and video series featuring conversations with our friends over tea. We are two diasporic Korean women who were inspired by Nina Simone's quote, “An artist’s duty is to reflect the times.” Cha is our offering to the collective and we hope our conversations inspire you to start having meaningful dialogues and reflections with your own communities. So make sure to brew a pot of cha and join our conversations about art, spirituality, culture, and liberation.
Please consider becoming a paid subscriber so we can continue creating this work together. For a one-time donation, you can Venmo Laura. For monthly support, you can join our Patreon. Thank you!
LEAH’S FEATURES
In this episode I welcome Leah Kim, host of the excellent podcast Voices on the Side which centers stories of marginalised identities as an antidote to white supremacy.
Her guests have a variety of backgrounds. Some are thought leaders actively focused on the fight for collective liberation, whilst others share stories rooted in their personal history.
As people of the global majority, Leah's podcast contributes to resisting oppression through an insistence to live, create, be seen and heard, exploring narratives that remind us of our shared humanity. I came across Leah's podcast Voices on the Side through her episode with Paris Abbas Entitled Beyond Colonial Spirituality, and immediately I felt like this was someone that I needed to connect and converse with.
How White Supremacy Harms Us All with Leah Kim
Postpartum Depression Cannot Be Boxed Into One Year with Leah Kim
Leah Kim has been a long-time writer and champion of mental health, narrating her personal stories and essays so poignantly about her childhood trauma, growing up a daughter of a mentally unwell mother, and then battling postpartum depression (PPD), anxiety, panic disorder, and PTSD when she became a mother. We were so fortunate to sit down with Leah to dive deeper into her long-term experience with mental health in this episode.
Leah is a second-generation Korean American, born in Chicago and raised in the Bay Area. But she has traveled worldwide and may be better known for her admirable career as Nike's former Global Yoga Ambassador for 10 years. She is currently a mother of two, a blogger, and a podcast host herself for Voices on the Side. She is also a writer with a book in the works!
Because Leah grew up around her mother who was mentally unwell for as long as she could remember, she tried to set herself up to be as mentally well as possible before she became a mother. Leah thought that being a yoga and mindfulness expert meant that she would be able to think her way out of any darkness. She had a firm belief that she should be able to have a "natural" birth to fit her narrative as Nike's Yoga Ambassador. But 9 years ago, when her birth plan for her first child went south, she was not prepared for the traumatic aftermath.
In this episode, we talk about what she describes as "years long PPD after my first child," including how she first realized she actually needed more help when she started getting anxiety and panic attacks. These panic attacks didn't start until her son was 1.5 years old and finally led her to seek out therapy and help. We talk about how we cannot put a timeline on mental health and that PPD can go on longer than a year.
If you are someone who has had PPD for longer than a year or experienced panic disorder or C-PTSD, you may resonate deeply with this episode. But even if you have not, Leah touches on a lot of themes of mental health challenges that many new moms go through. Back when she had her first child, social media had not been such a safe space to talk openly about things like PPD, but Leah was one of the few AAPI voices on maternal mental health back then and continues to be now.
Motherhood, Mental Health & The Power of Sharing Your Story with Leah Kim
Courage To Create with Claudia Whitney
Today I interviewed my dear friend and fellow mama, Leah Kim. She's a mom of 2, taught yoga for over 15 years, was Nike’s global yoga ambassador for ten years, was recognized as Top Writer in Mental Health on Medium, and has a blog on motherhood and maternal health. On Leah's blog, she shares many of her rich and raw stories on motherhood - and in the interview, she talks about the healing that comes from sharing her story. I think it's important to share stories like Leah’s because we need more conversations on maternal mental health. In the interview, We talked about her experience with panic attacks and postpartum depression and how yoga just wasn’t enough to help her. So she removed herself from the yoga world, turned to therapy, and started her healing journey. She also shares about the gifts that came with postpartum depression and how parenting heals.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. And it’s been a wild ride the last couple of years for many people. You just never know what’s going on with the person in front of you. Or you might not be feeling yourself. Let’s normalize talking about mental health. Support the people around you, and as hard as it may be for you - ask for help.