What led you to the creation of the podcast and its overall mission?
I started a podcast a few years back called Not What It Seems RGV, which had kind of the same premise, but I was only interviewing people, and I was having a hard time finding my rhythm, and I also wasn’t producing it. So, my journey with podcasting started there, and that got a few listens, and people were excited, but I had such a hard time having to interview everybody that I wanted to interview…Then COVID happened, and it was like, well, I’m not going to sit down in a little tiny room with someone just in case something happens.
Finding the Anchor app was like, you know what? I have a lot to say, and I think it would be cool for people to hear some of my thoughts and opinions and eventually [I’d like to] interview people… I sat down with my phone, and I just was like, I don’t feel very good today, let me talk about that, and that’s how “Feeling Purposeless” came about, the first episode.
You talked about wanting to hear things you want to listen to… It’s really awesome that you said, “I am going to do this!”
For sure, and I also think when we think about a lot of other podcasters, they’re in different communities, and they’re also at different levels of financial places or ethnicity or their upbringing, their religion – there’s so many different diverse podcasters out there, which is really great. But I was like, how many women from the Valley [and how] many children of immigrants from Reynosa are talking about their problems? How many podcasters out there are talking about being on food stamps and trying to thrive and survive after being a food stamp baby and living in government housing? I’ve never heard somebody talk about that before on a podcast, so I’m like – there’s a lot of us out here, you know.
On The RGV Seems, you talk about friendships, relationships, body positivity, and more. What have your experiences taught you, and why do you believe these topics are important to discuss?
Friendships and conversations about friendships and how to be a good friend and a good person… I think sometimes those are important to have because my parents, when they moved here, they didn’t know what the hell they were doing. They didn’t speak the language, they didn’t know where they were going to get jobs, they didn’t know how they were going to feed us or clothe us…They had a lot going on.
So now that I’m an adult [I think] am I a good friend? What does that mean? So I talk about these things in the podcast, mostly because they’re questions that I have about myself and questions that I see coming up in relationships in my life, and I’m like – if my parents had a hard time teaching me about these things or talking about these things, or they were so busy with work or trying to make ends meet that they couldn’t sit down and be like “Hey, this is how this is done!” But they didn’t know either, so if I had those questions, I bet a lot of Valley kids also have those questions.
I think that’s worth discussing in the place of like if you want to have a better tomorrow, start focusing on yourself today. You can have better friends, you can have better relationships.
In your podcast, you’re very open about anxiety, feeling insecure, or overwhelmed.
What’s the value of speaking up about your emotions?
I think what I’m trying to do is make the human experience normalized. That’s my main focus. And showing that humans aren’t perfect, and we should stop coming into offices and acting like we’re all these robots without emotions because at the end of the day, everybody goes home and cries or stress eats or whatever because they had to keep it up inside so much because that’s what the corporate world is.
So I just wanted to share my emotions and make sure that people have an open space for them to share their emotions because once we start being real with our emotions and when we start being real with who we really are, the world can be a better place.
For the most part, I think it’s important for people to know that we all have emotions, we gotta share them, we gotta use them, we gotta stop acting like they’re not there, or we’re going to live really unhappy lives, and then you’re going to make people unhappy around you.
What kind of feedback have you received?
One of my first or second episodes, I had a guy message me. He was like, “My wife was listening to you, and I didn’t really care what you were saying, and then all of a sudden you started talking about how you felt like shit because you hadn’t accomplished something and you’re going to try anyway. You struck me because that’s a feeling I’ve had, so now I’m a fan, and now I’m glad that I heard you say that!”
I like that he probably thought that his wife was too-this or too-that, and it ended up helping him, and it made him think about what it’s like to be a woman in society. That’s why it’s important to talk about these things because you never know who is on the other side going on “I did think that,” or “I was wrong about this,” or “I have kept my emotions in my whole life, and it’s killing me inside, and it’s good to know that I can let it out.”