Let’s Have The Conversation

The holidays pull the curtain back, every single time. The kind your body speaks before your mouth ever does. And today, you’re one day away from a national holiday that many of us now recognize as steeped in mythology built to obscure violence against Indigenous nations on this land. That matters. It deserves acknowledgment. It deserves collective reckoning. But here’s the paradox we have to name...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com There are some conversations that don’t announce themselves as teachings — they unfold. They reveal. They stretch us past the surface and pull us into the marrow of what we know but rarely name. This session with Ukumbwa Sauti was exactly that. We didn’t come in with talking points. We didn’t follow a scrip...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com Before I get into today’s lesson, I want to say thank you. Losing my main Facebook account — losing my stories, my community, losing the people who have been building this work with me in real-time — was a grief I did not expect. One minute I had a digital home filled with memories, conversations, healing,...

There’s a myth that supremacy culture handed all of us; directly, indirectly, through family systems, school systems, religious systems, even workplace policies: “If you feel guilty, you’re being accountable.” But guilt is not accountability. Guilt is collapse. Guilt is emotional performance. Guilt is avoidance dressed up like virtue. And in today’s episode, we broke down exactly why guilt keeps u...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com Today’s Friday With Friends was a whole sermon on what it means to build a business that doesn’t betray your values. I sat down with Kay Coughlin , CEO of Facilitator On Fire , who has been behind the scenes helping me stay on task, sort the swirl in my brain into an actual roadmap, and keep Make Shi(f)t Ha...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com There’s a moment when awareness hits the body before it reaches the brain. That drop in your stomach, that heat in your chest, that quick rush to defend—that’s not guilt. That’s your nervous system trying to protect you from shame. But awareness is not punishment. It’s an invitation—to stay human when it wo...

There is something happening in the collective nervous system right now — you can feel it. Institutions are collapsing. Benefits are threatened. People are stretched, grieving, terrified, exhausted, and trying to hold a thousand things at once. And in moments like these, our bodies revert to what they already know : * Run. * Fix. * Perform. * Prove. * Disappear. * Brace. Not because you’re weak —...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com There is a place in this work where theory can’t take us. A place beyond language, beyond analysis, beyond the perfect explanation of “what happened to us.” There is a knowing that lives in the tissues. In the breath. In the organs. In the wobble. (As Susan Powell explained) This week’s Friday With Friends...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com We are living in a moment where everything feels like it is on fire — globally, locally, relationally, and inside of our own homes. And for many of us, the instinct is to move faster in response. To do more. To stay “on.” To prove that we are paying attention. To show that we care. But urgency is not proof...

Let me say this plainly before we go anywhere else: There is nothing accidental about hunger in America. Hunger is a policy decision. A design choice. A tool of control. And the people most impacted are the same people this country has tried to control since its inception: Black folks, Indigenous folks, poor folks, disabled folks, caregivers, elders, and every worker whose labor is treated as disp...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com There are conversations you hear , and then there are conversations you remember in your bones. Today’s Friday with Friends was one of the latter — not a performance of healing, but a return to the underworld of truth , the place where we stop pretending we’ve outgrown our wounds and instead ask: What shape...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com The chants will get quiet. The hashtags will slow. The adrenaline that surged through the streets will soften… hopefully, into something else, quieter, heavier, truer. This is the part they don’t teach you about revolution: the aftermath .The roar cracks open possibility. The quiet teaches us how to live in...

🌬️ Opening Reflection: A Declaration, Not a Destination The No Kings March was never meant to be the arrival point, it was a beginning. It was a collective exhale that said: no more crowns, no more thrones, no more hierarchy in the name of liberation. But as I shared in our live gathering, we have to remember that visibility is not victory. Marching gets the attention, but maintenance builds the m...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com The Fatigue of Freedom and the Fascism We Keep Ignoring Black folks have been marching for centuries, from plantations to protests to policies that never quite deliver. So when people ask why we’re not outside for every march, every movement, every “No Kings” moment, the answer is simple: we’re tired. Not o...

Today, as we honor Indigenous Peoples’ Day , I want to invite you to return to the bones, to the memory, the grief, and the relationships that tether us back to humanity. We live in a world that rewards forgetfulness. It rewards production over presence, and busyness over belonging. But October — this Season of Descent — calls us inward. It’s a time when the earth itself invites us to slow down, s...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com When Ukumbwa Sauti and I sat down for this conversation, it wasn’t simply to talk about men. It was to talk about memory . About what patriarchy made us forget: tenderness, belonging, accountability, and the sacredness of being in right relation with ourselves and one another. Our dialogue was less an inter...

This live began as part of my September thread on the Gilded Age, but it needed to be turned into something deeper. I wanted to trace the line from suffragettes to the Women of the KKK, all the way to Erica Kirk, and show how white womanhood has always played both sides of patriarchal power. Innocence, I argued, is not neutrality; it is complicity. And if we can’t hold that complexity, we can’t di...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com I went live this Friday expecting a guest, but they got called into work, so it turned into me, coffee, and community. What started as a “down day” conversation shifted into something sacred: elder care, intergenerational living, and what it means to hold space for life, loss, and legacy. 3 Key Takeaways *...

"We are living in the throes of a dying empire, and like any death, it fights to hold on. Grief is not just about loss; it's about transformation, reckoning, and the space in between. Today, we hold space for the grief of healing, the truth of violence (internal and external), and the call to return to ourselves." — Desireé B. Stephens “We Are in the Death Rattle of Empire” We are not simply livin...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com This conversation with Kate Coffman of Rooted Beginnings is all about what it really looks like to divest from oppressive systems and co-create something new. We talk about the fear, the cost, and the liberation that comes with walking away from systems that were never built for us. From IEP advocacy to mul...

This live began with me naming my struggle: how to stay true to my September editorial plan ( The Gilded Age: Then & Now ) while also honoring the urgency of what’s happening in real time with Charlie Kirk’s murder and the internal violence of whiteness. I reminded us that flexibility is part of liberation work—because nothing is static. The conversation unfolded around performative allyship, bina...

What happens when comfort is treated as the highest value? From Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement to today’s “civility politics,” white comfort has consistently been placed above justice. History shows us the pattern: when progress threatens to disrupt the status quo, calls for “unity” and “peace” rise up, not as tools for liberation, but as demands for silence. This is why today’s conve...

This week on Friday with Friends, I was joined by Celtic Ginge , a creator who proudly calls themself “a thorn in the side of those that seek to oppress.” Across Substack, Instagram, Bluesky, YouTube, and more, Ginge blends humor, history, and sharp political analysis to dismantle lies and systems that would rather keep us silent. You can find them here What unfolded in our conversation was not ju...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit desireebstephens.substack.com What does it take to disrupt systems that have been designed to recycle themselves for centuries? In every era; from the Gilded Age of robber barons and racial terror, to our age of billionaires and corporate rollbacks, people are asked a choice: Will you be brave, or will you be comfortable? This conversat...

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