Sole Witness by Roya Nava

What choice would you make? This podcast started as an idea for a book club. But it’s became something else. It’s a conversation about what it means to be human. About grief that has no language. About loving someone so much it costs you everything. About performing wholeness — While quietly falling apart. The books are where we go to have that conversation. But you don’t have to read them to get...

IS THIS YOU? I want to describe someone. She is fine. Genuinely, measurably fine. She has built a life that works. And she is carrying something she has never fully named. Maybe it’s a love that had no official ceremony. Maybe it’s a version of herself she talked herself out of. Maybe it’s a choice she made — a reasonable one — that sits strangely in the body at 2 in the morning. She doesn’t talk...

Do you think the feeling disappears — When the memory goes? Because I don’t think it does. I think it moves. Out of the memory — Into the body. Into the hands. Into everything you keep making — Or choosing — Or running from — Without quite knowing why. I found my journals from when I was fifteen. I didn’t recognize the girl who wrote them. Her pain was completely gone from my memory. But it was in...

Have you ever found something you made — And had no memory of making it? I found a letter twelve days before I turned fifty. I wrote it when I was fifteen. A month after arriving in Canada. In Farsi — because I didn’t have English words yet for what I was feeling. She wrote of sadness, loneliness, profound feelings of invisibility. I don’t remember being her. But she kept everything. Every paintin...

Have you ever tried to walk away from something — And found it had already followed you? At nineteen—I watched Pride and Prejudice. And I felt something so profound— I sewed an Elizabeth Bennet dress from a bedsheet. By hand. No pattern. Because the feeling had nowhere else to go. I have been making things my whole life because of feelings like that. Poems. Stories. Paintings. Music. All of it—pri...

Sole Witness Intro, what is it, who am I and why now:)I came here to tell you about my books. Somehow this happened instead. And honestly? It feels more like what I was supposed to do all along. I’m Roya Nava. Author. Mom. Wife. Daughter. Sister. And most of all — a human trying to figure out this life one reflection at a time. This is Sole Witness. For the woman who has spent her whole life being...