Check out the Season 10 trailer for Here’s What I Learned with Jacki Hayes, a fellow member of the Feminist Podcasters Collective.

This season is built around real experiments. Jacki isn’t just talking about ideas. She’s inviting coaches and service providers to assign her an actual experiment from their area of expertise. She runs it in her business, then they come back together to break down what worked, what didn’t, and what the results actually show.

If you like practical insight, honest reflection, and learning from real-world tests instead of polished theories, this season is worth a listen.

Find the show wherever you listen to podcasts or visit https://www.jackihayes.co/podcast

NOTE: This episode was recorded before the murder of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Our hearts are with his family and we share your outrage about his murder. Abolish ICE.

In this episode of Messy Liberation, Becky and Taina sit inside two overlapping kinds of grief: personal loss and collective unraveling. Becky names the heavy, destabilizing grief of watching U.S. power erode on the global stage—and what it means to confront the loss of privilege, safety, and certainty in real time. Taina shares the complicated aftermath of her mother’s death, including the anger, relief, and dissonance that come from being told a story about someone that doesn’t match your lived experience.

Together, they explore grief as a political and embodied experience, the difference between healthy and harmful anger, and why being “aware” isn’t enough without guardrails, resourcing, and community. This episode is about naming the mess without rushing to fix it—and learning how to stay human when the world makes it very tempting not to.

🧠 Discussed in This Episode
• The grief of losing global privilege—and why it still matters even when privilege is complicated
• Why awareness without action (or guardrails) can keep us stuck
• Seasonal depression, political despair, and “who gives a shit” energy
• Resource mapping as a tool for emotional regulation and capacity
• Healthy anger vs. destructive anger—and why movements can’t survive on rage alone
• Parenting, power dynamics, and what under-resourcing does to relationships
• Complicated grief after the death of an abusive or estranged parent
• The dissonance of hearing glowing stories about someone who harmed you
• Relief as a valid response to death—and why that doesn’t mean you didn’t love them
• Dehumanization, polarization, and the cost of refusing to seek understanding
• Why systems benefit when we fight each other instead of looking up

🎤 WE ARE PROUD MEMBERS OF THE FEMINIST PODCASTERS COLLECTIVE: http://feministpodcastcollective.com/

In this episode of Messy Liberation, Becky Mollenkamp and Taina Brown dive into a layered, messy, and necessary conversation about storytelling, race, motherhood, power, and who gets centered when Hollywood tells “political” stories.

Using three recent releases as our jumping-off point — Sinners, One Battle After Another, and His and Hers — we unpack what happens when art claims to be subversive… and whether it actually is.

We talk about:

• Why Sinners feels intentionally campy, unapologetically political, and rooted in Black culture, music, ancestry, and collective survival
• How One Battle After Another leans on harmful tropes about Black motherhood, revolutionary violence, and white male centrality — and why “satire” isn’t a get-out-of-harm-free card
• The racial reframing of His and Hers and how changing the main characters to Black women fundamentally shifts the story’s meaning, stakes, and power
• Who gets empathy, who gets invisibility, and who’s expected to carry the labor — on screen and off
• Why representation alone isn’t enough, and why who tells the story matters just as much as what story gets told

This is a spoiler-heavy episode that assumes you’ve either watched these films or are okay hearing the full critique. It’s also an honest conversation about discomfort, trigger warnings, and the exhaustion of watching your lived experience turned into “prestige art” for someone else’s enlightenment.

If you care about media literacy, liberatory storytelling, and calling bullshit when “art” punches down — this one’s for you.

🎤 WE'RE PROUD MEMBERS OF THE FEMINIST PODCASTERS COLLECTIVE