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Take a deep dive into a featured guest’s personal history; the pivotal moments of their childhood and adulthood that defined them and the crucial and sometimes painful decisions they made that forever changed the course of their lives. Each episode of And Then Everything Changed is an intimate conversation; sometimes funny, sometimes profound. Hosted by Ronit Plank. More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com More about WHEN SHE COMES BACK, a memoir: https://ronitplank.com/book/ More about HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE, a short story collection: https://ronitplank.com/home-is-a-made-up-place/ Sign up for monthly podcast and writing updates: https://bit.ly/33nyTKd Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/
Episodes
Tuesday Apr 27, 2021
Tuesday Apr 27, 2021
Sabrina Osso describes her childhood as stolen. Her father was abusive to her mother and she witnessed violence and endured trauma for 15 years. She was an extremely quiet child, was bullied in school, and her fear of both home and school created almost incapacitating difficulty for her. By high school she was suicidal but wouldn’t get help until college when a friend urged her to seek therapy.
Through years of hard emotional work she began to heal, finally realized her dream of becoming a dancer, and founded a company whose mission it is to certify homes and establish procedures to facilitate eviction in the event of domestic abuse. Violence stole so many years from her when she was too young to escape, but Sabrina has created a passionate life of advocacy, courage, and the confidence that she is worthy of love, contentment, and peace.
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Friday Apr 23, 2021
Friday Apr 23, 2021
Kelly McMenamin and Katie McMenamin are sisters and organizational specialists dedicated to helping others organize according to personality. After years of disagreeing with one another on how to declutter and whether to file or pile, they co-founders PixiesDidIt! After 10+ years of field research, they discovered that how you organize is hardwired in your brain and organization isn’t about making it perfect. It's about finding stuff when you need it. They created an assessment that calculates personality and harnesses individual strengths and preferences to transform living spaces into ideal places. On this episode Kelly and Katie help usher in spring and share some of their best tips for smoothing out the edges in pandemic-weary people and homes.
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Tuesday Apr 20, 2021
Tuesday Apr 20, 2021
Andrea Wilson Woods was barely an adult herself when she got legal guardianship over her 8-year old sister Adrienne after their mother called to say she no longer wanted to be a mother. An actress trying to make it in LA, Andrea worked hard to make ends meet while they navigated their new relationship in which Andrea became Adrienne’s mother first, her sister second, and her friend third.
Then, when Adrienne was 15 and experiencing profound pain she was diagnosed with stage IV liver cancer. Andrea focused on giving her sister who was now her daughter the best 147 days she could in the time she had left. From meeting Jay Leno to spending the day with Dave Navarro of Jane’s Addiction, Adrienne made every moment count. As she lay dying, Adrienne taught Andrea how to live and Andrea found the strength to change her own life. This episode of And Then Everything Changed is a story of motherhood, adulthood, sisterhood, and discovering who you are meant to be.
Connect With Andrea:
Better Off Bald - A Life in 147 Days book
Blue Faery Adrienne Wilson Liver Cancer Association
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For more about this episode click here!
Tuesday Apr 13, 2021
Tuesday Apr 13, 2021
For years, even as Laila Tarraf continued to feel disconnected from others, her belief that any vulnerability would make her soft dictated her personal life and her work as an HR leader. The firstborn child of Lebanese parents, she was encouraged to step up and take care of the family from a young age. She sometimes resented that role but then she met and married her husband and became a mother and began a new life. A year into their marriage he had a serious motorcycle accident, was prescribed pain pills, and never stopped taking them. Over the next six years they never discussed the topic of his drug and alcohol abuse; his dependence and their marital disconnect went unsaid. Their marriage began to collapse and soon after he overdosed on opioids. It wasn't until her mother was dying that Laila was able to better understand her history with co-dependent relationships, deal with the death of her husband, and be at her mom's bedside as her life ended. Her experience informed her leadership, her mothering, and her approach to the unexpected. Her new book Strong Like Water is out now.
Connect With Laila:
Purchase Strong Like Water via Laila’s Website or on Amazon
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For more about this episode click here!
Tuesday Apr 06, 2021
Tuesday Apr 06, 2021
Kenneth Scott’s mother had lupus while he was growing up and though they were living off of food stamps and SSI in section 8 and she was facing great hardship as a single parent she never let the rest of the family see her struggle. When she remarried, Kenneth gained siblings but his stepdad and he went head-to-head and he witnessed his new father emotionally and physically abuse his mom throughout their relationship. Sports became Kenneth’s escape, a way to cope with the trouble he saw at home and he soon excelled at football. He became #34 in the nation and had a plan to do 3 years of college football and then go to the NFL. But when he got to college the abuse he’d witnessed and the frustration he’d felt as a child surfaced and threatened the life he was building. With the support of his football program and coach he went to therapy to work on his anger issues and live the life he wanted for himself.
He gave back to the community, fell in love, and was so close to making his NFL dream come true. But after suffering two serious injuries he realized he would need to make a tough decision; he would need to set a new course for his life.
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Tuesday Mar 30, 2021
Tuesday Mar 30, 2021
Even from an early age Dr. Lynette Louise knew she would grow up and have heaps of children. The victim of domestic abuse she understood all too well that what she experienced growing up was not okay and that she would protect her own children at all costs. But as a young mother she faced unreliable and unsafe partners and the challenge of navigating the foster care system and securing adequate schooling for her autistic and neuro-atypical brood. And even more painfully still, she had to confront her own shortcomings and bad relationship patterns. In her desire to keep her promise to her kids she did the hard emotional work she needed to, went back to school and got her doctorate in psychophysiology, and developed a powerful system to help retrain the brain to help the most neuro-atypical children reach breakthroughs.
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Tuesday Mar 23, 2021
Tuesday Mar 23, 2021
Before Kim Hooper endured pregnancy loss herself she wondered if women experiencing miscarriages might have had a part to play in their loss—maybe they didn’t eat the right things or didn’t manage stress well, maybe it was their fault. As her own losses began accumulating and she understood the randomness of miscarriage, the unpredictability of pregnancy overwhelmed her and fear took over. As her sense of control over her body and her future seemed to spin out she grappled with questions of whether or not she was cut out to be a mother, if she deserved a baby at all.
Years passed and as she began to understand her grief better and let go of blame, she saw that she wasn’t ready to give up on having a baby and tried again. She is the co-author of the new book All the Love: Healing Your Heart and Finding Meaning After Pregnancy Loss and joins And Then Everything Changed on the eve of her book release to share her story, discuss the harmful clinical language around pregnancy loss, and how to best support grieving parents.
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Friday Mar 19, 2021
Friday Mar 19, 2021
For Kacee Hoffer, finding a new identity was not easy. After stepping away from almost 12 years of diving she found it hard to find other passions, fill her time, and treat her body with compassion.
She started diving at nine years old and had been a high performing division 1 athlete at Boise State, and that's all she knew. Everything she did was connected to diving and her social life outside of the sport was almost non-existent. But during her sophomore year of college she was assigned a new coach who had no compassion for the athletes and pushed them to perform while injured and past what they could take.She began feeling depressed, anxious, and even experiencing black outs. She knew her career as a diver needed to end.
She now coaches children and encourages their parents to enjoy the sport for what it should be: fun. Her book, “From Athlete to Human Being” tells the story of athletes that transitioned out of sports. She also coaches transitioning athletes on how to close that chapter of their life.
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Tuesday Mar 16, 2021
Tuesday Mar 16, 2021
Katherine was in second grade when her mother called attention to her weight, a moment that impacted the rest of her life. From that day on her insecurities about her size and an endless cycle of shame about her body took over. She learned that a thin body was ideal and began to believe that the smaller you could get, the more valuable you would become. She chased down diet after diet and felt that she had to apologize for being ‘fat’, doing everything she could to get skinny. But when she did lose the most weight she ever had before she found she was the unhappiest that she had ever been in her life. It was this pivotal moment that she realized that body weight and her happiness did not depend on each other.
Her journey of self-acceptance began in 2020, after she was laid off and had time to reflect on her deep-rooted beliefs and find clarity on her path. She decided that she did not want to hate herself forever and needed to break away from the behavior that was now second nature. She became active in the Body Positivity movement, launched the podcast “It’s Okay to Love Yourself”, and is now a leadership development coach who encourages women of all sizes to love themselves.
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Tuesday Mar 09, 2021
Tuesday Mar 09, 2021
Award-winning international travel and culture journalist, author, speaker, playwright, screenwriter, movie and theatre critic, opera librettist, and theatre director Judie Fein believes everyone has a mission in life even if they don’t know what it is and part of that mission is to become whole, as whole as they were at birth. Her own experience overcoming a trauma in childhood and her interest in story has moved her to dig into her family history, visit her ancestral homeland, and create a life rooted in expression, accountability, and curiosity.
In this episode she shares what she’s learned about the nature of family through emotional genealogy and relationship epigenetics, the elements essential to writing memoir, and what her life is like now in a post-family world.
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For more about this episode click here!
Episode Resources:
Deep Travel Ted Talk