She Loved Me AND She Cut Me Out of the Photo

Somebody handed us a lie: that you have to pick. Grieve or be grateful. Stay or go. Love your life or ache for more. This episode is your permission to stop choosing — and to live in the Both/And.

We start light (you can be gloriously bad at something and love every second) and move into the hardest Both/And I ever learned: my grandmother, who made me hamburgers "just like McDonald's" and wrote me letters I still cherish — and who played favorites, and once framed a family photo with me literally cut in half. You'll hear how two words — what if both things are true? — thawed a block of ice I'd carried for decades, why "no villain required" changes everything, and how to run your own Both/And Audit this week.

Inside: the four Joy Nuggets, the Scrapper, black-and-white thinking as a hiding strategy, the Inner Storyteller and the Threshold Guardian, and Both/And as honest faith.

I'm Rachel Harris, The JOY Coach — an identity & reinvention coach for women in the thick of a life transition, and a New York Times & USA Today bestselling author.

→ The essay, "The Half That Stayed" (The Salon): https://joyfulrebel.substack.com/p/the-half-that-stayed
Both things can be true. Create a life you love. Live a legacy of joy.

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Somewhere along the way, somebody handed us a lie, a sneaky little rule that we never agreed to. And the rule is you have to pick. Grieve or be grateful. Stay or go. Hold it together or fall apart. Be a good mom or chase the dream. Love your life or ache for more. Be good at something or quit. Because if you're bad at it, what's the point? Right? Pick a lane. Choose a side. Land on the answer and stay there. And here's what I've finally learned. You don't have to pick. You can be both. You can hold two true things in the same two hands at the same time. And when you finally let yourself do that, it is so dang freeing. It's like somebody walked over and opened the window that you didn't even realize had been painted shut. Stop picking aside. Join me in what I call living in the both and. And that is what today is all about. Hey friends, welcome back to the Joyful Rebel Podcast. I'm Rachel, an identity and reinvention coach for women in the thick of a life transition. And around here, we believe growing into your fullest, most alive self doesn't have to be heavy and it doesn't have to be hard. You can actually play your way there and experience a lot of joy. So, right from the top, the biggest takeaway, you don't have to choose. You can be bad at something and still have an absolute blast doing it. I've always wanted to be a singer. I'm not currently a good singer. Thanks to a wicked case of acid reflux, I likely will never be a good singer. But those two things get to live together. I can be terrible and joyful doing it. Somewhere we decided that if we're not great at it, we've lost the right to enjoy it. That's a trap. That's picking aside. Done is better than perfect. You can do it scrappy and have the time of your life. So that is joy nugget number one. You get to be gloriously bad at something and still love every second of it. Nobody is greating your joy. Here's a bigger one. You can love your life and ache for more. You can be so deeply grateful for the good, the people, the home, the calling, and still feel that restlessness humming underneath it. That little voice that whispers, is this really it? We treat that ache like it's a betrayal. Like wanting more means that we're ungrateful for what we've got. Like the ache cancels the gratitude. But what if the ache isn't greed? What if it's the part of you that's still growing, reaching toward the next thing that God has for you? And what if it's a gift and not a flaw? You can adore exactly where you are and reach for exactly where you're going. You don't have to choose both and. Joy nugget number two. Wanting more doesn't cancel your gratitude. You get to love your life and keep dreaming. That's not greedy. That's being human and alive. See how that works? Nothing got fixed, nothing got resolved, nothing changed. We just stopped forcing a verdict now. Let's take that same move, somewhere a little more sensitive. Because the hardest, both and that I ever had to learn wasn't about singing or dreams. It was about a person. I want to tell you about my grandmother. She made me hamburgers that tasted just like McDonald's. She called me up and started every phone call with an old Ray Stevens joke that just cracked her up. Her laugh was epic, and her joy was too. She welcomed me into her home, day or night, any hour, and she welcomed my friends in like they were family. She worked herself to the bone, making sure everyone was cared for. She passed down the family stories that she wanted us to remember. She wrote me letters that I still have and cherish. And she also played favorites. My cousin was the baby, not in actual age, but in her heart. And she was the center. And I was the one just standing a little off to the edge. And that sounds so small when you say it out loud. I know that. But when you're a child, those messages don't stay small. They become a story. They become a loop. They become the answer that you carry for years to the question, am I enough? For me, it added up to a 10-year-old's journal entry, one word that summed up how I felt when I visited her home. Unimportant. A belief that I carried so long that it calcified into identity. You were the one at the edge. For most of my life, I tried to manage this feeling, this belief on my own. I tried to ignore it. I tried to forgive the right way. I focused on gratitude. I listed all the good things. I reminded myself of her letters, her hamburgers, and meanwhile, everyone in my family sang her praises. And the thing is, they aren't and weren't wrong. She was remarkable in so many ways. And knowing that, I called it forgiveness for a long time. But now I think it was suppression. Because I had this private pocket of pain that didn't match the public story. And because it didn't match, I started to wonder if I was making it up. And then last year I found the photo. A professional family photo. Framed at one time, now in a photo album, printed. Everyone's in it, my cousin right in the center, and there I am, at the very edge, literally cut in half. One eye, one shoulder, one leg, half a nose, and half of a very unfortunate early 90s hairstyle. The rest of me, sheered clean off. I told my mom about it recently, after I'd found it. She wondered if maybe it had been cropped. This was the early 90s, and my grandmother was actually remarkable with technology. She filled hundreds of VHS tapes preserving family memories, and she made copies of photos and videos for everyone. She wanted everything documented, shared, kept. And it was possible that she'd been trying to make a copy of the photo and hadn't noticed or thought to check whether everyone actually made it into the photo, but my mom didn't dismiss it. She said, even if that was what happened, someone should have noticed. Someone should have made a new one. And I let that land for a minute. Because that right there is the both and in real life. My grandmother was the woman who documented everything out of love. And she had a blind spot. She never examined. Both true. No villain required. And you want to know the first thing I felt when I did find that photo? It was a little dark humor. Like the universe leaned over, winked at me, and handed me a receipt. That thing that you kept telling yourself you made up? You didn't. But right behind that dark laugh came the old spiral. Am I being dramatic? Am I being ungrateful? Do I even have the right to be hurt by someone who I know loved me so much? And if she was as wonderful as everyone says, and she was, why does this still hurt? That loop. That is the loop. And it kept me frozen for two decades. Four, if I'm being honest. Not because the love wasn't real, and not because the pain wasn't real, but because I couldn't figure out how to hold both the love and the pain at the same time. And then, about a year ago, I was in a coaching session. We were talking about a part of me that I call my scrapper. The part that got sharper, tougher, more defensive after years of feeling just off-center, slightly out of the circle, spotlight adjacent. She's the one who wanted the spotlight to prove something to anyone who might have doubted me in life, but mostly to prove it to me. That's the part that learned. If you're gonna live at the edge of the frame, you'd better earn your place there. And I told my coach in memory I hadn't touched in years. I was 16 at my grandmother's house. And for reasons I can barely explain, I picked a fight. Not because I believed what I was actually arguing, but because I wanted to feel powerful for one minute. I wanted to stop feeling like I was half in the picture. Maybe a part of me thought, if she got angry, even once, then the part of me that felt like an outsider, the one who'd only ever watched everyone sing her praises, would finally feel a little justified. Of course, she kept her cool because she was a grown-up, and yes, a very loving woman. So my teenage scrapper plan went over like a lead balloon. The whole thing was frankly mortifying to say out loud, then and now. But I said it. And then something happened that I didn't expect. In the middle of me talking it through, I heard myself say, what if both things are true? And everything in me went still. Not dramatic, not cinematic, just still. Because nobody had handed me that line before. I just found it right there, in the middle of my own story. What if she was loving and imperfect? What if she was generous and had blind spots? What if she was the family hero and still left a wound in me? What if the hurt was real and the love was real? What if I didn't have to choose? And the moment I let that be true, it was like a block of ice that I'd been carrying for decades started to thaw, not disappear, not dissolve, just soften. The love didn't get erased, the pain didn't get dismissed, they finally had room to coexist. And that coexistence, that's what healed something. Joy nugget number three, here's the freedom. The second you let both be true, the ice starts to melt and you get lighter. You were never carrying it wrong. You were just never told that you could set down the verdict. And one more thing about the both Anne that I missed for years, my scrapper, she wasn't the villain either. She was a bodyguard who never got the memo that the quote unquote danger was over. I was no longer that 10-year-old girl writing in her journal that she felt unimportant when she visited her grandmother's house. I was no longer the girl on the edge of the frame. My scrapper got sharp to keep me safe. And there were plenty of times in my life that I dealt with hard things or mean girls, and she rose up to give me strength. I appreciate that. I don't have to fire her, demonize her, or stuff her into a tiny box. I just get to tell her that she can stand down now, soften a bit, relax. She can whisper me words of strength, truth bombs like their opinions are their business, not mine, or I can care without carrying. But ultimately, I've got this now. So here's what I want you to know about black and white thinking. It's not a flaw, it's a developmental stage. Children, because they have to, think in categories, safe or unsafe, good or bad, with me or against me. That binary keeps them safe. It's actually brilliant for an eight-year-old. The problem is that a lot of us never got invited to recalibrate. We carry those childhood categories straight on into adulthood without realizing it, into our marriages, our friendships, our faith, and into the stories we tell about the people who shaped us. And here's the part that I had to sit with for a bit. Black and white thinking is often a hiding strategy. It's good girl ghosting in disguise. The way we abandon our own true, complicated feelings just to keep the story tidy and easy for everyone else. Because if there's only one right answer, we never have to face the harder, braver truth that two things can be real at the same time. There's even a name for the part of us that demands a clean verdict. I wrote a prize-winning essay about this recently, and in it, I meet my inner storyteller, the narrator who assigns meaning faster than I can check for facts. I lean on her every day. The trick is remembering that her story isn't prophecy unless I keep living it. But in this story, she couldn't stand the paradox. She wanted the file closed, guilty or innocent, saint or sinner. And that refusal, it hardened into what my essay calls a threshold guardian. A belief that made sense once, that protected me when I needed protecting, that worked beautifully for a season, and then kept standing at the door long after that door needed opening. She thought a clean story would keep me safe from the ache. What she didn't know was that the ache was never behind the door. The ache was what I had been carrying on this side of it. You've heard me name three moves before. Shrink, perform, embody. Watch what they do when it comes to paradox. When life won't hand you a clean verdict, the shrink move makes you swallow the confusion and call it forgiveness. The perform move makes you harden, put up walls, decide the person was simply bad, and control the narrative. But there is a third option. Embody means let it be true. All of it. She can be wonderful and she can have hurt you. You can love her and grieve what she didn't give. You can forgive someone and still feel the sting. That's not weakness. That's not a lack of faith. That's emotional maturity finally showing up for the party. And if you're a woman of faith, hear this. Scripture is full of paradox. God didn't give us a faith of clean, tidy categories. He gave us a faith that can hold grief and gratitude on the same page. The Psalms are basically a masterclass in both and. Both in the same poem. Faith isn't the absence of complexity. Faith is the willingness to be honest inside of it. To say, Lord, I'm grateful and I'm grieving. I love this person and they hurt me. I forgive and it still aches. I believe and I don't understand. That's not doubt. That's honest faith. Okay. Here is your rebel practice to claim this week. I call it the both and audit. And it's just two sentence stems. Think of a relationship, a memory, a situation where you keep swinging between they were wonderful, so I shouldn't be hurt, and I'm hurt, so maybe they're not wonderful. She was generous and loving, and she played favorites. He worked hard for our family, and his anger left a mark. She was my best friend, and she let me down in ways that still have me reeling. Both and. Hold that and watch the block of ice start to soften. Joy Nugget number four. You get to stop being the judge of your own story. Both and isn't giving up on the truth. It's finally making room for all of it. And that is the lightest you'll feel all week. Three questions that I want you to carry with you. Where have I been forcing a verdict on something that was actually a paradox? What relationship or story is waiting for me to say both and? And where has black and white thinking been a hiding strategy, protecting me from complexity, grief, or honest joy? So here are your permission slips. You're allowed to love someone and be hurt by them. You're allowed to grieve and be grateful at the same time. You're allowed to forgive someone and still feel the ache. You're allowed to be bad at something and love it anyway. You're allowed to adore your life and still reach for more. You're allowed to let complicated be complicated. You don't have to choose. Both things can be true. And so often they both are. Now, before you go, because even my invitation gets to be an and, if you're just curious whether any of this is for you, you can take the free quiz, Are You a Good Girl Ghost? It's right on my website and the link is in the show notes. If you want the in the moment words for those blank brain moments when you say yes and mean no, grab the Rebel Response Minikit at rachelharrisonline.com backslash kit. And if you're ready to become the whole both and you out loud on purpose, that's exactly what a rebel hour and coaching is for. Let's do it together. The link is in the show notes. You get to pick your own next step. Or honestly, pick a few. That's kind of the whole point, too. And the written version of this story, it's in my essay, The Half That Stayed. It was chosen for the first issue of the Salon, featured August 16th. And as one of the prize winners, I was also in conversation with the other winners in a really insightful discussion on midlife and threshold guardians. The links for the essay, the salon issue, and that full discussion are all in the show notes too. Now, here's where we're headed next time. Once you start holding your own complexity with this much compassion, you start to notice something. Not everyone in your life is equipped to hold it with you. And that's okay. Actually, it's important. Living unhidden doesn't mean flinging every door open to everyone. It means getting wise about who gets access to the whole you. But that is for next time. For now, the door's not locked anymore. I'm learning to walk right past that guardian. Not because I finally got the clean story, but because I realized that he was never coming. And the door was worth walking through anyway. The other half of me had been waiting. So let both things be true. Live in the both and and don't disappear. I'll meet you right back here.