Aloud : Normalizing Taboo Topics

Hey, everybody, it is Shannon stoff here with aloud, coming here to you with my first live ever. I'm in my backyard in beautiful St. Paul, Minnesota, and I'm doing out here because it's a gorgeous day. So it's day one for allowed. And so I'm going to tell you a couple things in this introduction. Number one, what is allowed? What does that mean? Number two, who am I and why am I talking about this stuff? Number three is what I hope you experience and what outcome I want you to have as a result of being a part of this journey and community.

And then last but not least, my why, which I'm sure you'll be able to tell from the other parts. So first and foremost, what is allowed or this relationship I think that we're building together. And that is because aloud is about talking about taboo topics. And so really what that means is we all take on roles in life, every single one of us, that come with expectations of what it means to be a good fill in the blank. And when we do that and then our lived experiences and who we are as individual human beings and how we show up in the world don't meet those standards or their different experiences, then we can tend to take on shame or feeling like we're not going to enough.

So I will speak for myself and the roles that I take on that I find are taboo to talk about society. So that's what allowed is going to be. A number of those roles for me are, I'm divorced twice. That's certainly not something that people, you know, you can't, at a dinner party, you can't go up to someone and say, hey, nice to meet you. You know, I'm twice divorced. What about you? That's a challenging topic. I actually have. I have anxiety. I've had panic attacks. Mental health has been a big part of my life for a long time.

I have CPTSD, which essentially means it's challenging for me to trust human beings, which is a challenge, as you might expect, as a human being. And finally, I'm also the caregiver. I have a son with autism who's 14. And that experience, too, has been a challenge to talk about openly. So that's why aloud is here is, you know, I am a million things just like you are, and I want to be able to openly talk about all of them, good and bad and mostly just human. Okay, so who I am, I'm Shannon. I just told you some of my roles and my titles.

I'm a professional. I am a mother. A friend. I'm an athlete. I love to run. I love communication and words and all the things. What I am not is a licensed anything. I am not a licensed therapist. I'm not a licensed mental health professional. But I am someone with a lot of lived experience, and I'm someone who has now been in therapy consistently for seven years. So it's that, right? That's what I'm sharing you, is my lived experience with these topics that can be hard to find, that can be hard to talk about with others and hard to find people like you.

So that's who I am and who I am not. So what I hope to be for you. So my experience, you'll hear a lot about me talking about being a caregiver for a child with autism and essentially the loneliness that can come in that role because there are a lot of services and supports for the person who has the condition. But again, it can be difficult to talk about with your social circle because often there are people in your social circle who might be part of the problem, frankly, for just you as an individual, to not feel shame.

You'll hear me talk about that quite a bit. You'll also just hear me talk about what it means to be a woman, a professional, in what can be a man's world a lot of the time and a lot of other topics. But really, again, it's just that core of, it's okay to talk about the things that are happening in your life. They're real. There's nothing wrong with you, and it's just something that millions of us go through, but we don't talk about it. All right, I have to look at my notes since this is day one.

My why, oh, what I hope to accomplish for you. Okay, I think I'm being redundant, so thanks for bearing with me three things. Number one, I want you to see people like you, right? So if someone looks at me from afar, I am maybe successful in a lot of ways. Meanwhile, I might have a lot happening inside. And so I want you to know that you can be that person, too. There's a ton of us out there, so I want you to see somebody like you. Number two, I want you to be able to hear stories of people like you, whether that's from me today, whether that's from someone else that joins the allowed community in the future.

I just. I want you to know, and know that what you're experiencing is absolutely normal. And number three is I want to be a lifeline. So we have those moments, you know, where we don't know what we're going to do. We don't know how we're going to go on. One I'll share with you in an upcoming post is about particularly being a caregiver and hitting that point of, oh, my God, I don't know what to do. I'm a horrible mother. None of that is true. But in those moments, I would love to hear from someone else.

Yeah, you're not a horrible mother. You're a human who is in a hard moment. So I want to be those three things for you. I want you to see people like you, I want to hear from people like you. And I want to be a lifeline. I think that's it for the introduction. Hi, Katie. Hi, Barbara. Thank you for the sweet notes. Thank you, Cadre team. So excited to be here. More to come. Just jump on in any time, particularly those caregivers for people who are struggling or frankly, anyone who feels alone right now, allowed will always be here for you.

We'll talk to you soon. Have a great day. Three, two.