Episode 2 - Living Beyond Expectations & Embracing Your Layers with Kelly Anne Carter
By Jessica Garrison
To bookend the beginning of season 9, we are joined by Kelly Anne Carter who is chronically curious, and she is not afraid of liminal spaces. She is also interested in people’s stories rather than their filters, a trait that connects her even further with our podcast and network.
When discussing living out of her own expectations versus others’, Kelly recalls the deconstruction phase and its brutal awakening. After living out of someone else’s expectations for so long, you forget who you truly are inside, so you have to deconstruct the belief system of others to rebuild your own in their place. She didn’t know herself at all, and I’ve experienced moments like that where I realized I was doing something to make another person happy rather than making myself happy. I think everyone can admit they’ve said yes to something they didn’t want to do or gave an expected answer rather than what they were really thinking.
Kelly says it’s important to be okay with the discovery of yourself and be okay with trying new things. See what feels right or what doesn’t, and make your way to your own decisions and opinions. It’s okay to change your mind, like maybe deciding something feels right for one season and not the other. Growing up in a strict, religious space, Kelly wasn’t allowed to be curious or ask questions, so now she’s making up for that in her adult life.
It can seem daunting to have to go through the self-discovery phase, but let me tell you it is so much fun. You get to do all kinds of different things to find out what you like or what you want to do. I love rediscovering things that I enjoyed as a child that I would’ve been bullied for liking past a certain age or something I hadn’t thought of in a long time. Just because you’re 30 doesn’t mean you can’t watch movies made for little kids or you can’t go to your favorite ice cream shop and have a sundae. Take yourself on dates, ask yourself questions, and find out who you are.
This step in your journey bleeds into accepting your layers, and Kelly says she is also accepting her humanity. She reminds us that it’s okay to make mistakes and it’s okay to slow down. Sometimes we need to address a layer and take a step back to fully appreciate, understand, and know it. It isn’t a race to see who can discover and accept their layers first—everyone needs to go at their own pace and go in their own order. Kelly has really connected with her layers on a physical level, but she is now working on accepting them on a nervous system level. No matter how you decide to go about your embracing layers journey, the most important step is beginning.
I know that finding empowerment and embracing layers is an exhilarating journey, but Kelly is such a great reminder of this. Her attitude and resilience will get you motivated to live out of your own expectations and accept the layered aspects of yourself, and then the rest will fall into place.
Ways to Engage: Notice what feels good to you. It doesn’t necessarily have to be sexual—it could be the way the ground feels under your feet or the way the wind feels on your skin. Pleasure is an important, yet often forgotten layer that we can focus more of our attention on.