"Some version of alright, eventually."

WEBVTT - This file has cues.

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Hey, how's it going?

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This is episode eight in season four of Something Shifted.

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If you're new here, you've got a lot to catch up on.

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Something Shifted is about identity after interruption.

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It's where we tell stories about who we become after a life quake hits and what we tell
ourselves when everything changes.

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And I think you're gonna like it here.

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My name is Sean.

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And this is something shifted.

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Today's story belongs to Kojo.

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A month after I came out of hospital, my then best friend came and found me in my room, my
spikes on my feet, in tears, trying to get my foot to move.

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That's next.

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Right after this.

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If you're one of those people that believe rest is a luxury, we can't be friends.

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Real change is exhausting, and even when your mind is ready, your body has kept the score
and it can't keep up without proper recovery.

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So I've started taking Solal's magnesium glycinate.

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It helps with muscle energy, nervous system support, and I'm honestly feeling a lot less
fatigued.

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You can learn more about Solol and their full range of supplements for healthy aging on
Solal.co.za uh

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That's today.

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If you spend enough time with my family, you'll probably be invited to join us for a walk
on one of the neighboring wine estates, not too far from where we live.

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And one of these estates has beautiful art installations across the property, a few of
which are ginormous mosaics.

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You know, the kind that you can't really see the picture when you're too close.

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But when you start to step back far enough, you can see the entire image.

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Which is when something clicks.

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And as you start to step closer again, you can see what it's actually made of thousands of
fragments of different colours and textures, of different origins, none of them the

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picture on their own, but all of them necessary to make up the whole.

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So how I always describe it is I come from a very simple family where five kids from three
different mothers of three different nationalities, all raised by my father.

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When you zoom in and study the picture of Frank Kojo Bafo Jr.' life, you'll see fragments
from Ghana, Germany, Uganda, Lesotho, and Swaziland making up the foundation of his story.

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Kojo's father is Ghanaian, as was his first wife, and Kojo's older sister was born there
too.

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His father later relocated to Germany for a lecturing position.

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where he met my mother, uh where I was born, and then moved to Uganda.

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Their family had barely settled in Uganda when tragedy struck.

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Kojo was about fifteen months old when he and members of his family were involved in a
terrible car accident.

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My mother, my grandmother, and my uncle passed away and myself and my nanny survived.

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Suddenly, Kojo's father found himself raising a toddler on his own.

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Some years later, they packed up their lives and relocated to Lesotho And when Kojo was
about five years old, his father remarried and two sons and a daughter were added to the

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family.

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Yeah.

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So my older sister's mother's from Gh from Ghana, my mother's German, and then my younger
siblings, their mother's from the Lesotho

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Like Kojo said, five kids, three different nationalities.

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A very simple family indeed.

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But as colorful as the various fragments are, it sometimes made it hard for Kojo to see
how they fit together.

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There's a part of me that's never felt like I belonged anywhere fully.

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Um, and sh you know, being my mother's only child, coming from a family, like I said,
three different nationalities in my family.

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I'm the white sheep of the family.

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So, you know, I'm my mother's only child and my most of my siblings are West African dark,
not just kind of black, but like West African black.

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Fortunately growing up in Lesotho in the seventies and eighties, race and Kojo's lighter
complexion didn't carry the weight it might have elsewhere, like across the border in

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Apartheid's South Africa.

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a lot of organizations had set up in Lesotho um to be able to to a certain extent I would
say sanction bust.

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From Lesotho you could access South Africa quite easily.

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I mean all the embassies were there.

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The high school I went to was multiple nationalities, um, from English to German, um,
Swedish, Norwegian, American, Ugandan, Nigerian, as well as South African.

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So it was a it was

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I guess the cliche term is a melting pot.

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But our influences were global, although we're in this small landlocked country.

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So even though Kojo didn't look like his siblings in Lesotho, that didn't matter.

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Because you know, I was my father's son, I was so and so's older brother, I was so and
so's younger brother, I was so and so's friend.

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In spite of the tragic loss of his mother, Kojo had a pretty charmed life growing up.

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In Lesotho he grew up with friends from all over the world, and his father travelled
extensively as a lecturer and later as a businessman.

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So Kojo started collecting bits and pieces of the globe even as a kid.

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My t shirt collection as a ten year old was amazing because I had T shirts from kind of
everywhere you could think about in the world.

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And my father used to send postcards.

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so I had a lot of postcards.

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My mother had a stamp collection which I kind of inherited.

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Um my father also had a lot of books.

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I remember we moved from a university com house to our own home and he converted the
garage into

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his study which had all his books.

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Um and I mean there were good good two, three thousand books in there.

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Collecting literature clearly rubbed off on Kojo.

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As we record this conversation, the bookshelf behind him is fully stocked, ceiling to
floor and still growing.

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I I continue to have like a quite a big t shirt collection.

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Yeah, I collect sneakers, I collect books.

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I've always collected music in its different forms.

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I remember being in high school and having this image of a cool guy with tattoos, dangling
earrings, leather jackets and riding a motorcycle.

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And yeah, I have acquired quite a few tattoos.

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I've worn earrings since I was fourteen.

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The influence of American television, right?

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I cringe a little bit now that I think about it, but like, you know, the image of the
hell's angel, yeah.

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Tattoos, motorcycle, et cetera, et cetera.

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Um, yeah, in the eighties that was I guess my idea of what w of what was cool, which has
changed.

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I mean I do ride a motorcycle.

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I started riding at forty years old.

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So the start of Kojo's mosaic has all of these international flavors, with a good dose of
a team cool, all the influences handed to him by others.

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But the one thing that was his, the one piece that Kojo was intentionally, deliberately
adding to the picture himself, was running.

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I was a bit of a jock in high school.

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Yeah, I started getting into a hundred meters at fourteen, fifteen years old.

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It was the 80s, and they weren't formal sports programs at Kojo School, or even in
Lesotho, really.

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So during school sports days, the students kinda participated in all the track and field
events.

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Whether they were good at them or not.

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I I used to train myself and I used to run barefoot on a a clay and grass track.

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Um but the what the the decathlete um, Daly Thompson from the UK, uh and my English
teacher used to have his videos, his training video.

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And I'd sit at home and watch watch the videos um and train myself.

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I have the utmost respect for anybody that's prepared to torture their body alone like
this.

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As a swimmer myself, if there wasn't a coach on the side of the pool deck, I wasn't about
to push myself hard, and there Kojo was going down to the track alone after school to

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practice running laps by himself.

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And my friends used to joke and they're like, you know, Kojo raised himself and lost.

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The jokes were teenage jabs, they didn't land, and Kojo kept his focus.

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Which is why that twinkle in his eye grew that much brighter when his stadium was built
close to home.

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They built a new stadium in Maseru with a proper track.

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And the guys in the army who used to run.

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This is what they did.

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So during school holidays, I would go and train with them.

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So every day, Monday to Friday, they'd be at the track and usually one of the sergeants
would lead lead training.

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Um and I used to train with them.

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A teenager training with the army because that's what focus looks like when it's real.

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After high school, Kojo spent a year in Germany as a Rotary Exchange student, and you best
believe he packed his running shoes.

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I joined a club my first week there and we used to train, I think it was like three, four
times a week.

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And but I had this old German coach, um, very red in the face.

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Um, and I think he had even fought in the war and and he couldn't speak English.

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So one of the other kids used to translate for me um until my German got better.

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So to give you an idea of what it's like on the start.

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He would make us stand on the line and then fall forward with our hands by our sides.

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And to stop falling in your face, when you hit like fifty degrees or forty five, you start
pumping your feet.

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So your feet are pushing you forward, which means that your steps are closer together.

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In the start usually takes you like ten meters, you know, between ten and fifteen meters
to come up to your full body height.

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Um so what's happening is that your steps are closer together.

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And because you're pushing backwards they're also a lot more intense.

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And then as you gradually kind of come up, like a plane kind of taking flight, as you
start to come up, then your strides get longer.

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And that was you know, that's he always used to teach us to listen to that.

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It'll be in training you'd you're constantly listening to your steps.

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If for example your strides are getting longer

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too quickly, then you're losing the power that the power of pushing you forward.

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Technically speaking, you're supposed to keep accelerating.

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Um but often, I mean, I would have it like at sixty meters or seventeen meters, you've
kind of reached your peak speed and what or what you're trying to do is kind of maintain

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it.

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Kojo was focused on maintaining his speed when he was racing.

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And like most of us in our 20s, he was focused on maintaining his dreams, maintaining the
picture that he was building.

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The 1992 Olympic Games were held in Barcelona.

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I was 12 years old at the time and totally transfixed by the sporting spectacle, which
represented a massive diplomatic and emotional turning point for South African sports.

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Being invited to compete in the Olympic Games as apartheid lost its grip on the country.

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The newly formed multiracial National Olympic Committee of South Africa competed at
Olympic level for the first time in 32 years.

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There was this air of possibility in 1992.

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And it was the same year that Kojo relocated to Durban and enrolled at the University of
KwaZulu-Natal, and where he started pursuing his commerce degree, with his sights, set on

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something much bigger.

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Um I was playing basketball.

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I was going to gym and I was at the track.

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So I was doing basketball kind of I was doing basketball practice twice a week, with a
match once a week.

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I was generally on the track five days a week and I was in the gym three times a week.

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And my hope and my dream at the time was to qualify for the ninety six Olympics.

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To qualify and represent Lesotho at the Olympics, Kojo just needed to clock a specific
qualifying time.

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And then he would be set.

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He had it all worked out.

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You know, if I go on ninety six and if I make it to the semifinals, then I can, you know,
get on the circuit and then the next next Olympics maybe I'm in the finals and maybe I win

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it.

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Maybe I win it.

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Four little words capturing a heart's deepest desire.

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Fast forward two years, it was the winter of nineteen ninety four.

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Kojo was warming up for one of those basketball games on a Saturday night.

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Just a warm up.

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The kind of thing you do before the thing you're there to do.

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a short team.

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So how we beat you was we literally ran you into the ground.

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We already know Kojo loves to run, so that's not a problem.

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But during the warm up, he got a pain in his leg.

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Pain was familiar to Kojo because he would often feel stiffness and a dull ache in his
tibialis anterior muscle, basically the muscle opposite the calf next to the shin.

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This is the muscle that pulls your foot up in the movement called dorsiflexion.

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So Kojo was used to this feeling in both his legs when he was running.

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But during this particular basketball game,

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That pain didn't go away.

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It came and I didn't stop.

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So I kept on, you know, I kept on pushing through it.

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And by the time the game ended and we had to leave, I couldn't drive anymore.

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that's how intense the pain was in my leg.

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Kojo was part of the team's administration, so he was in charge of driving the combi that
night.

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But he couldn't.

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So the team dropped him off at his residence, and there he was, alone.

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Literally I was just lying in my room in pain.

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Like um, you know, the thing about pain is you can never remember what it feels like.

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But at some stage I was banging my head on the wall to distract myself from the pain in my
leg.

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The following morning a friend drove Kojo to King Edward Hospital, where he waited in the
ER for hours.

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And they did x rays and they said, Yeah, it's probably a muscle strain and gave me
painkillers.

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But by that evening the pain was no better, so he called for the res doctor.

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And then when the doctor came that evening he gave me more painkillers and sleeping tap.

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By Monday, Kojo managed to get hold of some crutches and hobbled around campus as best he
could.

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But by Tuesday he knew something was wrong.

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He got himself to the campus clinic.

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He saw me for like ten minutes and he was like, Move your foot and I couldn't move my
foot.

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He was like, Wriggle your toes and I couldn't wriggle my toes.

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And he immediately said phoned a specialist and he was like, Okay, you need to go see the
specialist.

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I d later discovered orthopedic surgeon and he's at you know, he's at the hospital up the
road.

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This was long before personal cell phones.

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Kojo managed to wrangle a lift to the hospital with some of his friends and met with the
orthopaedic surgeon.

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He was like, you need an operation.

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I can't fit you in.

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I'm gonna refer you to another surgeon.

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So so literally I I then phoned my father in La Sotha using the payphone.

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Um and I was like, Okay, this is what's going on.

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With his dad up to speed, Kojo got friends to drive him back to Res and grab what he
needed, and then it was back to the hospital.

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Which brings us to the part of the story that Kojo remembers with perfect clarity, even
thirty years later.

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His father was on the phone with the finance department.

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They needed a deposit before they could admit Kojo.

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It was five PM nineteen ninety four, no internet banking, and his dad was in another
country.

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The hospital didn't want to admit Kojo without payment, when all of a sudden the back and
forth and the pain became too much, and Kojo snapped.

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Only time I've ever done it, I grabbed the phone from this woman and I cussed my father
out on the phone and said, Please sort this out.

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I never swore in front of my father.

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My father's my only parent from when I was one.

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I came with my father, I went to my father.

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So I mean we had we had, you know, we had our conflicts, we had our, you know, tensions, I
got into trouble.

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But it's also a West African and African father, so

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Even though, you know, the word shit was something that we all used, but I never saw in
front of my father.

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But that day, alone and in agony, desperate times called for curse words.

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And finally, Kojo was off to surgery.

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Waking up I guess a couple of hours later in total darkness and going, Where am I?

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I'm in hospital.

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What am I doing in hospital?

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yeah, my leg.

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And then I looked down and the blankets were over this huge mound where my leg was
supposed to be.

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And I sat up and scrambled and I pulled this thing off and they put this metal frame over
over my leg and I saw my toes.

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'Cause it was bandaged up to my knee.

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Um but I saw my toes and I was okay, I still have a leg and lying back down and then the
pain hit.

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Um and and somehow remembering that this little thing with a red button, they said when
you're in pain press.

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and nurse coming and giving me morphine, which is an amazing drug.

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But not good for you.

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Kojo remained suspended in that drugged haze for more than a week.

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Three surgeries in total.

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And through it all, Kojo kept asking the same question.

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I kept asking, will I be able to run again?

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My surgeon was not definitive.

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Although I later discovered that he knew that I wouldn't be able to run again.

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Um, because what they did is the first time I went into theater, they literally just cut
me open.

00:19:41.184 --> 00:19:45.567
I'd been bleeding internally and it it it was starting to fill up from my throats.

00:19:46.357 --> 00:19:49.129
and so my blood my my muscle was gangrenous already.

00:19:49.129 --> 00:19:50.826
Um

00:19:50.826 --> 00:19:56.810
And so they literally just cut me open for the blood to leak out.

00:19:57.211 --> 00:20:02.414
And then when I went in the second time, they cut out the muscle, top and bottom.

00:20:02.695 --> 00:20:06.857
So they knew that, you know, I wasn't going to be able to run again.

00:20:06.857 --> 00:20:09.840
And I went back in the third time for them to stitch me up.

00:20:09.840 --> 00:20:17.025
Um and it was only after I think five, six days that he said, Look, it's not going to
happen.

00:20:21.826 --> 00:20:26.652
Just like that, none of those Olympic dreams were going to happen.

00:20:27.955 --> 00:20:32.561
He was far from home and alone in the hospital with his loss.

00:20:34.382 --> 00:20:37.605
I was in a ward with I think it was like four beds or six beds.

00:20:37.605 --> 00:20:46.953
Eventually the very nice finance lady uh put me in a private room, but I was under strict
instructions not to touch the phone, anything else.

00:20:46.953 --> 00:20:53.269
Um so I was literally just in this room alone most of the time with television.

00:20:53.269 --> 00:20:56.982
Uh they come wake you up at five o'clock in the morning and then you're up.

00:20:56.982 --> 00:20:58.203
I'm having to get bath.

00:20:58.203 --> 00:21:01.866
I couldn't get up to go to the bathroom and just yeah.

00:21:02.856 --> 00:21:06.532
there by myself kind of trying to figure all of the stuff out.

00:21:08.128 --> 00:21:18.987
Eventually, Kojo was discharged, and he needed to figure out what life was going to look
like, because the plan had been clear and decided from the start.

00:21:19.048 --> 00:21:26.334
Kojo was always going to go to university and then join the family business, but he had
dreams of his own.

00:21:26.978 --> 00:21:35.554
My father helped to design my my degree for me to be able to be effective and use useful
when I came to work in the family business.

00:21:35.554 --> 00:21:39.266
I made in economics, marketing, business administration.

00:21:39.650 --> 00:21:40.575
Running.

00:21:40.575 --> 00:21:43.125
Running was Kojo's dream.

00:21:43.554 --> 00:21:54.241
Sprinting was the only thing where if I'd said, Okay, I'm gonna pursue this and this is
what I'm gonna do as a career was the one thing where you'd have been like, Okay, cool.

00:21:54.281 --> 00:21:55.842
I lost my plan A.

00:21:56.398 --> 00:21:59.561
Kojo calls it Plan A, running.

00:21:59.942 --> 00:22:03.084
But in reality it was more than just a plan.

00:22:03.225 --> 00:22:05.507
It wasn't just the high of racing.

00:22:05.748 --> 00:22:08.230
Running was the rhythm of his life.

00:22:08.622 --> 00:22:12.014
That one moment is great, but it's not just about that one moment.

00:22:12.014 --> 00:22:14.805
It's it's actually everything that you do around it.

00:22:14.805 --> 00:22:18.948
And you know, you wake up today and you're not in the mood, but you need strength.

00:22:18.948 --> 00:22:32.975
Um, you're at training and you know, you're tired or something else is bothering you, but
for that time you are focused purely on the training.

00:22:33.015 --> 00:22:35.377
You're focused on the things that you must do.

00:22:35.377 --> 00:22:38.318
You do everything kind of for that moment.

00:22:38.318 --> 00:22:44.542
And it's not even an anticipation when I stood at the top of the track.

00:22:44.542 --> 00:22:49.204
It was the one time I really felt in that particular moment.

00:22:49.204 --> 00:22:53.286
Like nothing else outside of that.

00:22:53.286 --> 00:22:56.408
You know, even even the people next to you.

00:22:56.408 --> 00:23:07.444
It's it's feeling really in the moment, just looking down this lane and going, you know,
not even thinking about what you're going to do and how you're going to run.

00:23:07.500 --> 00:23:09.358
But literally just being in the moment.

00:23:09.358 --> 00:23:13.836
Kojo had lost the thing that gave him focus and joy.

00:23:14.060 --> 00:23:25.929
I remember probably a month after I came out of hospital, my then best friend who stayed
next door to me in res came and found me in my room with my spikes on my feet, in tears,

00:23:26.612 --> 00:23:28.584
trying to get my foot to move.

00:23:32.270 --> 00:23:34.731
Kojo lost a lot of mobility.

00:23:34.731 --> 00:23:41.495
He needed to wear prosthetic support for two years after the operations because he now had
what is called dropped foot.

00:23:41.975 --> 00:23:46.758
He could push his foot down, but he couldn't pull it back up again.

00:23:46.898 --> 00:23:48.399
So he couldn't drive.

00:23:48.399 --> 00:23:50.980
And he had to learn to walk again.

00:23:51.441 --> 00:23:54.102
And then there was the sound.

00:23:54.542 --> 00:23:56.117
My foot slapped down.

00:23:56.438 --> 00:24:00.409
And so the sound of loss followed him wherever he went.

00:24:05.356 --> 00:24:06.209
lifequake.

00:24:06.209 --> 00:24:13.566
I would say a moment in time that influenced the trajectory of one's life.

00:24:13.600 --> 00:24:18.422
In his early twenties, Kojo's trajectory was rerooted.

00:24:18.894 --> 00:24:24.094
I guess I lost something that gives me jo that gave me joy in its own way.

00:24:24.490 --> 00:24:29.976
After a few additional surgeries, Kojo regained some movement in his foot.

00:24:29.976 --> 00:24:32.808
He doesn't need his prosthetic support anymore.

00:24:33.378 --> 00:24:46.269
can see when I'm tired because I have a bit of a limb and when I walk wearing shoes,
walking like in a mall or someplace with tiles, I hear I hear my step and it slaps down.

00:24:46.269 --> 00:24:48.210
I I get bad leg days.

00:24:48.210 --> 00:24:49.892
I call them bad leg days.

00:24:49.892 --> 00:24:52.714
I get days when it's more pronounced.

00:24:52.714 --> 00:25:02.602
Um I get days where it's irritating and infuriating and I mean fortunately I don't get
them as as much as I used to.

00:25:03.224 --> 00:25:10.806
Although Kojo lost running, he kept the practice of mindfulness that he had been
cultivating subconsciously on the track.

00:25:11.256 --> 00:25:18.712
So I I'd never made the association with mindfulness and running and being on the track.

00:25:18.712 --> 00:25:27.019
But it is something that I have done a lot of work on over the last ten plus years.

00:25:27.119 --> 00:25:31.924
It's something that I'm very kind of conscious of and trying to live very much in the
moment.

00:25:31.924 --> 00:25:39.904
And for me that's like riding a motorcycle is another exercise in in really being present
and really being in the moment.

00:25:39.904 --> 00:25:54.324
I would say the biggest lesson gained from that life quake is more around how I deal with
setbacks, how I deal with the difficult moments in life.

00:25:54.722 --> 00:25:57.967
There is no way to escape hardship in life.

00:25:58.149 --> 00:26:05.442
Life is full of difficult moments, slightly off-color fragments that get folded into the
mosaic of our lives.

00:26:05.964 --> 00:26:17.060
And when I say moment it's like it's a couple of years of trying to navigate it, you know,
mentally, emotionally, physically, you know, make sense of life and how you define

00:26:17.060 --> 00:26:20.120
yourself and how you show up in the world.

00:26:20.120 --> 00:26:26.995
Kojo wasn't part of the 1996 Olympic team, nor did he get to add Olympic medalists to his
life's picture.

00:26:27.296 --> 00:26:35.603
But when you zoom out from that difficult moment and look at the bigger picture, you can
see how much joy, success, and meaning was added in different ways.

00:26:35.784 --> 00:26:43.870
Kojo became a writer, a poet, an editor, a media consultant, a husband, and a father.

00:26:44.226 --> 00:26:45.797
minute I've settled into myself.

00:26:45.797 --> 00:26:53.374
Look, I'm fifty three years old, so at this stage I uh I've lost a lot of fs.

00:26:53.374 --> 00:26:56.616
But I've lost I've lost all my fucks.

00:26:56.817 --> 00:26:58.368
Not even just a few.

00:26:58.506 --> 00:27:08.814
And with the wisdom of surviving many life quakes in the first half of his life, Kojo
holds it all lightly now, both hardships and happiness.

00:27:09.078 --> 00:27:12.039
It's really not that deep, this life thing.

00:27:12.039 --> 00:27:17.121
Because the first time something happens, it feels like the end of the world.

00:27:17.342 --> 00:27:22.224
Like it feels like it'll never get better after that moment.

00:27:22.744 --> 00:27:27.947
By the time you hit like the fifteenth, it's just like, okay, it feels like shit.

00:27:28.058 --> 00:27:29.768
Like I really don't like it.

00:27:29.768 --> 00:27:34.089
But I'm still here and I got through all of those others.

00:27:34.170 --> 00:27:35.030
So

00:27:35.264 --> 00:27:41.636
The only thing to do is really just kind of focus on right now and keep plugging away.

00:27:41.877 --> 00:27:44.808
Like it'll it'll be alright eventually.

00:27:44.808 --> 00:27:47.739
It will be some version of alright eventually.

00:27:48.179 --> 00:27:54.562
And some like it's it's like the I call it the one foot in front of the other approach.

00:27:55.102 --> 00:28:02.705
So sometimes when things are really, really tough, I try to put my head down and just keep
putting one foot in front of the other.

00:28:03.486 --> 00:28:04.172
And

00:28:04.172 --> 00:28:10.975
When you look up, eventually when you look up, you realize, wait, like I'm already halfway
out the trough.

00:28:11.800 --> 00:28:18.783
He may have lost one dream, but Kojo walked himself into a meaningful life one step at a
time.

00:28:19.692 --> 00:28:27.505
You can never predict or forecast exactly what a moment is gonna do for the trajectory of
your life.

00:28:27.785 --> 00:28:31.287
So there's billions of potential paths that you can take with your life.

00:28:31.287 --> 00:28:39.770
Um and whether we know it or not, each little moment is influencing that.

00:28:40.711 --> 00:28:49.134
With a life quake, it's it's a bigger moment that you can kind of look back on and go, Oh,
okay.

00:28:49.324 --> 00:28:50.435
That was major.

00:28:50.435 --> 00:28:53.836
But most of them are, you know, small moments.

00:28:54.517 --> 00:29:01.760
But the moments that I guess the moments that we learn from, or that hopefully we'll learn
from.

00:29:02.501 --> 00:29:05.152
I'm waiting to see what the lessons are.

00:29:07.436 --> 00:29:14.051
These days, Kojo is still adding pieces, living in Johannesburg with his wife and two
children.

00:29:14.251 --> 00:29:20.416
His podcast and book, both titled Listen to Your Footsteps, are exactly what the name
promises.

00:29:20.416 --> 00:29:27.701
A man still collecting, still listening, and still placing pieces into a picture that
keeps revealing itself.

00:29:32.970 --> 00:29:43.296
If something shifted has moved you, made you feel seen or simply kept you company, the
best way to say thank you is to leave us a five star rating on your listening platform.

00:29:43.296 --> 00:29:46.977
It takes five seconds and honestly means the world.

00:29:47.538 --> 00:29:56.293
Subscribe so you never miss a human-centered story and check out the show notes for the
Something Shifted soundtrack playlist, a compilation of songs we've listened to while

00:29:56.293 --> 00:29:57.584
making this season.

00:29:57.584 --> 00:30:02.196
Songs that make us feel a little less lonely and a lot more empowered.

00:30:02.710 --> 00:30:07.034
Many thanks to Rue, my executive producer, for additional writing on this episode.

00:30:07.034 --> 00:30:10.397
And as always, thank you for listening.

00:30:10.858 --> 00:30:11.658
Bye.