Out Here Tryna Survive
Out Here Tryna Survive is a trauma-informed, reflective podcast centering the emotional lives, resilience, and humanity of Black women — especially those of us navigating midlife, healing, motherhood, and healing after survival. Hosted by Grace Sandra — Mama, storyteller, advocate, and lifelong student of survival — this podcast explores what it feels like to live in a world that constantly demands our strength while offering little protection. Through personal storytelling, cultural reflection, and nervous-system-aware conversations, each episode holds space for truth, grief, joy, rage, softness, and repair. This is not a place for perfection or performance. It’s a place for us as Black women to exhale, feel seen, and remember ourselves. We are braver than we believe ✨
Episodes
A man tells me, “You’re not like those other Black girls,” and suddenly the real conversation isn’t about compliments at all. It’s about misogyny, colorism, and the quiet ways “pretty privilege” can become a trap that asks us to shrink other women just to feel chosen. I’m pulling the lens inward and telling the truth from the inside looking out: getting attention is easy, but getting real love can still feel impossi...
The hardest part of watching the Epstein files dominate the headlines is not the shock. It is the familiar, stomach-dropping feeling of seeing alleged abusers stay protected while victims get ignored. If you are a sexual abuse survivor, that public denial can hit like a flashback, not because you are “too sensitive,” but because your nervous system remembers what it meant to have power used against you with no consequenc...
What if survival means walking away from what was supposed to save you? Grace opens up about growing up in church, stepping into ministry, and the slow burn of shame that came with purity culture, constant confession, and the pressure to be “holier than thou.” When her marriage and identity cracked, she didn’t lose the sacred—she lost a system that needed her small. This is a raw, grounded journey from evangelical guilt ...
A stranger’s 5 a.m. DM tried to make me small—attacking my sexuality, my finances, and my motherhood in one breath. What they didn’t expect was how quickly I would choose boundaries, body wisdom, and community over shame. This conversation starts with the gut punch of anonymous cruelty and opens into something larger: why sexually autonomous Black women who ask for help in public unsettle people who rely on control.
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The anger you’re feeling isn’t random—it’s a signal. We open up about what happens when survival mode collides with a culture that shrugs at harm, from the Epstein files to everyday silence, and why so many women are rethinking romance, risk, and what safety actually looks like. This is a candid walk through fury, data, and the deep relief that comes with choosing alignment over appeasement.
We explore the matri...
The mic is on, the map is clearer, and the mission just got sharper. We’re opening Season Two with Survival Diaries—a deliberate turn toward stories that center how Black women survive, heal, and reimagine life in a world that keeps testing our limits. This isn’t about polish. It’s about truth told from a steadier place, where faith can shift and still affirm that God wants us whole.
We trace the path from early...
The day already felt heavy—parenting logistics, frayed edges, and no Sunday reset—so we start where real life starts: tired and still showing up. From there, we move into the sharp stuff making so many of us ache right now: Don Lemon’s arrest for “witnessing,” Nicki Minaj’s homophobic attacks, and the public prize of siding with power. The throughline is bigger than celebrity drama. It’s the old playbook of authoritarian...
Your eyes told the truth, and then the headlines told you they didn’t. That whiplash has a name—DARVO—and once you see how deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender operate, it becomes impossible to unsee the pattern in both intimate relationships and public life. We connect the dots between personal narcissistic abuse and national narrative control, exploring how gaslighting erodes trust in your senses, scrambles yo...
The camera rolls, a woman dies, and then the story tries to kill her again. We talk about Renee Good’s killing and the speed with which power moves to rename a victim a threat, turning language into a shield for violence. As Black women, we know this pattern by heart. The harm happens, then the management of the harm—press briefings, headlines, talking points—asks us to doubt our eyes. We refuse that bargain. We grieve w...
Headlines love a simple story, but real relationships rarely fit clean plots. When Christy filed for divorce and Desmond responded publicly, the internet crowned a villain overnight. We slow down the scroll and ask harder questions: why does a stranger’s breakup cut so deep, what myths about beauty and “being enough” do we keep swallowing, and how do religious rules shape the way people stay, confess, and finally leave?<...
Your sexuality is not a community project—and it never needed a committee’s approval. We’re pulling back the curtain on how purity culture, patriarchy, and respectability politics train women, especially Black Gen X women, to carry shame like an heirloom. I share where I’ve judged and been judged, why celibacy and casual sex are both valid when they’re chosen freely, and how agency turns the volume down on everyone else’...
Let’s tell the truth about a “good, not greatest” year and why it still mattered. We walk through six lessons that rewired how we think about success, love, and healing: movement as medicine for the nervous system, the power of changing your scenery, and why the best highlights might be free. From a poolside summer with my daughter to a hike that started tense and ended in laughter, these small moments outshined the glos...
A woman is eight minutes from delivery, screaming through a wheelchair ride, and a nurse is still asking about “live births.” That moment—followed by another mother turned away to give birth on the roadside—sparked a raw, necessary conversation about disbelief, danger, and the cost of bias on Black women’s bodies.
We trace the throughline from the labor ward to the comment section: how joy gets labeled arrogance...
A headline asked whether having a boyfriend is embarrassing—and it landed because so many women are done letting public romance define their worth. I take you from “boyfriend land” and early mommy blogging to a new center of gravity where sovereignty, safety, and self-respect lead. As a Gen X Black woman who grew up in church culture, married young, and lived the trad-wife script, I’ve seen how the internet once rewarded...
The headline said SNAP might pause, and my stomach dropped. Not because of theory, but because of dinner. What follows is a raw, grounded look at who gets hit first when social safety nets fray—women-led households, elders, disabled neighbors, and children—and how Black women absorb the shock long before it makes the news. I share what it felt like to pencil out November with nothing extra, why “just get a job” ignores r...
The moment I stopped needing a relationship, everything changed. After years of pushing through “little t” traumas in the dating pool and holding out hope that the right man would make it all click, a brutal Valentine’s reveal forced a reset. I saw the real pattern: every time I accepted nonchalant energy or waited for potential, I was abandoning myself.
I walk you through the exact shifts that followed—clear bo...
A high school football game ended with an injury—and a prayer. What came next exposed something bigger than sports: the way covert racism hides behind “safety,” outrage, and the performance of white motherhood. When my short clip of my son praying went viral, the internet rushed to judge a 14-year-old Black boy as a criminal, calling for prison instead of proportionate accountability. We walk through what actually happen...
The feed won’t stop. One more video of a life ending, one more thread turning human pain into content—and our nervous systems keep paying the price. I’m talking frankly about what it’s like to be inundated by violent imagery, how selective empathy fractures trust, and why we need boundaries that protect our peace without blurring our values.
I share personal updates from a year of real healing—therapy, Gabor Mat...
// The Soft Girl Survival System - https://stan.store/GraceSandra/p/the-soft-girl-survival-system //
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Ever felt like you're hanging by a thread, quietly crumbling while trying to hold it all together? This raw, honest conversation dives into what happens when a Black woman reaches rock bottom—and finds her way back.
I'm sharing my pe...
Connect with Lily!
Website - https://www.bodyintelligenceacademy.com
IG: https://www.instagram.com/bodyintelligence_academy
Her Medium article- https://medium.com/@lily_56950/love-bombs-and-red-flags-a-story-about-self-trust-703e50041bbc
What happens when two women discover they've been manipulated by the same man? In this raw, intimate conversation, we meet Lily - a woman who had a brief encounter with the G...
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