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
Your body is not subtle forever. Sometimes it whispers through curiosity, tension, or that weird tiredness you can’t “push through.” Sometimes it yells through burnout, shutdown, or the kind of restlessness that makes you question everything. I’m Grace, and I’m sharing the real-life ways my body has been trying to guide me for decades, even when my brain couldn’t name what was hap...
A single line on a reality show can expose a lifetime of conditioning. After watching Love Island’s most explosive moments, we sit with the gut-punch of hearing someone plead to be chosen and ask the real question behind all the viral “pick me” discourse: what happens when you start choosing another person over yourself?
We talk about why “pick me culture” gets weaponized as a sh...
One glance at my Apple Podcasts stats had me ready to throw the whole dream away. I filmed a full “I’m quitting” rant, cried real tears, and convinced myself it was bravery and honesty when it was actually a crash: PMDD, perimenopause, and plain old overload dressing themselves up as clarity.
I’m talking about what it feels like when your brain gets loud and cruel and you believe it be...
Subscribe to my Substack: https://substack.com/@outheretrynasurvive
Get the Out Here Tryna Survive Journal: https://stan.store/GraceSandra
Business Inquiries: OutHereTrynaSurvive@gmail.com
A man knows where you live, and suddenly rejection isn’t a simple text, it’s a safety decision. That’s the reality I’m sitting in after letting my guard down with someone I barely knew, then realizing I felt a...
Fifty lessons. Three themes. Zero sugarcoating. I’m celebrating a huge personal milestone with a rapid-fire list of what I’ve learned about sex, healing, and survival while rebuilding my life and learning to trust my body again.
We start with sexual healing and body autonomy: why arbitrary dating rules don’t matter as much as consent and safety, how purity culture can train us to ignore our ...
A grown ssa man can say something vile about Brandy on camera, and somehow the loudest anger still lands on the her
. That’s the real story I can’t stop thinking about and it’s why I’m speaking on the resurfaced comments about Wanyye Morris and Brandy, who was 16 at the time. I’m not interested in nostalgia or celebrity tea. I’m interested in what our reactions reveal about groomin...
Survival mode is sneaky because it can feel like “I’m just handling life” right up until you pause and realize you’ve been white knuckling everything for years. I’m Grace Sandra, and I’m talking about the way trauma, chronic stress, and a cruel culture can plant beliefs in us that sound true but quietly wreck our self-worth, our relationships, and our health.
I share a pers...
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 ea...
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 w...
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 jo...
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 wh...
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.<...
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.
W...
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 dram...
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 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 th...
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, confe...
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 turn...
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 mom...
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 sectio...
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