Podcast
Braving the Waves
Hosted by Mikaela Brewer · EN
Author, speaker, researcher, and storyteller, Mikaela Brewer, brings us Braving the Waves & Bridging the Gap: Stories of Unsinkable Resilience & Resolvving Stigma. This podcast features a series of storytelling-focused conversations with youth in our communities. Inspired and guided by the powerful advocacy, care, and storytelling legacy at Resolvve and Unsinkable, Brewer speaks to some of today’s most empowering young storytellers, writers, musicians, comedians, activists and more about their mental health journey in a deeper, refreshing way.
Season 2 adds a new layer to storytelling. To complement the programs at Unsinkable & Resolvve's work supporting students, Mikaela offers another way to Brave the Waves: crafting words for moments that feel like they don't have any, especially for those who don't feel comfortable writing, speaking, or publicly sharing. Each week, Mikaela gathers anonymous voice notes, memories, journal entries, photos, drawings, and anything that captures a specific, meaningful moment, through a memory box form. She then creates a poem and episode to offer a comforting way to pause in a moment, preserve a memory, and feel seen/heard in it as it's given words and read aloud. Head to tinyurl.com/bravingthewaves to read more about the process and submit!
Season 1 of Braving the Waves featured a series of storytelling-focused conversations with youth in our communities. Inspired and guided by the powerful advocacy, care, and storytelling legacy at Resolvve and Unsinkable, Mikaela spoke with some of today’s most empowering young storytellers, writers, musicians, comedians, activists and more about their mental health journey in a deeper, refreshing way.
Resolvve, driven by a lack of comprehensive mental health literacy being taught in high schools and universities, aims to fill the gap by providing mental health education and rapid access to integrated therapeutic services.
Unsinkable, a charitable organization founded by Olympic hero and mental health advocate Silken Laumann, aims to use storytelling to help people #BridgeTheGap between struggling with their mental health and taking steps towards mental well-being.
55episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Happy Birthday Unsinkable
Apr 22, 202400:14:32Tap to summarizeEpisode Notes Our poem & episode this week are special birthday editions for Unsinkable’s 5th anniversary! We so hope you enjoy it. Please be sure to check out the resources, programs, partnerships, and action items shared in this episode. Thank you so much to our podcast guests from season 1 for lending their voices & words to this poem. You can re-listen to their episodes below! Here's an excerpt of the poem (the full written & visually formatted versions can now be found & read at mikbrew.substack.com!): Because we’ve braided this woven raft of 4.1 million people, strong and vast, limbs linked, lying on our backs and having practiced our breathing in sync, above the waves we float, steer, expand always and all ways. Listen to this week's episode to hear the full poem! If you’d like to share your moment or memory on the podcast, please head to tinyurl.com/bravingthewaves.
Transcribe →First Therapy Session
Apr 15, 202400:19:41Tap to summarizeEpisode Notes This week’s poem and episode explore fears around trying therapy for the first time, juxtaposed with the experience of telling someone you love them. We step into a stream of consciousness as someone journals their thoughts, navigating hesitancies around how therapy may or may not help them. It’s easy to feel like you have to fit into a box of what’s ‘normal’ or ‘acceptable’ to struggle with (and how this is at odds with what you may actually need to bring to therapy). Woven into our poem is an example of how to show we love someone without ever having said the words. Here's an excerpt of the poem (the full written & visually formatted versions can now be found & read at mikbrew.substack.com!): I’m sure my best friend knows I might even bring this moment to therapy, yet they never swayed. Tucking my toes into my boots (and stomping my heel in) I know I still need therapy and I’m loved, too. Listen to this week's episode to hear the full poem! If you’d like to share your moment or memory on the podcast, please head to tinyurl.com/bravingthewaves.
Transcribe →The Sleep Pea
Apr 8, 202400:18:07Tap to summarizeEpisode Notes This week’s poem and episode unpack “revenge bedtime procrastination.” Perhaps most importantly, the poem and discussion challenge the colloquial understanding of this experience alongside its common coping mechanisms, questioning the environments that create such behaviour—beyond our intentions and self-regulation. The poem asks us to consider: is this a lack of self-control or am I trying to meet a need the only way I can in my present circumstances and environment? Here's an excerpt of the poem (the full written & visually formatted versions can now be found & read at mikbrew.substack.com!): No, I haven’t looked at my screens for over thirty minutes. I read a magazine. I stretched muscles I only found ten minutes ago. I meditated. But for some reason, I’m still holding the closing loop of the box breath (and no, I don’t have hiccups). Rather, I’m stuck on the inhale of an extra cycle and can’t let it go. My body bursts with uncracked glowsticks that could build a seven-eleven and perch it along a deserted two-lane backstretch at midnight. Listen to this week's episode to hear the full poem! If you’d like to share your moment or memory on the podcast, please head to tinyurl.com/bravingthewaves.
Transcribe →The River Through
Mar 25, 202400:23:40Tap to summarizeEpisode Notes This week’s poem and episode explore the relationship between mental health and money. Perhaps especially right now, many of us are feeling pinched by rising costs among much else. In particular, this episode unpacks the complicated common phrase and belief that “money isn’t everything.” Though it might not be, we need livable wages of it to survive. Within this dynamic (and for the sake of our mental health and well-being), we can still challenge how we think about money, how society worships it, and how not to let it consume our spirit; intentionally disconnecting it from all that truly makes us feel most alive. Here's an excerpt of the poem (the full written & visually formatted versions can now be found & read at mikbrew.substack.com!): Why do we swim, glide, and slide across the Earth? Because we real rich first. and still are and that is where our fight is when we don’t have responses or answers like right now as you and I see that this poem didn’t and can’t fix any of the empties. But, it can dream, forcing us to ask where we will break even, crooked, or fully? But you see, the greatest power we have is the soul and heart of each other—where the words of a poem break; cracking the dam to let a river run right through it. Listen to this week's episode to hear the full poem! If you’d like to share your moment or memory on the podcast, please head to tinyurl.com/bravingthewaves.
Transcribe →What We Hide
Mar 18, 202400:18:18Tap to summarizeEpisode Notes This week’s poem and episode explore the idea that living is a sort of contronym—a word with two opposite meanings. It’s not a perfect contronym, but living your best life is considered both voluptuous and by nature, hidden, since “the best life” is free of the mucky and murky parts of being people. Much of what we attempt to hide—to appear to be living perfectly or fully—is deemed impolite and/or embarrassing. This poem and episode rips off the bandaid of a few good examples of these (which in truth, make us more human. It’s amusing how desperately we try to conceal bodily functions so deeply out of our control). Here's an excerpt of the poem (the full written versions can now be found & read at mikbrew.substack.com!): But these are life. And perhaps our souls or minds are that thick, soft fog of ripe water droplets suspended in the air. Or, as the frozen lake-like lagoon begins its March melt, our souls are the ice crystals—shards of the swamp’s frayed bedsheet at the edges of wet sandy shore— tinkling & twinkling together to make music, welcoming the rebirth of vivacious life beneath the toy waves and their frosty icing. Listen to this week's episode to hear the full poem! If you’d like to share your moment or memory on the podcast, please head to tinyurl.com/bravingthewaves.
Transcribe →The Pantoum of Women
Mar 11, 202400:17:59Tap to summarizeEpisode Notes After International Women’s Day on March 8th, this week’s episode is inspired by America Ferrera’s speech in the Barbie movie. In the format of a pantoum poetic form, which repeats lines in succeeding stanzas, the contradictions women face are perpetually repeated and in conversation with each other—overlapping and taking on new meanings that simultaneously clarify and confuse, similar to how finding an answer/response to our questions opens the door of further questions. The purpose of this is to create a safe container for the cyclical feelings of overwhelm and exhaustion to be seen, heard, and shared. Here's an excerpt of the poem (the full written versions can now be found & read at mikbrew.substack.com!): and don’t wait to grow old with a little selfish fear and peel back layers of beefy mould soup and shave it shiny when you fall down & fail rudely because today we will snip the feeding tube Listen to this week's episode to hear the full poem! If you’d like to share your moment or memory on the podcast, please head to tinyurl.com/bravingthewaves.
Transcribe →Wanting Words
Mar 4, 202400:19:08Tap to summarizeEpisode Notes Our poem and episode today explore longing for words when we don’t have any. One of our deepest aches, especially while navigating the depth of pain or peak of joy, is to have words at our disposal to give shape and meaning to these experiences—for ourselves, our notebooks, our poems, and our explanations to someone who hasn’t experienced what we’re trying to communicate, but is offering support. As we can be lonely in a crowd, we can feel lonely among language that doesn’t fit, doesn’t exist, or has been stripped from or imposed upon us. It’s often more disheartening to not be able to generate words when we can’t find the right ones in others’ poems, songs, books, therapy, etc. (the places we most often search). Of course, we do frequently find words in these places and it’s worth considering that some of what we feel may never have adequate words. Even so, part of mental health in relationship with words is considering not just our mind (and the ways in which clinical jargon can isolate if it’s weaponized), but our body, and the intricate language that it offers us—one which we may be out of practice in communicating with. Here's an excerpt of the poem: The language I need is nearly extinct. Because you, body-brain, gave me my firsts— like language long before words— is it you who offers sounds, words, and sentences, and then clicks them together like looping linked lights swooping across lampposts like jungle vines? Listen to this week's episode to hear the full poem! If you’d like to share your moment or memory on the podcast, please head to tinyurl.com/bravingthewaves.
Transcribe →Loving
Feb 26, 202400:17:28Tap to summarizeEpisode Notes Our poem takes a deep dive into love today, specifically all the things it might and might not be. How far outside the box can we take the concept of love, especially on the heels of Valentine’s Day and Family Day? Since love is such a critical element of our well-being and mental health, this poem offers a few of my thoughts on what love means, to both broaden and deepen how we think about it—namely as a central current in our lives. Here's an excerpt of the poem: Yet, the question of our lives is always with us: unlike gravity, can we choose to break this law of love? Do we have the choice not to follow it? Perhaps the true form of loving is agility: never forgetting to ask those two questions and tallying how many times we’ve answered, “Yes, but here’s how many times we haven’t.” Listen to this week's episode to hear the full poem! If you’d like to share your moment or memory on the podcast, please head to tinyurl.com/bravingthewaves.
Transcribe →HALT
Feb 19, 202400:17:49Tap to summarizeEpisode Notes Today, we’re looking at the acronym HALT through a poem. HALT stands for “hunger, anger, lonely, tired,” and it is often used as a method for checking in with yourself. For example, when you’re feeling activated or dysregulated, stop (halt) and ask yourself if one of these categories is suffering. The intention is to support folks in getting to the root of what they’re feeling, alleviating any urge to rely on substances to cope. Though this is a helpful framework, sometimes the boundaries we draw between hunger, anger, loneliness, and being tired either have deeper roots or are a bit blurry. They consistently overlay and can mean something different to each of our mind, body, and soul. Hunger, anger, loneliness, and being tired can also look different through time, such as throughout moments, hours, days, weeks, or years. This week’s poem seeks to explore this nuance, depth, and overlap. Here's an excerpt of the poem: It’s a carpet, you see. Where do my hunger, anger, loneliness, and tiredness live? In my mind, body, and/or soul hungering for earth’s food while on fire with anger, feeling lonely among water life, yet tired of flying through empty airspace crammed with interference. Listen to this week's episode to hear the full poem! If you’d like to share your moment or memory on the podcast, please head to tinyurl.com/bravingthewaves.
Transcribe →Dear February
Feb 12, 202400:19:35Tap to summarizeEpisode Notes This week’s poem looks at a moment of recognition that a familiar, intimate pain is coming—one that can make us more vulnerable to various forms of relapse. Through the personification of January and March, this episode is a personal one from me, exploring the pain of remembering a bone-deep pain and what it’s like to prepare for it, such as the anniversary of a loss, birthday, death, suicide attempt, or the beginning of a sobriety journey. My hope is that the poem allows us to think about the question: “Why wade through the ache and loneliness every year?” Perhaps we were never alone, to begin with. Perhaps we wouldn’t be stronger if we didn’t have to remember. Perhaps we’re stronger if we do remember, together, and fumble forward in a way we wouldn’t have been able to if we didn’t feel. Here's an excerpt of the poem: > I, March, nod. > “January, I know your waiting > isn’t the same as > November’s waiting— > where the joy is in the waiting > rather than the waiting for joy > to return. If it was ever there.” > > “But don’t forget that > memory doesn’t stop > for death. Nor does the life > of relationship, as known > by looking into a face > and seeing the layering > of ancestral features > that built it.” Listen to this week's episode to hear the full poem! If you’d like to share your moment or memory on the podcast, please head to tinyurl.com/bravingthewaves.
Transcribe →