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Description
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 ✨
42 Episodes
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Send a text 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 social posts and mommy blogs to a podcast born after a near‑spiral, ...
Send us a text 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 authoritarianism: punish dissenters, criminalize documentation, and lou...
Send us a text 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 your nervous system, and turns outrage into exhaustion. I s...
Send us a text 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 without confusion, and we get practical about what comes ne...
Send us a text 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? We talk candidly about parasocial grief—how attachment to...
Send us a text 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’s projections. We get practical and personal. I walk thro...
Send us a text 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 glossy wins and reminded me that you don’t need a new life—you...
Send us a text 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, how visibility is framed as provocation, and how a simple hello ...
Send us a text 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 hard launches and identity-by-relationship. Now, younger ...
Send us a text 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 reality, and how pulling millions from local stores drives ...
Send us a text 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 boundaries, daily self-love you can actually feel in your body, and ...
Send us a text 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 happened on the field, how the refs missed it, and how a missed ...
Send us a text 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 Maté’s The Myth of Normal, The Body Keeps the Score, long walks, and ...
Send us a text // The Soft Girl Survival System - https://stan.store/GraceSandra/p/the-soft-girl-survival-system // 💌SIGN UP FOR MY NEWSLETTER! 💌https://substack.com/@outheretrynasurvive 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 personal journey from escaping domestic violence through the darkest valleys o...
Send us a text 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 Grace's ex-husband years before their marriage. When Grace discov...
Send us a text Have you ever watched a show that unexpectedly cracked your heart open? That's what happened when I watched Netflix's "Forever" - and I'm still processing all the feelings it brought up. This adaptation of Judy Blume's 1975 novel follows two Black teenagers in 2018 Los Angeles through their experiences of first love. But what struck me most powerfully were the parents - particularly Justin's mother with her protective (sometimes "overbearing") love and his father with his perf...
Send us a text "Why didn't she just leave?" It's a question that reveals how profoundly we misunderstand the dynamics of abuse. Drawing from personal experience as both a childhood sexual abuse survivor and domestic violence survivor, I'm pulling back the curtain on why this question hurts victims and protects abusers. The truth is that leaving an abusive relationship isn't simply a matter of walking out the door. Trauma bonding creates powerful psychological attachments that feel impossible...
Send us a text The journey to inner peace often begins in unexpected ways. For me, it started with a desperate search for financial independence while trapped in an abusive marriage. In 2018, I turned to meditation not for spiritual enlightenment but because successful people in an MLM claimed it helped them make money. What began as a practical pursuit transformed into the cornerstone of my healing journey. That first 45-minute guided meditation sent me into the deepest, most cathartic slee...
Send us a text When Tracy Ellis Ross mentioned dating younger men, she faced an immediate wave of criticism and bizarre comparisons to Shannon Sharp – a man facing multiple sexual assault allegations. This glaring double standard perfectly illustrates the misogynoir Black women face when simply discussing their dating preferences. As a 48-year-old Black woman navigating modern dating, I deeply relate to Tracy's perspective. The reluctance many of us feel toward dating older men isn't arbitra...
Send us a text That voice inside your head telling you something feels off? It might be your inner child trying to protect you from making painful mistakes. In this deeply personal episode, I share how a seemingly perfect romantic connection triggered a surprising healing journey that saved me from potential heartbreak. After 20 years of marriage followed by dating in my 40s, I found myself experiencing an electric connection with a younger man. Despite our incredible chemistry, aligned worl...
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