Molly Burke, UNSEEN: How I Lost My Vision But Found My Voice
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[0:45]Molly Burke is the author of Unseen, How I Lost My Vision, but found my voice.
[0:50]Molly Burke is a blind public speaker, content creator, consultant, model, and author.
[0:55]With more than 5 million followers across social media, she uses her platform to advocate
[1:00]for greater inclusivity and representation at every touch point, uplifting and empowering
[1:04]others.
[1:05]She has partnered with major brands such as Arie, Google, Bose, Samsung, Estee Lauder,
[1:11]Disney Dove, Microsoft, Tommy Hilfinger, Crocs, and more.
[1:15]She received a clear lifetime achievement award and has spoken at the United Nations
[1:19]and the World Economic Forum in Davos.
[1:22]Molly is a Forbes 30 under 30 recipient who has been featured in the Wall Street Journal
[1:26]paper, Forbes, Adweek, Teen Vogue, and a lore, and appeared on the Daily Show with Trevor
[1:31]Noah.
[1:32]And today, she is based in Los Angeles.
[1:34]Welcome, Molly.
[1:35]Thanks so much for coming on Totally Butte to talk about your memoir, seen congratulations.
[1:39]Thank you.
[1:40]I'm so excited.
[1:41]This is my first podcast where I get to talk about the book.
[1:44]No way.
[1:45]You're the perfect person to chat with it about.
[1:47]Oh, I love it.
[1:48]Publicists often put me first on people's schedules because I'm really just here to
[1:53]boost and support and try to get all the good out of the author.
[1:57]So, yeah, I'm happy to be your first one.
[1:59]Well, I loved your book.
[2:01]I learned so much about you, obviously.
[2:04]I learned about dangers of different organizations.
[2:08]I learned about guide dogs and despair and just so much you just really did a beautiful
[2:17]job with this book.
[2:18]So congratulations.
[2:19]Thank you.
[2:20]I feel like my guide dog just heard you because he like stood up and just walked past me.
[2:24]Like, oh, that's my roll call.
[2:25]She said, guide dog, that's me.
[2:29]Why don't you tell listeners a little bit about the book and why you decided to write
[2:34]it?
[2:35]So a little bit of background on me when I was four years old, I was diagnosed with
[2:38]a rare progressive eye disease called red and ice pigmentosa, which caused me to lose
[2:43]the majority of my vision at 14, which was a lot younger and faster than the doctors
[2:48]had anticipated.
[2:50]And when that happened, I not only lost my vision, but my friends, I fell into a deep
[2:54]depression, was severely bullied and really struggled in many ways to rebuild my life.
[3:01]I say it was like trying to grieve the death of yourself while figuring out how to keep
[3:05]living, which is a very profound experience at any age, but particularly at 14 years
[3:11]old when you're already going through so much.
[3:14]I really rebuilt my life, thanks to a lot of support from my family and medical professionals.
[3:20]And along the journey, I realized that I could either be a victim to my circumstance
[3:25]or I could do something to try to change it.
[3:27]And the only way to change it was through actively getting out there and trying to educate society
[3:32]and change the misconceptions and the stereotypes that were frustrating me so much.
[3:37]And so that's what I started doing and at 18 years old, I started touring full time as
[3:41]a speaker, which I get into a lot in this book, which I've never talked about before.
[3:46]My followers who have spent the last 11 years with me, they know that that's how my
[3:51]career started, but they don't know what it was really like.
[3:55]They know the glamorous side of what it looked like.
[3:57]They don't know what it was really like the way you do since you got to be a big copy.
[4:02]So I did that for two years.
[4:04]I ended up having a workplace accident quit my job, moved back in with my parents in
[4:08]the suburbs and felt like I was starting life all over again.
[4:11]I was the drama of a 20 year old, you know, I was like, oh, my God, I peaked at 20.
[4:15]What am I going to do now with my life?
[4:17]Because, you know, I grew up with the unemployment statistics that all blind people
[4:22]and disabled people live with, which for me was knowing that in Canada, where I grew up
[4:27]80% of blind people were unemployed.
[4:29]And that was really terrifying.
[4:31]My whole life that it felt like it plagued me.
[4:33]Like it was just in the back of my mind all the time that I was living with this looming
[4:37]unemployment statistic.
[4:39]And I happened to be a blind person who most of my passions are our individual arts.
[4:44]I love makeup and fashion and home decor and design.
[4:48]And I know that as much as I love those things, it would be very hard to work as a fully
[4:52]blind person in those visual fields because those are difficult fields for anybody to
[4:57]break into.
[4:58]And I also grew up always wanting to work in entertainment.
[5:00]And I also knew it would be very difficult to work in entertainment as a disabled woman
[5:05]because disabled people have less than 3.1% media representation in 2025, let alone the
[5:12]early 2000s.
[5:13]So I really felt a lot of despair around now that I've lost this incredible opportunity
[5:18]that I thought I'd had for these two years.
[5:20]Like, what am I going to do with my life?
[5:23]Am I just going to have to live on like government support and live in my parents' home
[5:26]for the rest of my life?
[5:27]I'm such an ambitious, hardworking person.
[5:30]Like I can't accept that, but I don't know where to go from here.
[5:33]And that was 11 years ago when I started social media and I've grown a platform of over
[5:38]5 million followers.
[5:39]And I think I'm really known for being vulnerable and honest and authentic.
[5:45]And I've been all of those things very openly.
[5:47]And yet there was still so much I had never felt safe or comfortable to share.
[5:53]And that was ultimately why I wrote this book.
[5:56]It was my way of saying, you know a lot about me, but man, there's still so much you
[6:00]I don't know.
[6:02]And I only feel comfortable putting it in the form of a book, which is so much more intimate
[6:08]than a video that can be shared thousands of times with comments that everybody else can
[6:12]can share and put into a Reddit thread and everybody gets their opinion or even live on
[6:16]stage to hundreds or thousands of people at a time putting it in a book.
[6:20]It's me and it's you, the reader, sharing this, sharing this moment.
[6:24]Well, I love sharing them with you.
[6:26]And who's laughing now, really, with those statistics and you have just swung, hit it
[6:32]out of the park, your career obviously is just amazing.
[6:36]One of my kids, by the way, was like, oh, I follow her when I said that I was going to
[6:41]interview you.
[6:42]So you've become a superstar.
[6:44]And to do it with so many obstacles, including the emotional toll that your diagnosis
[6:51]took and adapting to that and the physical challenges, it's really amazing.
[6:56]Let's go back, though, to the job because, first of all, you, as you say, in great detail,
[7:01]you talk about this speaking engagement, which is essentially like joining a cult and where
[7:08]you were living there among vermin and the worst possible conditions and they did not care
[7:14]about you getting sick.
[7:15]They did not care about you full stop and tried to like, milk you out of a book deal.
[7:21]I mean, like all the stuff I could not believe, talk a little bit about that.
[7:26]And also, is that the company that your lawyer made you take half the book out to discuss?
[7:33]Yes.
[7:34]So going into this book, I was very clear with my publisher before I ever agreed to write
[7:39]it that we were going to need a legal read and that was partly why I felt finally safe
[7:44]sharing these stories, so many of the stories in this book because I knew like I was going
[7:48]to have a lawyer vet them that each word was handpicked to make sure that I was protecting
[7:53]myself because at the end of the day, like I am speaking a little bit disparagingly of
[7:59]large entities with power and a reputation to uphold.
[8:04]And at the end of the day, I'm not sharing my story to tear them down.
[8:07]I'm sharing my story to take back my power because I felt silenced for so long.
[8:13]I felt silenced out of my own fear.
[8:15]But I think these stories are important to share, these stories are important to talk
[8:19]about.
[8:20]And the reality is that I felt trapped in a circumstance because of the unemployment statistics
[8:29]I knew that I was facing as a disabled woman and the ways in which the systemic oppression
[8:35]and society of disabled people sets us up for being in harmful situations, right?
[8:42]And so for me, it was really important that I finally be able to talk about this, but also
[8:47]that I talk about it in a way that is safe, that protects me because disabled voices are
[8:52]already at a disadvantage, are already so often silenced, minority voices in general.
[8:57]And so being able to feel like, okay, like a lawyer has vetted this, I've done my best,
[9:01]you'll see a legal disclaimer at the beginning, it says, you know, names and identifying
[9:05]characteristics have been changed, dialogue has been recreated.
[9:08]I did my best to keep their anonymity.
[9:11]I did my best to protect them as well, even though they don't necessarily deserve it,
[9:16]because it's not about tearing them down.
[9:18]As I said, it's about freeing myself.
[9:20]Well, basically this organization prayed on you as someone who was vulnerable by, you know,
[9:28]beefing you up in a way and saying, like, you need to be this public speaker.
[9:31]And of course, from a young age, you wanted to be a public speaker and you sort of
[9:35]crave that limelight early on and then felt like it wasn't going to ever happen to you.
[9:40]And then they were like, no, no, please come do go on the road.
[9:44]You're going to be a speaker for us.
[9:45]And suddenly you were sharing the stage with these giants of industry and you were getting
[9:51]the most likes or the most biggest awards in the show or whatever it was.
[9:58]I must have felt incredibly wide.
[10:00]to you, like what is, what was that like?
[10:03]It really felt like in my head,
[10:06]when I got on stage for the first time with them,
[10:09]I was like, this is it, I've made it.
[10:11]Like it felt like my Hollywood moment
[10:13]that I dreamed of my whole life.
[10:15]Because I was just five years old
[10:16]when I told my parents,
[10:17]I'm gonna move to Hollywood and me and actress.
[10:19]We still have a school project that I did
[10:21]when I was in grade six.
[10:23]I was 11 years old.
[10:24]And we had to create like a film reel
[10:27]of what we thought our life was gonna be.
[10:29]And my film reel that I created
[10:31]was literally like moving to Los Angeles,
[10:33]being an actress in movies,
[10:35]being a singer songwriter,
[10:36]like that was just always my dream.
[10:38]I was obsessed with the early 2000 stars,
[10:41]Lindsay Lohan and Hillary Duff.
[10:44]I, you know, wanted to be that triple threat.
[10:46]I was a competitive dancer.
[10:48]I took vocal lessons, piano, drums.
[10:52]I did stage performance acting classes, improv classes.
[10:56]It was all I wanted.
[10:57]I was definitely like a theater kid through
[10:59]and that was my identity.
[11:02]And then when I went blind
[11:04]and I realized nobody in Hollywood is like me.
[11:06]Like I don't see myself represented.
[11:08]And if I don't see myself represented,
[11:09]how do I know that it's even possible to achieve that?
[11:12]Especially coming from, you know, the suburbs of Toronto.
[11:15]Like I was like, how am I gonna get my way to America
[11:19]to the big Los Angeles
[11:20]and get into this really, really historically exclusive
[11:24]industry?
[11:26]I just felt like it was hopeless.
[11:28]And so by just 18, four years later,
[11:31]to be offered this opportunity
[11:33]to speak to audiences as large as 20,000 in stadiums
[11:37]that pop stars performin'
[11:39]and to have screaming fans in front of me
[11:43]and to be working alongside A-list celebrities.
[11:48]Like I had a full-time assistant at 18 years old.
[11:53]I was traveling the world.
[11:55]I was literally rubbing shoulders with like Demi Lovato
[11:59]and Jennifer Hudson.
[12:01]Like that was my life.
[12:02]And it was like, whoa, this is crazy.
[12:06]This is a dream come true.
[12:08]And all of that is what made me so susceptible
[12:11]to putting up with a lot less than I deserved.
[12:15]Wow.
[12:15]Well, you can tell how intoxicating it felt
[12:18]by how you described it and anybody,
[12:20]particularly at that age, would fall victim to that.
[12:24]I mean, it's obviously, you know, they know that.
[12:28]That's why they did it.
[12:29]But then after it didn't work out,
[12:32]you were so upset in the worst place.
[12:36]And can I just read a paragraph or two
[12:38]from that part of the book?
[12:40]You said, I decided that the only way
[12:42]to avoid being hurt by the world
[12:43]was to avoid the world entirely
[12:46]and spend as much time as possible
[12:47]in the comfort and safety of my bedroom.
[12:49]I stopped public speaking, I stopped performing.
[12:52]I stopped doing all of these different things
[12:54]I was passionate about and that made me me.
[12:56]These things gave me life.
[12:58]They made me feel alive.
[12:59]But I didn't really want to be alive.
[13:01]I was suicidal.
[13:02]I just wanted to hide myself away from the world
[13:05]and pretend I didn't exist.
[13:07]I believed that if I hid myself away,
[13:09]the world couldn't hurt me anymore.
[13:11]And then, you said later, I was learning
[13:13]that it was okay to grieve the loss of the girl I'd been
[13:16]and the life I thought I was going to have,
[13:18]grieving and this is what you said in our conversation.
[13:20]But grieving the death of yourself
[13:22]while trying to figure out how to keep living
[13:24]as a profound experience.
[13:26]And then one more passage, sorry,
[13:28]people and these are from, this is from all over the book,
[13:30]but people say that suicide is selfish.
[13:32]And while I understand why someone might feel that way,
[13:35]when I was struggling with suicidal thoughts,
[13:37]it actually felt like the very opposite.
[13:39]In my mind, Molly was already dead and gone
[13:42]and what remained was simply a physical body
[13:44]that needed to be cared for.
[13:45]I was a burden on all those around me who still loved me
[13:48]and there were very few of them.
[13:50]I was a shell of a human with everything
[13:52]that made me already stripped away
[13:54]by vision loss, bullies and depression.
[13:56]If I were to go, it was far from selfish.
[13:59]It would actually be self less.
[14:00]I'd be giving them a gift by removing this dead weight
[14:03]from their lives.
[14:04]Once I had decided that ending my life
[14:06]was probably what was best for everyone,
[14:07]I felt more at peace than I had in a very long time.
[14:10]My final parting gift to my family
[14:12]was to make their life easier by leaving it.
[14:16]So sad, Molly, oh my gosh.
[14:20]You know, I think it's, we stigmatized mental health so much,
[14:24]but so many people are impacted by it every single day.
[14:28]And I really hate this rhetoric of suicide is selfish
[14:33]because it really demonizes it even more.
[14:37]And it's like none of us get to that place
[14:39]because we're mentally well, right?
[14:42]And so to then demonize us even further
[14:45]and make us feel even worse about it isn't helpful.
[14:49]And I think also the flip side of that is
[14:52]that unfortunately not everybody makes it out of that place
[14:56]to be able to share what it really feels like.
[14:58]And I think the people who say it's selfish
[15:01]perhaps have never been there.
[15:03]And so I want to share at least from my perspective
[15:06]what it felt like in the hopes
[15:08]that other people who've also been there
[15:10]would maybe say like think like, yes, this puts words
[15:14]to thoughts that I felt but didn't know how to express
[15:16]to my loved ones.
[15:18]And then for those who have been impacted by suicide
[15:20]in their life, some understanding of perhaps
[15:22]what their loved ones had felt like when they were in that place.
[15:26]Wow. Well, it's really brave of you
[15:28]to share that the most vulnerable thoughts
[15:31]of such a dark place.
[15:33]So thank you.
[15:33]And to see you so radiant now, you know,
[15:37]just beaming on the release of this book
[15:39]and with all of your success, it's amazing.
[15:42]It's so inspiring.
[15:43]And I'm sure many people will feel that way
[15:46]just seeing this contrast.
[15:48]Tell me a little bit more about how you,
[15:52]how you pick up and keep going
[15:54]because you do this throughout the book.
[15:57]One setback after another,
[15:58]including when you walked off the stage
[16:01]thanks to your terrible assistant or whatever
[16:03]and you had such a terrible neck injury,
[16:06]like how do you bounce back?
[16:08]What is the secret to that?
[16:10]You know, resilience is a skill.
[16:13]I think it takes a lot of practice.
[16:16]I was forced to develop resilience,
[16:19]but it is something that everybody needs
[16:21]because challenge is something that we will continue to have
[16:24]to overcome time and time again.
[16:26]And it's a theme that runs throughout the book,
[16:28]as you mentioned.
[16:29]I talk a lot about duality.
[16:31]I open the book and end the book with the idea of duality
[16:34]that good and bad coexist in our lives.
[16:36]And we will continue to have to overcome them.
[16:38]And for a long time, when I was younger and more naive,
[16:41]I thought, okay, I did it.
[16:43]I got through my big challenge.
[16:45]I'm good.
[16:46]And then I kept facing them.
[16:48]And every time I faced more,
[16:49]I was like, surely this is the last one.
[16:51]And at this point at 31, I realized,
[16:53]no, I've got many more to come,
[16:55]as much as that is pains me to think about.
[16:58]But the reality is, every single time I face new challenges,
[17:01]I know that I have the tools in my toolbox
[17:04]from the previous challenges I faced.
[17:06]And so what I encourage people to do
[17:08]is that if you have not yet met a life circumstance
[17:11]that has forced you to develop resilience,
[17:13]intentionally develop it,
[17:15]so it's there and you have those tools when you need them.
[17:17]And what that can look like is getting out of your comfort zone,
[17:20]doing things that scare you,
[17:22]and proactively changing your mindset.
[17:25]So when you hear no,
[17:27]don't just take it as a no.
[17:29]Flip that and think, okay, this is a challenge.
[17:34]I'm not just going to accept this, no, I'm going to say,
[17:37]okay, how am I going to get it to a yes?
[17:40]How am I going to find a new path to reach that goal?
[17:43]Don't see obstacles as setbacks,
[17:46]see them as setups.
[17:48]They're helping you prepare to bound you
[17:50]to the next step in your life.
[17:52]Amazing.
[17:53]And in the book,
[17:54]you talk about how you developed your big following of today,
[17:59]how you were like,
[18:00]I think I'm just going to start this YouTube thing
[18:02]and let's see what happens.
[18:04]And it's grown and grown and grown obviously.
[18:06]Talk a little bit about that
[18:08]and how it has been sort of becoming this star
[18:13]in a new medium from when you were first coveting Hollywood
[18:17]and then realizing actually it's like already on your computer.
[18:20]Well, it's funny because when I went blind at 14,
[18:23]I stopped consuming mainstream media
[18:26]because at large it was not accessible to me.
[18:29]The audio description was not what it is today.
[18:32]We still lack a lot of audio description,
[18:34]which in case anybody doesn't know audio description
[18:37]is essentially like what closed captioning is to the deaf
[18:40]but for the blind.
[18:41]So it's an audio track that gets layered
[18:43]over the audio of a movie or TV show
[18:46]and in between the gaps in dialogue,
[18:49]it fills in the visuals that are an necessity
[18:52]to understand the full scope of what's happening in the scene.
[18:55]And so that was not widely available.
[18:58]when I went blind at 14 in 2008.
[19:01]So I stopped enjoying media
[19:04]and it's funny because now I oftentimes people will reference
[19:08]something that I really probably should know.
[19:10]That was like really popular when I was in high school
[19:12]or my early 20s and I'm like not got no idea.
[19:15]I skipped movies and TV for like a good decade of my life
[19:18]so I'm missing a lot.
[19:20]And now that Ad is more widely accessible,
[19:23]I've been loving going back and watching a lot of old television
[19:27]movies, even ones that I did watch when I had a bit of sight
[19:30]but they now have audio description
[19:32]so I'm picking up all the nuance of what I missed.
[19:34]But anyways, little side tangent,
[19:36]but I did, I stopped enjoying mainstream media
[19:39]but what I found instead to fill that void was social media
[19:43]and it was by no means what it is today.
[19:46]It was really this pretty new up and coming space.
[19:49]Nobody was being paid to do it.
[19:51]Nobody had good quality cameras,
[19:52]but it didn't matter to me.
[19:53]I couldn't see the visuals.
[19:55]I was just listening.
[19:56]And it was so easy because I found these girls.
[20:00]who were all just around the same age as me,
[20:02]talking about beauty and fashion and lifestyle,
[20:05]and they just sat in their bedroom
[20:07]and talked to the camera,
[20:09]almost like a podcast.
[20:10]It was really audio forward.
[20:12]And even when they would hold up products,
[20:15]they would describe it in detail
[20:17]because the video quality was so poor.
[20:20]So they had to describe it really well.
[20:22]So it was kind of like this really great way
[20:25]for me to be entertained
[20:26]and also feel connected because as I said,
[20:28]I lost all my friends.
[20:30]So now I had social media to both feel a connection
[20:35]to girls my age and things that I loved.
[20:38]And also, I had a form of entertainment
[20:41]that felt accessible to me.
[20:43]So I really fell in love with social media
[20:46]and throughout my high school,
[20:47]I, in the back of my mind,
[20:48]I was like, I'd love to do that one day.
[20:49]That would be so cool.
[20:50]That would be so fun.
[20:52]And eventually, you know,
[20:54]when I left this, you know,
[20:56]what some call of corporate calls,
[20:58]I ended up deciding I was ready to take the plunge
[21:03]and start my own channel at 20 years old
[21:05]and in my parents' house
[21:07]and started filming and uploading.
[21:09]And at the time,
[21:11]well, social media had grown quite a lot larger
[21:15]in those years.
[21:15]It was now 2014.
[21:18]There was still no disability representation.
[21:21]I could find like maybe five channels
[21:24]that were very small of different disabilities
[21:27]of creators all over the world,
[21:29]but there was nobody really succeeding.
[21:32]And it felt like mainstream media.
[21:34]Like we had just not kind of had our moment yet.
[21:37]And I thought, well, mainstream media
[21:39]has a lot of gatekeepers,
[21:40]but social media, the only gatekeepers if you were,
[21:43]the general public,
[21:44]they either resonate with you or they don't.
[21:46]And so I took the plunge
[21:49]and I never, ever, ever expected.
[21:51]It would be what it is today.
[21:53]It's been 11 years, almost five million followers
[21:55]across platforms later.
[21:57]And now I'm so proud to say
[21:59]that the disability community is thriving on social media.
[22:02]There are so many creators with different disabilities
[22:05]making a full-time living,
[22:07]running their own business,
[22:08]sharing their lives, educating building community,
[22:11]changing misconceptions, and it's incredible.
[22:14]That is incredible.
[22:15]Well, how amazing to have been at the forefront
[22:17]of a movement like that,
[22:18]which has helped so many.
[22:20]And I love that on your channel,
[22:22]you're educating the rest of us
[22:25]for what cited people should know,
[22:28]what the common things are that they,
[22:30]that upset you or all of that.
[22:33]So you're really not just showing us amazing blush
[22:37]and all of that, but also teaching us
[22:40]how to get what you need,
[22:42]how we should be more sensitive,
[22:44]what we should know what we might not have thought of,
[22:47]which is really wonderful.
[22:49]Tell me about your content creation
[22:51]and how this is just a part now of what you do
[22:55]and how that comes to pass.
[22:59]My content is definitely a wide spectrum.
[23:02]I think that my content is really self-expression
[23:05]of who I am as a person,
[23:06]which is very multifaceted as we all are.
[23:09]And I don't wanna put myself into one box
[23:12]because I'm creative,
[23:14]like I need the freedom to play.
[23:17]And so my content is,
[23:18]I guess if you have to put it in a category,
[23:20]it's lifestyle,
[23:21]but lifestyle of course with the disability twist.
[23:24]So I do content ranging from makeup and fashion
[23:27]to travel to advocacy and education
[23:30]or on disability and service dogs.
[23:32]But I really like to try to keep it fun
[23:34]and light and entertaining.
[23:36]Not always light,
[23:37]there's definitely,
[23:38]there's been a fair share of tears
[23:40]because again, that's the spectrum of life experience,
[23:43]a human emotion is there's really beautiful moments,
[23:46]but there's really hard moments.
[23:47]And the one thing that I missed in the creators
[23:50]that I grew up watching and loving
[23:52]was the vulnerability of the hard stuff.
[23:56]There was an era of showing the pristine, the perfect,
[24:00]really glamorizing your own life, that highlight reel.
[24:04]And as a young person who went through so much
[24:06]at such young age,
[24:08]that was the one part that I didn't resonate with.
[24:11]It was like, oh, that's like the life I want,
[24:14]but it's far from the life I have.
[24:17]And I made a commitment to myself,
[24:19]when I started 11 years ago,
[24:21]that I was gonna show the full spectrum of my life.
[24:23]Not just the good,
[24:25]because that doesn't do anybody any justice.
[24:28]It's important to show that there is duality,
[24:31]that there is the bittersweetness and that that's okay,
[24:34]that you have your bad days and you have your good days,
[24:36]you have your hard moments
[24:37]and you have your incredible ones.
[24:40]And the incredible ones are what we live for, you know?
[24:43]You got to ride out those downs and live for the ups
[24:46]and every down, just remember the up comes again.
[24:49]So what are you most scared of right now?
[24:52]Releasing a book is terrifying.
[24:55]As much as I've done everything I can,
[24:57]illegally protect myself, of course I'm still scared.
[24:59]Again, that's why I've not shared
[25:00]so many of these stories for so long.
[25:03]And I mean, I could have made the whole book
[25:05]just on that corporate experience.
[25:07]Like there was so much more,
[25:09]and it was really hard going through that legal rewrite process
[25:13]where I did have to change so much
[25:16]and find a way to still do my story justice
[25:19]while keeping myself safe,
[25:20]which was such an interesting experience,
[25:22]but I'm still terrified.
[25:24]I'm terrified that people won't like it.
[25:26]I wrote this entirely on my own.
[25:28]I did not have a ghostwriter, I did not have a co-writer,
[25:32]I did not have AI, I did this all on my own,
[25:35]and I'm not a writer.
[25:37]And I've never written a book in full like this before.
[25:40]And it was a really difficult journey.
[25:43]I think the editing was a lot harder than the writing.
[25:46]The writing was like this cathartic creative brain dump,
[25:49]and the editing was piecing it into some semblance
[25:53]of something that makes sense.
[25:54]And that was really difficult and also deciding
[25:57]like what doesn't need to be there,
[26:01]what doesn't serve the book,
[26:03]but it's still meaningful to me.
[26:05]Like there's so many complicated parts of editing.
[26:08]And so it's ended up as the book that it is,
[26:10]and it's just terrifying to think that I spent
[26:13]a year and a half writing this two and a half years
[26:15]working on it from beginning of the proposal process
[26:18]to when it's on shelves on September 23rd,
[26:21]and it's been such a commitment of my time,
[26:24]of my love, of myself, and it's just terrifying
[26:27]to think maybe people won't like it,
[26:30]or maybe it won't resonate, because as I said,
[26:32]I'm not a writer, you know,
[26:34]it's very much written in my own voice,
[26:36]in my own style, in my own tone.
[26:38]And so yeah, it's just really scary to think
[26:40]that people won't like something that took so much of me.
[26:44]Well, those feelings are totally normal.
[26:46]You would be an aberration if you were not worried
[26:51]about a book coming out.
[26:52]Every author, I think, has those pre-launch jitters
[26:55]and is convinced that the book is like terrible
[26:59]and that they have to steal it from the market
[27:00]the second, like it's too late
[27:02]and it's out of your control and oh my gosh, now what?
[27:04]But they are going to like it.
[27:05]Your book is good, it's a great story, it's inspiring.
[27:09]And books should be written in the voice.
[27:12]I mean, obviously it's fine to have help,
[27:14]but you know, the fact that it's your voice
[27:16]is what is going to make people drawn to it,
[27:19]because they want to hear from you.
[27:20]So it's easy for me to say, oh, don't worry Molly,
[27:24]but you know, I'm just saying, I get it
[27:27]and I'm looking forward to you feeling the joy
[27:30]that comes with knowing that people are liking it.
[27:33]Thank you, yeah, everybody keeps assuring me
[27:36]that it's a normal feeling to have.
[27:38]So I'm comforted in that, but yeah, I think,
[27:41]you know, you put so much of yourself into something
[27:44]and so many vulnerable things that you've never shared
[27:47]and one thing that I was really passionate about
[27:49]going into writing this book was that this book is not
[27:54]written in a way that's just supposed to make me look perfect.
[27:57]It's written in a way to share that I'm human.
[27:59]And that means that I'm not always perfect
[28:01]and that I do make mistakes and bad decisions
[28:03]and that there's things in this book that I'm ashamed of.
[28:07]But I didn't want to not put them in just because I'm ashamed.
[28:10]I wanted to put them in so that other people
[28:12]who have felt these same things
[28:13]and have also felt ashamed by them know that it is normal
[28:17]and other people feel those things too,
[28:19]even if we don't readily admit them.
[28:20]I love that.
[28:22]Well, Molly, congratulations.
[28:24]I'm really excited for you.
[28:25]I can't wait for the book to come out
[28:27]and I hope that you have time to celebrate
[28:31]the accomplishment of all that you've done
[28:34]and you're just getting started.
[28:36]So it's pretty cool.
[28:38]Thank you so much.
[28:39]I appreciate it.
[28:40]Okay, all right.
[28:42]I'll be reading for you.
[28:43]Take care.
[28:44]Thanks.
[28:45]Bye, have a nice day.
[28:46]Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibi.
[28:49]Formerly, mom's don't have time to read books.
[28:51]If you loved the show,
[28:53]tell a friend, leave a review,
[28:55]follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens
[28:57]and spread the word.
[28:59]Thanks so much.
[29:00]Oh, and buy the books.