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Description

Nicole J Georges always felt like an outsider in her family. She didn’t look like anyone else. Everyone was taller than her. But at 23 years old, a chance encounter with a palm reader changed her life in an instant. “I had grandparents that were looking for me. I had brothers and sisters I never knew about.” Plus, Nicole’s advice for teens who feel like the black sheep of their own family. “You’re going to find your people and your place and it is going to make you even stronger and much cooler.”

 

You can follow Nicole J Georges on Twitter and Instagram @nicolejgeorges.

 

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Interested in learning more about Nicole? Check out the links below: 

• Read Nicole’s graphic novel about uncovering her family secret, Calling Dr. Laura: http://nicolejgeorges.com/publications/calling-dr-laura/
• Listen to Relative Fiction, Nicole’s podcast collaboration with Oregon Public Broadcasting: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/relative-fiction/id1557300926
• Keep up with all of Nicole’s work at her website: http://nicolejgeorges.com/

 

To follow along with a transcript and/or take notes for friends and family, go to http://lemonadamedia.com/show/good-kids/ shortly after the air date.

 

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If you want to submit a show idea, email us at goodkids@lemonadamedia.com.

Transcript

SPEAKERS

Nicole J. Georges

Nicole J. Georges  00:05

Hi, I’m Nicole J. Georges, and you’re listening to GOOD KIDS. I am a podcaster and graphic novelist. And I’m going to talk about family secrets and how a palm reader changed my entire life.

Nicole J. Georges

For as long as I can remember, I have felt adopted. I always felt like there was something not being said in the room and that the adults were looking at each other over my head. I don’t look like anyone else in my family. Supposedly, my dad died of colon cancer when I was a baby. And I don’t have any grandparents except for my mom’s Syrian dad. Aside from that, I just, I feel like an alien. Everyone’s taller than me. Everybody has Syrian noses like strong noses. And I have, I’m short. At this round face, I have tiny nose. My mom said that I looked like my great grandma Seto. And any picture of her She is 80 years old and just like hunched and she looks like a little bundle of rags.

Nicole J. Georges 

And I just, it’s hard to believe that that’s the person who I most resemble in the entire family. I was always an outsider in my family. And then our family had so much turmoil and kind of turnover. And we moved so much that I just always had this kind of natural outsider status. So then when I started finding underground music, through grunge, or alternative, I felt at home, this kind of I came of age around the time of grunge and Kurt Cobain killing himself hit me very hard. And I just remember really glomming on to this outsiderness of these people that were on MTV in the mainstream, but they were like, we’re outsiders in the mainstream. And that was my gateway to punk.

Nicole J. Georges  02:03

And once I found out about punk and alternative, I was all in. I found Riot Grrrl Zines when I was in high school, and they were confessionals zines, where people talked about mental health and abuse and sexism and sizeism, racism, homophobia, ableism, ageism, all these things I had never heard said out loud before, because this was like the prehistoric days of the internet. And I realized that you could tell your own story, and that you could tell a confessional true raw story and the more raw you were, and the more vulnerable you let yourself be, the more people could actually connect with you.

Nicole J. Georges 

It could be, your isolation, you could form a bridge from your isolation, through vulnerability. And I found that in doing that, in my own zine, the teenage boys, I was hanging around really didn’t like it. But I found girls and women and queer people who understood me completely, and I felt at home for maybe the first time in my life. When I was 23, my friend took me to a palm reader for my birthday, because she got a 2 for 1 coupon, she found a two for one coupon for palm ratings out of the back of the newspaper, it couldn’t have been more than $20. And this palm reading changed my entire life.

Nicole J. Georges

The palm reader looked at my palm and within like five minutes said: “oh, you should talk to your father more often.” And I said, I can’t talk to him more often because he is dead and she said, “well, maybe the man you think is your father is dead. But your real father is very much alive.” And I just that was a moment. It rang a bell inside me that couldn’t get unrung like I didn’t tell my friend about it. I didn’t tell anybody about it. I just went home and all the floating pieces of my entire life. It just kind of glommed together where it was like, oh, this could be true. And I asked my sister about it. A year, it took me a year to ask my sister because I was so freaked out to like shatter my whole reality.

Nicole J. Georges  04:17

And my sister just started crying and was like, I always wanted to tell you I’m so sorry. It’s true. And my whole family said, oh, we knew you would figure it out eventually, because you’re so smart. But I’m not. I didn’t hear it out. I don’t have that detective gene. I can’t guess the end of movies. I can’t. I’m never suspecting anything. I just found out because my friend took me to a parameter. That’s it. I didn’t know what to do. So I called the Dr. Laura show. If you have grown up with like, problematic Christian family, you’ll feel very at home listening to Dr. Laura because that’s her deal. She’s like this mean, conservative, anti-feminist.

Dr. Laura

Female empowerment. What was that supposed to mean?

Nicole J. Georges 

Cannot keep her feet out of hot water. Like she just said, Oh, she’s so awful. I have to stop listening.

Dr. Laura 

Was that supposed to mean that women would be as crude, promiscuous, was that female empowerment?

Nicole J. Georges

But I grew up with no boundaries. And she has nothing but boundaries. And so something about her I just kept being gravitated to, especially during that time, when I’d only been in therapy for like, one minute. And I just, I always wanted to have a good question to call an advice show with and this felt like a really good question. So I called and I got on the air.

Nicole J. Georges

My question was: “should I go home for Christmas? Like, my mom doesn’t know, I know this secret. Do I tell her that I found out? That she’s busted or, or what? Like, she wants me to come home for Christmas. I don’t know what to do.” And I started crying. As soon as I started talking about it. I was surprised I had been keeping it so, I’ve been keeping it so balled up inside of me. And then as soon as I talked to this, just like stern parental woman, I was like, and she said, Your dad sounds like a deadbeat. Who cares if he is alive. You’ve been through enough chaos, go home and have Christmas. And so I did. And it was awful. So at Christmas, I didn’t say anything. And my mom was like very much living in the present, trying to be her like hostess with the mostess. I love you. I love you self.

Nicole J. Georges  06:46

And I was like, Oh, God, I went home. And within a couple months, my life fell apart, my chosen family fell apart, which at the time was my girlfriend, she had a million dogs, we had a band, we had my life was built around this person. And then she just blew it up. She like cheated on me, left for a world tour with her mistress and a band and broke up our band. And I just felt like I had nothing. I just I was at rock bottom. And from there, I was like, there’s no, there’s no lower I can go I have reached my bottom of what I can conceive is the worst possible scenario. So I actually don’t care what my mom says. So I’m just going to tell her and I actually had not come out to my mom as gay. And so I wrote to my mom and I just in one fell swoop was like, hey, I’ve been lying to you about something. This person was not my roommate.

Nicole J. Georges

I’m not so tore up about my roommate moving out. This was my life partner. And we were in love. And now we’re not in a very sad. And PS, I know you’ve been lying about something, too. I found out about my dad. I had to get really harsh place before I was willing to do that. When I started talking about it, I was able to unburden myself from the secret that wasn’t even mine. And like someone else’s shame that somehow like got thrown to me, I got to let that go. And also, I wrote an entire graphic memoir about it. And from that graphic memoir, all these family members started coming out of the woodwork and being like, we always knew that you existed, we were just waiting for you to show up one day.

Nicole J. Georges  08:22

Because everyone thought I was such a genius that I’d be able to figure out the secret. I’m not Frodo, I’m not. I’m not a damn Hermione Granger, I can’t be expected to figure all this out. I had no interest in finding my dad because I figured he was a scumbag from what my family had told me. But because I was working on a graphic novel, and I believe in art, I found him. But not only did I find him, I found an entire other family. And I discovered that he had kept a baby picture of me and his wallet all this time. And that there was so much to the story that I didn’t even know. There was, you know, like I had grandparents that were looking for me.

Nicole J. Georges 

I had brothers and sisters I never knew about there was this whole world of people who knew about me. And it really took going to this palm reader and unraveling this secret to find them. If you are a teenager, and you are feeling like the black sheep or you’re feeling alone, I want to tell you a couple things. This is not gonna last forever. The only thing we know for sure is change. Sadness is not your final emotion; you will get through whatever time you are not alone. You are among. You may not know who those people are yet, but they exist. You’re not alone in your experience.

Nicole J. Georges

And you’re going to grow up with this otherness, whether you’re gay, whether you’re weird, whether it’s something about you, your otherness that’s going to end up being your strength. It’s going to be the thing, from what you find the coolest people from what you make the best art and that your otherness is the thing that’s actually it feels maybe the worst in the moment, but you’re going to find your people in your place and it is going to make you even stronger and much cooler.

Nicole J. Georges  10:26

I’m the author of the graphic novel Calling Dr. Laura and the podcast adaptation, Relative Fiction. You can follow me on Instagram at @NicoleJGeorges. Thank you for listening to GOOD KIDS

CREDITS

GOOD KIDS is a Lemonada Media Original. Supervising producer is Kryssy Pease. Associate producer is Alex McOwen and Kegan Zema is our engineer. The show is executive produced by Stephanie Wittels Wachs and Jessica Cordova Kramer. The music is by Dan Molad with additional music courtesy of APM music. Check us out on social at @LemonadaMedia, recommend us to a friend and rate and review us wherever you listen to podcast. If you want to submit a show idea, email us at hey@lemonadamedia.com. Until next week, stay good.