Bassey Ikpi's New Memoir Tells The Truth About Bipolar Disorder And Anxiety

As a former slam poet Bassey Ikpi is no stranger to performing before a crowd but telling her own story of coming to terms with her bipolar disorder diagnosis was another matter. Writing I'm Telling the Truth, But I'm Lying and then narrating it was the culmination of years growth and a yearning for understanding.

Listen in as Ikpi talks with editor Rachel Smalter Hall about what it means to tell your own story when you can't always turn to your memories for details and how important it is for us to have a real understanding of mental health issues.

Note: Text has been edited and may not match audio exactly.

Rachel Smalter Hall: I'm Audible editor Rachel Smalter Hall, here with writer, mental-health advocate, and ex-poet, Bassey Ikpi. Ms. Ikpi was touring the country with HBO's Def Jam Poetry, when she was hospitalized and diagnosed with Bipolar II. Her new memoir, I'm Telling the Truth, But I'm Lying, tells that story, and it's out this August. Welcome to Audible, Bassey.

Bassey Ikpi: Thank you for having me.

RSH: It's so nice to have you here. I personally loved this memoir. I'm a resident memoir person here at Audible. And I'm always looking for those memoirs that really dig into the truth, whatever that truth is. And I really got that from your memoir.

BI: Oh, thank you so much.

RSH: I wanted to start out by asking you, what made you feel like this was the right time to tell this story?

BI: I don't know if I was thinking on those terms. But I know that three years ago, when I started the writing process, I was in one of the worst depressive states that I'd been in for a very long time--the worst I've ever been in. And I was writing a much different book then. The book that I was pretending to write was very self-help-y. It had a very Touched by an Angel inspirational kind of tone to it. Even the title lent itself to that. I wasn't purposely doing that, but I think I was hiding underneath that because I needed something else. And I was afraid of writing the truth of what it was I was experiencing, and what I had experienced over the X amount of years that I'd been dealing with my mental health.

What opened up the writing for me was when I had to give myself permission to tell the story in the most authentic way I could think of--even if it was just to get that out of the way. Like, "Let me just do that, get that out of the way, and then go back to the book that we sold, the book that I promised I was writing." But that never happened. Every time I tried to go back to that original [book], there was a block there. And the block again was this overwhelming need I felt to be dishonest in the writing.

Once I gave myself that permission again to just tell it the way that makes sense, the way that I want people to read it, it just opened things up. I still can't claim some sort of direction that was purposeful and pointed. It just appeared the way that I feel like it needed to appear, which so mystical. I don't mean it like that at all, but, you know.

RSH: Yeah. It makes sense to me, though. I get that. You spent a lot of time, especially in the beginning of the story, talking about this sense that the facts seem very slippery, and that all you really have to hold onto are your impressions and memories of the facts. There is a story you tell at the beginning about watching [the launch of] the Challenger, which as many listeners will know, was [shown] around the nation as school children were watching, and then it ended in this tragic explosion. That seemed very formative to you. But also, as I was reading the story, I could tell you were grappling with, "Well, I know this isn't exactly what happened, but this is what feels like it happened." How did you reconcile those things as you were writing, and why was that important? Was there a block to giving yourself permission to writing it the way you remember?

BI: Yeah. Absolutely. What I was getting at was that a lot of books, the how-to manuals on how to write memoirs, they're very explicit in that if you have a bad memory, you shouldn't write one, or you should write something else. And I didn't think that was fair because so much of what we read in nonfiction and memoir is pieced together. There's no way that you remember exact conversations. There's no way that you remember complete scenarios. You fill in the blanks.

There are people who have more concrete, factual memories.

And I don't think that is any better or worse than someone who has an emotional memory. And I've known, for as long as I can remember, that I have an emotional memory. I can't tell you the number of people in the room. I can't tell you what day of the week it was. Unless something historical happened... Even then, because with the Challenger, I couldn't remember what year it was.

But I felt like my emotional memory was just as valid as anyone else's historical memory, and I needed to work with what this mental illness was doing. I needed to work with it--as opposed to trying to work around it and fill in all these blanks and do all this research. Because that would be dishonest, I felt, to the stories that I needed to tell.

What was more important [than factual details] was making sure that I was able to place people in these situations, and place them in the center, so that they're looking around and experiencing the same way that I would experience it, given the way that my brain works. And the only way that I could do that was to be as connected to the emotion [as possible] and leave the rest of the stuff aside.

RSH: Right. As someone who also has a very emotional memory, I find that very validating and comforting. It almost feels like you're giving permission to other people who have stories to tell who felt like they weren't able to tell the stories because there are rules about how it should be done.

I'm prouder of the audiobook than I am of the actual written manuscript. I'll be honest with you. It's my favorite part. 

BI: Yeah. 100%. Again, I can't take credit for things being that calculated and intentional. But during the process, once I realized the kind of stories that I was telling, the perspectives in which I was telling them, I was hoping and praying [to help] anyone who read it, whether they be someone who can firsthand understand some of the situations, or someone who is able to recognize someone else.

One of the essays was adapted and put in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago. And I got an email from a woman who said she wondered what her son, who's diagnosed bipolar, was doing all night when he said he couldn't sleep. She was like, "Just go to bed, or just lie down, or just think of things that will make you sleepy." And she said, [it helped] for her to read just the sheer amount of noise in your head, and the kind of things that that noise is doing and why it feels so impossible to get to sleep. That's what I wanted people to get.

And it was very selfish in that I want people to understand me, but also hoping that in understanding me that there are other people who can also feel seen, and heard, and validated through the work.

RSH: Right, and in your story there is such a sense of the sleepless nights, that insomnia. You really evoke that in a very visceral way. It feels weird to say I enjoyed that part, but it definitely rang true to me. So, thank you for writing that.

BI: Thank you.

RSH: It's one thing to write about yourself, but whenever we write about ourselves, the people around us are kind of brought into that story, too. And you talk about your parents. There's some tension with your sister... How would you describe  your dynamic with your parents and your sister?

BI: I love my family. I love my sister and my brothers, my parents. Again, my perspective as the oldest child in an immigrant family is that I wasn't measuring up. And that's, again, my perspective of it. My sister is amazing. She's the grown-up. She's six years younger than me, but she's six years older sometimes. Like, she just has it all together. And one of the things that I'm careful about is not to speak too much about other people further than how they intersect with my story. And then, even then, very clear: This is my perspective, and this is not to vilify anyone or to just label them.

I wanted to disallow these very concrete notions we get about other people's experiences. Especially with social media, people are very quick to say, "This is toxic, this is abusive, this is... whatever." I'm like, "No, this is complicated." These are people who have their own stories and experiences that shape how their stories intersect and collide with others. And I wanted to be very, very respectful of that. I don't know what happened in your history, but I know how your experience affected my history and my life moving forward. So I wanted to be very fair about that.

But for the most part, the dynamic is that I've always felt like... I don't want to say black sheep, but just the one who could never figure it out. And my family, my parents are very patient. My siblings are amazing. I wouldn't have survived a lot of things without them. And we have that kind of bond together. But despite that, it didn't exclude me from this notion that I wasn't measuring up. Something that I gave myself.

I'm not going to say that I gave it just purely. Family dynamics have it so that you know what the expectations are. They're very clear about what those expectations are. And if you fall short of those expectations, regardless of whether or not it's being pounded in your head that you failed, you still feel that. That's something that can organically manifest despite what other people would say about you.

RSH: Yeah. There's a scene in the book where your sister is graduating, and I think you really capture the complexity there. In that scene, you're very happy for your sister, but you're feeling a little bit down on yourself, and your family. This feeling that you hadn't measured up in the same way. For those who haven't heard the story yet, can you describe just a little bit what was going on? I'm also wondering if you feel like there's any sort of personal cost to committing that to the page.

BI: So, the scene is: I was home for my sister's college graduation. She graduated from Rutgers, just around the corner. Her graduation. And I'd dropped out of college about six or seven years before that and moved to New York in the middle of a crisis. What I know now to be a crisis. Then, I was like, "I'm just restless; I don't like school," all that stuff.

I'm speaking as someone whose family moved from one country to the next because of education. My parents were in college when I was younger. The immigrant story is that you come to this country, and you succeed in these very concrete and very finite ways. And I just wasn't capable of that, especially as I entered college. College was a different... It was much more difficult. I figured out high school. I figured out that I could stay up all night and read my textbooks and be able to pass an exam just by refreshing on the bus, or whatever. You can't do that in college. In college, it's 12 books for each class. It's impossible.

The edits had to be towards kindness, and not trying to draw out any kind of drama or conflict just for the sake of it.

And having trouble in college triggered some of the depressive episodes that I still didn't have the language for. So, when I got home--and I wanted to celebrate my sister, I was very proud of her--I couldn't help but hear that... Again, with the way the book is set up, as much as I know that's what I heard, I can't put that intent behind it. Whether they were trying to shame me. That's just what came with me. That's what I brought to the party, quite literally.

But then trying to find ways to navigate the very real, "I don't feel great about being here, but I'm very happy for my sister, and I want to be around my family." Which is, I love my family; I'm always wanting to be around them. But then also knowing that my mother had been harboring and holding disappointment.

In a lot of essays, especially the early ones, I talk about the fact that I was very much her child. I was the first. I was the baby girl. The first girl. The one who was born there and moved to the States. There were all these expectations placed on me by an entire village of people, quite literally. And I just didn't measure up--in any way, shape, or form. And having to figure out how to live in those moments, and at the same time knowing that my mental health wasn't doing great. And these collisions that I had had with my mom my entire life, and it all coming to a head with us not really knowing how to communicate our pains to each other in a very clear way.

And that story was important to me, too, because it set up the dynamics that came in relationships afterwards. Having to swallow emotion. Not being able to be very vocal about being hurt by somebody, or having a dynamic where you can't express pain, and you can't say, "You hurt me." Or, "This is hurting me." And having someone else who processes pain in a very ostentatious...  I don't want to say violent in that way, but like silently aggressive.

RSH: Right. And this is your mom?

BI: Yes. And just the way that I learned not to do that. Knowing that we share some kind of pain that we haven't discussed, and there's something there that we can connect on a very real... in a way that I would connect with a stranger. If they told me their story, I'd be right there. But we just don't have that kind of dynamic.

And knowing that the ways in which we've learned to process these things that have hurt us are very different. And I learned again, in later essays, people haven't read it, but like how to deal with an ex-boyfriend who was just pretty horrible. But knowing the way that I can express my rage and my anger and my hurt. I didn't want to do it the way that I'd learned, or the way that I'd seen other people do that's very hurtful to all that they're on their own.

RSH: Yeah. I was thinking about the chapters about your exes--that would be a whole other hour-long interview, but definitely worth a listen. Because you do, as you do in the entire memoir, just go into these spaces that are really complex and explore them. Has your mom read any of the essays or chapter?

BI: No.

RSH: Do you want her to sometime?

BI: No. I'm really afraid of it. That was the other question that you asked. I had my brothers read some of the chapters that I was worried about, and I actually did tone down a lot of language. And I wanted to be as empathetic as I possibly could. Because, again, I'm not one of those writers or creatives who's fine blowing their lives up for the sake of the story. That's not something that I'm interested in. I would rather, if I couldn't find a way to be as kind, and as clear, to anybody. You know, there's the stories about the exes. I was pretty terrible in those stories too. It wasn't like this person did a thing to me, it was just so terrible. I wanted to be as fair as possible but I also know what the dynamics are. And my brothers read, and asked me to tone some things down. And once I wrote them originally, and went back in editing, was able to say, "Okay, wow, this thing here is connected to this other thing. I can play this part up because this is really important to how the story is told."

I'm concerned about it. I don't think she'll read it. I think my dad will read it more so. But I hope that within that they see the past tense of it, and how things have changed since then. And then also, I hope they just realize that it was done in order to provide some balance and some understanding and not to vilify or throw anybody under the bus.

I was very, very afraid and cautious of that. I kept telling my editor, Aaron, listen, "I don't feel great about this. So as much as possible, the edits have to be towards kindness, and not trying to draw out any kind of drama or conflict just for the sake of it." I don't want that to be the story at all. And I had a bunch of friends and people read it. My best friend from the eighth grade, who knows my family very well, read it, and she was like, "No, this is actually very kind. You were very kind to the situation."

RSH: I love that. Editing for kindness.

BI: Yeah.

RSH: There are these tender moments between you and your mom that are really unexpected. My hope is that, when and if she hears these stories,  it will open up some ways for you to have conversations that you haven't had before.

BI: I hope so, but I don't know. That can't lead the conversation around it. I want them to understand, if anything else, the lump sum of it. Like all of it, as opposed to these little individual things. I want them to see it as a whole thing. But, I don't know. I hope it's received well.

RSH: Yeah. One of the things you brought up a couple of times in this interview is that you are from this immigrant family. You were born in Nigeria,is that right? And then moved to the States when you were four. And later in the book, you talk about your eventual hospitalization and diagnosis of Bipolar II.  How accepting did you feel your family and your culture were of this really mental health issue? Was it something that you felt you could talk about openly, or was there some resistance to that?

BI: I didn't think that I could talk about it openly, and I think that's more of a societal thing. Especially when I was diagnosed, it still wasn't openly talked about. People weren't talking about depression. I think the closest people would get is exhaustion. And I think people were okay going into rehab, but no one would talk about a mental health issue.

My mother has a degree in psychology, and I remember she used to get Psychology Today mailed to the house all the time. And I used to sit there and read it cover to cover, and felt really kind of both connected and disgusted by the possibility... I didn't want to be written about in the ways that I was reading these people being written about. But I also was very aware that there was something going on from a very early age.

After I was diagnosed, and I told my parents, my father went and he looked up all the symptoms, and he was very sad to see that he could, in hindsight, connect these symptoms to some of my behavior over the course of my growing up. He was very sad about that. I think my mom was a bit more scared. Again, these are conversations we don't have, so I don't know what direction she was afraid of. But she was very, "Don't tell people. It will affect the way that they treat you. It will affect the way that they'll see you. People won't want to hire you," you know, whatever.

So, there was a lot of fear there and a lot of concern. But once they understood that this was a thing that existed for me, they were very, very supportive about medication and doctors. They, for better or for worse, wanted to talk to my therapist and find out how they could help and what they could do.

What really, I think, frightened them, the second time I was hospitalized, about 10 years ago... it was the first time they had seen the deterioration. They said, "I can hear you walking around at night. I can see you just sort of falling into yourself, crying a lot, but trying to hide it from people." Once they saw that it changed the way [I was], it became an actual tangible thing, as opposed to something theoretical, where they were like, "Oh, I can see how." They saw it as it was occurring.

And that has been very helpful. My family and my friends are very attentive, and they're a lot more sensitive to me and to other people since I've been diagnosed.

RSH: I'm picturing little Bassey, getting Psychology Today, and flipping through it. I mean, "Oh, I don't want it..." Like, "What if this is me and I don't want to be written about that way."

BI: Where was one of the ones I remember the clearest, it had ... Do you know who Howard Hughes was?

RSH: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

BI: It had Howard Hughes on the cover, like a painting of him. And he had this long scraggly beard and really long nails. And so I read it. He had some sort of OCD. I can't remember what the diagnosis they had in there, but it was just the story of all of his behavior. And I was terrified. I was like, "Okay, I have to go outside every day so I don't get agoraphobic and stuck in the house." I mean, I wasn't going to grow a beard, but I was very careful about my fingernails being trimmed. Like whatever the aesthetic that was crazy, I didn't want that.

And that carried over for a very long time in that no matter how depressed, or whatever, I was, I had to make sure that I didn't look it. If I could not bring myself to get dressed and to look presentable, I would just stay in the house. And I would be in the house for weeks on end, but no one would see me. And then, when I could emerge, wear all the clothes that I spent all the mania time shopping for. Like stuff like that, trying to not look like it... That came from all the stuff I read in Psychology Today. Oh my gosh, it was like a how-to, or how-not-to, manual.

RSH: I wish that everyone listening could have seen your face just now. That was amazing. You had this look on your face. I almost wonder if writing I'm Telling the Truth, But I'm Lying was kind of your way of taking your narrative back from something like Psychology Today...and saying, "No, this is what it's like."

BI: It was. It absolutely was. Writing the book, it was almost like both an apology and a thank you note to people who've been around. Or like just this ability to explain it, and explain it in a way that wasn't as terrifying as the Psychology Todaystuff. And I think I was very deliberate, and I told my editor as much. Especially as a woman of color writer, there's this need to only attach our stories to things that other people will care about.

So it can't just be the story of the Challenger explosion. I'd have to go and find a way to connect it to the greater societal ills, or statistics about how, you know, "One in every 10 person who does ABC ..." Like all these things that I feel like we do to try to make other people care about the stories. So what I wanted to be very clear about is that the stories are enough. And the story is not just enough for people to care about, but I want to write it in a way that makes it impossible for you to leave whatever essay you just finished without feeling like you just experienced the thing in some way, shape, or form.

RSH: You mention your mom having this fear, you believe, about your being out as a Bipolar II woman. Was that a journey for you to decide how much you wanted to share with the world about that?

BI: Absolutely. I wasn't going to. I was perfectly okay doing what I needed to do to be okay. I didn't tell anybody for the longest. When I left the tour and people were asking and emailing, "Where were you? Came to see you in Chicago, and you weren't there." "I was sick." That was the thing I would say. "I have to go to the doctor." Not say I was going to therapy or going to a psychiatrist. I hid a lot.

The first time I was in the hospital, I had a blog at the time. I was clearly documenting depression, and mania, and stuff. But people didn't know that and I didn't know it as well. But once I was fully diagnosed, I was very silent about it. I was shamed. I was ashamed of it. I didn't understand it. But I did know that, "Okay, it doesn't matter if I like it or not: it's a thing; I need to get it taken care of. So I should go to a doctor, therapy. And a psychiatrist for medication, try to figure out my medication." But I didn't want to tell anybody what it was. I didn't want anyone to know.

What I saw about people who had mental illnesses on TV or read in books was never positive. You know, because the people who were quietly thriving and surviving, those stories aren't very exciting, so you don't hear them. But it also appears as though they don't exist because you don't hear them. But I didn't want people to look at me like I looked at the people I read about in Psychology Today.

I didn't want people to treat me like I was fragile... The few friends that I told treated me like I was just about to explode into a million pieces at any given time. And I didn't want that either. I just wanted to be normal. I wanted people to just treat me like they always treated me. With a little bit more care, because the way that I was before was also very destructive.

So, I didn't want to tell anybody and my parents were also very vocal about not telling anybody. I don't think they knew how to explain it. And going back to your question before, in Nigeria, and a lot of places around the world, mental health issues are seen as character flaws or personality defects, and/or crisis of faith. And so a lot of the advice and stuff goes back to trying. "You're not trying hard enough. You're not praying hard enough." You're not doing all these things enough, and it puts it squarely on you.

I know that my parents didn't feel that way, but they also didn't really understand what it was. And they didn't want other people to judge me or to have preconceived notions about what that meant. They were very protective in that way, and I got it. But it was also very difficult for me. Because I felt whenever there's something that exists that you can't speak about, there's no choice but to internalize the shame.

Even if it's a good reason why you're not saying it. It still manifests itself in a shameful way, and you start to lie and maneuver. Like, "Oh, I'm not feeling well," or, "I got... and all these things." Just the energy that's behind that and the weight of that is not positive.

RSH: What made that change for you? I mean, now you describe yourself as a mental health advocate. You've written this gorgeous book about your diagnosis with Bipolar II. What changed for you from wanting to be hidden to just really sharing that?

BI: I'll tell you a quick story. There was a show that used to be out years and years ago, Girlfriends, with Tracee Ellis Ross. And there was a character on the show named Lynn, who was very flaky, and irresponsible. She couldn't keep a job.  She was a perpetual student. She would just go from major to major. She was just very, very... out there. She was also adopted. And she had the opportunity to meet her biological mother, [who] turned out to have bipolar. At the time, Girlfriends was like the number-one show in Black households. And that episode came out about a week after I was let out of the hospital the first time.

And I'm sitting on my couch watching the show that I watch every Tuesday, and they're talking about bipolar, and there are Black people that watch it, and I was so excited. Not excited, but just kind of, "Oh my god, this is how I get to tell people." Because everybody I know watches this show. This is fantastic. But what happened was the biological mother, they said that she had bipolar, but they gave her these personality traits. She was kind of developmentally delayed. She had what people back then would call multiple personality disorder. Like she kept flipping her personalities. She'd get really angry, then she'd get really... all these things. And I was like, "That's not what that is." I was very frustrated watching it.

And then what really got me was the other character, Lynn, whose biological mother that was, she was afraid that she might have also have bipolar because her biological mother did. And she was listing the actual symptoms, the ones that I recognize. Like, "I'm irresponsible, I'm not good with money." All these different things. And I'm like, "Yeah, that's what that is." But then her friend, Joan, Tracee Ellis Ross's character, says, "No, you're nothing like that. You're not crazy. You're this. You're beautiful. You're amazing."

I'm sitting on the couch like, "Wait, like all those things can be true." And it felt like a personal wound. It felt like a personal attack. Because the odds of me just getting out of the hospital, me just being diagnosed, and watching this show that I watch all the time. And the first time, because I just got out of the hospital, I wasn't watching with a group of friends. But I was hoping that this would be the entrance. And it wasn't. I remember feeling just so sad about it.

At time I had my blog, BasseyWorld.com, and I went and I just posted everything. This is why I left the tour. This is what I was diagnosed with. The last a couple of days when I wasn't online is because I was in the hospital. And I was in the hospital for passive suicidality, which means you lose the will to live. So you don't brush your teeth. You don't shower. You don't eat. You don't do anything that would help. I just put it out there.

And what I wanted was, very selfishly... I wanted one person somewhere who had watched that episode with me to be like, "Holy crap, me too. We're in the same situation." I wanted one person, because I knew that if it wasn't someone who read my blog, it's someone whose cousin read the blog. Just something. I just wanted that connection. And I posted and I went to bed. And I woke up, and I got a lot of emails and comments on the blog telling me that they'd experienced something similar, and they didn't know what it was. Or, "I was diagnosed." It was just this sense of community that I didn't know existed. And this was way before social media, so I couldn't just get on Twitter and start tweeting about it.

But I remember a lot of emails were from people who had jobs, and they were afraid that they would lose promotions, or they wouldn't be given any projects because they'd be a health risk. I mentioned that I was off the tour because I was an insurance risk. So, they didn't want to risk putting me under that kind of pressure. And I'd lost a lot of work. And I lost a lot of money. And I lost a lot of these things that I'd been working towards for so long. I was like, I don't have anything to lose.

I still get these speaking gigs, and I still get these poetry gigs; so, for the last five to 10 minutes of every show, I would read a poem that I wrote during a crisis. Then, I would spend the next 10 minutes talking to the audience about mental health, and telling them that if they needed help [to get it]. Because I did a lot of universities and colleges, and I remember feeling so alone and completely inadequate when I was in college.

If you feel that way, it might be nothing. It's probably just nothing, but let  the on-campus therapist [tell you] that it's nothing. That you're overreacting. That you're lazy, whatever. Let someone who's professionally able to do that tell you that, instead of just suffering in silence because it's not worth it.

I knew that I didn't have anything to lose at that point. So, that's what started the conversation around it. When it comes to the book... I felt like people wanted an advocate. They didn't when someone who was still struggling with all the things.

I have very long answers to short questions, but there we are.

RSH: No. That was amazing. I want to bring it back around for one last question about the book;  specifically, the audiobook. I'm always so interested to hear what it's like writing down a story first and then being in the studio telling your story,  reading those words that you wrote. What was it like for you to narrate this book?

BI: It was amazing. Again, I come from a performance background, and I also come from a dance background. So my dance, poetry, and prose writing are all very connected in that there's something that I'm very attached to rhythms, and the way that one sentence flows into the next. Like all these are very, very important to me. So being able to write that way and then know that I speak that way.

The only thing that was a problem is that I speak, or I think, in a very Nigerian English, which is very formal. There are not a lot of contractions. I speak, you know, I'll say "it's," and whatever, but when I write it's like "it is not," and stuff like that. So that was very difficult to read. So like, wait a minute, "Why am I ..." I think like that but I don't speak like that, so it's very different.

But it was very emotional for me, too, because it was the first time that I read the story from beginning to end. I'd read bits and pieces of essays, and I'd read essays out of order, but it was the first time I read the book and experienced it the way that somebody else would experience it. And it was very emotional. Excuse me. It was very emotional for me. I cried throughout the last a couple of essays because I was experiencing everything all over again.

What was also incredible was that I also felt very proud of myself. I felt in a way that I don't think I'd given myself permission to be prideful. I survived all that stuff. Like I got to the point I lived to tell the tale, quite literally. And that was so moving. It was so moving, and it meant so much to me. It made me very grateful for my family and my friends, and the people who had seen me through these things.

And also, honestly... reading it and doing the Audible, it gave me a more direct sense of purpose. I can't go back. Like I'm speaking these things out loud, and it was, "God, I feel like such a hippy, and I'm really not." But it felt like this incantation. Like you've spoken this stuff. You wrote it. You did it. You lived it. You're here now. You can't go back. It's out there. The world had heard it. You're not allowed to not take care of yourself. You're not allowed to not work as hard as you possibly can towards constant and consistent wellness.

That's what it felt like. I'm prouder of the audiobook than I am of the actual written manuscript. I'll be honest with you. It's my favorite part. It's my favorite.

RSH: I love that. I love it. Well, Bassey Ikpi, thank you so much for being here with us today to talk about I'm Telling the Truth, But I'm Lying. The memoir is out this August and you can find it on Audible.

BI: And thank you so much for having me in and for choosing it. When I read your blurb, it always makes me feel so good when people get it, and I feel like you're actually getting it. And hearing people say that the intent has come across well is really important to me, so I really appreciate that.

RSH: Oh, thank you for sharing that with me. I love that.