EP 01 · Reclaiming Our Peace in the Performance of Healing with Van Newman and Minaa B.When did caring for ourselves become something to prove? “Mental health” is everywhere. Ad campaigns. Onboarding paperwork. Influencer captions. We talk about burnout, boundaries, therapy, rest. And yet, for many of us, actually feeling better still feels out of reach. In this debut of Self-Centered, Tori Lazar and Olivia Owens slow down to ask what support really looks like when productivity culture swallows self-care, healing becomes performance, and rest turns into another thing to optimize. What does care feel like when it’s not measured or monetized? And how do we find our way back—especially in a world that keeps asking us to push through? Who we tapped to investigateIn each core episode of Self-Centered, we sit down with two guests: one to help us explore the self, and one to help us examine the systems that shape it. Together, their perspectives reveal how personal experience and structural design are always in conversation. To ground the conversation in lived experience, we turned to Van Newman—a writer, designer, and cultural strategist who has spent the last decade creating digital, physical, and narrative spaces where people can feel more like themselves. From platforms like Somewhere Good to the writers’ room, Van’s work blends systems thinking with lived experience to ask: What does it take to feel safe enough to be honest? In this conversation, we dive into the importance, and the challenges, of finding community in an ever-changing landscape. To help us explore the systems that impact our mental health, we sat down with Minaa B.—a licensed therapist, author of Owning Our Struggles, and founder of the media company I’m So Mature. Her work lives at the intersection of mental health, workplace wellbeing, and cultural care. A former social worker turned consultant, Minaa challenges the ways we’ve turned healing into performance, and invites us to choose presence instead. In this episode, she keeps it real about the urgency of challenging the systems we’ve inherited. What we explore in this episodeWhy mental-health visibility hasn’t translated into actual wellbeingHow healing became something to perform (and who that serves)The difference between resilience as survival vs. resilience as sustainabilityPerfectionism, palatability, and the quiet harm of being “the regulated one”Rest and joy as rituals of return—not rewards for enduranceDevotion to the self vs. self-optimization and hyper-disciplineWhat it means to design systems that support rather than measure healingFollow along00:00 — Show open · What this project is and why now02:50 — Self × system · How we’ll hold tension without binaries05:22 — Episode setup · “If the language of healing is co-opted, how do we find our way back?”10:08 — Performance wellness · When sleep scores and discipline replace softness13:07 — Double-Tap: Minaa B intro · What “quality mental health” really means14:03–17:03 — Minaa on function, resilience, and why support shouldn’t require constant strength17:32–21:34 — Palatability, people-pleasing, and unlearning regulated selfhood24:31–26:37 — Labels as shields · Therapy-speak vs. feeling the thing28:44–29:36 — Untamed · Glennon Doyle’s reminder that self-liberation frees others, too35:22 — Double-Tap: Van Newman intro · Safety, identity, and community in flux36:20–41:20 — Van on resilience myths, leaving/returning, and “small hills” of change43:17–45:10 — Rest as source of resilience · Learning, not earning49:00–51:37 — Softer, cyclical models of healing (home, work, community)57:01–1:01:24 — Work as a site of care · Structure, data, and leadership1:02:07–1:04:31 — From discipline to devotion · Designing for regeneration1:05:05 — Close · How to stay a little more self-centeredSome takeawaysHealing shouldn’t require heroics. When systems rely on individual resilience, they outsource care. Support should reduce the need for constant endurance. Palatability keeps us small. Performing “fine” to stabilize a room fragments authenticity. Permission to be messy is part of being whole. Devotion > discipline. Discipline optimizes; devotion nourishes. The point isn’t to become “better,” it’s to remain in honest relationship with yourself. Rest is not a reward for endurance. If rest only arrives as recovery, we’re already overdrawn. Treat it as a sustaining rhythm and ritual of return. Language can liberate or limit. Labels help us name; overuse helps us avoid. Precision without compassion dilutes connection. What We Need More OfCare that counts. Move beyond “performance wellness” toward practices that prioritize rest, reflection, and repair over metrics and measurement. Soft leadership as a standard. Leaders modeling repair through transparency, boundaries, and accountability—replacing endurance with empathy. Care by design. Workplaces and teams intentionally building systems for rest, flexibility, and regeneration before burnout becomes the norm. Community as infrastructure. Mutual-aid networks, peer support, and workplace cultures that make dignity and connection non-negotiable parts of how we work and live. Prompts for ReimaginationIf true care shouldn’t require resilience, what would it look like to design systems that reduce the need for endurance instead of rewarding it?If healing has become performance, how can we return to practices that feel nourishing?Where are you still optimizing what needs to be felt?What would change if rest wasn’t something you earned, but something you protected?How might devotion replace discipline in the way you approach your own growth, care, and connection?When was the last time you felt fully yourself, and what conditions made that possible?Links for Further ExplorationMinaa B. WebsiteInstagramOwning Our StrugglesI’M SO MATUREVan Newman WebsiteLinkedInWriting Portfolio Stay ConnectedSelf-Centered is a space where centering the self is the first step to rethinking the systems around us. If this conversation resonated, we’d love your support in helping the work reach more listeners. Subscribe & Listen 🎧 Apple Podcasts 🎧 Spotify 🎧 YouTube Produced by Phoenix MaulellaEdited by Louis SangiorgioRecorded at The KINN Rate & Review Leaving a quick review or rating helps more people find the show, and keeps thoughtful, slow media visible in a noisy world. Join the Community 📬 Subscribe to our newsletter for deeper dives, tools, and upcoming episodes. 💬 Follow us on Instagram for clips, quotes, and behind-the-scenes moments.