Family We're Given and Family We Choose, with Diana Hanafy and Lindsey Ingram

(air whooshes) (mouse clicks) (gentle music) Headspace Studios. (bells chiming) (soft music) Hi, and welcome to "Radio Headspace." It's Dora here. In honor and celebration of Pride month, we are joined by two members of the Headspace team, Lindsay and Diana, for a heartfelt conversation about family, identity, and belonging. Together, they share their experiences navigating life as LGBTQ+ women, from coming out and finding community to building families of their own. At the heart of their story is something that we all share, the deep human need to be seen, accepted, and to know that we belong. That thread runs through all of us, whatever our experience may be. So along the way, they reflect on the meaning of chosen family, the challenges and joys of parenthood, the importance of allyship, and how compassion and connection can help us feel less alone. Whether you're a part of the LGBTQ+ community or supporting someone you love, we hope you enjoy this episode. Excited to have you here today, Lindsay and Diana. And yeah, maybe we can start with thinking about where you came from, maybe your origin story, and then this journey that you've been on and how you would define family now. Sure, I can start. So growing up, my family is small, but tight-knit. My mom and my dad, while I was younger, they did divorce, but much family support on my mom's side with my grandparents. So that was a lot of my growing up. It was at my grandparents, with my grandparents, well, my mom raised my sister and I kinda as a single mom. So defining family growing up was really just knowing that you had a loving environment, a safe environment, a loving home, and we had a lot of fun growing up. So that's really what family kind of looked like for me then, and it's something that I strive for within my family now. As far as different, well, when I came out, I knew that my family dynamic was probably gonna be different and might look like from what I grew up with. But yeah, that's a little bit about my background. Yeah, thank you for sharing. What about you, Diana? So, my family is a little bit different. I was born into a split family. So my mom is full Mexican, born and raised in Mexico, and my dad is Egyptian, born and raised in Egypt. And so, both of them came from strong backgrounds, not only culturally, but also religiously. My mom and dad got divorced shortly after I was born and then they both remarried and had additional kids. So I ended up having six siblings, three brothers, three sisters, a big mixture of all the things. But for me, family was always this different, it was always different from, I think a few of my friends that I had growing up because I had two houses. You know, when I was with my mom, I was growing up Christian,...