In this long-form, unscripted year-end episode, Jacob Newsome is joined by returning guest and chosen-family collaborator Brandon Ellington for a raw, wide-ranging conversation about survival, rupture, and transformation in 2025.

What begins as a reflection on the growth of Power of the Narrative, from global listeners to interviews with activists, artists, and families shaped by loss, unfolds into something deeper: an unfiltered reckoning with money shame, institutional betrayal, abusive relationship dynamics, spiritual disillusionment, and the slow, nonlinear work of reclaiming one’s life.

Jacob speaks openly about financial precarity, job loss, and the psychological residue of growing up without material safety, naming how capitalism, trauma, and shame intertwine, especially for Black and marginalized communities. Rather than romanticizing struggle, the episode reframes survival as data, not deficiency, and rejects the lie that worth is measured by stability or silence.

Brandon mirrors and grounds the conversation with his own story of upheaval: leaving a harmful relationship, rebuilding a sense of home, rediscovering joy through creation, self-care, and radical self-prioritization. Together, they explore what it means to choose oneself without apology, even when healing is incomplete and the future uncertain.

The episode moves fluidly through deeply personal terrain and broader cultural critique:
– how institutions protect themselves rather than people
– how elders can minimize harm in the name of order
– how silence is often mistaken for maturity
– and how telling the truth publicly carries real social cost

Jacob reflects on leaving spaces that could not hold queer, trauma-informed truth, and on channeling what he learned into new work, including trauma-informed programs for system-involved youth and a forthcoming narrative nonfiction book rooted in witnessing, accountability, and human complexity.

There is laughter. There is grief. There is anger without spectacle. And beneath it all runs a single throughline: narrative is not decoration, it is power. Whoever controls the story controls what is remembered, what is forgiven, and what becomes possible.

This episode does not offer clean resolution or packaged healing. Instead, it stands as a living record of two people mid-transformation; choosing clarity over comfort, integrity over belonging, and truth over containment.

In mythic terms, this is not the return of the hero seeking approval.
It is the departure of the storyteller who no longer needs permission.