Title:
She Was Rescued by SEAL Team Six. Then She Had to Rescue Herself

Subtitle:
Jessica Buchanan on captivity, trauma recovery, PTSD, intuition, and surviving survival

Transcript:

Alycia Anderson: Welcome to Pushing Forward with Alycia, a podcast that gives disability a voice. Each week, we will explore topics like confidence, ambition, resilience, and finding success against all odds. We are creating a collective community that believes that all things are possible for all people. Open hearts, clear paths, let’s go.

Welcome back to Pushing Forward with Alycia. I’m Alycia. We’ve got one of the most impactful episodes today. I am so excited about this episode. I can’t even believe that we locked this guest in. She’s absolutely amazing. Y’all, our guest today is Jessica Buchanan. She is a New York Time bestseller.

She’s a speaker, an author, founder of her company, a podcast host and she’s a survivor, she survived kidnapping and a dramatic rescue by the SEAL team. She has been in headlines around the world. You probably recognize her and know her. She’s got a very big presence. She has a new book, How to Survive Survival, which has a podcast that is its beautiful complement and partner.

And she’s just an absolutely amazing person who has absolutely overcome so much adversity in her life. And the second that I heard your story, I was almost like… And I’m sure this probably happens to you a lot, but I was, I didn’t know how to catch my words. Your story is one of those stories that you see on the news or you hear about in faraway lands, and you go, “How in the heck could that ever happen to anybody?”

in real life. And it happened to you, and I’m just so grateful for you to come on and share your power and your presence and your story and how you’ve overcome all these things. We can talk a little bit about mental health and anxiety and all of that stuff. But Jessica, thank you so much for not only becoming my friend over these years, but just for the incredible presence and gifts that you give to the world.

It’s absolutely incredible. Welcome to Pushing Forward with Alycia.

Jessica Buchanan: Oh, thank you, Alycia.

It is my honor to be here. I feel so lucky. I always joke that I’m, like, the luckiest girl you’ll ever meet. And I just, I’m so grateful to be here. Thank you for the privilege of your time.

Alycia Anderson: I just wanna start, first of all, with how bright and beautiful and cheery you look today. I feel like that is your essence out of all of the adversity that you’ve had to overcome and fight through and survive through. You’re such a bright light, and you bring so much hope to just even just your presence and your aura, and you’re showing up that way right now on the show, and I love it.

Jessica Buchanan: Thank you.

Alycia Anderson: Life’s too short to wear black.

I love it. Okay. So I really wanna start, if it’s okay, and I’m assuming that you do this a lot, but for those of our audience and our community that has not heard your story yet, I think we should start there to paint a little picture about where this whole platform and advocacy and empowerment has come from.

Can you share with us a little bit about your journey, the kidnapping, and your story from, that point? Or take us back to where we need to familiarize ourselves with you.

Jessica Buchanan: For sure. I know, one of the questions I get asked most often is, how does a school teacher who grew up in the middle of a cornfield in Ohio end up working in a place like Somalia? And I think that’s a fair question, needs a little context. Honestly, I grew up in church, and so I grew up very religious.

I internalized this message that to whom much is given, much is required, right? I’ve been given skills and talents and resources, and so I have a responsibility to go out into the world and, try to make it a better place, which is very naive in some regards, I think.

But, ultimately, that is how I was raised and the context from which I– my worldview, right? And so I went to college to become a teacher and ended up doing my student teaching in Nairobi, Kenya at an international school. It was awesome. I was the first student in that program to ever do my student teaching internationally, so I forged the path for other students to do that, which I felt excited about.

And they offered me a permanent position at the school. I very happily took it. And then about a month and a half into my contract, I met this cute Swedish guy in a really trashy nightclub one night, and we’ve been talking for 20 years now.

Alycia Anderson: Ooh.

Jessica Buchanan: And he was based in Nairobi, but he was working in Somalia for a non-governmental organization. And we got married about a year and a half later, and I moved up to Hargeisa, Somaliland, the northern part of Somalia, with him, where a lot of NGOs were based. The UN had a presence there. I figured, teachers always land on their feet. There’s always work to be done, and sure enough, there was, and I started working for the Ministry of Education and then became the education advisor, the regional education advisor for a nonprofit or an NGO called the Danish Demining Group. And I worked in mine risk education, firearm safety, and conflict management. I always joke it’s not everybody’s dream job, but for me, I was just like, “Oh my gosh,” I didn’t even know a job like this existed. I was traveling all over East Africa. I was working with, nomadic people groups, non-literate people groups, creating materials and educational experiences to help try to keep kids and, their parents safe.

A lot of the villages that we worked in and communities we worked in were post-conflict, so there were explosives laying around, and there were lots of areas that were uninhabitable, or they couldn’t move through safely because of unexploded ordinances or leftover landmines. And my job was to create material and educational experiences for them so they understood the dangers of those things.

And so- I did that for about almost three years, until October of 2011. I was called upon to do a training, which was my job and my responsibility in southern Somalia, which was part of my portfolio. But I also had the right and the ability to pull the plug on trainings if I felt like something wasn’t safe or I didn’t feel good about something.

And so I’d actually done that twice before when this training had been scheduled. And then the third time we scheduled it, I called my counterpart, a Danish colleague of mine who was based down in Galkayo, which if people are familiar with Somalia. You probably are– if you ever hear about it on the news, it’s because something has happened in Mogadishu, which is the capital, right?

I was gonna be a little bit north of that, which is not as dangerous as Mog, but certainly not super safe either. And I just didn’t feel good about the trip. And so I called him and I said, let’s figure something else out,” trying to come up with alternate ideas so that I would feel safe about the training and stuff.

And essentially, he was like, “Look, if you’re not gonna get down here and do your job, I’ll call your boss and, we’ll find somebody who will.” so I got off the phone feeling kinda bullied and figured, I’m a school teacher who grew up in a cornfield in the middle of Ohio. What’s the worst that can happen?

Very naive. But also what are the chances, right? I’ve gotten clearance from our security advisor. I followed all the necessary protocols. I have a flight on a UN plane to go down there, and so that’s what I do. I go down for this three-day training, the first two days were great, and then the third day is what I was nervous about because we were gonna have to move from location to location.

I had taken HEAT trainings, hostile environmental awareness trainings. And I knew I was most vulnerable when I was in transit. And so it was then when we were on our way back after we’d completed that third day of work, we were on our way back to the guest house, that our car was held up at gunpoint and overtaken by armed gunmen. We were driven out into the desert for hours forced to participate in what I consider and refer to as a mock execution.

Alycia Anderson: My God.

Jessica Buchanan: Subsequently held hostage for 93 days out in the desert.

Alycia Anderson: It’s unreal. It’s absolutely unreal. And you know what’s so interesting is that you had that intuition. It’s like the women’s intuition.

Jessica Buchanan: Oh yeah.

Alycia Anderson: Isn’t It wild how strong that is?

Jessica Buchanan: That is, has been one of my life lessons to learn on this… I don’t know if we, have multiple lifetimes or how it all works, but I do feel like there are big patterned lessons we are meant to learn in our lifetime, and that was one of them, is to listen to my intuition, trust my intuition, and stop deferring to other people to make decisions about my safety and my life.

I’d done that my… That’s how I’d been raised. And the buck had to stop there if I was gonna survive. And it took me, it’s taken me years to unravel that, but absolutely.

Alycia Anderson: And I think that’s like conditioning as women you know? it’s like eventually we just, a lot of times just give in. And,

Jessica Buchanan: One hundred percent.

Alycia Anderson: Oh, wow. So you were there with who? And what did it require of you to survive survival? What happens to your brain? Where do you go?

Jessica Buchanan: Yeah.

Alycia Anderson: What does that look like?

Jessica Buchanan: So I was taken with my Danish colleague, the one who forced me to come and complete that mission. Turns out on day 27, he needed to get it off his chest that actually, you were right to feel, a little paranoid because there was actually a direct kidnapping threat on the organization, but I just didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to cancel the training.

So that was fun to find out. I was like, “Okay. You might be the last person I ever talk to in my life so I’m gonna have to put that over here and compartmentalize, and I don’t have the energy and the resources to be angry at you right now.” But boy, when I got out, you better believe that came off the shelf, and there was a lot to deal with.

But, in terms of surviving captivity I would say largely it was a minute-by-minute, situation. Sometimes those minutes could stretch out to hour by hour and then day by day. But it was equal parts terrifying as it was just mind-numbingly boring. I was not one of those where they gave me books to read or a notebook to write in.

I was not taken to a structure or a house. We sat under trees for 12 hours, and then we slept out in the open at night. So I was outside for the entire 93 days. And so, you can imagine, you’re being exposed to the elements, There’s no proper hygienic sanitation facilities. You’re going to the bathroom behind a bush.

I’m surrounded by men the entire time. I’m the only woman I saw the entire time. Can’t wash properly. Nutrition, I lost 45 pounds, within the span of the 93 days because they were starving. They were starving us. Again, you’re being, like, tortured. You’re being told that they’re gonna take you and sell you to Al-Shabaab, which is an Islamic terrorist extremist group. They started the ransom demand at $45 million. Our people apparently allegedly countered at $20,000. And I’m, like, no mathematician, but I can tell you that I’m gonna sit there for a really long time if we’re, if those are the two figures we’re working toward finding a middle ground. I spent long periods of time in silence where Paul had been taken to another part of the camp. I was being punished because negotiations weren’t moving in the right direction, so I would have to, turn my back and, face an opposite direction. I wasn’t allowed to talk. No one was allowed to talk to me. There were moments where I definitely was afraid that… Maybe I wasn’t afraid of physically dying, but I was afraid I was going to lose my mind, and that was something I was particularly afraid of. I think that’s something I’ve always been, actually, if I’m honest, afraid of. I watched my mom have a, basically a psychotic break after she had my brother, and that was something that I felt like I’m predisposed to genetically.

And I thought if anytime there’s a time where I’m gonna go insane and lose my mind, it’s gonna be now. And so I was very careful to try to safeguard my mental capacity. And I learned a lot actually through this experience about how powerful our minds really are what it takes to master a mindset.

And that actually that is the only thing that’s gonna keep you alive and keep you sane in the end, is just trying to hold on to hope.

And so I’ve learned so much about, I think, being human and so much about myself, in those 93 days.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah, I guess in isolation you’re forced to really find yourself because that’s all you have, right? And I guess that’s all we have in the end anyways. But wow. And so you’re out there for 93 days, and talk about the extraordinary military operation that it took to get you out of there.

Jessica Buchanan: Yeah. I had no idea that was a possibility. I didn’t know that the American military, could be deployed to rescue hostages. I just missed the memo on that. And so 93 days later, the night of January 25th, 2012, I went to bed or laid down on my mat rather that night, and was super sick.

I had gotten a urinary tract…

Alycia Anderson: oh no.

Jessica Buchanan: …infection that was moving into a kidney infection because they wouldn’t bring me any medication or a doctor, and I’m dehydrated, the whole nine yards. And just physically ill. And, I had woke up a couple hours after I had fallen asleep with the need to be sick.

And so there were nine pirates, they called themselves pirates on the ground that night that were… someone was always supposed to be awake keeping watch while we slept overnight in the camp. And this particular night, they were all passed out. No one was awake, no one was keeping guard, which I thought was weird. But I woke up with a need to be sick, so I picked up a, like a small pen light, like a flashlight, and I started flashing it ’cause I wanted them to know I’m not trying to escape. I’m here. I just am going to the bush to do what I need to do.” And so I come back, I wrap myself up in my blanket, and then 30 seconds later, the whole camp just erupts into automatic gunfire.

And I’m just thinking, “Oh my God,” I’m hearing all of the the pirates. They’re, like, waking up. They’re sh- like, firing their… They’ve got AK-47s. And I’m thinking… I can see the sparks of the bullets flying over my head no way. And I’m laying there on the ground and I’m just thinking, “Oh my God, I’m really not gonna survive this.”

I’m gonna get shot.” or maybe it’s another group taking us. I’m thinking we’re gonna be kidnapped again by another group, ’cause that was always a threat. And I’m just hearing horrific things happening all around me, and I’m just praying please help me survive this.”

And then suddenly somebody grabs my legs and my shoulders, and they start shaking me, and they pull the hood away from my face, and I can’t see anything ’cause it’s just, it’s so dark out. And then I hear the sound of a young American man’s voice and he says… Yeah, he knows my name, and he says, “Jessica, it’s okay.

You’re safe now. We’re here to take you home.” And I’m just overcome with shock, right? I just… All I keep saying is, “You’re American? Wait a second. I don’t get. What? You’re American?” I don’t understand. I can’t fathom what happening right now. I can’t make it make sense.

And, It takes a little while for me to start putting things together, but I finally realize that actually it’s SEAL Team Six, and they had been sent in by order of President Obama, who was sitting president at the time, to come in and rescue me and Paul if he was there, but mainly me and bring me home. And it was the shock of a lifetime. That is sure.

Alycia Anderson: That is absolutely incredible. Thank you to President Obama and the SEAL team. I mean, there’s an am-amazing photo of President Obama and Michelle Obama I believe calling you.

Jessica Buchanan: Calling my father, yeah.

Alycia Anderson: Oh, calling your father, and the image alone is so powerful.

Talk about Like, What a incredible… President Obama saved you.

It’s so beautiful, and you had no idea. None.

Zero.

Jessica Buchanan: No. idea. I remember being… So they took us from, we waited for the helos to come in and the came and got us, took us to an airstrip in Galkayo, put us on a plane, and then it was explained that they were gonna take us to Djibouti to a military base there for medical care. That was the closest facility for for medical care, and I needed an IV.

I needed antibiotics. And so I just have this very clear memory of a Marine. There was a Marine in my room, and his job w- apparently was, like, to hold my IV bag because there was no stand to put it on, so he’s just standing there with his arm up holding this IV bag. And he’s “You know what I heard is that President Obama called your dad to let him know that you’re safe and you’re coming home.”

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Jessica Buchanan: And I was like I think you didn’t get that right. I think you must have misunderstood.” I’m like, ” President Obama doesn’t know about me. I’m just an aid worker. What are you talking about?” and out he was right, and that i- that’s an amazing story that is my dad’s story to tell, but just the recounting of, him and President Obama just calling him by his first name and saying, “John, this is Barack.

I’m I wanted to call you personally and let you know that your daughter is safe. She’s alive. She’s coming home, and I just wanted to be able to tell you father to father, how proud we are that she survived and that she’s safe and she’s coming home.” And I, my, I think my dad was just like…

what do you say? Like he was just a hotel room in Washington, DC. He’d just met with the FBI all day. And I was feeling pretty down about the state of affairs and whether or not my family was gonna see me alive again. And so to have that special moment is it is a family legacy piece that will always it’ll be family lore forever.

Alycia Anderson: Roots like, an event like grow out, like you’re saying, a family lore, and imagine the trauma of the ones that are waiting…

Jessica Buchanan: Yeah.

Alycia Anderson: … To hear what’s gonna happen. Like, I can’t even imagine how much torture that would be for them as well so-

Jessica Buchanan: It’s traumatic for everybody, right? And everybody has a perspective and yeah, believe me, when I was out there in my own suffering, I was thinking about my family suffering as well. And there’s this weird feeling of too “Oh, I wish I could just communicate to them that I’m okay.”

” Today I’m feeling strong,” and so you just try to energetically don’t know how it all works again, but just pass this let them know that I’m doing okay today.

Alycia Anderson: Did they never have any, like…

Jessica Buchanan:

There were six proof of life calls that I participated in but only one of them I got to talk to my husband for two minutes. The other five were with a negotiator who had been put on the phone because there was insurance, kidnapping and ransom insurance and like experts who were managing the whole thing.

It gets very complicated and convoluted, but yeah, no family.

Alycia Anderson: That’s absolutely incredible. First of all, congratulations like, surviving something like that. It gives you hope as just a human our resiliency. I mean, Something like that, I literally, again, when I first heard your story and I sat on that panel, I was What?” You know? Like, how? How do you survive that, fear alone. Let’s talk about mental health and anxiety and PTSD and like, I’m sure all the things that come from that. Like, how have you managed that? Like, how have you healed it? Like, Have you?

Jessica Buchanan: Yeah. I know. It’s so interesting when people will say long did it take you to get over?” And I’m like, “Oh, there’s no getting over this.” and I also think that I’ve allowed it to define me in a way that- I don’t know if it’s necessarily healthy or not. It’s just how I have been able to make it, to manage it, to bear it.

Yeah, PTSD, very complex. I got pregnant with my son like days after the rescue, and

so then …

Alycia Anderson: Wow.

Jessica Buchanan: …I was like thrown into …

Alycia Anderson: Ooh!

Jessica Buchanan: …this very confusing physical and emotional and mental time of my life of entering motherhood in like conjunction with trauma. And so that was really difficult for me to navigate. A lot of therapy, at times medication. I’ve tried every modality that you can imagine of trauma treatment some alternative things as well. I feel especially, this was like this was a like a confined event. Yes, it was long. It was 93 days. But for people who like experience years of suffering and abuse and things like– and again, I’m not into like comparison or anything.

But I think that you’ve gotta do whatever you gotta do to get better, right? And more than anything, it’s just been a lot of time. I think that time is the greatest healer. And that’s why I’m so passionate about this concept of surviving survival because there’s a second survival phase that comes in the aftermath of your trauma experience. And that’s, after the dust settles and you resume, everybody resumes back to normal, and you’re supposed to go back to normal life, and then you’re like, “Wait a second. Hey, who am I? I’m not the same person I was before this happened. My DNA has literally changed. I don’t know what I want.

I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I wanna do. I don’t know what I can do.” It’s, it’s– was a very scary period of my life that has really taken me years, a decade to move through lots of steps forward and many steps back. But because I’m very privileged to have great support and tools and resources and I wanna, I wanna make sure I mention that because it’s, it is a privilege to be able to access mental health resources or to have family or friends that will listen to you tell the same story over and over again.

And not everybody has that. I do feel like I’m on the other side of it so that I’m in the space now where I’m seeking meaning and embodying purpose. And a large I think a large part of that has come to me by way of writing, which is what I do a lot of now and what I work in now. I feel like writing has been equal, if not more healing in my recovery journey in terms of just processing and I’m grateful to be able to do that.

Alycia Anderson: I have this question in front of me, like with regards to that writing, like your first book, Impossible Odds, and now your newest book, How to Survive Survival,

Which explores like what comes after, right? And I have this question in front of me, how has your relationship with your own story through the actual event to the impossible odds book, the impossibility of this happening, happening, right?

Surviving it in your amazing book now, like how does your relationship with your own story change? ‘Cause from an outsider looking in, like it looks to me that the way that you share your story, like anybody that’s listening to this, you have to, if you’re not, go follow Jessica, buy her book, go to her website, listen to her podcast, listen to my episode I was just on.

But you sharing your story, it feels almost therapeutic. You’re so open. So can you talk a little bit about that, I guess, the relationship with your own self.

Jessica Buchanan: Yeah I love that question because I think it’s really true, and I think it’s really important to talk about that. At the beginning it was really hard for me to tell this story because I didn’t know what part I played in it.

I think I was telling the story how I thought other peoplewanted to hear it.

Honestly, that was me, the damsel in distress, and then Seal Team Six came in and rescued me and, and yes, those parts are true, but there are also that I hadn’t maybe become aware of and then embraced. And so those came about by way of actually having a meeting with some of the guys who were on my rescue mission many years later, to sit down at a table with them and show them pictures of my kids and thank them again and again.

And for them to say to me, “We appreciate, like, all of the advocacy and the way you tell the story to highlight us, but also don’t forget that you’re a badass in this story too.” And in some ways, that left me up to explore my own courage. And I actually, I think that’s when I realized there can be more than one hero in a story, and oftentimes we tell stories with just there’s can only be one antagonist and one protagonist, but actually, no, there can be many. And there’s a way for me to tell this story where I can be a hero too. And so that was such an active reclamation for me. And so now feel like I can tell this story from a place of deep reflection and healing and also pride in, in who I’ve become and what I’ve survived and just the collaborative effort of surviving.

Alycia Anderson: I love that you brought that up because and I wanna hear what a couple of those things are that you’re maybe leaving out of the damsel in distress. when you started talking about your story, you were really strong in the Danish guy and your intuition and like being persuaded and knowing, and like the way that you articulated that was powerful.

And I could tell immediately, your ownership in your power there, knowing those words. And so for you to go to damsel in distress, for me, like My like– And I cannot compare stories. I cannot, it’s not the same. But in my own advocacy, like when I started, I thought I needed to give credit more here or do a little bit of this or make sure I’m saying that or do this, and I was leaving myself out in my power.

And when you strip that away, pff,

Jessica Buchanan: Yeah.

Alycia Anderson: You know, boom. Like you’re, it’s you, it’s your power, it’s your and you are the survival. You know, Was right, like whoever you were meeting with in those meetings were right.

So like what were the things that you were leaving out that then they gave you permission to own in a prideful way, which I don’t agree at all that we should never not be like that.

Like.

Jessica Buchanan: Yeah.

Alycia Anderson: When we… something that we should own, that we like accomplish that is big,

Jessica Buchanan: Yeah.

Alycia Anderson: Freaking own it.

Jessica Buchanan: Yeah.

Alycia Anderson: Own it.

So What what were those things?

Jessica Buchanan: The first thing is that I didn’t– I protected Paul in my storytelling for a long time because I was I felt I didn’t know how to… I think I was on my forgiveness journey. That’s always been my forgiveness journey is with Paul and my organization, not really the Somalis.

People think that I harbor all of this ill will toward the Somali people. I’m like, “No, they’re amazing people.” The people who took me were bad, but, there’s bad people everywhere. My, my forgiveness journey was really towards Paul and my organization for lack of duty of care, and I wasn’t re- I couldn’t talk about that for a long time.

So then I, in-inadvertently, I was protecting him and his bad decision that changed my life, so that’s one thing. I think, yeah, I was just afraid to talk about myself. I was afraid that… and people give me about this all the time, especially on social media, and I don’t know if you en-encounter this, but if I do talk about myself or things that I did during the kidnapping or the fact that I do I do make a living speaking about it, and I write about it, and I sell books.

And people think that they have a lot to say about the fact that I’m capitalizing off of my trauma and that I should be doing more for SEAL Team six or, whatever. And I’m just like, ” I don’t know what you expect me to talk about, what you want me to do. If you don’t like what I’m saying or it doesn’t resonate with you, that’s fine. Just keep scrolling or go on your merry way.” I’m not for everybody. But I think I was so afraid of getting reactions like that or offending people that I just kept on tell- again, telling the story the way I thought everybody wanted to hear it instead of telling it the way I wanted to tell it. I got confident enough to tell it the way I wanted to tell it, then that’s when your healing really starts to take off because it’s like nothing’s gonna stop you now. this is

Alycia Anderson: Yeah.

Jessica Buchanan: truth. I’m speaking what happened to me. I’m telling you how I felt about it. I’m telling you what I’ve done to survive it and to recover and heal, and I’m not ashamed.

Alycia Anderson: I think that’s transformative, right? For you personally, but also for the world. And a lot of people are navigating trauma in one way or the other, whether they want to admit it or not. And I feel like the naysayers, like that happens to me too, again, on a different level. But, you know, my business is a for-profit business, and I’ve definitely had the comments of why you’re making money off disability and things like that.

Jessica Buchanan: Yeah, I’m sure.

Alycia Anderson: But this is an opportunity to help people, change the world, to contribute to it. You’re very much doing that.

And so those naysayers, I don’t know, like I try to just push that to the side myself too, ’cause they’re going through something that they don’t want to admit.

Jessica Buchanan: Exactly.

Alycia Anderson: And the most I don’t know if it’s the most important, and that might be selfish for me to say too, but for me, one of the most important things has been being able to claim my power finally and in my own way without making everybody else feel better before I’m just able to be authentically me.

Like you doing that in the world in in such a Unique, like lived experience is incredible. it’s beyond. There’s not very many– I don’t know what the number is, but I can’t imagine. There’s– It’s a small number of people that have lived through what you have lived. What was the deciding factor to start speaking?

Let’s talk about your platform. The speaking, the books, the podcast. What drove that?

And talk about how it’s flourished.

Jessica Buchanan: Yeah. The first book my husband and I co-authored it, Impossible Odds came about largely there wa- when the rescue happened it was a very high-profile media event. And so my family was, like, inundated stateside with press and journalists and all of that. And I had no idea, of course, that any of that was happening.

I didn’t know anybody knew anything about any of it. And then I kinda come out of what felt like I don’t know, like a mental coma or something, and then suddenly, and I was in, I was reunited with Eric in Italy at a military base, and then we were transported back to the US, but the hiding me from the media so that I could reunite privately with my family.

I wasn’t interested in telling the story or anything. And then I woke up, know, six months later, and I thought, “Okay, I’m gonna have this baby now, and I’m gonna forget everything that happened because my life is gonna get really busy.” And also, I was very aware that there were many people out there that had been a part of my recovery that I would probably never meet and be able to say thank you.

So this felt like perhaps a way to try to do that, try to let them know it was like for me and to say thank you. And I’m a teacher by profession. I did major in English, I don’t– I’ve written all my life, but never really aspired to writing a New York Times bestselling book or anything like that.

And so when that happened, I don’t think I even really understood the magnitude of what that meant. And then to speak and share the story came, and so I took them because to me it felt a lot like teaching, just in a different capacity. And it’s… As it ends up turning into a business if you want it to, and it’s an industry just like anything else, and you learn sometimes the hard way what works and what doesn’t. But really what I guess moved me into a space of creating my own publishing imprints was when women came to me and they were like, “Hey, I’ve been through something really hard. I’d like to do what you’re doing. Could you help me? Could you show me?” I realized that there was a really big barrier to especially in the memoir genre, to publishing, the traditional publishing path. And Krista has always got my back. So I met my mentor who helped me learn a lot about business and set up my imprints, and it’s just it’s been five years, I believe, that we’ve been in business, and it really has flourished. We’ve worked with hundreds of authors at this point. We’ve expanded our audience and our reach. And I kinda feel like we’re just getting started, and I think about just… I for me, life is just like a big faith walk, i’m just putting one foot in front of the other. I’m believing and trusting that God, angels, universe will continue to guide and direct my steps.

And I my mentor, Krista, always asks me these three questions: What life do you wanna lead? What business do you wanna be in? And who are you here to serve? so I take those three questions with me into most days and so that is, that has become the guiding, force for how I continue to move through the world and the work that I do.

Alycia Anderson: Mm-hmm. I love that. And I don’t know if you’ve seen recently, but there’s a mother of one of the young men that were kidnapped in Gaza, and she had an interview on TV.

Jessica Buchanan: I just watched her interview and it was really good.

Alycia Anderson: And his quote came from a book from a Holocaust survivor, and it ” if you know your why, you’ll figure out your how.” that’s so true. true

Jessica Buchanan: Yeah.

Alycia Anderson: who are you serving? Why are you doing this? What work do you wanna do? What do you wanna leave? What do you want your legacy to be? What, can you give to the world? And that’s absolutely what you’re. Okay. Did we miss anything important and impactful? Impactful

Jessica Buchanan: I don’t think so.

Alycia Anderson: Okay. What I want you to do, we’re gonna leave all your information in our show notes,

but like give me a elevator pitch for the companies that are out there that are listening to this to contact you and work with you and hire you and all the things.

Jessica Buchanan: So I think first and foremost, my mission is to help people understand that their pain doesn’t have to be wasted, and that hope is available to all of us. And my main I guess my main message when I’m speaking keynoting is that change is our proof of life. Things are not… we’re not living if things aren’t constantly changing, and so it’s up to us to decide the difference between our options and our choices. So that’s really what I focus on I’m speaking, and I love to do that and share that with with people. And then in terms of thought leadership or memoir manifestos, you’ve been through something, now you know something, and you wanna teach us something. We have two imprints, and we work with anyone and everyone who wants to really put that legacy into writing in terms of what they’ve been through and the lessons that they’ve learned. And we’re here and open and ready to work and to support people in that journey as they move into thought leadership spaces, and then moving into the speaking space as well.

Alycia Anderson: Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Jessica Buchanan: Thank you for having me.

Alycia Anderson: You are just, ugh, I love you. You’re so incredible. Thanks for all the gifts that you give to the world.

Jessica Buchanan: Likewise.

Alycia Anderson: This is a call-out to our community. Make sure you share this episode. It’s so incredible Jessica’s story I want the world who hasn’t heard it to hear. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you to… pushing forward moment.

Jessica Buchanan: Okay.

Alycia Anderson: We can’t leave without a pushing forward moment. Give a little mantra or something that you live by.

Jessica Buchanan: A little mantra that I live by is, I don’t understand, but I choose to trust.

Alycia Anderson: Oooh.

Jessica Buchanan: So…

Alycia Anderson: I don’t understand but I choose to trust. I love it.

Thank you so much for coming on.

Jessica Buchanan: Absolutely.

Alycia Anderson: Thank you to our community. We’ll be back next week. This has been Pushing Forward with Alycia and Jessica, and that is literally how we roll on this podcast. We will see you next time.