From The SpeakEasy archives
When my episode of The Oprah Podcast came out in August 2026, I was still trying to process the fact that I’d sat across from Oprah Winfrey and talked about my marriage for the whole world to hear.
And listen, there was plenty to talk about.
I’d already shared the behind-the-scenes moments, the limousine, the tiny New York hotel room, the outfit I searched approximately 400 stores to find, and the high five I accidentally left Oprah hanging on.
(The evidence is on the internet forever now. My bad, Miss Oprah 😩)
But the thing that stayed with me wasn’t actually something that happened during the interview. It was something that happened afterward, in the comments.
One woman told me she’d been thinking that very morning that I needed to be on Oprah. Then she opened her phone and saw that the episode had come out.
Another woman saw the promo and immediately thought, “I need to send this to Kesha.” She kept watching and realized I was already part of the episode.
For some reason, those stories hit me differently than the congratulations.
These women didn’t see me sitting across from Oprah and then decide I belonged there. They’d already connected my voice with the conversation before they knew I was part of it. They heard that Oprah was talking about women who were unhappy in their marriages, women living in the gray area between staying and leaving, and they thought of me.
That means the work had become recognizable to them before it received this kind of public recognition.
And there is something about that I can’t stop thinking about.
Somebody said my name.
Of course, there’s another woman at the very beginning of this story.
Back in March, when Oprah’s team put out the call looking for women who were “quiet quitting” their marriages, someone who followed me saw it and told them, “You need to reach out to Kesha Speaks.”
She could have kept scrolling. Hell, we all see things that remind us of somebody and think, “I should send this to her,” only to get distracted and forget five minutes later.
She could have assumed they wouldn’t pay attention to her recommendation or that somebody else had probably already mentioned me.
Instead, she said something.
Oprah’s team listened, contacted me, and eventually chose me as one of three women who would sit down with Oprah for this conversation. A woman I may never have known was speaking my name helped carry my voice into a room I didn’t even know was open to me.
When you pull the camera back, this isn’t simply a story about one woman posting videos on TikTok and getting discovered. It’s also a story about what happens when women recognize something valuable in another woman and decide not to keep that recognition private.
She used her voice to amplify mine. My voice was then able to reach more women. Some of those women may finally hear language for something they’ve been living but haven’t been able to explain.
They might share the conversation with another woman who needs it, and now the truth has traveled farther than any one of us could have carried it alone.
That’s what advocacy can do.
Women are comparing notes.
Sitting on that panel made me think about how much it means that women are able to have these conversations publicly now.
The rules a lot of us inherited about marriage are old as hell. Women were taught what a good wife should endure, forgive, carry, overlook, and somehow make work.
We were told to adjust our expectations, communicate better, pray harder, become softer, ask for less, and be grateful for whatever wasn’t actively destroying us.
A lot of those rules never really changed. They just put some new clothes on the same old foolishness and called it modern marriage advice.
What’s changing is that women are talking to one another.
We’re naming emotional labor. We’re talking about loneliness inside marriages that look perfectly fine from the outside. We’re questioning why keeping a family together so often requires one person to slowly come apart.
Women are speaking more honestly about resentment, coercion, financial dependence, unequal parenting, invisible labor, and what it feels like to lose yourself inside a role you were taught should fulfill you.
Women have always had voices, so I don’t want to act as though we were suddenly handed one. Our mothers, grandmothers, aunties, and the women before them had plenty to say.
The difference is that speaking openly usually came with a much higher cost, and there were fewer ways for those conversations to reach beyond the kitchen table, the beauty shop, the church basement, or the one trusted friend who knew the real story.
Now, women are comparing notes in public.
That matters because isolation keeps a lot of old systems alive. When every woman thinks her experience is happening only inside her house, she’s more likely to believe the problem is her.
Maybe she isn’t patient enough. Maybe she expects too much. Maybe everybody else figured out marriage and she somehow missed the lesson.
Then another woman tells the truth about her life, and suddenly the first woman has language. She might not make the same choices or come to the same conclusions, but she can finally see that what she’s been experiencing isn’t hers alone.
Once women start comparing notes, what looked like a private failure can reveal itself as a pattern.
Why I keep women at the center...
Since I started Kesha Speaks, I’ve had people come into my DMs asking me to talk to men or teach men how to understand women better. I understand part of the impulse. They hear something that resonates and think, “Men need to hear this too!”
I’m not gonna argue with that at all.
I hope men listen. I hope they examine themselves, question what they were taught, and learn how the systems built around them have shaped the way they show up in relationships.
But I don’t believe the natural progression of work created for women is that it has to eventually turn toward educating men.
Men can listen to the conversations we’re already having. They can read the books, watch the videos, ask better questions, and do their own work. I don’t need to create a separate syllabus and walk grown men through information women have been expected to understand intuitively for generations.
I want to advocate for us.
That doesn’t mean men are banned from learning here. It means I’m not moving women out of the center to make the conversation more comfortable or convenient for them.
My work is about helping women understand what they’re experiencing and hear themselves more clearly. It’s about giving language to the things we’ve been conditioned to normalize.
It’s about asking whether the rules we inherited are still serving us, or whether they ever served us at all.
If men grow because they’re willing to listen, beautiful. But women are the center. And if I’m going to be for women, that asks something of me too.
Support before the proof...
It’s easy to celebrate a woman after everybody else has decided she’s worth celebrating.
Once the promotion comes, the business takes off, the book becomes a bestseller, or her name ends up next to Oprah’s 😉, people are usually happy to say they always knew she had it in her.
The more consequential kind of support usually happens before there’s proof.
It happens when her work is still small enough to be overlooked. It happens when her name doesn’t automatically open doors. It happens when recommending her might require you to explain why somebody should pay attention.
The woman who submitted my name didn’t wait for Oprah to validate the work first. She recognized that my voice belonged in the conversation and spoke up while her recommendation could still make a difference.
That’s the kind of advocacy I want us to think about.
Because amplifying a woman’s voice doesn’t only create an opportunity for her. It can help an idea reach people who were never going to hear it otherwise.
We have access to something women before us didn’t have in the same way. A conversation that once might’ve stayed between a few women at the kitchen table can now travel across cities, generations, cultures, and millions of screens. Women can compare notes publicly, question the rules we inherited, and bring attention to experiences that were once treated as private problems we were supposed to solve quietly.
That reach matters because a lot of antiquated ideas survive through isolation. They stay believable when each woman thinks she’s the only one struggling with them. But when the right voice travels, more women can recognize the pattern, find language for what they’ve experienced, and start questioning something they were taught never to question.
So when we help a thoughtful woman’s work reach farther, we’re not only helping her become more visible. We might also be helping an important conversation become harder to ignore.
Who are the women doing meaningful work that you already know about? Whose name comes to mind when you see an opportunity? Who’s helped you think differently, solve a problem, feel understood, or put words around something important?
Have you only told her? Or have you said her name somewhere it could matter?
Private admiration is lovely. We all need encouragement, especially while we’re building something that other people might not understand yet. But private admiration doesn’t always travel.
Sometimes support needs to leave the group chat.
It might mean recommending a woman for a job, sending someone her work, making an introduction, inviting her into a room, buying from her business, giving her credit for an idea, or simply telling the right person, “You need to hear what this woman has to say.”
Now, that doesn’t mean blindly endorsing every woman because she’s a woman. Some of us are wrong. Some of us are loud and wrong. And some ideas need to stay right there in the group chat. We don’t have to pretend everything is excellent or agree with everybody. Advocacy still requires judgment.
But when you recognize substance in another woman, don’t assume somebody else will be the one to say something.
You may have no idea how far her name, or the truth she’s carrying, could travel once you give it some forward motion.
Before you go...
A lot of people saw me sitting across from Oprah. What they couldn’t see was the woman who helped me get into that room by deciding not to keep her support private.
I was responsible for using my voice once the opportunity came. I had to show up, tell the truth, and trust that the experiences I’d been sharing from my house belonged on a much larger stage.
But another woman used her voice first.
She said my name in a room I wasn’t in. Because she did, my voice was able to reach women I may never meet.
So I want you to think about the women whose names you’ve been carrying quietly. The friend whose work deserves a larger audience. The colleague who should be considered for the opportunity. The business owner you recommend privately but haven’t mentioned in the right room yet.
Whose voice could travel farther because you decided to say her name out loud?
And if there’s somebody who’s been generous enough to say your name in a room you couldn’t get into on your own, I hope you’ve had the chance to tell her what it meant. Those women deserve to know their voices made a difference too.
Because sometimes changing another woman’s life doesn’t start with a grand gesture.
Sometimes it starts with mentioning her name.
🖤 Kesha
If you’d like to see the conversation that inspired this essay, you can watch my appearance on The Oprah Podcast.