New Soft White Underbelly Book By Mark Laita

Think about a prostitute that is walking the street. On one side, you have the cops that want to arrest you because you're doing something illegal. And on the other side, you have customers or johns that don't all have the best intentions. And they call that walking the blade. It's a lose, lose situation no matter what. If you think about it, though, you. You probably put yourself in some sort of situation like that all the time. I have friends that are very successful that will do this for their addiction. So they will have an addiction that they need to feed. And that addiction can be drugs, sex, gambling, but it also can be work and success. You know, a lot of us that grow up poor want to appear successful, and that becomes an addiction. You will. You will work really, really hard to feed that addiction. And so then on the other end, you make compromises. You see easy paths, so you will take easier paths for the monetary part. So then you can feed the vanity. But that's walking the blade. You're walking this razor blade that you get cut no matter which side you lean towards. Which brings me to today's addition to the library. Mark Lyda's brand new book. This is hot off the Press's Soft White Underbelly, which is a follow up to his book Created Equal, which is in my top seven books of all time. This focuses more on his YouTube channel. And I'll tell you, at the end of this, I'm gonna explain to you how you can get a signed copy of this book. I'm gonna give one away. I always kind of say that if you have more than two books, you've started a library yourself. And I would like to help somebody grow their library. And so stick around until the end and I'll explain how that is going to work. So two of my three favorite interviews from Soft White Underbelly are in here. The third one is not. I'm going to show you those, and I'm just going to kind of go through this. If you're new to the Soft White Underbelly, I would go check out his channel. But he is an incredible photographer. His background is advertising, and he started going around and taking pictures of people that were maybe forgotten about or considered to be low status. So this is one of my favorite interviews. I would encourage you to go watch it, Marisol. She's from Illinois. And the way that Mark has formatted this is he's put kind of quotes from the interview next to the picture. That sort of gives you the spirit of what it is about. Marty Soul is A childhood sexual abuse survivor. And I'm going to, I'm going to read this quote. And then my two oldest brothers started doing it. That was really intense for me. I had no privacy because it would have happened everywhere. I could be taking a shower, you know, and I have a memory of being like nine and taking a shower and being picked up and put on the sink and them proceeding to do things. To me, it's crazy. Your mind has a weird way of protecting you from your trauma. The thing that really stuck with me is she doesn't act like, or talk like a victim. She has kind of forgiven her father and she's forgiven her siblings. And I cannot say that if I was her, I would be able to forgive like that. Now this one, Ashria, she's a prostitute. She was working the streets in Figueroa. The quote here is, what age were you when you started working as a prostitute? And she said, when I started working, I was about 13. This kind of turns into a soap opera. She's got quite a few interviews on the channel because Mark, bless his heart, tries to help her. One that isn't in here, that was, was maybe my favorite of all time is Preacher's Daughter on his channel.

What's beautiful about what Mark does is a lot of the people that he interviews have really, really low self esteem and value of themselves. And when he interviews them, he takes a picture of them and he uses this large format. Even people that seem very unattractive, very beat down, there's just something so noble and dignified in the picture that he takes of them. And sometimes that's all somebody needs is just a little bit of positivity or a little bit of a light to build on something that you can grow that is on the positive side of the table, not the negative side. And I have this Bukowski quote behind me at home where I write sometimes it says, when I write, I'm the hero of my own shit. You want to think that way. You want to write yourself as the hero. You want to start seeing yourself as the hero of your story. And the thing that I've found that is the easiest way to flip that script is to do what Mark's doing here is to start to notice it in others, to stop judging and start paying attention to what is beautiful in the things that the people around us are doing and sharing that with them, giving them a compliment, looking for ways to make somebody's day better. Because what happens to you when you do that is you start to see the positive side of things in yourself. It ends up becoming a reflection, a mirror. You will attract the negative if all you see is the negative. And so you got to go out of your way a little bit to see the positive in others and point it out and shine a light on it. And when you do that, you are shining a light on the things about you that are beautiful. And we do it together. That's how we grow. That's how we become something special takes all of us. And Mark is leading by example. If you want a signed hardcover edition of Soft White Underbelly, we're giving one away. We're trying to get going. So we need likes and we need comments. So if you'd watch the videos on the channel and subscribe, like, comment, send me screenshots. And here's the email that you're going to send it to. It is infoondicatex.org and on December 15, I will put them all in a hat. Everybody that enters and I will pick one out. And then we'll get your info and send the book out. I want to contribute to your library, and I just want you to remember, write your own story. Don't let somebody else write it. We'll see you next time.