I have been asked one question more than almost any other: "Vivian, why did you start all of this?" And the real answer (the one that actually matters) is that I became a mother, and everything I thought I knew about myself got rewritten overnight.

This episode is probably the most personal one I've done, because I'm going to take you all the way back: to a hospital in Uganda where a thirteen-year-old girl died in childbirth and left her newborn daughter behind, to the back-to-back miscarriages that redirected my entire life, and then forward to the moment I looked at my own son Zak — bunkered in his room, isolated, anxious, depressed — and thought, "If I were a better mom, I would know what to do."

Here's what I now know that I didn't know then: the system is broken, not us. When 40% of high schoolers report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and suicide has become the second leading cause of death for ages 10 to 24 (higher than cancer, heart disease, and AIDS combined!) this is not a personal failure. This is a crisis.

The Girl Power Project, now scientifically studied by Texas A&M University and having reached over 200,000 individuals, taught me something I bring directly into Project Grit: you can transform everything just by telling a kid they have the power inside of themselves. You'll walk away from this episode knowing exactly where this podcast came from, why it exists, and why you, right now, in the middle of whatever hard thing you're in, are not a bad mom. You're a badass in a broken system.