This week, Gabby is thinking through a question that started somewhere unexpected: content creation discourse. Between scrolling Substack and watching the internet's collective exhaustion with cookie-cutter content, pastel fonts, and everyone posting the same thing, she started to wonder if the fatigue went deeper than social media. If people are tired of performance online, are they tired of performing everywhere else too?

Gabby traces the question through her own life — the movies and shows she wants someone to watch with her so they can really know her, the difference between the ocean of her emotions and the puddle she usually lets people see, and the years she's spent being told she's "so social" without anyone knowing how much practice that took. She gets specific about the tightrope between being palatable and being called too much, and what it's meant to carry that as a Black woman navigating both content and community.

This isn't a lesson on how to stop performing. It's a real-time attempt to notice where the performance is doing something useful, where it's costing something, and whether either of those has to be resolved at all.

While I've got you, ask yourself: who are you when you're not performing?

Gabby is riding a wave of motivation she hasn't felt in years, juggling three jobs, a growing podcast, and a brand she's building from scratch, and it feels incredible. It also feels familiar in a way that scares her a little. The last time she moved at this pace, in college, it took years to recover from the burnout that followed.

This episode sits inside that tension instead of resolving it. Gabby turns to Keke Palmer's TED Talk on hyper-functioning as a survival skill, and to the parable of the Tortoise and the Hare, not for answers but as mirrors for the questions she's actually asking herself: where is the line between driven and burned out, and would she even recognize it before she crossed it. It's a conversation about rest, ambition, and the moments, like a quick drive for a third espresso, where the questions actually show up.

In this episode of While I've Got You, Gabby sits with the tension underneath so many friendships: knowing whether to address what's wrong, or just adapt around it. Drawing from months of friends reaching out to her for help navigating their own friendship conflicts, she turns the question back on herself, why is this so much harder to work through in her own relationships than the way she helps others work through theirs.

She traces the idea of "outgrowing" a friendship and lands somewhere more honest: growing differently, or at a different pace, rather than one person moving forward and the other staying behind. From there she works through what's actually salvageable in a friendship and what isn't, and why the guilt of a quiet fade can sit heavier than a dramatic falling out ever does.

The episode moves through real, specific stories, a friendship that ended cleanly and never came back, another that went quiet for years before she stood in that friend's wedding, and a much more recent moment where choosing to ask instead of assume changed everything. Gabby also turns the lens inward, naming the parts of her own personality, and the patterns underneath them, that make staying in vulnerability harder once it's met with anything less than full acceptance.

Feed the Love We Desire is out now on While I've Got You.

Gabby's been sitting with this one since March, when Sean "Diddy" Combs was sentenced to 50 months and Usher followed up with comments many read as an endorsement — call it a "legacy" over a conviction. Weeks later, Usher announced a co-headlining tour with Chris Brown, whose own charges are recent and ongoing, not old history.

In this episode, Gabby digs into what it means to keep loving music made by people you have real moral objections to — not as an abstract debate, but as someone who grew up on this exact era of R&B and hip hop and still has all of it wired into her memory. She unpacks Usher's exact words, questions what "misrepresented" means next to the footage everyone's already seen, and draws out the distinction between an enabler and someone doing direct harm.

From there, the conversation widens: is there any actual standard for who gets canceled and who gets a pass? Why does connection to art seem to outlast our objections to the artist, especially when they're still here, still profiting, still selling out shows in real time? A Shakespeare thought experiment gets floated and mostly abandoned, but it opens the door to a bigger question about legacy, memory, and whether accountability changes shape once someone's no longer alive to benefit from it.

No conclusions here — just Gabby thinking out loud about a genuinely uncomfortable gray area, and inviting you to sit in it with her.

In this sister episode to The Glow Up Tax, Gabby Turner turns inward. Instead of the physical pursuit of a glow up, she's tracking a shift she's noticed in herself since mid-May and has found that she is more open, more unbothered, more willing to say what she means without apologizing for it. She connects the timing to something she'd only recently started paying attention to: her Saturn return, the astrological transit that lands between ages 27 and 30 and audits everything a person has built against whether it's actually theirs.

Gabby walks through what her specific placement, Saturn in Aries in the third house, has been asking of her: owning her voice, speaking with conviction, taking up space in how she communicates and creates. She's honest that last year nearly broke that voice entirely, and honest that the clarity she's feeling now is real but narrow. It applies to one lane. Everything else, she says, is still chaotic, confusing, and a bit of a dumpster fire.

This episode sits with the question rather than answering it: is this the clarity that comes with age, or confirmation bias, a little delusion, and some cosmic timing? Probably both.

The Glow Up Tax

Gabby Turner decided in January that 2026 would be her glow up year — sustainable, patient goals around her skin, her curls, and her consistency at the gym, built to last past a single burst of motivation and gave herself until her 30th birthday to get there. She went in with a healthy mindset, real self-confidence, and no interest in extremes. Then a few months into hormonal acne treatment, her skin got worse instead of better, and she noticed something unexpected: instead of grace, her first instinct was instant self-criticism, to the point of avoiding a night out with friends because of how her face looked. This episode is Gabby naming what she's calling the glow up tax — the quiet cost that comes with pursuing any beauty standard, even from the most grounded, healthy place, and why noticing when that cost gets too high matters more than the goal itself. She gets into the messy middle of self-improvement, what it means to catch yourself reverting to old self-talk mid-glow-up, the tools she's using to interrupt that spiral including naming her inner critic "Greg," and why grounding confidence has to exist before the hard part hits, not just after.

Have you ever watched a man date exclusively Black women for years, and then announce his engagement to a white woman, and felt something you couldn't quite name? This episode is about that feeling, and everything underneath it.

In Why Her Though | A Thought Starter on the Black Girlfriend, White Wife Phenomenon, Gabby Turner gets into one of the most layered conversations in contemporary dating culture: the specific vitriol directed at Black women who date interracially, and what it reveals about how Black women's bodies, choices, and relationships are perceived by everyone except themselves. What started as a observation about the Summer House reunion quickly became something bigger: a pattern that shows up on Love Island, in Travis Kelce's dating history, in the West and Ciara situation, and in comment sections across the internet every single day.

This episode covers the Madonna-whore complex and what it actually means when Black women are sorted into the "desire" category at birth. It covers the historic hypersexualization of Black women's bodies, dating back to Saartjie Baartman in 1810, and why that history isn't just context, it's the foundation of this phenomenon . It covers the sociological concept of Black exceptionalism in partner selection, the experimentation versus commitment perception that so many Black women have named, and what it means that research actually shows white men and Black women couples are substantially less likely to divorce than white and white couples by year ten of marriage.

Gabby also makes room for the directions the vitriol comes from, as they are not all the same. From the internalized shame Black women sometimes carry for dating outside their race, and the question of whether white women who pursue men with an exclusively Black dating history are always just passive endpoints in the pattern. As a biracial woman with a front row seat to multiple sides of this conversation, Gabby isn't speaking from inside the wound. But she's close enough to understand the weight of it.

There's no clean answer here. That's kind of the point. While I've Got You is a short-form podcast about culture, identity, and the moments worth slowing down for. New episodes weekly.

Have you ever caught yourself doing something with real fluency — noticing every detail, having opinions, feeling it in your body — and still walking around saying I don't really know anything about that?

That's where this episode starts.

In Liberation Through Creativity, Gabby Turner is driving home from a coffee shop at the beginning of the year, listening to Tiffani Singleton and Taryn Delanie Smith on We're Your Girls, when a Coleman Domingo quote from the 2025 Met Gala stops her in her tracks. He said: "I stand here representing so many generations of men who have liberated themselves through style." And something cracked open.

This episode moves through the history and cultural significance of Black dandyism — the official lens of the 2025 Met Gala theme Superfine: Tailoring Black Style — and what it means that Black men specifically used clothing to hold power and softness simultaneously in a world that told them they weren't worthy of both. But it doesn't stay in history. It comes back to something more personal: the ways we deny ourselves entry into creative containers by deciding we're not that kind of person before we ever really try.

Gabby gets into what it looks like to disclaim your own fluency — to have opinions about every fabric choice and proportion on the Met Gala carpet and still say I'm not really a fashion girlie — and what that disclaimer is actually doing. It's not humility. It's a cage. And the key is permission only you can give yourself.

This one is for anyone who has ever limited their own liberation by deciding in advance where it was and wasn't allowed to live. As a Black woman and creative navigating self-expression and identity in real time, Gabby holds the both/and: freedom lives where you already are and in the places you haven't let yourself go yet.

While I've Got You is a short-form podcast about culture, identity, and the moments worth noticing. New episodes monthly.