FLAVIA SHARES THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CONVERSATION ON THE INTERNET
In a series of interviews, globetrotter and electro-pop Thrilla FLAVIA gets open and personal on the subject of abortion, her own experience around it, the challenges, and the many facets of the healing process that has to come after one. FLAVIA spoke to some of the people in her life, sharing feelings together, asking and answering questions on the tough realities around the topic of women's reproductive rights.
In this First interview, FLAVIA speaks to her sister, GIULIA who acts as an interviewer, in a touching interrogation that explores trauma, honesty, and the effects that personal openness in music can have on an audience
FLAVIA is an activist and Pop Icon-To-Be celebrated by Billboard. Her fanbase is growing every day thanks to her stunning live performance and the ferocious and unapologetic sounds she brings to the table. FLAVIA grew up in Ireland and Italy, and before settling in L.A. she lived all across the vastness of the U.S. of A. This multicultural and expansive upbringing has no doubt given her a unique lyrical sensibility that enables her to connect with a huge variety of people and places with ease.
GIULIA - Nameless is the most personal song you’ve written, why was it so important for you to write this song?
FLAVIA - It was instrumental in my healing. Having an abortion is treated as something so taboo that for so long I never talked about it. Sharing this with the world and being able to talk about something I’ve kept hidden for so long is wildly healing. The writing process is a therapeutic experience that allows me to tap into my most raw feelings and to uncover all the emotions I’d buried.
GIULIA - Having kept this secret to yourself for so long, what inspired you to start opening up about your abortion?
FLAVIA - For many years I buried these feelings so deeply. I didn’t even know I was affected by it, I felt numb. It wasn’t until an acting class that I was in where we were doing an exercise and I publicly shared my story in front of a class of 40 strangers. Afterwards I received, a ton of messages from women who thanked me, and said it was so healing for them, that it gave them courage to process about their own abortion, and that they felt less alone. That was a huge awakening for me. I realized by sharing my story and speaking out about my experience that it could aid not only my own healing but that of others. It made me realize how many women sitting next to you in a room have gone through the very same thing. Every time I talk about it, I’m able to take back a bit of my power that was silenced.
GIULIA - What kind of reactions have you received from Nameless?
FLAVIA - So many women have opened up to me and shared their stories, and that’s such a beautiful thing. One moment that has stuck with me is this elderly man came up to me after a show and said he is pro life but that this was the first time he’s understood the other side and thanked me deeply for sharing my story with him. That was so beautiful. The thing about this song is it really deals with the complexities of abortion. Just because I am pro a women’s right to choose what is best for her body, it doesn’t make this experience easy, it is the hardest thing I have ever had to do.
GIULIA - What do you hope this song can do for people?
FLAVIA - My hope is that it’ll help society talk about it more openly, that we can create community to the people that have to go through this, to create a support system, destigmatize the shame and fear and trauma. It’s something so common; 1 in 4 people have an abortion. Those are our children, our mothers, our sisters our friends…the people we know and we love. When we internalize our trauma, it lives in us. It then affects so many aspects of your life; your relationships, self worth, physical and mental well being.
GIULIA - How have you tried to heal from this trauma over the years?
FLAVIA - Years later and I’m still dealing with it. But meditation, breath work, energy work, connecting to my body, journaling, working on forgiving myself, talking openly about my abortion, women circles, writing this song and sharing my story with the world. Those are some ways that I have began to heal.
GIULIA - Why is it so important to change legislations to make abortion accessible for all around the world?
FLAVIA - Criminalizing abortion doesn’t stop them, it just makes it way more unsafe. 25 million unsafe abortions take place each year and lead to a huge number of deaths and causes of permanent disabilities. I’m lucky in Los Angeles to have access to safe abortions, but so many people worldwide do not have this basic and vital healthcare need available.
Interview with BIIANCO
FLAVIA speaks to her sibiling-in-pop BIIANCO about their own abortion story and the importance of being open about it. BIIANCO's story is raw as can be, while FLAVIA's questions are succinct and poignant. What can we learn as wallflowers from this conversation?
BIIANCO is a queer pop vanguardist, whose brand of genuine musical activism keeps the struggle for rights and legitimacy for the oppressed, marginalised and abuse front and center. Their lyrics often deal with overcoming hardship and trauma, finding oneself through art and experiencing catharsis through allowing feelings to come and go as they may.
FLAVIA - You mentioned to me that you have had 2 abortions, for very different reasons. Can you explain a bit about why abortion is so important to you and so many others?
BIIANCO - My 2nd abortion I had after a rape. I’ve had this convo in my brain so many times, “could I love this baby?” And I think I would see my rapist every day I had ever looked at it and that was the most horrible realization that I would never be a good mother to this baby. Honestly abortion freed me of shackles of my trauma, it was a vehicle for me not to become a vessel for my rapists baby. It’s important for us to talk about abortion in terms of women’s rights, we have the right to choose, but there are also millions of women who have been raped and been forced to carry the rapists baby. The horror of that. Abortion has become something that is incredibly liberating for me. We want to normalize women having the right to “not be ready”, but it is also so fundamentally important that we have a vehicle for not being bearers of our rapists kid.
FLAVIA - Thank you for being so brave and speaking openly about this.
BIIANCO - I think it’s important to tell the story of the hardest reasons why abortion is so important, and unfortunately I lived through one of them.
Abortion saved my life. I’m happy to be the person to put a name to that story.
FLAVIA - Why are some of the legislations around abortion so problematic?
BIIANCO - A lot of times with rape and sexual assault it takes us a while to process what we just went through, in my case I was already 4 weeks pregnant, in some states by that point the heartbeat laws would have taken into effect and I wouldn’t have been able to have an abortion. That’s why those laws are so dangerous.
Post abortion counseling and resources https://womenshealthclinic.org/what-we-do/abortion/abortion-resources/
https://www.all-options.org/resources/abortion/
FLAVIA - When your abortions happened, how did you deal with the emotional repercussions?
BIIANCO - I am the kind of person if a traumatic thing happens I will bury it for a long time and then it will explode. It’s also very painful, I don’t think people talk about how abortions hurt like hell.
FLAVIA - How do you think we can help change the system and conversation around abortion?
BIIANCO - VOTE, everybody needs to vote. Voting is the most important thing in America VOTE VOTE vote for women’s lives, vote for women’s rights. If you have family members in red states, vote. If people need ways to understand how they can help women in America when it comes to abortion, they have to vote blue.
That’s the only way we’re gonna help women in Arkansas, Alabama, Ohio etc.
https://www.usa.gov/register-to-vote
FLAVIA - Why do you think it’s important to have establishments like planned parenthood, and to make sure there’s enough funding going into them?
BIIANCO - Abortion is so expensive and the cost is a very real reason why women don’t get them. My 2nd abortion cost me $1100, that’s not an option to some women. We need healthcare services that are free so women aren’t deterred to exercise their own right.
FLAVIA - How have you began to heal?
BIIANCO - Therapy, I responded well to psycho somatic therapy: touch, movement and overcoming the trauma that manifests in your body, community, shout your abortion and being a part of those things and understanding the women who have gone through it.
FLAVIA - Gabby, thank you for sharing your story, you are so brave and remarkable. I know this conversation will mean so much to so many people. <3
Interview with Jeff (FLAVIA’s Dad)
In this final interview, FLAVIA keeps it all in the family again, this time bringing her dad into the conversation about her Abortion experience, how the family coped and helped with the mental toll the situation took, and what's more, we also get an account of his own experience with a different abortion which involved him more directly. With this last interview, we close this series bringing this particular story to light with a level of honesty and spontaneity that is perhaps lacking in the public conversation surrounding this topic.
FLAVIA - Dad, I’m so glad that fate intervened, the only time it's ever happened in my life that I sent you an email that was addressed to mom. And I'm so glad that because of that, you were able to share your similar abortion experience with me. I think finding that out really helped me.
DAD - I wanted to support you. I think I immediately realized you must have been going through a difficult mental state with it and sharing my experience with you would be important. Instinctively I knew that I had to assure my daughter that she's not alone.
FLAVIA - When you made the decision with your partner at the time to go through with the abortion, what were your reasons for wanting to go through with that?
DAD - I was with a girlfriend who I had barely been with for three months. I was essentially an 18 year old in my second year of university and she was about the same. It was a relationship that wasn't that serious and we were both too young. It was pretty much a mutual decision I would say. It was definitely an action I thought was right for me at the time.
FLAVIA - How did you feel after the abortion and do these feelings come up every once in a while?
DAD - I don't know the extent to which she struggled with her feelings, we didn't talk about it at all. So I probably kind of buried my feelings and just moved on. But then when I started exploring my Christianity, it kind of came back up. If I wanted to do a serious kind of confession as I recounted the “sins” in my life and where I needed to ask God for forgiveness, it was one of the biggest areas that immediately came up. So I didn't probably start processing it heavily until I tried to have of a relationship with God.
FLAVIA - Did you find that that was healing to be able to bring it back up and talk about it?
DAD - Yeah it was good to be reflecting on things as opposed to just bottling them up, and addressing it with myself had a healing element. It started coming up every year or two, periodically I found myself aging the child and I would go, okay, this happened in 1979 I'd have a four year old by now. I’ve always been a liberal politically. I am pro abortion and abortion rights, but I have felt for some time that society takes it too lightly and there's not enough focus on just preventing it from happening, maybe having the child be born and given to somebody who's desperate to adopt, or getting guys to be more responsible and taking care of the child, or teaching people to use birth control measures to avoid it happening, getting societal policies that allow people to have healthcare, childcare so they can still go to university and work a job. So not enough focus on actually creating safety nets to educate and support people.
FLAVIA - Why do you think it might be important for us as a society to talk openly about our abortions and what we’ve experienced?
DAD - Oh all of these things are better out in the open. We have all kinds of hangups. We don't talk about sex, we don't talk about mental health illness, we don't want to talk about feelings. A lot of these things are just better when they're out in the open.
FLAVIA - Why do you think it's important to have establishments like planned parenthood and make sure that they are funded adequately?
DAD - I think it's important to have organizations that can intervene and offer counseling and options and a place that people can turn to to make these decisions. I think it's absolutely important. It's a specialist area that needs specialist attention.
FLAVIA - What are the ways you think we could change the system around abortion for the better?
DAD - Education. Educate them in schools and teach them about this. So people understand their options to prevent this, understand how severe it would be to go through an abortion and some of the mental health issues that come with that, understand that there's birth control measures you can take to prevent it.
FLAVIA - When you went through this, did you tell your family and friends, could you confide in anyone?
DAD - Not really. I don't think I told anyone for years just me and her.
FLAVIA - Pops, what a cool thing. There's not a lot of dads and daughters that can come together on something like this. And if they do have that in common, it's most likely that they'll never share it with each other.
DAD - Yeah that was me and Giulia too, and “the joint”. I thought this is fricking ridiculous. For three to four years now we’ve both been secretly smoking, hiding from each other, telling the big lie, and I want to have an honest relationship with my kids. So I took her aside and said we have talk to you about something…whipped out the spliff and said “the lie must end”, and we smoked it together.
*Flavia dying of laughter*
FLAVIA - Dad thanks for sharing your story. My hope is that some people reading this can be inspired to talk more openly with their parents and their kids. It's done me a world of good having that kind of relationship with my parents.
MEET THE AUTHOR
FLAVIA is an activist and Pop Icon-To-Be celebrated by Billboard. Her fanbase is growing every day thanks to her stunning live performance and the ferocious and unapologetic sounds she brings to the table