#and ik it can’t be true but it feels like we’ve made no progress

[thefluxsystem]

DID is really fucking annoying to have, actually.

Yeah yeah, friends in your head, pre-installed found family, lifelong teammates, fun innerworld/headspace interactions, good and dandy. Genuinely, those are the only parts of all this I take any comfort in.

The rest of it, though?

There’s no point “living each day to the fullest”, because I’ll forget it by tomorrow. I have to take notes on my own life like I’m studying for a final exam solely to exist. I have to write down every appointment, every task, write down whenever I eat for fucksake, because “I” might not be here in 20 minutes and whoever comes next cannot remember what I’ve done. We’ve tried.

It’s near impossible to maintain relationships because, even though most people don’t know what is wrong with me, they can tell something’s off. Even if I do make friends, everyone in my system has such messed up attachment styles that I sometimes wonder how we have anyone.

Those who get it don’t even truly get it. I have been in and out of therapy for over 12 years, and I’ve spent most of that time learning with the professionals. This disorder has effective treatment, yet so few know anything about that, or about the disorder in general. It’s horrifying.

I adore “the people in my head”, they’ve done so much for me, for us, but it wasn’t supposed to be this way. We were supposed to be one. I was supposed to be just I.

As much as I don’t have time to think about it— I have a life to live, I have to keep going— it’s still there. Always an active part of me, voices and thoughts that aren’t my own commenting on every little thing I do. Because, even though I wish it weren’t the case, anything I do affects them, too.

I have never lived my life for myself and I never will. It’s beautiful, in a way. It just was meant to be different.

I was meant to be different.

[ebenpink]

Only Excitement As I Know What Lies Ahead https://ift.tt/2NkCnTO

It’s Monday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. I’ll continue to publish these each Monday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!

Yup, success stories are back! And I’m looking for more. Follow-ups, mid-progress reflections—every story at every stage has the potential to inspire folks out there who are getting started or contemplating a new beginning. Contact me here to share your story. You never know who you’ll impact by doing it. Enjoy, everyone!

It has been 8 years since the start of our journey so going back to the beginning after so much time has passed will be interesting for me.

My weight issues didn’t start until my mid-20s. Within a 5 month time period I went from an an active job to a completely sedentary one, got pregnant, and quit smoking. It was the perfect storm. My diet was horrendous. At my active job I routinely ate doughnuts and chocolate milk for breakfast, lunch was a smoke break and Surge soda, supper was fast food (a favorite was a double Whopper meal from Burger King) or a *home cooked* (that meant stuff out of boxes and cans most nights) dinner consisting of a meat and carb heavy sides. My youthful metabolism allowed me to eat what I wanted without gaining weight though I had no idea of the unseen damage I was doing to my body. My husband was holding his own as well with basically the same diet.

After starting my new job I immediately gained about 10 pounds. I don’t even remember really worrying about it—just went out and bought bigger clothes with some abstract idea that, surely, this was an anomaly and I’d miraculously wake up one day thin again. I was blessed enough during my pregnancy to not have any measurable morning sickness but I had a wicked and unending craving for ice cream. I don’t even want to know how much money Dairy Queen made off of me during that time period. The end result was that after our child was born I was carrying nearly 180 pounds on my 5′ 4″ frame.

Again, caught up in this whole new baby business and not really having any true understanding of weight gain, I still thought it would work itself out in time. I continued to wear my maternity clothes for WAY too long because I didn’t want to spend money on a larger sized wardrobe when this fatness was only temporary. It amuses me now to think that I had zero idea or plan of how to fix it—as if I were just a passive bystander who had no control over the outcome and could only wait and see.

I did eventually decide to join Weight Watchers, convinced that a few months of following the program would divest my body of the approximately 50 extra pounds it was carrying. I started at 177 pounds and s.l.o.w.l.y. reached the first milestone loss of 10%. And 160 pounds—give or take 5 pounds—is exactly where I sat for the next decade.

During that time, we’d decided that we did not want our daughter raised to eat the same crap diet we had so we overhauled our eating habits. We had oatmeal in the mornings, whole wheat bread sandwiches with low fat mayonnaise for lunch, dinner was chicken breasts or ground turkey patties with brown rice and a vegetable—all of the *healthy* stuff that guaranteed I’d drop the extra weight like a hot potato.

Except I didn’t. Over the years we had 2 more kids. Because I started out those pregnancies already overweight I managed to only gain *baby weight* so after each birth I hadn’t gained any extra…but that was little consolation since the scale was still sitting at around 160. I’d pretty much resigned myself to the idea that this was just how it was going to be. I was a married mom and married moms just aren’t young and thin anymore. CLEARLY my body liked being at 160 and I needed to accept that and move on with my new plus sized life.

By the time our third and last child was born in 2009, my husband had managed to put on about the same amount of weight that I had. We both were sitting at about 40 pounds over our wedding day weight. We would periodically comment on our own weight gain but never mentioned the other’s. I wasn’t concerned about his and he didn’t seem concerned about mine so we just sort of settled into our fat and happy family life.

The turning point came in November 2010. My husband and I had gone out to eat for our anniversary and, having gone to Marble Slab for dessert, were sitting on the bench outside the shop eating our ice cream when he said those fateful words. “We’ve gotten fat. And I’m not happy.” The blood roared in my ears as I sat there in shock, trying to digest what he’d said (along with my Sweet Cream with M&Ms). I thought, “Did he just call me fat?” Nevermind that I WAS fat…hearing those words come out of the mouth of the person you love more than life itself is still a punch in the gut. The only thing that kept me from dissolving into tears was that whole *we* part. That one little word allowed me to move past the trauma in a matter of seconds and look at it objectively.

“Ok. I’m not really happy either but I’m not sure what to do about it. I feel like I’ve tried everything and nothing has worked.”

“Maybe it’s a matter of motivation. Next year is our 15th anniversary. Let’s plan a big trip to somewhere exotic and use that. We have a year to get ourselves into shape.”

I was equal parts excited and terrified about what lay ahead. I knew now that my weight DID bother him and that did more than anything to change my mental state from *I can’t* to *I have to and I want to*. But I had so many years under my belt of making changes and trying different (many times unpleasant) things that left me no better off than before that I just didn’t see how I could accomplish this.

We spent the first few months of 2011 planning and booking our vacation to the Virgin Islands, haphazardly trying to fit workouts into our schedule, and not ordering Dominos for supper. We weren’t seeing any progress and each month we lost out of our 1 year timeline caused me to panic a little bit more that this problem was just unfixable and I was going to let him down in the end.

That’s about when I started hearing about this thing called Paleo and a guy named Mark Sisson. On a completely unrelated forum I belong to, people were starting to discuss it in depth and sharing their experiences. It seemed crazy to me that people could A) willingly give up the foods I loved so much and B) achieve drastic results from it. The other diets I’d tried over the years all centered around counting calories and fat grams, weighing and measuring every bite, trying to acclimate yourself to being hungry all the time, having to arrange your day to be able to eat every 2-3 hours to *keep your blood sugar up* and *fire up your metabolism*. Paleo, in spite of the loss of my beloved bread, seemed so…..freeing.

I laid out the basics of it for him, shared success stories, and although he was as skeptical as I was, he was fully on board to try this crazy new thing.

We jumped into it in May and, after the first couple of weeks where our bodies were trying to adjust to the absence of sugar, were amazed at how GREAT we felt! I’d been having constant brain fog and exhaustion and my wrists always hurt and I’d started having heartburn after almost every meal. All gone. Along with a steady loss of 5 pounds a month for each of us. For the first time in about 10 years I was losing weight! AND IT WAS EFFORTLESS!!!

By the time November and our anniversary trip rolled around we each had lost 30 pounds. We went on to lose 35 pounds each total then settled into maintenance.

Two years ago, Hurricane Harvey hit our area and flooded our home. This was actually the second time in 9 years as we flooded in Ike in 2008 but Ike was before our Paleo journey. Having our home in disrepair for over a year caused us to get REALLY lax with our eating. Convenience was the word of the day and not having a functional kitchen meant we were eating almost catch as catch can. We started having fast food again and even the meals I was able to cook at home trended towards the quick and easy and were based around which cooking apparatuses I had available to use at any given time. As expected, weight started to creep back on.

As of today, we have each gained back 10 of the pounds we’d lost. We have a fully functioning kitchen again and just had a conversation about how we KNOW what we need to do. We KNOW what works. We have the ace up our sleeves and it’s time to toss that sucker on the table and get back to the lifestyle that changed our lives so many years ago. There is no terror this time. No worrying that it’s going to be just another diet I fail at and I won’t have any success. This time, there is only excitement as I know what lies ahead—a healthier, more energetic, thinner, and happier us.

Tiffany (and Wes) Bailey

Have a story to share? Email me here. Thanks, everybody, and have a great week.

//

//

The post Only Excitement As I Know What Lies Ahead appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

from Mark's Daily Apple https://ift.tt/2NjCC1H via IFTTT https://ift.tt/2JF13VL

[jesseneufeld]

Only Excitement As I Know What Lies Ahead

It’s Monday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. I’ll continue to publish these each Monday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!

Yup, success stories are back! And I’m looking for more. Follow-ups, mid-progress reflections—every story at every stage has the potential to inspire folks out there who are getting started or contemplating a new beginning. Contact me here to share your story. You never know who you’ll impact by doing it. Enjoy, everyone!

It has been 8 years since the start of our journey so going back to the beginning after so much time has passed will be interesting for me.

My weight issues didn’t start until my mid-20s. Within a 5 month time period I went from an an active job to a completely sedentary one, got pregnant, and quit smoking. It was the perfect storm. My diet was horrendous. At my active job I routinely ate doughnuts and chocolate milk for breakfast, lunch was a smoke break and Surge soda, supper was fast food (a favorite was a double Whopper meal from Burger King) or a *home cooked* (that meant stuff out of boxes and cans most nights) dinner consisting of a meat and carb heavy sides. My youthful metabolism allowed me to eat what I wanted without gaining weight though I had no idea of the unseen damage I was doing to my body. My husband was holding his own as well with basically the same diet.

After starting my new job I immediately gained about 10 pounds. I don’t even remember really worrying about it—just went out and bought bigger clothes with some abstract idea that, surely, this was an anomaly and I’d miraculously wake up one day thin again. I was blessed enough during my pregnancy to not have any measurable morning sickness but I had a wicked and unending craving for ice cream. I don’t even want to know how much money Dairy Queen made off of me during that time period. The end result was that after our child was born I was carrying nearly 180 pounds on my 5′ 4″ frame.

Again, caught up in this whole new baby business and not really having any true understanding of weight gain, I still thought it would work itself out in time. I continued to wear my maternity clothes for WAY too long because I didn’t want to spend money on a larger sized wardrobe when this fatness was only temporary. It amuses me now to think that I had zero idea or plan of how to fix it—as if I were just a passive bystander who had no control over the outcome and could only wait and see.

I did eventually decide to join Weight Watchers, convinced that a few months of following the program would divest my body of the approximately 50 extra pounds it was carrying. I started at 177 pounds and s.l.o.w.l.y. reached the first milestone loss of 10%. And 160 pounds—give or take 5 pounds—is exactly where I sat for the next decade.

During that time, we’d decided that we did not want our daughter raised to eat the same crap diet we had so we overhauled our eating habits. We had oatmeal in the mornings, whole wheat bread sandwiches with low fat mayonnaise for lunch, dinner was chicken breasts or ground turkey patties with brown rice and a vegetable—all of the *healthy* stuff that guaranteed I’d drop the extra weight like a hot potato.

Except I didn’t. Over the years we had 2 more kids. Because I started out those pregnancies already overweight I managed to only gain *baby weight* so after each birth I hadn’t gained any extra…but that was little consolation since the scale was still sitting at around 160. I’d pretty much resigned myself to the idea that this was just how it was going to be. I was a married mom and married moms just aren’t young and thin anymore. CLEARLY my body liked being at 160 and I needed to accept that and move on with my new plus sized life.

By the time our third and last child was born in 2009, my husband had managed to put on about the same amount of weight that I had. We both were sitting at about 40 pounds over our wedding day weight. We would periodically comment on our own weight gain but never mentioned the other’s. I wasn’t concerned about his and he didn’t seem concerned about mine so we just sort of settled into our fat and happy family life.

The turning point came in November 2010. My husband and I had gone out to eat for our anniversary and, having gone to Marble Slab for dessert, were sitting on the bench outside the shop eating our ice cream when he said those fateful words. “We’ve gotten fat. And I’m not happy.” The blood roared in my ears as I sat there in shock, trying to digest what he’d said (along with my Sweet Cream with M&Ms). I thought, “Did he just call me fat?” Nevermind that I WAS fat…hearing those words come out of the mouth of the person you love more than life itself is still a punch in the gut. The only thing that kept me from dissolving into tears was that whole *we* part. That one little word allowed me to move past the trauma in a matter of seconds and look at it objectively.

“Ok. I’m not really happy either but I’m not sure what to do about it. I feel like I’ve tried everything and nothing has worked.”

“Maybe it’s a matter of motivation. Next year is our 15th anniversary. Let’s plan a big trip to somewhere exotic and use that. We have a year to get ourselves into shape.”

I was equal parts excited and terrified about what lay ahead. I knew now that my weight DID bother him and that did more than anything to change my mental state from *I can’t* to *I have to and I want to*. But I had so many years under my belt of making changes and trying different (many times unpleasant) things that left me no better off than before that I just didn’t see how I could accomplish this.

We spent the first few months of 2011 planning and booking our vacation to the Virgin Islands, haphazardly trying to fit workouts into our schedule, and not ordering Dominos for supper. We weren’t seeing any progress and each month we lost out of our 1 year timeline caused me to panic a little bit more that this problem was just unfixable and I was going to let him down in the end.

That’s about when I started hearing about this thing called Paleo and a guy named Mark Sisson. On a completely unrelated forum I belong to, people were starting to discuss it in depth and sharing their experiences. It seemed crazy to me that people could A) willingly give up the foods I loved so much and B) achieve drastic results from it. The other diets I’d tried over the years all centered around counting calories and fat grams, weighing and measuring every bite, trying to acclimate yourself to being hungry all the time, having to arrange your day to be able to eat every 2-3 hours to *keep your blood sugar up* and *fire up your metabolism*. Paleo, in spite of the loss of my beloved bread, seemed so…..freeing.

I laid out the basics of it for him, shared success stories, and although he was as skeptical as I was, he was fully on board to try this crazy new thing.

We jumped into it in May and, after the first couple of weeks where our bodies were trying to adjust to the absence of sugar, were amazed at how GREAT we felt! I’d been having constant brain fog and exhaustion and my wrists always hurt and I’d started having heartburn after almost every meal. All gone. Along with a steady loss of 5 pounds a month for each of us. For the first time in about 10 years I was losing weight! AND IT WAS EFFORTLESS!!!

By the time November and our anniversary trip rolled around we each had lost 30 pounds. We went on to lose 35 pounds each total then settled into maintenance.

Two years ago, Hurricane Harvey hit our area and flooded our home. This was actually the second time in 9 years as we flooded in Ike in 2008 but Ike was before our Paleo journey. Having our home in disrepair for over a year caused us to get REALLY lax with our eating. Convenience was the word of the day and not having a functional kitchen meant we were eating almost catch as catch can. We started having fast food again and even the meals I was able to cook at home trended towards the quick and easy and were based around which cooking apparatuses I had available to use at any given time. As expected, weight started to creep back on.

As of today, we have each gained back 10 of the pounds we’d lost. We have a fully functioning kitchen again and just had a conversation about how we KNOW what we need to do. We KNOW what works. We have the ace up our sleeves and it’s time to toss that sucker on the table and get back to the lifestyle that changed our lives so many years ago. There is no terror this time. No worrying that it’s going to be just another diet I fail at and I won’t have any success. This time, there is only excitement as I know what lies ahead—a healthier, more energetic, thinner, and happier us.

Tiffany (and Wes) Bailey

Have a story to share? Email me here. Thanks, everybody, and have a great week.

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Only Excitement As I Know What Lies Ahead published first on https://drugaddictionsrehab.tumblr.com/

[lauramalchowblog]

Only Excitement As I Know What Lies Ahead

It’s Monday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. I’ll continue to publish these each Monday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!

Yup, success stories are back! And I’m looking for more. Follow-ups, mid-progress reflections—every story at every stage has the potential to inspire folks out there who are getting started or contemplating a new beginning. Contact me here to share your story. You never know who you’ll impact by doing it. Enjoy, everyone!

It has been 8 years since the start of our journey so going back to the beginning after so much time has passed will be interesting for me.

My weight issues didn’t start until my mid-20s. Within a 5 month time period I went from an an active job to a completely sedentary one, got pregnant, and quit smoking. It was the perfect storm. My diet was horrendous. At my active job I routinely ate doughnuts and chocolate milk for breakfast, lunch was a smoke break and Surge soda, supper was fast food (a favorite was a double Whopper meal from Burger King) or a *home cooked* (that meant stuff out of boxes and cans most nights) dinner consisting of a meat and carb heavy sides. My youthful metabolism allowed me to eat what I wanted without gaining weight though I had no idea of the unseen damage I was doing to my body. My husband was holding his own as well with basically the same diet.

After starting my new job I immediately gained about 10 pounds. I don’t even remember really worrying about it—just went out and bought bigger clothes with some abstract idea that, surely, this was an anomaly and I’d miraculously wake up one day thin again. I was blessed enough during my pregnancy to not have any measurable morning sickness but I had a wicked and unending craving for ice cream. I don’t even want to know how much money Dairy Queen made off of me during that time period. The end result was that after our child was born I was carrying nearly 180 pounds on my 5′ 4″ frame.

Again, caught up in this whole new baby business and not really having any true understanding of weight gain, I still thought it would work itself out in time. I continued to wear my maternity clothes for WAY too long because I didn’t want to spend money on a larger sized wardrobe when this fatness was only temporary. It amuses me now to think that I had zero idea or plan of how to fix it—as if I were just a passive bystander who had no control over the outcome and could only wait and see.

I did eventually decide to join Weight Watchers, convinced that a few months of following the program would divest my body of the approximately 50 extra pounds it was carrying. I started at 177 pounds and s.l.o.w.l.y. reached the first milestone loss of 10%. And 160 pounds—give or take 5 pounds—is exactly where I sat for the next decade.

During that time, we’d decided that we did not want our daughter raised to eat the same crap diet we had so we overhauled our eating habits. We had oatmeal in the mornings, whole wheat bread sandwiches with low fat mayonnaise for lunch, dinner was chicken breasts or ground turkey patties with brown rice and a vegetable—all of the *healthy* stuff that guaranteed I’d drop the extra weight like a hot potato.

Except I didn’t. Over the years we had 2 more kids. Because I started out those pregnancies already overweight I managed to only gain *baby weight* so after each birth I hadn’t gained any extra…but that was little consolation since the scale was still sitting at around 160. I’d pretty much resigned myself to the idea that this was just how it was going to be. I was a married mom and married moms just aren’t young and thin anymore. CLEARLY my body liked being at 160 and I needed to accept that and move on with my new plus sized life.

By the time our third and last child was born in 2009, my husband had managed to put on about the same amount of weight that I had. We both were sitting at about 40 pounds over our wedding day weight. We would periodically comment on our own weight gain but never mentioned the other’s. I wasn’t concerned about his and he didn’t seem concerned about mine so we just sort of settled into our fat and happy family life.

The turning point came in November 2010. My husband and I had gone out to eat for our anniversary and, having gone to Marble Slab for dessert, were sitting on the bench outside the shop eating our ice cream when he said those fateful words. “We’ve gotten fat. And I’m not happy.” The blood roared in my ears as I sat there in shock, trying to digest what he’d said (along with my Sweet Cream with M&Ms). I thought, “Did he just call me fat?” Nevermind that I WAS fat…hearing those words come out of the mouth of the person you love more than life itself is still a punch in the gut. The only thing that kept me from dissolving into tears was that whole *we* part. That one little word allowed me to move past the trauma in a matter of seconds and look at it objectively.

“Ok. I’m not really happy either but I’m not sure what to do about it. I feel like I’ve tried everything and nothing has worked.”

“Maybe it’s a matter of motivation. Next year is our 15th anniversary. Let’s plan a big trip to somewhere exotic and use that. We have a year to get ourselves into shape.”

I was equal parts excited and terrified about what lay ahead. I knew now that my weight DID bother him and that did more than anything to change my mental state from *I can’t* to *I have to and I want to*. But I had so many years under my belt of making changes and trying different (many times unpleasant) things that left me no better off than before that I just didn’t see how I could accomplish this.

We spent the first few months of 2011 planning and booking our vacation to the Virgin Islands, haphazardly trying to fit workouts into our schedule, and not ordering Dominos for supper. We weren’t seeing any progress and each month we lost out of our 1 year timeline caused me to panic a little bit more that this problem was just unfixable and I was going to let him down in the end.

That’s about when I started hearing about this thing called Paleo and a guy named Mark Sisson. On a completely unrelated forum I belong to, people were starting to discuss it in depth and sharing their experiences. It seemed crazy to me that people could A) willingly give up the foods I loved so much and B) achieve drastic results from it. The other diets I’d tried over the years all centered around counting calories and fat grams, weighing and measuring every bite, trying to acclimate yourself to being hungry all the time, having to arrange your day to be able to eat every 2-3 hours to *keep your blood sugar up* and *fire up your metabolism*. Paleo, in spite of the loss of my beloved bread, seemed so…..freeing.

I laid out the basics of it for him, shared success stories, and although he was as skeptical as I was, he was fully on board to try this crazy new thing.

We jumped into it in May and, after the first couple of weeks where our bodies were trying to adjust to the absence of sugar, were amazed at how GREAT we felt! I’d been having constant brain fog and exhaustion and my wrists always hurt and I’d started having heartburn after almost every meal. All gone. Along with a steady loss of 5 pounds a month for each of us. For the first time in about 10 years I was losing weight! AND IT WAS EFFORTLESS!!!

By the time November and our anniversary trip rolled around we each had lost 30 pounds. We went on to lose 35 pounds each total then settled into maintenance.

Two years ago, Hurricane Harvey hit our area and flooded our home. This was actually the second time in 9 years as we flooded in Ike in 2008 but Ike was before our Paleo journey. Having our home in disrepair for over a year caused us to get REALLY lax with our eating. Convenience was the word of the day and not having a functional kitchen meant we were eating almost catch as catch can. We started having fast food again and even the meals I was able to cook at home trended towards the quick and easy and were based around which cooking apparatuses I had available to use at any given time. As expected, weight started to creep back on.

As of today, we have each gained back 10 of the pounds we’d lost. We have a fully functioning kitchen again and just had a conversation about how we KNOW what we need to do. We KNOW what works. We have the ace up our sleeves and it’s time to toss that sucker on the table and get back to the lifestyle that changed our lives so many years ago. There is no terror this time. No worrying that it’s going to be just another diet I fail at and I won’t have any success. This time, there is only excitement as I know what lies ahead—a healthier, more energetic, thinner, and happier us.

Tiffany (and Wes) Bailey

Have a story to share? Email me here. Thanks, everybody, and have a great week.

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Only Excitement As I Know What Lies Ahead published first on https://venabeahan.tumblr.com

[hermannovack]

Source: Matt Dinerstein/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank / Getty

LaRoyce Hawkins Stars And Eriq LaSalle Directs “Chicago P.D.” Episode About Police Involved Shooting

NBC is set to air an especially sensitive episode of “Chicago P.D.” Wednesday night called “Night In Chicago,” where Detective Kevin Atwater goes undercover to bring down a dangerous drug lord and ends up in a difficult situation after a traffic stop turns into an officer involved shooting! Eriq La Salle, who directed the episode, spoke with BOSSIP exclusively about working on the show.

“The first thing I told LaRoyce [Hawkins, who plays Det. Atwater] was we owe it to a lot of brothers and sisters who can’t tell the story,” La Salle told BOSSIP. “It’s our responsibility now to make sure that we tell the story right and that we represent that. That was really the start for me.”

Source: Matt Dinerstein/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank / Getty

“I’ll never forget that call,” LaRoyce Hawkins told BOSSIP about his initial conversations with LaSalle about the episode. “What I love about working with Eriq La Salle is his excitement for the job. This was a story that really touched him, written by Ike Smith who is a Chicago native, and actually I am from the Chicago area, and Eriq La Salle thought it was really important that we made this story so authentic and real to the people who have actually been in those experiences, to the people who have actually been pulled over, to people who haven’t been pulled over to the people who don’t understand and the people who do. I like to think we tell stories for everyone’s perspectives, even the people you might not like in this episode. Atwater gets jammed up and the struggle for power gets political and uncomfortable but at the end of the day it’s a night in Chicago that I don’t think anybody can really run away from.”

With a plot that feels pulled straight from the headlines, the show ventures into some complicated waters, particularly after some of Atwater’s superiors try to place the blame for the shooting on him, saying he should have disclosed his undercover status to diffuse the situation.

“I think when these kinds of things happen, officer involved shootings, now there is somewhat of a vulnerability or a perception of a vulnerability because people are becoming more vocal and things need to be criticized,” La Salle told BOSSIP. “We’re not telling anybody how to think… We’ve become so segregated and divided, not to point out the obvious, but things become very black and white. If you’re from the black community you see it this way, if you’re from white community you see it this way. That’s not necessarily true, people have their own opinions. We don’t try to force feed any of our stories, we basically just put it out there and let the audience decide which side of an issue they fall on.”

One of the cops who makes the traffic stop is blatantly racist — something that viewers will likely grapple with while watching. The other, La Salle says, is simply doing his job. At the end of the day, Atwater will play a major role in deciding whether or not to publicly burn the offending cop.

“The piece of advice that Atwater takes to heart is from Voight, when he tells him ‘Win lose or draw, you have to live with yourself at night. Whatever is going to allow you to go to sleep peacefully is ultimately the best decision or the right thing to do for you, that might be the truth, that might not be the truth,’” Hawkins told BOSSIP.

The highly acclaimed Wendell Pierce has a crucial guest role on the episode, as a local Alderman whose own political agenda only further complicates matters for Atwater. Both Hawkins and La Salle heaped praises on his performance in the episode.

“Wendell and I go way back, we went to college together,” La Salle told BOSSIP. “He’s an amazing actor. For me it’s just bonus when you get to go basically play with one of your boys who happens to be extremely talented. He makes us all look good and I’m thankful for him and appreciative of what he contributes. I think his character having the potential mentor role over an Atwater in this episode is really interesting, but it’s really about Atwater finding his own way and being his own man and standing on his principles and what he believes is right no matter what. He’s really torn, he’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. Wendell represents the community… so if Wendell is saying ‘Maybe you should lie a little bit,’well you have to decide where your moral compass is. That’s a major theme of this episode.”

Hawkins told BOSSIP he saw the opportunity to act in a scene with Pierce as a dream come true, especially because it coincided with other meaningful milestones for his character.

“The relationship with Wendell Pierce’s character Ray Price and Atwater is really interesting,” La Royce Hawkins told BOSSIP. “I’m excited about where that relationship can go. That was my first scene with him… Just off the strength off the relationship, I think that Atwater respects Ray Price, even though he knows that Ray Price is a politician. I just appreciate Wendell Pierce for being so gracious in that scene and not just running circles around me because I am a big fan of his work. He’s a dynamic actor… It’s a lot of dreams come true for me on this show. This episode brought a lot of those things out, like I’ve always been a fan of Wendell Pierce, to be able to work with Mikelti Williamson and be directed at the same time by an Eriq La Salle. That’s pretty amazing for me as a young black man, so I learned a lot.”

La Salle and Pierce weren’t the only pair of longtime friends on set either. Hawkins told us he and the actor who played the racist cop, Officer Doyle, have a lot of history.

“Actually I met the cop that plays Doyle, who is the racist cop, I met him in high school,” LaRoyce told BOSSIP. “We used to compete against each other in speech. We ended up going to college together, he’s actually a real good friend and he was probably the perfect person for us to explore that energy with because he and I were so close. But he’s a great actor, he did his thing, I believed him, but for topics this sensitive it was almost extremely perfect for me to be working with a homie like that.”

Source: Matt Dinerstein/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank / Getty

Fans of “Chicago P.D.” know that this isn’t the first time the show has touched on such sensitive matters, particularly when it comes to race, and Eriq La Salle said it’s not just coincidence. He credited “Chicago P.D. writer and showrunner Rick Eid for not shying away from tough conversations. There’s a moment between Det. Atwater and Officer Adam Ruzek where Ruzek acknowledges his whiteness will never allow him to truly experience what Atwater has to deal with, but he pledges to have his back regardless of his lack of understanding.

“I think that to me sort of represents what I was saying about Rick Eid,” La Salle told BOSSIP. “We gotta just start having honest conversations about race and gender if we hope to make any progress. A man has to be able to talk to woman, a white man has to be able to talk to a black man and so on. We have to be able to talk and we have to be willing to own what we don’t know and that’s what I love about that conversation between Ruzek and Atwater. ‘I don’t know and I’ll never know but I got your back’ We have to be able to say what we know and what we don’t know and that scene is my relationship to a degree with Rick. He teaches me certain things and I teach him certain things but we both respect each other as men. One happens to be black and one happens to be white and we respect each other as men that we’re able to have conversations.”

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The post “Chicago P.D.” Exclusive: Eriq LaSalle And LaRoyce Hawkins Weigh In On Episode Where Police Involved Shooting Puts Atwater In Jeopardy [Spoilers] appeared first on NEWS.

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