Veronica Unfiltered

By: Veronica

Jay Shetty Podcast, On Purpose ft CardiB

There’s a certain kind of truth that doesn’t need translation. The kind that comes from women who’ve lived through the grind and still found a way to hold their heads high. When Cardi B talks, I don’t just hear a celebrity story. I hear survival. I hear the kind of woman who’s had to be resourceful, unbreakable, and misunderstood all at once.

She’s not talking theory. She’s talking memory. The kind of lessons that aren’t written down anywhere, but get passed from struggle to struggle, mother to daughter, and woman to woman. When she says she brushed the corners of the apartment by hand, I know that’s not about cleaning. That’s about control. When you grow up in spaces that life forgot, pride becomes your first currency.

When Cardi B Talks, I Don’t Hear Fame; I Hear Familiar

When Cardi B talks about brushing corners by hand, I know exactly what that means. I’ve lived in places where no matter how clean you kept it, there were still roaches, still mice, still someone upstairs who didn’t care as much as you did. Clean didn’t mean perfect. It meant pride. It meant, “I’m still trying.”

I’ve been that woman in the welfare office with my head held high, trying to explain what I need without losing my dignity. The system doesn’t care that you’re doing your best. You learn to navigate it without breaking, because breaking isn’t an option when you’ve got mouths to feed and rent due.

When Cardi says, “Even if you get with a man with money, you should have your own,” I feel that in my bones. I’ve lived enough to know that stability tied to someone else can disappear overnight. Foster care taught me not to rely on anyone. Love taught me not to trust men who say they’ll never leave and then do.

I’ve always been the responsible parent. The one who fills out the forms, pays the bills, shows up, figures it out. Now I’m doing it without a W-2, trying to make entrepreneurship work on a budget, still carrying that same quiet promise: my kids will never feel instability the way I did.

Cardi’s story isn’t just about the come-up. It’s about the mentality, that middle-to-lower-class knowing, that no one’s coming to save you. That’s what connects women like her and women like me. We hustle differently, but the root is the same: survival, self-respect, and the will to build something steady out of what never was.

The Shared Language of Survival

What I love most about women like Cardi B is that we speak the same language, even if our lives look different now. It’s the language of people who’ve had to make something out of nothing; who’ve learned how to stretch food, time, and patience. It’s the unspoken bond between women who’ve stood in line for food stamps and still showed up to work the next day acting like everything’s fine.

We recognize each other by the way we keep going, by how we hold our families together, by how we still dream even when the math doesn’t add up. That’s the part people miss when they reduce women like us to “too much.” They don’t see the grace it takes to survive what we’ve survived and still have softness left in our voice.

What Survival Teaches You

Survival doesn’t make you bitter. It makes you honest. It teaches you the kind of humility that never forgets where you came from, but also the kind of faith that doesn’t need applause.

It’s why I root for women like Cardi. Because beneath the music and the headlines, I see a woman who refuses to let her beginnings define her ending. That’s the quiet dream every working-class woman carries: to outgrow what broke her without pretending she’s forgotten it.

And for me, that’s what being Veronica Unfiltered means, telling the truth about where I’ve been, but not letting it limit where I’m going.

Thank you joining me again in the middle.