Tavarus Taylor: How to Break Free From Generational Trauma

Identity loss does not always announce itself.

For many people, it arrives quietly — disguised as a career that stopped fitting, a life that looks successful from the outside but feels hollow on the inside, or a persistent, nagging question that will not go away: is this really who I am?

Episode 120 of The Lost & Found Podcast explores exactly that question through the story of Tavarus Taylor: a Nashville entrepreneur, community advocate, radio host, and drag performer. Tavarus has built a full and multidimensional life. But the path to get there required navigating generational trauma, systemic injustice, corporate betrayal, and a years-long process of figuring out who he actually was beneath everything the world had decided about him.

His story is one of the most instructive conversations this podcast has featured on the intersection of identity, resilience, and purpose — and it is one that listeners across every background and experience level will find something meaningful in.

 

Meet Tavarus Taylor

Tavarus Taylor is the founder and CEO of TNT Commercial Services 615, a Nashville-based commercial facilities company he launched after a corporate layoff and now leads into its fourth year of operations. He is also the host of The Queen’s Table, a radio and podcast program on ACME Radio Live that provides a platform for LGBTQ+ voices, allies, and community advocates. And he performs professionally as Vivica Steele — a drag persona with two simultaneous residencies on Broadway in Nashville who has become both a local icon and a vocal advocate against anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Tennessee.

Before building any of that, Tavarus was a first-generation college student from the South who graduated from Middle Tennessee State University despite being told by a high school guidance counselor that he was not college material. He navigated early adulthood largely without institutional support, which made the obstacles he encountered along the way significantly more costly than they should have been.

 

The Cost of a Broken System

One of the most significant moments in this episode centers on when Tavarus was arrested for unintentionally writing a fraudulent check. As a young adult managing his finances independently for the first time, Tavarus wrote a check at a Walmart that bounced due to insufficient funds. The amount was $5.44. When he attempted to resolve the situation with local law enforcement, the interaction escalated in a way he did not anticipate, ultimately resulting in a felony charge for filing a false police report — a charge that stripped him of his constitutional right to vote in the state of Tennessee.

Tavarus recently completed the process of petitioning the courts to have his citizenship rights restored, a process he describes as both expensive and unnecessarily difficult. He speaks about the experience with measured clarity: he believes in the justice system, and he also believes that what happened to him was not justice.

What is most notable about how Tavarus carries this chapter of his life is not the injustice itself, but what he chose to do with it. Rather than distancing himself from the experience, he has used it to inform his advocacy work. He actively supports organizations that assist at-risk youth navigating the criminal justice system, contributes to community initiatives focused on economic stability, and uses his platforms to help audiences understand the real and lasting consequences that systemic inequity imposes on real people.

That choice — to transform a painful and unjust experience into a framework for serving others — is a recurring theme throughout this conversation and one of the clearest illustrations of what purposeful living can look like in practice.

 

From Corporate Layoff to Business Owner

Prior to founding TNT Commercial Services 615, Tavarus spent years building a career in corporate sales. By most professional measures, he was performing well. His division was meeting its targets. He was managing a team of approximately thirty people. And then, around the time he began to notice and question financial discrepancies within his organization, circumstances shifted quickly.

His specialty services division was shut down without advance notice. He was handed a box and asked to return his company car. The layoff happened in November. By January, he was performing at the Ryman Auditorium as Vivica Steele during Ashley McBride’s Lindyville tour alongside Brothers Osborne — a moment he describes as one of the clearest signs that life was redirecting him somewhere better.

The decision to launch his own company came from a conversation with his father-in-law, who offered a single, direct piece of advice: you will never get wealthy working for somebody else. Tavarus took that advice seriously. He identified community partnerships, secured initial clients, and built a business from the ground up with his now-husband Kolten.

His experience speaks directly to a pattern that resonates strongly with this podcast’s audience: the moment a person stops trying to find the right place within a broken structure and starts building something of their own. For many of us navigating our own career crossroads, Tavarus’s story offers a concrete and grounded example of what that pivot can actually look like.

 

Identity, Drag, and the Work of Becoming

Our conversation took a notably personal turn when Tavarus discusses Vivica Steele and what she represents to him beyond performance.

Tavarus describes Vivica as the version of himself who finally gets to live — as opposed to the version that spent years focused on survival. Through her, he found a creative and emotional outlet that allowed him to process his identity more fully than he had previously been able to. He is deliberate in clarifying that drag, for him, is not a statement about gender identity. It is an art form, a community, and a practice that has helped him develop a deeper relationship with himself.

“I was so busy surviving. Where Vivica gets to live. Through Vivica, I think she has really polished Tavarus. She has really allowed me to step out and know who I am.” — Tavarus Taylor

Vivica has also become a platform for advocacy. When Tennessee legislators introduced anti-drag legislation that would have criminalized public drag performances and imposed felony-level penalties for repeat violations, Tavarus used his visibility to speak out. He notes, with particular weight, that a second offense under that legislation would have carried the same class of charge that had already cost him his right to vote. The personal and the political were not abstract for him. They directly affect his and his friends in the drag performance industry’s livelihoods.

This section of the conversation offers a thoughtful and grounded entry point for listeners who are curious about LGBTQ+ identity, the relationship between self-expression and self-discovery, and the ways in which cultural and legal pressures shape how people understand and present themselves.

 

Who This Episode Is For

Episode 120 covers significant ground — generational trauma, the criminal justice system, entrepreneurship, identity, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and the slow, deliberate work of learning to love yourself without apology. But at its core, it is a conversation about one thing: what it takes to stop living inside a story someone else wrote for you.

This episode will be particularly valuable for listeners who identify as:

• Professionals navigating a career pivot or recovering from a layoff and weighing what to build next
• Anyone working through the effects of generational trauma on their sense of identity and self-worth
• People in their 30s and 40s questioning whether the life they built is actually the one they want
• Those looking for honest, experience-based perspectives on LGBTQ+ identity and self-acceptance
• Anyone who needs to hear from someone who has genuinely been through systemic injustice and come out the other side with their integrity and purpose intact

When I asked Tavarus what he would say to someone who feels lost in their life and their not sure what to do next, he closed the conversation with a piece of advice that I thought is worth sharing regardless of where you are in your own journey:

“Start with yourself. There is no book, there is no podcast, there is no sermon. You start with yourself. Sit with yourself in silence and see what that does. Some of my most transformative moments have come from exactly that.” — Tavarus Taylor

 

Listen to Episode 120

Episode 120 with Tavarus Taylor is available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and all major podcast platforms. Links to Tavarus’s business, his drag persona Vivica Steele, and The Queen’s Table are included in the show notes below.

If this episode resonates with you, the most meaningful thing you can do is share it with someone who needs it. Leaving a review on Apple Podcasts also helps new listeners find the show and grows the community this podcast is built around.

New episodes release weekly. Subscribe, rate us, and leave a review wherever you listen so you never miss a conversation!

And remember… Wanderers are always welcome.

 

— Amanda Powers

Host, The Lost & Found Podcast

 

CONNECT WITH TAVARUS:

Business Website: tntcommercialservices615.com

Vivica Steele Website: vivicasteele.com

Vivica’s Instagram: ⁠@vivicasteele615⁠

The Queen’s Table: acmeradiolive.com/the-queens-table

The Queen’s Table Instagram: @thequeenstable615

Personal Instagram: ⁠@ttaylor608⁠

 

CONNECT WITH AMANDA:

Don’t forget to subscribe for more content about reclaiming your identity, finding your purpose, and steps for becoming your future self.

Want to share your story or question for an upcoming Wanderer Wisdom Episode? Contact Amanda here! 

Email: hello@podcastforthelost.com

Instagram: @podcast.for.the.lost & @amanda.k.powers

TikTok: @podcast.for.the.lost

YouTube: @podcastforthelost

Substack: podcastforthelost.substack.com

 

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