Episode 13 | You Must Define For Yourself What Love Is

Episode 43 | Hope — And the Question Nobody Asks You Before You Start Paying for Things You Can't Take Back

I didn't want to have children. Ever. I said that out loud for the first time not too long and ago, and then again in this episode — publicly, on a microphone, knowing my biological children might hear it. Not because I don't care about them. Because the truth matters more than the performance of what I was supposed to want. And do. I got married because religion told me that's what you do with sexual urges. I had children because the Bible said be fruitful and multiply. I took jobs I didn't want. Said what people wanted to hear. Went through the motions of a life that was built around everyone else's definition of normal and hoped — there's that word — hoped that eventually it would start to feel like mine. It didn't. This episode is about what hope actually is when you stop dressing it up. Not optimism. Not positive thinking. That persistent, nagging internal signal that what you're doing doesn't match who you are. The gap between the life you're living and the life your self-concept keeps quietly pointing toward. And it's about forgiveness — not the religious kind, not the kind that requires someone else to grant it. The kind where you finally acknowledge that you cannot change what you've already done, and you stop paying a debt to people who aren't even collecting it anymore. I'm sitting here stone cold sober talking about being a shitty father and a shitty ex-husband. And I'm telling you — that doesn't have to destroy you. Not because it wasn't real. Because love, when you finally stop running from it, affords you the right to say: I did that, and I'm still here, and it didn't win. This is from the archive. The foundation of everything else.

Episode 42 | What We Tell Ourselves — And Why Getting "Wet" Didn't Fix A Damn Thing

I've been baptized somewhere between four and five times. Different denominations. Different water. Same me standing there afterward, still carrying everything I walked in with. Because getting wet doesn't wash away memory. It doesn't change what you think about yourself. It doesn't touch the self-concept that's been running the whole show since childhood. This episode is about what we tell ourselves to explain why we feel the way we feel — and the specific loop most of us get stuck in when we try to fix an internal problem with an external solution. Religion. Relationships. Money. Alcohol. Marriages. Having children. I tried all of them. Rinse and repeat. Here's what I finally had to understand: if my father isn't hitting me right now, and the neighbor isn't doing what he did right now, then everything I feel and think about those things in this moment is on me. Not as blame. As responsibility. There's a difference. And the difference is everything. Because if I'm waiting for a dead man to apologize before I get on with my life, I'm stuck. Still a victim of something that isn't actively happening anymore. Still handing my peace over to someone who isn't in the room. This episode is from the archive — early Real Empowered Self, before Sharon joined the mic, before the Blue Collar Buddha existed as a name. It's me working through the question that eventually became the workbooks, the website, the whole thing: What would it be like if somebody could love me for who I am right now? That question changed something. This episode is about how I got there.

Episode 41 | You Are Not "Only" Human — And My Motorcycle "Proves" It

We've been told our whole lives that we're only human. Only. As if human is a limitation. As if it's the explanation for everything we can't do, everything we've failed at, everything we've settled for. As if the word itself is an apology. This one starts there and goes somewhere most people don't. I bought a motorcycle once. Wanted it badly enough to go into debt for it. Got it. Didn't feel the way I thought it would. And when I sat with that — really sat with it — I realized it was never about the motorcycle. It was about wanting to belong somewhere. Wanting to fit. Wanting to feel like I was part of something that would make me feel better about myself. The motorcycle was just the thing I put between me and the actual question. This episode is about the actual question. About the self-concept loop most of us are stuck in — old self, current self, the self we're trying to become — and why treating these as three different people is exactly what keeps us from becoming any of them more fully. And about what happens when you stop trying to force the answer and let the question move around in you for a while instead. This is from the archive. April 2023. Sharon was deep in treatment. I was sitting on a Tuesday morning asking myself questions I'd been avoiding for most of my life. This is what came out.

Mystical Now? And You Won't Believe What You Already Know

We were going to make a different episode today. Sharon and I were behind the microphone, the direction was clear, and something was off. Not dramatically off. Just — wrong. The little voice said not right now and I stopped. Her throat hurt. She was going to muscle through it. I know her well enough to know that. We stopped anyway. This episode is about what happens in the space between what you planned and what's actually in front of you — and the inner conversation most of us have in that space that we don't even realize we're having. The flat tire that becomes proof you should have checked earlier. The appointment you're late to that becomes evidence of inadequate preparation. The episode that didn't happen that becomes a data point in the case you're building against yourself. Most of us have a self-concept built around the gap between what was supposed to happen and what did. We live in that gap. We build our identity in it. We collect evidence there. This one is about the other option. The still quiet inner voice that says not right now without judgment, without drama, without a performance evaluation attached. The one that's been there the whole time underneath the noise of should-haves and what-ifs and I-should-have-left-earliers. Sharon had stage 3 cervical cancer. Her thyroid was removed. What she eats affects how she feels affects everything else — because there is no separation between the physical self and the emotional self and the psychological self, no matter how much we're told there is. She was going to push through. We didn't push through. And somehow this became the episode anyway.

You Got Sexted, Ghosted, and Confused — And You're Still Asking the "Wrong" Questions

You did everything right. Asked the good questions. Waited the appropriate amount of time. Finally gave up the booty. And they disappeared. And now you're sitting there asking what you did wrong. Here's the question nobody is asking you — and the one that actually matters: what did you actually base any of it on? A paragraph and some pictures? A 40-point compatibility algorithm that matched your answers to someone else's answers, neither of which were entirely honest? This episode is about online dating, swipe culture, and the specific exhaustion of doing everything the platform tells you to do and ending up exactly where you started. But it's not really about the apps. The apps are fine. The apps do exactly what they were built to do. The problem is you walked into Billy Ray Jenkins Washington's chicken house and asked for shrimp. And when you didn't get shrimp, you were confused. Here's what nobody in the dating advice space will say plainly: the constant variable in every failed connection, every ghosting, every relationship that starts right and ends badly — is you. Not as a criticism. As a fact. You take your self-concept, your beliefs about what you deserve, your unasked questions about who you actually are — you take all of that onto every app, into every swipe, through every first date. And until you get honest about what's actually running the program, you will keep getting the same results in different packaging. I filled out the forms. I paid for the 40-point compatibility site. I tried the interracial dating sites. I changed the variables. And I kept running into the same person on the other side of every match — myself, and everything I hadn't dealt with yet. This one is for anyone who is tired of starting over and ready to ask a different question. www.theloveofyourlifetime.com [https://www.theloveofyourlifetime.com]