Episode 46 | Dating, The Club, And The Ritual That Never Actually Worked — Here's Why

Episode 46 | Dating, The Club, And The Ritual That Never Actually Worked — Here's Why

You know the ritual. Pre-drinks at home. The outfit deliberation. The cologne decision. The mirror check. The mental rehearsal of how the night is going to go. The absolute certainty that this Friday is the Friday. I did all of it. Multiple times. For years. And here's what nobody said out loud while I was doing it: the person who told me to go to the club didn't have what I was looking for either. I was taking advice from someone just as single, just as lost, just as convinced that the next venue was going to be the one. This episode is about dating — not as a generational conversation, because ghosting isn't new and neither is loneliness — but as a self-concept conversation. About the compulsive external search for something that lives internally. The club, the church, the workplace, the mall, the app — I tried all of them. Kept changing the location. Kept getting the same result. Because the location was never the variable. I was. And nobody sat me down and asked the question that would have saved me years of searching: what do you actually want, and why are you looking for it the way you're looking for it? I didn't know the answer. I didn't even know how to ask it. And so I kept going back out on Saturday, convincing myself that this time would be different. It wasn't. Until I finally stopped looking out there and started asking in here.

Episode 45 | What Really Matters — The Question I Finally Asked At 4:49 In The Morning

It was 4:49 in the morning. No alarm. Just awake. I rolled out of bed as quietly as I could and Sharon reached out and found my hand in the dark before I even got to the door. I thought about that for a long time sitting on the sofa in the quiet with the lights off and the birds just starting outside. What really matters? Not as a philosophical exercise. As an actual question with an actual answer that I actually had to sit still long enough to hear. This episode traces the whole thing — from coming out of the womb into the hands of people we don't know, who then spend the next two decades deciding who we are, what we should want, how the world works, what a man is, what a black man is, what a husband is, what a father is. All of it handed down with the confidence of people who believed it themselves and passed it on without examining it first. At some point you have to sit down and ask: am I doing these things because I actually want them, or because I was told I was supposed to? That question took me a long time to even be willing to ask. Because if the answer is wrong, everything built on top of it gets complicated. The marriage. The job. The kids. The whole structure. And yet. Here's what I want you to do before the next episode. Take a pen. A piece of paper. Write at the top: What Really Matters To Me. Not to anyone else. Not to your parents or your culture or your religion or your ex. To you. That's it. That's the exercise. That's where this starts. This is from the archive — April 2023, Sharon in treatment, me on a sofa at 4:49 in the morning figuring out what I actually knew.

Episode 44 | You're Not "The Technician" — So Stop Telling "The Universe" How To "Fix" Your Life

My day job is tech. People bring me broken laptops and then stand there telling me how to fix them. They don't know how to fix them. That's why they brought them to me. And yet — the suggestions keep coming. The hovering. The anxiety about whether I'm doing it right. The complete inability to go get a cup of coffee and trust that someone who knows what they're doing is doing it. I let them talk. And then I do what I was going to do anyway. This episode uses that exact scenario to talk about the thing most self-concept work eventually runs into: control. Not the obvious kind — the kind that looks like planning, research, and due diligence. The kind that's actually just fear dressed up as competence. You cannot tell the universe, natural law, God, or any other name you want to use for the thing larger than your current understanding — how to bring about what you want. You can set the intention. You can do the work on self. And then you have to let the technician do the job. My car broke down during this period. Sharon and I started walking to the bus stop together every morning. I didn't plan that. I didn't engineer it. The breakdown created it. And I found out my legs look kind of sexy and I'm enjoying the walk more than I enjoyed driving. That's not a metaphor. That's just what happened when I stopped trying to fix the thing and let the process run. The new laptop under warranty — better specs, data saved, costs you nothing — only happens if you chilled out long enough for the technician to find it.

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.