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Episode 39 | The Ever Changing: Who I Was, Who I Am, and What I'm Actually Doing Here

I've got a cold Guinness, headphones on, and Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings playing while I talk into this microphone. Very few people know I'm a classically trained flautist. That's not the point of this episode, but it kind of is. This one goes back to the beginning — not the beginning of the podcast, but the beginning of the pursuit. The Bible verses my father had me memorize while the belt and the rubber paddle said something completely different. The list of traditions I moved through trying to find something that made sense of what I was experiencing. Neville Goddard, Abraham Hicks, Eastern mysticism, the Church of Latter-day Saints, Elizabeth Clare Prophet — I needed answers badly enough to look everywhere. What I finally understood is that the answer was never in any of those places. Not because they were wrong, but because none of them could tell me who I was. Only I had access to that. You are the single constant variable in every experience you have ever had. Every single one. And until you're willing to sit with that — really sit with it — none of the books, the traditions, the courses, or the teachers are going to do what you actually need them to do. I'm not counting listeners anymore. I'm not counting anything. Someone is going to hear this and know exactly what I'm talking about. What do you hide? What do you submerge so other people will accept you? How much of yourself do you set aside just to keep the peace? That's what this episode is actually asking.

She's Here (FINALLY) — And No, She's Not Introducing Herself

I've been talking about bringing Sharon on for years. Today she's here. Sitting across from me, right in front of the microphone, on a Monday in June that we weren't even planning on recording. This is not what I imagined this episode would look like. It sure as shit isn't what she imagined either. What you're going to hear is two people who have been together for twelve years doing what they actually do — which is talk, disagree, laugh, forget what they were saying, knock shit over, and somehow arrive at something true by the end of it. No outline. No formal introduction. No curated version of who we are. Sharon refused to introduce herself. She was right to. We talk about TikTok and why we haven't done it yet. We talk about Jelly Roll and Bunny XO and celebrity couples and irreconcilable differences and what it actually takes to make something real work. We talk about her cancers. About four marriages and four divorces and what made the fifth one different. About schedules and the word fuck it and why consistency means something different to us than it might to you. And at the very end, Sharon figures out why she was resisting posting the TikTok conversation we recorded earlier. It's a good reason. She's here. It took as long as it needed to.

What About That Fucking List is Really True?

I made a list.    Four marriages worth of lists actually.    One could reasonably say that I sucked at finding the one to love, the one with whom all of life could be truly shared.   Four marriages.   Four divorces.   How in the actual fuck did I even think that a fifth was possible and not end up like the other four? Out. Of. My. Everlasting. Mind.   Right?   But you see, I still believed, despite all of the shit that I thought about myself, was that the right person with the right qualities was “out there.” And together, we would figure out the relationship from there.   Together.   Didn't work.   Until…   This episode is about what I finally asked myself instead — what if I stop focusing on the person and start defining the relationship I actually want? And what if I go even further back than that and ask who I need to be to participate in that relationship honestly?   I talk about the sexual abuse and what it did to my ability to be intimate with another person. About the litmus test disclosures — giving someone just enough to see if they recoil before you give them the real thing. About learning the hard way that preemptive disclosure doesn't work and that trusting yourself means trusting the timing.   I didn't know Sharon existed when I made my list. I didn't know what year she was born or what her skin looked like. I just did the work on myself and defined what I actually wanted honestly for the first time. And then she showed up.   I don't know how that works exactly.    I'm just telling you it did.   The free workbooks are at www.theloveofyourlifetime.com.    Start with The Mist. Everything else follows from there.

Episode 38 | None of This Tech Holds My Hand

I'm on the sofa next to my wife. Coffee's hot. The trees outside haven't leafed out yet but the birds are already doing their thing on the light post and I'm watching them like I've got nowhere else to be. I've got an iMac, a MacBook Air, a MacBook Pro, a 32-inch monitor, an iPad Air, an iPad Pro, a Vocaster 2, Bose speakers, and a fountain pen. And not one single piece of it comes to meet me at the door. This one is short. It's about cherry picking — specifically about the fact that most of us do it constantly and don't realize it, and that what we tend to pick is the ugly stuff. The painful stuff. The evidence for the prosecution against ourselves. What if you rooted around for the good stuff instead? Not toxic positivity. Not pretending the hard things didn't happen. Just — what if you applied the same energy you use to excavate the worst moments to finding the ones that actually felt like something worth keeping? That's it. That's the episode. I'm going to go hold my wife's hand before I have to get dressed for the day job.

Mundane Musings: What Makes It True? *TRIGGER WARNING*

⚠️ Trigger Warning: This episode contains discussion of childhood abuse, sexual abuse, and suicide. This is another one of those episodes that I wasn't going to post. And if you’ve been with me for a bit, then you know that there seem to be times when I question whether or not I should an episode, and if we want to be undeniably clear about the why, it’s because, and some of you already know this, and that’s some disclosures leave me, us, feeling so fucking vulnerable that we really do think that maybe we might just want to keep it to ourselves.   This is one of those.   That probably tells you everything you need to know about why I did this one and am sharing.   It’s a theme and promise to myself. If I am going to “be real” then, fucking be real, and as such, if I post it, it’s gotta be real and true. Otherwise, it stays on the hard drive.   No editing out the life that drives this.   We deserve better than that trifling shit.    And you all know what I mean by that….   I was 13 or 14 years old when my parents sent me to a psychologist. Not because they had any idea what was actually happening to me — in the house, next door, inside my own head.    Or in my heart.   They just knew that their kid had changed and they wanted to know why.    So there I was, sitting across from a stranger with my hands in my pockets, and something that had been building pressure inside of me that I needed to let out; it felt like it was strangling me.   It needed to came out.   I just didn’t know how badly I needed that to happen. Or what it would cost me when I did let it out.   She, the professional that I was supposed to trust, asked me a question that closed every door I had just opened.   I went home. My mother said what she said. I went downstairs, put on KISS, and crawled under my bed.   I'm 60 years old and that's something I've never told another living soul until right now.   This episode isn't a lesson. It's not organized and it's not supposed to be. It's me sitting behind a microphone doing what I used to call mundane musings — which really just means I needed to hear myself think out loud. About the psychologist. About the surveys and the theories and the schools of thought that never answered the actual question. About two POWs in the same camp who come out and become completely different people. About November 2nd, 1994.   And about the one question that changed everything for me when I finally stopped running long enough to ask it:   What makes it true?   I know what it feels like to think you don't belong here — and I know what it feels like to be wrong about that.   Come sit with me for a little bit….   The Site [https://www.theloveofyourlifetime.com]