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

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.

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.