Sunday Stroll 05 | Cherry Pick The Good Stuff

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]

Episode 40 | The 300 Songs Nobody Heard — And Everything Else We Leave Behind

Another from the archive. Three years ago. My wife deep into chemo and radiation, and I, her husband, still having those inner conversations that I'd never actually paid attention to in the past. This is one of those moments. I've got over 300 songs. I didn't do anything with them because I didn't think anybody wanted to hear them. So they sat. And I kept making more. And none of them went anywhere because somewhere inside me I had already decided the answer before I asked the question. This episode has my own music playing in the background. I decided to do it tonight because I didn't want to talk myself out of it again. How much of your life are you leaving behind you? Not because someone took it. Because you decided in advance that it wasn't worth sharing. That nobody wanted to hear it. That you needed to be more certain, more ready, more something before you could just — be who you are out loud. This one is quiet. It's short. It's me asking the question I kept not asking myself for most of my life. What do you want to share? What do you desire to share? And what's actually stopping you — not externally, but in the self-concept you carry about what you and your life are worth? Now is what we have. That's it. The past doesn't get to decide who you are in this moment. Neither does the fear of what someone might think of your 300 songs.

This Shit Is Hard — And I Built It That Way On Purpose. Yep, It's True.

If you've tried the affirmations, bought the course, done the work someone else told you to do, and you're still exactly where you were — this episode is for you. I could have made this easy. I know how that's done. I've been the person who bought the easy version — Elizabeth Clare Prophet, the chanting, sweat running down my face, four baptisms across four denominations because I needed answers badly enough to try anything. I know what it feels like to want to believe something and keep finding out it isn't true. That's why I built this the way I built it. The website is a gauntlet. Not by accident — by design. Because the real self-concept work, the kind that actually changes why you repeat the same relationship patterns, why love lands wrong, why you keep choosing familiar over good — that work cannot be handed to you in a way that bypasses your own interior process. I cannot live a second of your life. I cannot describe sweetness to someone who has never tasted it. And I'm not going to pretend otherwise just to make the sale. Someone told me recently my stuff is too expensive. So let me ask the question underneath that question: what is the value of finally liking yourself? What is the value of your own freedom? What is the value of the moment when you realize the inner voice that has been telling you that you're not enough has been lying to you your whole life? I don't have a number for that. Neither do you. And that's exactly the point. The free workbooks are at theloveofyourlifetime.com. Scroll to the bottom. No email. No catch. Just the work — and a fair warning that it will ask you to be more honest with yourself than you may be used to.

The Words I Wanted To Hear. And Feel.

If you grew up hearing I love you from the same people who hurt you, you already know what this episode is about. It means that a lot of us have moved through life feeling fucked-up.  You know what it does to your self-concept when love and pain arrive in the same sentence. You know what it does to your identity when the people who were supposed to show you what love feels like showed you something else entirely and called it the same thing. You know the relationship patterns it creates — the ones you keep repeating, the ones that make no sense from the outside, the ones that make perfect sense once you understand where they started. What then, is this thing called, “love?” Was I too fucked-up to ever know what it is? Could be? Let’s chat…. Sunday night. Ninety degrees in St. Louis. I'm in bed next to my wife and something on television hits me so fast and so hard I don't move for I don't know how long. When did my mother say I love you without it being attached to an ass beating? I couldn't find a single time. What I found instead was her standing in the hallway, arms crossed over her housecoat, telling my father to hit me again because I hadn't learned yet. Not. One. This episode is about what that does to a child's inner voice. About the self-worth you can't build when the foundation is that. About the 17-year-old who wrote a love song called Where Were You, took it to a recording studio with his father, failed at something he was never equipped to do, and ended up at the end of the driveway with two paper bags of clothes feeling relief at the thought that it might all just be over. About what snapped on the walk up Whited Avenue, walking alone with those bags in my hands.  It became all about survival mode. About four marriages and alcohol and decades of not letting anyone close enough to hurt you again. And about what's on the other side of all of it — if you're willing to stop running long enough to find out. This one is for anyone who has ever wondered why love feels wrong when it arrives clean. Why I love you lands sideways. Why you keep choosing what hurts because at least you know how to survive it. You may not yet be ready to believe it, but we aren’t fucking broken.  Never were.  No matter how much we believed it. But damn if the journey doesn’t suck. Truly. Sit with me….

The Shit That "Self-Help" Won't Even Touch. Ever.

Another episode that I wasn't planning on posting. But like the others, here it is. I recorded this for myself. Voice memo. Private thoughts. The kind of conversation you have with yourself at 2am when something won't stop pulling at you and you finally just hit record because that's the only way to hear what you actually think. I posted it anyway. Because this is exactly the shit that self-help won't touch — and somebody needs to. Here's what nobody building a course or a following or a brand is going to tell you about self-concept work and inner transformation: it gets worse first. Not as a metaphor. Literally worse. I had a 1969 GTO with gunk all over the engine. Cleaned it up. Car ran like shit. Turns out the gunk was load-bearing — it was plugging the holes where the gaskets had failed. The car had built a compensation system out of its own damage. Clean it up and you expose everything the debris was holding together. That's what happens when you start paying honest attention to your inner voice, your relationship patterns, your self-worth, the stories you've been telling yourself since childhood. The self-help industry doesn't tell you this because it doesn't sell. I'm telling you because it's true and I lived it. I also talk about four people I know personally — a nurse, a doctor, a cop, a social worker — all in professions built around helping others, all of them miserable, all of them told me so directly. About what excessive drinking actually signals when someone is trying to squeeze themselves into an identity that doesn't fit. About the math we do — around alcohol, around wrong relationships, around careers we chose for everyone else — to defer the consequence just long enough to keep functioning. And about the one question that cuts through all of it. How many of the people you're going to for guidance on your life, your relationships, your sense of self — how many of them are actually happy? Not their follower count. Not their income. Not their curated highlight reel. Actually happy. Inside their own skin. When nobody's watching. Because if the answer is no — and more often than not, it is — what the fuck are you taking their advice for?