Episode 28 | The F Word — Who Decides The Value

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]

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….