Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Best of MBB 2023!

Episode Date: December 26, 2023

Mayim and Jonathan are bringing you their favorite podcast moments of 2023! Join us as we revisit ADHD and the benefits of reparenting yourself with Jodie Sweetin, Corey Feldman’s thoughts on forgiveness and life after child stardom, Dr. Susan David’s advice for “unsticking” from emotions, Melissa Rauch and Mayim’s favorite Big Bang Theory memories, and Marc Maron’s reflections on grief. We also reflect back on Dr. Neil Theise’s explanation for why we’re all more connected than we think, Ben Stiller tells us how he rekindled his marriage during the pandemic, Gabriel Iglesias gives us his take on aliens, Whitney Cummings roasts Jonathan’s beard….plus so much more! BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's Miami-Bi-Aleck's breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. Because you know she knows a thing or two. And now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down. Hi, I'm Miami-Ellick. And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

And the way our 20-23 has gone, we're sitting right next to each other and can't even be on the same computer. Today we're breaking down some of the best episodes of 2023 just for you. There were too many to choose, which was the best one to include You can't choose just one.

It's like having a favorite child. It's impossible. People ask us, though, who's the best interview that we've had? What do we learn from them? So we did a super cut. We did. What's a super cut, Jonathan? It's where things are super in there, cut together.

What we've done is we've taken some of our best guests and topics of the year. We hope that you agree with who we've picked. But if your favorite was left out, we want to hear about it. We want all of your anger and outrage. Or we want positive comments about how much you've enjoyed the journey with us, you know. We're going to revisit ADHD and the benefits of reparenting yourself. What does that even mean with Jody Sweeten? She brought us that.

Corey Feldman opened up about forgiveness and life after child stardom. Dr. Susan David has wonderful advice for getting unstuck from an emotion. I wish that I even knew what that meant. I'm such an expert in unsticking. Oh, wait, I'm not. I learned a lot from Dr. Susan David. Melissa Rauch's Blossom fan-girling. That was a great moment for me

and how she met Myam and Big Bang Theory memories. Mark Maren, this was a fantastically rich, complicated episode. He talked specifics about grief, even things that he hadn't shared in his special that he did about his loss over COVID. Dr. Neil Thies explains why we are all more connected than we think really breaks down the science of the meditative or philosophical notion that we are all one in an amazing way. Also, from a completely physiologically appropriate and scientifically fascinating perspective,

I love that episode. We had Ben Stiller on. It was quite a big deal. I know you weren't here, Jonathan, but the episode still made it in. Ben Stiller talked to us about how he rekindled his marriage during the pandemic, and he laughed a lot. His eyes were so pretty. I just keep thinking about that.

Great episode. Gabriel Iglesias, Fluffy, gives us his take on aliens and tells us about a harrowing plane crashed. Really big moment in his life this year. We had someone on who created a lot of conversation. We had Jada Pinkett Smith on to discuss her memoir, and she talked all about her relationship with Will Smith, She talked about why she's chosen to be so open about it and why she chooses to delve into it repeatedly in public,

but I had a great time learning all about it. Whitney Cummings roasted my beard and made mine laugh in a way that was just unbelievable. That was a hilarious episode and also filled with a lot of heart and insight, a lot of recovery in the room when she joined us. And the expression, Finger in Tushy came up in that episode. Thank you, Whitney.

I want to give a shout out to, if you haven't listened to the Bob Odenkirk episode, it's really, really awesome. Also, Sharon Salzberg, one of the human beings who brought the practice of meditation and loving kindness from the East to the United States and to the West. Also, Angela Johnson Reyes, Joel Kim Booster.

We've had so many great guests this year, Justine Bateman, talking all about aging. Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Ron Funches, who was probably the person I enjoyed making laugh the most. because I love his laugh. Also, I sing a song with Eric Hutchinson, which I didn't do as well as I wanted to.

I'm much better when he's in concert, and I'm in the back of the room singing along. I was out at one of those concerts, and she almost took over the show. Plus, so many more things. We hope you enjoyed what we were able to bring to you in 20203. Kind of a dumpster fire of a year in a lot of ways. But we're going to take the first week of January off

to try and regroup. We are so looking forward to showing you many exciting things that we have in store for 2024. We've got some exciting things coming up. and we're very, very grateful that we've had the opportunity to keep having you a part of our lives. We think about you every day, even if we're not on every day. We put a lot of thought into what we do here. And Valerie, we're so appreciative of all the hard work Valerie is put in this year.

And Jonathan, thank you for continuing to show up in 2023 in such an awesome way. Thank you, Ma'am. And thank you to all the other guests who we could have three supercuts. so many amazing clips and episodes that I really enjoyed, and thank you for coming along the journey. Happy New Year, everyone. We hope you have safe holidays and that you've enjoyed being part of our journey as much as we have enjoyed being part of this journey with you. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have, we'll see you in 2004. Having gotten diagnosed with ADHD later in life, I have found that looking at all of those

ways that I grew up, I think were actually, it was like the perfect environment for someone like me because I was constantly stimulated and doing something different and learning something new. What made you initially be like, maybe I should explore this as a potential diagnosis or label? I was reading more and more about girls and how ADHD affects them. It looks different than in boys. It looks very different. It looks like talking. talking a lot. It looks like not being able to shut up in class and let me tell you that was the number one thing I got in trouble for. Like name on the board every day teachers hated me,

but they loved me, but they were like, she can't. I don't physically think she can stop talking. Wow. And I was like, I can't. I can't right now. It's good for podcast hosts. You know what my therapist said to me recently? She said, and it sort of ties into being a parent yourself, is she said that parenting is learning how to reparent yourself. And it's learning how to be the parent that you needed to show up for you, like in all of the ways that, you know, maybe didn't happen. And that there's nothing wrong with your parents.

And it's okay that they did things wrong. Or different. Or different. Right, right, right. That it doesn't make you a bad person for then talking about it and being like, that kind of fucked me up. You know what I mean? I think one of the things that happens with adoptees is that we discount ourselves and

think, well, all that happened before I remember. Right. You know what I mean? Like, that was like the first year of my life. Like, what the hell was it? You know what I mean? Like, all the rest of it was fine. The body keeps score.

The body keeps the score. Such a great book. Those are things I don't remember, but my body does. And so, you know, for me, living a life long battle with anxiety and depression and all of those things, you know, I had to really stop and look at and reconsider the importance of those things and not use them as an excuse, but allow them to enter, right, to enter my brain as part of the information. of, oh, this is what's affecting me. And again, until I look at it, I can't do anything about it. So if I'm constantly going, well, that's stupid. There's no way that could be it.

And how do I know unless I look at it? I do regret the fact that I didn't have a normal life or the option to have a normal life. You know, the problem is that when you work so young and your life is dedicated to the point where you're already kind of seen as famous before you're even famous, before you even know what that is before you know what your own name or worth or value as a human is. The problem with that is you can't get fame and then decide, okay, now I don't want it anymore. It doesn't work that way because now people point and laugh at you. People look down at you.

They go, oh, you're working a blockbuster now and you used to be famous. L loser. And you're disregarded as like a loss. Like your life is over. You're worthless. And that's the guilt that's put, you know, that's the guilt that's put on top of you the second you walk out of that hit show or the second you walk away from that, you know, series of films or whatever it is.

Right. So you can't just stop. You'd like to stop, but you can't stop because if you don't, then you get this, this bullying that happens from the world at large that, oh, well, you're no good anymore. Sorry, I guess you just blew it, you know, you're over with. It's tragic and it's sad because at my age. I should not have so much loss of life. But yet, I feel like I'm a 75-year-old man

because literally 70% of my friends are gone. 70% of them are gone. You know, that's insane. It was a very rigorous emotional time. And also, you know, we were young people and teens at a time when drugs looked very different. And it wasn't because they died because they were random knuckleheads

who just did a lot of drugs. These kids were badly abused. Let's call it what it is. They were badly abused. I was badly abused. And that's why we did drugs. We did drugs because generally the abusers were the ones giving us the drugs. Otherwise, we wouldn't have had them in the first place.

I live my life thinking this, that I have one shot to do it right. I am a spiritual man. I believe in God. I pray every night. And I believe that God wants help with this. I believe that that was the message it was given to me after I saw too many of my friends die. I learned that, you know, it's best to pray for others

and not pray for yourself because praying for your own selfish means tends to go nowhere. When you're selfless instead of selfish and you give back instead of taking all the time, that things just tend to work out for you. I can forgive, but I cannot forget. And therefore, if somebody is still a,

ongoing threat to society by my perception, then I can't forget it. I can forgive what was done to me. And I can say, okay, I'll be fine. I'll deal with it. But you're still going to go out there and ruin other people's lives. And I can't let that go. If you can just get to the point of being okay with yourself, where we're not self-abusing, we're not self-harming, we're not looking down upon ourselves. And we're simply just realizing our own worth. Then we can be a productive member of society, right? So that to me is where the forgiveness is. It's like, I forgive myself for the pain that I've allowed others to cause me. I forgive myself for causing pain to anybody and intentionally, you know? And I also forgive those who have caused pain for me inadvertently. But anybody that's

just an evil shit or whatever, you know, this is going out of their way to hurt people. I don't have much forgiveness for that. The overarching narrative, even in psychology, is that emotions are good or bad, positive or negative. Now, if we grow up in a society that tells us that some of our emotions are bad, then that fundamental premise is that when you experience these difficult emotions and they are so-called negative or bad, we then learn a whole lot of strategies to try and suppress them, do away with them. And we do this because we, you know, again, have this narrative around us.

But what it leads to is a greater and greater disconnect with the core of who we are, with our values, with what we care about. And there are profound consequences. That person who now is connecting their values with their actions has significantly lower levels of burnout. and higher levels of well-being. All of us engage every day in actions that can either bring us towards our values or away from our values, regardless of our circumstances. And there don't need to be huge things. They can be smaller things, but there are aspects that involve thinking about how we can

make changes that allow us to reflect in the way we come to ourselves or others, the stuff that matters in our worlds. Children who have grown up in communities that tell them constantly, or in families that tell them constantly, you don't matter. You're never going to go to college. You're never going to make anything of your life. That child hears that. that constantly. And so what the child starts to grow up with is a stereotyped. We often think of

stereotypes of things we have about others, but we can actually internalize other people's stereotypes. And we start to have a stereotype view of ourselves. The vast majority of those kids are likely to take those stereotypes that they've grown up with and then turn them back on themselves. So they'll start saying, oh, everyone was right. You see, everyone was right. I'm not cut out for it. A child who spends just 10 minutes affirming their values is protected three years down the track from taking those stereotypes and turning them against themselves.

So again, I keep belaboring the point. But I think it's because these are foundational. skills that enable us to be healthy human beings in a world that will constantly tell us we do not deserve to be. Fusion is the idea that you have a thought. The thought might be, I'm not good enough. There's no point. I've already stuffed up, so there's no, I may as well not even bother. So we have these thoughts. We have these emotions. Emotions might be emotions of anxiety. there might be sadness, it might be experiences of grief. We might have stories.

Our stories, some of them were written on our mental chalkboards when we were five years old, stories about whether we're good enough, whether we belong, whether we're creative. You know, in a world of social media that tells us you've got to only think positive things or you'll manifest, you know, a reality that, you know, this world of magical thinking. That is nonsense. our thoughts, our emotions and our stories, including the difficult ones, the challenging ones, the ones that feel horrible to have are completely normal. You know, they are your body and your psychology trying to help you make sense of the world.

When you say something like, I am stressed, okay, we all do this. I am sad. I am stressed. you can hear the fusion that is happening in that language. I am, all of me, 100% of me is defined by anxiety, by sad, by stress. When you define all of you by that difficulty emotion, there is no space for calm or wisdom or breathing, love, courage, connection, there's no space for any of it. So language matters. I am sad. I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad. I am anxious. I'm noticing that right now I'm feeling anxiety. What

you're doing linguistically is you just creating a little breath between you and the emotion so you can start unsticking from it. My Mbialx breakdown is supported by superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful. Maybe they're like, you're fine, drink more water. There's no real data. There's no game plan. This has happened to me many, many times, especially on the perimenopause journey. That's why we're fascinated by what superpower is doing. They send a licensed professional to your home or you can visit a nearby lab, one simple blood draw with over 100 biomarkers. That's way more than you usually get. It unlocks a true understanding.

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Make sure to mention my and Biala's breakdown to help support the show. My grandpa, his cousin was put in the closet for speaking Spanish at school. And then the teacher forgot him in the closet. And he never came home from school. And his mom was like calling the school. and then the teacher remembered she left him in the closet and they had to come back and get him. Unreal.

Traumatic. Awful. And like what that does to you and your family about speaking Spanish, about your culture and embracing all of that. And then it just trickles down into what you teach your children. And so then it's like, oh, blend in.

Don't speak Spanish. Don't have an accent. Don't talk about this. Don't talk about that. You know. Peanut Butter and Jers. Kelly, put your burrito away. I am subconsciously assigning mom, dad, all of that.

Siblings even, right. Teacher at school, principal. Like, I am assigning people an authority role over me. And I'm coming in, like, I'm 40 years old, but I'm coming in, like, I'm this little kid. And I'm like, okay, here's my presentation. Give me a good grade. Right.

And what they say goes. They're the boss. I had never had a conversation with my dad about the trauma that has been caused in my life because of his actions. I'm writing out everything from never hearing, I'm proud of you, never hearing any of those types of things, to him competing with me, to verbally abusive, physically abusive, like all the things growing up. And this is the first time you've kind of tackled this with him. Ever. Ever. I said, I wrote you a letter.

I'm going to read it to you. And he's like, okay. And I was like, I want you to not say anything during this letter. Just listen. Just listen. Afterwards, you can ask me questions. We could talk about it. I don't want you to say anything.

And he's like, okay, I start reading my letter. The whole time I'm reading it. What? Wow. I don't remember that. When? My dad does not have the capacity. to understand his own trauma and the trauma he has caused.

Correct. I think when I released myself of needing him to understand and own what he did to me in my life, when that was, the weight of that was gone, it was like, I can actually have a great relationship with you now. Wow. Trauma taught me a lot. and me getting into therapy because of trauma, educating myself in those ways,

being open to aspects of faith. I'm so grateful for my upbringing in faith, but I also see where it was limiting and where it was traumatic and where it caused damage. And I'm able to deconstruct that and be like, oh, this was amazing that I learned from Christianity. Oh, this, I'm going to hold on to this.

This part right here, that's real toxic. That's got to go somewhere. That was not the Lord. That was man-made religious trauma right there. So I feel like trauma was a gift to then get help for it. If I didn't experience this trauma, I wouldn't seek this type of help. And I wouldn't have learned these types of things. whether you want to call it god or not i think we all have a knowing in our our own spirit in our own

self when you are in alignment with truth truth of who you are truth of what you're capable of truth of your value and we all step out of alignment daily weekly monthly whatever it is you can be like on a roll and then all of a sudden you're doubting yourself and you're insecure one day and then you bring yourself back into alignment with truth. You're like, oh, no, I'm right where I'm supposed to be. Like, I am enough. I think there's an intuition, a confidence in that. And when you're like, your life is messy and you're in a state of like insecurity or doubt or like all the things,

then I think it's harder to be in touch with that intuition and knowing in your own spirit, whether you call it God or self. I was diagnosed bipolar when I was in my 30s, my early 30s. And it was one of those things. The diagnosis, you know, is, it's upsetting. It's not something you want to hear, but it did also at the same time really reframe a lot of my experiences growing up and as a younger adolescent and as a young adult. And I found it very helpful because it was like putting words to feelings that I didn't know

how to manage as a young adult and as someone in my 20s. And so it was, it was, it really recolored a lot of those experiences, specifically that one instance, when I came out and really had like my first sort of like true meltdown, breakdown, um, that, um, would go on to sort of, I would re-experience moments like that throughout my life. And I didn't ever really know why or how or to deal with it. Mania was sort of how my bipolar manifested, um, a hypomania. mostly. It was really hard to pinpoint because I was so productive. And as a as a person who's very social as well, like I was always, it's, it's really hard for a lot of people to pinpoint that

as a problem sometimes because when I was hypomanic, I was funny. I was charismatic. I was, you know, my garage has never been cleaner. Exactly. I was in a hypomantic episode. It's a hard thing to let go of when you start treating it. You know, we don't talk about that a lot. I, I went into treatment and before, in the beginning stages of it, you know, you miss that mania a little bit, you know, because, and I struggled a lot with whether or not my medication was dampening my creative ability, I, or suppressing a part of myself that I felt was very core to who I was, you know, and it's scary. And obviously, now that I've, I've sort of, you know, gone through the process of figuring out what the right cocktail of medication is.

is I'm a much happier person, just like living in stability. And I think it is part of the trick of the disease that like you, you sort of grow to really appreciate and love certain parts of yourself when you're you're manic. It's scary to let go of that. I was an early adopter of being an overshare on social media. The lie is you're seeing 90% of who I am as a person right now, when in fact it was always just 15%. You know? And but because I was selling it as radical transparency and my entire life is,

is an open book for you. They had this idea that they knew who I was on a really deep level when in fact they didn't. It's one of those things where I just needed to walk it back in, in order to regain control of my own narrative. Everything I was doing was being pathologized as like, anything I did was like, oh, that's a gay guy thing or that's an Asian guy thing or et cetera, et cetera. And I was so worried that like now being public about this, everything I would do would be colored by this lens of mental illness too. And I didn't want to step into becoming like a spokesperson or some sort of model of what mental disease looked like. I just wanted to be honest and be me. I don't want to feel like I'm selling out my entire race by just having the interests that I have and being the person

that I am. And yet I do feel that pressure. We're sort of up against a century. of these messages and these ideas around who we are as people based on our race that are really hard to dismantle. I would love to be able to just not think about these triangulations of my various identities every time I do anything. I'm doing the calculus of it all constantly. Having to go through those thoughts, it takes its toll emotionally and it's exhausting. And I don't think that we sort of address how that the, mental exhaustion that people of color and people of different identities, that labor that we have to go through every day to try and like, stay ahead of people's assumptions about us.

So I was sitting next to Mayam at our table read and trying to decide the entire time, at what point do I tell her that I grew up being such a huge fan of Blossom? Like I'm talking like pretty hardcore Blossom fan dressed up as her, like had a Blossom. hat, reenacted the opening of Blossom with my childhood best friend. Like, pretty, pretty hardcore. So every episode loved her in Beaches. Beaches was also one of my favorite movies. So, like, it was a big deal that were you sitting next to each other. So I was like, do I bring it up immediately?

Or do I wait so that she doesn't think I'm too thirsty? And then we become friends. And then I sneak it in casual. Like, what's worse? What's worse? if like after like is it a bait and switch that I'm like, eh, I'm cool. And then all of a sudden, I'm like, I got to tell you I'm a big fan.

So our dressing rooms were next door to each other. So there was a lot of just knocking on each other's doors. And we share, even shared our, they were adjoining for a while, wasn't it? We share, so we shared a bathroom. That's right. For the first, I think the first year. And then there was some renovation that happened. And all of a sudden, we each had our own bathroom.

And I thought, oh, she doesn't like to share a Pish room with me. Okay. Look who got too big for her bridges. I did not initiate that. I did not turn it down when it was supposed. No, I think, right. Look, you saw the beginning of this and would I turn down sharing a bathroom with Blossom? Out of my head?

People always ask me like, what was your favorite episode? And it's like, I don't think in episodes, you know? Like, I remember certain things that were particularly fun. Like, I always liked doing, you know, like Penny Bernadette, Amy stuff. Like, I liked, you know, when we would go out drinking and, like, those were fun. But I more think about, and I hate to give people a downer of a response, but I more think about that we were together, you know, for a decade of our lives, you know, give or take. And I more think about like all the other things that went on in our lives that is nobody's

business, you know, and that's usually what I say. It's like, you know, I know for me, like I got divorced. My dad died. You know, like life happened for all of us. And while everybody thinks of us as these characters and these relationships and it was so funny and I loved it. And that's super important and it's so valuable. And we were a very specific thing, you know, in television history. What I more think about is like that was that was like almost a decade of my life that I spent, you know, with these people who I saw more than I saw my own family, really. It was very much a family for that decade. And it was my first job where I knew. knew I was going every day and there really wasn't a minute where I drove on that lot where I didn't

feel like this immense sense of gratitude for this thing that I was going to. And yeah, I think it's very much about the people. I think the fun of those tape nights and that that electricity and it really is what sort of made me fall in love with that medium and why I wanted to do it again. But there was it was just a very special moment in time. When you have narcissistic parents, you're an appendage. So, you know. Also, it's very unusual to have two narcissistic parents. Oftentimes you'll have a narcissist and then, you know, kind of an enabler.

Co-dependent, yeah. Yeah. When there's a flavor of that with both, it leads to a lot of this kind of floating. You're kind of like. You've got to build you. Correct. You sort of emulate and see what sticks until you, you know, become who you are. When you have these, these type of parents is that you are,

you do not know how to receive or give love properly. I think that when you have, you know, kind of needy, selfish parents, you're denied a fundamental foundation of you. If your parents aren't capable of detaching properly in order for you to make mistakes and come into yourself, you know, you become sort of this, you know, there's a, I don't know, is the word amorphous. There, there was something, you know, yearning. You know, I don't think I had a very defined sense of self. I didn't really know how to live life. So I didn't know how to have any discipline around seeing the future or organizing my thoughts.

I just didn't have the ability to compartmentalize. The journey to self, which, you know, was fractured for me. I mean, I would argue that there's a possibility that I may have been a borderline personality disorder person when I was younger. because my dad is like there's something wrong with them. And, you know, it was never clear if it was bipolar or mania or whatever or narcissism, but it's a little bit of all of them. Yeah, it's usually not just one thing. Whatever I have, I had the fortitude to survive. I had enough incentive or something inside of me to the will to sort of like not be, you know, destroyed by two pathologically selfish people. And I think that there's some part of the revealingness is me owning that space.

Is that, you know, this is, this is who I am, this is what I come from. This is what I do. This is my life. That it's an aggressive act of self proclamation. I've been horrible. Horrible. I've been emotionally abusive. I've been a fuck around. I've been. I've been jealous. I've been, like, you know, I was a very destructive type of man and very selfish. This is all in addiction also, correct? Of course. And I'm no good at intimacy now. Love feels manipulative to me. I'm afraid of disappearing. So, so that's a trust issue in order to to manufacture what feels like relationship. It's usually around drama and provocation. When you have parents that are incapable of nurturing and they basically are just using you,

as an extension of their own emotions, and they play their emotions out with each other and themselves on you, and that's love. I mean, how are you not, or how are you not wary of that? It's exhausting. I was very, you know, full of angry swagger for a lot of years, and I heard a lot of people's feelings, and, you know, I broke a lot of hearts. You know, it's taken years to take any sort of, you know, responsibility for that. The devastating thing really is like you don't, you don't expect people to die. And there's nothing that's going to prepare you for that. I decided I should show up in this state for people. It wasn't serving me. I don't know if it's by virtue of my self-centeredness. I don't know, but I knew that talking about it, not unlike Shiva, not unlike anything else,

that you're going to sit with this, you know, and, you know, it is a human thing that that's what evolved was that, you know, once I found, like, the sadness is going to be what it's going to be, that layer of grief is going to stay there. Totally. There's nothing you can do about that. Right. So to counterbalance it and find the balance between humor that, you know, that can sustain and hold the grief, that was the trick.

I had to lie to become a parent. I had to say on my adoption certificate thing that I was not now, nor had I ever been a lesbian. That was just standard practice. And there were gay social workers who you would know someone who knew someone and you'd call them and they'd get in to be your person. And we'd help each other create these families. And, you know, we'd get our fingerprints. We'd do everything legally. But as for, you know, who I wanted to be in bed with, I didn't really, you know, wasn't going to let that prevent.

me from being a parent of children in need. I think that nature or nurture is a real question. And when you adopt, you try to find a situation where everyone kind of wins, where a family in crisis for a variety of reasons, all of them valid, decide that they can't parent this child and want to find a home for the child. And so you try to make a triad between you, the birth, family and the baby, you know you've signed a triple contract for life that you three are going to be kind of connected in some way, even if it's a closed adoption. All of my adoptions were closed except Dakota because it was 10 years, 20 years later and the adoption models that is used now, mostly is open. Adoption trauma is the fact that the baby sitting in the amniotic fluid with

the cortisol flipping out from the mother who's going to have to do this thing that she doesn't really want to do, place the baby or wants to do or needs to do, but feels she can't do. It's all of that cortisol stew that the baby's in. And then, you know, hearing the voices of the mother and the father, hearing the voices and the smell, there's actually smells that baby takes from the mom. And then all of a sudden you're in this world and you're given to someone else and they don't smell the same. It's not the same heartbeat rate. And there's an initial primal wound that occurs. And, you know, Dakota is on the spectrum and had a beautiful interaction with her birth mother when she

was five, asked to talk to her on the phone. And we found her and got her on the phone. And she said, I just wanted to let you know, I'm the baby that was in your stomach. Oh, God. And I wanted you to know that I ended up with my mommy because she grabbed my finger and I wouldn't let go of her pinky. So I'm all good now and I just wanted to tell you so bye. And she walked away from the phone. The birth mother's sobbing. I'm sobbing. And she never mentioned it again.

We've been getting more and more abstracted from the world we arise from. I don't think it's a surprise that that was like, you know, 10,000 years or so ago, and then you start to have five or six thousand years later these, you know, what we call the great religions, they're popping up all over the place. And I think it was the necessity after a few thousand years of abstraction to find ways to reconnect, even within the midst of that abstraction. And that's what I think that a lot of the spiritual traditions are doing. They're going inward to find those connections, even as outward we're pulled away.

All these concepts are useless to bring me peace, to give me resilience. To me, they're pointers at something. When we're talking about that connection to the world that makes you feel whole like we were just describing, the ideas of how to do that don't do it. experience of connecting to the world, whether it's by getting out of your city and going for a walk in the woods, or maybe it's just going to Central Park, or maybe it's just showing up for the person who's your neighbor in a fully present way, the way you'd be fully present if you were looking at a bird and a tree with every fiber of your being. Those experiences reveal the unity of

things. Maybe there's a God's eye view from which all of this makes sense, are bound to are our skin, and that's the way we think of ourselves. But at the cellular level, where are our boundaries? We're not a living human body without our microbiome. And current estimates are 50% of your cells or your human cells, and 50% of your living body necessarily are these bacteria and other stuff. All the people who share a home and their pets all share a single microbiome. You come in with your own microbiomes, but within a very short time, this has been studied and measured.

Your microbiomes emerge into one single system. At the molecular level, the boundary of our bodies is the entire biomass of the planet. At the atomic level, we see ourselves as being these isolated individuals walking around on this rock we call planet Earth. But there is no atom in our bodies that we didn't breathe, eat, or drink from the planet. So are we separate individuals walking around on the surface of planet Earth, or are we the atomic substance of the Earth that in three and a half billion years have self-organized, according to the rules of chaos and complexity theory, into living things that think of themselves as separate? Compassion arises from the experience of the boundaries.

Because you don't have to ask, what does this person need? What should I withhold? What, you know, that's the compassion. Do I give someone money on the street or do I call 911 or, you know, that's compassion. But real compassion, my hand hits the stove and it turns out it's hot and my other hand leaps to pull it back. It doesn't stop and pause and think, should I do this? Will this put me in danger? Actions that arise from that sense of unity, that's real compassion.

wisdom is seeing the world as it is without delusion. Complexity theory and Goetheum and quantum physics and biology, et cetera, et cetera, to me, give us now the frame to see the world without delusion in a more complete way. And the result of that is compassion. So the wisdom is seeing the nature of true reality and cultivating a direct experience of it. What arises from that is true compassion. And that's what heals the world. You like aliens and conspiracy theories.

Yes, I do. I think that we are definitely a small little piece of dust in a giant swimming pool. Because I've always said it too. We're just, you know, have fun. As soon as the aliens get here, get ready. You know, because I think it's at least with me, like, yeah, this is not going to end well. I just, I do the math on that. And it's just there's no way.

The universe is just so massive. They're like, really? We're the ones? We're the ones that get all the life? Okay. All right. And some people still think we're flat. And I'm just like, okay.

I always like to imagine like an ant hill. You know, there's all these ants on the hill. And they're just all about their own little thing that's going on. They're just going out. They're collecting food for the queen. They're building their nest. And that's all they know. They have no idea that on the other side of the world,

there's another ant hill. and millions of ant hills from here to there. Maybe there's aliens that are nice and pleasant and they want to help grow other species and stuff like that. And there's got to be some aliens that are at dicks. You know, there's got to be the dicks of their community. And they're like, you know, they will die, you know, and freaking, you know, incinerate versus helping to grow.

Because, I mean, like, for example, we're right there trying to teach chimps sign language to better communicate with them. We want to help them, you know, be their best version of them to try to understand and, communicate and what's to say that that's not what's happening out there. Like, you know, we see these freaking hairless things down there. You know, they're walking around.

They know how to hold sticks and stuff like that. They can be taught. They can be taught, you know, because the amount of technology that we have, you know, developed in 200 years, not even 200 years, is insane. When you think about, you know, how long ago it was just a horse and a wagon. And like, you know, smoke signals were like, oh, my God, right? They're sending smoke signals and like, look at that. They're, they're, look at, ooh.

And now it's like you send a text and literally anywhere in the world. That's crazy. And that's mind-boggling when you think about it. Yeah, for sure. The truth is out there. Coming out of the industry at a young age, you end up having a very transactional outlook on interpersonal relationships. you kind of are like, what am I getting from this? Or what do I have to do?

How do I have to perform in order to extract what I need in this moment? And it really messes you up for a long time. You know, you also have to live in your ego actively. I actually call a narcissistic purgatory in, I believe, that article as well. Because it's like you don't want to talk about, yourself, but you have to talk about yourself. You don't want to think about the past because you want to heal from the past, but you have to talk about the past because that's all people talk about. And so it's like you're one foot in, one foot out, or one foot grabbing you from the grave.

And you're like, what can I do? I cannot win. So you feel extremely vulnerable and you feel extremely exposed. And everywhere you go, you feel raw and you feel like you have to be a version of yourself because that better version of yourself is going to improve the quality of your life or you know you don't have any answers essentially because you you really aren't given a point of view when you're a young kid and you're and they're like this is the character you're going to play you kind of dissociate um over time there's a lot of my childhood that I don't even remember um when I think about how I'm getting my kids. to connect the dots in interpersonal relationships from now.

It's not just gentle parenting. It's me reparenting myself. They have body awareness. No means no. And just that alone, that body awareness keeps them in their body. If I ever know, if I ever see them get that thousand yard stare where they're dissociating because it's like an uncomfortable moment, I'm immediately like, okay, let's try to take the time we can because this is obviously sending this kid to a point that they can.

that they can't handle this. This is why child actors are addicts. It's because they had the high highs and they're at a low low and they're trying to find that feeling of joy and, you know, I remember just going out every single night. I was struggling so hard with feeling seen

and I would dye my hair different colors, you know, and I would just keep paying money to psychics and, you know, it was just stupid shit. I would sleep with different people. It was like I was just filling the void with different things. I did a lot of things with my body that I never would have done if I hadn't been a child actor. I definitely had a love addiction as well over time that really brought me to my knees several

times. It goes back to being addicted to people, places and things. I was addicted to other people filling that void inside of me. and physically, emotionally, luckily, it was not financially. I just wanted them to love me and I just wanted them to stay. And I just wanted to fill the void that like, you know, my mom really made me feel perfect. And I just feel like I was looking for that perfection, for someone to think that I was their perfect person again. I actually have that in my partnership and in my marriage.

I've managed to carve that out because of my sobriety, because of my commitment, because of me showing up for myself. I've made peace with, I've made peace with so much. I was one of the first people that I knew, you know, in my circle that was divorced.

I was a trailblazer in ways. First the flower hat, then the divorce. Yeah. And, you know, I, I, everybody having fun. Why can't not let a good? That's a solid burn. Basically, a New Year's tradition for me because I don't drink.

I'm allergic to alcohol. And I realize I've been spending a lot of New Year's ease just chasing women around and ended up on party buses that I didn't want to be on. And I was like, this does not seem productive. That's how I met mine. On a party bus? So you're going to unmeat me too.

Yeah, that sounds like a place you hang out. And I'd heard about vision boards. It's just like a business plan but for your life. You wouldn't just come into a bank asking for a loan with no business plan. And you can't go into your life for the year with no guidance, no goals, no map. So it's just like whatever you want on there, spiritual goals, physical goals, just materialistic goals. Words of affirmation are just pictures that make you feel powerful or strong?

Sure. I like a pompom. Yes. There's a lot of things that happen in my life that really folks forced me to really dive into individuality. You know, having a son who had autism was like, okay, he's going to be different. Our lives are going to be different. The way that he needs to be parented is going to be different. and I'm going to have to defend all of that.

And so I need to be able to defend myself, my individualities, who I am as a person, and continue to push that. The best weapon I have is me. And so the more me I become, the more I dig into what I am and what I love and what I'm about, the more I differentiate myself,

and I think it served me well now. I never used to be an angry person before I started meditating, needless to say, I'd been hugely angry, but I hadn't ever quite faced it or seen it. So I would say the successful part came when I could combine that sort of introspection and the highlighting of my interior world with a real loving kindness and compassion instead of all that judgment.

And that took a while because I didn't believe it. You know, I didn't believe in it. I thought, well, it's garbage. You know, that's what they say to like the real beginners because they can't do the real thing, you know. What's hard for many people to believe And so much of the commentary I can't do it, I tried it once, I failed at it, comes from a kind of expectation

that a good meditation is going to look like, well, you know, I felt a little restless in the beginning and then this piece, this unfathomable peace, just descended. And then it began to like shimmer the edges and became bliss. And then it was bliss and peace and bliss and peace. And I seeing meditation as a skills training, first of all, in concentration, being less fragmented, less kind of divided, less distracted, certainly, and being more aware, being more mindful.

So what happens when we're mindful? It's not just being with our experience, like noticing I hear sound or I feel fear, but it's being with it in a certain way so that we can continue to explore it. So it's developing curiosity, it's developing interest, not being subject to. immediate reactivity so we can check things out for ourselves. And then loving kindness or compassion. Because if you talk about interconnection as the basis of that, that's the reality of things that's often overlooked. So how many other people need to be doing their job well,

for you to do your job well? Let's take apart our reality. And we find one another. As Buddha said, the mind is naturally radiant and pure. The mind is shining. It's because of visiting forces that we suffer. And there are a couple of important things in that statement.

One is these forces, like our greed or fear or jealousy, they're only visiting. You're not inherent to our being. They're born out of conditions. They may visit a lot. They may visit nearly all the time, but they're still only visiting. And the other thing is,

the Buddha didn't say it's because of visiting forces that were horrible people. He said it's because of visiting forces that we suffer. So I'd think of myself right away, sitting at home, minding my own business, there's a knock at the door. So we'd go answer the door and there's, you know, jealousy or, you know, terrible fear or something. And I can either fling open the door and say, welcome home. It's all yours. Thereby forgetting who lives there.

Or he's so freaked out that I desperately should. shut the door, trying to pretend they never heard the knock, only to find that they come in the window or they come down the chimney. Somehow they make their presence known. So a kind of skills question is, what do we do with the door? We've heard the knock, and there it is. And we practice. We practice more balance. We practice more presence. We practice more kindness. And it turns out it's a more successful way of dealing with the visitor. The idea of love has gotten so diminished, that we think of it as sentimentality or a weakness

rather than a great force that can transform. So when we talk about loving kindness, it's not determining the action we're going to take, right? It's determining the heart space, which we are dwelling in, as you said, you know, whereas one of my friends put it about somebody had like a grudge against that he went over and over and over and over and over and over the grudge. He said, I let him live rent free in my brain for too long.

What would it be like to be free of that? And it's a whole different worldview. Genuinely, so. Not forcing yourself to. I think it would free up a lot of energy with which to try to make a difference. You know, but we're coming from a very different place. And I think it's powerful. Love is powerful in that sense.

because it's based on the truth of how connected we are, that we live in an interconnected universe, like it or not. And science certainly shows us this. And epidemiology shows us this. Economic shows us this. Environmental consciousness shows us this. And that's a lot of what loving kindness really means, you know, like that we acknowledge that degree of connection.

And the idea of self and other in us and then we see as a construct. But that doesn't mean you're going to just let somebody behave the way they behave or not fight or not protect somebody. And that's the confusion many people have, you know, countless people who said to me, I don't know about this like opening your heart thing because then I can only say yes. I can only let them move back in. I can only give them more money. I could only let them keep hurting me. And I don't think it means to any of that.

We know that such a thing is tough love. We know this such a thing is fierce compassion. And, you know, our actions might be intense and have a strong boundary and really saying no. And partly that's based on a balance of compassion for ourselves as well as compassion for someone else. I was very connected to my parents. You know, I didn't, I got homesick a lot. I had some traumatic events that would happen when I was away from my parents. Things would get, it was scary to be on my own.

Now, I haven't really explored that. I mean, I've been in therapy over the years and different forms of therapy. But, and I guess I have explored it. But, I mean, you know, in terms of like why I was so connected to them. I mean, I feel like, you know, you love your parents. You want to be with your parents. That's a natural thing. Sure.

They probably were going away a lot to work. They would come out here to L.A. to work a lot. They never wanted to move to L.A. They were New Yorkers. So they would go for a few weeks at a time. And when you're a kid, a couple of weeks is a long time. And so my sister and I were kind of on our own with our housekeeper, Hazel, who is our sort of second mom. There was a lot of anxiousness, I think, or kind of fear of being alone.

I mean, my mom, you know, my mom had issues across her life with alcoholism. she got sober and was really explored that stuff. She had a very tough child. She lost her mom when she was 10. She was an only child. She had so much trauma. And the thing that I'm so grateful for is that, you know, I think so many people who live with alcoholism,

in their families, it's never dealt with. Sure. Right? It's never, ever explored or even talked about. And so that's what I'm grateful for is that she really dealt into that in her therapy. For someone who's a functioning alcoholic, you know, it's basically you're trying to sort of navigate that because it's not dramatic, you know. We had been separated and we came back together. It happened to coincide with, I guess, a place in our relationship where we were trying to figure out, you know, whether or not.

we were going to be together or not. We weren't together and had been separated for a couple of years. But I think we both had the desire to explore that. And I know I did. We made the decision when lockdown happened that we were going to all stay in our house together when we hadn't been living together. I wanted to get back together.

So I don't know if she did or not. I get the feeling she could have gone either. And then for like a year we were in the house together, but we weren't really a couple together. We've had all sorts of ups and downs. And, you know, it's not a perfect relationship in any way. But at the end of the day, we really appreciate each other. And I know that since we got back together on my end, I appreciate it even more because I don't take whatever I might have taken for granted before. Ben Stillard, do you have a favorite Yiddish word?

I like, I mean, there's a bunch. You know, I like tumult. Oh, look at you. Well, I like tumult because it's sort of been appropriated as like a word in our language, as a lot of Yiddish words have. I like Mishbukha. Okay. Very nice. Family.

It's fun to say. You know, and then there's like Oigavalt. It's just a great expression. It just like grew up with that. Oh, it's a Shanda. It's a Shanda. My mom's saying it's a Shonda. It's a technically a scandal.

or a shame. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then what's the word for, for pig? Khazar. Hazer.

Yeah. A Khazar. And the word Khazerai, which means pig bits. Khazerai is stuff. Yeah, yeah, totally. But it's literally pig bits. Yeah.

I'll teach you a Yiddish word before we let you go. Oiske-Zumt. People created this word during COVID to describe the feeling of being on too many Zoom meetings. Oiske-Zoom. When you start conforming to some really narrow idea, talking about people pleasing.

Yeah. We're talking about inclusion in the tribe. We're talking about the irrational fear that you are not going to be included. You're not going to have a cut of the hunt. A lot of it is fear of expressing yourself, being yourself. Being different. Fear that that is, and being different nowadays is just being. you, just normal you without doing any of that stuff. And I get it because a terror comes up in

people sometimes to varying degrees of like, oh, now I'm going to be this irrational fear. Now I'm going to be an outlier. So many times in my life, I've gotten to those points. Oh, no, if I say this or wear what I really want to wear or do what I really want to do and everything, I will be excluded. I will be excluded. I will be excluded. And I got to tell you. I've got to tell you. tell you, it just doesn't fucking work that way. What if you had stayed on your path? What if you had done the thing you wanted to do in that moment? What what would have happened? What what ceiling would have fallen in? And not asking rhetorically like don't be ridiculous. You can act be yourself and nothing's going to happen to you. I'm not talking about that. I'm saying really give those irrational

fears their time. Write it out, say it out loud. And I find that in doing that it, you expose it to the atmosphere and it starts to erode somehow. It's like, I swear to God, it's like magic. I guarantee anybody who wants to try this, I guarantee you, absolutely 100%, you are going to get free of these things. Writing out or saying out loud those irrational fears, it somehow can't live in the same state after that. It just starts eroding. So let's say you're going to do the opposite. You're like, okay, I'm not going to, I'm not going to be afraid that none of these things are going to happen for me. I'm going to trust that things are going to work out. And frankly, as we get older, we should be even more trusting because we have more evidence, more things to point to say,

oh, I thought that was going to be a disaster, but it worked out fine. It's really helpful to have some sort of spiritual something, whether you're going to, it can be God for you or the universe or the fucking son, whatever, to just go, I'm going to be taking care. It's going to be okay. I'm going to be okay. I don't have to be living in this fear that these things aren't going to happen for me ever or just trusting that things work out. Things work out. Look at some parts of your life where moments in your life where you thought that was going to be a disaster and maybe it was a disaster, but then something came out instead. Sure. Or that thing you thought, that disaster you thought would happen never happened at all. And you spent three months prior to that, just like giving

yourself an ulcer? I say I have less imposter syndrome now, a lot less, but I still have it. And I don't know too many people who don't. It's more detrimental for kids, young people, to think it is an impossibility to dream of being president, senator, famous actor, musician, it's more detrimental to think those things are pretty much impossible than it is detrimental to believe that they're easy and that you deserve that opportunity. I watched so many friends, Dana Carvey and Chris Farley and, of course, Adam Sandler and even Conan,

become, you know, huge around me. That's the hardest part is that you have to sort of say goodbye to your friend. There's a rhythm to this business, and it can work in your favor if you can be patient and calm. One, it always needs new things. So if you're not the flavor today and you haven't been the flavor and your ideas haven't gone over for the last five years, that doesn't mean year six won't be the year it turns.

They always need something. What else have you got from me? And that's a great thing. You have to keep trying to get better at what you do, to some extent my work ethic which you can say is you know appreciable laudable is also a cover for something you know not being able to sit still and I became very aware of that coming out of this experience of near death of when you just work, you sort of almost don't make memories, I think. If all you do is add to your list of to-do things

and ask yourself every second of every day, what do I need to get done? What do I need to do? What am I not doing right now that I should be doing? And there are times in life when that's all you can do. If you have a kid with some medical problem, if you have financial challenges, there are times and years in people's lives where all they can do is just go, I can't dwell on my life, I can't put some space in here, I can't meditate,

I have to every second go do something else. I have to make something else fix. I have to fix something else. I have to make something happen. And I understand that. But the heart attack really made me know that if you just live that way, you don't really live. You don't really, it's like you didn't do any. It's like you weren't here. I'm shake. My body starts to shake this like overwhelming amount of, I'm talking about the most intense wave of emotion just came over me and tears just building up in my eyes and, you know, and just flood out of my eyes. And I'm like, I don't know what's happening. My brain can't catch up to the response of my body. I'm like, I got to get out of here. And I go in my car and I'm thinking I'm going to drive. And all I could do

was get to the next corner and just turn down this side street and park. And I'm so terrified to allow what's coming over me. So I'm fighting it. And that just made it. And that just made it. worse. Then I started getting these intense feelings of I don't want to be here anymore. And it was almost like if I didn't get somebody in that house with me, my hand was involuntarily going to get a knife and slash my wrist. He became my prozac. I completely abandoned focusing on what had happen a year prior because I was like, well, I have to be fixed by now in a year. You know what I mean? I got to be fixed by now. How much more of this talking am I supposed to be doing? And then Will came and that was such a world win. He was the savior prince. Right? And I kicked the prozac to the curve and didn't even

know that unconsciously expected him to be the fix. He was so just dynamic and so charismatic. And I mean, he is, he is the pro at courting. I mean, it's just like, we're going here. And I'm filling your trailer up with thousands of roses. And it was just so, it was the fairy tale. And, you know, as the honeymoon stages start to fade away as they do, wanting to expecting your partner to keep up the honeymoon, right? You keep chasing that romantic idealism and you feel entitled to it. You're like, no, no, no, no. I decided to be with you because you made me happy. Make me happy, damn it.

Right? But what I've come to realize is that those kinds of interactions and these different stages that come into relationships demand a different kind of attention within the relationship, but first and foremost, personally. I was looking for my relationship with will to substitute the work that I needed to do on myself. And I needed a lot of work. So it wasn't until I left to we broke up in 2016 that I started going on my own journey and I started to recognize like, yo, Jada, this is this is the part that you're playing.

This is the dynamic in you that. feeds the unhealthy dynamic between you and will. This is your part. And this is a 50-50 deal. You kept thinking it was 99% him. This is another reason why I didn't divorce. Because here's the thing. I was like, uh-uh.

I'm not going to be, I'm not going to, I'm not going to divorce him and then me to see five years later that it was that it was because I didn't fix some shit in me. I've always been the villain in this dynamic. Once we got to the Oscars, they were like, there was no way Will would have done this. Jada Somway, you know, put her villainous energy, you know, she rolled her eyes and made him fly up on the stage, right?

It's like, that's how powerful we are when we're the villain, right? That's the only time we ever have power, mind you. But that's part of the whole patriarchal idea, right? And so I went to the Oscars with Will as a family member. We hadn't called each other husband and wife in years. And so when he said, keep my name's wife out of your mouth, I was like, damn oh okay oh okay I was as shocked as everybody else because we hadn't been on that flow it's so funny how an event an intense event can amplify love because as soon as I saw that

will was in trouble and as soon as I saw what it was going to be once we left that building I said, I'm his wife now, because we're going to get through this together. And that's the moment that I knew. I said, man, I'm not going to be able to get away from this man. I've been trying to get rid of his ass for six years. I said, you know what? All right, God, I surrender. I surrender.

There's not going to be no separation. There's not going to be no divorce. He's what I got. All right, fine. And that's what it is. beard is there's fake. It's fake. So I'm not intimidated by something that glues on his Santa Claus beard that he got from Oz on sunset. What? Okay. So look, I don't buy that for a second. You made the Canadian blush. Look at him. I have to come in person so that she can, you know,

hug on it. Yeah. Is that a string on the side or those Apple headphones? It looks like the little plastic string. But it's a power move to the way that he's putting the lab. is, it's like if a woman were to put their boobs in the foreground. I mean, it really is. You're not shying away from it. I do feel like the beard is the boobs for men at this point. You're not at that it is. Yeah, like, you know what you're doing.

I want to give you a coaster. Hold on. Oh, thank you. It's all I've been thinking about. The poster is just his beard. Unbelievable. Unreal. There's actually four different coasters.

I'm calling HR. Okay. This is a lot. I couldn't compete with the substances my parents were addicted to. Great. So I always had a very short amount of time to get their attention, to try to entertain them. And someone's drunk, it's very hard to, like, get them to pick you. You know, so I was always competing with alcohol, with, you know, my dad's other, you know, mistresses, whatever it was.

But I also remember a moment specifically, and I had this recently, and I did an EMDR session on something. And it came up where I remember going out to try to get my dad's attention. I was like, whatever, maybe five, six. And I went out and was like, hey, dad, something, something. And he was watching TV. And I remember walking away and going, that didn't go well. And I remember being like, okay, next time you're going to walk out like this. And then you're going to do this.

And you're going to do an impression of Rodney Dangerfield because he's watching Rodney Dangerfield. And I just remember thinking, like, he would watch SNL and he would laugh. And I remember just going like, I got to get in the box. Like, I got to get in that box. That's what I have to do. So I got obsessed with like getting on television and being entertaining or perfect. or perfect. The other way that I would get attention is to be perfect and sometimes being sick or hurt. You basically were raised in a chaotic environment. You only know how to care for yourself the way your parents cared for you.

You essentially sort of developed all these coping mechanisms to cope with the chaotic environment that worked really well when you were a kid. And then you grow up and all of a sudden they're not working so well. So it's like you're a parentified child. You were the kid that had to kind of take care of everything. You had to take care of yourself too much. You know, we develop these characteristics that we call like the 3Ms, mothering, micromanaging and martyering. Like we think we have to parent other adults. One of my issues was I would actually chronically minimize instead of pathologize at all, you know, it was just sort of everything's fine. This is how everybody is.

Or like, I can take it. I can handle it. Like, I'm the strong one. Everyone else is allowed to be a mess. And I can just sort of hold it in. You know, we call ourselves the exploding door mats, you know, you know, kind of thing. Sort of it's like, I have all this anger and also a complete lack of self-care and total self-deprivation. Once you've sort of done the, okay, let me heal the invisible wounds, let me work on it.

oh, I actually have a couple of these like superpowers and advantages that a lot of my friends that were loved and like read to or whatever or had some kind of stability and predictability and didn't have to use fantasy to check out before they had some kind of drug. They don't have that. You know, and so I can kind of now be in that radical forgiveness and radical gratitude of like, oh, okay. Like, you know, adversity yielded some pretty cool things. The inability to tolerate the discomfort of others or perceived discomfort. Right. So it's, it's. It's like someone else is uncomfortable. I have to do whatever I have to do to make them comfortable. But what's more annoying than someone people please? Like it doesn't work. It's never worked. Being helpful doesn't help. And the people that sort of thawn over others,

I was to make sure you're okay. I mean, I actually was in the car on the way here. And I was like, I didn't bring her a gift. And I was like, that is such progress. Because I collect these vintage neuroscience books. And I was like, oh, I should have given her that neuroscience book. and I, she would love it. And I was just like, don't do that.

Additioning for approval every day. And that gives them a power that they don't want. And if they do want it, like you have to need me. They got to go. Yes. And I'm constantly going to do all these things to make you think I'm a good person instead of just the best thing I can do is just take care of myself.

But I'm going to fuss over you. Even complimenting. Over complimenting. Because you know what it also does? It's patronizing. It's like, you're not okay without me. You're a mess. And I learned about the tool of scheduling when to worry about something.

You go like, you know what? December 1st, I'm going to start worrying about this thing. And I will make a decision by December 15. Or my favorite is you can worry about that for 20 minutes today. And then you do not worry about it again today. And maybe there's a lot of voices in my head that aren't mine, positive and negative. So I can just go like, oh, I'm not an idiot. I'm not stupid. I'm not ugly. I'm not this. I'm not unlovable. Like, those are just like voices that I heard. It's like a shitty radio station in the back. Can I offer something that's, we've never done on this podcast? And there's a little bit out there, but we've never also had a, I don't think we've ever had a pregnant person on the podcast

either, have we? Please. I don't know, just based on everything you shared, it feels, and being the third kid and maybe potentially being questioned if you were intended, it feels like putting your hands on your little boy and just saying, you are loved, you are a gift. He wants you to do a positive affirmation on the podcast. This is going to make me cry. Little buddy.

you are loved. How'd I do? I'm like, what's my grade? He is loved. He is a gift and he is wanted. I'll just be your backup P and it. You have the chords up for this one? I've got the whole thing.

So it'll take me a second to turn pages. Yep. All right. Let me know if we got to stop. Okay. I mean, it's a little fast, but I'm going to do it. I got it. Should we do it slower?

Nope. Whatever you want. Here are the box. Here we go. Yep. All over now. One, two, one, two, three, four. Call me crazy if you got it in you,

but these people don't seem to mind. They're telling me that your little stubbornness or work out fine. Bottom feet are at the end of my roll when I wondered where this road began. I circle around when I couldn't help bring down it's just supply with demand. Nothing looks the same rule

Give it when there's been no change, ooh Say that something's gonna give and it's all giving out on you When it's all over now So it's no longer fun and it's all been overdone So it's all over now It's all over now It's no longer fun and it's all been overdone So it's all now

So now I'm the o'allic everybody Woo! Oh that's amazing Down she's gonna break it down for you She's got a neuroscience PhD or two One fiction one And now she's gonna