How to Release Uncomfortable Emotions Like Anger and Sadness

Here is where I have landed after years of trying the wrong things with anger and sadness: uncomfortable emotions are not the enemy. You do not need to fight them, argue with them, numb them, or explain them away. You feel them fully, in your body, without attaching a story, and you let them move through you. Then you ask what they are trying to tell you. That is the method I keep coming back to across everything below, and it is the answer I would give anyone searching for how to deal with anger or sadness that will not go away.

My view has changed over time, and the order matters. In my original 2021 post I described what still works for me: say you are willing to feel whatever is present, let go of the story about why, and release the feeling with sound and tears, the way children do. In 2022, in How Not to Take Things Personally, I added that when I was angry, the cause was usually something going on inside me, and that understanding the other person is the antidote to anger. In 2024, in How Not to Be Angry All the Time, I put it plainly: emotions are okay, they pass, and I am never upset for the reason I think I am. Anger also needs to leave the body, so I use yoga, exercise, walking and massage for that. Those same months I wrote about loving my mind even when it thinks insane thoughts, and about how the self-talk I repeat shapes what I feel.

By 2025 the emphasis moved from managing emotions to using them. In August I wrote that unless a tragedy is directly in your life, you do not need to hand over your peace to it. In September I wrote about anger that pointed at something I wanted to build, a 4 p.m. AA meeting I had been told was unnecessary, in I'm Turning My Anger Into Something New. In October I wrote about running two miles to burn off the rage, clenching my fists on the last mile and letting each stride release what I was carrying. In November 2025 I handled one painful morning badly during my divorce, then spent the rest of that day owning it, crying through an AA meeting, and asking people for help instead of hiding in the discomfort. That post is in I Broke Down, Then Showed Up Anyway.

The most recent posts, from March and June 2026, push the idea further. In A Good Cry on the Massage Table a release on a massage table let me see how I had been treating the women I was dating, and it became the start of trying to be kinder. In June 2026 I wrote that I am not a positive person and not a negative one, I am balanced, and that the trouble starts when you box yourself into one identity. In I Know What to Do, but I Don't Do It I wrote that change plunges you into the unknown and that the short-term pain is real, which is why we stay stuck. My newest post, I'm Sad, and Then I'm Willing to Change, says sadness is a call to action. Do not numb it, and do not reach for a drink or a drug, because that blocks the clear thinking you need to see the message. For me, that sadness pointed to dating taking attention I needed for building my YouTube channel and getting my money in order, so I stepped back from dating for now and kept the door open.

Below you will find all 13 pieces in full, newest first. The 2026 videos and journal entry come first, then the 2025 diary entries from my daily autobiographies, the 2024 videos on anger, self-talk and loving your mind, the 2022 post on not taking things personally, and the original 2021 post at the bottom. If you want practical tools, start with the anger and emotion posts. If you want to see those tools under real pressure, read the diary entries, where the messy parts are not edited out. If your struggle is tied to sobriety, my Alcoholics Anonymous hub gathers the recovery side of this story in one place.

If you want me to look at a specific situation with you, you can get a personal video review at https://jerrybanfield.com/review/.

On this page

Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.

1. I'm Sad — and Then I'm Willing to Change (June 18, 2026)
2. I'm Not a Positive Person. I'm a Balanced One. (June 17, 2026)
3. I Know What to Do, but I Don't Do It: Why We Don't Change (June 17, 2026)
4. A Good Cry on the Massage Table (March 3, 2026)
5. I Broke Down, Then Showed Up Anyway (November 23, 2025)
6. I Ran Two Miles to Burn Off the Rage (October 22, 2025)
7. I'm Turning My Anger Into Something New (September 14, 2025)
8. Don't Hand Over Your Peace (August 29, 2025)
9. Loving Your Mind Even When It Thinks Insane Thoughts (May 5, 2024)
10. How Not to Be Angry All the Time (May 1, 2024)
11. The Power of Positive Self-Talk (March 2, 2024)
12. How Not to Take Things Personally (October 17, 2022)
13. How to Release Uncomfortable Emotions Like Anger and Sadness (April 8, 2021)

I'm Sad — and Then I'm Willing to Change

From my video published June 18, 2026.

I invite you today, the next time you're sad, to say thank you for this sadness right now. What is this teaching me? How can this help me? I've been feeling sad a lot this week, and I don't usually feel very sad — I'm usually very upbeat and happy, more world-domination mindset than feeling powerless. But I've been sad the last week, maybe five days, and the root of the sadness has been in my dating.

Where my sadness came from

I've gone out with so many women and gotten absolutely no return on investment. I mean, not one single relationship from it, hardly even any second dates — despite spending tens of thousands of dollars on matchmaking, on Hinge and Roses and Bumble, and taking women out to dinner and coffee and lunch, and just absolutely nothing. It has been shockingly disappointing. And I've been facing sadness, like: man, how can so many women treat me in a way that feels so bad, that feels like it's just been one humiliation after another?

Don't fight sadness — get curious

A lot of us, what we try and do is fight the sadness, argue with it, debate it, make the other person wrong, and try to do things to compensate for the sadness. And that's the exact wrong approach. What I've done this week is I've said: what do I need to learn from this? There's clearly something I'm missing, because what I find is that if my life is operating with maximum effectiveness, where I'm really loving and living an open-hearted life, I generally will not be sad. I generally will not be down or depressed.

Sadness is a call to action

Sadness, therefore, ends up being a call to action. Sadness is a warning sign that I'm operating out of alignment. Now, sure, some sadness may happen — but even that, to me, like when somebody passes, that's not the same kind of sadness. Often I feel grief when somebody passes, which is a reflection of how much I've loved them. I do feel sad when they pass. But also that sadness is a call to action to find more people to love. I get out there, and I notice that my sadness will tend to disappear once I apply the call to action. My sadness is saying: hey, look, Jerry, there's something you could learn and change in your life. When you learn it and change it, you will feel better again.

So I don't spend much time sad now, because when I'm sad, I say thank you — what are you trying to tell me? And sure, sometimes I start off by saying, "F you, I'm tired of this." I don't usually have days where I'm sad, but I've had days of just moping this week. And then I had a breakthrough yesterday.

What you can do with sadness, if you will avoid numbing it: do not numb it. Do not distract yourself from it. Focus on it, feel it, and say — what are you here to tell me? How am I willing to change? What should I change? Sometimes there will be all these negative narratives. My mind's been like, "Oh, give up on dating, dating is not worth your time, it's never going to happen." No — that's not helpful. Where's the helpful call to action?

You have to be able to think clearly

You really need your mind cleared for this, because if you're drinking, if you're using drugs, if you're into addicted behaviors, it'll block you from seeing things like this. I'm able to see things like this today because I'm not in the middle of drinking, I'm not in the middle of doing drugs, I'm not in the middle of doing things that are screwing up my ability to think clearly. So it is critically important that if you want to be able to process sadness like this, don't do things like drinking or drugs, because it will screw up your ability to think clearly. Once you can think clearly, the calls to action will become pretty obvious.

The call to action: stop trying to date

With me, the call to action was: Jerry, you need to stop trying to date. So many people have said, just be yourself, surrender, stop putting all this effort into dating, focus on building your YouTube channel. Your thinking should be obsessed every day, all day, with what's the next YouTube video. Don't even worry about the last one — what's the next one? Can you make 12 YouTube videos a day, Jerry?

The main times I've been sad are when my dating has distracted me from building my YouTube. My sadness this week showed me that my attention is not going in the place where it's most valued. When I make YouTube videos like this, I've gotten millions of impressions, hundreds of thousands of views, thousands of subscribers, thousands of dollars already, in just the first three months of starting six brand new YouTube channels. My attention on YouTube is clearly very much appreciated. Although I'd had an audience before — I deleted everything, and they came back pretty quick — I'm literally getting viewers on dating channels and gaming channels from scratch. The time I'm putting into YouTube is setting up making money and being a provider. My sadness showed me: Jerry, you need all of your attention on your YouTube channel right now.

Getting my money right

I've leveraged my credit, and I can continue to leverage my credit without making much money for the next six weeks to months if I need to. However, if I don't have my YouTube producing like $10,000 a month — even just $5,000 a month would be enough, but if I don't ideally get to like $10,000 a month within the next six months — I'm looking at having to move out of the house I'm in, and my entire quality of life drops, potentially severely. I might have to move in on somebody's couch or sell my YouTube equipment. I may have to give up on my dreams. Dating doesn't mean anything compared to that.

My kids are the most important people in my life. The house I live in now costs $2,700 a month in rent, and it's an amazing house the kids love, in a great neighborhood where I can have them overnight three or four nights a week. They love it. My ex is very happy with the arrangement. My mother comes over consistently. I am very happy with it. And my sadness showed me: Jerry, you need to stop screwing around dating right now. You need to get your money right, right now. That's what really matters. It doesn't matter if you find somebody to date in the next six months — you'll be just fine without a woman to date. But if you don't get your money right in the next six months, you will potentially be uncomfortable, and your kids may lose out on time with you. So stop focusing on dating.

I'm not giving up on dating forever

That's not to say I need to give up forever on dating. I'm not going to give up forever on dating. But right now, my mind should not be putting time and energy into dating. If you want to follow all of that, I go into it in much more detail over on my Dating playlist.

When you change, the sadness lifts

It was my sadness — just feeling like I needed to cry, crying, feeling like everything sucks, like nothing in my life even makes sense, like the world's totally an unfair, awful place. It was days of that. But my sadness broke, and the key breaking factor was seeing what I need to change. And what's beautiful is, when I make a change, I sometimes will have weeks, sometimes even months, where I barely have any sadness. Because when I'm operating at maximum effectiveness, almost any of the things you would think would make me sad don't. I just continue to flow and go through the flow of life. I accept the things that might make me sad. But when I'm out of alignment with my own self and how I'm contributing to life, the sadness is there to show me the difference: here's where you want to be.

I want to give you millions of dollars of value

Where I want to be is making $10,000 a month on YouTube — and I want to be doing that by giving you huge amounts of value in your life. There are things I could do to just trade my time for money; I could easily make $100,000-plus a year doing some marketing or tech job. But I want to give you millions of dollars of value every month on YouTube, and in return I'll take back a fraction of what I give.

Some of you have fought with sadness your entire life. In this one video, I may be able to help you change your outlook on sadness and dramatically change how you approach your emotions from here. That's priceless — it's something you might spend $10,000-plus working with a therapist on. If I can give you this idea directly in a video, or turned into a blog post, that's the kind of value I want to give. But I can't give out millions of dollars of value while I'm obsessed with wondering if a woman's going to text me back, or when I'm going to have my next date, or while I'm taking four hours to drive to Orlando to meet a woman for a date who doesn't even like me as soon as I meet her. I don't have time to be spending hours on Hinge, not getting a single match, sending roses, then matching with people who waste my time. I literally had one woman on Hinge where I could have made five or ten videos like this in the amount of time I spent messaging her — and I ended up unmatching her, because she just asked me personal questions and then criticized me over my answers. That's where I was sad: I was sad to see the opportunity I missed. I could have been creating huge value for you here, but instead I was fooling around with somebody I'm unlikely to ever meet in person and have no way to contact again.

Stop fighting sadness, start getting curious

So I hope this is a breakthrough for you: stop fighting sadness and start getting curious. What's really happening inside me? Where does my sadness indicate a call to action to change? Try some affirmations — "I'm willing to change" — and you may see it. If you want to build a life you don't have to escape from, a life you're proud of, the basis for that is relationships and dating (even if dating right now just means stop trying for a while and get your money right), being happy with enough money, and being at the forefront of technology, crypto, and AI. If you want a mentor who's been there and done that — through divorce, through losing weight, through getting sober, through making millions of dollars online and burning it down and building it back up again — I'm here at jerrybanfield.com every day. And if you want the whole journey, money and mindset and the comeback, that's what I document on my Life playlist.

I'm Not a Positive Person. I'm a Balanced One.

From my video published June 17, 2026.

I'm Not a Positive Person. I'm a Balanced One.

I'm not a positive person, and I'm not a negative person either. I'm a balanced person. To me, this is a really helpful point of view to have, because some of you say, "Oh, Jerry, you're so positive," and I think it depends on the context. It's important to intelligently apply the use of positive and negative. If you ask me about the healthcare system, I'm really negative and toxic about it. It's a sick care system. It's horrible. If you ask me about crypto, I'm really toxic and hateful on most of crypto, because crypto is designed to rip fools off. Almost everything I see in it is somebody's money-making scheme designed to separate naive people from their money. It's pitched as a get-rich-quick thing, but it's terrible.

So I'm grateful to accept and see the balance I have in myself. What I find frustrating in the world is that so often people say, "Oh yeah, just be positive, it's all good." No, it's not. Life sucks sometimes. Life is miserable and hard sometimes, and it leaves you questioning everything. Life is not this beautiful thing of flowers and rainbows all the time. And if it was, you'd get sick of it and destroy it anyway. I've heard it said that we created a universe before where everything was all good, where we were all blissed out on our connectedness and God consciousness all the time, and it was boring. There was no reason to do anything. There was no momentum or purpose to guide our lives. Ironically, what I find powerful is the balance, the polarity of positive and negative. The exciting thing is the balance between the negative side of the battery and the positive side of the battery.

The Problem With Boxing Yourself In

The trouble starts when you try to box yourself into being "this positive person" or "this negative person." Then you don't want to do certain things. It's like, "Positive people don't play Warzone or first-person shooter games." Why can't I play a first-person shooter game if I want to? Nobody is really 100% positive all the time anyway. What's wrong with constant positivity is that it can turn into obedience to authority. There are times to be extremely negative, to fight, and to resist. Now, of course, a lot of people do this at the wrong time. They protest meaningless, stupid things they have no ability to change, and meanwhile the things they actually could do something about go ignored.

So what I try to do is intelligently apply the positive and negative in my life. For example, I'm very positive about my marriage and very positive about my kids, but I probably lay more criticism on my kids than anybody else does, because the people who know you best are in the best position to criticize. That said, I generally don't criticize them much. I'm not going to claim that all I do is tell my kids I love them, even though that is most of what I tell them. Ideally you want to be mostly positive, but it depends on the context. It's not just about always telling everybody they're right. When I drank and was poisoning myself all the time, the right thing to say was not, "Oh, you're doing great, Jerry, just keep going, it'll be all right." No. I was poisoning myself to death and I needed to stop, and I needed to quit being an insane, selfish person. That's the thing to tell me, not "just be positive, keep going, bro." There's a time to be negative and a time to be positive, and you need to pick that out intelligently and consciously.

With crypto, we need a lot more negativity toward all these garbage coins. Almost every coin out there is a garbage coin, a fraud, a liar, a cheater, a stealer coin. And we need some more positivity toward ICP, because that's real technology. That's what I do. I apply what's needed. I'm very reactive. In fact, I've usually voted reactively. Whatever most people were for, whoever won the election, I generally voted against them for most of my life, because what I'm all about is balance.

Balance Is Where the Power Is

To me, balance is where you have power, like in a battery. Do you want a battery that's all positive? No. Balance is where the power lives. A battery works by having a positive pole and a negative pole, and without both poles the battery doesn't work. In life, we need balance the same way.

I saw a man in his 90s in my AA meeting today who can barely do anything, and I found myself wondering, why are you here, what are you doing, what is your life purpose? I'm not saying you should quit and give up. I'm saying that at that point you should be very clear about why you are here and what you're doing, because you have very limited functionality and probably very limited time left. You should be very aware of what else you have to do. I'm very aware of what I'm doing here. I'm having fun, I'm enjoying the experience, and I'm trying to wake other people up and help others learn and grow. That's why I'm here, and I think it's very valuable to always be aware of your purpose.

Now, sometimes you may not know your purpose, and a lot of the time we really need other people to help us fulfill it. Life is pretty meaningless if you're just trying to do everything by yourself. I believe that's why so many people are depressed. They go around trying to be positive, saying "Yeah, it's all good," but it doesn't feel all good, because all they're doing is suppressing. They hate how things are going in their life, but they keep telling everyone they're doing great. It's also genuinely challenging because a lot of the time you don't have the time. People ask, "How are you doing?" Well, how much time have you got? Five minutes? Fine, I'll just say I'm good. I don't have enough time to go into the details of life.

But one thing I do that's really effective is that when I'm feeling like garbage, I say it. My grandfather would ask, "How are you doing, Gerald?" and I'd say, "I'm piss poor." That could be a bit of an exaggeration sometimes, but I think it's important to lean into the balance in life. You don't want to be a one-sided person who thinks one way and acts one way, because you're killing yourself doing that. You're draining the battery.

Why I Explore the Negative Side

So I'm not here being positive all the time. Life absolutely is horrible, miserable suffering in some cases. However, I tend to focus on the joy and the positive in my life. And I think there's even a place for the rest of it. Why am I out here playing Warzone solos? Part of me wants to suffer, wants to put myself in a kill-or-be-killed environment, me against the world. Part of me must really want that, because that's what I'm doing. And it seems like there's a place for that in life too. Some of the teachings you hear say, "Just be positive, it's all good all the time, never engage with negativity." I think that's extremely limiting, because there's a lot to learn, and sometimes you learn the most from getting into the negative situations.

I'm not saying you should put yourself in situations to be exploited or taken advantage of. I'm saying you really learn when you explore, and sometimes when you explore you find things that are rough and scary, and that's okay. I've been playing tennis, and the outside of my right knee started to hurt a little. I could have just sat in the house and not risked hurting my knee. But there's more to life than trying to be in perfect health. If you don't use your health, if you don't explore, then what good is having it? If all your actions are taken out of fear, you end up afraid to do anything because you don't want to get hurt. I struggle with that, because I don't want to have to deal with going to the hospital, so sometimes I think, let me just be super cautious, I don't even want to take a chance at getting hurt. But the thing is, you've got to be open to the negative experiences too. I'd prefer in most cases not to have the negatives, but there's value to everything.

Where it can really help you is realizing that some of the negative experiences in life are your chances to help each other. How am I going to help you by saying it's all good? That's not helpful. I can help you by saying, look, I've had some rough days in my life, and I'm really glad I kept going, that I kept trying and didn't give up, because I had no idea how good my life could get. A lot of the incredibly negative experiences I've encountered have actually helped me love and appreciate my life and gain perspective. Often someone who's had a really sheltered, easy life can have a hard time being kind and understanding, or a hard time being useful. So I'm out here saying life sucks sometimes, and that's okay. We don't need to make it not suck. We don't need to lie about it sucking. Life sucks sometimes, and that's okay. We don't need to act like it doesn't happen.

That's part of why a game like Warzone can get me there. Sometimes I don't feel like a whole person unless I can explore my nasty side, the part of me that's swearing at people. That doesn't hurt anybody. I'm having fun. I think it's ideal to explore that conscious side consciously, in a way that doesn't hurt other people, and that's what I try to do.

Teaching My Kids What "Disgusting" Really Means

I've noticed some things my kids don't understand yet. My kids will be whining about how bad they have it, and I remember my dad saying, "Boy, you have no idea how good you have it." Now I have a much better idea, and I accept that. My daughter, who's nine, was calling my son, who's seven, disgusting the other day. I told her I'm going to fine her every time she calls him disgusting from now on. They have to pay for their own stuff besides food and shelter. I told her, you have no idea what disgusting even is. You've seen so little of life. You've lived in a sheltered, nice life, and you don't have a clue what real disgusting is. And that's fine. That is okay. One day you're going to understand what I'm saying better, and it's okay if you don't understand it today. Calling your brother disgusting because he farted is nothing. There's life that can get so disgusting that you would beg to be somewhere like this, and it would feel like the cleanest, most beautiful, safest home you've ever been in.

Reading books is one way I broaden my horizons on this. Reading the stories of people who've had really difficult, horrible lives, people who were kidnapped or brought up in abuse or abducted, or who escaped from North Korea, those kinds of stories really help me. They remind me not to be in denial, not to pretend life is good all the time. It's not always good. Sometimes it's so miserably horrible that it's shocking people can even live through it. But ironically, that's part of what makes this experience interesting, and exploring that range of life is a lot of what I share over on my Life playlist.

I Know What to Do, but I Don't Do It: Why We Don't Change

From my video published June 17, 2026.

I Know What to Do, but I Don't Do It

I know what to do, but I don't do it. Why? If you've ever related to this or had this struggle, I think you'll really appreciate this. I'm recording it live on Twitch on my 4,993rd day on YouTube, January 29, 2025. Here's my example for today: I know exactly what I need to do with my music. All I need to do is make a sick dance set. That's it. Make an incredible Ableton Live dance set. So do you know what I've done? I've known this for quite a while, and I haven't done it.

Can you relate to doing this in your own life? Often there are things you need to do that will advance your life. You know what they are, and then you don't do them. Why? Why don't you do them? What I've noticed is that there are a lot of reasons, and I'll try to recall them from my own history in the hope that it helps you.

Doing It Plunges You Into the Unknown

If you know you need to do something to change your financial situation, such as quit a job, get a new job, or learn a new skill, often you won't do it. One of the weirdest reasons is that if you actually do what you know you need to do, it'll plunge you into the unknown, and you'll have to change your identity.

For example, I knew I needed to get sober for a long time. But if I get sober, then I don't know what my life is going to be like anymore. I knew it would be better, but it still felt like plunging into the unknown. I'd have to give up my identity as this person who drinks. And then I don't know who I am anymore.

If you're single and you know you want a girlfriend, you know you should go to the gym and work out, you know you should get on online dating, often you'll know you should do these things and you won't do them. Because if you actually do them, you'll get what you want, and then you'll have to change your identity. In my experience, some of the worst times in my life have come right after I had my whole identity pinned on one thing and then I got what I wanted. I had my identity pinned on being this frustrated single guy, and then I get with a beautiful woman, and all of a sudden I'm not a guy who struggles to get with girls anymore. I'm a guy who gets women I'm really attracted to fall in love with me. So who am I now? This identity of the frustrated single guy is gone, and yet somehow it's still there. Now my life is confusing and doesn't make any sense.

It's the same with my music. If I actually get an incredible dance set built, which I'm close to, then everything changes. What's frustrating is that you'll be so close, and then you'll quit, or something will come up.

The Short-Term Pain of Change

I have a friend who is at the highest weight she's ever been. She knows what she needs to do. She needs to change her eating. She needs to get back to the gym. But she doesn't do it. Why not? From my point of view, it's because you don't want to get rid of this identity. You don't want to let go of this experience. There's a part of you that wants to keep struggling with the weight and keep eating the way you've been eating, because you don't want to have to go through the short-term pain and uncertainty of change.

Take getting sober. Getting sober is so obviously an awesome thing, and it made my life so much better. So any rational person would ask, why wouldn't you just immediately do that? Why would anyone struggle and be miserable with alcoholism when you could get sober and have a much better life? Well, in the short term, it's so much harder to get sober. In the short term, I had to stop what I was doing and go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, read the book, and face all these painful things I'd been through. In the short term with my dance music, if I focus on just working on my set in Ableton Live, I can't make any songs yet. I have to watch tutorials. I don't know what to do. I have to try things and have them not work. In the short term, it's harder to do it.

But in the long term, I'm so glad I got sober in 2014. I'm so glad I basically stopped my life and put the work into going through the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and getting a sponsor. For so long I avoided that. I knew I should stop drinking, and I didn't.

When What You Tried Before Didn't Work

Here's another big reason I know what to do but don't do it: in the past, I knew what to do, I did it, and it didn't work. A lot of times you have bad ideas. You have ideas that won't work. You have ideas that are simply wrong. And when you do the things you think you should do, you sometimes get proven wrong, and that leads to some serious confusion.

For example, when I was building my business, I knew I needed to quit playing video games. So I quit playing video games. Then I knew I should set up an online course platform and teach courses to make money. And then it blew up in my face and didn't work. After a year, I'd borrowed all this money and it had all gone wrong. I realized I could have just kept playing video games, spent less money, and come out way ahead. I could have done what I really wanted to do, but I screwed it all up. The thing I thought I should do turned out to be wrong.

What I'm grateful for now is that I consistently act. If something feels to me like I know what to do, I just do it. Because if it's wrong, then I'll drop that as the thing to do, and then I'll face the confusion and uncertainty of figuring out a new way, learning, and advancing. To me, the worst thing is being stuck in that place of thinking you really want to do something, or you'd love to do it, but you can't do it now, so you keep putting it off.

Changing Behavior and Asking for Help

For so many years I was in that place. With my weight, I knew I needed to eat differently, but I didn't know how to eat differently. One of the hard things is that if you want to change your life, you often need to change your behavior. And to change your behavior, you need to ask for help. You need to read some new books. You need to change what you're doing. If you want to eat healthy, you need to stop going to the restaurants where everybody there is overweight.

I remember sitting in a fast food restaurant one night, struggling with my weight, looking around, and everybody in there was heavier than me. The thought came: if you eat here, you'll be like them. You're eating here today, so you're like them. Today, I'm in great shape, and I love my weight. I'm really happy about it. That means I don't get to go eat at fast food restaurants the vast majority of the time. Occasionally, maybe once a month, I'll go somewhere with the family. I can go out to dinner somewhere. But the vast majority of my eating, I don't get to do that.

Being accountable to other people really helps too, because what we often need is other people to help us do the thing when it's really hard. When I needed to get sober, I needed a lot of people to show me how to do it. A lot of times we keep this idea of "I know what to do, I just don't do it" out there as a kind of safety net. It's like, well, if I ever really need to get sober, I'll just go to AA. But then you don't actually do it. So everyone around you wonders, I guess you don't really want to get sober. You really need a support system, and you need encouragement.

A lot of times you realize that what you think you need to do isn't right, and what you actually need is a mentor who has been there and done what you want to do. For things like getting sober or losing weight, I've been there and I've done that. What worked for me, I can tell you very quickly. Number one, eat a whole plant-based diet. To do that, you'll probably need to read the book How Not to Die, and then read the whole book How Not to Diet. Then you make that your new way of eating. Another thing that helped me was not eating at night, minimizing going out to eat, and living an active, exercise-filled lifestyle. In my experience, it really is that simple. So why do so many people know that and not do it? And why do other people know they should go on some crappy diet, yet never even do the action they already know is wrong?

Be Okay With Doing It Badly at First

Sometimes you have to be okay with not doing it perfectly. A lot of us don't want to do something we know we're going to screw up, something we're not going to be good at. When you first go to Alcoholics Anonymous, you're a mess. You need help. When I first make music, it's a mess. It's hard to listen to. But you have to have that idea anyway. When I first played Call of Duty Warzone, I was horrible at it, but I had the audacious idea that I could be a professional gamer one day. Less than a year later, I was on my way to making $100,000 a year playing video games. You can follow more of these reflections on my Life playlist.

So today, I'm going to do what I know I need to do.

A Good Cry on the Massage Table

Originally published March 3, 2026.

This is my journal entry from March 3, 2026 — my real, unedited day, shared just as it happened.

We wake up and the kids are slightly dragging after their later bedtime. My daughter says they'll go to bed earlier tonight, which is fine. We get all the lunches made, get the agenda signed, and we're out the door. I get a little bit of snuggles with my son and wrestling in the back seat. I'm immediately heading over to a massage with a friend, which is unusually scheduled this early in the morning. And I'm taking a day of rest today. I think it'd be ideal once a week, as I said before, to just take at least one day a week where I kind of like give my body a rest day where we don't have to hit the usual physical level of activity. I enjoy a great conversation with my friend going over, you know, her book. And she likes the book business model, she's enthusiastic about it. And we just talk like the whole time. But there is time to also have some quiet. She does this new technique on me, she just went to a workshop and learned it, where it's something like myofascial release or something like that.

And then I remember a woman I had been seeing wanted to do a free massage on me just to test that technique herself. Then I feel bad about how I treated her when she was so nice to me and she gave me all those massages in trade and we had such a strong connection. I fucking, you know, did what I described in my writing. Yeah, I don't feel good about, you know, stopping seeing her and all that. So I get a big release. I start feeling all these feelings and I have a nice cry right there on the table. And I talk my friend through what I'm feeling, too. Like, I hear I've been going around criticizing these girls endlessly in my head. And well, that's been reflected in my writing as well. But it's like, look at my behavior. Now, this might be obvious. If you've managed to somehow read a bunch of these, you might be like, holy shit, what's surprising is that he has this level of awareness that, you know, he can see what an asshole he's been with these girls. Or, you know, there was a way to be nicer and more loving and more open. You know, I felt bad about my behavior, especially with the woman I'd been seeing. She was like the first one that I felt bad about. And then the woman I'd been talking to, I felt bad about that, too. Like I sent her a message after meeting her and then I didn't text her for two months. I run into her at a local spiritual community thing, you know, and then she didn't respond a couple of days ago.

Yesterday, I sent out some messages to a few women to see if they wanted to record a book with me. One was kind enough to say, you know, thanks, she's not feeling doing a book by dictation. You know, one lives an hour and a half away. The woman I'd been talking to hadn't heard from me in a couple of weeks, maybe a month. And she just didn't respond. And I was like, there's a big inventory taking this morning. It's like, damn, I'm not impressed with my own behavior towards women. And I could see that that bad feeling, especially what happened with the woman I'd been seeing, was then being replayed in all my other interactions with women. Having that good cry helped me also see like, look, I'm going to go forward and be as nice as I can be. Also, I thought about other times I'd led someone on and we both ended up feeling used. Like I set her up to feel bad and, you know, to feel kind of used. And I felt used and annoyed in the process myself. Like I led her on and made her think there was something there that there wasn't. And I was thinking of Jesus, you know, go forth and sin no more. Like, at least you can see what was done. OK, now I'm not going to live like that going forward. I'm going to clear my energy and be grateful and have interactions. If you are carrying regret about how you have treated people and want to talk through being different going forward, I would be glad to listen, so you can schedule a private one-on-one call with me and bring it straight to me.

Like I told my friend also, like when I was getting spun up about trading with her, I'm really glad that we turned that into the productive energy of doing her book together, which I mentioned her and her book in my letter that I'm going to be giving out to a bunch of people in St. Pete. I'm like, I'm glad her and I were able to turn that energy that, you know, sabotaged relationships, like the one with the woman I'd been seeing, that same energy with my friend we're able to create something out of that, which was really beautiful. So I have a beautiful session with my friend and I'm glad I scheduled this right before she's going on a trip so I won't get to see her again this month.

After the massage with her, I'm feeling really good. I head straight to the recovery meeting today. My sponsor's there chairing the meeting. I get called on pretty early, which is nice. I share, pass it on. And then after the meeting, I text a couple of girls I haven't seen a little bit. The one did the coffee last week. Said I missed her. No response. And I text another one that I haven't seen there in weeks. She was in kind of a dark place last time I saw her. Said, hey, hope you're doing well, I haven't seen you in a little while. She says, thanks, you too. Like, well, I guess I got what I wanted out of that, didn't I? I got an acknowledgement at least. But I noticed my mind's just fixated on this one girl who's pretty but still in her first year of sobriety. So, you know, that's on my mind. And I'm like, isn't that silly how much my mind focuses on, you know, it just takes for, you know, the one girl's response wasn't good enough.

And then I get a message from a girl I went to see, and she just randomly text me out of nowhere, you know, with a little funny little meme. And I said, hey, it's a nice surprise to get a text from you today. And she says, you know, I do what I can. And I'm like, see, now logically the mind should be focusing on how cool it was to just get a text first from this girl instead of like, oh, that girl didn't text me back. I'm like, that's logically what we should be doing here. So how about let's do more of what logically would make sense.

I go to this ACA meeting right after the recovery meeting, and my sponsor and another guy suggested I try that one too. The ACA meeting is real nice and I definitely love the idea of going to like four or five recovery meetings a week. And like one or two ACA meetings a week. I think that'll make a really strong program for me. The ACA program is so much more gentle and loving and kind and focused on healing compared to the other program. But the other program is very valuable for people in acute distress, which there are a lot today. The ACA is a deeper level of work. I see a woman there. I see several of the older ladies I know there. The one woman's in her 60s. And I remember she gave me her phone number years ago and she's like, oh, I didn't want you to think I was coming on to you or anything. And now I'm just noticing my own loneliness and attraction. And I remind her I still have her phone number and tell her I got divorced and everything. She says she has a date coming up on Thursday with a guy that she met online. She says that she doesn't want any of one political party either. And I kind of eye roll. I'm like, all right, whatever, to each their own, that seems like pretty trifling and unimportant to me. But you know, then again, some people don't care about sex that much and I do, so what do I know?

I head out of the ACA meeting and I barely have time to get home and eat and prepare snacks for the kids. Then I pick the kids up. They enjoy the snacks and I bring them home shortly after my ex-wife comes home and brings the dog. I tell her that, you know, why doesn't she go to the dog park with the kids by herself today? The kids are in a bit of a mood and a little bit of a fuss and tantrums and fights with each other. So I'm like, look, I've been with people all day from massage to multiple meetings, you know, and the kids pick up. I'm like, I'm good. Why don't y'all just have your time and space away from me today? You know, enjoy your time, just the three of you, because that's all the time my ex-wife's going to get with the kids today. Or so I thought. She comes back from the dog park. She's like, hey, I'm going to take them to get an acai bowl. I'm like, all right, that's cool. So she goes over there, gets a bowl for me too, drops $70 for food over there, comes back. I eat the bowl she gets from me. She heads out.

The kids are dying to play Settlers of Catan again. So we get another game in. This time we use the random setup, which they're excited about. And I get a win. And we have a great time playing. There's less fusses than yesterday, which is nice. And right as we're wrapping the Settlers of Catan game up, my mother comes over and reads to the kids. And I shower and I take a walk with my mother as well while the kids do their screens and homework and stuff. My mother, I love how she reads to the kids. All of us take showers, get lunches ready for school tomorrow, and then we're in bed at 9:15 tonight, which is nice. My mind tonight is obsessing about wanting some validation and connection in person. I'm like, all right, we'll consider these things tomorrow.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

I Broke Down, Then Showed Up Anyway

Originally published November 23, 2025.

This is my journal entry from November 23, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Divorce Day — my real, unedited days, published in order.

I barely slept again last night. Maybe a couple of hours at most. My mind felt aggravated, frantic, and completely unregulated, like it was pacing in circles without ever slowing down. I was still furious about the divorce, and reading my diary entry from the night before made me sound unhinged, which only confirmed that I still felt unhinged this morning. I finally got out of bed a little after 6:00 a.m., wired with energy and unable to sleep any longer. My thoughts were obsessive and distorted, and one of them kept looping: that if I just told the kids, right in front of my ex-wife, how much she was the problem and how this divorce was entirely her fault, she would suddenly realize how wrong she was for breaking up our family and decide to come back. I was exhausted from feeling like my family was being destroyed, and I wanted the destruction to stop.

I went over to my ex-wife’s house early that morning, earlier than they usually get up on weekends, let myself in, and told everyone they needed to get up and talk right now. My ex-wife was immediately upset. I told them that what they deserved to know was that my ex-wife was behind this divorce, that she was the one refusing my offers to reconcile, and that she was the one committed to breaking up our family. I said this also meant they could lose access to me at some point. I told them that could happen if I met someone new and moved away. Either way, I said my ex-wife pushing this divorce could mean they would see their father far less. My ex-wife tried to stop me, but I kept going because I felt like I had to get it out. It was upsetting for everyone. My ex-wife got angry, though thankfully she did not escalate further. I hugged the kids, held them close, and mostly just sat there with them. After about thirty minutes, I finally acknowledged that I had made my own contributions to my ex-wife feeling this way and that it was not entirely her responsibility. I admitted that I had done my part to cooperate with the divorce and that I had not fought for our family the whole time. Even so, I felt awful for causing that scene and for how I handled myself that morning.

Fortunately, I had tennis scheduled, which gave me somewhere to go. I went back to my place and headed out at 8:30 a.m., then talked with my tennis coach and a man from the tennis club about what was going on in my life. It was obvious I was deep in misery. I played lazy tennis, low effort but still somewhat enjoyable, and he shared details about his own marriage, which reinforced how it can feel impossible to win sometimes. Being married is hard. Being single is hard. Being divorced is hard. Somehow, joy exists inside all of it too, even when it feels completely buried.

After tennis, I went back home and started spiraling badly. I showered and tried to lie down and rest, but instead the depression intensified. For a moment, the way it all stacked together almost sounded like poetry, though it didn’t feel poetic at all. I kept thinking about how awful my life had become and wondering how everything had gone so wrong. I couldn’t believe I had thought and acted the way I did earlier that morning. The spiral deepened until I reached a point of total exhaustion. What I really wanted was for the old version of me to die, for that version of my ego to collapse so something new could take its place. I wanted to let go of the person who was so miserable and so attached to the past and become the best version of myself instead, someone capable of moving forward.

I started to see that the woman I met saying I was not ready to date again was accurate. I was still deeply attached to my ex-wife and the kids, still spending hours with them every day on school drop-offs, pickups, and time at my ex-wife’s house. There simply was not much room for another woman in my life right now. What I said that morning had some validity in that divorce does mean the kids will not see me as much, but I was also taking myself far too seriously. I was acting as though I were irreplaceable or uniquely essential. The kids have plenty of people who love them. My ex-wife has an enormous amount of love to give, as does her family just down the street, and my mom as well. I do not have to be the version of a father who is constantly present in the way I was when we were married, even if accepting that reality feels painful.

Even if I only see the kids a few times a week, that is good enough. Even if I eventually move somewhere else and only see them a few times a year, that is still good enough. There are other people in their lives who love them deeply. I will be there as much as I reasonably can, but I also see clearly now that if I am going to have a new woman in my life someday, that will inevitably mean seeing the kids less. I wish I had explained that to them in a way that was more loving and more grounded, because they have already been worried that they are not going to see me as much. And the truth is, they are right. That part is real. Still, this is a transition period, not a final state, even though it feels permanent when I am in the middle of it. If you are in the middle of a divorce and cannot yet accept seeing your kids less, I have sat exactly where you are, and if it would help to talk it through, you can schedule a one-on-one call with me and bring it to our call.

Despite these realizations, I am completely miserable. I keep thinking, what the fuck happened to my life? How did I get here? I feel like a failure, like an idiot, like someone who has ruined everything. It feels unbearable, like I cannot go on. I think to myself that if anyone actually cares about me, they should call me right now. And right then, my sister calls. She tells me she has just been through a really difficult stretch and is starting fresh again. She says she was thinking about me a lot while she was there, thinking about how similar we are and how much we could help each other. I tell her what happened with my ex-wife and the kids that morning, and she says she went through something very similar with her ex-husband, except he had that conversation with the kids over and over again. Hearing that makes something click. I commit to myself that I am not going to do that again to the kids or to my ex-wife, and that I need to understand how I got into that mental state in the first place so I can prevent it from happening again.

She tells me she thinks it would be really good for me to come visit her, and I start seriously considering it. I could come up for a week right now. My ex-wife and the kids are traveling tomorrow anyway, and I am about to face my first Thanksgiving since the divorce. Even though I believe I am invited and would be welcomed, I do not feel like being there. Going to Michigan suddenly sounds right. Being around my family, supporting my sister during such a vulnerable time, and not sitting alone in this emotional wreckage feels like exactly what I need. As she talks more about her experience, it becomes clear that she was in a much darker place than I am now when she hit her low point, and instead of judgment, I feel deep understanding. I can see how it happened. At the same time, it stirs a desperation in me to make sure that does not happen to me. I will do whatever it takes to avoid that path, because I am not convinced I would come back from it.

I want to see her. I genuinely believe we could help each other right now. After we hang up, I do not hesitate. I go straight to Delta.com, search through flights, and book a ticket to leave the next day to stay with her for a week.

After booking the flight, I text my sister to let her know when I am coming, and she tells me she will loop in our aunt and our other sister. Not long after that, while I am still feeling a surge of excitement about the trip, my aunt calls me. She wants to make sure I understand what I am walking into, just in case I do not. Everything she says mirrors what my sister already told me almost exactly. As she talks, I realize the purpose of her call is not to discourage me but to share how difficult her own experience was during a similar time and to help prepare me emotionally so I can actually support my sister instead of unraveling myself. I mostly listen, reassure her that I am stable, committed, and sober enough to be there, and tell her I genuinely believe this will be good for both of us. She says she will see me at Thanksgiving, asks me to keep her updated, wishes me a safe trip, and asks that the conversation stay between the two of us which I’m sure it will since no one reads these fucking books lol. What I take that to mean is not that it is a secret forever, but that it is not something to immediately dump on my sister. Realistically, my sister would probably assume this conversation happened anyway, and it feels like a healthy, normal exchange: someone checking in to make sure everyone knows what is going on and what they are stepping into.

After that call, though, fear starts creeping in. I suddenly wonder if I am actually stable enough to make this trip. What if things go badly while I am there? What if my sister relapses again? What if I start to lose it myself? I start questioning whether this was a mistake at all. I really hope it was not, because I already spent about $400 on a nonrefundable ticket. I could have stayed in Florida, and everyone would have understood. No one would have been upset with me for staying put and doing what I normally do. By booking this flight, I am deliberately stepping into the middle of everything in Michigan. At the same time, I realize that the only thing worse than committing to this and risking that something goes wrong would be canceling the trip after already saying yes. That would feel like an even bigger mess. I decide I need other people’s perspectives, because right now I cannot trust my own thinking to be clear.

My ex-wife lets me know that my son is available to hang out with me at 4:30 p.m., which feels like a gift because I am emotionally destroyed at this point. I have been crying on and off, hurting, wanting my ego to die and be reborn, fully in that phoenix-burning-down-and-starting-over process. Around the same time, I start listening to a book that feels uncannily perfect for where I am: Broken Open by Elizabeth Lesser. It is all about how difficult experiences can break you open in ways that help you grow. I listen to it at three times speed and tear through it, and it feels like exactly what I need. Divorce, pain, collapse, transformation—it is all there, right when I need to hear it. It feels aligned in a way that is almost absurd, like the right book showing up at the exact moment my life is falling apart, reframing this whole experience as something that could actually serve the evolution of my soul.

I talk to my sponsor and tell him exactly what is going on, then plan to see him at the meeting later. When I get together with my son to play soccer, everything still makes me cry. At one point, he makes a joke about what happened that morning, and I immediately start sobbing. At the same time, I feel strangely grateful that he can joke about it, because I am deeply ashamed. I am horrified that I walked into that house, woke everyone up, and spoke to them the way I did. It is the exact opposite of the kind of person I want to be. And yet, I remember the line from Alcoholics Anonymous about how we do not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. I need to understand this, not bury it. I need to see clearly how I ended up in such a fucked-up mental space and then acted on it, because if I do not understand that, I cannot make sure it does not happen again.

After playing with my son, I take him over to my mom’s house at 5:30 p.m., and my daughter comes over too. Before leaving, I make a point of hugging my ex-wife and owning my behavior directly. Step Ten in Alcoholics Anonymous is about promptly admitting the nature of your wrongs, so I tell her plainly that what I did that morning was awful, that I am sorry, and that I genuinely appreciate how she handled it. I tell her I am going to look carefully at what led up to it and make sure it does not happen again. As I say this, things are already starting to come into focus for me. On Saturday night, I did not get good sleep because I got overly excited the night before talking with the woman I met, listening to music, feeding off the hype of the event, and staying up late. The next day, I did no yoga, played no tennis, and did not get a massage. My sponsor even asked if I was going to the men’s meeting at 5:30 p.m., which I easily could have gone to, but I said no because I had been to meetings six days in a row. I remember feeling, even as I said it, that it was probably the wrong call, that things would go better if I went anyway, and then I skipped it.

When I look at it honestly, I did almost nothing that day for self-care. I spent the day aggravated, isolated, lying in bed, and doing nothing to regulate myself. After that, I said the nasty things to my ex-wife that I wrote about in the previous entry. She did not react, and when she did not react, I escalated internally. The next morning, I showed up and said the same kinds of things to the kids. Seeing it laid out like that, the pattern becomes obvious. Skipping yoga put me in a more amped-up, ungrounded state. I also put zero energy into my books, telling myself I was too tired, which was just another rationalization. I fed nothing that actually supports me. I did almost nothing to feel good or stay balanced, and it is shocking how quickly that absence turned into a full spiral of distorted thinking and impulsive behavior. If you can feel your own version of that spiral building and want to look honestly at the patterns underneath it with someone who has walked through them, you can book a private call with me and we will look at it together.

I can see now that having a wide emotional range is not the problem. In fact, it feels healthy to be able to experience life fully, but that range has to be managed. Without structure and care, it can run completely out of control. That realization does not erase what I did, but it helps me understand it.

At my mom’s house, things soften. Being there feels good. I tell her about my plans to go to Michigan, and I spend time with my daughter. The kids give me endless snuggles, the kind that crack you open whether you want them to or not. I cry more. My handkerchief is soaked from wiping tears, but being there with them, even in that raw state, feels grounding in a way nothing else has all day.

After that, I say goodnight to the kids and head to my Alcoholics Anonymous meeting to see my sponsor and my sponsee. I am right on the edge of tears the entire time, quietly crying through most of the meeting. I do not say anything until the very end, when they ask if there is a burning desire. At that point, I raise my hand and share. I say essentially everything I have written here, just compressed into two or three minutes instead of fifteen. I am rigorously honest with the group, and that kind of honesty has been a lifesaver for me in AA. I do not want to stand up in front of a room full of people who have heard for years how well I am doing and how great sobriety is and admit how much I am struggling. At the same time, I know that when I share honestly, I give people the opportunity to help me, and that is exactly what happens.

After the meeting, several people who have known me for years come up to support me. One guy looks me straight in the eye as I share my fear about going on the trip to see my sister after the call with my aunt. I tell him I am scared, that I do not know if I am going to make things better or worse, that I am not sure I can do this right now. He responds by paraphrasing a passage from AA's Big Book about being on the front lines together and seeing the lives and families that addiction damages. He talks about Step Twelve, about how once you are sober, your job is to carry the message to alcoholics who are still suffering. He reframes the trip for me in a way that lands hard and true. My sister got out of the hospital on Friday, and I will arrive on Monday. That is three days later. That is the front lines of alcoholism. And that, he tells me, is exactly what I am equipped to do at this point in my life.

I think about another man who has been like a sponsor to me for most of my sobriety, someone who has been sober my entire adult life. He once told me that right after his son died, he was still on a twelve-step call trying to help someone else get sober. That memory hits me. I realize how much I need to get out of myself and think about someone else, and how doing that might actually help me too. I also start to see this trip as a form of amends to my ex-wife. I took up far too much space in her life yesterday, and this morning especially. It feels like such a long day now, even though I am technically dictating this a couple of days later. I took up too much emotional space, and one way I can make amends is by giving her space instead. Taking a week-long trip might actually be one of the kindest things I can do for her right now. It is a way of saying, have Thanksgiving with your family without interruptions from me. I am going to go be with my family and support them, and you can have time away from me to think, to process, and to potentially complete our divorce while I am gone.

When this man at the meeting tells me that I am on the firing lines for the right reasons, that I have been sober eleven years, that I am going to be safe, and that I am genuinely in a position to be helpful, I start crying. I cry because I know he is right, and because I can feel the fear loosening its grip. Another guy tells me the exact same thing. My sponsor tells me the exact same thing. My sponsee tells me the exact same thing. They all hug me and I start to feel some hope.

After the meeting, people start sharing their own situations with me, and it immediately pulls me out of my tunnel vision. One guy tells me he is struggling financially right now. He sold a business, and the buyer was supposed to make another payment that he had been counting on for his financial security, but now the guy is refusing to pay. He has no idea what he is going to do next. My sponsee shares what his life looks like right now: a pregnant wife due in just a few weeks, a son with a broken wrist, a daughter, all of them young, kindergarten being the oldest, a full-time job, a packed household, and the daily work of staying sober on top of all of that. Listening to them, I realize that in some ways my situation looks great from the outside. I have an enormous amount of freedom and space, and comparatively little responsibility. That perspective shift is immediate and grounding. Talking with them restores me to sanity. I feel genuinely good again. I am reminded how absurd it was that I let resentment build toward this meeting, the very place that has supported me for so long, especially when I need it most. If you are carrying more than it feels like you can hold right now and just need to be heard by someone who gets it, you are welcome to set up a call with me and be heard on our call.

Even the small details of the night feel oddly affirming. The parking lot is packed because there is another event at the church, yet I manage to get a spot anyway. I end up parking on a sidewalk, but it is a wide one in the middle of the church near a staircase, and it works. I feel strangely proud of myself for finding a spot in such a crowded lot, like a small but meaningful win on a day that needed one. When I leave, I pull my car out and stop by my mom’s house again on the way home. I talk with her about the Michigan trip and ask for her honest feedback on everything. Hearing her perspective helps settle me further.

I get home and go to bed early, by 9:30 p.m., which feels incredibly good. I am ready for sleep in a way I have not been for days. I still have some fear about the trip tomorrow, but it no longer feels overwhelming. I trust the plan I set up for myself. I have tennis scheduled in the morning. I am seeing my massage therapist for a massage. I trust that when tomorrow comes, I will know exactly what to do, and that clarity will be there when I need it.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

I Ran Two Miles to Burn Off the Rage

Originally published October 22, 2025.

This is my journal entry from October 22, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Learning to Live Alone Again — my real, unedited days, published in order.

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The woman from yoga was at yoga again today. I was genuinely happy to see her. I’d debated going to the 9:30 class instead of the 9:00 a.m., wondering if she might be there, but she ended up showing up to mine. That felt like a small win. She seemed just as glad to see me as I was to see her, and we talked as much as we could before class started. Afterward, I was determined to ask for more time to talk, but she seemed in a hurry to get to work. I asked when we could hang out or talk more, and she said she’d see me tomorrow at the 9:00 a.m. class. I really hope she comes.

She’s beautiful, and I love how animated she gets when we talk—how her face lights up and her voice lifts. I do need to ask if she’s single, though. That question matters because it completely changes how I think about her. If she’s single, then maybe there’s something real to explore, a chance worth showing up for. But if not, I should probably just enjoy the connection for what it is—a friendship formed in yoga class—and not feed any expectations that would just get tangled up later.

Still, I felt a little sad watching her leave. Part of me had hoped for more time with her today, but I reminded myself how soon it is to feel that way. I literally just told her my name yesterday. Even so, it’s nice to have something to look forward to—to know I might see her tomorrow. She’s the only woman on my radar right now, which feels simple and refreshing.

This morning I managed to record one dream. It was about playing Texas Hold’em. In the dream, I was watching a hand unfold—one player had pocket jacks and went in against someone holding queens. The flop came down with a jack, and the player with queens folded. But I could somehow see the next two cards that would have come out—both queens. If that player hadn’t folded, they would have had four of a kind, nearly unbeatable.

The symbolism hit me immediately: don’t fold too early. I keep wondering where in my life that lesson applies. Maybe my guides are hinting at something—perhaps about not giving up on finding an agent for my publishing, or not backing down in dating, or even not losing patience on the tennis court. I want to do better in tennis. The last two times I played, I let frustration get the best of me, and I know I’m capable of handling myself better than that.

At the same time, I can see that my frustration is a call to action. Earlier today, the guy from the tennis ladder sent a message to the tennis club Men’s Singles Ladder asking if anyone wanted to play at 6:00 p.m. I was the only one who replied, but he never wrote back. Later, when I was thinking about using the ball machine, I noticed he had booked it at the same time. That stung. I couldn’t help but feel rejected—like he’d literally rather hit with a machine than play with me. A wave of rage ran through me, even though deep down, I agreed with his choice. I did get frustrated last night, and while people often say, “It’s fine,” when someone gets irritated during a match, nobody truly enjoys playing with that energy.

It’s clear I’ve reached a crossroads: either quit tennis or step up my game. Quitting isn’t appealing, so stepping up means committing—taking a couple of coaching lessons a week, attending clinics, maybe adding shared lessons. I started thinking about who could coach me. A coach I know came to mind. I could ask him to teach me more about strategy and technique instead of just rallying. I love hitting with him—it’s great exercise—but I could use a bit more structure. When we first started, I told him not to be too clinical because the last coach I had spent nearly the entire time talking instead of playing. But now I see there’s a middle ground. Stepping up always goes better with people in your corner, so if you want that kind of accountability, you can book a one-on-one call with me and we’ll build a plan to keep you showing up.

By the end of the day, my emotions had worn me down. I drove to my mom’s house, where my ex-wife and the kids were already visiting. My mom immediately started talking—again—about someone getting hurt. Lately, she’s constantly telling stories about pain, accidents, and hospitals, and this time, I finally asked her to stop.

Right when she began her story, my daughter rolled her eyes, and I felt the same wave of irritation. I told my mom, “Stop talking about people being hurt. I’m tired of hearing this.” Of course, she got defensive, saying it was her house and her rules, and that everyone else wanted to hear about this person who had fallen and hurt their tailbone. My ex-wife and my son stayed quiet, just trying to keep the peace.

I admitted my daughter had rolled her eyes—it was the truth. She gets tired of these stories too. I’m frustrated because my mom seems completely unaware of her audience. She doesn’t listen or pause; she just talks, moving from one topic to the next without considering how anyone feels. After she reminded me that it was her house and she could say what she wanted, I decided the best move was to leave. I didn’t want to sit through another round of injury talk or feel my blood pressure climb higher.

So, about five or ten minutes after arriving, I got up and left. I didn’t hug her or say I loved her. I walked home and decided to burn off the tension with a two-mile run. My body was buzzing with energy, fueled by the conflict with my mom and a general restlessness that had been building all day.

Even the positive emotions from the morning—seeing the woman from yoga at yoga, feeling her attention on me—didn’t settle me. Yesterday, I had felt thrilled by the idea of meeting her, imagining what could happen between us. Today, I swung to the opposite extreme. Even though her showing up to the earlier class felt like a clear sign of interest, and the fact she wants to meet again tomorrow should have made me happy, my mind turned against itself. I started spinning in negativity: she probably doesn’t want kids, she’s too young, I’m too old, this won’t go anywhere.

If I had to guess, she’s in her mid-twenties, and instead of feeling excited, I found myself thinking it was all pointless—that I should skip yoga tomorrow and end the story before she does. I recognize that these thoughts are predictable and irrational, part of a familiar loop my mind runs whenever I start to care about someone new. Still, I know I need to look closer at what’s underneath all of this—to investigate it fully instead of folding too early, both in tennis and in love.

All those emotions—frustration, rejection, anger, restlessness—spiraled together until I felt completely on edge. I figured the best thing I could do was channel that energy into something productive. So around 7:30 p.m., I went for a run. I hadn’t run since mid-August, about two months ago. I took just my phone and left the door unlocked because I didn’t want a key bouncing around in my pocket.

Despite having to stop several times for cars, I ran two miles in under twenty minutes. That might not sound impressive to some people, but it felt great to me, especially since I haven’t been running lately. Back in ROTC in 2004, when I was twenty, I once ran two miles in under sixteen minutes to pass an Army PT test, so tonight’s time was only four minutes slower than my best ever—after a long break. That felt good.

For the last mile, I clenched my fists and ran with intention, using each stride to release anger. I let it burn off through movement—anger at my mom for always focusing on illness, pain, and injury as if that’s all there is to talk about; anger that I’m not having sex with anyone right now; anger that when a woman might actually be interested in me, like the woman from yoga, I spent most of the day trapped in anxiety instead of enjoyment; anger that the guy from the tennis ladder would rather hit with a ball machine than play with me; anger that my tennis game isn’t good enough for anyone to want to hit with me; anger that liars and cheaters seem to thrive in this world while people trying to do things honestly struggle to be noticed. If you’ve got a night of rage like this you need to burn off and make sense of, you can schedule a private call with me and we’ll talk through what’s underneath the anger.

But underneath the anger, gratitude started to surface. I felt thankful that my body is healthy enough to run two miles out of nowhere, comfortably, and still average under ten minutes a mile. That’s a gift. At forty-one years old, it’s something I couldn’t have done easily ten years ago. And the best part is that I didn’t even push myself that hard. I stayed at a comfortable pace, breathing through my nose the entire time. I probably could have run a minute or two faster if I’d gone all out, but that wasn’t the point. I just wanted to release the tension, not injure myself or prove anything.

When I got home, I took a shower and cooled down. My ex-wife texted, asking if I was coming over for bedtime. I went over and spent about ten minutes tucking the kids in. After that, she handed me the divorce papers I needed to fill out. Since she filed as the petitioner, I now have a few forms to complete as the respondent. I’ll need her help to make sure our answers match and stay consistent. I filled out what I could tonight, taking my time and writing neatly instead of rushing through it. It felt symbolic somehow—doing it carefully, acknowledging that this part of the process deserves attention and respect rather than avoidance.

After finishing the divorce paperwork, I put on More: A Memoir of an Open Marriage by Molly Roden Winter. That book has my mind spinning—it’s one of the reasons I was angry tonight. Listening to her describe an open marriage made me think about my own situation, and about boundaries my ex-wife and I never fully agreed on. I could respect where she stood, but it still frustrated me.

Part of me feels like an open marriage could have been a better path for us—still living together, supporting each other, raising our kids as partners without having to go through all this divorce crap. Instead, here we are, untangling our lives on paper. It feels silly at times, unnecessary even, though I also recognize that divorce does free me to eventually be fully with someone else. Listening to Molly’s memoir reminded me, though, that open relationships are far from simple. You need a certain kind of relationship—deep communication, trust, and honesty—to make that work. Maybe we never had that combination consistently enough.

Another layer of my anger tonight came from not knowing what to do with myself. I had thought about going to the tennis club with my son but realized it too late. I’d been waiting around to see if the guy from the tennis ladder wanted to hit, but he never responded. That left me restless, pacing through options that went nowhere.

Still, there were bright spots in the day. I recorded over two hours of audio for I Was Famous on the Internet. I came straight home from yoga after seeing the woman from yoga, full of energy, and recorded nonstop before eating anything, wanting to ride the creative momentum. I made it through the entire “Crypto Still Sucks” section and am now more than halfway done recording the audiobook.

Getting all my books into audio format feels increasingly important. More and more people seem to prefer listening, and I want my work available however people best absorb it. When I start promoting the books more seriously, they’ll need to be on audio. It also feels like the universe keeps sending me reminders in that direction—like one of my former sponsees mentioning this week that “audiobooks are where the money’s at.” Even Courtney Maum, in Before and After the Book Deal, says audiobook sales have become one of publishing’s fastest-growing areas.

It makes sense to me. I mostly consume audiobooks myself these days because I can listen while driving, running, or cleaning—times when reading wouldn’t be possible. So, it’s settled: every one of my books will get an audio version. It’s another way to keep my voice out in the world, even as I continue moving toward a life built more on presence and real connection.

After finishing my audiobook recordings, I picked the kids up from school and dropped them off at my ex-wife’s house. I spent about thirty minutes there, petting the dogs, talking with the kids, and playing Uno No Mercy with my daughter and my son. It turned into one of those playful, chaotic games where luck just isn’t on your side. I had to draw twenty cards in multiple rounds, and once I was down to four cards, which meant I didn’t get mercy-rolled—small victory. Still, I didn’t win a single game today. My daughter was on fire and took every win like a champ.

At 4:00 p.m., I went to my AA meeting. Lately, it’s been all men, which is funny because when I first started going to this group, the meetings were filled with women. They seemed to enjoy it, but for whatever reason, most of them haven’t come back. Still, it was a solid meeting. The topic was the Tenth Step—continuing to take personal inventory and admitting when we’re wrong. Someone even drove in from out of town because a friend had recommended the meeting. That’s dedication. I’ve lived here for nine years and have never once been to a meeting in Tampa, though maybe I’ll try one someday.

After the meeting, I went home and kept working on my books while hoping a tennis match would materialize. It didn’t, and that’s how the day wound down to where I am now.

I have to admit, I feel much better tonight than I did earlier. Before my run, I’d been sad, angry, and tightly wound, but after the run, the shower, putting the kids to bed, and a quiet evening alone, I finally felt a sense of relief. My emotions have been all over the place, but I take that as a sign of being alive, engaged, and honest with myself.

It feels good—really good—to be getting to know a woman again, to have that spark of possibility without guilt. For the first time in fifteen years, I feel free to date and explore, to see what happens without hiding or holding back. I’m curious about what tomorrow will bring with the woman from yoga.

I’m also certain now that I don’t want to quit tennis. When I ended my the tennis club membership before, I missed it almost immediately. I love the game, and I want to get better. So instead of quitting, I’ll take more lessons and keep showing up.

It’s 10:00 p.m. now, and I’d like to be in bed by 10:30 to get a little more sleep tonight. This diary entry might not be quite as long as some of the others, but it feels complete. I wrapped up adding new material for my third diary book today and started processing the transcripts to turn them into a publishable manuscript. I haven’t decided on a title yet, but with some focus, I should be ready to publish it next week.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

I'm Turning My Anger Into Something New

Originally published September 14, 2025.

This is my journal entry from September 14, 2025, part of my daily autobiography The Kind Divorce — my real, unedited days, published in order.

I felt a wave of explosive anger during my Alcoholics Anonymous meeting tonight—anger mostly directed at the format itself. Nearly every meeting I go to revolves around the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and my former home group is no exception. It’s what they call a “Big Book discussion” meeting, which usually means someone starts reading or rambling about some passage from the book for ten, fifteen, sometimes even thirty minutes straight. Meanwhile, everyone else sits facing them like an audience, which kills any sense of genuine connection.

The whole setup feels stagnant to me. I can read the Big Book on my own; I don’t need someone else to read it at me or explain it line by line. And even I f I did, there are dozens of other meetings around here doing the exact same thing. What I crave is a meeting that feels alive—one that challenges me, engages newcomers, and actually sparks conversation. Too many meetings have become lifeless loops of people quoting the book, preaching about God, and insisting that everyone must get a sponsor and let them “run your life.” Sure, that approach can work for some, but it also alienates a lot of people.

Underneath my frustration, though, I can see an opportunity. I’ve learned that anger often points to something that wants to change. My first impulse was to push for reform—to convince my old home group to adjust the format. But I’ve tried that before, and they weren’t interested. Now, I realize the answer is simpler: I need to start my own meeting, built the way I believe it should be. If people want the same format repeated fifty times over, they already have those options. I want to create something that feels different—something that complements what already exists but breathes new energy into the Fellowship.

Lately, I’ve been yawning through meetings, feeling disconnected from the spirit that originally drew me to AA. That’s not what this program is supposed to be about. Thankfully, the structure of AA makes it easy to start fresh. There’s an old saying that most meetings begin “with a resentment and a coffee pot.” In my case, I might skip the coffee pot—but the resentment is real. It’s not bitterness, though—it’s fuel. A drive to create something better, or at least something true to what I believe recovery can be.

I really want to start a 4 p.m. AA meeting, mainly because there isn’t one anywhere in this area. The schedule is packed between 5:30 and 7, but nothing hits that sweet spot in the late afternoon. A 4 p.m. meeting would fit perfectly into my day, and I know plenty of others who would appreciate it too—people whose spouses are still at work, or teachers who could stop by right after school instead of waiting until evening and cutting into dinner or family time. All I really need is a place to host it. Once I find the location, I can text everyone I know in AA and start announcing it at the meetings I already attend.

I’m grateful today that I recognized my anger for what it is—an invitation to make a change. Instead of complaining about the problems with my home group, I asked myself, What’s the most effective thing I can do? I could rage, gossip, or stew about it like so many people do, or I could act. Anger, when used well, is a compass—it points straight toward growth. For me, that means creating something new. I wanted to start a 4 p.m. meeting a year ago, but my sponsor discouraged it, saying there were already too many meetings and that we should focus on supporting the existing ones. Back then, that made sense. Now I see it differently. Some of these repetitive, stale meetings could stand to fade out, making space for new formats and fresh energy.

Trying to change existing meetings doesn’t work anyway. They’re on autopilot—no one’s really steering. It’s like the default setting in human nature: people resist change. So I’ll build something new instead of trying to fix what’s stuck.

The rest of the day felt turbulent, full of that same restless, ragey energy. By the time the meeting came around, I was both agitated and oddly clear. Underneath the anger, though, I also felt sadness—especially about my books. I started spiraling into doubt about Author in St. Petersburg, wondering if it was even good enough to give away. I worried that the parts where I briefly mention changing my race might trigger people, or that the open talk about sex might lead to gossip like it did years ago after I published Speaker Meeting 2017. That fear had me questioning everything: Why am I writing these books if I’m too scared to share them?

I’d just received eleven new copies in the mail and realized I hadn’t been doing much with them. Then it hit me: I should order more, not less. During the 10 a.m. yoga class at my yoga studio with a yoga instructor, I had a moment of clarity. Either I fully believe in my books and give them to everyone who will take one, or I stop writing them altogether. What people do with them afterward doesn’t matter. Half of them will probably sit untouched on a dresser or in a car anyway—but that’s fine. The point is to get them out there.

If I’m serious about being a coach, a massage therapist, a local author, and a public speaker, then I need my books in people’s hands. Now, while I’m still in massage school, is the perfect time to do it. The books are like seeds—they need time to sit, to germinate. By the time I graduate, some of those seeds will have grown into real opportunities: clients who want coaching or massage, invitations to speak, or readers who connect deeply with my story.

I also realized what’s been holding me back: vulnerability. I told ChatGPT about it, and it described what I was feeling as a “vulnerability hangover.” That hit home. I spent an hour or two tinkering with the Author in St. Petersburg manuscript today, only to realize I was just avoiding the discomfort of being seen. The book’s good enough. I don’t need to hide behind endless edits. I just need to give it to people and see what happens. If no one says they’re bothered, then there’s nothing to worry about. If you're stuck in your own vulnerability hangover and want to talk it through with someone who has sat in that exact discomfort, you can book a private call with me.

Sure, down the road—once the books are selling more or I have extra time after massage school—I can go back and polish the details. Maybe make sure titles like I Was Famous on the Internet are italicized consistently or fix the few minor typos that slipped through. There aren’t many anyway; ChatGPT did a solid job cleaning everything up. But perfection isn’t the point. Readers are used to small errors—they know it’s a self-published book with my face on the cover, not a polished bestseller. What matters is that it’s real—and that it’s out there. The only real improvement I want going forward is consistency: writing each book cleanly the first time so I don’t get lost in endless revision.

After giving up on making changes to Author in St. Petersburg, I devoted at least an hour to refining the workflow for I Was Famous on the Internet. I’ve realized I can’t trust ChatGPT with more than a thousand words at once. Once I go beyond that, it starts truncating or summarizing no matter how clearly I instruct it not to. The upside is that I finally nailed down a process that works. After spending last night experimenting, I wrote out a long prompt designed to minimize preventable problems—things like avoiding the appearance of medical or legal advice, steering clear of copyright or privacy issues, and making sure that everything I write is clearly my personal perspective, not an absolute statement of truth. It feels good to have those boundaries in place, and the writing seems stronger and cleaner as a result.

I also recognized something deeper today: I want to lead by example rather than by instruction. I’ve always hated being told what to do, yet sometimes I slip into doing that with others. I need to respect my own resistance and assume that the kind of people drawn to me—many of them independent thinkers, rebels like me—don’t want to be told what to do either. Tonight at the meeting, one of the guys said exactly that, and I realized I had probably offended him in the past by being too direct. I’m determined to adjust my language and behavior to avoid that. The lesson feels humbling but necessary.

As I wind down for the night, I feel grateful. It wasn’t an easy day—there were waves of anxiety, anger, and even depression that hit me harder than usual—but it was productive. I ordered thirty-three more copies of Author in St. Petersburg, which Amazon says should arrive in about three weeks. Going forward, I plan to always keep a supply of my books on hand so I never run out. My goal is to give away an average of two books per day and get them circulating throughout the community. By the time I graduate from massage school, I want thousands of copies moving through the city—because I know some people will be helped by them, and others will be inspired enough to pay for a deeper experience through coaching or massage. That vision motivates me more than anything else right now.

Unbroken

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

Don't Hand Over Your Peace

Originally published August 29, 2025.

This is my journal entry from August 29, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Author in St. Petersburg — my real, unedited days, published in order.

Today I’m trying something different: dictating this diary entry while driving with my AirPods in. Yesterday was my daughter’s birthday. We ended the day with a delicious ice cream cake, and in the evening I played tennis with the boys, which was a wonderful way to close out her celebration while she enjoyed an evening with my ex-wife’s family. Last night, as I lay in bed, I had a flood of ideas I wanted to record, but I didn’t dictate them then. I’ll do my best to recall them now. What I feel I can offer most through these books is the gift of out-of-the-box thinking. I know that what I hunger for is exposure to new thoughts and fresh possibilities. Too often life feels like the endless recycling of the same ideas.

That is one reason I cherish the Seth books. I am currently reading The “Unknown” Reality, Volume One by Jane Roberts, the same author of Seth Speaks. These books stretch my mind with perspectives far beyond the conventional. I don’t mind the diary-like style or the inefficiency in the prose, because what I value most is the originality of thought. That is exactly what I aim to provide here as well. When someone reads my books, I want them to pause and think, I’ve never considered that before. That kind of mental expansion is the real treasure.

It’s important to begin with a vision of what you have to offer. I feel almost certain that no one else in St. Petersburg is writing daily diaries and publishing them. Probably not in Tampa either, or even across much of Florida. In truth, very few people in the world commit to publishing daily diaries. Most assume a book requires a singular theme or narrative. David Sedaris is one of the few who has published diaries that I have read, and his are excellent. That inspires me, yet I know I’m charting my own path.

Here’s one of the unconventional ideas I’ve been reflecting on. Recently, a friend told me about a heated argument they had with a family member who was upset about the latest widely publicized tragedy. I remember when I used to react the same way. During my streaming years, whenever a tragedy dominated the news cycle, many of my viewers would come into chat upset. I would get upset at them. I’d think, Don’t you see you’re being manipulated? You’re not thinking clearly. You’re letting your peace be stolen by something that doesn’t touch your actual life at all.

This morning, out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT how many people are born and die each day. The numbers it returned—while not perfectly reliable—showed that roughly three to four hundred thousand people are born daily, and a few hundred thousand less die each day. What struck me is how much peace I now feel about both living and dying. The method of death no longer troubles me. What matters is perspective.

ChatGPT’s estimate suggested that about seventy-four percent of global deaths result from lifestyle diseases: heart disease, cancer, and related conditions. These are largely preventable or reversible with lifestyle changes. From the research I’ve read and my own experience, I’ve come to believe that a whole-food, plant-based diet and lifestyle play a powerful role in long-term health; Dr. Michael Greger’s How Not To Die explores the research in detail, and it aligns with what I’ve experienced. I believe many lifestyle-related deaths could, in theory, be delayed or avoided. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of lives daily, lost not to random tragedy but to people’s own choices—what they eat, how much they move, whether they smoke, how they handle stress, and so on.

In contrast, the events that dominate headlines—wars, terrorism, shootings, disasters—account for only one or two percent of global deaths. Yet these rare causes provoke the majority of people’s grief and outrage. Think about how backward that is. Roughly three-quarters of deaths are preventable, yet people hardly react to that ongoing, everyday tragedy. Instead, we pour our energy into outrage over the one or two percent.

This is personal for me. My father died at sixty-three from lifestyle-related conditions. I believe his choices around smoking, diet, and exercise shortened his life. That tragedy cut far closer to my heart than any news headline ever could. Yet I see now that even this painful reality is part of the bigger picture.

I’m grateful today that I no longer fall into most manipulation. My friend’s story about political arguments reminded me how easily people become distracted. I won’t waste my peace of mind like that anymore. When you zoom out, you see that overall, humanity is still growing. Every day, hundreds of thousands more people are born than die. If the goal is simply more human life, then we’re succeeding.

Still, this raises deeper questions: Should more human life even be the goal? With our current impact on the planet, can Earth sustain our expansion? If we lived with less destruction, perhaps it could support two or three times as many of us. Yet the way we consume resources and pollute ecosystems makes the answer uncertain. Sometimes I wonder if the Earth itself even wants more humans, or if the other beings—trees, oceans, animals—long for a reprieve. Reading Braiding Sweetgrass has made me reflect on this more deeply, reminding me to consider all life, not just human life.

From the broader perspective, much of what agitates people daily dissolves into insignificance. Some may accuse me of being numb, but I see it differently. I’ve been a police officer. I’ve seen tragedy firsthand. I know what it feels like to be haunted years later by nothing more than paperwork describing horrific acts. Just the written reports alone were enough to move me to tears. Drunk driving fatalities, robberies, violent crimes—I witnessed the reality behind the statistics.

Yet even with that experience, I’ve learned to hold a larger view. Unless a tragedy is directly in your life, there is no need to hand over your peace. We should instead be the change we wish to see, living differently and working together to help one another. That is the lesson I’ve taken from all of this: almost all of our suffering is preventable if we learn to cooperate. If you want to guard your own peace and be around people choosing to live differently rather than handing it over to the outrage of the day, you can set up a call with me and we'll look at it together.

After school yesterday, the kids and I were talking about Harry Potter. I commented on how rarely swimming pools appear in the series. In Florida, pools are everywhere, so the absence struck us as odd—especially since my daughter had just celebrated her birthday with a pool party. That conversation opened a doorway for me to share a different way of looking at stories. Many people assume the Harry Potter universe is fixed—what J.K. Rowling wrote is all there is. Yet after immersing myself in the Seth material, I’ve begun to see it differently.

I believe fictional universes are real on another level, and Rowling’s books are simply her personal snapshot of that reality. It’s like taking a photograph: one image of you in one outfit, in one place, at one moment. That picture captures only a sliver of your essence. Behind every photo is the full, invisible reality of your body, your life, your soul. No single photo can contain all of that.

The Harry Potter universe works the same way. Rowling’s books are one set of snapshots, one collection of angles on that reality. They are valid, but they are not complete. Other versions of that universe exist. Your own mind can tap into them, just as hers did.

This is one reason we love fiction so much: we intuitively sense that these imagined worlds are more than make-believe. They are alternate realities we can access through imagination. For example, in one version of the Harry Potter universe, the central child might be a girl named Hailey rather than Harry. In another, there is no Voldemort at all—perhaps wizards are not fighting for control of Earth but striving to conquer space. The variations are infinite. Each one is just as real as Rowling’s snapshot, just as a different photo of you is still you.

Children are naturally adept at this. They slip in and out of universes through play, creating entire worlds from their imagination. Adults often forget this ability. We lock ourselves into the notion that what has been written is final. Yet in truth, the possibilities are endless, and the mind is far more powerful than we usually allow ourselves to believe. That realization excites me. It reminds me of the vast creative potential within us all.

This morning I woke up buzzing with both excitement and doubt about starting massage school on September 8th, now less than two weeks away. The thought hit me hard: I can’t do this. The schedule loomed in my mind—five days a week, from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon. It felt overwhelming. Part of me thought it was ridiculous to even attempt, especially when I considered the training clinics.

At the Sarasota massage school, each student must complete sixteen five-hour clinics after school, providing massage to the public. From what I’ve heard, most of the clients who come in are in their seventies. That reality jarred me, because in my ideal vision, I pictured myself massaging mostly beautiful women and, on occasion, men with vibrant energy. I wasn’t imagining a steady stream of elderly bodies, skin loose and worn by time. The thought of working on them felt far removed from the fantasy that first attracted me to massage.

Yet when I calmed down, I remembered something essential: sometimes the true value of an experience lies in contrast. The experience itself might not feel desirable, but it teaches by comparison. A memory came to me of visiting my brother a year ago. During that trip, the atmosphere was tense and uncomfortable, and being in his house felt oppressive. Yet the visit still held value because of the stark contrast it provided. It reminded me of how different my own home environment is, how peaceful and sober my daily life has become. The contrast itself was a gift.

Massage school may serve the same purpose. Even if I find myself massaging people I wouldn’t normally choose, those experiences could heighten my appreciation for the sessions I do enjoy. They may challenge me to find meaning beyond preference and to connect with people simply because they are human beings in need of healing touch. In that way, the very thing I resist might become the most valuable part of my education.

I keep reminding myself that even the parts of massage school that seem undesirable will have value. Spending eighty hours massaging older clients with frail, smelly, or aging bodies will make me appreciate all the clients I dream of working with afterward. Without that contrast, I might not value them as deeply. I may even come to enjoy massaging some of those elderly clients. Their presence could teach me lessons I would not otherwise learn—lessons about compassion, patience, and the universality of touch. In that way, the experience may expand my horizons, break down my narrow expectations, and push me into new territory.

As I lay in bed this morning questioning whether I had made the right choice in enrolling, I realized that what I truly need is new experiences. Massage school will be exactly that. It will force me to learn anatomy, a subject I know little about. It will put me in daily contact with new people, many of whom I will spend significant time alongside. It will require me to learn something intensely physical, whereas most of my learning over the past decade has been purely mental. All of this will integrate with what I already know and create something powerful.

I am grateful for the opportunity, especially when I consider what I’ve read about dementia and Alzheimer’s. I once listened to a podcast describing a study where people with identical genetics and identical brain scans could live radically different lives. Some would exhibit no symptoms of brain disease, while the others would. The deciding factor was lifestyle. For me, that is an astonishing and hopeful truth. So many of us view genetics as a curse, a fixed destiny. Yet science confirms what my intuition has often told me: that the brain, like the body, thrives on challenge and novelty.

I used to rationalize my video game playing by claiming I was “keeping my brain young.” Learning new games, I told myself, kept my mind flexible. Perhaps there is some truth to that, but it pales compared to the real benefits of forcing the brain into truly uncomfortable territory—learning something wholly unfamiliar. Like muscles worked in new ways at the gym, the brain strengthens when asked to perform beyond its routines. Massage school will demand exactly that. It will push me into material and environments where I have little background to lean on. That struggle, science suggests, is precisely what staves off cognitive decline. Even if my genetics were to predispose me to dementia, consistent brain challenges can keep the symptoms from appearing at all.

That is an incredible gift, and it reframes massage school as one of the best decisions I could make. It’s not just a career move. It’s medicine for my brain, a safeguard against the stagnation I’ve seen in others. Those who succumb to brain disease often live lives of repetition—watching television, going to the same places, having the same conversations. They stop expanding. They stop learning. By contrast, I am choosing to throw myself into something radically new.

Of course, the resistance in me is logical. My ex-wife, for instance, often has a silent tantrum before her morning runs. She’ll wake at 5:30 a.m., angry that she has chosen to get up, even though she usually goes to bed early enough to be rested and often naps later. She’ll think, I don’t want to run. Why am I doing this? Yet once she finishes, she feels renewed. Massage school may be the same. I can imagine looking back one day, grateful for having gone through it, even if some of it felt difficult at the time.

I’m also excited about what massage school will allow me to offer afterward. I love the idea of exchanging massages with my therapist friends rather than paying for sessions. I love the thought of adding massage to my coaching tools, being able to help someone heal both physically and mentally. I like the idea of building a physically based, in-person income that combines with my writing and book publishing. Beyond that, I can already see the next step: yoga teacher training. Once I finish massage school, I’ll have an intimate understanding of the body. Pairing that with yoga training will deepen both practices, and I believe I’d enjoy yoga training even more with the foundation massage provides.

Looking back, I’m grateful I considered yoga training first, because it primed me for this leap. The arc of this diary book excites me. It began with me documenting the process of unplugging from the internet, and now it closes with me enrolling in massage school. That kind of journey, captured honestly, feels invaluable.

My dream is to continue writing like this indefinitely—publishing a book every month composed only of diary entries, with no agenda beyond sharing the truth of my life. Themes will emerge naturally, and I’ll shape the titles around them. Personally, I would love to read diaries like this from others—friends, family, people I meet in town. Not that I would read every single book, but the chance to know someone more intimately through their thoughts and experiences is something I’d treasure.

I hope my writing inspires others to do the same. Journaling like this is valuable for me and potentially for others. Creativity left unexpressed often festers. People carry unspoken ideas and desires that, when bottled up, can manifest in destructive ways—even in illness. I believe expression is a form of health. That belief makes me especially grateful for my own vitality today. Yesterday I spent three hours moving my body through tennis and yoga, and this morning I still feel energized.

Just before dictating this, I drove to the Toyota dealership at 7:30 a.m., where another lesson unfolded. A few days ago, I left there burning with irrational anger. I had just paid $4,000 for service, and because they didn’t automatically provide me with a $46 rental car, I left feeling cheated. Never mind that I hadn’t even asked for the rental this time, despite receiving it free on prior visits. I could have waited at the dealership, I could have asked—but I did neither. My outrage was irrational. Recognizing that, though, was powerful. Seeing your own irrationality breaks its spell.

Yesterday, when my ex-wife told me our 2016 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid was making another noise, my frustration boiled over again. I thought, You’ve got to be kidding me. After spending $8,000 at this dealership in the last two weeks, I have to go back again? Anger surged, but this time I handled it better. Instead of venting at management when they texted me for feedback, I called my service advisor, who has always taken care of me with professionalism and kindness. I explained the problem, and she immediately offered me a 7:30 a.m. appointment today.

When I arrived—early, at 7:28—she greeted me warmly and handed me the keys to a white Camry Hybrid rental, free of charge. She apologized for the inconvenience, assured me they would realign the wheel, check the noise, and even replace my wipers. The gesture shifted my perspective entirely. As I left in the rental, I laughed at myself. I must like being at the Toyota dealership, because it has been one of my most-visited places lately. This was the third time in two weeks, meaning six total trips back and forth. Instead of resentment, I chose gratitude. Gratitude that they are maintaining my car, gratitude for her care, gratitude even for the lesson in spotting my irrational anger. Everywhere I am, I remind myself, is a place I’ve chosen to be. That means even the Toyota dealership is, in some way, my creation. If you catch yourself handing your peace over to irrational anger and want to talk through what is really driving it, you can book a one-on-one call with me and we will work through it together.

After dropping the RAV4 off at the Toyota dealership, I attended my daughter’s Dolphin of the Month ceremony at their school, where one child from each class was chosen to be honored. The school brought them on stage, announced their names, and shared what each child wanted to be when they grew up. My ex-wife and I sat together in the audience, laughing and joking like the Muppet critics in their theater balcony.

After the third or fourth girl declared she wanted to be a veterinarian, I leaned over and said, “Who is telling all these girls they need to be veterinarians?” My daughter had wanted to be one herself for a while, and I had encouraged her to think carefully about what that really meant. My ex-wife shot back at me with perfect timing: “If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother,” since my mom worked in animal care and I even dated two women in that field back when I lived out of state.

At first my daughter’s reasoning was simple: “I love animals.” I reminded her that being a veterinarian doesn’t mean playing with healthy animals all day—it means treating sick and injured ones, performing surgeries, and sometimes euthanizing them. Loving animals is one thing; loving medicine is another. If she wasn’t interested in the medical side, she might want to consider other ways of working with animals.

She thought about it and considered a neighbor of ours who boards and walks dogs for a living. For a time, my daughter said she wanted to be a dog walker. Today, though, when she was announced on stage, her vision had expanded: she wanted to be an entrepreneur and own an animal shelter. That thrilled me. Owning a shelter combines her love of animals with her entrepreneurial spirit. Maybe she wants to be like her dad. The work might be heartbreaking at times, but the vision was bold and specific. I loved hearing it voiced publicly at school for the first time.

Another child, whose father once gave us several mulberry trees, said he wanted to be a hibachi chef. I laughed out loud. That’s the kind of clarity and originality I adore. One boy in first or second grade said he wanted to be vice president. My ex-wife quipped, “Why not president?” But the truth is, the vice presidency carries enormous power, sometimes as much as the presidency itself. I remembered all the talk during the Bush years that Dick Cheney was really the one in charge.

Listening to these kids, I felt proud of their courage to dream. Society needs people in every role, from vice presidents to hibachi chefs. Even jobs that seem menial, like janitors at Disney cleaning bathrooms, matter profoundly. Whenever I went to Disney I made a point to thank the bathroom staff, because their work created the environment for joy. Ideally, though, we wouldn’t need full-time janitors if everyone simply cleaned up after themselves. I often imagine a gift economy where everyone contributes joyfully, doing what they love, and everything gets taken care of that way.

That thought always leads me back to waste and trash. In kindergarten, I dreamed of being a garbage man because the trucks looked fun. As an adult, I wouldn’t want to do it full time. Still, I once got a glimpse of that reality when I hauled 15,000 pounds of my mom’s possessions to the landfill. I’ll never forget it. You imagine some sophisticated system at a landfill, but in reality, it’s just garbage dumped onto the ground, bulldozed around, compacted, and layered until it becomes a mountain covered in dirt. Watching it unfold was shocking. I think everyone should take a trip to a landfill at least once, to see where all our “stuff” ends up.

When my mom moved, I had only a week to clear out her storage. She had accumulated mountains of possessions—tens of thousands of pounds of books, mugs, tubs of stuffed animals, and old textbooks. Ideally she would have had time to donate, sell, or give away much of it, but she was locked in a survival mindset and didn’t make the time to even go through her house, let alone her three storage units. I did manage to drop off at least five car loads of items at thrift stores, but most of them didn’t want outdated textbooks or worn stuffed animals. In the end, I made many more trips to the landfill because that was the most time-efficient.

The saddest moment came when one of the plastic tubs of stuffed animals I had tossed—filled with Winnie the Poohs and Eeyores—got smashed open and pushed away from the main pile. They lay there the next day dirty, splattered with blood from other trash, abandoned in the open. The sight broke my heart. It made me think about how easily people get swept up in the euphoria of buying, whether at Disney or online, and how little thought goes into the full life cycle of those purchases.

For years, my mom shopped to soothe loneliness while living alone out of state. Thankfully, she has slowed down lately, but for years the pattern consumed her space and her finances. Seeing the landfill firsthand changed my perspective. Every item we buy required raw materials, labor, and energy to make, and for many of them the end of the story is just being crushed into a pile of garbage. It forced me to ask myself: Am I willing to buy this knowing it will eventually end up here?

I realized I had fallen into the same trap. In business I bought equipment and gadgets brand new, only to sell them later at a fraction of the price or give them away. I often told myself I needed the latest and best, when in reality a used version would have served just as well. I’m grateful I managed to sell about $1,700 worth of gear on eBay when I cleaned out my studio this month, but I had probably spent three times that buying new. Looking back, I see how unnecessary much of it was.

Today I buy less than ever before, though I still have room for improvement. Just recently I bought new massage sheets when, realistically, I probably could have found used ones. Massage sheets and linens aren’t typically items people buy secondhand, but I’m sure some massage therapist has donated theirs to Goodwill. I might look into that for the rest of my sheets. The important thing is that I am more conscious now. I no longer buy thoughtlessly.

Dictating this diary today feels much better than yesterday. Yesterday’s entry felt rushed, unfinished, anticlimactic. Today I’ve expressed more of what I needed to say, offered ideas I believe are worth sharing, and left behind a complete reflection. Sometimes I wonder if these diaries are worth the paper they’ll be printed on. Yet I know I would love to read someone else’s diaries like this, even just once. That thought reassures me that my writing holds value too.

Books, after all, are communal objects. One copy can be read by a hundred people. That alone makes the effort worthwhile. So I’m excited to finish and publish this diary. I don’t yet know what the next one will be titled, but I know I want to continue. I want to keep writing like this every day, capturing the ordinary and extraordinary moments of my life, so that others can read them and perhaps find something of themselves in my words.

If you want more of my books, you’ll find them linked on JerryBanfield.com. I will be here writing, documenting, and publishing for as long as I live. This book is over 50,000 words now, and I’ll stop here because I want it to be long enough to provide a full reading experience but not so long it overwhelms readers like my 526-page Speaker Meeting 2017 or my 690-page Officer Banfield. I’ll be publishing I Was Famous on the Internet next and hope you will continue reading with me.

If you want to meet up with me in person or send me a message, I have a phone number for you on JerryBanfield.com. Thank you for reading, and I hope to see you again in another book.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

Loving Your Mind Even When It Thinks Insane Thoughts

From my video published May 5, 2024.

I love my mind even when it thinks insane thoughts. This is a new thought for me to have, because most of my life I've really hated all the crazy stuff my brain would come up with, and I associated those thoughts with my identity. I believed that if I had certain thoughts, that must mean I am that kind of a person. Just yesterday I had the breakthrough that I can love my mind exactly as it is, even with its dark sides and its ugly sides, because ultimately my actions will really determine what people think of me and my impact in the world.

To some degree, although I believe we are telepathically connected and our thoughts do have some effect on other people, we also do have privacy. To some degree we can think whatever we want to, and it doesn't bother anybody.

Why I used to hate my own mind

I used to think that if I had any thoughts that I didn't like, I should fight those thoughts. Then I would subconsciously hate my mind and tell it to shut up and stop that, and then I'd flip and really go deep into the insane areas of my mind. Like when I first got sober, my mind would think about drinking all the time, and I got to hate it. I'm like, stop thinking about drinking. You're such an idiot. I don't want those thoughts.

No matter how spiritual you get or how wonderful your life is — and I'm pretty spiritual, my life is pretty nice — my mind still comes up with some crazy ideas. I'll be driving down the road, and I used to be a police officer, and I'll be driving home from the grocery store and my mind comes up with the thought that you should just floor it and ram that police car in the back. It's like, what? Yeah, that'd be a nice day, going to jail, wouldn't it? That's so crazy.

Treating my mind like a stand-up comedian

What helps me is to look at the thoughts my mind produces like that as a stand-up comedian who's trying to entertain me. The thought can be there as a test — like, hey, let's see if he goes for this crazy thought. Because some of the crazy thoughts I actually believe. My mind says this person is awful and you should hate them, and occasionally it tricks me into that, and I start thinking, yeah, you're right, this person is awful, come up with some more thoughts of why I should hate them.

That happens even when I know that I'm here as a being of light, as we all are, and that my role, my joy, is in sharing the light and helping others and being a part of the community and serving. Therefore, anything besides that — thoughts of harm, insanity, inconsiderate, self-centered, delusional thoughts — those I used to be so mad about.

The real test of love is whether you can love the insanity

What I find is that the true test of love is: can you love when things aren't going your way? Can you love your partner when they're looking ugly or when they're being mean? Can you love your kids when they're being crazy and when they're not doing what you think they should want to? Can you love your parents when they're sick and delusional and they aren't taking care of themselves? Can you love the world when horrible things are happening — wars and violence, people starving in a world where a third of people are overweight? Can you love the world when it's insane? Can you love yourself and your family and your friends when they're insane?

Now, I'm not saying that you need to put yourself in the middle of the insanity and feed the insanity. As a general rule, if my mind comes up with some crazy stuff, I acknowledge it. Like, wow, that was unusual, or that was pretty far out there, or I see you — I see you thinking about that — and now we're going to move on. Now I'd like you to think about what you'd like to do the rest of the day, or what kind of a video you can make.

Accepting the thoughts instead of fighting them

What's really cool is that yesterday my mind was filled with more insane thoughts than usual. Instead of being so critical and feeling in conflict, I accepted and I noticed the thoughts. I'm like, okay, I see you, I see these thoughts. These are selfish, insane thoughts — that's my judgment of them — I see them, I accept that they're there, and it doesn't matter that they're there. Because just like I'm not going to ram the police officer on the way home from the grocery store, I'm not going to do anything in my life that's going to cause anyone harm, whether it's my family, my friends, or some random person on the street. I'm not here for that purpose, and that doesn't bring me joy. Therefore my mind can think whatever it wants to.

It was a revolutionary concept to just say, I love you, mind. This shift — choosing love and trust over fighting my own thoughts — is the same move I describe in how I chose faith when my mind went to fear. And I had to recognize that, hey, all the tough spots I've ever been in, my mind has always gotten me out of them. From asking for help when I was first sober in Alcoholics Anonymous — that started with feeling desperate and alone and hungover and hopeless, and my mind gave me the thought, why don't you go to Alcoholics Anonymous, to get me out of that. So my mind has its light and dark sides, and I'd rather recognize, accept, and acknowledge them than fight and deny them.

Dropping the split personality

What I don't want to have anymore is a split personality. I used to have this split personality where I'd have one identity based around all the dark thoughts and one identity based around all the light thoughts. Drinking often was a way to really get into and embrace and accept all the dark thoughts, but it also ended up acting them out sometimes as well, which was really scary.

Where I find a lot of us struggle and suffer is that we compartmentalize ourselves. We try and put our thoughts in little boxes and hide them and pretend they don't exist, and then they only come out at certain times when certain things are triggered, and then they're really scary because we've tried to hide them. Often our bodies will do things and produce symptoms based on thoughts we're not willing to think, or thoughts we've tried to compartmentalize and push away. That connection between an unacknowledged thought and what shows up in the body is something I go even deeper on in how I am creating every experience in my body.

For example, I was talking to my daughter the other day when she was trying to act sick in order to stay home from school. She said that she really wanted to go to school, and I said, well, your body indicates you don't want to go to school, because if you wholeheartedly wanted to go, you'd feel good and you'd go there. Your body is clearly wanting to stay home, which usually means there's some unacknowledged thought that you don't want to express that needs to be shared. My daughter said, yeah, it's been a long weekend, it's Monday, I was out, I'd like to just have a quiet day at home and then go to school tomorrow. So I said, fine, have a quiet day at home — you don't need to be sick to have a quiet day at home. She instantly got out of bed, ate her breakfast, and had a regular nice day at home, not sick.

Share the exact nature of your thoughts with a safe person

It is important, when we have thoughts, to remember that if you feel like you're really alone and nobody else ever thinks about this stuff, first off, that's a lie, because we're all telepathically connected. The thoughts we have are all connected, thought together with other people in this big telepathic net of thoughts.

If your thoughts really bother you, one thing you can do is find a safe person to share the exact nature of the thoughts with. For example, with my sponsor and my grand-sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous, I shared the exact nature of all the craziest thoughts my mind was having, and all the past experiences I had related to those thoughts, and they shared their lives and their crazy thoughts. It helped me realize that what you see people expressing and talking about on the surface — especially if you're in a peaceful, caring, loving community like I'm in, where people are generally pretty nice and understanding, which means they're generally not too crazy or outrageous and usually not expressing these thoughts — most of us are still having some kind of nutty, insane, selfish thoughts. Not all the time necessarily, but here and there, some days more than others. You're not alone with these thoughts. All of us have our crazy thoughts, our dark thoughts. Finding that kind of safe person to be honest with is a big part of what helps, and if you want that, you can join me in Jerry Banfield Family and we'll talk yours through together.

Your thoughts are more collective than individual

Often our thoughts are mirroring each other. I used to feel really bad when I would have thoughts that I should leave my wife and find another one. Usually when I was thinking those thoughts, it turns out, after talking to my wife about them, that she was usually thinking thoughts that she'd rather be alone and she didn't need me anymore. Our minds were literally having the same basic thought, individualized into both of our life experiences. So the thoughts you're having are really more collective thoughts than individual thoughts, especially when you consider that rarely do your thoughts not involve anyone else somehow. Even if you think you're totally isolated and self-centered and you're only thinking about you, you're often thinking, what are other people going to think of me? Or the things you're afraid of doing involve other people.

I am not my mind

So what I've found that really helps is to say: I love you, mind. I love you no matter what thoughts you're thinking. I love you, I see you, we're here together. And at the same time, I am not my mind. I observe my mind, but I am much more than a mind that thinks or a body that feels and acts. I am consciousness. I am God. I am the universe. I really am the space that everything happens within. Sitting in that identity — that I'm the Higher Power having this experience — is what I explore in why being God is hard.

I also don't identify with the thoughts that come through. To some degree they're just like the example Eckhart Tolle used in The Power of Now — a rat race, where an animal runs by, and there goes a thought, and there goes another thought. Sometimes it's like you're watching a little mouse hole or groundhog hole, just wondering when a thought's going to pop up. Oh, there's one, there it is, and then it goes back, and there's no thought for a moment. Nope, there's another thought. To some degree the thoughts just come out without me doing anything.

The people I'm around have a big impact on the thoughts I'm thinking, and I'm certain we're all telepathically connected, so that with some people we'll have certain thoughts and with other people we'll have other thoughts — because all our thoughts are connected.

You are never thinking alone

I want you to know you're never alone. You're never thinking thoughts alone, and there's a reason and a purpose for your thoughts. If you can't find any other reason, it's a test: can you love your mind when it's going nuts? It's easy to love my mind when it's inspired and coming up with great ideas and full of enthusiasm for life. But can I love my mind when it's really nihilistic, when nothing matters and everything's stupid and everyone's wrong? Yes, I can, and I do. And I love your mind that way as well. If reflections like this are the kind of thing you enjoy, you can watch more of them in my Life playlist.

How Not to Be Angry All the Time

From my video published May 1, 2024.

If you're tired of being angry, if you truly want relief, I'll tell you what works for me to deal with anger. I used to get so angry as a kid that I would bang my head on the floor and try to smash my head open. I remember that as young as being two or three years old. My parents used to have to physically restrain me so I wouldn't hurt myself. Anger was a big challenge, a big problem, a consistent emotion for me for most of my adult life, until the last few years where I've learned to handle anger in several different ways, in a process that's actually productive, that allows the anger to be used and to fuel my life.

Emotions are okay and they pass

The number one thing with anger is to understand that emotions are okay. They have their time and place, and it's a passing emotion.

The number one thing you need to stop doing if you don't want to be angry is stop attaching emotions and stories. Stop taking the emotion and tying it into a story, because that's where you're losing power over yourself and your surroundings, and where you're also fueling future anger.

For example, if you just feel anger: my kids are seven and five, and they often just feel an emotion really strongly for a minute and then they move on. They feel it, they get it out there, they express it, and then they move on. What we've done as adults, lots of times, is we feel the emotion and then we try to suppress it. We try not to feel it, we pray for it to go away, we try to ignore it, or we put a story around it. So basically, we resist the anger.

What works for me is to let the emotions pass through me and acknowledge it and say, "Yes, I'm angry right now, but I'm angry for no reason." And that is where the real power comes in. I'm angry for no reason. I'm just feeling the feeling of anger right now. That allows me to be powerful, and to let the anger, the emotion, flow through and then move on.

I'm never upset for the reason I think I am

Another thought process that can work with that is one I learned in A Course in Miracles, that's called, "I'm never upset for the reason I think I am." I was feeling angry today, and I was making the mistake of putting a story with it. I was making the mistake of tying something that happened in my life, something my wife did that I didn't like, sticking the story of that with my feeling.

I felt anger when my wife did something I didn't like in the bedroom last night, and anger came up, and then the story came with it. Today, when I woke up, the story was there, and then the anger came up. What I did is I severed the anger and the story. I just am experiencing anger. There's no story. There's no reason. I'm not upset for the reason I think I am.

If you continue to experience anger over and over again, there are a few different ways it can be productive, but the secret is that you're not upset for the reason you think you are. There are a few different reasons you can really be upset. One is you're just experiencing being human and emotions. All emotions are desirable. They're part of the human experience. It's just like all colors of the rainbow are desirable. Would you tell me that you want to remove red from the rainbow because you don't like it, because you don't think it should be there? How would the rainbow look without red? Anger is an emotion that's part of the human experience. If you're feeling anger, it just might be a normal part of being human.

Where you get screwed is the story

Where you get screwed is when you start to take that emotion and wrap a story around it. I'm angry because this person did this, this person said that. I felt a surge of anger in traffic this morning as a person drove close to my bumper, then passed me, then pulled right in front of me at a stoplight. My mind's like, "You effing moron, I should rear-end you." But I don't believe that, and I don't hold on to it. That person's driving was impersonal. They don't know me, they don't care about me, they're just driving how they drive. They're not driving in any personal way toward me.

Another thing that helps with anger is to see that the things that happen aren't personal. People's driving is just how they drive. They don't know you, they don't care about you, their driving has nothing to do with you. At a certain level of growth and maturity, you realize that, and you don't take it personally, and you don't let those thoughts run you. I had the thought to put my finger out the window and flip this person off, and I laughed at it. I'm like, well, I'd be an idiot then if I did that. I realized that the anger I felt had nothing to do with that other person's driving. It had to do with an emotion I internally was experiencing, and any other set of circumstances would have served to produce anger. I could have gotten angry the light changed. I could have gotten angry about the bill at the post office.

Once you see that you're experiencing emotions, and external reality really has very little to do with those emotions, that's where you get powerful. Then you see, I'm not upset for the reason I think I am. I'm upset because I'm just being human, because I don't even remember who I am. I don't remember that I'm a mortal soul, that I'm source energy having a human experience by choice, and I wanted to have all the emotions and feelings. That's why they're here. That's why they're possible. This is what helps me to deal with anger, as I consciously separate my mind's tendency to put a story with the feeling. This is the same inner work I keep coming back to across my Life playlist, and it's a lot like how, in another moment, my mind went to fear but I chose faith instead of letting the story take over.

Release the anger through the body

I also do physical practices. Yoga helps me physically release anger from the body. While mental processes can stop you from doing something dumb, like sticking your middle finger out the window at another car, if I'm angry, often that energy needs to be released through the physical body. Yoga, exercise, massage, sex, and many other physical practices can help. Meditation, walking, light exercise, all these things can help release the physical energy of anger.

Another thought I have with anger is that I'm thankful I've got enough energy to be angry. I hate when I don't have enough energy to be angry, and being angry is proof that I'm full of energy. I love being full of energy. I love having enough energy to show up in the studio and make videos, to go do yoga in the morning, to handle all the stuff that comes through my day, and then just rest at night, sit on the couch, watch some videos, and learn how to make music after I've eaten lunch while my food digests. I love that most of the 15 hours a day I'm awake, I'm not angry. I've got a lot of energy, and when I'm angry, I get grateful. I'm like, thank you, body, for having enough energy to get upset, enough energy to get in a fight right now. I love having that much energy. My anger is proof that my body is working properly, because when you're sick and you feel bad, you can hardly have enough energy to even get angry. I'm glad today to be able to handle anger, because this has been a tough emotion for me over the course of my life.

Handling my anger helps everyone around me

I love it when the people around me can handle their anger in an acceptable way, because the better I handle my anger, the better I'm able to understand other people's actions. I wouldn't be surprised if that other driver today was angry themselves. Once you realize that, you'll often see you attract people in similar emotional states to the one you're in. If you're angry, you're likely to attract another angry person to you, and that's what motivates me to want to just experience the emotion and release it. Learning to do that consistently is its own kind of practice, much like the long-term emotional sobriety I work on every day.

If you're stuck in anger, I guarantee you you're playing a story, and you're doing a feedback loop where the story triggers the emotion of anger, and the emotion of anger triggers the story, and it goes back and forth. You can break that cycle in your mind with your thinking alone, and then you can help the emotion and the body relax through physical practices. This is a very valuable skill that every kid should be taught in school, and that's why I'm sharing this today, because I've seen the results of me being angry and breaking things, destroying things, hurting myself, hurting others. I love today the feeling that I'm empowered, that I'm in control, that I can safely experience my emotions without causing destruction to other people.

It's okay to have emotions, too. Sometimes I get angry and other people around me can sense and feel my anger, and they take it personally. I've helped other people, like my wife, to learn that if I'm angry, it's not her fault. If I'm angry, it's not my kids' fault. It's no one's fault that I'm upset. I'm not upset for the reason I think I am. There's no reason, truly, that I'm upset, except that I'm having the human experience.

The Power of Positive Self-Talk

From my video published March 2, 2024.

My friends, I've come to believe that if you talk to yourself the way I'm about to describe, you'll get everything you want in life. I think you'll love learning about the power of self-talk. I'm Jerry Banfield, and I see myself as a living example of self-talk putting you in the exact position you want to be in. So first, let's define what self-talk is, and then I'll tell you a few stories I think you'll enjoy.

Self-talk is the habits, the language, and the thinking you direct at your ego, your mind, your body, your idea of who you are. For example, self-talk happens when you screw something up. What kind of self-talk happens right after that? The self-talk I have now, if I fall down in a yoga pose, is: that's funny, nice job trying, you're getting stronger. If I upload a video on YouTube that does poorly, my self-talk is: we're going to learn from this, we're going to go get some more inspiration, and we're going to do even better next time. My self-talk when I get upset is: it's okay to be a little upset, you chose to feel this way, and you can choose to feel a different way.

What's even more important than that kind of reactionary self-talk is the deep-down beliefs you carry. These have often been programmed very thoroughly in the past, frequently by other people, but you've accepted them, you've taken them in, and you've reinforced them. In my experience, if you'll take in new thoughts, you can program those as your new reality.

How I came to believe I reprogrammed my health

I set out to see a level of health in my life that I'd never seen before. I made a decision that I'll do whatever it takes to be in the best health of my life. And I have not had one day sick, not a single day sick, since October 2022 — which, at the time I'm recording this in March 2024, is a long stretch.

I can tell you exactly why I believe I got sick that last time. I was about to go help my mother move. On the surface, I was happy to go help her. But deep down, I really didn't want to. In the way I've come to understand it, my body honored my deep-down subconscious unexpressed desire to stay here in my house, do my videos, play my games, be with my family, go to my yoga and my AA meetings, and keep the intimacy with my wife. That subconscious desire said: I really don't want to take a week to go help my mother move in Mississippi. And to me, that manifested as an illness — pure fatigue, no other symptoms, just fatigue — to give me what I was subconsciously asking for.

Once you realize the self-talk you've done in the past — consciously, at some point — you see that once you program it, repeated enough times, it becomes unconscious and unquestioned belief. But if you can get those beliefs out and examine them, I believe you can reprogram your entire reality.

The money story: from "I'm broke" to "I have enough"

Let's talk about money. I used to have a mindset that I'm broke, that I can't afford nice stuff, that everything's too expensive. I didn't focus on how much I did have. I'd look at my bank account and feel like other people had it better than me. My money self-talk was that I don't have that much money, I don't have enough money. If you boiled my self-talk down to its simplest form, it was: I don't have enough money.

So what did that materialize into? Especially after college, I took really low-paying jobs, where my other self-talk was: I don't value my time, my time is not valuable, I don't value it and other people don't value it either. So I'd take low-paying jobs and then resent how little money I got. Meanwhile, friends I went to college with were earning double, triple, some of them five times as much money as me — and I resented them for that too. I expected they should pay for things because I'm poor and they're not. All of that was driven by self-talk.

When I examined my self-talk around money and chose to reprogram myself, I looked around about ten years ago and realized: I am wealthy. I've never had a day in my life where I didn't have enough to eat. I've never had a day where I didn't have a place to live — despite being an alcoholic and a gambling addict and having a few other issues. Not one day have I had to sleep outside. Not one day have I missed a meal. I'm clearly very wealthy. I clearly have enough money.

Even though my external circumstances were the same as they'd been for a while, when I internalized "I have enough money," that started being my self-talk. And I've made more money doing work I love than all the years I worked so-called real jobs combined, multiplied several times over. Just showing up and doing videos on YouTube, saying whatever I think can help you each day, turns out to pay way, way more than anything I'd been able to do before — way better than all the jobs I worked so hard at and risked my life at, like being a corrections officer and a police officer. It pays better than a lot of my friends' jobs too, and some of them are jealous.

So when your self-talk is "I am wealthy, I am healthy, I love myself, I love the world, I have enough," I believe that, ironically, reality reinforces your existing self-talk. If you want to go deeper on the money side of all this, I keep these conversations going in my Crypto Reviews playlist.

Why I think so many people get hurt in crypto

Let's move on to things that operate on that same energy. This is how a lot of people have gotten ripped off in crypto. People come into crypto with the conscious mindset, "I'm going to make all this money." And while some do, many come in with the conscious thought "I'm going to get rich quick." But the unconscious belief behind that is, "I'm poor, I'm broke, I don't have enough." That's why so many people who thought they were going to get rich plowed into crypto and lost huge amounts of money — the self-talk behind it was "I'm broke, I'm poor, I don't have enough."

Consciously you're using something like crypto to try and escape that, but even if you do succeed, the old self-talk catches up with you. Even when I had poor money self-talk, any good opportunity that came along, I'd end up finding a way to waste the money. I'd go to the strip club when I was a police officer and blow two weeks of my pay. I'd wreck my car and then have to work. The first car I bought, I worked a whole summer and used all my savings bonds to buy it — and I wrecked it in a night of drunk driving. It took me quite a while to get enough money together to buy another car.

Today, even with a car payment, because I have enough money, and because my self-talk is that I have enough money and that I love the car I have, I'm driving a car with almost 200,000 miles on it and I'm not shopping for a new one. I love the car I've got. When you extrapolate this self-talk across all areas of life, you can see how powerful it is.

My worst financial decisions — and realizing I was wealthy anyway

When I was at the depths, in the worst financial situation of my life, my self-talk a year before that had started saying, "I'm broke." Looking back now, it seems so ridiculous, because at the time I had paid off tons of debt and made hundreds of thousands in crypto. But my earnings had dropped drastically when the crypto bull market turned into a bear market, and I felt broke. Externally, you would have thought, this guy made $100,000 in 2018 running his mouth online — and yet I felt broke at the end of the year.

In 2019, I made the worst financial decisions I've ever made. I sent my daughter to a private school and even talked my wife into it. That private school for her pre-K was $18,000 of after-tax money. I then spent over $100,000 on a new startup idea — on credit cards, business loans, and personal loans — and it failed miserably. A year after I'd made over $100,000 in 2018, in 2019 I lost something like $70,000 in my business. And I was sitting at the bankruptcy attorney's office, and I realized: I did this by thinking broke, by self-talking broke. I did this.

As I drove home from the bankruptcy attorney and decided not to declare bankruptcy, I realized again how wealthy I was. Even though I had destroyed my finances — I'd borrowed and borrowed and borrowed, taking cash advances on credit cards to make minimum payments, I had drawn down my wife's investments to bail me out so we could even pay our bills. I was paying the mortgage up until I told her I was taking cash advances on credit cards that collectively had over $100,000 in limits and were almost maxed out. My wife was not prepared for that, and she went through her entire savings and her investments.

Despite all of that, my wife still loved me. Despite all of that, I still had enough money to pay for professional massages. Despite all of that, my daughter continued in private school — we'd already paid the tuition. And I never missed a meal. My kids never missed a meal. We never wanted for anything. And I realized: I'm insanely wealthy. Even with all the stupid decisions I'd made, I still hadn't suffered any real, lasting financial harm.

Today, all those credit cards are paid off. Today I have almost $50,000 in crypto, and all of our family debt may be paid off in the next year or two. I was looking through some of my papers earlier today. Four years ago, we had $600,000 in debt, and our net worth was negative $200,000 or more. I believe I did that by self-talking broke. Our net worth has gone up several hundred thousand dollars since then — and I believe I did that by self-talking wealthy.

Self-talk and your relationships

When you realize that your inner reality drives your outer reality, you can apply this to relationships too. When you feel lonely and disconnected and you tell yourself, "I'm a lonely person, people don't like me, I don't like other people," that self-talk pushes people away. But when your self-talk is, "I love people, I love getting to know people, I am a person who thrives in relationships, I love being a parent, a child, a romantic partner, a husband — I do really well in these roles, I learn a lot, it's supportive," then in my experience it manifests.

The main way you learn self-talk is by what you take in and the people you surround yourself with. As kids, a lot of us got into habits of negative self-talk because we grew up in environments — parents, relatives, friends, school, classrooms, music, movies — that taught us all this negative self-talk. The good news is that today there's all kinds of literature, and there are people you can listen to, including me, who will help you reprogram it.

I'm a person today who only participates in healthy, loving, positive, supportive relationships. If a relationship is based on toxicity, on wanting to change somebody, on somebody not being good enough, I will not participate in it — and I don't care which relationship it is. I only accept relationships full of love and joy, where we're growing together, learning, and enjoying life. Those are the only kind of relationships I accept today.

If you're single and you want to attract somebody, the self-talk is: "I am preparing to receive the partner of my dreams. I'm doing the work today to be ready to be a fantastic husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, or fiancé." When you do that self-talk and you prepare, your mind starts looking for that intentionally. Our eyes take in billions of points of data every moment we're seeing, but the brain filters that down to a picture that's relevant to what we already understand. It automatically filters out what it doesn't think we're interested in, and it focuses most easily on what it already recognizes and knows. So if you want your life to be any particular way — if you want anything in life — I believe it starts with the self-talk. I talk through a lot more of this in my Dating playlist if attracting a partner is where you're focused right now.

The music problem, and looking under the hood

I'm grateful to be remembering all of this today, because it can be very easy to slip into negative self-talk — especially when you listen to music. A lot of the music that's promoted and popular today carries a ton of negative self-talk. If you listen for the "I am" statements in the music, and you listen to the stories, a lot of it is basically programming you to say, "I am a victim, I'm powerless, other people did this to me." When you focus on all that, the self-talk gets programmed in unconsciously and negatively. That's why I avoid listening to that kind of music.

What's frustrating in life is when your conscious mind says one thing and your unconscious says another. When I was trying to date and find a woman to be with, my conscious mind said, "I'm doing everything I can to find the perfect girl, I'm so committed to dating and being happy and having a great relationship." But my unconscious self-talk said, "I'm a sad, lonely, single man. I don't deserve to be with anybody who really loves me." And that stuff is often unconscious — you have to intentionally look into what you actually believe and see what's going on under the hood.

If you look at the movies you watch, the music you listen to, and the people you hang out with, you'll often find a reflection of your self-talk. Married guys tend to hang out with other married people. Single people tend to hang out with other single people. Sober people tend to hang out with sober people. Drunks tend to hang out with drunks. The people you surround yourself with are often a mirror of your self-talk.

Aligning your conscious and unconscious self-talk

Where peace usually comes in is when your unconscious self-talk matches your conscious idea of what you're trying to do. When you're trying to manifest money and you already feel wealthy and know you have enough, things line up. I logged into MEXC today and found $1,600 sitting there that baffled me — I had no idea how it got there. When your conscious self-talk is "I am wealthy, I have so much financial abundance, life easily supports me in doing what I want to do," and at the same time you're consciously asking, "How can I give people value? How can I help people and then give them avenues to give back and support me?" — when your self-talk, the people you spend time with, and your conscious mind are all aligned, that's when the magic happens.

I know it's frustrating when your conscious self-talk is going one direction and your unconscious beliefs are going the other. If you feel like you're having a battle in some area of your life, the real battle is usually your unconscious self-talk versus your conscious self-talk. This is the same idea behind how I believe I hacked reality to get anything I want — it always comes back to lining up what you say with what you actually believe underneath.

Stepping back from my mother, and digging up "you're a bad son"

I recently stepped back from my relationship with my mother, and I felt some turbulence. Consciously, I was saying: I will not have anyone in my life where I have an unhealthy relationship, where we argue and fight, where they're in active addiction and mental insanity. Consciously I was saying, "I will not tolerate this in my life anymore. I will not have anyone in my life who doesn't take care of me, who isn't themselves, who has that constant negative self-talk." I'd said that to everybody in my life, including my mother, many times before I actually let go of the relationship — because I know the relationships I want in my life are loving, positive, supportive ones where we're growing and helping each other.

But my unconscious self-talk was: "You're a bad son." That's where the conflict came from. When my relationship with my mother got to a place where it didn't fit what I'd committed to, my unconscious self-talk conflicted hard with my conscious decision.

So what I did is I started asking everybody for advice. A lot of times you can't figure out your unconscious self-talk without other people's help. I asked my wife, my kids, my AA meetings, my yoga friends — I asked everybody about my situation with my mother. The consensus was: if you can't have a relationship with your mother where you can just be with her, where you find joy in being together, where you trust her and accept who she is without trying to change her or save her, then the most loving thing you can do is step back and say, "Look, I love you, Mom. I'm over here. If you want what I have, I'm over here. I don't want what you have, so I'm going to stay away — but if you want what I have, you can come over to my house and get it. I'm just not going to go over to your house and be in that insanity."

Because everybody was telling me that, I asked myself, "Okay, so what's the resistance, then?" And I realized my unconscious self-talk was: "You're a bad son. If you were a good son, you'd put up with your mother no matter what she did." Once I pulled that out and could see it clearly, I said, "No, I'm not." I talked to other people I thought of as good sons and daughters, and they'd had similar experiences and had stepped back from their parents too. From my point of view, they weren't bad children for refusing to keep going into situations that were destroying their own sanity — for some of them, a parent in addiction, or a mother in a nursing home who couldn't remember them anymore and where every visit just hurt. The way I dug up my own unconscious self-talk and modified it was through seeing other people's experiences and getting their help.

I told myself: "You are a great son. You're a son your mother would be proud of." I even had a vision of being five years old. My mother was such a great mother to me growing up — she held the family together, made a living for everybody, and helped my dad get sober. I imagined asking her, at five years old, "Hey Mom, what do I do thirty-some years from now, when you've gotten really sick and I can't stand to be around you anymore without trying to save you or change you?" And I could picture her saying, "Just don't worry about me. I'll be fine. Enjoy your life, enjoy your family. If you don't want to hang out with me, that's fine — you're a grown-up, it's fine." I cried. That big emotional experience, along with everybody else's help, reprogrammed my unconscious belief.

Now my self-talk is: I am a loving, caring son. I'm a son who very much loves and cares for his mother — and the most effective way for me to love and care for her right now is to not be near her. When I'm near her, I think about what's wrong with her. From a distance, I love her, and I'm very glad for the life we've had together. If you've ever wrestled with guilt like this, you might recognize it in loving your mind even when it thinks insane thoughts.

Grief, willingness to change, and where I am now

Grief is often the secret to really making those unconscious changes — letting go of how things used to be and saying, in order for me to grow, I let go of the past. "I'm willing to grow. I'm willing to change." That's an affirmation that's been extremely helpful for me, and that self-talk has made a huge difference across my life. When I was in the depths of my financial suffering, I started affirming constantly, "I'm willing to change." That willingness to change is what allows the conscious and unconscious beliefs to actually shift. And from where I'm standing now, the whole world is just wonderful and amazing.

So I hope this has been helpful for you. If you want to dig further into the inner work behind all of it, I keep sharing it in my Life playlist. I'd also love to get to know you better — you can hop on a one-on-one call with me and chat any time.

How Not to Take Things Personally

From my video published October 17, 2022.

I want to tell you how not to take things personally — because if you don't take things personally, life is pretty easy. Life gets difficult when things are taken personally, especially when they're not meant to be taken personally. For example, somebody says something, and you get all upset and pissed off when they didn't really mean to attack you with what they said. What they said could have not been taken personally, and in that instance, you might not have been upset. This has been a skill I've been very intentionally developing: how not to take things personally.

The number one thing: take inventory of yourself

So the number one thing to do to not take things personally is to really take inventory. Take inventory of yourself. Get to know: who are you? What are you all about? Because it's much harder to take things personally when you really know yourself well. And if you see a reaction coming up, then it really points to something within you.

For example, when I start getting upset at something, there's the temptation to look at it and blame it on other people. But really, I'm disturbed. There's something going on inside of me. It's not really them. It's me losing my cool. It's something happening inside me. So taking full responsibility for my own feelings and my own emotions makes a world of difference. And it allows people to not have power over me. Because as long as I am letting other people offend me, then I'm not going to be able to do anything — I'm vulnerable to losing control of myself.

And I don't like losing control of myself. I really like having control of this body and this mind. I really enjoy being in control. So with taking full responsibility for who I am and what I'm doing, I'm able to be in control — to really love myself. That self-love and ownership is something I've explored more in my story about my higher power, sobriety, and self-love.

If you're an angry person, it's not about them

So not taking things personally starts with getting to know thyself. For example, if you identify as an angry person, then of course anything anybody says is likely to trigger your anger. But it's really not about them. If you are an angry person, and somebody says something that leaves you feeling angry, it's not really them. It's you. You're an angry person. And pretty much anything that could happen, pretty much anything, could come along that would trigger you to be angry — because you're an angry person.

And that level of identification, saying, "Oh, I'm an angry person. You know, maybe it's not what everybody else is doing. Maybe it's me" — that just produces magical results in life. That responsibility. So having that ownership over how I'm feeling allows me to not take things personally.

How Alcoholics Anonymous taught me to look within

I've worked on this in Alcoholics Anonymous through things like the fourth step and the fifth step — taking inventory, and looking within to see, okay, who am I really? And taking full responsibility for myself. That makes it much harder for me to take anything personally. Because in the event that I do get upset, I suspect it's something to do with me and how I'm feeling. My first thought is, "Hmm, what's going on with me today?" instead of immediately thinking, "What's going on with them? What's wrong with them?" If I get upset, I think, well, what's going on with me? Why am I letting this person upset me? And that makes it so much easier. I've written more about the emotional side of this work in long-term emotional sobriety in action.

This has been very important for me as someone who streams live, too. Instead of looking out and getting mad — and I've gotten mad at people lots of times while streaming, for one thing or another — it's really helped me to look at myself and ask: what's going on with you, that you've got to get pissed off about this person? That's helped me a lot. Taking that personal responsibility has made a real difference.

Another thing that really helps, if you don't want to take things personally, is to realize that every time I get offended, it's an opportunity for me to learn something about myself.

People tell me I seem nice now. Well, I am now — but I used to get angry a lot. I mean, a ton. That's the point: if you don't want to get offended and take things personally, it really helps to examine yourself. I used to be a very angry person who got very easily frustrated. And I realized, I don't like being like that. I don't want to be angry and easily frustrated. I want to be in control of myself. And when you set that intention, that intention is very powerful. You know what? I don't want to be angry or frustrated. I want to be in control of myself. That makes a huge difference. That's why taking personal responsibility makes such a big difference. I've said, look, I don't want to be all frustrated and annoyed on a daily basis. I don't want to be powerless over my own emotions. I want to be responsible for who I am. And then it's harder for me to take things personally.

The second thing: set an intention for who you want to be

So once you get to know yourself really well and you understand what's happened in the past, it helps to then set the intention: how do you want to act? Do you want to get really nasty and offended when any little thing happens in life? Or do you want to be cool? Do you want to be able to be at peace and enjoy your situation? I want to be at peace and enjoy my situation. I don't want to be all angry and frustrated.

So the first thing is to know thyself — look at who you are and how you're acting. And then the second big thing is to say, you know what, I want to be a person who's not easily angered or frustrated. I want to be a person who's calm and composed. I want to be a person who's full of love and joy. I want to be a person who is not afraid. And when I set all those intentions for myself, those end up coming true. This is the kind of everyday inner work I keep documenting in my Life playlist.

The third thing: understand what the other person is going through

And then the final thing, the last thing that makes a big difference. Knowing myself makes a big difference. Setting an intention — I don't want people to be able to make me angry, because I feel powerless when people make me angry — makes a big difference. The last thing is then to always question what's going on with anybody else. Because other people have their own things going on in life. Other people are struggling and frustrated sometimes themselves. When you know yourself well and you know how you want to be, you can better understand how other people are operating.

For example, I know myself and my driving history. It used to really piss me off when someone tailgated me. It used to really piss me off when people were driving too slow. Basically almost anything that happened when driving was liable to get me really pissed off, because I'd get afraid of getting in a car wreck, and that would often lead to it — or I'd be in a hurry and impatient, looking at how somebody else was in my way.

So when I know myself, and I know, hey, it's okay, people can drive however they want to — it's fine, it's not a big deal — and I remember my own driving history, it's much more difficult for me to get angry with somebody else's driving. Because I remember very well how I used to drive: angry, fast, tailgating other people. And when I see other people doing that now, I'm able to be more compassionate and say, you know what, this might be an angry or frustrated person right here. Or this is somebody who's in a hurry right now. That compassion allows me to not get angry, because the antidote to being angry is understanding.

Understanding someone else is love

So if you don't want to take things personally, you take control over yourself, your stories, and your life; you set an intention for how you want to be; and if somebody comes along and is being a bit of a jerk, then there's an opportunity to understand them. When you can understand them, that's love. When you can understand somebody else and how and why they're operating the way they are, that's love — being able to understand somebody else and why they're doing what they're doing. And that's a beautiful thing to be able to do.

To give somebody grace: I look at somebody now in the same situation where I would have gotten angry before. Somebody's tailgating me. Instead of getting all pissed off at them, I remember why I tailgated other people — I was in a hurry. And why was I in a hurry? Because I was out of control. When you're out of control, and you're trying to do too many things, and you feel like things aren't going well for you, it's very tempting to get yourself into a hurry. So I got myself into a hurry all the time because I was out of control. And I was unhappy. And I was anxious. And I was having trouble managing my emotions successfully. That left me consistently in a hurry, because I wasn't looking at the big picture.

So all of that understanding — when somebody's tailgating me — instantly comes into my head. And then the logical thing to do is to just get out of the way. Somebody's tailgating me, I get out of their way, because that's the intelligent thing to do. And I don't get upset, because it's nothing personal. Somebody tailgating me is nothing personal. I am nothing — I don't even exist to them. I'm just in their way.

Nothing personal: the real gift

And what's funny is, I'll watch the same person who tailgates me go on to tailgate the person in front of me, once I get out of the way. And the person in front of me will take it personally and get pissed off, and honk, and they'll be giving each other fingers. And I feel so enlightened. I'm like, see, I don't have to do that. That's the real gift of not taking things personally.

One day there was a guy in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting who said something that, I guess, made the room gasp. Because whatever he said sounded like it was really negative and directed toward me. But I didn't even notice. I didn't associate that what he said might be related to what I said. I simply figured they're talking about their experience, which has nothing to do with me, because I don't even know them. And this lady said, "Can you believe what that guy said about you?" I said, "No. Who said what?" And she told me. And I still wasn't offended. I'm like, he can say whatever he wants to. I don't know him. The same thing is true of any negative feedback you get out in the world — most criticism is a sign of success you can mostly ignore.

Another guy in AA said something that left me feeling enlightened one day. He walked into a meeting and told this other guy, "I don't think these people like me." And the guy looked at him and said, "They don't know you well enough to not like you." And that helps.

So I hope this helps you to not take things personally as your day proceeds. And then, if you do take something personally, maybe you can set the intention: next time, I'm not going to take that personally. If this resonated with you, you can watch my newest videos in my Life playlist.

How to Release Uncomfortable Emotions Like Anger and Sadness

Originally published April 8, 2021.

Here is where I have landed after years of trying the wrong things with anger and sadness: uncomfortable emotions are not the enemy. You do not need to fight them, argue with them, numb them, or explain them away. You feel them fully, in your body, without attaching a story, and you let them move through you. Then you ask what they are trying to tell you. That is the method I keep coming back to across everything below, and it is the answer I would give anyone searching for how to deal with anger or sadness that will not go away.

My view has changed over time, and the order matters. In my original 2021 post I described what still works for me: say you are willing to feel whatever is present, let go of the story about why, and release the feeling with sound and tears, the way children do. In 2022, in How Not to Take Things Personally, I added that when I was angry, the cause was usually something going on inside me, and that understanding the other person is the antidote to anger. In 2024, in How Not to Be Angry All the Time, I put it plainly: emotions are okay, they pass, and I am never upset for the reason I think I am. Anger also needs to leave the body, so I use yoga, exercise, walking and massage for that. Those same months I wrote about loving my mind even when it thinks insane thoughts, and about how the self-talk I repeat shapes what I feel.

By 2025 the emphasis moved from managing emotions to using them. In August I wrote that unless a tragedy is directly in your life, you do not need to hand over your peace to it. In September I wrote about anger that pointed at something I wanted to build, a 4 p.m. AA meeting I had been told was unnecessary, in I'm Turning My Anger Into Something New. In October I wrote about running two miles to burn off the rage, clenching my fists on the last mile and letting each stride release what I was carrying. In November 2025 I handled one painful morning badly during my divorce, then spent the rest of that day owning it, crying through an AA meeting, and asking people for help instead of hiding in the discomfort. That post is in I Broke Down, Then Showed Up Anyway.

The most recent posts, from March and June 2026, push the idea further. In A Good Cry on the Massage Table a release on a massage table let me see how I had been treating the women I was dating, and it became the start of trying to be kinder. In June 2026 I wrote that I am not a positive person and not a negative one, I am balanced, and that the trouble starts when you box yourself into one identity. In I Know What to Do, but I Don't Do It I wrote that change plunges you into the unknown and that the short-term pain is real, which is why we stay stuck. My newest post, I'm Sad, and Then I'm Willing to Change, says sadness is a call to action. Do not numb it, and do not reach for a drink or a drug, because that blocks the clear thinking you need to see the message. For me, that sadness pointed to dating taking attention I needed for building my YouTube channel and getting my money in order, so I stepped back from dating for now and kept the door open.

Below you will find all 13 pieces in full, newest first. The 2026 videos and journal entry come first, then the 2025 diary entries from my daily autobiographies, the 2024 videos on anger, self-talk and loving your mind, the 2022 post on not taking things personally, and the original 2021 post at the bottom. If you want practical tools, start with the anger and emotion posts. If you want to see those tools under real pressure, read the diary entries, where the messy parts are not edited out. If your struggle is tied to sobriety, my Alcoholics Anonymous hub gathers the recovery side of this story in one place.

If you want me to look at a specific situation with you, you can get a personal video review at https://jerrybanfield.com/review/.

On this page

Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.

1. I'm Sad — and Then I'm Willing to Change (June 18, 2026)
2. I'm Not a Positive Person. I'm a Balanced One. (June 17, 2026)
3. I Know What to Do, but I Don't Do It: Why We Don't Change (June 17, 2026)
4. A Good Cry on the Massage Table (March 3, 2026)
5. I Broke Down, Then Showed Up Anyway (November 23, 2025)
6. I Ran Two Miles to Burn Off the Rage (October 22, 2025)
7. I'm Turning My Anger Into Something New (September 14, 2025)
8. Don't Hand Over Your Peace (August 29, 2025)
9. Loving Your Mind Even When It Thinks Insane Thoughts (May 5, 2024)
10. How Not to Be Angry All the Time (May 1, 2024)
11. The Power of Positive Self-Talk (March 2, 2024)
12. How Not to Take Things Personally (October 17, 2022)

I'm Sad — and Then I'm Willing to Change

From my video published June 18, 2026.

I invite you today, the next time you're sad, to say thank you for this sadness right now. What is this teaching me? How can this help me? I've been feeling sad a lot this week, and I don't usually feel very sad — I'm usually very upbeat and happy, more world-domination mindset than feeling powerless. But I've been sad the last week, maybe five days, and the root of the sadness has been in my dating.

Where my sadness came from

I've gone out with so many women and gotten absolutely no return on investment. I mean, not one single relationship from it, hardly even any second dates — despite spending tens of thousands of dollars on matchmaking, on Hinge and Roses and Bumble, and taking women out to dinner and coffee and lunch, and just absolutely nothing. It has been shockingly disappointing. And I've been facing sadness, like: man, how can so many women treat me in a way that feels so bad, that feels like it's just been one humiliation after another?

Don't fight sadness — get curious

A lot of us, what we try and do is fight the sadness, argue with it, debate it, make the other person wrong, and try to do things to compensate for the sadness. And that's the exact wrong approach. What I've done this week is I've said: what do I need to learn from this? There's clearly something I'm missing, because what I find is that if my life is operating with maximum effectiveness, where I'm really loving and living an open-hearted life, I generally will not be sad. I generally will not be down or depressed.

Sadness is a call to action

Sadness, therefore, ends up being a call to action. Sadness is a warning sign that I'm operating out of alignment. Now, sure, some sadness may happen — but even that, to me, like when somebody passes, that's not the same kind of sadness. Often I feel grief when somebody passes, which is a reflection of how much I've loved them. I do feel sad when they pass. But also that sadness is a call to action to find more people to love. I get out there, and I notice that my sadness will tend to disappear once I apply the call to action. My sadness is saying: hey, look, Jerry, there's something you could learn and change in your life. When you learn it and change it, you will feel better again.

So I don't spend much time sad now, because when I'm sad, I say thank you — what are you trying to tell me? And sure, sometimes I start off by saying, "F you, I'm tired of this." I don't usually have days where I'm sad, but I've had days of just moping this week. And then I had a breakthrough yesterday.

What you can do with sadness, if you will avoid numbing it: do not numb it. Do not distract yourself from it. Focus on it, feel it, and say — what are you here to tell me? How am I willing to change? What should I change? Sometimes there will be all these negative narratives. My mind's been like, "Oh, give up on dating, dating is not worth your time, it's never going to happen." No — that's not helpful. Where's the helpful call to action?

You have to be able to think clearly

You really need your mind cleared for this, because if you're drinking, if you're using drugs, if you're into addicted behaviors, it'll block you from seeing things like this. I'm able to see things like this today because I'm not in the middle of drinking, I'm not in the middle of doing drugs, I'm not in the middle of doing things that are screwing up my ability to think clearly. So it is critically important that if you want to be able to process sadness like this, don't do things like drinking or drugs, because it will screw up your ability to think clearly. Once you can think clearly, the calls to action will become pretty obvious.

The call to action: stop trying to date

With me, the call to action was: Jerry, you need to stop trying to date. So many people have said, just be yourself, surrender, stop putting all this effort into dating, focus on building your YouTube channel. Your thinking should be obsessed every day, all day, with what's the next YouTube video. Don't even worry about the last one — what's the next one? Can you make 12 YouTube videos a day, Jerry?

The main times I've been sad are when my dating has distracted me from building my YouTube. My sadness this week showed me that my attention is not going in the place where it's most valued. When I make YouTube videos like this, I've gotten millions of impressions, hundreds of thousands of views, thousands of subscribers, thousands of dollars already, in just the first three months of starting six brand new YouTube channels. My attention on YouTube is clearly very much appreciated. Although I'd had an audience before — I deleted everything, and they came back pretty quick — I'm literally getting viewers on dating channels and gaming channels from scratch. The time I'm putting into YouTube is setting up making money and being a provider. My sadness showed me: Jerry, you need all of your attention on your YouTube channel right now.

Getting my money right

I've leveraged my credit, and I can continue to leverage my credit without making much money for the next six weeks to months if I need to. However, if I don't have my YouTube producing like $10,000 a month — even just $5,000 a month would be enough, but if I don't ideally get to like $10,000 a month within the next six months — I'm looking at having to move out of the house I'm in, and my entire quality of life drops, potentially severely. I might have to move in on somebody's couch or sell my YouTube equipment. I may have to give up on my dreams. Dating doesn't mean anything compared to that.

My kids are the most important people in my life. The house I live in now costs $2,700 a month in rent, and it's an amazing house the kids love, in a great neighborhood where I can have them overnight three or four nights a week. They love it. My ex is very happy with the arrangement. My mother comes over consistently. I am very happy with it. And my sadness showed me: Jerry, you need to stop screwing around dating right now. You need to get your money right, right now. That's what really matters. It doesn't matter if you find somebody to date in the next six months — you'll be just fine without a woman to date. But if you don't get your money right in the next six months, you will potentially be uncomfortable, and your kids may lose out on time with you. So stop focusing on dating.

I'm not giving up on dating forever

That's not to say I need to give up forever on dating. I'm not going to give up forever on dating. But right now, my mind should not be putting time and energy into dating. If you want to follow all of that, I go into it in much more detail over on my Dating playlist.

When you change, the sadness lifts

It was my sadness — just feeling like I needed to cry, crying, feeling like everything sucks, like nothing in my life even makes sense, like the world's totally an unfair, awful place. It was days of that. But my sadness broke, and the key breaking factor was seeing what I need to change. And what's beautiful is, when I make a change, I sometimes will have weeks, sometimes even months, where I barely have any sadness. Because when I'm operating at maximum effectiveness, almost any of the things you would think would make me sad don't. I just continue to flow and go through the flow of life. I accept the things that might make me sad. But when I'm out of alignment with my own self and how I'm contributing to life, the sadness is there to show me the difference: here's where you want to be.

I want to give you millions of dollars of value

Where I want to be is making $10,000 a month on YouTube — and I want to be doing that by giving you huge amounts of value in your life. There are things I could do to just trade my time for money; I could easily make $100,000-plus a year doing some marketing or tech job. But I want to give you millions of dollars of value every month on YouTube, and in return I'll take back a fraction of what I give.

Some of you have fought with sadness your entire life. In this one video, I may be able to help you change your outlook on sadness and dramatically change how you approach your emotions from here. That's priceless — it's something you might spend $10,000-plus working with a therapist on. If I can give you this idea directly in a video, or turned into a blog post, that's the kind of value I want to give. But I can't give out millions of dollars of value while I'm obsessed with wondering if a woman's going to text me back, or when I'm going to have my next date, or while I'm taking four hours to drive to Orlando to meet a woman for a date who doesn't even like me as soon as I meet her. I don't have time to be spending hours on Hinge, not getting a single match, sending roses, then matching with people who waste my time. I literally had one woman on Hinge where I could have made five or ten videos like this in the amount of time I spent messaging her — and I ended up unmatching her, because she just asked me personal questions and then criticized me over my answers. That's where I was sad: I was sad to see the opportunity I missed. I could have been creating huge value for you here, but instead I was fooling around with somebody I'm unlikely to ever meet in person and have no way to contact again.

Stop fighting sadness, start getting curious

So I hope this is a breakthrough for you: stop fighting sadness and start getting curious. What's really happening inside me? Where does my sadness indicate a call to action to change? Try some affirmations — "I'm willing to change" — and you may see it. If you want to build a life you don't have to escape from, a life you're proud of, the basis for that is relationships and dating (even if dating right now just means stop trying for a while and get your money right), being happy with enough money, and being at the forefront of technology, crypto, and AI. If you want a mentor who's been there and done that — through divorce, through losing weight, through getting sober, through making millions of dollars online and burning it down and building it back up again — I'm here at jerrybanfield.com every day. And if you want the whole journey, money and mindset and the comeback, that's what I document on my Life playlist.

I'm Not a Positive Person. I'm a Balanced One.

From my video published June 17, 2026.

I'm Not a Positive Person. I'm a Balanced One.

I'm not a positive person, and I'm not a negative person either. I'm a balanced person. To me, this is a really helpful point of view to have, because some of you say, "Oh, Jerry, you're so positive," and I think it depends on the context. It's important to intelligently apply the use of positive and negative. If you ask me about the healthcare system, I'm really negative and toxic about it. It's a sick care system. It's horrible. If you ask me about crypto, I'm really toxic and hateful on most of crypto, because crypto is designed to rip fools off. Almost everything I see in it is somebody's money-making scheme designed to separate naive people from their money. It's pitched as a get-rich-quick thing, but it's terrible.

So I'm grateful to accept and see the balance I have in myself. What I find frustrating in the world is that so often people say, "Oh yeah, just be positive, it's all good." No, it's not. Life sucks sometimes. Life is miserable and hard sometimes, and it leaves you questioning everything. Life is not this beautiful thing of flowers and rainbows all the time. And if it was, you'd get sick of it and destroy it anyway. I've heard it said that we created a universe before where everything was all good, where we were all blissed out on our connectedness and God consciousness all the time, and it was boring. There was no reason to do anything. There was no momentum or purpose to guide our lives. Ironically, what I find powerful is the balance, the polarity of positive and negative. The exciting thing is the balance between the negative side of the battery and the positive side of the battery.

The Problem With Boxing Yourself In

The trouble starts when you try to box yourself into being "this positive person" or "this negative person." Then you don't want to do certain things. It's like, "Positive people don't play Warzone or first-person shooter games." Why can't I play a first-person shooter game if I want to? Nobody is really 100% positive all the time anyway. What's wrong with constant positivity is that it can turn into obedience to authority. There are times to be extremely negative, to fight, and to resist. Now, of course, a lot of people do this at the wrong time. They protest meaningless, stupid things they have no ability to change, and meanwhile the things they actually could do something about go ignored.

So what I try to do is intelligently apply the positive and negative in my life. For example, I'm very positive about my marriage and very positive about my kids, but I probably lay more criticism on my kids than anybody else does, because the people who know you best are in the best position to criticize. That said, I generally don't criticize them much. I'm not going to claim that all I do is tell my kids I love them, even though that is most of what I tell them. Ideally you want to be mostly positive, but it depends on the context. It's not just about always telling everybody they're right. When I drank and was poisoning myself all the time, the right thing to say was not, "Oh, you're doing great, Jerry, just keep going, it'll be all right." No. I was poisoning myself to death and I needed to stop, and I needed to quit being an insane, selfish person. That's the thing to tell me, not "just be positive, keep going, bro." There's a time to be negative and a time to be positive, and you need to pick that out intelligently and consciously.

With crypto, we need a lot more negativity toward all these garbage coins. Almost every coin out there is a garbage coin, a fraud, a liar, a cheater, a stealer coin. And we need some more positivity toward ICP, because that's real technology. That's what I do. I apply what's needed. I'm very reactive. In fact, I've usually voted reactively. Whatever most people were for, whoever won the election, I generally voted against them for most of my life, because what I'm all about is balance.

Balance Is Where the Power Is

To me, balance is where you have power, like in a battery. Do you want a battery that's all positive? No. Balance is where the power lives. A battery works by having a positive pole and a negative pole, and without both poles the battery doesn't work. In life, we need balance the same way.

I saw a man in his 90s in my AA meeting today who can barely do anything, and I found myself wondering, why are you here, what are you doing, what is your life purpose? I'm not saying you should quit and give up. I'm saying that at that point you should be very clear about why you are here and what you're doing, because you have very limited functionality and probably very limited time left. You should be very aware of what else you have to do. I'm very aware of what I'm doing here. I'm having fun, I'm enjoying the experience, and I'm trying to wake other people up and help others learn and grow. That's why I'm here, and I think it's very valuable to always be aware of your purpose.

Now, sometimes you may not know your purpose, and a lot of the time we really need other people to help us fulfill it. Life is pretty meaningless if you're just trying to do everything by yourself. I believe that's why so many people are depressed. They go around trying to be positive, saying "Yeah, it's all good," but it doesn't feel all good, because all they're doing is suppressing. They hate how things are going in their life, but they keep telling everyone they're doing great. It's also genuinely challenging because a lot of the time you don't have the time. People ask, "How are you doing?" Well, how much time have you got? Five minutes? Fine, I'll just say I'm good. I don't have enough time to go into the details of life.

But one thing I do that's really effective is that when I'm feeling like garbage, I say it. My grandfather would ask, "How are you doing, Gerald?" and I'd say, "I'm piss poor." That could be a bit of an exaggeration sometimes, but I think it's important to lean into the balance in life. You don't want to be a one-sided person who thinks one way and acts one way, because you're killing yourself doing that. You're draining the battery.

Why I Explore the Negative Side

So I'm not here being positive all the time. Life absolutely is horrible, miserable suffering in some cases. However, I tend to focus on the joy and the positive in my life. And I think there's even a place for the rest of it. Why am I out here playing Warzone solos? Part of me wants to suffer, wants to put myself in a kill-or-be-killed environment, me against the world. Part of me must really want that, because that's what I'm doing. And it seems like there's a place for that in life too. Some of the teachings you hear say, "Just be positive, it's all good all the time, never engage with negativity." I think that's extremely limiting, because there's a lot to learn, and sometimes you learn the most from getting into the negative situations.

I'm not saying you should put yourself in situations to be exploited or taken advantage of. I'm saying you really learn when you explore, and sometimes when you explore you find things that are rough and scary, and that's okay. I've been playing tennis, and the outside of my right knee started to hurt a little. I could have just sat in the house and not risked hurting my knee. But there's more to life than trying to be in perfect health. If you don't use your health, if you don't explore, then what good is having it? If all your actions are taken out of fear, you end up afraid to do anything because you don't want to get hurt. I struggle with that, because I don't want to have to deal with going to the hospital, so sometimes I think, let me just be super cautious, I don't even want to take a chance at getting hurt. But the thing is, you've got to be open to the negative experiences too. I'd prefer in most cases not to have the negatives, but there's value to everything.

Where it can really help you is realizing that some of the negative experiences in life are your chances to help each other. How am I going to help you by saying it's all good? That's not helpful. I can help you by saying, look, I've had some rough days in my life, and I'm really glad I kept going, that I kept trying and didn't give up, because I had no idea how good my life could get. A lot of the incredibly negative experiences I've encountered have actually helped me love and appreciate my life and gain perspective. Often someone who's had a really sheltered, easy life can have a hard time being kind and understanding, or a hard time being useful. So I'm out here saying life sucks sometimes, and that's okay. We don't need to make it not suck. We don't need to lie about it sucking. Life sucks sometimes, and that's okay. We don't need to act like it doesn't happen.

That's part of why a game like Warzone can get me there. Sometimes I don't feel like a whole person unless I can explore my nasty side, the part of me that's swearing at people. That doesn't hurt anybody. I'm having fun. I think it's ideal to explore that conscious side consciously, in a way that doesn't hurt other people, and that's what I try to do.

Teaching My Kids What "Disgusting" Really Means

I've noticed some things my kids don't understand yet. My kids will be whining about how bad they have it, and I remember my dad saying, "Boy, you have no idea how good you have it." Now I have a much better idea, and I accept that. My daughter, who's nine, was calling my son, who's seven, disgusting the other day. I told her I'm going to fine her every time she calls him disgusting from now on. They have to pay for their own stuff besides food and shelter. I told her, you have no idea what disgusting even is. You've seen so little of life. You've lived in a sheltered, nice life, and you don't have a clue what real disgusting is. And that's fine. That is okay. One day you're going to understand what I'm saying better, and it's okay if you don't understand it today. Calling your brother disgusting because he farted is nothing. There's life that can get so disgusting that you would beg to be somewhere like this, and it would feel like the cleanest, most beautiful, safest home you've ever been in.

Reading books is one way I broaden my horizons on this. Reading the stories of people who've had really difficult, horrible lives, people who were kidnapped or brought up in abuse or abducted, or who escaped from North Korea, those kinds of stories really help me. They remind me not to be in denial, not to pretend life is good all the time. It's not always good. Sometimes it's so miserably horrible that it's shocking people can even live through it. But ironically, that's part of what makes this experience interesting, and exploring that range of life is a lot of what I share over on my Life playlist.

I Know What to Do, but I Don't Do It: Why We Don't Change

From my video published June 17, 2026.

I Know What to Do, but I Don't Do It

I know what to do, but I don't do it. Why? If you've ever related to this or had this struggle, I think you'll really appreciate this. I'm recording it live on Twitch on my 4,993rd day on YouTube, January 29, 2025. Here's my example for today: I know exactly what I need to do with my music. All I need to do is make a sick dance set. That's it. Make an incredible Ableton Live dance set. So do you know what I've done? I've known this for quite a while, and I haven't done it.

Can you relate to doing this in your own life? Often there are things you need to do that will advance your life. You know what they are, and then you don't do them. Why? Why don't you do them? What I've noticed is that there are a lot of reasons, and I'll try to recall them from my own history in the hope that it helps you.

Doing It Plunges You Into the Unknown

If you know you need to do something to change your financial situation, such as quit a job, get a new job, or learn a new skill, often you won't do it. One of the weirdest reasons is that if you actually do what you know you need to do, it'll plunge you into the unknown, and you'll have to change your identity.

For example, I knew I needed to get sober for a long time. But if I get sober, then I don't know what my life is going to be like anymore. I knew it would be better, but it still felt like plunging into the unknown. I'd have to give up my identity as this person who drinks. And then I don't know who I am anymore.

If you're single and you know you want a girlfriend, you know you should go to the gym and work out, you know you should get on online dating, often you'll know you should do these things and you won't do them. Because if you actually do them, you'll get what you want, and then you'll have to change your identity. In my experience, some of the worst times in my life have come right after I had my whole identity pinned on one thing and then I got what I wanted. I had my identity pinned on being this frustrated single guy, and then I get with a beautiful woman, and all of a sudden I'm not a guy who struggles to get with girls anymore. I'm a guy who gets women I'm really attracted to fall in love with me. So who am I now? This identity of the frustrated single guy is gone, and yet somehow it's still there. Now my life is confusing and doesn't make any sense.

It's the same with my music. If I actually get an incredible dance set built, which I'm close to, then everything changes. What's frustrating is that you'll be so close, and then you'll quit, or something will come up.

The Short-Term Pain of Change

I have a friend who is at the highest weight she's ever been. She knows what she needs to do. She needs to change her eating. She needs to get back to the gym. But she doesn't do it. Why not? From my point of view, it's because you don't want to get rid of this identity. You don't want to let go of this experience. There's a part of you that wants to keep struggling with the weight and keep eating the way you've been eating, because you don't want to have to go through the short-term pain and uncertainty of change.

Take getting sober. Getting sober is so obviously an awesome thing, and it made my life so much better. So any rational person would ask, why wouldn't you just immediately do that? Why would anyone struggle and be miserable with alcoholism when you could get sober and have a much better life? Well, in the short term, it's so much harder to get sober. In the short term, I had to stop what I was doing and go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, read the book, and face all these painful things I'd been through. In the short term with my dance music, if I focus on just working on my set in Ableton Live, I can't make any songs yet. I have to watch tutorials. I don't know what to do. I have to try things and have them not work. In the short term, it's harder to do it.

But in the long term, I'm so glad I got sober in 2014. I'm so glad I basically stopped my life and put the work into going through the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and getting a sponsor. For so long I avoided that. I knew I should stop drinking, and I didn't.

When What You Tried Before Didn't Work

Here's another big reason I know what to do but don't do it: in the past, I knew what to do, I did it, and it didn't work. A lot of times you have bad ideas. You have ideas that won't work. You have ideas that are simply wrong. And when you do the things you think you should do, you sometimes get proven wrong, and that leads to some serious confusion.

For example, when I was building my business, I knew I needed to quit playing video games. So I quit playing video games. Then I knew I should set up an online course platform and teach courses to make money. And then it blew up in my face and didn't work. After a year, I'd borrowed all this money and it had all gone wrong. I realized I could have just kept playing video games, spent less money, and come out way ahead. I could have done what I really wanted to do, but I screwed it all up. The thing I thought I should do turned out to be wrong.

What I'm grateful for now is that I consistently act. If something feels to me like I know what to do, I just do it. Because if it's wrong, then I'll drop that as the thing to do, and then I'll face the confusion and uncertainty of figuring out a new way, learning, and advancing. To me, the worst thing is being stuck in that place of thinking you really want to do something, or you'd love to do it, but you can't do it now, so you keep putting it off.

Changing Behavior and Asking for Help

For so many years I was in that place. With my weight, I knew I needed to eat differently, but I didn't know how to eat differently. One of the hard things is that if you want to change your life, you often need to change your behavior. And to change your behavior, you need to ask for help. You need to read some new books. You need to change what you're doing. If you want to eat healthy, you need to stop going to the restaurants where everybody there is overweight.

I remember sitting in a fast food restaurant one night, struggling with my weight, looking around, and everybody in there was heavier than me. The thought came: if you eat here, you'll be like them. You're eating here today, so you're like them. Today, I'm in great shape, and I love my weight. I'm really happy about it. That means I don't get to go eat at fast food restaurants the vast majority of the time. Occasionally, maybe once a month, I'll go somewhere with the family. I can go out to dinner somewhere. But the vast majority of my eating, I don't get to do that.

Being accountable to other people really helps too, because what we often need is other people to help us do the thing when it's really hard. When I needed to get sober, I needed a lot of people to show me how to do it. A lot of times we keep this idea of "I know what to do, I just don't do it" out there as a kind of safety net. It's like, well, if I ever really need to get sober, I'll just go to AA. But then you don't actually do it. So everyone around you wonders, I guess you don't really want to get sober. You really need a support system, and you need encouragement.

A lot of times you realize that what you think you need to do isn't right, and what you actually need is a mentor who has been there and done what you want to do. For things like getting sober or losing weight, I've been there and I've done that. What worked for me, I can tell you very quickly. Number one, eat a whole plant-based diet. To do that, you'll probably need to read the book How Not to Die, and then read the whole book How Not to Diet. Then you make that your new way of eating. Another thing that helped me was not eating at night, minimizing going out to eat, and living an active, exercise-filled lifestyle. In my experience, it really is that simple. So why do so many people know that and not do it? And why do other people know they should go on some crappy diet, yet never even do the action they already know is wrong?

Be Okay With Doing It Badly at First

Sometimes you have to be okay with not doing it perfectly. A lot of us don't want to do something we know we're going to screw up, something we're not going to be good at. When you first go to Alcoholics Anonymous, you're a mess. You need help. When I first make music, it's a mess. It's hard to listen to. But you have to have that idea anyway. When I first played Call of Duty Warzone, I was horrible at it, but I had the audacious idea that I could be a professional gamer one day. Less than a year later, I was on my way to making $100,000 a year playing video games. You can follow more of these reflections on my Life playlist.

So today, I'm going to do what I know I need to do.

A Good Cry on the Massage Table

Originally published March 3, 2026.

This is my journal entry from March 3, 2026 — my real, unedited day, shared just as it happened.

We wake up and the kids are slightly dragging after their later bedtime. My daughter says they'll go to bed earlier tonight, which is fine. We get all the lunches made, get the agenda signed, and we're out the door. I get a little bit of snuggles with my son and wrestling in the back seat. I'm immediately heading over to a massage with a friend, which is unusually scheduled this early in the morning. And I'm taking a day of rest today. I think it'd be ideal once a week, as I said before, to just take at least one day a week where I kind of like give my body a rest day where we don't have to hit the usual physical level of activity. I enjoy a great conversation with my friend going over, you know, her book. And she likes the book business model, she's enthusiastic about it. And we just talk like the whole time. But there is time to also have some quiet. She does this new technique on me, she just went to a workshop and learned it, where it's something like myofascial release or something like that.

And then I remember a woman I had been seeing wanted to do a free massage on me just to test that technique herself. Then I feel bad about how I treated her when she was so nice to me and she gave me all those massages in trade and we had such a strong connection. I fucking, you know, did what I described in my writing. Yeah, I don't feel good about, you know, stopping seeing her and all that. So I get a big release. I start feeling all these feelings and I have a nice cry right there on the table. And I talk my friend through what I'm feeling, too. Like, I hear I've been going around criticizing these girls endlessly in my head. And well, that's been reflected in my writing as well. But it's like, look at my behavior. Now, this might be obvious. If you've managed to somehow read a bunch of these, you might be like, holy shit, what's surprising is that he has this level of awareness that, you know, he can see what an asshole he's been with these girls. Or, you know, there was a way to be nicer and more loving and more open. You know, I felt bad about my behavior, especially with the woman I'd been seeing. She was like the first one that I felt bad about. And then the woman I'd been talking to, I felt bad about that, too. Like I sent her a message after meeting her and then I didn't text her for two months. I run into her at a local spiritual community thing, you know, and then she didn't respond a couple of days ago.

Yesterday, I sent out some messages to a few women to see if they wanted to record a book with me. One was kind enough to say, you know, thanks, she's not feeling doing a book by dictation. You know, one lives an hour and a half away. The woman I'd been talking to hadn't heard from me in a couple of weeks, maybe a month. And she just didn't respond. And I was like, there's a big inventory taking this morning. It's like, damn, I'm not impressed with my own behavior towards women. And I could see that that bad feeling, especially what happened with the woman I'd been seeing, was then being replayed in all my other interactions with women. Having that good cry helped me also see like, look, I'm going to go forward and be as nice as I can be. Also, I thought about other times I'd led someone on and we both ended up feeling used. Like I set her up to feel bad and, you know, to feel kind of used. And I felt used and annoyed in the process myself. Like I led her on and made her think there was something there that there wasn't. And I was thinking of Jesus, you know, go forth and sin no more. Like, at least you can see what was done. OK, now I'm not going to live like that going forward. I'm going to clear my energy and be grateful and have interactions. If you are carrying regret about how you have treated people and want to talk through being different going forward, I would be glad to listen, so you can schedule a private one-on-one call with me and bring it straight to me.

Like I told my friend also, like when I was getting spun up about trading with her, I'm really glad that we turned that into the productive energy of doing her book together, which I mentioned her and her book in my letter that I'm going to be giving out to a bunch of people in St. Pete. I'm like, I'm glad her and I were able to turn that energy that, you know, sabotaged relationships, like the one with the woman I'd been seeing, that same energy with my friend we're able to create something out of that, which was really beautiful. So I have a beautiful session with my friend and I'm glad I scheduled this right before she's going on a trip so I won't get to see her again this month.

After the massage with her, I'm feeling really good. I head straight to the recovery meeting today. My sponsor's there chairing the meeting. I get called on pretty early, which is nice. I share, pass it on. And then after the meeting, I text a couple of girls I haven't seen a little bit. The one did the coffee last week. Said I missed her. No response. And I text another one that I haven't seen there in weeks. She was in kind of a dark place last time I saw her. Said, hey, hope you're doing well, I haven't seen you in a little while. She says, thanks, you too. Like, well, I guess I got what I wanted out of that, didn't I? I got an acknowledgement at least. But I noticed my mind's just fixated on this one girl who's pretty but still in her first year of sobriety. So, you know, that's on my mind. And I'm like, isn't that silly how much my mind focuses on, you know, it just takes for, you know, the one girl's response wasn't good enough.

And then I get a message from a girl I went to see, and she just randomly text me out of nowhere, you know, with a little funny little meme. And I said, hey, it's a nice surprise to get a text from you today. And she says, you know, I do what I can. And I'm like, see, now logically the mind should be focusing on how cool it was to just get a text first from this girl instead of like, oh, that girl didn't text me back. I'm like, that's logically what we should be doing here. So how about let's do more of what logically would make sense.

I go to this ACA meeting right after the recovery meeting, and my sponsor and another guy suggested I try that one too. The ACA meeting is real nice and I definitely love the idea of going to like four or five recovery meetings a week. And like one or two ACA meetings a week. I think that'll make a really strong program for me. The ACA program is so much more gentle and loving and kind and focused on healing compared to the other program. But the other program is very valuable for people in acute distress, which there are a lot today. The ACA is a deeper level of work. I see a woman there. I see several of the older ladies I know there. The one woman's in her 60s. And I remember she gave me her phone number years ago and she's like, oh, I didn't want you to think I was coming on to you or anything. And now I'm just noticing my own loneliness and attraction. And I remind her I still have her phone number and tell her I got divorced and everything. She says she has a date coming up on Thursday with a guy that she met online. She says that she doesn't want any of one political party either. And I kind of eye roll. I'm like, all right, whatever, to each their own, that seems like pretty trifling and unimportant to me. But you know, then again, some people don't care about sex that much and I do, so what do I know?

I head out of the ACA meeting and I barely have time to get home and eat and prepare snacks for the kids. Then I pick the kids up. They enjoy the snacks and I bring them home shortly after my ex-wife comes home and brings the dog. I tell her that, you know, why doesn't she go to the dog park with the kids by herself today? The kids are in a bit of a mood and a little bit of a fuss and tantrums and fights with each other. So I'm like, look, I've been with people all day from massage to multiple meetings, you know, and the kids pick up. I'm like, I'm good. Why don't y'all just have your time and space away from me today? You know, enjoy your time, just the three of you, because that's all the time my ex-wife's going to get with the kids today. Or so I thought. She comes back from the dog park. She's like, hey, I'm going to take them to get an acai bowl. I'm like, all right, that's cool. So she goes over there, gets a bowl for me too, drops $70 for food over there, comes back. I eat the bowl she gets from me. She heads out.

The kids are dying to play Settlers of Catan again. So we get another game in. This time we use the random setup, which they're excited about. And I get a win. And we have a great time playing. There's less fusses than yesterday, which is nice. And right as we're wrapping the Settlers of Catan game up, my mother comes over and reads to the kids. And I shower and I take a walk with my mother as well while the kids do their screens and homework and stuff. My mother, I love how she reads to the kids. All of us take showers, get lunches ready for school tomorrow, and then we're in bed at 9:15 tonight, which is nice. My mind tonight is obsessing about wanting some validation and connection in person. I'm like, all right, we'll consider these things tomorrow.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

I Broke Down, Then Showed Up Anyway

Originally published November 23, 2025.

This is my journal entry from November 23, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Divorce Day — my real, unedited days, published in order.

I barely slept again last night. Maybe a couple of hours at most. My mind felt aggravated, frantic, and completely unregulated, like it was pacing in circles without ever slowing down. I was still furious about the divorce, and reading my diary entry from the night before made me sound unhinged, which only confirmed that I still felt unhinged this morning. I finally got out of bed a little after 6:00 a.m., wired with energy and unable to sleep any longer. My thoughts were obsessive and distorted, and one of them kept looping: that if I just told the kids, right in front of my ex-wife, how much she was the problem and how this divorce was entirely her fault, she would suddenly realize how wrong she was for breaking up our family and decide to come back. I was exhausted from feeling like my family was being destroyed, and I wanted the destruction to stop.

I went over to my ex-wife’s house early that morning, earlier than they usually get up on weekends, let myself in, and told everyone they needed to get up and talk right now. My ex-wife was immediately upset. I told them that what they deserved to know was that my ex-wife was behind this divorce, that she was the one refusing my offers to reconcile, and that she was the one committed to breaking up our family. I said this also meant they could lose access to me at some point. I told them that could happen if I met someone new and moved away. Either way, I said my ex-wife pushing this divorce could mean they would see their father far less. My ex-wife tried to stop me, but I kept going because I felt like I had to get it out. It was upsetting for everyone. My ex-wife got angry, though thankfully she did not escalate further. I hugged the kids, held them close, and mostly just sat there with them. After about thirty minutes, I finally acknowledged that I had made my own contributions to my ex-wife feeling this way and that it was not entirely her responsibility. I admitted that I had done my part to cooperate with the divorce and that I had not fought for our family the whole time. Even so, I felt awful for causing that scene and for how I handled myself that morning.

Fortunately, I had tennis scheduled, which gave me somewhere to go. I went back to my place and headed out at 8:30 a.m., then talked with my tennis coach and a man from the tennis club about what was going on in my life. It was obvious I was deep in misery. I played lazy tennis, low effort but still somewhat enjoyable, and he shared details about his own marriage, which reinforced how it can feel impossible to win sometimes. Being married is hard. Being single is hard. Being divorced is hard. Somehow, joy exists inside all of it too, even when it feels completely buried.

After tennis, I went back home and started spiraling badly. I showered and tried to lie down and rest, but instead the depression intensified. For a moment, the way it all stacked together almost sounded like poetry, though it didn’t feel poetic at all. I kept thinking about how awful my life had become and wondering how everything had gone so wrong. I couldn’t believe I had thought and acted the way I did earlier that morning. The spiral deepened until I reached a point of total exhaustion. What I really wanted was for the old version of me to die, for that version of my ego to collapse so something new could take its place. I wanted to let go of the person who was so miserable and so attached to the past and become the best version of myself instead, someone capable of moving forward.

I started to see that the woman I met saying I was not ready to date again was accurate. I was still deeply attached to my ex-wife and the kids, still spending hours with them every day on school drop-offs, pickups, and time at my ex-wife’s house. There simply was not much room for another woman in my life right now. What I said that morning had some validity in that divorce does mean the kids will not see me as much, but I was also taking myself far too seriously. I was acting as though I were irreplaceable or uniquely essential. The kids have plenty of people who love them. My ex-wife has an enormous amount of love to give, as does her family just down the street, and my mom as well. I do not have to be the version of a father who is constantly present in the way I was when we were married, even if accepting that reality feels painful.

Even if I only see the kids a few times a week, that is good enough. Even if I eventually move somewhere else and only see them a few times a year, that is still good enough. There are other people in their lives who love them deeply. I will be there as much as I reasonably can, but I also see clearly now that if I am going to have a new woman in my life someday, that will inevitably mean seeing the kids less. I wish I had explained that to them in a way that was more loving and more grounded, because they have already been worried that they are not going to see me as much. And the truth is, they are right. That part is real. Still, this is a transition period, not a final state, even though it feels permanent when I am in the middle of it. If you are in the middle of a divorce and cannot yet accept seeing your kids less, I have sat exactly where you are, and if it would help to talk it through, you can schedule a one-on-one call with me and bring it to our call.

Despite these realizations, I am completely miserable. I keep thinking, what the fuck happened to my life? How did I get here? I feel like a failure, like an idiot, like someone who has ruined everything. It feels unbearable, like I cannot go on. I think to myself that if anyone actually cares about me, they should call me right now. And right then, my sister calls. She tells me she has just been through a really difficult stretch and is starting fresh again. She says she was thinking about me a lot while she was there, thinking about how similar we are and how much we could help each other. I tell her what happened with my ex-wife and the kids that morning, and she says she went through something very similar with her ex-husband, except he had that conversation with the kids over and over again. Hearing that makes something click. I commit to myself that I am not going to do that again to the kids or to my ex-wife, and that I need to understand how I got into that mental state in the first place so I can prevent it from happening again.

She tells me she thinks it would be really good for me to come visit her, and I start seriously considering it. I could come up for a week right now. My ex-wife and the kids are traveling tomorrow anyway, and I am about to face my first Thanksgiving since the divorce. Even though I believe I am invited and would be welcomed, I do not feel like being there. Going to Michigan suddenly sounds right. Being around my family, supporting my sister during such a vulnerable time, and not sitting alone in this emotional wreckage feels like exactly what I need. As she talks more about her experience, it becomes clear that she was in a much darker place than I am now when she hit her low point, and instead of judgment, I feel deep understanding. I can see how it happened. At the same time, it stirs a desperation in me to make sure that does not happen to me. I will do whatever it takes to avoid that path, because I am not convinced I would come back from it.

I want to see her. I genuinely believe we could help each other right now. After we hang up, I do not hesitate. I go straight to Delta.com, search through flights, and book a ticket to leave the next day to stay with her for a week.

After booking the flight, I text my sister to let her know when I am coming, and she tells me she will loop in our aunt and our other sister. Not long after that, while I am still feeling a surge of excitement about the trip, my aunt calls me. She wants to make sure I understand what I am walking into, just in case I do not. Everything she says mirrors what my sister already told me almost exactly. As she talks, I realize the purpose of her call is not to discourage me but to share how difficult her own experience was during a similar time and to help prepare me emotionally so I can actually support my sister instead of unraveling myself. I mostly listen, reassure her that I am stable, committed, and sober enough to be there, and tell her I genuinely believe this will be good for both of us. She says she will see me at Thanksgiving, asks me to keep her updated, wishes me a safe trip, and asks that the conversation stay between the two of us which I’m sure it will since no one reads these fucking books lol. What I take that to mean is not that it is a secret forever, but that it is not something to immediately dump on my sister. Realistically, my sister would probably assume this conversation happened anyway, and it feels like a healthy, normal exchange: someone checking in to make sure everyone knows what is going on and what they are stepping into.

After that call, though, fear starts creeping in. I suddenly wonder if I am actually stable enough to make this trip. What if things go badly while I am there? What if my sister relapses again? What if I start to lose it myself? I start questioning whether this was a mistake at all. I really hope it was not, because I already spent about $400 on a nonrefundable ticket. I could have stayed in Florida, and everyone would have understood. No one would have been upset with me for staying put and doing what I normally do. By booking this flight, I am deliberately stepping into the middle of everything in Michigan. At the same time, I realize that the only thing worse than committing to this and risking that something goes wrong would be canceling the trip after already saying yes. That would feel like an even bigger mess. I decide I need other people’s perspectives, because right now I cannot trust my own thinking to be clear.

My ex-wife lets me know that my son is available to hang out with me at 4:30 p.m., which feels like a gift because I am emotionally destroyed at this point. I have been crying on and off, hurting, wanting my ego to die and be reborn, fully in that phoenix-burning-down-and-starting-over process. Around the same time, I start listening to a book that feels uncannily perfect for where I am: Broken Open by Elizabeth Lesser. It is all about how difficult experiences can break you open in ways that help you grow. I listen to it at three times speed and tear through it, and it feels like exactly what I need. Divorce, pain, collapse, transformation—it is all there, right when I need to hear it. It feels aligned in a way that is almost absurd, like the right book showing up at the exact moment my life is falling apart, reframing this whole experience as something that could actually serve the evolution of my soul.

I talk to my sponsor and tell him exactly what is going on, then plan to see him at the meeting later. When I get together with my son to play soccer, everything still makes me cry. At one point, he makes a joke about what happened that morning, and I immediately start sobbing. At the same time, I feel strangely grateful that he can joke about it, because I am deeply ashamed. I am horrified that I walked into that house, woke everyone up, and spoke to them the way I did. It is the exact opposite of the kind of person I want to be. And yet, I remember the line from Alcoholics Anonymous about how we do not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. I need to understand this, not bury it. I need to see clearly how I ended up in such a fucked-up mental space and then acted on it, because if I do not understand that, I cannot make sure it does not happen again.

After playing with my son, I take him over to my mom’s house at 5:30 p.m., and my daughter comes over too. Before leaving, I make a point of hugging my ex-wife and owning my behavior directly. Step Ten in Alcoholics Anonymous is about promptly admitting the nature of your wrongs, so I tell her plainly that what I did that morning was awful, that I am sorry, and that I genuinely appreciate how she handled it. I tell her I am going to look carefully at what led up to it and make sure it does not happen again. As I say this, things are already starting to come into focus for me. On Saturday night, I did not get good sleep because I got overly excited the night before talking with the woman I met, listening to music, feeding off the hype of the event, and staying up late. The next day, I did no yoga, played no tennis, and did not get a massage. My sponsor even asked if I was going to the men’s meeting at 5:30 p.m., which I easily could have gone to, but I said no because I had been to meetings six days in a row. I remember feeling, even as I said it, that it was probably the wrong call, that things would go better if I went anyway, and then I skipped it.

When I look at it honestly, I did almost nothing that day for self-care. I spent the day aggravated, isolated, lying in bed, and doing nothing to regulate myself. After that, I said the nasty things to my ex-wife that I wrote about in the previous entry. She did not react, and when she did not react, I escalated internally. The next morning, I showed up and said the same kinds of things to the kids. Seeing it laid out like that, the pattern becomes obvious. Skipping yoga put me in a more amped-up, ungrounded state. I also put zero energy into my books, telling myself I was too tired, which was just another rationalization. I fed nothing that actually supports me. I did almost nothing to feel good or stay balanced, and it is shocking how quickly that absence turned into a full spiral of distorted thinking and impulsive behavior. If you can feel your own version of that spiral building and want to look honestly at the patterns underneath it with someone who has walked through them, you can book a private call with me and we will look at it together.

I can see now that having a wide emotional range is not the problem. In fact, it feels healthy to be able to experience life fully, but that range has to be managed. Without structure and care, it can run completely out of control. That realization does not erase what I did, but it helps me understand it.

At my mom’s house, things soften. Being there feels good. I tell her about my plans to go to Michigan, and I spend time with my daughter. The kids give me endless snuggles, the kind that crack you open whether you want them to or not. I cry more. My handkerchief is soaked from wiping tears, but being there with them, even in that raw state, feels grounding in a way nothing else has all day.

After that, I say goodnight to the kids and head to my Alcoholics Anonymous meeting to see my sponsor and my sponsee. I am right on the edge of tears the entire time, quietly crying through most of the meeting. I do not say anything until the very end, when they ask if there is a burning desire. At that point, I raise my hand and share. I say essentially everything I have written here, just compressed into two or three minutes instead of fifteen. I am rigorously honest with the group, and that kind of honesty has been a lifesaver for me in AA. I do not want to stand up in front of a room full of people who have heard for years how well I am doing and how great sobriety is and admit how much I am struggling. At the same time, I know that when I share honestly, I give people the opportunity to help me, and that is exactly what happens.

After the meeting, several people who have known me for years come up to support me. One guy looks me straight in the eye as I share my fear about going on the trip to see my sister after the call with my aunt. I tell him I am scared, that I do not know if I am going to make things better or worse, that I am not sure I can do this right now. He responds by paraphrasing a passage from AA's Big Book about being on the front lines together and seeing the lives and families that addiction damages. He talks about Step Twelve, about how once you are sober, your job is to carry the message to alcoholics who are still suffering. He reframes the trip for me in a way that lands hard and true. My sister got out of the hospital on Friday, and I will arrive on Monday. That is three days later. That is the front lines of alcoholism. And that, he tells me, is exactly what I am equipped to do at this point in my life.

I think about another man who has been like a sponsor to me for most of my sobriety, someone who has been sober my entire adult life. He once told me that right after his son died, he was still on a twelve-step call trying to help someone else get sober. That memory hits me. I realize how much I need to get out of myself and think about someone else, and how doing that might actually help me too. I also start to see this trip as a form of amends to my ex-wife. I took up far too much space in her life yesterday, and this morning especially. It feels like such a long day now, even though I am technically dictating this a couple of days later. I took up too much emotional space, and one way I can make amends is by giving her space instead. Taking a week-long trip might actually be one of the kindest things I can do for her right now. It is a way of saying, have Thanksgiving with your family without interruptions from me. I am going to go be with my family and support them, and you can have time away from me to think, to process, and to potentially complete our divorce while I am gone.

When this man at the meeting tells me that I am on the firing lines for the right reasons, that I have been sober eleven years, that I am going to be safe, and that I am genuinely in a position to be helpful, I start crying. I cry because I know he is right, and because I can feel the fear loosening its grip. Another guy tells me the exact same thing. My sponsor tells me the exact same thing. My sponsee tells me the exact same thing. They all hug me and I start to feel some hope.

After the meeting, people start sharing their own situations with me, and it immediately pulls me out of my tunnel vision. One guy tells me he is struggling financially right now. He sold a business, and the buyer was supposed to make another payment that he had been counting on for his financial security, but now the guy is refusing to pay. He has no idea what he is going to do next. My sponsee shares what his life looks like right now: a pregnant wife due in just a few weeks, a son with a broken wrist, a daughter, all of them young, kindergarten being the oldest, a full-time job, a packed household, and the daily work of staying sober on top of all of that. Listening to them, I realize that in some ways my situation looks great from the outside. I have an enormous amount of freedom and space, and comparatively little responsibility. That perspective shift is immediate and grounding. Talking with them restores me to sanity. I feel genuinely good again. I am reminded how absurd it was that I let resentment build toward this meeting, the very place that has supported me for so long, especially when I need it most. If you are carrying more than it feels like you can hold right now and just need to be heard by someone who gets it, you are welcome to set up a call with me and be heard on our call.

Even the small details of the night feel oddly affirming. The parking lot is packed because there is another event at the church, yet I manage to get a spot anyway. I end up parking on a sidewalk, but it is a wide one in the middle of the church near a staircase, and it works. I feel strangely proud of myself for finding a spot in such a crowded lot, like a small but meaningful win on a day that needed one. When I leave, I pull my car out and stop by my mom’s house again on the way home. I talk with her about the Michigan trip and ask for her honest feedback on everything. Hearing her perspective helps settle me further.

I get home and go to bed early, by 9:30 p.m., which feels incredibly good. I am ready for sleep in a way I have not been for days. I still have some fear about the trip tomorrow, but it no longer feels overwhelming. I trust the plan I set up for myself. I have tennis scheduled in the morning. I am seeing my massage therapist for a massage. I trust that when tomorrow comes, I will know exactly what to do, and that clarity will be there when I need it.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

I Ran Two Miles to Burn Off the Rage

Originally published October 22, 2025.

This is my journal entry from October 22, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Learning to Live Alone Again — my real, unedited days, published in order.

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The woman from yoga was at yoga again today. I was genuinely happy to see her. I’d debated going to the 9:30 class instead of the 9:00 a.m., wondering if she might be there, but she ended up showing up to mine. That felt like a small win. She seemed just as glad to see me as I was to see her, and we talked as much as we could before class started. Afterward, I was determined to ask for more time to talk, but she seemed in a hurry to get to work. I asked when we could hang out or talk more, and she said she’d see me tomorrow at the 9:00 a.m. class. I really hope she comes.

She’s beautiful, and I love how animated she gets when we talk—how her face lights up and her voice lifts. I do need to ask if she’s single, though. That question matters because it completely changes how I think about her. If she’s single, then maybe there’s something real to explore, a chance worth showing up for. But if not, I should probably just enjoy the connection for what it is—a friendship formed in yoga class—and not feed any expectations that would just get tangled up later.

Still, I felt a little sad watching her leave. Part of me had hoped for more time with her today, but I reminded myself how soon it is to feel that way. I literally just told her my name yesterday. Even so, it’s nice to have something to look forward to—to know I might see her tomorrow. She’s the only woman on my radar right now, which feels simple and refreshing.

This morning I managed to record one dream. It was about playing Texas Hold’em. In the dream, I was watching a hand unfold—one player had pocket jacks and went in against someone holding queens. The flop came down with a jack, and the player with queens folded. But I could somehow see the next two cards that would have come out—both queens. If that player hadn’t folded, they would have had four of a kind, nearly unbeatable.

The symbolism hit me immediately: don’t fold too early. I keep wondering where in my life that lesson applies. Maybe my guides are hinting at something—perhaps about not giving up on finding an agent for my publishing, or not backing down in dating, or even not losing patience on the tennis court. I want to do better in tennis. The last two times I played, I let frustration get the best of me, and I know I’m capable of handling myself better than that.

At the same time, I can see that my frustration is a call to action. Earlier today, the guy from the tennis ladder sent a message to the tennis club Men’s Singles Ladder asking if anyone wanted to play at 6:00 p.m. I was the only one who replied, but he never wrote back. Later, when I was thinking about using the ball machine, I noticed he had booked it at the same time. That stung. I couldn’t help but feel rejected—like he’d literally rather hit with a machine than play with me. A wave of rage ran through me, even though deep down, I agreed with his choice. I did get frustrated last night, and while people often say, “It’s fine,” when someone gets irritated during a match, nobody truly enjoys playing with that energy.

It’s clear I’ve reached a crossroads: either quit tennis or step up my game. Quitting isn’t appealing, so stepping up means committing—taking a couple of coaching lessons a week, attending clinics, maybe adding shared lessons. I started thinking about who could coach me. A coach I know came to mind. I could ask him to teach me more about strategy and technique instead of just rallying. I love hitting with him—it’s great exercise—but I could use a bit more structure. When we first started, I told him not to be too clinical because the last coach I had spent nearly the entire time talking instead of playing. But now I see there’s a middle ground. Stepping up always goes better with people in your corner, so if you want that kind of accountability, you can book a one-on-one call with me and we’ll build a plan to keep you showing up.

By the end of the day, my emotions had worn me down. I drove to my mom’s house, where my ex-wife and the kids were already visiting. My mom immediately started talking—again—about someone getting hurt. Lately, she’s constantly telling stories about pain, accidents, and hospitals, and this time, I finally asked her to stop.

Right when she began her story, my daughter rolled her eyes, and I felt the same wave of irritation. I told my mom, “Stop talking about people being hurt. I’m tired of hearing this.” Of course, she got defensive, saying it was her house and her rules, and that everyone else wanted to hear about this person who had fallen and hurt their tailbone. My ex-wife and my son stayed quiet, just trying to keep the peace.

I admitted my daughter had rolled her eyes—it was the truth. She gets tired of these stories too. I’m frustrated because my mom seems completely unaware of her audience. She doesn’t listen or pause; she just talks, moving from one topic to the next without considering how anyone feels. After she reminded me that it was her house and she could say what she wanted, I decided the best move was to leave. I didn’t want to sit through another round of injury talk or feel my blood pressure climb higher.

So, about five or ten minutes after arriving, I got up and left. I didn’t hug her or say I loved her. I walked home and decided to burn off the tension with a two-mile run. My body was buzzing with energy, fueled by the conflict with my mom and a general restlessness that had been building all day.

Even the positive emotions from the morning—seeing the woman from yoga at yoga, feeling her attention on me—didn’t settle me. Yesterday, I had felt thrilled by the idea of meeting her, imagining what could happen between us. Today, I swung to the opposite extreme. Even though her showing up to the earlier class felt like a clear sign of interest, and the fact she wants to meet again tomorrow should have made me happy, my mind turned against itself. I started spinning in negativity: she probably doesn’t want kids, she’s too young, I’m too old, this won’t go anywhere.

If I had to guess, she’s in her mid-twenties, and instead of feeling excited, I found myself thinking it was all pointless—that I should skip yoga tomorrow and end the story before she does. I recognize that these thoughts are predictable and irrational, part of a familiar loop my mind runs whenever I start to care about someone new. Still, I know I need to look closer at what’s underneath all of this—to investigate it fully instead of folding too early, both in tennis and in love.

All those emotions—frustration, rejection, anger, restlessness—spiraled together until I felt completely on edge. I figured the best thing I could do was channel that energy into something productive. So around 7:30 p.m., I went for a run. I hadn’t run since mid-August, about two months ago. I took just my phone and left the door unlocked because I didn’t want a key bouncing around in my pocket.

Despite having to stop several times for cars, I ran two miles in under twenty minutes. That might not sound impressive to some people, but it felt great to me, especially since I haven’t been running lately. Back in ROTC in 2004, when I was twenty, I once ran two miles in under sixteen minutes to pass an Army PT test, so tonight’s time was only four minutes slower than my best ever—after a long break. That felt good.

For the last mile, I clenched my fists and ran with intention, using each stride to release anger. I let it burn off through movement—anger at my mom for always focusing on illness, pain, and injury as if that’s all there is to talk about; anger that I’m not having sex with anyone right now; anger that when a woman might actually be interested in me, like the woman from yoga, I spent most of the day trapped in anxiety instead of enjoyment; anger that the guy from the tennis ladder would rather hit with a ball machine than play with me; anger that my tennis game isn’t good enough for anyone to want to hit with me; anger that liars and cheaters seem to thrive in this world while people trying to do things honestly struggle to be noticed. If you’ve got a night of rage like this you need to burn off and make sense of, you can schedule a private call with me and we’ll talk through what’s underneath the anger.

But underneath the anger, gratitude started to surface. I felt thankful that my body is healthy enough to run two miles out of nowhere, comfortably, and still average under ten minutes a mile. That’s a gift. At forty-one years old, it’s something I couldn’t have done easily ten years ago. And the best part is that I didn’t even push myself that hard. I stayed at a comfortable pace, breathing through my nose the entire time. I probably could have run a minute or two faster if I’d gone all out, but that wasn’t the point. I just wanted to release the tension, not injure myself or prove anything.

When I got home, I took a shower and cooled down. My ex-wife texted, asking if I was coming over for bedtime. I went over and spent about ten minutes tucking the kids in. After that, she handed me the divorce papers I needed to fill out. Since she filed as the petitioner, I now have a few forms to complete as the respondent. I’ll need her help to make sure our answers match and stay consistent. I filled out what I could tonight, taking my time and writing neatly instead of rushing through it. It felt symbolic somehow—doing it carefully, acknowledging that this part of the process deserves attention and respect rather than avoidance.

After finishing the divorce paperwork, I put on More: A Memoir of an Open Marriage by Molly Roden Winter. That book has my mind spinning—it’s one of the reasons I was angry tonight. Listening to her describe an open marriage made me think about my own situation, and about boundaries my ex-wife and I never fully agreed on. I could respect where she stood, but it still frustrated me.

Part of me feels like an open marriage could have been a better path for us—still living together, supporting each other, raising our kids as partners without having to go through all this divorce crap. Instead, here we are, untangling our lives on paper. It feels silly at times, unnecessary even, though I also recognize that divorce does free me to eventually be fully with someone else. Listening to Molly’s memoir reminded me, though, that open relationships are far from simple. You need a certain kind of relationship—deep communication, trust, and honesty—to make that work. Maybe we never had that combination consistently enough.

Another layer of my anger tonight came from not knowing what to do with myself. I had thought about going to the tennis club with my son but realized it too late. I’d been waiting around to see if the guy from the tennis ladder wanted to hit, but he never responded. That left me restless, pacing through options that went nowhere.

Still, there were bright spots in the day. I recorded over two hours of audio for I Was Famous on the Internet. I came straight home from yoga after seeing the woman from yoga, full of energy, and recorded nonstop before eating anything, wanting to ride the creative momentum. I made it through the entire “Crypto Still Sucks” section and am now more than halfway done recording the audiobook.

Getting all my books into audio format feels increasingly important. More and more people seem to prefer listening, and I want my work available however people best absorb it. When I start promoting the books more seriously, they’ll need to be on audio. It also feels like the universe keeps sending me reminders in that direction—like one of my former sponsees mentioning this week that “audiobooks are where the money’s at.” Even Courtney Maum, in Before and After the Book Deal, says audiobook sales have become one of publishing’s fastest-growing areas.

It makes sense to me. I mostly consume audiobooks myself these days because I can listen while driving, running, or cleaning—times when reading wouldn’t be possible. So, it’s settled: every one of my books will get an audio version. It’s another way to keep my voice out in the world, even as I continue moving toward a life built more on presence and real connection.

After finishing my audiobook recordings, I picked the kids up from school and dropped them off at my ex-wife’s house. I spent about thirty minutes there, petting the dogs, talking with the kids, and playing Uno No Mercy with my daughter and my son. It turned into one of those playful, chaotic games where luck just isn’t on your side. I had to draw twenty cards in multiple rounds, and once I was down to four cards, which meant I didn’t get mercy-rolled—small victory. Still, I didn’t win a single game today. My daughter was on fire and took every win like a champ.

At 4:00 p.m., I went to my AA meeting. Lately, it’s been all men, which is funny because when I first started going to this group, the meetings were filled with women. They seemed to enjoy it, but for whatever reason, most of them haven’t come back. Still, it was a solid meeting. The topic was the Tenth Step—continuing to take personal inventory and admitting when we’re wrong. Someone even drove in from out of town because a friend had recommended the meeting. That’s dedication. I’ve lived here for nine years and have never once been to a meeting in Tampa, though maybe I’ll try one someday.

After the meeting, I went home and kept working on my books while hoping a tennis match would materialize. It didn’t, and that’s how the day wound down to where I am now.

I have to admit, I feel much better tonight than I did earlier. Before my run, I’d been sad, angry, and tightly wound, but after the run, the shower, putting the kids to bed, and a quiet evening alone, I finally felt a sense of relief. My emotions have been all over the place, but I take that as a sign of being alive, engaged, and honest with myself.

It feels good—really good—to be getting to know a woman again, to have that spark of possibility without guilt. For the first time in fifteen years, I feel free to date and explore, to see what happens without hiding or holding back. I’m curious about what tomorrow will bring with the woman from yoga.

I’m also certain now that I don’t want to quit tennis. When I ended my the tennis club membership before, I missed it almost immediately. I love the game, and I want to get better. So instead of quitting, I’ll take more lessons and keep showing up.

It’s 10:00 p.m. now, and I’d like to be in bed by 10:30 to get a little more sleep tonight. This diary entry might not be quite as long as some of the others, but it feels complete. I wrapped up adding new material for my third diary book today and started processing the transcripts to turn them into a publishable manuscript. I haven’t decided on a title yet, but with some focus, I should be ready to publish it next week.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

I'm Turning My Anger Into Something New

Originally published September 14, 2025.

This is my journal entry from September 14, 2025, part of my daily autobiography The Kind Divorce — my real, unedited days, published in order.

I felt a wave of explosive anger during my Alcoholics Anonymous meeting tonight—anger mostly directed at the format itself. Nearly every meeting I go to revolves around the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and my former home group is no exception. It’s what they call a “Big Book discussion” meeting, which usually means someone starts reading or rambling about some passage from the book for ten, fifteen, sometimes even thirty minutes straight. Meanwhile, everyone else sits facing them like an audience, which kills any sense of genuine connection.

The whole setup feels stagnant to me. I can read the Big Book on my own; I don’t need someone else to read it at me or explain it line by line. And even I f I did, there are dozens of other meetings around here doing the exact same thing. What I crave is a meeting that feels alive—one that challenges me, engages newcomers, and actually sparks conversation. Too many meetings have become lifeless loops of people quoting the book, preaching about God, and insisting that everyone must get a sponsor and let them “run your life.” Sure, that approach can work for some, but it also alienates a lot of people.

Underneath my frustration, though, I can see an opportunity. I’ve learned that anger often points to something that wants to change. My first impulse was to push for reform—to convince my old home group to adjust the format. But I’ve tried that before, and they weren’t interested. Now, I realize the answer is simpler: I need to start my own meeting, built the way I believe it should be. If people want the same format repeated fifty times over, they already have those options. I want to create something that feels different—something that complements what already exists but breathes new energy into the Fellowship.

Lately, I’ve been yawning through meetings, feeling disconnected from the spirit that originally drew me to AA. That’s not what this program is supposed to be about. Thankfully, the structure of AA makes it easy to start fresh. There’s an old saying that most meetings begin “with a resentment and a coffee pot.” In my case, I might skip the coffee pot—but the resentment is real. It’s not bitterness, though—it’s fuel. A drive to create something better, or at least something true to what I believe recovery can be.

I really want to start a 4 p.m. AA meeting, mainly because there isn’t one anywhere in this area. The schedule is packed between 5:30 and 7, but nothing hits that sweet spot in the late afternoon. A 4 p.m. meeting would fit perfectly into my day, and I know plenty of others who would appreciate it too—people whose spouses are still at work, or teachers who could stop by right after school instead of waiting until evening and cutting into dinner or family time. All I really need is a place to host it. Once I find the location, I can text everyone I know in AA and start announcing it at the meetings I already attend.

I’m grateful today that I recognized my anger for what it is—an invitation to make a change. Instead of complaining about the problems with my home group, I asked myself, What’s the most effective thing I can do? I could rage, gossip, or stew about it like so many people do, or I could act. Anger, when used well, is a compass—it points straight toward growth. For me, that means creating something new. I wanted to start a 4 p.m. meeting a year ago, but my sponsor discouraged it, saying there were already too many meetings and that we should focus on supporting the existing ones. Back then, that made sense. Now I see it differently. Some of these repetitive, stale meetings could stand to fade out, making space for new formats and fresh energy.

Trying to change existing meetings doesn’t work anyway. They’re on autopilot—no one’s really steering. It’s like the default setting in human nature: people resist change. So I’ll build something new instead of trying to fix what’s stuck.

The rest of the day felt turbulent, full of that same restless, ragey energy. By the time the meeting came around, I was both agitated and oddly clear. Underneath the anger, though, I also felt sadness—especially about my books. I started spiraling into doubt about Author in St. Petersburg, wondering if it was even good enough to give away. I worried that the parts where I briefly mention changing my race might trigger people, or that the open talk about sex might lead to gossip like it did years ago after I published Speaker Meeting 2017. That fear had me questioning everything: Why am I writing these books if I’m too scared to share them?

I’d just received eleven new copies in the mail and realized I hadn’t been doing much with them. Then it hit me: I should order more, not less. During the 10 a.m. yoga class at my yoga studio with a yoga instructor, I had a moment of clarity. Either I fully believe in my books and give them to everyone who will take one, or I stop writing them altogether. What people do with them afterward doesn’t matter. Half of them will probably sit untouched on a dresser or in a car anyway—but that’s fine. The point is to get them out there.

If I’m serious about being a coach, a massage therapist, a local author, and a public speaker, then I need my books in people’s hands. Now, while I’m still in massage school, is the perfect time to do it. The books are like seeds—they need time to sit, to germinate. By the time I graduate, some of those seeds will have grown into real opportunities: clients who want coaching or massage, invitations to speak, or readers who connect deeply with my story.

I also realized what’s been holding me back: vulnerability. I told ChatGPT about it, and it described what I was feeling as a “vulnerability hangover.” That hit home. I spent an hour or two tinkering with the Author in St. Petersburg manuscript today, only to realize I was just avoiding the discomfort of being seen. The book’s good enough. I don’t need to hide behind endless edits. I just need to give it to people and see what happens. If no one says they’re bothered, then there’s nothing to worry about. If you're stuck in your own vulnerability hangover and want to talk it through with someone who has sat in that exact discomfort, you can book a private call with me.

Sure, down the road—once the books are selling more or I have extra time after massage school—I can go back and polish the details. Maybe make sure titles like I Was Famous on the Internet are italicized consistently or fix the few minor typos that slipped through. There aren’t many anyway; ChatGPT did a solid job cleaning everything up. But perfection isn’t the point. Readers are used to small errors—they know it’s a self-published book with my face on the cover, not a polished bestseller. What matters is that it’s real—and that it’s out there. The only real improvement I want going forward is consistency: writing each book cleanly the first time so I don’t get lost in endless revision.

After giving up on making changes to Author in St. Petersburg, I devoted at least an hour to refining the workflow for I Was Famous on the Internet. I’ve realized I can’t trust ChatGPT with more than a thousand words at once. Once I go beyond that, it starts truncating or summarizing no matter how clearly I instruct it not to. The upside is that I finally nailed down a process that works. After spending last night experimenting, I wrote out a long prompt designed to minimize preventable problems—things like avoiding the appearance of medical or legal advice, steering clear of copyright or privacy issues, and making sure that everything I write is clearly my personal perspective, not an absolute statement of truth. It feels good to have those boundaries in place, and the writing seems stronger and cleaner as a result.

I also recognized something deeper today: I want to lead by example rather than by instruction. I’ve always hated being told what to do, yet sometimes I slip into doing that with others. I need to respect my own resistance and assume that the kind of people drawn to me—many of them independent thinkers, rebels like me—don’t want to be told what to do either. Tonight at the meeting, one of the guys said exactly that, and I realized I had probably offended him in the past by being too direct. I’m determined to adjust my language and behavior to avoid that. The lesson feels humbling but necessary.

As I wind down for the night, I feel grateful. It wasn’t an easy day—there were waves of anxiety, anger, and even depression that hit me harder than usual—but it was productive. I ordered thirty-three more copies of Author in St. Petersburg, which Amazon says should arrive in about three weeks. Going forward, I plan to always keep a supply of my books on hand so I never run out. My goal is to give away an average of two books per day and get them circulating throughout the community. By the time I graduate from massage school, I want thousands of copies moving through the city—because I know some people will be helped by them, and others will be inspired enough to pay for a deeper experience through coaching or massage. That vision motivates me more than anything else right now.

Unbroken

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

Don't Hand Over Your Peace

Originally published August 29, 2025.

This is my journal entry from August 29, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Author in St. Petersburg — my real, unedited days, published in order.

Today I’m trying something different: dictating this diary entry while driving with my AirPods in. Yesterday was my daughter’s birthday. We ended the day with a delicious ice cream cake, and in the evening I played tennis with the boys, which was a wonderful way to close out her celebration while she enjoyed an evening with my ex-wife’s family. Last night, as I lay in bed, I had a flood of ideas I wanted to record, but I didn’t dictate them then. I’ll do my best to recall them now. What I feel I can offer most through these books is the gift of out-of-the-box thinking. I know that what I hunger for is exposure to new thoughts and fresh possibilities. Too often life feels like the endless recycling of the same ideas.

That is one reason I cherish the Seth books. I am currently reading The “Unknown” Reality, Volume One by Jane Roberts, the same author of Seth Speaks. These books stretch my mind with perspectives far beyond the conventional. I don’t mind the diary-like style or the inefficiency in the prose, because what I value most is the originality of thought. That is exactly what I aim to provide here as well. When someone reads my books, I want them to pause and think, I’ve never considered that before. That kind of mental expansion is the real treasure.

It’s important to begin with a vision of what you have to offer. I feel almost certain that no one else in St. Petersburg is writing daily diaries and publishing them. Probably not in Tampa either, or even across much of Florida. In truth, very few people in the world commit to publishing daily diaries. Most assume a book requires a singular theme or narrative. David Sedaris is one of the few who has published diaries that I have read, and his are excellent. That inspires me, yet I know I’m charting my own path.

Here’s one of the unconventional ideas I’ve been reflecting on. Recently, a friend told me about a heated argument they had with a family member who was upset about the latest widely publicized tragedy. I remember when I used to react the same way. During my streaming years, whenever a tragedy dominated the news cycle, many of my viewers would come into chat upset. I would get upset at them. I’d think, Don’t you see you’re being manipulated? You’re not thinking clearly. You’re letting your peace be stolen by something that doesn’t touch your actual life at all.

This morning, out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT how many people are born and die each day. The numbers it returned—while not perfectly reliable—showed that roughly three to four hundred thousand people are born daily, and a few hundred thousand less die each day. What struck me is how much peace I now feel about both living and dying. The method of death no longer troubles me. What matters is perspective.

ChatGPT’s estimate suggested that about seventy-four percent of global deaths result from lifestyle diseases: heart disease, cancer, and related conditions. These are largely preventable or reversible with lifestyle changes. From the research I’ve read and my own experience, I’ve come to believe that a whole-food, plant-based diet and lifestyle play a powerful role in long-term health; Dr. Michael Greger’s How Not To Die explores the research in detail, and it aligns with what I’ve experienced. I believe many lifestyle-related deaths could, in theory, be delayed or avoided. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of lives daily, lost not to random tragedy but to people’s own choices—what they eat, how much they move, whether they smoke, how they handle stress, and so on.

In contrast, the events that dominate headlines—wars, terrorism, shootings, disasters—account for only one or two percent of global deaths. Yet these rare causes provoke the majority of people’s grief and outrage. Think about how backward that is. Roughly three-quarters of deaths are preventable, yet people hardly react to that ongoing, everyday tragedy. Instead, we pour our energy into outrage over the one or two percent.

This is personal for me. My father died at sixty-three from lifestyle-related conditions. I believe his choices around smoking, diet, and exercise shortened his life. That tragedy cut far closer to my heart than any news headline ever could. Yet I see now that even this painful reality is part of the bigger picture.

I’m grateful today that I no longer fall into most manipulation. My friend’s story about political arguments reminded me how easily people become distracted. I won’t waste my peace of mind like that anymore. When you zoom out, you see that overall, humanity is still growing. Every day, hundreds of thousands more people are born than die. If the goal is simply more human life, then we’re succeeding.

Still, this raises deeper questions: Should more human life even be the goal? With our current impact on the planet, can Earth sustain our expansion? If we lived with less destruction, perhaps it could support two or three times as many of us. Yet the way we consume resources and pollute ecosystems makes the answer uncertain. Sometimes I wonder if the Earth itself even wants more humans, or if the other beings—trees, oceans, animals—long for a reprieve. Reading Braiding Sweetgrass has made me reflect on this more deeply, reminding me to consider all life, not just human life.

From the broader perspective, much of what agitates people daily dissolves into insignificance. Some may accuse me of being numb, but I see it differently. I’ve been a police officer. I’ve seen tragedy firsthand. I know what it feels like to be haunted years later by nothing more than paperwork describing horrific acts. Just the written reports alone were enough to move me to tears. Drunk driving fatalities, robberies, violent crimes—I witnessed the reality behind the statistics.

Yet even with that experience, I’ve learned to hold a larger view. Unless a tragedy is directly in your life, there is no need to hand over your peace. We should instead be the change we wish to see, living differently and working together to help one another. That is the lesson I’ve taken from all of this: almost all of our suffering is preventable if we learn to cooperate. If you want to guard your own peace and be around people choosing to live differently rather than handing it over to the outrage of the day, you can set up a call with me and we'll look at it together.

After school yesterday, the kids and I were talking about Harry Potter. I commented on how rarely swimming pools appear in the series. In Florida, pools are everywhere, so the absence struck us as odd—especially since my daughter had just celebrated her birthday with a pool party. That conversation opened a doorway for me to share a different way of looking at stories. Many people assume the Harry Potter universe is fixed—what J.K. Rowling wrote is all there is. Yet after immersing myself in the Seth material, I’ve begun to see it differently.

I believe fictional universes are real on another level, and Rowling’s books are simply her personal snapshot of that reality. It’s like taking a photograph: one image of you in one outfit, in one place, at one moment. That picture captures only a sliver of your essence. Behind every photo is the full, invisible reality of your body, your life, your soul. No single photo can contain all of that.

The Harry Potter universe works the same way. Rowling’s books are one set of snapshots, one collection of angles on that reality. They are valid, but they are not complete. Other versions of that universe exist. Your own mind can tap into them, just as hers did.

This is one reason we love fiction so much: we intuitively sense that these imagined worlds are more than make-believe. They are alternate realities we can access through imagination. For example, in one version of the Harry Potter universe, the central child might be a girl named Hailey rather than Harry. In another, there is no Voldemort at all—perhaps wizards are not fighting for control of Earth but striving to conquer space. The variations are infinite. Each one is just as real as Rowling’s snapshot, just as a different photo of you is still you.

Children are naturally adept at this. They slip in and out of universes through play, creating entire worlds from their imagination. Adults often forget this ability. We lock ourselves into the notion that what has been written is final. Yet in truth, the possibilities are endless, and the mind is far more powerful than we usually allow ourselves to believe. That realization excites me. It reminds me of the vast creative potential within us all.

This morning I woke up buzzing with both excitement and doubt about starting massage school on September 8th, now less than two weeks away. The thought hit me hard: I can’t do this. The schedule loomed in my mind—five days a week, from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon. It felt overwhelming. Part of me thought it was ridiculous to even attempt, especially when I considered the training clinics.

At the Sarasota massage school, each student must complete sixteen five-hour clinics after school, providing massage to the public. From what I’ve heard, most of the clients who come in are in their seventies. That reality jarred me, because in my ideal vision, I pictured myself massaging mostly beautiful women and, on occasion, men with vibrant energy. I wasn’t imagining a steady stream of elderly bodies, skin loose and worn by time. The thought of working on them felt far removed from the fantasy that first attracted me to massage.

Yet when I calmed down, I remembered something essential: sometimes the true value of an experience lies in contrast. The experience itself might not feel desirable, but it teaches by comparison. A memory came to me of visiting my brother a year ago. During that trip, the atmosphere was tense and uncomfortable, and being in his house felt oppressive. Yet the visit still held value because of the stark contrast it provided. It reminded me of how different my own home environment is, how peaceful and sober my daily life has become. The contrast itself was a gift.

Massage school may serve the same purpose. Even if I find myself massaging people I wouldn’t normally choose, those experiences could heighten my appreciation for the sessions I do enjoy. They may challenge me to find meaning beyond preference and to connect with people simply because they are human beings in need of healing touch. In that way, the very thing I resist might become the most valuable part of my education.

I keep reminding myself that even the parts of massage school that seem undesirable will have value. Spending eighty hours massaging older clients with frail, smelly, or aging bodies will make me appreciate all the clients I dream of working with afterward. Without that contrast, I might not value them as deeply. I may even come to enjoy massaging some of those elderly clients. Their presence could teach me lessons I would not otherwise learn—lessons about compassion, patience, and the universality of touch. In that way, the experience may expand my horizons, break down my narrow expectations, and push me into new territory.

As I lay in bed this morning questioning whether I had made the right choice in enrolling, I realized that what I truly need is new experiences. Massage school will be exactly that. It will force me to learn anatomy, a subject I know little about. It will put me in daily contact with new people, many of whom I will spend significant time alongside. It will require me to learn something intensely physical, whereas most of my learning over the past decade has been purely mental. All of this will integrate with what I already know and create something powerful.

I am grateful for the opportunity, especially when I consider what I’ve read about dementia and Alzheimer’s. I once listened to a podcast describing a study where people with identical genetics and identical brain scans could live radically different lives. Some would exhibit no symptoms of brain disease, while the others would. The deciding factor was lifestyle. For me, that is an astonishing and hopeful truth. So many of us view genetics as a curse, a fixed destiny. Yet science confirms what my intuition has often told me: that the brain, like the body, thrives on challenge and novelty.

I used to rationalize my video game playing by claiming I was “keeping my brain young.” Learning new games, I told myself, kept my mind flexible. Perhaps there is some truth to that, but it pales compared to the real benefits of forcing the brain into truly uncomfortable territory—learning something wholly unfamiliar. Like muscles worked in new ways at the gym, the brain strengthens when asked to perform beyond its routines. Massage school will demand exactly that. It will push me into material and environments where I have little background to lean on. That struggle, science suggests, is precisely what staves off cognitive decline. Even if my genetics were to predispose me to dementia, consistent brain challenges can keep the symptoms from appearing at all.

That is an incredible gift, and it reframes massage school as one of the best decisions I could make. It’s not just a career move. It’s medicine for my brain, a safeguard against the stagnation I’ve seen in others. Those who succumb to brain disease often live lives of repetition—watching television, going to the same places, having the same conversations. They stop expanding. They stop learning. By contrast, I am choosing to throw myself into something radically new.

Of course, the resistance in me is logical. My ex-wife, for instance, often has a silent tantrum before her morning runs. She’ll wake at 5:30 a.m., angry that she has chosen to get up, even though she usually goes to bed early enough to be rested and often naps later. She’ll think, I don’t want to run. Why am I doing this? Yet once she finishes, she feels renewed. Massage school may be the same. I can imagine looking back one day, grateful for having gone through it, even if some of it felt difficult at the time.

I’m also excited about what massage school will allow me to offer afterward. I love the idea of exchanging massages with my therapist friends rather than paying for sessions. I love the thought of adding massage to my coaching tools, being able to help someone heal both physically and mentally. I like the idea of building a physically based, in-person income that combines with my writing and book publishing. Beyond that, I can already see the next step: yoga teacher training. Once I finish massage school, I’ll have an intimate understanding of the body. Pairing that with yoga training will deepen both practices, and I believe I’d enjoy yoga training even more with the foundation massage provides.

Looking back, I’m grateful I considered yoga training first, because it primed me for this leap. The arc of this diary book excites me. It began with me documenting the process of unplugging from the internet, and now it closes with me enrolling in massage school. That kind of journey, captured honestly, feels invaluable.

My dream is to continue writing like this indefinitely—publishing a book every month composed only of diary entries, with no agenda beyond sharing the truth of my life. Themes will emerge naturally, and I’ll shape the titles around them. Personally, I would love to read diaries like this from others—friends, family, people I meet in town. Not that I would read every single book, but the chance to know someone more intimately through their thoughts and experiences is something I’d treasure.

I hope my writing inspires others to do the same. Journaling like this is valuable for me and potentially for others. Creativity left unexpressed often festers. People carry unspoken ideas and desires that, when bottled up, can manifest in destructive ways—even in illness. I believe expression is a form of health. That belief makes me especially grateful for my own vitality today. Yesterday I spent three hours moving my body through tennis and yoga, and this morning I still feel energized.

Just before dictating this, I drove to the Toyota dealership at 7:30 a.m., where another lesson unfolded. A few days ago, I left there burning with irrational anger. I had just paid $4,000 for service, and because they didn’t automatically provide me with a $46 rental car, I left feeling cheated. Never mind that I hadn’t even asked for the rental this time, despite receiving it free on prior visits. I could have waited at the dealership, I could have asked—but I did neither. My outrage was irrational. Recognizing that, though, was powerful. Seeing your own irrationality breaks its spell.

Yesterday, when my ex-wife told me our 2016 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid was making another noise, my frustration boiled over again. I thought, You’ve got to be kidding me. After spending $8,000 at this dealership in the last two weeks, I have to go back again? Anger surged, but this time I handled it better. Instead of venting at management when they texted me for feedback, I called my service advisor, who has always taken care of me with professionalism and kindness. I explained the problem, and she immediately offered me a 7:30 a.m. appointment today.

When I arrived—early, at 7:28—she greeted me warmly and handed me the keys to a white Camry Hybrid rental, free of charge. She apologized for the inconvenience, assured me they would realign the wheel, check the noise, and even replace my wipers. The gesture shifted my perspective entirely. As I left in the rental, I laughed at myself. I must like being at the Toyota dealership, because it has been one of my most-visited places lately. This was the third time in two weeks, meaning six total trips back and forth. Instead of resentment, I chose gratitude. Gratitude that they are maintaining my car, gratitude for her care, gratitude even for the lesson in spotting my irrational anger. Everywhere I am, I remind myself, is a place I’ve chosen to be. That means even the Toyota dealership is, in some way, my creation. If you catch yourself handing your peace over to irrational anger and want to talk through what is really driving it, you can book a one-on-one call with me and we will work through it together.

After dropping the RAV4 off at the Toyota dealership, I attended my daughter’s Dolphin of the Month ceremony at their school, where one child from each class was chosen to be honored. The school brought them on stage, announced their names, and shared what each child wanted to be when they grew up. My ex-wife and I sat together in the audience, laughing and joking like the Muppet critics in their theater balcony.

After the third or fourth girl declared she wanted to be a veterinarian, I leaned over and said, “Who is telling all these girls they need to be veterinarians?” My daughter had wanted to be one herself for a while, and I had encouraged her to think carefully about what that really meant. My ex-wife shot back at me with perfect timing: “If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother,” since my mom worked in animal care and I even dated two women in that field back when I lived out of state.

At first my daughter’s reasoning was simple: “I love animals.” I reminded her that being a veterinarian doesn’t mean playing with healthy animals all day—it means treating sick and injured ones, performing surgeries, and sometimes euthanizing them. Loving animals is one thing; loving medicine is another. If she wasn’t interested in the medical side, she might want to consider other ways of working with animals.

She thought about it and considered a neighbor of ours who boards and walks dogs for a living. For a time, my daughter said she wanted to be a dog walker. Today, though, when she was announced on stage, her vision had expanded: she wanted to be an entrepreneur and own an animal shelter. That thrilled me. Owning a shelter combines her love of animals with her entrepreneurial spirit. Maybe she wants to be like her dad. The work might be heartbreaking at times, but the vision was bold and specific. I loved hearing it voiced publicly at school for the first time.

Another child, whose father once gave us several mulberry trees, said he wanted to be a hibachi chef. I laughed out loud. That’s the kind of clarity and originality I adore. One boy in first or second grade said he wanted to be vice president. My ex-wife quipped, “Why not president?” But the truth is, the vice presidency carries enormous power, sometimes as much as the presidency itself. I remembered all the talk during the Bush years that Dick Cheney was really the one in charge.

Listening to these kids, I felt proud of their courage to dream. Society needs people in every role, from vice presidents to hibachi chefs. Even jobs that seem menial, like janitors at Disney cleaning bathrooms, matter profoundly. Whenever I went to Disney I made a point to thank the bathroom staff, because their work created the environment for joy. Ideally, though, we wouldn’t need full-time janitors if everyone simply cleaned up after themselves. I often imagine a gift economy where everyone contributes joyfully, doing what they love, and everything gets taken care of that way.

That thought always leads me back to waste and trash. In kindergarten, I dreamed of being a garbage man because the trucks looked fun. As an adult, I wouldn’t want to do it full time. Still, I once got a glimpse of that reality when I hauled 15,000 pounds of my mom’s possessions to the landfill. I’ll never forget it. You imagine some sophisticated system at a landfill, but in reality, it’s just garbage dumped onto the ground, bulldozed around, compacted, and layered until it becomes a mountain covered in dirt. Watching it unfold was shocking. I think everyone should take a trip to a landfill at least once, to see where all our “stuff” ends up.

When my mom moved, I had only a week to clear out her storage. She had accumulated mountains of possessions—tens of thousands of pounds of books, mugs, tubs of stuffed animals, and old textbooks. Ideally she would have had time to donate, sell, or give away much of it, but she was locked in a survival mindset and didn’t make the time to even go through her house, let alone her three storage units. I did manage to drop off at least five car loads of items at thrift stores, but most of them didn’t want outdated textbooks or worn stuffed animals. In the end, I made many more trips to the landfill because that was the most time-efficient.

The saddest moment came when one of the plastic tubs of stuffed animals I had tossed—filled with Winnie the Poohs and Eeyores—got smashed open and pushed away from the main pile. They lay there the next day dirty, splattered with blood from other trash, abandoned in the open. The sight broke my heart. It made me think about how easily people get swept up in the euphoria of buying, whether at Disney or online, and how little thought goes into the full life cycle of those purchases.

For years, my mom shopped to soothe loneliness while living alone out of state. Thankfully, she has slowed down lately, but for years the pattern consumed her space and her finances. Seeing the landfill firsthand changed my perspective. Every item we buy required raw materials, labor, and energy to make, and for many of them the end of the story is just being crushed into a pile of garbage. It forced me to ask myself: Am I willing to buy this knowing it will eventually end up here?

I realized I had fallen into the same trap. In business I bought equipment and gadgets brand new, only to sell them later at a fraction of the price or give them away. I often told myself I needed the latest and best, when in reality a used version would have served just as well. I’m grateful I managed to sell about $1,700 worth of gear on eBay when I cleaned out my studio this month, but I had probably spent three times that buying new. Looking back, I see how unnecessary much of it was.

Today I buy less than ever before, though I still have room for improvement. Just recently I bought new massage sheets when, realistically, I probably could have found used ones. Massage sheets and linens aren’t typically items people buy secondhand, but I’m sure some massage therapist has donated theirs to Goodwill. I might look into that for the rest of my sheets. The important thing is that I am more conscious now. I no longer buy thoughtlessly.

Dictating this diary today feels much better than yesterday. Yesterday’s entry felt rushed, unfinished, anticlimactic. Today I’ve expressed more of what I needed to say, offered ideas I believe are worth sharing, and left behind a complete reflection. Sometimes I wonder if these diaries are worth the paper they’ll be printed on. Yet I know I would love to read someone else’s diaries like this, even just once. That thought reassures me that my writing holds value too.

Books, after all, are communal objects. One copy can be read by a hundred people. That alone makes the effort worthwhile. So I’m excited to finish and publish this diary. I don’t yet know what the next one will be titled, but I know I want to continue. I want to keep writing like this every day, capturing the ordinary and extraordinary moments of my life, so that others can read them and perhaps find something of themselves in my words.

If you want more of my books, you’ll find them linked on JerryBanfield.com. I will be here writing, documenting, and publishing for as long as I live. This book is over 50,000 words now, and I’ll stop here because I want it to be long enough to provide a full reading experience but not so long it overwhelms readers like my 526-page Speaker Meeting 2017 or my 690-page Officer Banfield. I’ll be publishing I Was Famous on the Internet next and hope you will continue reading with me.

If you want to meet up with me in person or send me a message, I have a phone number for you on JerryBanfield.com. Thank you for reading, and I hope to see you again in another book.

If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.

Loving Your Mind Even When It Thinks Insane Thoughts

From my video published May 5, 2024.

I love my mind even when it thinks insane thoughts. This is a new thought for me to have, because most of my life I've really hated all the crazy stuff my brain would come up with, and I associated those thoughts with my identity. I believed that if I had certain thoughts, that must mean I am that kind of a person. Just yesterday I had the breakthrough that I can love my mind exactly as it is, even with its dark sides and its ugly sides, because ultimately my actions will really determine what people think of me and my impact in the world.

To some degree, although I believe we are telepathically connected and our thoughts do have some effect on other people, we also do have privacy. To some degree we can think whatever we want to, and it doesn't bother anybody.

Why I used to hate my own mind

I used to think that if I had any thoughts that I didn't like, I should fight those thoughts. Then I would subconsciously hate my mind and tell it to shut up and stop that, and then I'd flip and really go deep into the insane areas of my mind. Like when I first got sober, my mind would think about drinking all the time, and I got to hate it. I'm like, stop thinking about drinking. You're such an idiot. I don't want those thoughts.

No matter how spiritual you get or how wonderful your life is — and I'm pretty spiritual, my life is pretty nice — my mind still comes up with some crazy ideas. I'll be driving down the road, and I used to be a police officer, and I'll be driving home from the grocery store and my mind comes up with the thought that you should just floor it and ram that police car in the back. It's like, what? Yeah, that'd be a nice day, going to jail, wouldn't it? That's so crazy.

Treating my mind like a stand-up comedian

What helps me is to look at the thoughts my mind produces like that as a stand-up comedian who's trying to entertain me. The thought can be there as a test — like, hey, let's see if he goes for this crazy thought. Because some of the crazy thoughts I actually believe. My mind says this person is awful and you should hate them, and occasionally it tricks me into that, and I start thinking, yeah, you're right, this person is awful, come up with some more thoughts of why I should hate them.

That happens even when I know that I'm here as a being of light, as we all are, and that my role, my joy, is in sharing the light and helping others and being a part of the community and serving. Therefore, anything besides that — thoughts of harm, insanity, inconsiderate, self-centered, delusional thoughts — those I used to be so mad about.

The real test of love is whether you can love the insanity

What I find is that the true test of love is: can you love when things aren't going your way? Can you love your partner when they're looking ugly or when they're being mean? Can you love your kids when they're being crazy and when they're not doing what you think they should want to? Can you love your parents when they're sick and delusional and they aren't taking care of themselves? Can you love the world when horrible things are happening — wars and violence, people starving in a world where a third of people are overweight? Can you love the world when it's insane? Can you love yourself and your family and your friends when they're insane?

Now, I'm not saying that you need to put yourself in the middle of the insanity and feed the insanity. As a general rule, if my mind comes up with some crazy stuff, I acknowledge it. Like, wow, that was unusual, or that was pretty far out there, or I see you — I see you thinking about that — and now we're going to move on. Now I'd like you to think about what you'd like to do the rest of the day, or what kind of a video you can make.

Accepting the thoughts instead of fighting them

What's really cool is that yesterday my mind was filled with more insane thoughts than usual. Instead of being so critical and feeling in conflict, I accepted and I noticed the thoughts. I'm like, okay, I see you, I see these thoughts. These are selfish, insane thoughts — that's my judgment of them — I see them, I accept that they're there, and it doesn't matter that they're there. Because just like I'm not going to ram the police officer on the way home from the grocery store, I'm not going to do anything in my life that's going to cause anyone harm, whether it's my family, my friends, or some random person on the street. I'm not here for that purpose, and that doesn't bring me joy. Therefore my mind can think whatever it wants to.

It was a revolutionary concept to just say, I love you, mind. This shift — choosing love and trust over fighting my own thoughts — is the same move I describe in how I chose faith when my mind went to fear. And I had to recognize that, hey, all the tough spots I've ever been in, my mind has always gotten me out of them. From asking for help when I was first sober in Alcoholics Anonymous — that started with feeling desperate and alone and hungover and hopeless, and my mind gave me the thought, why don't you go to Alcoholics Anonymous, to get me out of that. So my mind has its light and dark sides, and I'd rather recognize, accept, and acknowledge them than fight and deny them.

Dropping the split personality

What I don't want to have anymore is a split personality. I used to have this split personality where I'd have one identity based around all the dark thoughts and one identity based around all the light thoughts. Drinking often was a way to really get into and embrace and accept all the dark thoughts, but it also ended up acting them out sometimes as well, which was really scary.

Where I find a lot of us struggle and suffer is that we compartmentalize ourselves. We try and put our thoughts in little boxes and hide them and pretend they don't exist, and then they only come out at certain times when certain things are triggered, and then they're really scary because we've tried to hide them. Often our bodies will do things and produce symptoms based on thoughts we're not willing to think, or thoughts we've tried to compartmentalize and push away. That connection between an unacknowledged thought and what shows up in the body is something I go even deeper on in how I am creating every experience in my body.

For example, I was talking to my daughter the other day when she was trying to act sick in order to stay home from school. She said that she really wanted to go to school, and I said, well, your body indicates you don't want to go to school, because if you wholeheartedly wanted to go, you'd feel good and you'd go there. Your body is clearly wanting to stay home, which usually means there's some unacknowledged thought that you don't want to express that needs to be shared. My daughter said, yeah, it's been a long weekend, it's Monday, I was out, I'd like to just have a quiet day at home and then go to school tomorrow. So I said, fine, have a quiet day at home — you don't need to be sick to have a quiet day at home. She instantly got out of bed, ate her breakfast, and had a regular nice day at home, not sick.

Share the exact nature of your thoughts with a safe person

It is important, when we have thoughts, to remember that if you feel like you're really alone and nobody else ever thinks about this stuff, first off, that's a lie, because we're all telepathically connected. The thoughts we have are all connected, thought together with other people in this big telepathic net of thoughts.

If your thoughts really bother you, one thing you can do is find a safe person to share the exact nature of the thoughts with. For example, with my sponsor and my grand-sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous, I shared the exact nature of all the craziest thoughts my mind was having, and all the past experiences I had related to those thoughts, and they shared their lives and their crazy thoughts. It helped me realize that what you see people expressing and talking about on the surface — especially if you're in a peaceful, caring, loving community like I'm in, where people are generally pretty nice and understanding, which means they're generally not too crazy or outrageous and usually not expressing these thoughts — most of us are still having some kind of nutty, insane, selfish thoughts. Not all the time necessarily, but here and there, some days more than others. You're not alone with these thoughts. All of us have our crazy thoughts, our dark thoughts. Finding that kind of safe person to be honest with is a big part of what helps, and if you want that, you can join me in Jerry Banfield Family and we'll talk yours through together.

Your thoughts are more collective than individual

Often our thoughts are mirroring each other. I used to feel really bad when I would have thoughts that I should leave my wife and find another one. Usually when I was thinking those thoughts, it turns out, after talking to my wife about them, that she was usually thinking thoughts that she'd rather be alone and she didn't need me anymore. Our minds were literally having the same basic thought, individualized into both of our life experiences. So the thoughts you're having are really more collective thoughts than individual thoughts, especially when you consider that rarely do your thoughts not involve anyone else somehow. Even if you think you're totally isolated and self-centered and you're only thinking about you, you're often thinking, what are other people going to think of me? Or the things you're afraid of doing involve other people.

I am not my mind

So what I've found that really helps is to say: I love you, mind. I love you no matter what thoughts you're thinking. I love you, I see you, we're here together. And at the same time, I am not my mind. I observe my mind, but I am much more than a mind that thinks or a body that feels and acts. I am consciousness. I am God. I am the universe. I really am the space that everything happens within. Sitting in that identity — that I'm the Higher Power having this experience — is what I explore in why being God is hard.

I also don't identify with the thoughts that come through. To some degree they're just like the example Eckhart Tolle used in The Power of Now — a rat race, where an animal runs by, and there goes a thought, and there goes another thought. Sometimes it's like you're watching a little mouse hole or groundhog hole, just wondering when a thought's going to pop up. Oh, there's one, there it is, and then it goes back, and there's no thought for a moment. Nope, there's another thought. To some degree the thoughts just come out without me doing anything.

The people I'm around have a big impact on the thoughts I'm thinking, and I'm certain we're all telepathically connected, so that with some people we'll have certain thoughts and with other people we'll have other thoughts — because all our thoughts are connected.

You are never thinking alone

I want you to know you're never alone. You're never thinking thoughts alone, and there's a reason and a purpose for your thoughts. If you can't find any other reason, it's a test: can you love your mind when it's going nuts? It's easy to love my mind when it's inspired and coming up with great ideas and full of enthusiasm for life. But can I love my mind when it's really nihilistic, when nothing matters and everything's stupid and everyone's wrong? Yes, I can, and I do. And I love your mind that way as well. If reflections like this are the kind of thing you enjoy, you can watch more of them in my Life playlist.

How Not to Be Angry All the Time

From my video published May 1, 2024.

If you're tired of being angry, if you truly want relief, I'll tell you what works for me to deal with anger. I used to get so angry as a kid that I would bang my head on the floor and try to smash my head open. I remember that as young as being two or three years old. My parents used to have to physically restrain me so I wouldn't hurt myself. Anger was a big challenge, a big problem, a consistent emotion for me for most of my adult life, until the last few years where I've learned to handle anger in several different ways, in a process that's actually productive, that allows the anger to be used and to fuel my life.

Emotions are okay and they pass

The number one thing with anger is to understand that emotions are okay. They have their time and place, and it's a passing emotion.

The number one thing you need to stop doing if you don't want to be angry is stop attaching emotions and stories. Stop taking the emotion and tying it into a story, because that's where you're losing power over yourself and your surroundings, and where you're also fueling future anger.

For example, if you just feel anger: my kids are seven and five, and they often just feel an emotion really strongly for a minute and then they move on. They feel it, they get it out there, they express it, and then they move on. What we've done as adults, lots of times, is we feel the emotion and then we try to suppress it. We try not to feel it, we pray for it to go away, we try to ignore it, or we put a story around it. So basically, we resist the anger.

What works for me is to let the emotions pass through me and acknowledge it and say, "Yes, I'm angry right now, but I'm angry for no reason." And that is where the real power comes in. I'm angry for no reason. I'm just feeling the feeling of anger right now. That allows me to be powerful, and to let the anger, the emotion, flow through and then move on.

I'm never upset for the reason I think I am

Another thought process that can work with that is one I learned in A Course in Miracles, that's called, "I'm never upset for the reason I think I am." I was feeling angry today, and I was making the mistake of putting a story with it. I was making the mistake of tying something that happened in my life, something my wife did that I didn't like, sticking the story of that with my feeling.

I felt anger when my wife did something I didn't like in the bedroom last night, and anger came up, and then the story came with it. Today, when I woke up, the story was there, and then the anger came up. What I did is I severed the anger and the story. I just am experiencing anger. There's no story. There's no reason. I'm not upset for the reason I think I am.

If you continue to experience anger over and over again, there are a few different ways it can be productive, but the secret is that you're not upset for the reason you think you are. There are a few different reasons you can really be upset. One is you're just experiencing being human and emotions. All emotions are desirable. They're part of the human experience. It's just like all colors of the rainbow are desirable. Would you tell me that you want to remove red from the rainbow because you don't like it, because you don't think it should be there? How would the rainbow look without red? Anger is an emotion that's part of the human experience. If you're feeling anger, it just might be a normal part of being human.

Where you get screwed is the story

Where you get screwed is when you start to take that emotion and wrap a story around it. I'm angry because this person did this, this person said that. I felt a surge of anger in traffic this morning as a person drove close to my bumper, then passed me, then pulled right in front of me at a stoplight. My mind's like, "You effing moron, I should rear-end you." But I don't believe that, and I don't hold on to it. That person's driving was impersonal. They don't know me, they don't care about me, they're just driving how they drive. They're not driving in any personal way toward me.

Another thing that helps with anger is to see that the things that happen aren't personal. People's driving is just how they drive. They don't know you, they don't care about you, their driving has nothing to do with you. At a certain level of growth and maturity, you realize that, and you don't take it personally, and you don't let those thoughts run you. I had the thought to put my finger out the window and flip this person off, and I laughed at it. I'm like, well, I'd be an idiot then if I did that. I realized that the anger I felt had nothing to do with that other person's driving. It had to do with an emotion I internally was experiencing, and any other set of circumstances would have served to produce anger. I could have gotten angry the light changed. I could have gotten angry about the bill at the post office.

Once you see that you're experiencing emotions, and external reality really has very little to do with those emotions, that's where you get powerful. Then you see, I'm not upset for the reason I think I am. I'm upset because I'm just being human, because I don't even remember who I am. I don't remember that I'm a mortal soul, that I'm source energy having a human experience by choice, and I wanted to have all the emotions and feelings. That's why they're here. That's why they're possible. This is what helps me to deal with anger, as I consciously separate my mind's tendency to put a story with the feeling. This is the same inner work I keep coming back to across my Life playlist, and it's a lot like how, in another moment, my mind went to fear but I chose faith instead of letting the story take over.

Release the anger through the body

I also do physical practices. Yoga helps me physically release anger from the body. While mental processes can stop you from doing something dumb, like sticking your middle finger out the window at another car, if I'm angry, often that energy needs to be released through the physical body. Yoga, exercise, massage, sex, and many other physical practices can help. Meditation, walking, light exercise, all these things can help release the physical energy of anger.

Another thought I have with anger is that I'm thankful I've got enough energy to be angry. I hate when I don't have enough energy to be angry, and being angry is proof that I'm full of energy. I love being full of energy. I love having enough energy to show up in the studio and make videos, to go do yoga in the morning, to handle all the stuff that comes through my day, and then just rest at night, sit on the couch, watch some videos, and learn how to make music after I've eaten lunch while my food digests. I love that most of the 15 hours a day I'm awake, I'm not angry. I've got a lot of energy, and when I'm angry, I get grateful. I'm like, thank you, body, for having enough energy to get upset, enough energy to get in a fight right now. I love having that much energy. My anger is proof that my body is working properly, because when you're sick and you feel bad, you can hardly have enough energy to even get angry. I'm glad today to be able to handle anger, because this has been a tough emotion for me over the course of my life.

Handling my anger helps everyone around me

I love it when the people around me can handle their anger in an acceptable way, because the better I handle my anger, the better I'm able to understand other people's actions. I wouldn't be surprised if that other driver today was angry themselves. Once you realize that, you'll often see you attract people in similar emotional states to the one you're in. If you're angry, you're likely to attract another angry person to you, and that's what motivates me to want to just experience the emotion and release it. Learning to do that consistently is its own kind of practice, much like the long-term emotional sobriety I work on every day.

If you're stuck in anger, I guarantee you you're playing a story, and you're doing a feedback loop where the story triggers the emotion of anger, and the emotion of anger triggers the story, and it goes back and forth. You can break that cycle in your mind with your thinking alone, and then you can help the emotion and the body relax through physical practices. This is a very valuable skill that every kid should be taught in school, and that's why I'm sharing this today, because I've seen the results of me being angry and breaking things, destroying things, hurting myself, hurting others. I love today the feeling that I'm empowered, that I'm in control, that I can safely experience my emotions without causing destruction to other people.

It's okay to have emotions, too. Sometimes I get angry and other people around me can sense and feel my anger, and they take it personally. I've helped other people, like my wife, to learn that if I'm angry, it's not her fault. If I'm angry, it's not my kids' fault. It's no one's fault that I'm upset. I'm not upset for the reason I think I am. There's no reason, truly, that I'm upset, except that I'm having the human experience.

The Power of Positive Self-Talk

From my video published March 2, 2024.

My friends, I've come to believe that if you talk to yourself the way I'm about to describe, you'll get everything you want in life. I think you'll love learning about the power of self-talk. I'm Jerry Banfield, and I see myself as a living example of self-talk putting you in the exact position you want to be in. So first, let's define what self-talk is, and then I'll tell you a few stories I think you'll enjoy.

Self-talk is the habits, the language, and the thinking you direct at your ego, your mind, your body, your idea of who you are. For example, self-talk happens when you screw something up. What kind of self-talk happens right after that? The self-talk I have now, if I fall down in a yoga pose, is: that's funny, nice job trying, you're getting stronger. If I upload a video on YouTube that does poorly, my self-talk is: we're going to learn from this, we're going to go get some more inspiration, and we're going to do even better next time. My self-talk when I get upset is: it's okay to be a little upset, you chose to feel this way, and you can choose to feel a different way.

What's even more important than that kind of reactionary self-talk is the deep-down beliefs you carry. These have often been programmed very thoroughly in the past, frequently by other people, but you've accepted them, you've taken them in, and you've reinforced them. In my experience, if you'll take in new thoughts, you can program those as your new reality.

How I came to believe I reprogrammed my health

I set out to see a level of health in my life that I'd never seen before. I made a decision that I'll do whatever it takes to be in the best health of my life. And I have not had one day sick, not a single day sick, since October 2022 — which, at the time I'm recording this in March 2024, is a long stretch.

I can tell you exactly why I believe I got sick that last time. I was about to go help my mother move. On the surface, I was happy to go help her. But deep down, I really didn't want to. In the way I've come to understand it, my body honored my deep-down subconscious unexpressed desire to stay here in my house, do my videos, play my games, be with my family, go to my yoga and my AA meetings, and keep the intimacy with my wife. That subconscious desire said: I really don't want to take a week to go help my mother move in Mississippi. And to me, that manifested as an illness — pure fatigue, no other symptoms, just fatigue — to give me what I was subconsciously asking for.

Once you realize the self-talk you've done in the past — consciously, at some point — you see that once you program it, repeated enough times, it becomes unconscious and unquestioned belief. But if you can get those beliefs out and examine them, I believe you can reprogram your entire reality.

The money story: from "I'm broke" to "I have enough"

Let's talk about money. I used to have a mindset that I'm broke, that I can't afford nice stuff, that everything's too expensive. I didn't focus on how much I did have. I'd look at my bank account and feel like other people had it better than me. My money self-talk was that I don't have that much money, I don't have enough money. If you boiled my self-talk down to its simplest form, it was: I don't have enough money.

So what did that materialize into? Especially after college, I took really low-paying jobs, where my other self-talk was: I don't value my time, my time is not valuable, I don't value it and other people don't value it either. So I'd take low-paying jobs and then resent how little money I got. Meanwhile, friends I went to college with were earning double, triple, some of them five times as much money as me — and I resented them for that too. I expected they should pay for things because I'm poor and they're not. All of that was driven by self-talk.

When I examined my self-talk around money and chose to reprogram myself, I looked around about ten years ago and realized: I am wealthy. I've never had a day in my life where I didn't have enough to eat. I've never had a day where I didn't have a place to live — despite being an alcoholic and a gambling addict and having a few other issues. Not one day have I had to sleep outside. Not one day have I missed a meal. I'm clearly very wealthy. I clearly have enough money.

Even though my external circumstances were the same as they'd been for a while, when I internalized "I have enough money," that started being my self-talk. And I've made more money doing work I love than all the years I worked so-called real jobs combined, multiplied several times over. Just showing up and doing videos on YouTube, saying whatever I think can help you each day, turns out to pay way, way more than anything I'd been able to do before — way better than all the jobs I worked so hard at and risked my life at, like being a corrections officer and a police officer. It pays better than a lot of my friends' jobs too, and some of them are jealous.

So when your self-talk is "I am wealthy, I am healthy, I love myself, I love the world, I have enough," I believe that, ironically, reality reinforces your existing self-talk. If you want to go deeper on the money side of all this, I keep these conversations going in my Crypto Reviews playlist.

Why I think so many people get hurt in crypto

Let's move on to things that operate on that same energy. This is how a lot of people have gotten ripped off in crypto. People come into crypto with the conscious mindset, "I'm going to make all this money." And while some do, many come in with the conscious thought "I'm going to get rich quick." But the unconscious belief behind that is, "I'm poor, I'm broke, I don't have enough." That's why so many people who thought they were going to get rich plowed into crypto and lost huge amounts of money — the self-talk behind it was "I'm broke, I'm poor, I don't have enough."

Consciously you're using something like crypto to try and escape that, but even if you do succeed, the old self-talk catches up with you. Even when I had poor money self-talk, any good opportunity that came along, I'd end up finding a way to waste the money. I'd go to the strip club when I was a police officer and blow two weeks of my pay. I'd wreck my car and then have to work. The first car I bought, I worked a whole summer and used all my savings bonds to buy it — and I wrecked it in a night of drunk driving. It took me quite a while to get enough money together to buy another car.

Today, even with a car payment, because I have enough money, and because my self-talk is that I have enough money and that I love the car I have, I'm driving a car with almost 200,000 miles on it and I'm not shopping for a new one. I love the car I've got. When you extrapolate this self-talk across all areas of life, you can see how powerful it is.

My worst financial decisions — and realizing I was wealthy anyway

When I was at the depths, in the worst financial situation of my life, my self-talk a year before that had started saying, "I'm broke." Looking back now, it seems so ridiculous, because at the time I had paid off tons of debt and made hundreds of thousands in crypto. But my earnings had dropped drastically when the crypto bull market turned into a bear market, and I felt broke. Externally, you would have thought, this guy made $100,000 in 2018 running his mouth online — and yet I felt broke at the end of the year.

In 2019, I made the worst financial decisions I've ever made. I sent my daughter to a private school and even talked my wife into it. That private school for her pre-K was $18,000 of after-tax money. I then spent over $100,000 on a new startup idea — on credit cards, business loans, and personal loans — and it failed miserably. A year after I'd made over $100,000 in 2018, in 2019 I lost something like $70,000 in my business. And I was sitting at the bankruptcy attorney's office, and I realized: I did this by thinking broke, by self-talking broke. I did this.

As I drove home from the bankruptcy attorney and decided not to declare bankruptcy, I realized again how wealthy I was. Even though I had destroyed my finances — I'd borrowed and borrowed and borrowed, taking cash advances on credit cards to make minimum payments, I had drawn down my wife's investments to bail me out so we could even pay our bills. I was paying the mortgage up until I told her I was taking cash advances on credit cards that collectively had over $100,000 in limits and were almost maxed out. My wife was not prepared for that, and she went through her entire savings and her investments.

Despite all of that, my wife still loved me. Despite all of that, I still had enough money to pay for professional massages. Despite all of that, my daughter continued in private school — we'd already paid the tuition. And I never missed a meal. My kids never missed a meal. We never wanted for anything. And I realized: I'm insanely wealthy. Even with all the stupid decisions I'd made, I still hadn't suffered any real, lasting financial harm.

Today, all those credit cards are paid off. Today I have almost $50,000 in crypto, and all of our family debt may be paid off in the next year or two. I was looking through some of my papers earlier today. Four years ago, we had $600,000 in debt, and our net worth was negative $200,000 or more. I believe I did that by self-talking broke. Our net worth has gone up several hundred thousand dollars since then — and I believe I did that by self-talking wealthy.

Self-talk and your relationships

When you realize that your inner reality drives your outer reality, you can apply this to relationships too. When you feel lonely and disconnected and you tell yourself, "I'm a lonely person, people don't like me, I don't like other people," that self-talk pushes people away. But when your self-talk is, "I love people, I love getting to know people, I am a person who thrives in relationships, I love being a parent, a child, a romantic partner, a husband — I do really well in these roles, I learn a lot, it's supportive," then in my experience it manifests.

The main way you learn self-talk is by what you take in and the people you surround yourself with. As kids, a lot of us got into habits of negative self-talk because we grew up in environments — parents, relatives, friends, school, classrooms, music, movies — that taught us all this negative self-talk. The good news is that today there's all kinds of literature, and there are people you can listen to, including me, who will help you reprogram it.

I'm a person today who only participates in healthy, loving, positive, supportive relationships. If a relationship is based on toxicity, on wanting to change somebody, on somebody not being good enough, I will not participate in it — and I don't care which relationship it is. I only accept relationships full of love and joy, where we're growing together, learning, and enjoying life. Those are the only kind of relationships I accept today.

If you're single and you want to attract somebody, the self-talk is: "I am preparing to receive the partner of my dreams. I'm doing the work today to be ready to be a fantastic husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, or fiancé." When you do that self-talk and you prepare, your mind starts looking for that intentionally. Our eyes take in billions of points of data every moment we're seeing, but the brain filters that down to a picture that's relevant to what we already understand. It automatically filters out what it doesn't think we're interested in, and it focuses most easily on what it already recognizes and knows. So if you want your life to be any particular way — if you want anything in life — I believe it starts with the self-talk. I talk through a lot more of this in my Dating playlist if attracting a partner is where you're focused right now.

The music problem, and looking under the hood

I'm grateful to be remembering all of this today, because it can be very easy to slip into negative self-talk — especially when you listen to music. A lot of the music that's promoted and popular today carries a ton of negative self-talk. If you listen for the "I am" statements in the music, and you listen to the stories, a lot of it is basically programming you to say, "I am a victim, I'm powerless, other people did this to me." When you focus on all that, the self-talk gets programmed in unconsciously and negatively. That's why I avoid listening to that kind of music.

What's frustrating in life is when your conscious mind says one thing and your unconscious says another. When I was trying to date and find a woman to be with, my conscious mind said, "I'm doing everything I can to find the perfect girl, I'm so committed to dating and being happy and having a great relationship." But my unconscious self-talk said, "I'm a sad, lonely, single man. I don't deserve to be with anybody who really loves me." And that stuff is often unconscious — you have to intentionally look into what you actually believe and see what's going on under the hood.

If you look at the movies you watch, the music you listen to, and the people you hang out with, you'll often find a reflection of your self-talk. Married guys tend to hang out with other married people. Single people tend to hang out with other single people. Sober people tend to hang out with sober people. Drunks tend to hang out with drunks. The people you surround yourself with are often a mirror of your self-talk.

Aligning your conscious and unconscious self-talk

Where peace usually comes in is when your unconscious self-talk matches your conscious idea of what you're trying to do. When you're trying to manifest money and you already feel wealthy and know you have enough, things line up. I logged into MEXC today and found $1,600 sitting there that baffled me — I had no idea how it got there. When your conscious self-talk is "I am wealthy, I have so much financial abundance, life easily supports me in doing what I want to do," and at the same time you're consciously asking, "How can I give people value? How can I help people and then give them avenues to give back and support me?" — when your self-talk, the people you spend time with, and your conscious mind are all aligned, that's when the magic happens.

I know it's frustrating when your conscious self-talk is going one direction and your unconscious beliefs are going the other. If you feel like you're having a battle in some area of your life, the real battle is usually your unconscious self-talk versus your conscious self-talk. This is the same idea behind how I believe I hacked reality to get anything I want — it always comes back to lining up what you say with what you actually believe underneath.

Stepping back from my mother, and digging up "you're a bad son"

I recently stepped back from my relationship with my mother, and I felt some turbulence. Consciously, I was saying: I will not have anyone in my life where I have an unhealthy relationship, where we argue and fight, where they're in active addiction and mental insanity. Consciously I was saying, "I will not tolerate this in my life anymore. I will not have anyone in my life who doesn't take care of me, who isn't themselves, who has that constant negative self-talk." I'd said that to everybody in my life, including my mother, many times before I actually let go of the relationship — because I know the relationships I want in my life are loving, positive, supportive ones where we're growing and helping each other.

But my unconscious self-talk was: "You're a bad son." That's where the conflict came from. When my relationship with my mother got to a place where it didn't fit what I'd committed to, my unconscious self-talk conflicted hard with my conscious decision.

So what I did is I started asking everybody for advice. A lot of times you can't figure out your unconscious self-talk without other people's help. I asked my wife, my kids, my AA meetings, my yoga friends — I asked everybody about my situation with my mother. The consensus was: if you can't have a relationship with your mother where you can just be with her, where you find joy in being together, where you trust her and accept who she is without trying to change her or save her, then the most loving thing you can do is step back and say, "Look, I love you, Mom. I'm over here. If you want what I have, I'm over here. I don't want what you have, so I'm going to stay away — but if you want what I have, you can come over to my house and get it. I'm just not going to go over to your house and be in that insanity."

Because everybody was telling me that, I asked myself, "Okay, so what's the resistance, then?" And I realized my unconscious self-talk was: "You're a bad son. If you were a good son, you'd put up with your mother no matter what she did." Once I pulled that out and could see it clearly, I said, "No, I'm not." I talked to other people I thought of as good sons and daughters, and they'd had similar experiences and had stepped back from their parents too. From my point of view, they weren't bad children for refusing to keep going into situations that were destroying their own sanity — for some of them, a parent in addiction, or a mother in a nursing home who couldn't remember them anymore and where every visit just hurt. The way I dug up my own unconscious self-talk and modified it was through seeing other people's experiences and getting their help.

I told myself: "You are a great son. You're a son your mother would be proud of." I even had a vision of being five years old. My mother was such a great mother to me growing up — she held the family together, made a living for everybody, and helped my dad get sober. I imagined asking her, at five years old, "Hey Mom, what do I do thirty-some years from now, when you've gotten really sick and I can't stand to be around you anymore without trying to save you or change you?" And I could picture her saying, "Just don't worry about me. I'll be fine. Enjoy your life, enjoy your family. If you don't want to hang out with me, that's fine — you're a grown-up, it's fine." I cried. That big emotional experience, along with everybody else's help, reprogrammed my unconscious belief.

Now my self-talk is: I am a loving, caring son. I'm a son who very much loves and cares for his mother — and the most effective way for me to love and care for her right now is to not be near her. When I'm near her, I think about what's wrong with her. From a distance, I love her, and I'm very glad for the life we've had together. If you've ever wrestled with guilt like this, you might recognize it in loving your mind even when it thinks insane thoughts.

Grief, willingness to change, and where I am now

Grief is often the secret to really making those unconscious changes — letting go of how things used to be and saying, in order for me to grow, I let go of the past. "I'm willing to grow. I'm willing to change." That's an affirmation that's been extremely helpful for me, and that self-talk has made a huge difference across my life. When I was in the depths of my financial suffering, I started affirming constantly, "I'm willing to change." That willingness to change is what allows the conscious and unconscious beliefs to actually shift. And from where I'm standing now, the whole world is just wonderful and amazing.

So I hope this has been helpful for you. If you want to dig further into the inner work behind all of it, I keep sharing it in my Life playlist. I'd also love to get to know you better — you can hop on a one-on-one call with me and chat any time.

How Not to Take Things Personally

From my video published October 17, 2022.

I want to tell you how not to take things personally — because if you don't take things personally, life is pretty easy. Life gets difficult when things are taken personally, especially when they're not meant to be taken personally. For example, somebody says something, and you get all upset and pissed off when they didn't really mean to attack you with what they said. What they said could have not been taken personally, and in that instance, you might not have been upset. This has been a skill I've been very intentionally developing: how not to take things personally.

The number one thing: take inventory of yourself

So the number one thing to do to not take things personally is to really take inventory. Take inventory of yourself. Get to know: who are you? What are you all about? Because it's much harder to take things personally when you really know yourself well. And if you see a reaction coming up, then it really points to something within you.

For example, when I start getting upset at something, there's the temptation to look at it and blame it on other people. But really, I'm disturbed. There's something going on inside of me. It's not really them. It's me losing my cool. It's something happening inside me. So taking full responsibility for my own feelings and my own emotions makes a world of difference. And it allows people to not have power over me. Because as long as I am letting other people offend me, then I'm not going to be able to do anything — I'm vulnerable to losing control of myself.

And I don't like losing control of myself. I really like having control of this body and this mind. I really enjoy being in control. So with taking full responsibility for who I am and what I'm doing, I'm able to be in control — to really love myself. That self-love and ownership is something I've explored more in my story about my higher power, sobriety, and self-love.

If you're an angry person, it's not about them

So not taking things personally starts with getting to know thyself. For example, if you identify as an angry person, then of course anything anybody says is likely to trigger your anger. But it's really not about them. If you are an angry person, and somebody says something that leaves you feeling angry, it's not really them. It's you. You're an angry person. And pretty much anything that could happen, pretty much anything, could come along that would trigger you to be angry — because you're an angry person.

And that level of identification, saying, "Oh, I'm an angry person. You know, maybe it's not what everybody else is doing. Maybe it's me" — that just produces magical results in life. That responsibility. So having that ownership over how I'm feeling allows me to not take things personally.

How Alcoholics Anonymous taught me to look within

I've worked on this in Alcoholics Anonymous through things like the fourth step and the fifth step — taking inventory, and looking within to see, okay, who am I really? And taking full responsibility for myself. That makes it much harder for me to take anything personally. Because in the event that I do get upset, I suspect it's something to do with me and how I'm feeling. My first thought is, "Hmm, what's going on with me today?" instead of immediately thinking, "What's going on with them? What's wrong with them?" If I get upset, I think, well, what's going on with me? Why am I letting this person upset me? And that makes it so much easier. I've written more about the emotional side of this work in long-term emotional sobriety in action.

This has been very important for me as someone who streams live, too. Instead of looking out and getting mad — and I've gotten mad at people lots of times while streaming, for one thing or another — it's really helped me to look at myself and ask: what's going on with you, that you've got to get pissed off about this person? That's helped me a lot. Taking that personal responsibility has made a real difference.

Another thing that really helps, if you don't want to take things personally, is to realize that every time I get offended, it's an opportunity for me to learn something about myself.

People tell me I seem nice now. Well, I am now — but I used to get angry a lot. I mean, a ton. That's the point: if you don't want to get offended and take things personally, it really helps to examine yourself. I used to be a very angry person who got very easily frustrated. And I realized, I don't like being like that. I don't want to be angry and easily frustrated. I want to be in control of myself. And when you set that intention, that intention is very powerful. You know what? I don't want to be angry or frustrated. I want to be in control of myself. That makes a huge difference. That's why taking personal responsibility makes such a big difference. I've said, look, I don't want to be all frustrated and annoyed on a daily basis. I don't want to be powerless over my own emotions. I want to be responsible for who I am. And then it's harder for me to take things personally.

The second thing: set an intention for who you want to be

So once you get to know yourself really well and you understand what's happened in the past, it helps to then set the intention: how do you want to act? Do you want to get really nasty and offended when any little thing happens in life? Or do you want to be cool? Do you want to be able to be at peace and enjoy your situation? I want to be at peace and enjoy my situation. I don't want to be all angry and frustrated.

So the first thing is to know thyself — look at who you are and how you're acting. And then the second big thing is to say, you know what, I want to be a person who's not easily angered or frustrated. I want to be a person who's calm and composed. I want to be a person who's full of love and joy. I want to be a person who is not afraid. And when I set all those intentions for myself, those end up coming true. This is the kind of everyday inner work I keep documenting in my Life playlist.

The third thing: understand what the other person is going through

And then the final thing, the last thing that makes a big difference. Knowing myself makes a big difference. Setting an intention — I don't want people to be able to make me angry, because I feel powerless when people make me angry — makes a big difference. The last thing is then to always question what's going on with anybody else. Because other people have their own things going on in life. Other people are struggling and frustrated sometimes themselves. When you know yourself well and you know how you want to be, you can better understand how other people are operating.

For example, I know myself and my driving history. It used to really piss me off when someone tailgated me. It used to really piss me off when people were driving too slow. Basically almost anything that happened when driving was liable to get me really pissed off, because I'd get afraid of getting in a car wreck, and that would often lead to it — or I'd be in a hurry and impatient, looking at how somebody else was in my way.

So when I know myself, and I know, hey, it's okay, people can drive however they want to — it's fine, it's not a big deal — and I remember my own driving history, it's much more difficult for me to get angry with somebody else's driving. Because I remember very well how I used to drive: angry, fast, tailgating other people. And when I see other people doing that now, I'm able to be more compassionate and say, you know what, this might be an angry or frustrated person right here. Or this is somebody who's in a hurry right now. That compassion allows me to not get angry, because the antidote to being angry is understanding.

Understanding someone else is love

So if you don't want to take things personally, you take control over yourself, your stories, and your life; you set an intention for how you want to be; and if somebody comes along and is being a bit of a jerk, then there's an opportunity to understand them. When you can understand them, that's love. When you can understand somebody else and how and why they're operating the way they are, that's love — being able to understand somebody else and why they're doing what they're doing. And that's a beautiful thing to be able to do.

To give somebody grace: I look at somebody now in the same situation where I would have gotten angry before. Somebody's tailgating me. Instead of getting all pissed off at them, I remember why I tailgated other people — I was in a hurry. And why was I in a hurry? Because I was out of control. When you're out of control, and you're trying to do too many things, and you feel like things aren't going well for you, it's very tempting to get yourself into a hurry. So I got myself into a hurry all the time because I was out of control. And I was unhappy. And I was anxious. And I was having trouble managing my emotions successfully. That left me consistently in a hurry, because I wasn't looking at the big picture.

So all of that understanding — when somebody's tailgating me — instantly comes into my head. And then the logical thing to do is to just get out of the way. Somebody's tailgating me, I get out of their way, because that's the intelligent thing to do. And I don't get upset, because it's nothing personal. Somebody tailgating me is nothing personal. I am nothing — I don't even exist to them. I'm just in their way.

Nothing personal: the real gift

And what's funny is, I'll watch the same person who tailgates me go on to tailgate the person in front of me, once I get out of the way. And the person in front of me will take it personally and get pissed off, and honk, and they'll be giving each other fingers. And I feel so enlightened. I'm like, see, I don't have to do that. That's the real gift of not taking things personally.

One day there was a guy in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting who said something that, I guess, made the room gasp. Because whatever he said sounded like it was really negative and directed toward me. But I didn't even notice. I didn't associate that what he said might be related to what I said. I simply figured they're talking about their experience, which has nothing to do with me, because I don't even know them. And this lady said, "Can you believe what that guy said about you?" I said, "No. Who said what?" And she told me. And I still wasn't offended. I'm like, he can say whatever he wants to. I don't know him. The same thing is true of any negative feedback you get out in the world — most criticism is a sign of success you can mostly ignore.

Another guy in AA said something that left me feeling enlightened one day. He walked into a meeting and told this other guy, "I don't think these people like me." And the guy looked at him and said, "They don't know you well enough to not like you." And that helps.

So I hope this helps you to not take things personally as your day proceeds. And then, if you do take something personally, maybe you can set the intention: next time, I'm not going to take that personally. If this resonated with you, you can watch my newest videos in my Life playlist.