Welcome to Help Wanted: An Advice Column by Alex, the only place that I, a comedy writer with a psychology degree, am legally allowed to give advice. Warning: this advice is NOT guaranteed to solve your problems nor is it 100% guaranteed to give you a kiss on the forehead! But it might do both, idk still working out the kinks.
To submit a question, quandary, or pickle, please email botharetrue@substack.com with “Help Wanted” in the subject line.
BROWSE PAST ISSUES
i want to be good but i am bad - help? - Ep 6
People used to think humans were made of four humors: blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile. This is, of course, ridiculous.
With science, we now know that we are, in fact, made up of a mixture of each and every animal from Winnie the Pooh.
There is Winnie the cute addict, Piglet the anxious wreck, Tigger the ADHD manic depressive, Owl the alcoholic intellectual with dyslexia, Rabbit the narcissist with OCD, and last but certainly also least, by his own approximation, Eeyore the depressive donkey.
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Life? a highway? get real - Ep 5
People say ‘what am I gonna do with you?’ and they mean ‘I can’t figure you out. I don’t know how to conceptualize you in my brain so that I may feel okay.” Or: you’re unwieldy, like flubber from the hit movie flubber.
The other way people use “do with” is like this:
45 Best Leftover Ham Recipes - What To Do With Leftover Ham
Here, ‘do with’ refers to a physical object you have and are wanting help figuring out how to best use.
But life is not a leftover ham.
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if have nothing, then how give anything? - Ep 4
So what can be done? Simple: let it go (I wrote a song about this in a movie called Frozen Veggies.)
Or to put it in the parlance that my fellow 23-year-olds will understand – because I am also 23 – you’re giving fear.
Fear that you aren’t enough, that you must give more in order to be enough.
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Life after Twitter & writing a tv show with no experience - Ep 3
We've all spent the last ten years with swimming in the contaminated waters of three or four platforms for so long that we no longer realize there’s fresh air on the surface and free wifi too. We all know the water is going to kill us, but where else would we go? And what this taught us, in that medium is the message sort of way, is that we lack the agency to create anything beyond what is already here in front of us (sound familiar? that’s the capitalism baby!!).
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Battling the self-doubt monster & how soon is too soon to remarry - Ep 2
Lets start at the beginning: congrats on starting to publish your work at all. I have it on good record that most people never get that far and end up instead throwing their computer into a nearby river and calling the police screaming "my computer, someone hurled it into the river" and demanding the police make a public announcement on the local newspaper’s Police Blotter that "Alex's genius writing was tossed into a river by a dastardly criminal who wanted nothing more than to see Alex suffer and lose.
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How can I be funny like you? - Ep 1
Before we dive in, a brief explanation: this newsletter now has an advice column in it. Why? Simple. Because the ‘advice column’ format:
is a great excuse to write regularly 👍
gets me out of my own problems and into someone else’s 😅
might be a way I can help people. stretch goal. 🍄
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