real quick: the batwrite cowriting sessions are just getting really fun and weird. the last one featured me taking anyone’s bad beliefs and dragging them into a giant dumpster, all in powerpoint slide. here’s what the ppl who attended had to say when asked to describe BATWRITE:
After participating in 4 of the 20, 2 hour sessions, I conclude that if you want to write, or hang out with some writers and artists and you like lighthearted, humorous discussions, advice on a stack issue it is all of that and more. Clear your calendar and rsvp to a couple of dates, talk or observe and be open to the prompts for the day. A welcoming casual group.
— Anon
A soft landing spot to rest your bones, align your guts, wrestle with you thoughts, and usually produce great work.
—
I took advantage of the cowriting time to work on a letter to a beloved former teacher. I feel I’m able to be vulnerable with this group and that helps me take risks in my writing.
—
You don’t just get to metaphorically trash beliefs that don’t serve you, Alex will literally put them in the dumpster during the live, so you’ll have witnesses. And you’ll be free!
—
Sadly I missed most of it on account of parenting and optimal time for going to the beach BUT it seems like fun? Also, it's run by the guy that wrote that really funny substack
— Anon (not me tho i swear)
next one is today (Thur) at 10a est - if you wanna get some shit done and hang with cool weirdos, join us! you can sign up here.
aaaand we’re live
Hello and welcome back to Both Are True LIVE - Part comedy, part philosophy, and 100% a cry for help, Both Are True is Alex Dobrenko and guests talking about creativity, culture, chaos and other stuff too. It’s deep, it’s dumb, it's basically group therapy -- what could possibly go wrong?!
And today I’m talking with
who is indeed a real therapist. He’s also the writer of here on the stack and the host of the Three Percent podcast:At our best, men are typically 97% honest with ourselves and others. It's that crucial 3% we hold back—the stuff that feels too shameful, too vulnerable, too real—that keep us bound to shame and loneliness from which many of our struggles stem.
Today, Blake and I talk about:
whether real vulnerability is possible on the internet
why men pretend to be MEN
body stuff
therapy
12-step
kindness vs people pleasing
more!
Listen or watch it and you’ll hear it all i promise. here are some pull quotes:
men pretending to be bulletproof
"Every man was born sensitive and soft—if you have kids you know that to be true. Somewhere along the way they learn that they need to be hard and calloused and strong and assert dominance in order to be accepted or close to people."
"We're all adolescent boys trying, pretending like we're men. We're trying to get back to that adolescence in some way and reclaim what I left back there because I thought that wasn't okay."
"There's a lot of 'I don't want to be like that.' But then who do I want to be or what kind of man do I want to be? I didn't know. So it was a lot of figuring out on my own what I didn't want."
living above the neck
"We as men are particularly disembodied in the sense that we live above this line. For a lot of us, our relationship with our body is centered around aggression or shame."
"I grew up in the Christian evangelical space—and I still consider myself a Christian but it's so different than how I grew up—because it was like 'don't trust your body, your body's bad.' Well, not trusting my body and my body being bad led to all this unwanted sexual behavior."
"It's wild when you learn to trust your body and go with what it is leading you to. We got to this memory that was so painful for him that it made complete sense why he was sharing these facts and being very disconnected from it."
therapy for the fellas
"In my private practice, I work probably 95% with men individually. I don't do couples anymore right now. It just takes a different energy for me."
"I see a lot of men that fall under the avoidant attachment style—a lot of shame, a lot of people-pleasing tendencies, total avoidance of conflict. They're like the sensitive guys that everybody thinks isn't really a man. And that's me too."
"If I can make myself small, if I can see your perspective and make it more important than mine, if I can avoid conflict at all costs, then we can stay close. Because when I tried to do the opposite of that, you weren't okay with it."
finding your people in church basements
"At the root of most addiction is a connection problem. I'm trying to fill this void of this lack of connection with myself, with other people, and whatever my drug of choice is."
"It doesn't get much more honest than meeting a stranger in this place where just the fact that you were there, you were admitting, 'My life is unmanageable and I can't control everything.'"
attempting suicide in high school
"I attempted suicide in high school. It wasn't because I devalued my life. It wasn't because I didn't care enough about the people in my life. It was because I had all this stuff happening in my body that I was not aware of and that nobody was helping me name and work through."
"We just don't talk about things and then it kills us. That was almost my experience. Now I mostly just feel sad for that place and feeling like that was his best option."
the weird narcissism of hating yourself
"There's a phrase that comes out of 12-step recovery: 'I'm not much, but I'm all I think about.' I have this low self-worth and self-value, but yet all I think about is myself."
"Self-loathing and self-deprecation is in many ways very narcissistic. I don't view insecurity as something that I need to fight and get rid of as much as I view it as good information—an invitation for me to have a deeper connection with myself."
"Man, I hope you don't get over it. The people that say they don't have that—I used to be envious of them, but now I just don't even believe it anymore."
why closure is bullshit
"We have this whole language around grief that we need to find closure. 'I need to go to the funeral so I can have closure. I need to send this final text so I can have closure.' I think that sets us up really poorly to feel later when inevitably we're going to have feelings about that thing that ended."
"If we're just more accepting of like, 'I'm not going to have all this figured out and maybe I'm good right now, but five years from now, something's going to come up that I just need to deal with.'"
the voice that doesn't matter
"One of my biggest wounds is that my voice doesn't matter. To write about my story and then ask for people to pay me for that is to have to receive that these people believe in my voice so much that they're going to give me some of their hard-earned money. Which, as I say that out loud, sounds like a really nice way to rewrite that narrative."
"There's something that feels more scary about asking somebody for money for writing than in a therapy session, even though people pay me a way higher hourly rate than a five-dollar monthly subscription."
kindness vs people-pleasing
"There's a difference between kindness and people-pleasing. You actually have anger in you and needs and a voice and all these things that really matter and are beautiful and can be added to the relationships, and you can still maintain your sensitivity and kindness."
"What would it be like to not have to classify it as right or wrong or good or bad? Let's just go with the first thing that comes up and see where it leads. My belief is that eventually it's going to lead to some version of a deeper connection with yourself."
Read Blake here
and check out his pod here 3% podcast.want more both are true live?
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