I mean, I could have been a dancer if I had just had that person in my life who told me that it wasn't the most important thing in the world to represent this idea of manliness. Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Brian Broom, a poet, screenwriter, and instructor in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh. He has been a finalist in the Moth Storytelling Competition and won the Grand prize in Carnegie Mellon University's Martin Luther King Writing Awards. Today, Brian and Eric discuss his book Punched Me Up to the Gods, a Memoir. Hi, Brian, welcome to the show. Thank you, thank you for having me. I am excited to talk with you about your book called Punch Me Up to the Gods, a Memoir, which is just a beautifully written, devastating and wise book. So we'll get to that in a minute, but we'll start, like we always do, with a parable. In the parable, there's a grandfather who's talking to his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather. He says, well, grandfather, which wolf wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do well. Most definitely, I think for the first several years of my life, I said, the anxiety wolf, you know, the one that kept me from reaching I don't want to say my full potential, because I don't know if I've reached that yet, but you know, any potential. You know, there was a great deal of self doubt, self loathing. Even I don't know, I seem to have just gotten by that way, as horrible as it sounds. Now, I think both because I need both were my writing, you know, I need to tap into both things. I was afraid to write this book because I was, in a lot of ways displaying that more negative wolf. I was sort of putting him out there for people to look at and evaluate and judge um. And I was afraid to put the book out. But what I found, you know, since it's been out, is that many people relate to the anxiety, the depression, the self loathing. You know, I've had so many wonderful letters of support from people who quite opposite of what I thought was going to happen, you know, are saying, I absolutely understand what you were going through. I know it, I live it, I still live in on some days. Yeah, as I was reading that parable to you, it made me think about something in your book that was on my mind to talk about. And a lot of your book is really reflecting on what we get from our parents and our society that tells us how we should live. Specifically, you reflect a lot on the lessons you got about what it means to be a black man, you know, masculinity and blackness. I have half that equation, the masculinity, and I related with a lot of that. But as I was reading, I was thinking about, like, what might your life have been like if you had a grandfather or a parental figure who said to you, you know what, bravery, kindness, love, These things are what's good to feed in life, Not toughness, not never crying. You know, if we had been taught that some of the qualities that I certainly think you have that you show in the book, you know, those have been nurtured. And I'm not really asking you to say, like, well, my life would have turned out like x. I just as I was reading it, it made me think about that. Well, you know, I thought about this a lot myself too. Would my life have gone down such a you know path, Sorry for the language, but there's no other way to put it. You know, would my life have gone down such a path. If I had had somebody in my life to tell me that it's more important to be yourself and to treat other people well and to be brave, what would I have been? And I remember very distinctly, like when I first left home, I was just trying to escape home. I didn't really know what I was going to college for. I just wanted to get out of that little town. And I signed up for a ballet class because I was always really interested in ballet, and I would I would see ballet dancers on public television, and I thought it was just the most beautiful thing. So I signed up for a ballet class at the University of Akron. And I remember, you know, they had this requirement that you had to you know, you had to come to your first class in your tights. You walked into this room with all these people. So I put onto tights underneath my jeans, and I got as far as the front door, you know, and all these voices in my head just came echoing, you shouldn't be here, this is girly, this is for fix um. You know, every single voice that I had heard in my head to tell me what I wasn't supposed to be became really loud, and I just turned around and walked away, and I didn't go back to that class. And in terms of like what I might be doing, I mean, I could have been a d answer if I had just had that person in my life who told me that it wasn't the most important thing in the world to represent this idea of manliness. There's a lot of things that I probably would have done had I had that person. But you know, as it turns out, I didn't, and you can't live and regret, and the only thing that I can do is try to be that person going forward. Yeah, it's a great story. I want to read a section from your book A because I think this little part summarizes so much of the themes in the book, and be when I interviewed someone like you, who write so beautifully, I'm always afraid, like, no matter how well I do this conversation, it's not going to get across to the listeners, how lovely the writing is. So when it's that case, I like to read parts of it, and so I wanted to do that. In this case. I'm going to set it up a little bit for listeners you were young. I don't know what age you were, but you were in your sister's room playing with their dolls, and your dad basically walks in and it hits you hard several times. And you then say, each time I felt a sob rise to the surface, I would choke it back down. I suspect that this was in my initiation into black manhood really began. I placed a pillow over the face of bad feelings and held it there until they stopped moving, until I was sure that they were dead. But they never really die. They just find other ways to escape. I am learning to sit with them now. Yeah. The thing about masculinity, I mean, if we all take a look at it, it seems to be more about things that you can't do, you know, than it is about things that you can do. I think the list of things that you can't do is a lot longer than the things that are supposed to actually externally be like, you know, masculine, and I named them at the beginning of the book, Like curiosity is one of them, you know, being bookish was one when I was a kid. I don't know if it's still the same way now, but there was just this long list of things that you couldn't be. And one of the most important and biggest things was you couldn't be emotional, You couldn't be sad outwardly, you couldn't be insecure outwardly. You couldn't be any of these things. And I see it all the time, you know, with men, particularly a lot of men in their relationships, you know, are very closed off. And those bad feelings, those feelings of insecurity, as I say, and those feelings of sadness and depression and anxiety, they don't go away. They don't like you just find another way, whether it's known to you or not, you know, you find another way to let them escape. Sometimes they escape, you know, unfortunately through violence. Sometimes they escape through other ways that are that are cruel to other people. And I've engaged in all of that, you know, I've engaged in horrible behavior because of my own feelings of you know whatever, just by my own bad feelings. I'm learning now that I just need to sit with them, Like I literally go into a room and I just sit with them, and I feel every bad thing that people feel, and I just I cry, where I call a friend or I try to process them. Now as opposed to acting out on them through other people. It's a horrible way to use other people to get through your bad feelings. And that's what I do now, you know, and they feel just as bad, you know. But I don't want to bring anybody else down with me anymore. Yeah, there's a theme in the book, certainly about fathers. The way the book is laid out is so great because you are observing a young black boy on a bus interacting with his father, and you're using it to refle lect back on all these interactions and all these stories through your life. I just love the way it's laid out and structured. And you know, your father is a prominent figure in this book. And there's a line that you wrote that I think speaks to what you just said, which is, there's no thing on earth more dangerous than a man who refuses to accept that he is carrying all of these loads, because it then becomes up to everyone else to carry them for him. In one way or another. Other people have to pay the price for his insecurities. Yeah. I believe that very very strongly. You know, if you look at the news and you look at men doing, you know, horrible things that to me, is the embodiment of that, you know, there's some person who had to pay the price for this man's feelings of insecurity. Oftentimes it's a woman who had to pay the price because this man hated himself or because he couldn't feel, he couldn't process the feelings that he was feeling. You know. My father, I think was was one of those men. He had been told throughout his life that you know, men shouldn't feel, men shouldn't cry, men shouldn't you know, all these things that men shouldn't do. And I think what he ended up doing was taking a lot of those things out on his family, my mother. Mostly. He was a very jealous man. He was a very controlling man, you know. But I also believe, you know, underneath all that he really did love us. And I say I believe that because he you know, he never said it or really showed it in any sort of like tender way. But I just believe that he was so walled off one of the main reasons why we're here, and by we, I mean like human beings, you know, I think we're supposed to relate to each other. But he was so wrapped up in this idea of you know, man cause play m that he never that he never got to access, you know, those feelings. You know, my father was a steel worker, He was a strong man, He was a provider. He was the head of the household. And when the provider thing got taken away from him, he honestly did not know what to do. He didn't know who to be. When I look at your father in the way that you describe in the book, there's a few different factors that I think you're capable of looking at the way he treated you through a few different lenses. You know. One of them, and it's an important lens, is as a black family. His belief was I'm gonna make you behave a certain way so that you don't get hurt by white people. So some of what was happening with him was coming through that fear. And then, as you mentioned, he was laid off from steel work and never found another career. So you know, he had that factoring into who he was. And then of course he had the way he was raised. All these things factoring into what you're saying. But it's still I think for me, I believe that part of my role as a human is to take everything that's handed to me and work through it and transform it so that I don't just pass the pain on to other people. I really loved in the book how you were able to both look at the factors that caused your dad to be the way he was and look at those things and hold him responsible for the way he was at the same time and acknowledge the impact it had on you. I just thought that that balance was done really well because it's a nuanced topic. It is, you know, I thought I didn't act the way he did just out of nowhere. You know, a lot of racism informed the way that he thought men black men should be. You know, my father grew up in a time where white people could literally just pretty much do anything they wanted to you, and he was very aware of that, and he was very aware of the fact that he had sons and he really wanted his sons to be strong and tough. So it wasn't just because he was like a mean dude, right, You know that that he imposed these kinds of like rules around behavior and rules around what not to feel and what not to think. He didn't want you to be soft in the world. That was going to be harsh with you as a black person, as a black man. So and I understand that, but at the same time, I can't help wishing that there was a way that he could have done both by first learning who I was as a person and then maybe teaching me how to properly or how to better navigate the world as the person that I was, rather than the person that he wanted me to be. Yeah, this may be a terrible direction to take this. We'll see. I'm watching this TV show. It has been gone for a while. It's called Dexter. I don't know if you ever saw it. I saw the first season. I think the basic idea of Dexter and it's not quite what you were saying, but there's an element of it, which is that he rescues his son, Fexter, from watching his mother be murder at the age of three, and he realizes very early on that Dexter is not like the rest of us, like he has problems right in his case, it's he's a serial killer. But it's fascinating because his dad works so hard to create and help Dexter find a world that works for him. I don't think that's such a bad analogy. Yeah, it's just such an interesting thing. Now there's good and bad to that. You know. The show raises questions about, well, did his dad sell him short? Could he have been better than he was? But the point being, I think that it's wonderful when our parents can see who's in front of him. You know, I'm a parent when we can see the child that's in front of us and think what's the best way to raise this child, not shove him into these collective cultural and gender based straight jackets. Right, That's exactly my point. Like my father, I don't think ever really knew me. Yeah, you know as a person, like I think first and foremost in his mind was who I was supposed to be, and so the thrust of my upbringing was just trying to hammer me into this shape that he felt I needed to be in order to get through the world. Also, there's also a bit of ego in there as well, like he didn't want me reflecting on him, you know, in this way that wasn't masculine, that wasn't you know strong, so and I think a lot of parents do that too. That's part of it as well, Like you know, you want your child to some degree to be, you know, a younger version of yourself. I mean, I don't have any kids. I don't know, but I feel like I see it sometimes. You know parents who just really want their kid to be You're young me now, so do all the things that I would do and think, all the things that I would think, and believe all the things that I would believe. So there was an element of that in it as well. Yeah, it's funny. At one point, I basically drove my life off a cliff with heroin addiction. So I have constantly throughout my son's life been like trying to just at him and be like, I hope he's on a different track. Yeah. I do not want to turn him into a little version of me. I don't think, or at least I don't want to turn him into a little version of what I was. Like then maybe the different version of me. There's a really sad scene in the book, and sad because I relate to it very very much. And it's basically, you find out that your father is dying, and you know your mother is really trying to get you to come visit him, to spend time with him. You know, everybody's envisioning this moment at the end of your father's life where you know, you guys are going to have these beautiful moments together, and you know, maybe you could describe what happened. Well. You know, at this point, I was really in the high cotton of my addiction and my mother had been after me to come home for quite some time to visit my father. He was in a hospice or like a nursing home, just getting worse and worse. And you know, when I got there, it was very strange, Like, you know, my mother, who didn't really have that great of a really ship with my father either, was really pushing for this moment, you know, like she really wanted us to connect, and you know, and it was very strange because I thought, well, she must have loved him to some degree to which I had never seen growing up. You know, she seemed to really want this moment, and so he kept begging me to come back home. I did, you know, she wanted my father and not to have time alone in this room, in this little tiny room in this in this nursing home, and so she literally like shoved me in the room, it felt like, and and you know, I just sat there with this man who was a lot frailer than I had ever seen him. And the scene plays out in the book, you know, like a movie scene, like you know, like a set, completely manufactured experience. You know. I literally was sitting there by his bed, like I dig my fist into my eyes, you know, and try to make them red. Will dissatisfy my mother when I come out of here, so that it might look like I was crying because I think I loved him, but I didn't know him, you know, I loved him on this level that I guess you're supposed to love your father, you know, since he's been gone to a long time, I do remember the good times when I was little, before all the sort of rules around masculinity kicked in, you know. I remember playing with him when I was really little. But in that moment, the scene that played out between two people, I mean, he couldn't say anything. Um he was already at that point, but it was just two complete strangers in a room, you know, where I was trying to sort of like drum up some thing. And I felt bad about that for a long time. But if there's nothing there, there's nothing there, you know. At the time, since then, as I've gotten older, I realized now that there was something there. You know. Maybe I couldn't access it at the time and he couldn't speak, but I recognized now as an older person that if you're lucky, your parents just kind of do the best they can. You know. The best thing that somebody's tolding me about parenting somewhat recently was, you know, when you're growing up, your parents are growing up to you know, a lot of times they don't know what the hell they're doing. And it has allowed me to have a little bit of grace with regard to not just my father, but my mother as well. You know, the grudges that I held when I was young, I don't have those anymore. You know, although my father's parenting style was problematic in a lot of ways, I do have to also recognize that he just was doing what his father did to him, and from all accounts, you know, my grandfather was worse. I mean, he was far worse than my father was on me. So I have to recognize that as well. Yeah, I love what you just said there, which is that I loved him, but I didn't know him. That's a really great way of saying it. I have a similar relationship with my father closer, I would say than the one maybe sounds like you have, and I see him, but he has Alzheimer's, he's declining, and largely what I end up feeling very often is nothing kind of like you describe. It just didn't feel anything. And my father was not maybe violent in the same way that your father was, or to the extent, but there was definitely a lot of the same dynamics where at play, I was a relatively sensitive, clumsy kid, and my dad had no patience for it. And you know, everybody in the neighborhood was kind of scared of him, that kind of thing. I have no ill will towards him at all. I've healed that enough. But what hasn't sprung up in its place is this deep and abiding love because I don't think I know him or he knows me. You know, our conversations for years, they are just stilted. You know, I think we both want to, but it just doesn't work. And so I'm left with that that sort of feeling of not a lot of emotion and the same thing you're saying, which is that I end up then going what is that bad. Is there something wrong with me? Should I feel something that I don't? Well? What happened for me? And I don't know if you'll find this as well, but you should write a book about what happened for me and it's still happening. Is that I have learned more about my father after his death than I ever knew about him when he was alive. And I started writing this book, and um, I started doing this sort of research for this book, and I was asking people about my father's life. You know, I just told you that my grandfather, who I had never met, who died before I was born, was far harder on my father than my father was on me. I didn't know that until after my father had died. I've heard horrible stories of how my father was treated as a boy and as a young man. I have heard of things that he tried to do and failed at. I have been preppy to things that he has said to other people you know about me, that I just he would have never said to me. So, although it isn't a well spring of love that has sprung up, it is, however, a great deal more understanding of the kind of obstacles he faced, and he built his emotional walls for a reason. They weren't always good reasons in my opinion. But I didn't live his life, you know, with a father who just was cruel and abusive on a quotitian basis. So yeah, I think I understand him a bit more. In that understanding, I can find a bit of love. Yeah, I agree. I think you know, when I look at my dad, it's very clear to me why he became the way he was, what the set of circumstances were. Let's change direction a little bit. I want to talk about sobriety a little bit. Because you got sober, I guess I'm sort of curious how you got sober and what your sobriety has been about since then. Is it something that you've gotten support from through different organizations or groups, or just always kind of curious what people's journey is into that world. I mean, I've got my own. I'm fourteen years sober this time around, um my head of stint before that, So I'm just kind of always curious what people's path looks like in that area. Well, I am so bored because there's just no drama in my life anymore. After writing, I'm coming up on year nine in December and congratulates to you, by the way for fourteen YouTube. I had gotten to a point where my behavior was so appalling. I met a guy at a bar, which is a bar that I always went to, and we were both just obliterated, and we were going to go back to his place, and he was like, we can walk to my place. I live. I live really close to the bar. Uh. It turns out he didn't live as close as he thought he did in his state. Um, and we ended up and this is going to get a little blue, but we ended up like falling into somebody's backyard and making out in a doghouse, and that's like the last thing I've met. You know. We were in this doghouse and like tearing each other's clothes off, and there was a dog. I think the dog was so oct that it didn't even like bark, Like it was just like, what the hell is going on? So I wake up the next day, you know, he's gone, right, he just left me there, and there's this dog, you know, just looking at me and the dog. I think at that point had gotten enough gumption up to just be like, I'm going to murder you like, like the dogs started barking and I ran away. So anyway, I'm I told this story to a friend of mine. You know, I'm picking up clothes, you know, off the ground, and I'm running away from this dog who's like, fortunately tied up. I told that story to a friend of mine, and it was like, you know, on the tail end of a lot of stories and a lot of behavior that I had engaged in. And I told it to him in this way that it was like, ha, ha, isn't that funny? And I remember looking up at him and he was not smiling, you know. He said, you could have been shot. You could have been killed, you know, like you're a black man. If somebody had shot a crazy, strange looking black man in their backyard, just be reading about you in the paper. And I remember him telling like, if you don't get yourself together, you could be hurt, you know. Um. And it was at a time when my behavior was increasingly erratic and careless and thoughtless, and he pretty much issued me an ultimatum, you know, and as as a lot of people were at that point, if you don't go to rehab, if you don't try to do something, then we're just not going to be your friends anymore. And so I really initially want to rehab just to shut everybody up. I thought I was smarter than everybody. I went, and I remember trying to bamboozle the intake lady, you know, telling her I'm just gonna be here a couple of days. I was trying to make jokes, and I ended up going there and actually getting it, you know that I did have a problem and sitting in and listening to other people talk about things that were similar to my life, and I got it. I absolutely got it. That story about your friends makes me think of deep into my heroin addiction. There was similar experience with a friend where I was telling them, you know, something else that I had done or whatever, and they were just appalled. And I had a partner at the time, we were both drug addicts together. Um, I said, they're just jealous of our exciting life. My my level of delusion was deep. So you got out of rehab, and then what supports have you found in helping you to stay sober. Has it been friendships or groups or reading or just sort of kind of doing it yourself. What's worked for you? I think a combination of all of those things. You know, I don't go to meetings. You know, I have friends who go to meetings every day. Yeah, I don't go to a meeting every day. I go to a meeting like I feel like I need a meeting. I do that. I also have other friends who are sober, with whom I spend a lot of my time. But I'm not a real social person. I do like to spend most of my time, you know, on my own with my cat and I write. And it's funny because I used to think I was this people person, you know. I used to think I was Johnny party Um and I loved people. Turns out I can't stand people. I'm a lot more solitary than I thought I was. You know, if you had asked me, you know, twelve years ago, I would have told you, like, oh, I love being around people, but I didn't like being around people. I liked being around drugs and alcohol and the people were just what kind of kind of came with that. So it's just a combination of things, you know. I do have people that I can talk to now, and that's something that I didn't have when I was using. I had people that I talked with and partied with. But I now have a few good friends that I can listen to them and I can talk to them, and that has made all the different to my sobriety. Yeah, a few good close friends is a wonderful thing to have, so valuable. There's a place in the book where you mentioned I closed my eyes and breathe deeply, like my therapist tells me to do. She tells me that I'm the only black male client she has ever had. This does not surprise me, so kind of back to your black masculinity thing, you know, not going to therapy. But then there's a spot where you say, the first time my therapist asked me to go to my safe place, I giggled because this is the kind of liberal psychobabble that I used to laugh at it, and that made me laugh. I still kind of laugh at it. But then I do it right totally. Yes, Yes, that's that teaching, kicking in a teaching that you're not supposed to have feelings. You know, that's a defensive mechanism. A giggle when we start talking about that. I still kind of giggle when we do that. And again, it's just a defense mechanism. But I do have a safe place, you know, I have a safe physical space that I go to. I get it now, because through all this, I think all of us realize as beautiful as the world can be, it's also treacherous and you kind of have to have a place either in your head or in the world or both that you can go to in order to feel better about life in general. So yeah, I'll go to my happy place all day. And I'll say a happy place all day and that you know, and when I say it to other people, you know, other young men, you know, big giggle because it sounds so namby pamby to us. But also, like you say, you know, a lot of black people in general don't go to therapy because we grow up with this idea that you're supposed to be tough. You're supposed to tough it through. You know, the world is harsh and you're supposed to be harsh. And I think that's to our detriment a lot of times, this idea of having to just be tough and resilient and strong all the time. Yeah, you said in the book, as a race, we're often admired for how strong we are and how much we have endured. But the truth is where no stronger than anyone else. We've endured, but we're only human. This enduring and having to be strong adds up and takes its toll. And you say it leads to our emotional undoing. Yeah, I absolutely believe that, you know, and you know even now, and I told my mom that I was going on anti anxiety medication medication for my depression. You know, her immediate reaction was, well, why would you want to do that? You know, you know, why would you want to get on more drugs, because in her mind, you know, drugs or drugs. But I could also tell that she felt a little bit of shame in that her son had to be on anti anxiety medication and anti depression medication because you know, he isn't strong enough to just take on, you know, the headwinds of the world. He has to be medicated in order to do it. And I'm like, yes, I yes, I absolutely do. I'm not ashamed of that. And I think a lot of people could do with, you know, a little help in that department. You know, we have a lot of people, you know, going through the world depressed and anxious, and they don't have to be, and they have this stigma against, you know, medication that's supposed to help you. Yeah, there definitely is a stigma against medication. I think there's two camps on that. I think there's one which is just the old school, like medicine is bad, you shouldn't take that stuff, you don't need it your week, etcetera. And that's one group. The other group of people seem to be coming from a place of you go to your doctor and they just give you a pill to make you get better, and that's not really what people need. And while I agree with that sentiment as in, like, if you've got mental health issues, it's good to work on all aspects of that. So I think there's been an overreaction to the medicalization of some of this stuff, you know. But I think it's we're throwing the baby out with a bath water to some degree, you know. For me, I've said on this show before, my depression is taken me throwing the kitchen sink at it. It has taken me using every tool at my disposal to deal with and medication is certainly one of them. Yeah, I mean, talk therapy is good, Like I wouldn't trade my therapist for the world, you know. And in the beginning when they said like this, you know, I mean, they started they started me on anti presence while I was in rehab, like after detox. You know, they were like, look, dude, you have some serious issues. And this was after talk therapy. And then you know, my anxiety started reaching new heights, and you know, that's when I really started to consider like maybe you know, because I started feeling better. That's the thing. When I was in rehab. It's a very strange thing. And I've told this story before, but when I was in rehab, I got there and I went through like the detox thing, and I had a roommate and he was a really big guy, and he he snored like really bad, like it just really loud, and so I was getting like no sleep. And the first thing that I thought to do when I was up nights with him snoring was to start right just writing about my life, writing some of the stories that appear in the book. But the funny thing about that was that when I was a kid, I used to write all the time. And it feels in some ways like I just kind of picked up, you know, once the medication chicked in, you know, and I was feeling better. You know, I just kind of picked up where I left off, you know, because there were so many people who told me don't write, it's not what boys do. But in that rehab facility, with nothing else to do, I just immediately picked up a pen and pad and just started writing and enjoyed it through the night. Yeah. Well, it's clear that writing is a therapeutic tool for you. I mean, I know that's not all it is. I'm always wary of turning art into only a therapeutic tool. Um. I think it's beautiful in ways far beyond that, but it does act that way for a lot of people. Yeah, I mean, I don't mind you saying it. You know, I didn't think this book was going to get published. You know, I didn't even think this book was going to be a book. I just started writing these stories in rehab, and you know, when I got out of rehab, I just kept writing because I was afraid to go anywhere, you know, I didn't want to relapse, So I just stayed at home all the time and I was just writing and writing. And one of my friends that I managed to retain was like, you're doing all this writing, like why don't you give it to somebody? And that's how this book came to be. So I certainly don't mind you saying it's a therapeutic you know, at least this particular book was a therapeutic act for me. It really helped a lot. And then of course we got to the point where it was going to be published and I was like, wait a minute, Oh god, really it's a vulnerable book. For sure, there's no doubt about that. Yeah, I kind of put some less instellar behavior out there, but you know, I am a hundred percent able to admit that I was a less than stellar person. You know, I used people, you know, as a means to an end. You know, I was drunk or high or both nine of the time. You know, I did manage to hold a job or two, you know, but those jobs were strictly for the purpose of procuring you know, drugs and alcohol. Yeah, you know, my apartment was dark because the electricity hadn't been paid. I was a typical addict, which you know you may have lived through as well. I've been there a couple of times, very very familiar, you said at one point. You know, I've wasted time trying to numb myself with drugs and alcohol in ways that made me both vile and pathetic. And I totally related with that, like both pathetic and awful at the same time. It's like just this, it's just a bad combination. Oh yeah, it definitely was. And you know, one of the things, and you asked earlier what keeps you sober or keeps you striving for it is that I just don't ever want to be that person again. You know, I'm too old to be that person. Totally. I have the same thought sometimes I'm like, you know, I was pathetic enough at you know what, thirty five, which was the last time I drank, Like doing that at fifty is just too much. And I just feel like I would I mean, I'm just like it would be the same dance, you know, be the same same dance. So, yeah, you used a word a few minutes ago talking about your mom. You feel like she might have felt shame around you needing to use antibiotics, And I wanted to explore the idea of shame a little bit. And then I also want to explore a line that you put somewhere else in the book, because I think they're kind of connected, you said, because when you're young, everything is about me. You're talking about the fact that you have just stirred up all this trouble and all this fuss because you want people to see you. And I'm kind of curious. Sometimes we think shame is an emotion that is the opposite of what we think of, like with ego, I think really highly about myself, but to me, they seem to all be sort of related together. What are your thoughts? You know, I know that shame has ruled my life, and I think that when I was younger, the only way that I could stave it off was to be loud, you know. I mean, I think I'm kind of hitting on your point where people think shame is sort of a shrinking violet, right, you know, kind of thing where you're just sort of trying to hide away. But shame can also present itself in the complete opposite way. You know, my whole life, I've been ashamed, And so when I got out on my own, like I was just the loudest, most obnoxious thing you could possibly imagine, because I think I felt like, well, people can see, people can see that I should be ashamed. So I'm just gonna be as loud and obnoxious and attention seeking as I can maybe put them off, you know, to maybe like keep them from seeing the real me. And in that way, it all became about me, Me, me, me me. You know. It's this constant work to keep putting up these false ideas of myself. It was a lot of work, and it was a lot of paying attention to me on my part, and paying attention literally to nobody else, you know, everybody else, or just kind of like bit players in my little production to keep myself from actually getting to know myself or to keep myself from feeling things I didn't want to feel. You know. Everybody else was supporting cast, and I was the star of this like really rickety production of you know, ladies and gentlemen. Here's Brian and here's like the most ridiculously loud, greedy, arrogant thing. It was all in act, but it was an act that I had to keep up a lot, and it was exhausting and it required more drugs and alcohol to do. Yeah, I relate with that, trying to I don't know if I was trying to be loud, but I certainly was trying to be tough in my own sort of way, Like I couldn't be tough in like an athletic way, so I tried to be tough in like a I'm a worse uh street criminal junkie than you are. You know. That was my attempt to embody that masculinity. I did it through like just sex, lots and lots of sex, like I think in gay life at the time. I don't know how it is now, but in gay life at the time, it was an odd sort of show of masculinity. If you were just you were just a slut, you know, you banged guys and you just went home with somebody every night. It was a way of showing masculinity. I tell people that and they're like really, I'm like yeah, it was kind of a pedigree to be a slut back in the nineties, and I did it to death. I I had a lot of regrettable sexual encounters because of it, both because of me and because of the other person. Yeah. Well, I think that exists in heterosexual culture too. I think men have always been regarded as more masculine. The more partners that they have, the more conquering they do beyond the basic urges that drive it. I I pursued that because I felt like it said something about me. If I was able to have multiple partners, well I must then be okay, I must be good, I must be all these things, right. I think that's been around for a long time. I didn't know, you know, when I first came out that there was gonna be any sort of test of masculinity. I thought, you know, I've I've left that behind, you know. But again, like I said, I haven't been out there in a while. But I know that when I was, you know, in my twenties, it was a mark of being a stud it to just go out and be sleeping with all these people. So I used that as well. You know, it was all a ship show. It was all pretty, you know. And I've had a lot of friends who haven't made it, you know, with regard to their addictions, whether they be drugs, alcohol, sex, you know whatever. I have way too many friends who didn't make it. And then you have that, you know, sort of survivor's guilt a little bit. You know, I was just as bad as they were, you know, and if not worse. But I'm still here and they are not. And you know. That's yet another thing that tries to keep me every day waking up saying in the mirror, I'm not going to use today, which is what I do. I wake up, Um, I look in the mirror, I look myself dead in the face, and I say, not today, I'm not going to use today. Here's what I'm gonna do instead. When that's how you get nine years. The last chapter in the book is a letter to the young man on the bus, and he's not young man, the small child, the little boy on the bus that a lot of your book is related to. Not I'm not going to go through the whole thing because you wrote an entire chapter on it and I think it's beautiful. But I'm wondering if you could summarize or say to you, what does being a man mean to you? Now? What is that concept? Is it even a useful concept? I guess I would start with, and then secondly, if so, what does it mean to you? At tend not to think that it's a useful concept. But I still have all of the things that I grew up with around masculinity. I still have those ideas in my head and they're not going anywhere. But as I get older, I think it's just not really a useful concept, this idea of being a man. I you know, this is going to sound so trite, but it is simply about being a human being who identifies as male. You know, That's what I'm starting to think about it more and more and more. There's no certain set of behaviors that you're supposed to have. There's no certain way that you're supposed to dress, there's no certain way that you're spposed to react to things. You know, it is also constructed that it all feels ridiculous to me after a while. Yet you know, I will not go outside in a sun dress. Nobody wants to see that anyway. But you know, I'm still not gonna be breaking any molds as far as you know, some behaviors. But I do try to remember when I am crying, I am a human being crying. I'm not somehow shaming my penis by doing so so again. And and you know what's really interesting too, is that you know, I teach college, and you know, so I'm in contact with a lot of young people who are increasingly seemingly to me, the students that I get are viewing the idea of gender as an antiquated concept. So they teach me whenever I come up with something that's supposed to be about being a man, you can say the same thing about being a woman, you know, or not identifying you know at all, You can say those same things. We're all in this same weird struggle. And so I don't know that there's anything special that I think that there is to being a man. I just don't. Yeah, it's a really interesting idea of whether there are certainly psychological traditions, spiritual traditions that talk about a masculine and feminine energy, and they're very clear to say, hey, you know, everybody's going to have a blend of these things. And I'm like, you don't know whether that's a useful framework or concept anymore to even divide them up like that. And certainly more and more I think, like you, I am learning from younger people about the fluidity here of these ideas. Yeah, and I think that the trappings of masculinity and the trappings of you know, so called femininity really, and this is gonna sound weird, but I really they're just they're just sex kinks, you know, They're just things that turn you on, you know, as far as sexually, like some people like you know, somebody who has big muscles, or wears sun dresses or whatever. I mean, these things they don't seem to really have any use beyond the sexual And that's kind of where I am leaving it for right now. I hope to learn more about it, but right now they just feel like things that, like I said, that just either turn you on or not, and they don't have anything to do with actually moving through the world as a human being. You say near the end of the book to this young boy, it would be a mistake to wait around for anyone to save you. You will have to save yourself, and I hope that you do. Maybe we can end with you just saying a little bit about that idea. In the process of trying to save myself, I've looked far and wide, high and low for somebody to save me, whether that be you know, a lot of black women on whose shoulders I have leaned, or a partner, boyfriend, or whatever. I have looked for all these things for somebody to save me. When I say save me, I mean except me. I mean love me and make me feel like I am allowed to take up space in the world. I've looked for all those things and other people, and I have found those things to be insufficient. And it's also a burden that you're putting on somebody else that really is your burden. That's what I mean when I say you'll have to save yourself. You're gonna have to find a way to be you in this world and be proud of that fact and to say to yourself that not only are you allowed to take up space, like you should take up space. And that's what I mean by saving yourself, like you're not going to find it in the bottom of a bottle, in the bottom of the syringe, like you're not going to find it there, like you have to save yourself. That's what I mean. I couldn't agree more. I think obviously other people and our relations to other people can be big supports and critical supports in that journey. But that energy of ultimately getting down to I'm okay with who I am, that's an internally generated thing, and the desire to say, okay, I want to be I think you use a word that I'm not going to pronounce, right, it's the sovereign sovereignty. Every once in a while. But I have to compound a word. I get lost. My editor Chris is well aware of this problem. Um, But I love that idea of my own sovereignty, right, I've got to own that now again, wise action. Maybe that I get lots of help from lots of people, but still the locus of ownership and control starts inside me. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean, you know, you know, you're not an island. You're not going to do it all on your own. But the kernel of it, the core of it, has to start with you, because it's not anybody's job to like pick you up and carry you all the way. I think that's too much to lay on somebody else. And this is everybody. This is in some like masculine thing that I'm saying. We all have to find a way to navigate the world in a way that we fit into it and that we belong here, and that we deserve the entirety of the human experience, happiness, sadness, all that it has to offer, and to embrace it beautiful. I think that's a great place to end it. As I mentioned, the book is called Punch Me Up to the Gods and memoir Well of links in the show notes for how you can get Brian's book if you want to, and how you can find him and Brian. Thank you so much for coming on. I have really enjoyed this conversation. It's been great. I've enjoyed it as well. Thank you so much and I appreciate you having me on. You are very welcome. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive member is only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now. We are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level and become a member of the one you Feed community. Go to when you feed dot net slash Join The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.