How to Beef With Grief

Getting over grief can take time... but it doesn't have to. Discover proven strategies and trauma-tested techniques to heal your broken heart and get your sweet ass back in the mix by today's close of business.

Recorded in mid-2023.

Music by Visions of the Universe.

Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes is LA's number-one avant-garde personal development program. New episodes premiere on KCHUNG Los Angeles on the first Wednesday of the month.

The writer, producer, host, and witty and wounded romantic hero is Emerson Dameron, who is wholly responsible for its content.

Levity saves lives.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Healing Your Broken Heart

Speaker 1 0:00

Healing your broken heart from a nasty breakup can take time , but it doesn't have to . These five quick and dirty heart hacks will get your ass back in the mix by today's close of business . Number one let it go . Ghost them , block them on everything . Rewire your consciousness by smoking psychedelic toad venom . They're deader than the dinosaurs to you now , and if you have kids together , you can always get new ones .

Speaker 1 0:21

Number two work out Lift weights . Hit a bag . You can always get new ones . Number two work out Lift weights , hit a bag . Run until you're in another time zone . See if you can get a job murdering people . Number three get to work . Pick up five new side hustles . Win a hot sauce contest and eat a Carolina Reaper , just to feel something .

Speaker 1 0:37

Number four have sex . Sex feels good and you need to do it today . So lower your standards and enjoy the pure catharsis of hate sex with idiots . Number 5 , be your own hero . If you can swing all this in one day , imagine how it'll feel in five years when you ascend to your final godlike form . Just remember when you fast track your grief , you stop feeling sorry for yourself and start feeling sorry for everyone else .

Speaker 1 1:05

Nothing is so dangerous as an ignorant friend , a wise enemy is to be preferred , the wise and prescient words of the French fabulist and poet Jean de la Fontaine . What that means is trust . Issues might be painful , uncomfortable , may seem like an unpleasant alternative to just assuming the best , assuming that people have your back . But they are in fact a good start in the direction that you want to go in , which is not trusting anyone ever , for any reason . People will screw you over . If you're lucky , they'll do it on purpose . If not , they'll do it on purpose . If not , they'll do it by accident . At the points where incompetence is indistinguishable from malice in the damage that it can do . People that are good at inflicting harm to get what they want , that use targeted strikes , that try to be classy about it so they don't risk vengeance , will likely leave you in better shape than , for instance , clumsy friends . Clumsy friends , the incompetent lovers who ask too much or too little , the bosses that exploit you and think that they're doing you a favor . You're better off with real enemies than fake friends . I am Emerson Dameron . You're better off with real enemies than fake friends . I am Emerson Dameron . I'm your one true friend . I also have a host of Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes . The program that you're listening to on K-Chung , los Angeles 1630 AM . Kchungradioorg medicated-minutes is the site for this show , which I produce , create and star in through the power of my own hard work and charisma .

Speaker 1 3:45

I would never describe myself as a sociopath . I think if I were , I would find something better to do than this . There aren't that many sociopaths and the world is optimized for them , so they really have no excuse for not running it . I would say if you can work on that level with regards to other people , you should . I don't see a significant downside . If you're not going to experience guilt over it , then really what's the risk ? You risk treating people poorly , but that's what most people want , obviously . Just look at the way that they behave and treat themselves . Treating people well is just an invitation for them to hurt you and the confusion that results from that . Treat them like garbage and they'll feel right at home and they'll respect you for having the guts to do that . I'm not . That's not really my thing .

Speaker 1 4:57

I talk a big game on the show , but I've been referred to as a pussycat in person . I think that's just because I don't like to bring a whole lot of conflict on myself . My nervous system has taken a beating over the last few years . I'm prone to depression and comorbid anxiety . I don't like to create a lot of static or drama in my life for no reason .

Speaker 1 5:27

I've had one or two experiences where I took revenge or attempted to take petty revenge on someone I thought had harmed me , and it was never satisfying in the way that I thought it would be . And we're talking pretty minor stuff Like , for instance , I've been in bad jobs that I really hated , and it's always difficult for me to enjoy life while hating my job . It tends to bleed over . So you know I've had sustained periods of consistent frustration and unhappiness as a result of conditions in my place of employment and I've fantasized for months or in some cases years about quitting and twisting the knife while doing it . I don't usually follow through on that . In the cases where I have even come close or even intimated that I might do any harm to someone I thought had wronged me , it never feels good the way that I fantasize that it will . It's not worth the trouble . It doesn't really accomplish anything .

Speaker 1 6:51

I do have a ritual for quitting a job , which is that on my way to quit a job I will listen to Ayers' soundtrack for the Sofia Coppola film the Virgin Suicides . That's a ritual that I've maintained now since I think it began in 2010 . And I've quit a number of jobs and other obligations since then . It's always the journey to the point where that is going to happen , which now I guess it might happen on Zoom most of the time . But if it's going to happen in a physical location , which is generally to be preferred when delivering bad news , just to show you have the nerve to do it , I will always listen to Air's Virgin Suicide soundtrack on the way to do it . I will always listen to Ayer's Virgin Suicide soundtrack on the way to do that , and that's really the most glamour or razzle-dazzle that I ever put into that process .

Speaker 1 7:57

Usually , I just want to GTFO as quickly as possible and get on with my life and experience . That feeling of leaving a bad situation that suddenly , even if it had been going on for years , feels like it never happened . It just becomes another funny anecdote in your arsenal . That's really what I want . I don't want to create a bunch of problems for myself . And yet the world is optimized for sociopathy and there are a lot of fake wannabe sociopaths , typically people who have been badly hurt and want revenge Again .

The Power of Self-Interest

Speaker 1 8:41

Going back to that , which is a dangerous game Doing things out of spite , unless you're doing it just for yourself . Spite is a wonderful catalyst for getting things done . It can generate rip-roaring comedy if you're a writer . It also helped me earn my bachelor's degree because I just wanted to not have to go back to college . I just wanted to get out and get a victory over those forces and just not have to do it again . And by the end of my senior year it was pure spite that was driving me on and it worked . I have a bachelor's degree , so I'm qualified to be a bachelor , which I'm divorced , so I guess I'm a born-again bachelor now and that degree is coming in quite handy . Born-again bachelor now , and that degree is coming in quite handy .

Speaker 1 9:46

If you are not a sociopath and you're hardwiring , it is generally unwise to pretend , as you will almost certainly be eaten alive by the genuine article . When you encounter such a person . There's nothing they hate more than wannabes . The whole advantage of being a sociopath is that it's a lonely business because you can't really talk about it and there aren't that many of them . They don't tend to socialize with one another . It's hyper-competitive but not as competitive as it would be if anyone could just decide to join that club .

Speaker 1 10:31

So don't pretend . If you don't have the stomach for it , don't even try . But If you don't try , how do you know ? Because you're a good person , how do you know that ? What test have you put that to ? Are you just a good person by omission of things that would be considered evil or less than good ? If you're doing good things because you want to , that's one thing . If you're in fact just protecting yourself or trying to ingratiate yourself or giving to get , I would say you haven't experimented with evil . And my advice to you would be my advice to any child who is curious about something or wanted to try something , which would be try it and see what happens . As long as you and everyone else is safe or reasonably safe , nothing is ever without risk . But experiment with it .

Speaker 1 11:52

And that doesn't mean hurting people just to hurt people . That is not practical behavior . In most cases . Cases I prefer to hurt people who long for it in exactly the ways that will most help them . That's my own business . I don't see any point in just ungracefully going around bullying people . That will catch up with you . People don't like . People like to suffer , but they don't like it to be that obvious and they don't like it to come from somebody that they're gonna encounter again which they will , because the world is small and life is long and people will get back at you . Upends will come if you just go around hurting people for no reason , but it's interesting to just observe what happens when you put yourself first , last and always .

Speaker 1 13:03

First of all , it will benefit people around . Nobody likes a people pleaser because nobody respects anyone if they don't know who that person is , who they are , what they stand for , what they value , what they really want . If it's just someone kissing their asses , you don't know who that person is , they're a mystery and likely useless in a combat scenario . Whereas if you put yourself first and you're well-defined , which comes from a practiced selfishness which , if you're really doing it well and spending an hour a day every day for 90 days really cultivating a practice of self-centeredness , you will become much more well-defined . It will be easier for people to know if they like you or not and they will respect you for respecting yourself and adding some individuality and flavor to the world and inspiring them , because there's nothing quite like the thrill of having someone with true self-love and self-confidence and independence of thought on your side . When that person has your back , you'll feel invincible .

Speaker 1 14:25

It can be intoxicating for neurotics , but also a learning experience , because you may provoke envy . But envy is just seeing what you want . It's like window shopping . If people are envious , you're an example of what they can become and what is latent within them , because you can't really observe something if it's not within you . You just won't recognize it , you won't pick it up . So you will be doing people a favor if you put yourself first and you're classy and discreet about it and you're not just wounded or trying to reenact some scenario where you got hurt in the past in the vain hope that you can change the circumstances of that event . But if you are really putting yourself first , you're doing the world a solid and a mitzvah and good things will come to you and also life will get very interesting .

Speaker 1 15:28

Going back to revenge you won't want to get revenge anymore . I mean it may be a reflexive thing that you think about when your anger flares up , but if you look at the way that apex predators deal with quote-unquote justice , it's not punishing bad deeds , it is taking a practical approach to dealing with a glitch in the matrix . Like it's been said , if a poor person steals a loaf of bread , that person has committed a crime . If someone steals $500 million out of the banking system , that person has started a conversation . Because why would you put that person in a box ? That person has useful skills . That is someone you want on your side . That person has guts to do something that risky . Let's talk . Let's talk . Let's see what we can do for each other when we join forces for our mutual self-interest , because in some cases you encounter a very powerful person . Forming an alliance is the thing to do .

Speaker 1 17:04

But , once again , it is almost never a good idea to trust anyone and , yes , that can seem like a lonely existence . If you're used to leaning on the people around you , there are going to be some growing pains involved with separating yourself . But when you do , when you can live withoutem and status , that will come your way . Perhaps it kind of depends . It's a mystery and that's what's exciting about embracing that lifestyle . So , if you have the stomach for it , give it a shot . If it turns out that you're just too good to pull it off , then you can always come back . That can be your little predatory rumspringa . So , between you and whoever was on that trip with you , you can rejoin the group if that's what is more comfortable for you . You really give it a good faith . Try to be un-good , slightly evil , practical and self-interested in a healthy way . Try it and see what happens .

Speaker 1 19:27

I have been asked to contribute my thoughts , my advice , any unique wisdom and insights that I might have pertaining to the subject of dealing with grief , the pain of loss , loss of a family member , older or younger . We almost inevitably lose our older family members , many of them the ones significantly older than us parents , grandparents , aunts , uncles and the like . Most of us will survive to bury the people who brought us into the world and shaped our characters and our quirks and gave us the attachment wounds that have made our lives so very melodramatically fascinating . We will have to say goodbye to those people in all likelihood during the course of our lives . During the course of our lives , losing younger relatives , I'm told , is much more acutely painful .

Speaker 1 20:47

Nick Cave has had to do it twice . Seems to have , I know correlation definitely ain't causation in this case , but from observing his creative output , his Red Hand Files newsletter , some of his recent artistic efforts , he has developed an overflowing compassion for humanity , much more than I had observed . As a long-term follower of his work In the past , I always seemed a little prickly . I grew up in the South and I was told he was reluctant to tour there . I have a vague memory of Billy Corgan going around interviewing people that were on the 94 Lollapalooza tour for MTV , and one of them was Nick Cave . Corgan asked him how does it feel to be the token British act on the tour ? Token British act on the tour ? Cave replied I'm Australian and took off and fielded no more questions . It was never my impression that he was overflowing with Andrew WK levels of desire for inspiring , motivational interaction with his fans , but that all seems to have changed over the last five to ten years and I can't help but wonder if that has something to do with the profound grief of losing not one but two of his children .

Speaker 1 22:39

Not saying that was a good thing , but you fill in the blank . I don't know if this is the best of all possible worlds , but I know it's the one we got . There's nothing that we have to compare it to . So if you are unhappy with the world as it is , what are you comparing it to ? What is your idea of how the world could be better ? Where is that coming from ? Is it fiction ? Come on , we are all adults here . Is it your imagination ? Again , you should . By the time you get out of college . The only point of having your imagination is using it to make money . So you should do that and make enough money that you won't be sad anymore . Surely you can do that . We attract the creative and tenacious listenership of hustlers . Everybody in Los Angeles has five different side hustles going just in order to scrape out a living here . So we're going to get to that in a little bit .

Speaker 1 24:01

The point is joy is your birthright . You were at the top of a graduating class . Half of your DNA came from the very finest swimmer among millions of sperm cells in one nut . You were the best . Half of you was a result of that and the other half was from an egg , which is a wonderful thing . You have no excuse for feeling sorry for yourself . You were born to experience pleasure . If you look around in the animal kingdom , living creatures gravitate to joy . Plants face the sun , cats curl up and fall asleep in a ray of sunlight in the warmth .

Speaker 1 25:00

Some believe that life is a brutal Darwinian struggle for survival ? I wouldn't say that it's not . I would say that's part of experiencing joy . Joy In my experience , procrastination and resistance and weak behavior , deferring my responsibilities , not getting done the things that I have told others that I would get done , that I'm obligated to get done , not completing the work that I promised myself . I can't experience real happiness if I don't struggle to some extent for my survival and success . And after I do that , when I have something to celebrate , that's when I experience

Finding Joy in Adversity

Speaker 1 26:03

joy .

Speaker 1 26:03

Addiction becomes a problem when you drink or rack up consumer debt or rail lines of increasingly cut cocaine . As time goes on and the addiction progresses , it's going to have a lot more rat poison in it . If you do those things when you are unhappy , that is the problematic behavior . If you are celebrating a job well done , an achievement , well deserved good fortune , properly capitalized on , celebration cannot hurt you but will rather enhance the experience of victory , of victory . So I believe that to the extent that there is a struggle for survival and clearly there is that is to enhance the experience of joy , to let us know that we deserve it .

Speaker 1 27:22

You have to actively screw up to not experience joy . It's what we're born to do . It's what we're good at . We've already made it this far just by virtue of birth Again , the unlikeliest of happenstances . Mathematically speaking , that was the most hard work that we've done and the most luck that we really need to have was just getting out of the nutsack in the inside of one of our parents .

Speaker 1 27:58

I was a cesarean section baby . There's a whole mythology you can read about it online about how C-section babies tend to kind of float through life Adrift , lacking in mission and purpose , and the hypothesis is that that has something to do with the fact that their lives did not begin with an epic struggle and journey . That , having experienced that , we are primed and ready for anything . So if you're a C-section baby , as I am , I would encourage you to find something difficult and do it . Find a dragon to slay , a quest to complete , and then you will know your own strength and experience the joy that you were born to experience , and that will certainly outweigh any feelings of sadness or anger or fear , or fear of death , dread of loss , pain , having experienced loss , any of those weaker emotions .

Speaker 1 29:26

Nothing will ever feel as bad as simply feeling alive when you wake up . In the morning feels good when you wake up in the morning , feels good . That's what I would say is the best way to lay the groundwork for grief . Just make sure that you are doing it to it on a daily basis . To the victor go the spoils . So just put some wins on the board in advance of any sort of loss that you may have to sustain . Certainly there will be something . We get dumped , rejected , fired . Bad things happen , deserved , and things that are simply bad luck . I don't think that . Well , I believe that everything happens as a result of a long , almost endless chain of causality that we never have any real hope of fully understanding . So , in that way , things happen for a reason , but I don't think it's to teach us a lesson necessarily , although you can usually put your imagination to work and find a lesson to be learned . Just use the thing that is making you think that things should be better and use it to make things better . Make things better .

Speaker 1 31:06

If you are sad or you feel bad or you're grieving , the first thing you can do is to not do that . Don't feel bad . It's a reaction , a result of not having the proper controls to modulate one's thoughts , and there are different ways to acquire those Some people do . Meditation , cognitive behavioral therapy is about changing thoughts with the goal of changing feelings . That works for a lot of people . Neurolinguistic programming is one thing . There are all sorts of modalities that exist that you can do every day for an hour a day for 90 days , and you will feel better if you take it seriously and lean into it . So the fact that you're feeling bad means that you're not really trying to not feel bad , which is the first step toward feeling good . If you can't control your thoughts , then whose thoughts are they ? Do you exist ? Obviously you do . You're listening to this .

Speaker 1 32:22

You get in your personal effects and find your driver's license , perhaps a birth certificate or a social security card somewhere in a cluttered desk drawer with a bunch of cell phone chargers from back when you had an Android before you acquired an iPhone . A civilized person . You're here , so you have agency and the thoughts are yours , so you can choose them . So think different thoughts and feel differently . Don't feel bad , or at least feel bad in a more interesting way . If that doesn't work , you have to resort to action , which again is something to be encouraged .

Speaker 1 33:14

The next step would be to figure out the exact nature of the loss by doing an inventory , much as if you were reporting your grief on your taxes . Just itemize what was lost , put a value on it for purposes of quantification and comparison . Quantification is not a perfect paradigm for measuring value , but it's what we have in this world and this is the world we have . So figure out what you lost exactly in real numbers and replace it . Get to work on finding something of equivalent or greater value , which also should not be too challenging . After all , you have made it this far . You are not hallucinating this . You are alive . You are a free agent , or you believe that you're a free agent to the extent that it's useful . Understanding those chains of causality and getting all tied up on the hard problem of human consciousness and the debate over free will is a waste of time , particularly when you have a loss to replace . So figure out what you lost and find something else that makes you as happy or happier . You can determine how that will work based on statistical analysis and in the meantime , because it may take a while , if it's something that has to be shipped and you don't have next day delivery , you may be grieving for at least another week , perhaps the better part of a month if you live in some far-flung locale where the mail service is not good . So if you must continue to grieve , I would do it solo .

Speaker 1 35:38

Don't spread the bad vibes . Don't become known as the griever in your social group . That's a bad look . There's nothing to be despised so much as self-pity followed by excessive apologies the one thing that you should feel sorry for and perhaps apologize for once . Everybody feels bad once in a while , much as everyone defecates on a pretty semi-regular basis , depending on the state of your physical health . You don't have to do it in front of other people , even if it's difficult . It in front of other people . Even if it's difficult . The graceful thing is to keep your own counsel on such matters . No bad vibes . You will be glad that you kept it to yourself when it's over , which inevitably it will be Perhaps sooner than you think .

Speaker 1 36:55

It may take a while , but give it time . That's the only thing that really helps , and it does inevitably On a long enough timeline . Everything changes . Nothing is impermanent . Be like water Change is the only constant is impermanent . And be like water Change is the only constant . If you don't like what you're doing , do something else . Oh , you're already doing something else and you're even a slightly different person , because nothing remains static In this , the one world that we have , which is , in fact , many worlds , as determined by recent findings in quantum physics and the fact that it's already changed billions of millions of trillions of times just in the interval in which we have had this discussion . So give it time .

Speaker 1 37:52

You have within your constitution a powerful inner healer that knows what you need , that delivers it when you need it , and you will heal . This is true of almost anything . If you jump off a building and you don't die , maybe you break a few bones . If you just stay there for long enough and you're not found by carnivores , you will eventually heal . That's just how it works . That is the magic of the passage of time , working in harmony and in concert with your powerful inner healer . So just be patient . Things will inevitably get better .

Speaker 1 38:48

You don't even really have to do anything , although I would recommend staying busy . That is putting wins on the board . That is earning your positive feelings . So get to work , get some aggressive hobbies , do some creative work , volunteer whatever you have the strength for . Cat shelters could always use an extra pair of hands If you can , if you are not in fact lying in the sun with broken bones patiently waiting to heal from an inopportune fall from a height that was great enough to wound you but not kill you . If you have the strength to get in the mix and make things happen , get busy that is another thing that will help , because that is another thing that we are born to do on our way to experiencing our birthright of joy , freedom from suffering and sorrow , which we can achieve provided that we don't screw it up and we must , because we must be strong for others .

Speaker 1 40:11

If nothing else cheers you up , it should cheer you up to know how miserable so many other people in the world are , much more than you , much more than you have any concept of the hurt people hurt people and the hurt people that hurt . You are likely hurting more than you could possibly understand . That should make you feel better . Just think of your enemy suffering . That should cheer you up . If that's not working , or if your enemy is not , if upence has not come for that person yet , then consider the suffering that's all around , all of the people who suffer , some better , more gracefully and effectively than others . There's always a lot of suffering . That should cheer you up , if only by contrast .

Speaker 1 41:11

So to review in summary , this is the world we've got and it is thus perfect because we have no meaningful point of comparison . If you do , then you are a child and you need to get out of your own head and into the real world and stop complaining , because joy is your birthright . Because joy is your birthright , it's what you were born to do and experience . And the only way to not be more happy than you will ever be sad when you are happy is to screw it up or get lazy or just don't do the work . If you work on yourself and you do the work , it will work and you will experience joy , because it's right there for the taking and it's what we naturally gravitate to . There's lots of Whatever you need around for the getting Abundance . Keep that in mind as a mindset . Cultivate the habit of correcting any scarcity thinking and turning it into abundance , thinking through the alchemy of the power of your mind .

Speaker 1 42:28

If you feel bad , don't . There's really no excuse . Just don't feel bad . No , don't even worry about not feeling bad . Don't think of it in like a don't . Do this way because your brain just hears feel bad and it screws you up . Feel good , have a positive intention , not a negative , away motivation , find something to go to and do that instead of feeling bad .

Speaker 1 42:59

And if you are feeling bad as a result of a loss whether it's a loss of status , loss of love and sexual congress and sexual congress , loss of the continuity that comes from long-term friendships or relations of family , the material support and sustenance and status and self-confidence that come from having respectable employment , all of the tax breaks and other advantages of marriage , or if you just lost the paperweight that you happen to love , figure out what it was worth and replace it If you think that it's priceless . You're bad at math Get better , do better . You're bad at math , get better , do better . And while you're in the process of grieving , if that's necessary , try to get it in during your you time . Do it alone . You'll be glad you did . You won't have to feel weird about it later on when you're not grieving anymore . But you grieved all over people and now it's just kind of awkward . You won't have to worry about that if you do it yourself and it won't be forever . Although it will feel like it has no beginning and no end . It will not be forever . Simply give it . Time will not be forever . Simply give it time .

Speaker 1 44:37

Whatever you're dealing with will come to its natural and inevitable conclusion on a long enough timeline . So if nothing else works , be patient . Read Seneca or meditate , maybe lift , do some cardio . Watch a movie , because all movies are required to be like six and a half hours long now . So if you go see a movie in a theater , that will be essentially not immersive experience . That's where you go into a bar and a bunch of characters start talking to you and try to drag you into their business . But it will be . You can lose yourself . If you're watching a good movie and if it's a long movie , you'll have the comforts of the movie theater for the duration of the film and that will burn up some of your grieving time . Burn up some of your grieving time . You will be .

Speaker 1 45:53

Whatever the length of Babylon is , you will be that much closer to feeling good again when it's over and perhaps satiated . Popcorn and snacks . Or you can go to one of the newfangled meaning like 1990s fangled theaters that serves full meals of entrees and greasy fries that you can dip into cheese sauce and you can have a beer . That's fine , even if you're feeling bad . One beer is not going to damage you . So give it time . Figure out something to do with your time , whether it's productive or replenishing . Just give it time . It will not last forever . At some point you will die . You will probably feel better before that happens , because that's , with any luck , that will not happen for a long time .

Embracing Grief and Healing

Speaker 1 46:57

In the meantime , be strong for others . There are a lot of people who are suffering more than you , who have endured hardships that you have no concept of or just simply of weaker constitution or will lean on you because they don't know how to find their own power and their own motivation , and you must be strong for them . I guess community is what keeps us going and their suffering should cheer you up , if only by contrast , because community is what keeps us going and their suffering should cheer you up if only by contrast , because you will realize that you are not really suffering if you're using the right metrics to determine how you feel and again , quantification is your friend and you should get busy . In the meantime , figure out something to apply yourself to . Surely there's something you can do . There's so much work to be done . Almost anything you could do is going to be more fun than grieving , so figure out something else to do with this time on your hands .

Speaker 1 48:16

Do not make excuses for yourself , do not wallow in self-pity . There's simply no reason to do that . When you have cultivated an abundance mindset and you're used to chalking up those W's , you're just not going to waste your time like that . It's not even going to occur to you much as you're not going to waste any time thinking about or wish-casting that things were somehow different . This may not be the best of all possible worlds . There's no excuse for not working to better the circumstances of ourselves and others around us , in our immediate communities and around the world . But this is the world we got , and if we can't make ourselves at home here , then hurry up and figure out how to get into space , or just drop so much acid that you are no longer grounded in reality , and that's another way to solve all of your problems at once .

Speaker 1 49:49

So , as you know , I've been doing quite a bit of work on myself over this last little slice of time . Per your recommendation . It was also something I wanted to do for myself for quite a while . In the past I'd done it for myself to better myself , so that you would come back for myself , to better myself so that you would come back . But now I'm really doing it for me , all out , and so I'm not going to tell you any of the life-changing , earth-shaking secrets that I've learned and the process of that , because it's just for me , it's not for you . I'm not trying to impress you or have any effect on your life one way or the other . I'm a free agent now and that means I keep my own counsel .

Speaker 1 50:45

So there were some profound insights and revelations that I encountered in the process of doing this work and you will find out about them . They will become self-evident in the next couple of years , I would say on the outside . Probably in the next three to six months , you will start to see some of these things begin to manifest and you may find yourself ill-prepared . But that's too bad , because I'm not going to tell you , because I'm doing this for me . I did find one interesting thing which I can share , which I will get back to . I just put a pin in that like there's a there's one really important conclusion that does affect me in my life and people around me , and at this point that includes you . I hope that it will continue to . At this point , that includes you , I hope that it will continue to in the future , and so I'll get back to that in a moment . And I also learned a lot about the grieving process .

Speaker 1 52:06

Time is really the only thing . You basically pretend like you're not broken , like the pleasure centers in your brain still work , and you read books . Perhaps you make art , you take walks in nature , you go through the artist's way by Julia Cameron at least once and do all of the exercises , starting with the morning pages exercise , which is three pages long handwriting every morning , totaling 750 words . She likes longhand . I think using the computer is fine , that's what I'm used to , and my hand cramps if I write longhand and I can't read my own handwriting . Sometimes I like to go back and look at some of the stuff that I wrote , just out of archival curiosity more than anything else .

Speaker 1 53:07

If you start doing this as you're going through the grieving process which is how many people get into it I did it before in a similar situation of loss , grief , and now I'm doing it again because I'm shocked at how I can , first of all , still experience those big high school emotions , still experience those big high school emotions , and also how much more deeply profound this kind of loss feels when you are headed into the back half of your life . When you're in your early 20s , at least you have the consolation of knowing that you're bulletproof and you're going to live forever and you can drink yourself half to death on a regular basis and risk your life in other ways and eat Taco Bell five or six nights a week and you will live to tell the tale indefinitely . As you get older , you start to realize that that's not how it's going to be and that there is a sense of finality to certain experiences . Life is , of course , full of surprises , even after the big 4-0, . I think in some ways I'm much wiser and better at a lot of things than I was when I was younger . I wish that I had the groundedness and the presence and just the ability to breathe deeply and the patience . I think I would have enjoyed a lot of things . A lot more sex comes to mind . That's the big one , but also all of the other things which are all about that . In one way or another . Everything is about sex , except sex , which is about power , which is what Oscar Wilde says , but he left out the fact that power is about sex , so it's kind of an Ouroboros foliety itself .

Speaker 1 55:26

Yeah , I did a bunch of work on myself . I tried a bunch of different treatment modalities . There was a ceremony , a grieve it and leave it ceremony , where I just put all of my bad attached feelings onto an object that I found on a nature hike , which in my case was a stick . Some of the other people found rocks , which turned out to be fortuitous for them because , after making these things symbolic of what we were trying to get rid of , we disposed of them by throwing them into a lake nearby , and with rocks . That was more dramatic than what I got with the stick . I didn't even get it in the water the first time I had to go down and I was frustrated , so I actually broke it into a couple of pieces . But that was satisfying , more so than anything else about the ritual really , but it did make me feel a little better at the time and then I felt bad again . But then I thought about that and I thought about other things I could do and I cleaned out my apartment . I threw away almost everything , all the stuff that I'd been hoarding , that I know is of no value , and the stuff that is of some value I put up for sale online , which helped subsidize my rather irresponsible lifestyle for a couple of months , and that felt pretty good . It felt like a load off . It felt like a break with the past , a literal separation that also served as a symbolic , metaphorical separation of just getting rid of the baggage and getting it gone , and that was that occurred to me as a result of the ritual , so it did serve some purpose in the end .

Speaker 1 57:46

There was also a lot of screaming and crying . I had not cried for years , up until fairly recently , I think . I just was . I thought I was physically incapable of it . I thought it was one of those things that I could only do when I was drunk , and then I just lost the ability to do that . I think it had more to do with just all of the stuff that I was repressing . There was so much of that , so much clenching and clinging going on that I , I think I was afraid that if I started to ugly cry it would never stop , and it did feel like that was the case .

Speaker 1 58:33

At one point I spent an entire weekend pretty much unable to go outside without large sunglasses because I would start crying . I think I literally cried at the drop of a hat , a small child . I was wearing his father's baseball cap , backwards , turned around , with a brim in the back . Of course I was too big for the kid and the center of gravity was off . It fell down onto oceanfront walk . Oceanfront walk and that just hit me in a place that I didn't expect , where I'd been holding something that I'd just been waiting to express and that it did , fortunately .

Navigating Grief and Self-Improvement

Speaker 1 59:32

It's very hard to be the weirdest person on Venice Beach . If you're just walking around crying . That probably makes you in the conversation for one of the five least remarkable people that you might encounter out there . So it's not exactly privacy , but it's privacy in a crowd .

Speaker 1 1:00:07

Anyway , I continued to do the work and I continue to challenge myself , to challenge my negative thinking and also to hold myself to a higher standard in how I treat people and how I behave , how I take care of myself , how I honor myself by having nice things , investing in nice clothes and nice accessories and things that aren't disposable , razors that I don't just cycle through or just crap that I dig out of the garbage not literally , but basically in a sense , basically In a sense . But the big surprise that I was going to tell you about is that I'm still grieving , I still feel really bad . I still feel bad in a way that makes me think that it is not possible for me to ever feel as good as I currently do bad , or perhaps to ever feel good again . And also , climate change is much further along than most people care to discuss in polite company . We are thoroughly boned , I would say .

Speaker 1 1:01:35

Miami has about six more months , so if you have been meaning to go there , I would go . I don't know if there's going to be another Art Basel , so maybe see what's going on down there and check it out , because that's time-limited , as is everything else . Everything is impermanent and everything is more impermanent than we thought . This has been Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes on Khe Chong , los Angeles , chinatown , 1630 AM . Kchungradioorg . I am Emerson Dameron . I'm the host of Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes medicated-minutescom . Levity saves lives . Thank you .