DAY 4 of 30!

Sharing personal stories has been a powerful tool for me in creating connection and healing. In this episode, I reflect on my journey of embracing vulnerability and openness, rooted in pivotal moments in my life, including the loss of my mother. I talk about how my early experiences with grief influenced my desire to present a brave face to the world, often at the expense of acknowledging my emotional truth.

I want to encourage you to share your own stories, as I believe that vulnerability fosters connection and understanding, ultimately making us all feel less alone in our journeys.

Resources: To listen in on more conversations about pivotal moments that changed lives forever, subscribe to "The Life Shift" on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate the show 5 stars and leave a review! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

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It's the day before election. I'm not stressed at all. Nope, not at all. Actually I am, but that's just part of being an American and hoping for the person that I chose to win.

But that's not what today is about. Today is about choosing another topic and telling a little story and letting you know a little bit about me.

That maybe is not something that I talk regularly about in every episode.

I think you know my essential story and why the Life Shift podcast exists, but maybe there are some other areas in which you can get to know me more in this 30 days of November. So in any case, today's topic is why share and why not become an island?

And so what this really means is why do I share everything so openly and I guess showing vulnerability or just my real self and not kind of hide behind things.

So obviously this comes from my own childhood experiences and I guess it probably would start maybe when my parents got divorced and I lived in separate places and I had to kind of live two different lives even as a just a kid, because you have to adapt to one family and then the other family and those things just kind of naturally form you. But the big event, obviously when my mom died, everything changed in my life and the people around me were doing the best that they knew how to do.

My grandmother was caring for me in the way that she knew how. My dad was just assuming a brand new role of dual parenting for both my mom and my dad.

And he was now going to be a full time parent in which he was taking care of me full time. Not the fact that he was my parent full time, he was always my dad full time.

But now he was going to have to take care of me every day for the rest of my upbringing. And so he was doing the best he knew how. He was mid-30s, he was still kind of trying to figure it out.

Plus he was going through his own grief journey, losing someone that he used to be married to and loved. And he has this 8 year old who doesn't know what the hell's going on. So at that time I saw all the people around me wanted me to be happy.

They wanted me to get back to being a kid again, being a happy kid again. And I think at 8 years old I assumed that role.

I essentially tried my best to do things that I thought everyone else would be happy about and they would think I was happy. So there were like two layers to that. I guess as I'm saying it out loud, I had to pretend that everything was okay.

Of course I would have breakdowns, of course I would cry about things. But I think in general I didn't really express those feelings or even take the time to dig into those feelings besides that surface level of sadness.

At the same time, I guess now this is from reflecting on this for so many years, but I look back on that time and I realized so many of the things that I changed in the way that I behaved in the world were out of fear of abandonment. And I've talked about this in a couple episodes with other people, but really I started to be great at school.

So before I was fine, but I didn't care about good grades. And then I realized that if I get good grades, my dad will be happy and then he won't abandon me.

Because if you think about it, my mom dying, I lived with my mom, I did everything with my mom. Her dying was abandonment for that tiny 8 year old's brain.

And so I think fear of my dad also leaving or other people that I loved leaving in my life forced me to behave, be good, not get in trouble. I got three detentions in first grade. That was before my mom died.

And then after that I was like on the honor roll and getting A's and, and just doing all the things to try to, I guess, impress the people around me. And that's kind of where I started taking on this checklist. Life talked about that I think on day one or two.

Two, I think, and it's only day four, Matt, kind of get it together. But in any case, what I'm trying to say is that I started shutting things out and down around the time that my mom died.

And I just kept kind of going through the motions of life without her, without grieving, without talking to an external party like a therapist or a counselor or any of those kind of things. Until about 16 years old when I had to write a paper for my English class. And I wrote this paper. It was a personal narrative that we had to write.

And for some reason I chose that I was going to write about the moment that my mom died. And I believe the paper opened with like, on this number, day of this year at this time, this is what happened.

And maybe that was me first kind of identifying the moment, the life shift moment in my life where Things changed.

But this narrative paper, I remember writing it, like, in my bedroom, like, sitting on my futon and writing this paper by hand and just going through without stopping. It was kind of like the stream of consciousness, if you will. I was playing the Mariah Carey Butterfly song, like, from the Butterfly album.

Don't know why, but it was on repeat over and over and over and over and over again. And I finished that paper. I skipped dinner because I was still writing, and I didn't want to stop because it felt like something was coming out.

It was cathartic in a way.

And this was really the first time that I put to paper something in which my feelings were there, and then I was going to turn it into someone else so that they could see these feelings. So it's kind of like a cracking, a bloodletting, if you will, of kind of letting a little bit out. And maybe I needed to. Maybe I was about to explode.

But at that point, I started to kind of feel like I could share a little bit more, a little bit more.

Instead of reacting when people would do your mom jokes in high school and I would always say, well, she's dead, as my retort, in a way that make them feel bad because they just made. Or they tried to make me feel bad. Instead of doing that, I would just let it go.

And then I started to just kind of write behind the scenes and not share too much, but kind of let those things out. And then they were a little bit more obscure and they were things trying to cover my feelings up.

And then social media came about, and it gave us an opportunity to some people be performative, some people be connective, you know, and they're trying to connect with people.

And then for me, it was an opportunity to kind of start sharing things like dipping my toe in the water for the public so that they could see, okay, Matt's feeling these kind of ways. It's a little obscure, but it's not dangerous in an. In a way for me to put those feelings out there.

So gradually, I think this kind of just built momentum and social media became this place in which when I was having a rough time or when I was facing a battle that I normally grew up thinking I had to hide, I started sharing that publicly.

And what happened was people would start to, you know, comment, like, whatever, and they would be supportive, but behind the scenes, I would be getting emails or messages through direct message or whatever, saying, hey, thank you for sharing that. I'm feeling the same way, and I don't feel as alone as I did before or so. And so in my life is facing this.

Would you be willing to talk to them, whatever it may be? But I started feeling like this connective tissue in which, like, I wasn't alone in those feelings.

They weren't necessarily wrong feelings or bad feelings, whether that was depression or some of the eating disorder things that I had that I was going through, or body dysmorphia or whatever it is that I faced. I feel like it's a laundry list of things that pushing down grief has caused me to kind of experience in my life. And maybe I'm better because of it.

And I kind of think I look back on those moments and feel like I've kind of overcome certain things and feel good about it or still battle with things and feel okay admitting it because I'm human and there are lots of things that we share with other people. But that being said, writing was always something that gave me a little bit of freedom to get things out of my head.

I say this a lot to people where things in my head seem much scarier than when I put them on paper or I say them out loud. And once they're out, they're out. And now people know and I don't have to worry about it because they know, you know, and.

And if they're going to react in any particular way or think different of me because I said something about how I was feeling, then so be it. And. And that's okay. I kind of think that this podcast has been kind of the perfect.

I don't know if it's an ending of that chapter, maybe it's a sequel now in which I am able to connect with full on strangers from across world and hold space for their often traumatic or really deeply personal stories. Life shift pivotal moments in which maybe they didn't share it a lot with other people.

And now me as a stranger, I have the, I guess, ability, the honor, the desire to share that space with them and in turn ask them questions that maybe other people have shied away from.

My whole life, I feel like people kind of tiptoed around talking about my mom, talking about my mom's death, talking about my grandmother and her death and all the things that happened in between and because of and in spite of and all the things that go along with that.

So now when I'm having a conversation with people on the life shift, I am trying to ask those questions that pop up, that I don't suppress, that are out of curiosity, that are out of curiosity to see if my experiences or my thoughts at the times when I was going through certain things were the same as what they were going through. In fact, there was one episode, probably more than one, but there's one that I can remember with Beth Booker.

And I had this conversation with her, and we were talking about teenage years. Her father passed away when she was younger, and she grew up, you know, kind of suppressing some of that grief.

And in her teenage years, she did something that I did for a long time. And what I did was I convinced maybe myself that my mother was in witness protection and that she didn't really die.

She had gone off and they had to protect her and that someday she would come back and she would be part of my life again. But she had to go away, and she was kind of in hiding, if you will. And when I was talking to Beth, she was like, I did the same thing.

And something about admitting that what other people might think is weird out loud and someone acknowledging it, saying they did it as well validates my human experience. Something about that was like, oh, maybe I'm not weird or broken or whatever it may be.

Maybe I'm just going through the motions of trying to find the space after something traumatic. And it was just really eye opening to the value of sharing these stories. So all that to say, why share? Two reasons.

Well, probably more than two, but my reasons, One, it's much scarier in my head, so get it out, let it happen, let other people know about it, and then move forward with that. Two, you never know who's listening, who needs to hear that, who needs to hear validation in their own experiences.

So I highly, highly, highly, if you're able to share your story, it doesn't have to be big, dramatic, anything.

Just share how you're feeling, share what life is like for you in an open and curious way so that other people can connect with you and you can have these conversations that maybe we were thinking all along we were supposed to shy away from. But honestly, these are the places that we connect.

But, you know, I think there's such power in storytelling and sharing, and I hope that you are someone that shares and if you're not, I hope you're someone that considers sharing your story, not on my podcast, just in general, with other people. Open yourself to it.

Don't worry about how other people react to that particular story, because if they react in a way that does not align with you, then maybe it's better that you know. All right, so that's my message.

I don't know why I have a moral to these stories, but I feel so much joy in sharing my story, even though it's hard to share a lot of those parts.

Because the more I can be out there sharing anything that's going on and how I'm feeling, hopefully someone out there feels a little less alone in that journey. So that is Day four.

I didn't know what I was going to talk about before I jumped into this, and I don't know what I'm going to talk about tomorrow, but day four is complete. Thank you for coming on this journey with me. I hope you're learning a little bit more about me.

And I will be back tomorrow on November 5th, which is election Day. So get out and vote and I will talk to you tomorrow. For more information, please visit www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com.