Comedy Centered

Hi everyone. Happy Comedy center and holy crap. Oh my God, I'm dying of heat. I'm sweating to death. And yeah, I was having a little technical problem. Sorry guys. I. I had to re download the app for some reason. I don't know. My phone's been acting weird. I'm not blaming the app, I'm not blaming others. Taking ownership, taking accountability. But I did. I had to. I. I was kind of panicking. I couldn't get into the. The live stream, the room. The room. And so I did a quick delete and reinstall and good to go.

So I don't know what was happening was probably on my end, but anyway. Hey Luke, have. I hope you're having a. A great weekend. Hope you're having a great Sunday. I was actually out by the. The. I was down by the river yesterday. The old St. Croix river in the border of Wisconsin and Minnesota. Hey, welcome on Annalise and. Oh hey, thank you. Hey, come on in. Amera. Pretty chill. Brought a book and did quite a bit of eavesdropping. Listening to families and other people. You know, I kind of like that.

I don't like to snoop in people's lives but it is kind of fun to listen in listening and see what going on other people's deals there. So. And also apologies. Last week we had a. I getting into the room also had an issue but we're. We're good to go now so. Because what I was going to talk about last week I tabled. Right. I was all fired up, ready to go. But one of the conversations we had had a couple weeks ago or I had obviously kind of a one way street here, but it was my own self observation of things I'm ruminating on.

And just to revisit rumination. Rumination is kind of defined. It's not a mental disorder in and of itself, but it can be a symptom of several. And it's hallmark characteristics are essentially there's something that you think about all the time. You're thinking about it almost to a point of compulsion. Like you can't stop it. Right. Similar to ocd like where people will say that they have obsessive compulsive disorder and they can't stop from cleaning or washing the hands or doing something like that.

Rumination can be compulsive. Thoughts, thoughts you just thoughts you really just can't. They'll go on and on if you don't kind of act and intervene. Right. And I was realizing because through my late diagnosis of neurodivergence I found that rumination is one of the common symptoms that people complain about. So if you want to go back and revisit that previous episode, I'm not going to recover any of that material. But I think this dovetails nicely into its own episode where I challenged myself at the end and other people, if they're interested, to just start making a list of things that are kind of your themes that you ruminate on.

What are the common denominators when you're, you know, it's 2 o' clock in the morning and your brain's still ticking away, what are those themes? And the reason why we do this is a. It's feedback, it's information for us. It's, it's, it's research into ourselves. And also too, you can't break a pattern until you. Excuse me, you can't break a pattern until you identify it. Right? You can't break a bad habit until you identify the habit. So I was listing off my list of ruminations, so that was my accountability to myself.

So here are some of the themes I've come up with. See, and jump into the chat and add anything you ruminate on. If you've got some ones, maybe some different ones than I do. This week. My ruminations have, have been around finance, finances, past relationships, specifically past relationships that ended either in kind of an ugly or an abruptly or an abrupt manner where there wasn't really a resolution of the tension and the relationship is now just kind of hanging out there unresolved. I found myself revisiting, I have a couple of those situations going on and revisiting those a couple of times now.

This factors definitely into my other factor in my neurodivergence, which is my cptsd complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which. One of the hallmarks is distrust. I've. I've been. Distrust of others has been a theme that's been running in my head quite in a very unfun way for a long time, not just this week. And this is gonna take me a little courage to admit too, but one of the, one of the things that I ruminate on, I catch myself is fantasies of revenge, fantasies of. And I don't mean like in any kind of violence or, you know, like, like, you know, that kind of a thing.

But just like that, you eventually get to have the showdown that you wanted or have the. Have a conversation that you wanted and you win it, you know, or, or that you, you make your point, they finally get it, you know, that there's going to be vindication that all these things. Now I, I'm just, I'm just admitting these are, these are things that I've noticed that go on in my own head. These are not things I seek to think about. And I'm noticing more and more it's like we, we've all seen the joke that like there's a browser, we've got a bunch of windows open in our browser and we don't really know which one's firing and, and all that.

Yeah, this is kind of what I'm, I'm analyzing and some of these ruminations are not pretty, they're not fun. A lot of competition. I, I notice myself especially, and that's why I try to not engage all that terribly much on social for like platforms like this, things that are recovery and basis or if I'm doing, you know, more like research type stuff, because it is difficult. It's difficult to see, you know, people that are peers, you know, and doing well. Right. And of course I want to wish them well and all that kind of stuff.

But we also always feel bad. We feel bad for ourselves too sometimes. And, and I'm just trying to be upfront about these themes. So I don't know if anybody else wants to drop and drop in the chat any ones that maybe I've missed, but a couple of them. Another ones though, but fear being taken advantage of. Now that is one that also ties back into another previous episode that we had of Comedy Centered, which is the fear of being perceived, which is another kind of a symptom essentially that that often goes along with people that are either on the spectrum neurodivergent, maybe also people that have some kind of physical, limited, limited physical limitation or things like that where, because at a young age or in social situations, people who get ridiculed or people who are different or get picked on and things like that socially can develop what's called a fear of being perceived, where you are afraid of judgment, you're afraid of being perceived and being judged.

And when I say someone with like a physical liability, like a physical difference, what I meant by that is like if you were a child that maybe had a physical difference that, you know was obvious and people would treat you differently because of it, things like that. These are, these are things that you cannot control about you that can affect long term how you view the world and how you view society. How we're greeted by the world in childhood plays very heavily into how we view our, you know, level of acceptance in adulthood.

You know, and in these, in these Social situations. And so. But the, the fear being taken advantage of. I think that one's worth spending a little time on. I don't know if other people have a great fear of that, but I think it's. I think distrust is something that we, we should really work towards figuring out why that distrust is there. Because distrust is. Got a purpose, right? If something seems off, if the story you're getting from someone doesn't seem to match the rest of the details or whatever, right.

There might be a good reason to be distrustful. However, if we are anticipating in advance that everybody we're going to meet or everybody is to a certain degree untrustworthy, well, how are we going to get over that? How are we going to trust if. I mean, we can, we can opt out of trusting others. I mean, that's certainly an option, but I don't think that that's the way we're supposed to live. I mean, we're supposed to, you know, isolation's a killer, literally. And we have to figure out a way to be in community.

But if you've had a lot of trauma in your past and bringing it back in my rumination circle, maybe you have entertained a lot of fantasies of getting back at the person that harmed you or, or vindicating yourself or redeeming yourself or saving yourself from that situation in some kind of way, you know, but that is the past and we cannot go back to it. You know, we can't, we cannot rewrite it. And so rumination, though, is when you can't stop yourself. You're. You're not, you're not able to pull yourself out of these negative spirals easily.

And there's no pills, there's no medication, there's nothing. There's no quick cuts to any of this. But one of the things they do recommend is, is journaling it and writing down what are the things that you find yourself really getting stuck around. And what I'm noticing now because I've been kind of trying to record them and I've also been trying to observe. There's some other ones that I've. I've come across that I'm not going to share here. They're of a personal nature. I don't think everybody needs to know.

Right. But I am noticing, though, when I'm ruminating. And then if I go back to this list, it will invariably fit in there somewhere somehow. Me getting upset with, like an exchange I had with my neighbor because my neighbor wants to borrow something that I don't necessarily think that they should be asking me for or something like that. Right. Well, maybe that goes right back to fear being taken advantage of. Right. So if you know, ruminating about past relationships. Well, it's pretty easy to ruminate about past relationships when, like, you're someone like me where I'm single and I'm trying to date.

So you go out on a first date with someone and you really do want to meet them, but it's also difficult to not in the back of your mind ruminate and go, does he remind me of another bad relationship I decision I made? Is this similar to another situation in the past that I should have learned more? Well, you know, that past relationship, your perception of that past relationship isn't real either. It's just how you view that relationship now through the lens of the past. Right. So sometimes you just have to accept that there's no more information you could have gotten in a situation and you really probably couldn't have made any different of a decision that you already did.

You know, we like to fantasize that, well, if I could go back now, I would make a totally different decision. But do you know that? Are you sure? Maybe not. You might not. You might. If you actually went back there and you were in your own shoes again, looking at the decisions before you with only the knowledge you had at that time, at that age, maybe you're gonna make the exact same decision. Do you know? And maybe that's the point. The point was never to avoid the decision. The point. And the point isn't to avoid harm.

And the point isn't to avoid, you know, uncomfortability or any of that. But, you know, but if you find those things happening from your decisions, your point. The point is to learn from them, learn for them, Learn from those things for yourself, is what I'm saying. Not learn from them in the sense of, well, then I'll, you know, I'll never fall for that again. Or I'll. I'll always watch out for that now. No, learn for yourself where those hurts began when you personally got so focused on ruminating on the idea that others were against you, that they didn't accept you.

Or maybe that, you know, no one understands you and no one gets you. I think those things all the time. I really, really do. But then when you say them out loud, you realize how many other people think those same things. Right? And that's why groups like this are so important. Even if you're just listening to me talk and you're not engaging in the chat or any of that Kind of stuff that doesn't really matter because you're putting yourself in the path of different information and someone else's experience from inside their own, you know, toilet zone or whatever.

Right. But, yeah, that has been kind of the focus of a lot of my. My thoughts. And like I said, I've also noticed too, for me, when I'm off of my routine, for example, I've been really trying to make myself eat at the appropriate times. I'm not someone who likes cooking meals for myself, and I live alone, so I don't really have anybody to pass that responsibility off to, and I don't want to eat fast food and all that. So I gotten a gift a while ago of this really expensive blender that I absolutely freaking loved, and it died.

And now I have to go buy a new blender. And because I haven't gone and spent the money on the new blender, I haven't been doing my smoothies in the morning. And because I haven't been doing my smoothies in the morning, I've been noticing I haven't been taking my pills at the exact same time. Normally, I would make my smoothie, and then I would take my pills, but now, because I'm not doing my smoothie right away, my meal time's kind of off, and now my pill time's kind of off. And then. And then I'm noticing that, like, when I, you know, my time, I kind of have carved out to go, like, all right, now we get in the shower, and now we do this.

I'm noticing that I'm just kind of scrolling on my phone and. And now I'm all off track. Now I'm all off of my schedule, and it just keeps rolling throughout the day, right? And I was ruminating about it, and I was thinking, you know, you really got to go and get that blender, and you really got to get, you know, got to get back on that and. And do that. And, you know, you've got all those frozen things in the. In the fridge that you want to eat and all that stuff. And. And I'll tell you what, I've gone to the grocery store twice, and I still haven't gone to the store.

I bought stuff for smoothies, and I still haven't gone and bought the stupid blender. So I have to do that. And. And these are the things that, like with attention deficit disorder and the executive function, making myself make decisions, making myself get up and actually do it, as opposed to just thinking about doing it when I. When I don't have my structure in those first couple hours in the morning, I notice that I go way, way, way off track for the rest of the day. And on several of those days, I ended up doing exactly this.

I ended up on my list of ruminations and we've discussed in the past. But I think it's always good to bring up that, you know, from a biological standpoint, just us as humans, I think we all know from school more than likely that we are very closely related to chimps and that's why they study them, you know, in lieu of doing experiments on human beings. Right. And but what they know between us, this is what sociologists and biologists know, is that in human beings, much like chimanzis, we have our prefrontal cortex, right?

And if our immediate needs aren't being met, hunger, safety, shelter, water, all that kind of stuff, we have measurably less empathy for other human beings. If I'm hungry, I have less empathy for you. They've proven it. And why is that? Well, it makes a lot of sense. Think about it. How can you feel empathy for another when you're not showing enough empathy to yourself to give yourself the food that you need? Yeah. So part of my job when I wake up every morning and I'm going to use a little bit of language here, but the thing I'm really trying to learn above everything in recovery is a way to more effectively navigate my emotions, my emotional landmines, and here comes the language and to quite frankly, just not be an to people.

Right. Take accountability and ownership for my actions. And I have to regulate my emotional well being when I go out in the world. That's my job. And I know that if I don't regulate my food, if I don't regulate my schedule, if I don't, if I, if I abandon my routine, those are the times in the past that I've slipped and I've started drinking again. Those are the times in the past where I have gotten to the point where I'm so whipped up that I'll call someone who I'm upset with. And I've been ruminating maybe about this conversation for a really long time.

And all of a sudden I'll just decide to give it to someone at both barrels. This is what I think. Boom. This is what I think. And, and they're not, and it's not polite and it's not right. And it doesn't go anywhere because I'm basically attacking them. I'm basically going at them. They haven't been ruminating on this. They haven't been thinking about this over and over again. That's me. You know, we talk about it darn near every week. No one can read our minds. We can't even read our minds. I don't even know what I'm thinking half the time.

I don't even know why I'm thinking it half the time. Right. That's all we can't. All we can do is keep our side of the street clean. That's the only thing we can do. And so when we react poorly, which is gonna happen when we react poorly, we overreact or maybe something so rude happens that you like, you would normally react, you would think in a certain way to a situation, but you're just so shocked that you don't react at all. You've fawn. Right. Do some exploring as to why that's happening. Do some exploring as to maybe where that's coming up.

Right. Okay. I'm going to catch up in the chat here. Okay. Oh, Amara. I've been stuck choosing a major and a career. Yeah. Oh, man. I don't envy that. I really don't. I'm not a good one to ask about career advice. I'm really not. I've had so many different careers. Every time I have a resume, I should just. Most of my covers, letters should just say, it'll make sense. Just give me. Just give me an interview and it'll make sense why I have all these jobs and they don't seem to go together, but they actually kind of do.

That's a tough one. That is a tough. Choosing a major, choosing a career. But know this, too. Again, kind of like we. I said maybe even 10 minutes ago, you're gonna make the best decision that you know how to make right now. And it might. It. And it may work out that you enjoy that industry and you're in it for 30 years, and it may not. It may not. But my recommendation is if you're spending money, good money for school, like, you've really gotta like it. You know, you gotta really enjoy. You gotta enjoy going to class.

That's what I think. If you're taking. If you're. If you're spending your own money, but you're doing it kind of like I did in college because, you know, you kind of listen to your parents and you get to the. You get the degree they think you should get, or you do the things they think you should do, that make sense. That make you responsible. I mean, okay, but, you know, school is kind of the Fun part, the career. Once you're in, it can be fun. Maybe not, but if you're not really passionate about it right now, if you're not excited about it, there's always a good idea to, you know, there's always time to.

I mean, you can always take general ed credits. For a while. I dragged my feet. I didn't declare a major till, like, halfway through my junior year. Like, my counselor was like, you stop. You have to pick. Stop, stop. You have no. You have nothing. You have no plan. And then I ended up becoming a comedian. See, these are not. I'm not good. Don't. Don't do that either. Don't become a comedian either. Stay in school. Okay, Nikki. Hard to forgive myself sometimes. Isn't that. Isn't that right? It is hard to forgive ourselves.

Why is that? It really is. Well, and it's hard to give us. I mean, I feel like I've been using this phrase too much, but I like it, so I'm going to use it again. But we do have to give. We do have to look back at our past decisions and behavior with some grace and. And also some empathy for ourselves. That, yeah, maybe we made some decisions that we can't take back. Maybe we said some things and we pushed it to a limit that that person's not going to talk to us again, or that situation's not going to come around again, or that is a closed door now.

That's it. You know, in life, there's, you know, that. The old Robert Frost poem about, you know, two roads in a wood. We do that every day. Every day we're picking between two roads, you know, constantly. And those, you know, and they're not always going to be great. You're. You're not going to be happy with every decision you make, and you're not going to be happy with every consequence of every decision you make. But if you can give yourself, you know, a pass and, And. And go, well, the reason why I did that was because I was kind of thinking this.

I know for me, a lot of the things that I regret the most are me going along with other people because I just didn't want to make waves. That's usually more of the stuff that I ended up regretting. Not actually saying what I wanted to say, not actually being authentic. And then I would let that go on for a while because I'm kind of codependent. And then we would hit some kind of a breaking point. And again. And now all my rumination, all of my stuff, all this Built up stuff that I used to suppress, not share.

All of a sudden, now it's coming out, boom, like a cannon. And everybody's like, what happened to her? Like, she was so nice. Like, you didn't have a problem with any of this two weeks ago. Where. Where did all this come from? And. And that's. And it's my ruminating. It's my ruminating. And so I have to own that. I have to own that and I have to remember that. What do I want. What do I want this conversation to look like? And how do I want to feel leaving the end of this conversation? And how do I want the other party to feel?

And if you can just even establish that even before you have the most basic conversations, I mean, that is the true. You know, people talk about love and romance and all that stuff. I'll take patience any day. I'll take patience over anything as far as human qualities. Right. Because if we can have some patience with ourself, then we can also have patience with others. I think if all of us could have just 10 more seconds of patience before we assume that. That the person across from us is wrong or after something or manipulating us or they want something.

You know, this. This distrust, this is what, you know, this is. This is a. This is a killer of communities. You know, that's why it's important for us to all circle up here, you know? Okay. Oh, let me see what's in the chat there. T. North family from California. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, also too. Yeah. And also, if we could go back in time, yes, we'd make different decisions, but it never works that way. We all saw back to the future, right? You go back, you change one thing, and then it screws up a whole bunch of other stuff in the future.

There's just no way. It just doesn't work. It just doesn't, you know, but learning to trust yourself begins with learning to identify where. Where did I. What are the major. I'll just leave it, you know, because I'll wrap up on this. But there's a. It's probably pretty easy for most people if I said, sit down with a book and just write a timeline of the biggest post, you know, like stop signs. Stop posts in your life. Like five major things that happened. Good, bad, doesn't matter. But five major things, right?

Like, you know, buying your house, first job, marriage, you know, all these things can be on that list. Right. How we have to look at that, though, is a. That is a continuum of decisions. None of those decisions existed In a vacuum. And it's really easy to look back and say, well, now that I know this, I wouldn't do that. But again, we have to remember that's not the point. The point is to learn the lesson, Identify the pattern so that we can hopefully see it when it's rearing its head. Interrupt the throat, the thought, and go, huh, Where'd that come from?

Right? Oh, that. Oh, that's a little dark. And interrupt it and try to re. Focus yourself, because I promise you, other people are not as bad as you think that they are, and you are not as bad as you think you are. I. I know you're. I1 is. I don't. Well, I mean, maybe some people. I think the worst people, though, honestly, the worst people are the ones that never analyze themselves. If you're sitting here wondering if you're a bad person, that means you have empathy. People that don't have empathy don't wonder.

They don't wonder about that. Not at all. Narcissists do not wonder if they're liked. They do, but they don't. Do you know what I mean? It's only to serve a purpose. If you're going, wow, am I the bad guy? Am I the one who screwed up? Am I the one who's a jerk? I'm not saying the person you had a fight with is automatically a narcissist either, but the fact that you're showing up for yourself, you're putting yourself in the path of new information, and, you know, you're honoring the fact that you did what you had to do.

And sometimes we have to do. What we have to do at certain times in our life is we have to do it to survive. And it's the lesser of two evils. And neither of the decisions are what we want. They're ugly. We don't like them. But something's got to be done, you know, and so just try to make your peace with it as best as you can, because living back there doesn't help us. And we need you here, you know, the work that needs to be done, especially bringing this country together as people with all the shenanigans that, that, that, that.

That we can't do through AI, that we can't do through chat GPT. We have to hold each other's hands, and we have to say, yeah, I screwed up. I was a jerk, or whatever, you know, and own it and, and move on and, and know that, you know, tomorrow you'll try to do better or not, but hopefully, well, you know, so take it easy on yourself. Okay? All right. 6:30, y' all. Happy, happy Sunday. Always. Reminder, navigating change is super hard. Stay centered as best as you can. Stay as happy, healthy, and whole as you possibly can.

And again, think about things that you're ruminating on and where those thought patterns kind of started. And that will. I think, hopefully it helped me, especially when I'm sitting there going back, I'm like, oh, yeah, no, I already have that one on the list. Oh, nope, that's already on the list. You get it? All right, have a good day, y' all. Have a good one. Bye.