Courtney Brain (0:01)

Hello and welcome to Something Positive for Positive People. I'm Courtney Brain. Something Positive for Positive People for The last almost eight years now has been a 501c3 nonprofit organization. Wait a minute, it hasn't been a non profit organization for that whole time. We're actually entering year six of being a non profit organization. As I started it in 2017, I was just interviewing people with herpes about their experiences because I saw that people with herpes wanted to kill themselves. People were posting different things online. They would talk about it in chats of the dating site and the support groups. And I got curious. I applied that curiosity to this space of people with herpes and I learned that actually that's a fairly common thing. Our last survey that we conducted, we saw that 36% of people with herpes wanted to end their lives. And that sucks. That's really hard, man. And a lot of this is because of stigma. But what is stigma, right? Like we hear people say, oh, it's because of the stigma. Oh, the stigma sucks. But no one really understands what stigma is unless you live the stigma. So as people who've had to deal with boundary violations, abusive relationships, the feeling when someone, someone has this discussed reaction after having had sex with you, knowing that you have herpes and they may not or may not know what their status is, navigating the emotions that come with people's behavioral responses to you in relation to herpes. That's what stigma is. So I'm very fortunate to have had at this point almost 400 podcast episodes. Whether those be interviews or just insights and solo episodes. I am very appreciative to everyone who's come on and shared their experience because that has trickled and evolved into other people being willing and able to share their experiences as well. All right, so setting expectations for this podcast episode, I think it's important for me as well. I am going to give you all an update and then by the end of this, I want to just give you something that you can go and apply today. All right, so I have had 97 or 98 recorded, not recorded like audio, but I've been tracking my support calls through this donation based support call intake form. So if you want to talk to me, if you want to have a conversation, if you want to vent, if you need advice, you can go to spfpp.org/herpes-support and that's on the website. When you go there, you'll have a drop down menu and it'll take you to the scheduling herpes support call. Page. So it's been like 97 people that I've been able to document that I had conversations with. And these one on one support calls, I've not had anything to offer beyond those. So I talk to people for 30 minutes to 45 minutes, typically about a particular situation, support them through it, and then there's no like follow up. It's very rare that I hear from anyone twice. And like this past week I did hear from someone twice. And when I heard heard from her, the conversation was just like, I don't want to, you know, disrespect her by putting her exact story out here. But the overview of it is that she disclosed to a guy, it was cool, they moved forward, they've been together for a while. And then he had his first outbreak. Him having his first outbreak. She was met with a response that was different than what she was met with in the past when she had her first outbreak and confided in her partner. She was met with abandonment in the first situation. And this time, not having experienced that, there was a little bit of a disconnect. And there is a lot to be said from a therapeutic lens of what that means, what that is. There's language, it's like there's the earth science and then there's the yoga science, I would say. And so much of the spiritual philosophy, the emotional philosophy, it has so much history to it. Whereas with the brain, cognitive science, like understanding why things happen, I don't think that that's as important to me as getting to the what's happening, how to deal with it. I don't really care about the why or the how. I want to get to the root of it. So as we were talking, you know, I heard her, I listened to her, validated her experiences, and then we just kind of went into a meditation. I just asked, all right, well, let's take a breath. Like, let's pause here. Let's see what your body has to say about what's happening right now. Where are you feeling these feelings that you're having? What feelings are you're having? So she told me what the feeling was and where the feeling was. And we just made space for that. And after having made the space for it, this was like 17 minutes, if that into the call, and I was like, all right, how do you feel now? She's like, oh, my God, I feel so much better. That's it. Like, that's all I need. I'm like, wait, are you sure we got like 15 more minutes. What do you need? Anything else? She was like, no, I'm, I'm good. That was really beautiful food. That was nice. Like, I feel better. I was like, all right, cool. And that speaks to the power of yoga. And I know that historically, like, I have a 500 hour yoga teacher certification, and I've been applying the things that I've been learning in my yoga therapy program, Shout out to Inner Peace yoga therapy, my 300 hour introductory course, which is why I've been so busy. Like, I've not been able to be consistent with the podcast. I'm doing the things that I have to do so that I can do the things that I want to do. And part of what I have to do is study. I need to be reading, I need to be applying things and implementing things. And part of the implementation. Like, I just been trying it out lately. What I'm learning about grief, I've been applying to my one on one support calls. I really should document notes in those. But after having done this for almost 100 people this year, it's safe to say that I have experience, at the very least, talking to people one on one about herpes and their diagnosis. I make the disclaimer, I'm not a mental health professional. I'm not a therapist. I don't have any licensure. So people know what they're getting into when they come here. And you'll probably see any criticism to people like me for not having a. An academic background while just supporting people and healing and helping them. And I think that that criticism stems from, like, I'm fucking with other people's money, especially because this isn't something that I don't want to charge for this, but obviously I need to charge for this, right? And it's important to me that the most accessible way that this can be done is through just offering a donation model. I. I got a lot to say about this, and this podcast episode was supposed to be just me giving y'all an update, but I think that this is important to say and Segway into. But the donation model here, through a nonprofit, aligns with me. And. And I do this shit where I go back and forth all the fucking time about, I need money, so I need to do things that make me money. And yet, like, I want to be of service, so I need to do the things that allow for me to make more money so that I can be of more service. And everyone who talks to me is telling me how much more money I can make if I just do this. You know, out of the nonprofit sector. And I, I believe that. I know I can, but I don't know, I don't know that. That just doesn't feel aligned for me. And I think that things continue to come around full circle. There's people who I've helped three, four years ago who've come back and been like, hey, I can make this huge donation now. And it just like it makes it worth it. And there's people I talk to, there's people who donate a dollar and I have to set boundaries around that. Because if you wanted to see a therapist, if you wanted to see someone who had all these schooling behind them and see them multiple times before getting what you'd get from a conversation with me in 30 minutes, you'd pay them upwards thousand plus dollars to not get to where we get to through this avenue. And so I want to be very clear that like I'm going to talk to everybody. If you reach out, we're going to schedule an appointment and we're going to have a conversation. And the quality of what you get, whether you give $1, I honestly would rather people give no dollars because then that tells me, okay, well, you just don't have it, you can't. And then like to give me a dollar and then show up on the call like, tell me, yeah, I'm going on dates with this girl, we fly to each other. Like that's disrespectful. So people like that, I'm lumping you all in the Tuesdays. So I will do the one on one support calls for anybody on Tuesdays for under $15. I said, like if it's under $15, we're not going to be able to do that because keep in mind the money that comes in, I don't take all of that. This is an organization that needs to run. It's a one man show. Like I have to have, yeah, I got to pay my bills. And the people who, or the organization itself has things that are necessary to stay up, like the, the, the website, the podcast, like the podcast itself doesn't cost anything but the hub of resources, maintaining those staying tax compliant. I wrote out because one of my board members told me to write out everything that you do, how much it costs, how much time you put into it and how much you get paid out of it, y'all. I, I'm not going to go into detail about it, but you can imagine based on my response what that looks like. So it's very wonderful when the people who have the means to contribute more do contribute More because it does help for those who don't have it. And I don't want to go into a non donation based model. I'm saying that on the record because that's my truth. The, the. In yoga, there's a lot of philosophy that does align with me and resonate. And it's like in my face now through yoga therapy before I think like I was hearing it, I was internalizing it, like into my body, into my being. But cognitively, like when we think about it from a mental level, what it wasn't just on the front, on the forefront of my mind. It wasn't a conscious thing for me to live in this way, apply these skills, do these things, live in this way. Until now, being in my yoga therapy training program because I see like, oh shit. What I have been doing has been holding space for people. It's been like inviting them into their body's inner wisdom rather than being in their head. There's the concept of the koshers. It's essentially that we have five layers of ourselves. We can call them sheaths, layers, whatever. But there's five aspects of self. There's the physical body, there's the mind body, there is the breath. I probably these aren't in order. There's the breath or the life force energy and then there's like the intuition, the inner wisdom, the body wisdom. And then there's like the spiritual self, the, the joyful self, right? And so many people that I talk to are more in their heads than they are in their bodies. And so we kind of take that as a path inward in order to get into the body and into the body's inner wisdom and then be able to connect at deeper levels with what that, that joy. What brings us joy, what makes us happy, what we feel like is our sense of purpose and what we want to be doing. Because a lot of us just aren't really conscious to what we're doing. And I'm guilty of that. Even me. Like I look up, it was last November, I looked up and I was like, what the am I doing? I was about to head to Australia and I had this wonderful person that I'm in a relationship with now. And I was about to leave her for like a month and do whatever it is that I wanted to do rather than being invested in and developing that relationship. And I'm so grateful to have made that decision now because here we are a year later, we've still been together and it's been very fucking pleasant to have this consistency with someone I ain't saying the whole relationship been pleasant like we be beefing sometimes, don't get me wrong. But that, that unconsciousness is what I see a lot of people have, and one of the things that drew me to my girlfriend is her intentionality. And I find that a lot of my work is asking people what their intentions are, but I've never really been able to have the language to guide them into identifying what that intention is. So much of what we do is unconscious, unintentional, and we find ourselves, we just look up and we're in a situation and we don't like the situation that we're in. And by that point, you know, this is where people start to find out about their herpes diagnosis. They find Courtney and they're like, what do I do? And it's like a, a seamless fucking conveyor belt that takes people from getting a diagnosis to eventually finding out about stigma. And then from there people, you know, do what they do. But the people who are finding me, at least the 97 people that have filled out a one on one support form, right, like they come here maybe not knowing what they need or thinking they need one thing and then finding out it's something else. And a lot of the work that I'm doing now is more directly engaging with people because y'all, I, I, I had a moment where I was gonna stop doing this shit. I was gonna stop doing the podcast. I was like, okay, well, because I do these events and the people who show up are medical professionals. Maybe that's who I need to serve. I need to focus on the medical professionals, which I did for a while. I was able to get some money, I was able to get some funding, I got some speaking events and only to learn that through yoga therapy. I like this way more. I, I do, I do. I love the one on one conversations. I wish we could record them and share them with the world. I want to shift something positive for positive people into a show, whether that just be a virtual show on YouTube or if it's a zoom, that the link goes out for once a month for people to join and attend live. Not to say that everybody who attends has to have herpes or even will have herpes, but like, that shit's irrelevant at this point because so much of the conversations that I have one on one isn't even about herpes. It's about how people relate. It's about how they communicate, it's about what they really want and the fact that they often don't know what they really want and that, that is okay because that's what the, that's what our roles are with one another is to discover that. So I, I feel like I, I really do feel like I am where I'm supposed to be. And for all of the flip flopping that has happened throughout the course of this show, like I've been wanting non monogamous conversations, monogamous people need to have. I've been wanting to do more hands on practice of identifying your safety and pleasure needs. I've been wanting to do this survey to research. I've been wanting to just do yoga for people with herpes. There have been so many things that I've just like trial and error, tried and failed and I don't even want to say fail, but I've tried and then learned from them. And these are things that I've been excited about. I've been wanting to bring to the the world and make them fruitous and fruitful. Why did I say fruit is fergalicious? That's how my brain work, y'all. That's, that's crazy. But excuse me, like I want to just point out and acknowledge that I'm very excited and in that excitement I am all over the place and I recognize that I'm all over the place. And man, like it feels as if I've settled into where I'm supposed to be. So I journal and I journaled yesterday. It was yesterday morning. Let me see if I can find a page. And I wrote out, you know what, what do things look like for me? So from a business perspective, something positive for positive people. I run the herpes disclosure workshops. I have the Something Positive for Positive People expo. I have the trainings for providers, which we have our first one in February in Arizona. I have wanting to do a monthly show instead of the podcast, but here I am recording a podcast. So technically there's both of those happening. There's the survey that we're creating to have that ongoing research so people can see, you know, numerically from a quantitative standpoint what the experiences are of people living with herpes. Maybe they can look during a particular time period, but being able to continuously accumulate that information is going to be helpful. I'm in a process of writing a book about letting go of herpes stigma and applying yoga therapy to that so that people have that as a resource. If you're curious about yoga therapy, even if it's not with me, like find out, see if you can meet with and talk to a yoga therapist. There's Yoga therapy for cancer care, yoga therapy for pain care management, yoga therapy for stress and anxiety. There are all these modalities of it. And I am creating right now the one that is for herpes stigma. And who knows, this might even branch out to something else. I don't know. But from where we at now, like, I'm doing case studies and I have people who are willing to work with me who are doing the exercises, who are sharing the value of these things. And I'm hype. I'm hype. And so, like, those are the things that I'm doing for something positive. I'm also in yoga therapy training, which I always forget to make note of. And I'm also running the organization Self, which is for men's emotional wellness, because that's something that has been helpful to me. Emotional wellness, going through yoga teacher training, being in the yoga therapy training program, understanding the landscapes of emotions, philosophy behind them, the real meaning, how they show up in the body. Like, understanding this, I guess somatic experience has made me a much more, not just empathetic person, but just understanding of my own self so that I can do the things that I need to do for myself and be of service to other people. And so I'm even looking at how I do my social media now. I want to weave yoga and yoga therapy into my something positive for positive people work. And on the social media page of Courtney Brain, like, talking more about this emotional wellness, yoga in general, but really applying it to the yoga therapy because I do want people to, like, benefit. Like, people be lost and people don't know where to go. People don't know what to do. And so many therapists that I've talked to and wanted to work with don't want to be known as the yoga therapist or, I'm sorry, the herpes therapist. I want to be known as a yoga therapist. So I'm working, y'all, and I apologize. That's what this is. This is an apology for the inconsistency. I have not been consistent. It's been, what, three weeks since the last podcast episode? And I did record one on my birthday, which was November 10th. Coming up on what would have been. Or what was the 23rd anniversary of my grandmother's death. So my grandmother, she passed away when I was 12, going into 13, and her funeral was on my 13th birthday in 20, 20, 21. And that was hard. The last 23 years of me grieving. And I, I've. I've learned from talking to my therapist, hey, maybe you should do these Things and also in combination with being in a yoga teacher training, especially around that time, acknowledging that the emotions were really big for me around then. So it was very like, I'm not gonna do this again. So I didn't stopped and re recorded this shit like several times now. And I think that it's probably more important that I leave in these, like, moments where when I think about my relationship to my grandmother and I do get emotional. My grandmother is the person who fought for my mom to have me. Everybody around my mom wanted her to get an abortion. And my grandmother, you know, gave my mom space to really think that through. And she was the only person to my understanding of what happened who fought for me. So here we are, 23 years after her funeral, on my birthday, and every year I have these emotional responses. I have like this. I get weird. It's the best way to describe it. But as I learn more about grief, I realize that that's what I've been doing. Like, I've not been grieving, but I've been grieving over the last 23 years. And I remember when I looked in the casket, so they didn't want me to see her in the hospital. And so I never went to the hospital. I just knew my grandma was here, and then all of a sudden she wasn't. And the next time I saw her was in a casket. And that did not look like my grandma. And I remember I laughed. I was like, that ain't my grandma. Like, y'all joking. And that's what denial, first stage of grief. But that really didn't look like her. And for the Next, let's say, 20 years, I would just get weird around my birthday. And I didn't know what that weirdness was. And it took for me to begin as I started doing this podcast, I think. I don't know if it shows up around my birthday in episodes, but I would. I would just be weird. Like, things would just be weird. That's the best way I can describe it up until like 2020, 2021, when I got into yoga teacher training and seeing a therapist that there became. Yoga teacher training offered the opportunity for emotions to have space and come up. And then therapy gave me a language around, like, what that was and then some. So in my teacher training, the. The space was made for the feelings. And I started to be able to have that practice of talking about those feelings and with my therapist at the time. So for the last maybe four years, I've been able to bring conscious awareness into that, that that time and it's usually around October, October, November, through my birthday. And it's like the day after my birthday or the day of, like, I'm good. And I have a lot of just really cryptic memories of that day. When I was 13 years old, for example, everybody's still, like, singing Happy Birthday to me as if it, you know, it was an afterthought. I didn't expect anybody to sing Happy Birthday to me. My grandma just. We just were at her funeral and here we are like, y'all bringing out a cake and everybody's, like, sad and trying to sing and do something that's supposed to be cheery. So, yeah, I have very conflicted emotions around my birthday, between the sadness, between the loss, between the death, between those things and the fact that I made it another year. And I. I should be celebrating my life. But I also understand, like, the undercurrent of that. The undercurrent of that being that this person fought for me and this was the first woman to fight for me. It wasn't my mom. You know, like, that's a very hard realization to have, is that, you know, the. The person who brought you into this world, you know, there were everybody around her, wanted her to not bring you into this world, except for. For this woman who is no longer here. And I wish that I was able to have a conversation with my grandmother and get closure and clarity on why my grandma was crazy. My grandma was bipolar, and I believe she was also schizophrenic, or maybe she was schizophrenic and not bipolar. I forget what it was, but I talked to my mom yesterday and she said that my grandmother had pass away from, like, complications with copd. And I, I forget what that is, but I believe that's something with your heart. My grandma smoked cigarettes out the ass, so I ain't really surprised. But this woman who didn't know me, like, I'm so, like, I'm sad that she can't be here and see what her hope brought into fruition. She didn't know me. She had no way of knowing what I was going to be doing with my life, who I was going to become. And I think for the last several years, I just been stuck, man. I've been stuck. And the last two weeks, like, we talk about this politics, like, Donald Trump is now going to be the president, you know, whatever, whatever. But the hot topic around that was abortion rights. Can you imagine as a. That wasn't aborted, the, the triggering, the constant, like, messaging shoved in my face. Is like, I should be able to get an abortion whenever the I want to. Nobody should ask questions. And how like conflicting that is, especially as someone who is in the sex education space where this is something that's threatening. And I'll be clear, like, I do believe that it should be the person's choice if someone is pregnant. And we also, like, there's so many conflicts of things between, like consent and when the parent has to have consent for the child and then when the person has consent, like age is a factor. All these factors are there. My mama was pregnant with me at 17 years old and made it to 18 and then had me. And so as a, first off, as a man to constantly be flooded with, you know, the abortion stuff, I, I don't really get much say in that. And especially as a man who's been with someone who had an abortion, like, there's no space for conversation about things like that. Like, how does the man who is not supposed to have a say in this supposed to navigate the complex emotions of, well, maybe if I tried harder, like I, I think about this regularly, I would have, I would be teaching my first kid how to drive right now. And I love the life that I have. But I'm also the kind of person who, whatever the kind of life I would have needed to have, I would have had. And I think that I'm brushed up against that, that challenge too of yeah, my. It wasn't me getting the abortion. She did what she thought was best for her. But also it's like, did I, did I try hard enough? Like I wanted to be there with her when she went to do to, to go through the abortion. I know how planned parenthood be when motherfuckers be outside shouting at you, shaming you and everything. I wanted to be there with her and she didn't want me there. And I can't help but think that she didn't want me there simply because it would, she wouldn't have wanted to do it if I was there. Like, she would have wanted to go through it. And this is someone who has said, I don't want to have kids, but I would. I could see myself having kids with you. And damn, dude, like, I, I guess this needed to come out. Like, I didn't want to talk about this, especially in this much detail just because it doesn't, it doesn't feel like the place to do it. No, it's not safe for me as a man, man to talk about my experience with abortion, but it's my experience, man. And it, it, it's very, it's, it's disrespectful to me at least to have these two powers that be of the right and the left who have these very opposite views overtly about abortion. And I think that most people, let's say 90% of people, are reasonable in being able to hear, okay, past this point of pregnancy, you can't get an abortion up to this point, and under these circumstances, you can get an abortion. That is the most sensible thing. But looking at what yoga has to say about government, there's not a lot of sensibility in politics and government. There's just not a lot of intentionality and consciousness. They make these general ass rules that apply to the people in their spheres of life and experience that people who are way the fuck outside that and outliers have to adhere to, creating these cycles of trauma for people who come after them or who are around them. So it's, it's very frustrating that there's nothing more reasonability in it, because on one side it's, yeah, I should be able to get an abortion whenever the I want. On the other side it's like, that's a life. From the time that sperm exits the, the mediatal opening and enters into the vaginal wall, that's life. Get the out of here. Like, let's be real and let's be reasonable, right? Like, if I were at the point of conception, if I'm that sperm swimming to the egg, let's be honest, niggas have billions of abortions a year. If we're going by this logic, because the sperm cells are life force, right? So that's an argument in itself. How many unborn babies we got in socks on backs in belly buttons in mouths, in asses in hands on keyboards, right? That's not what we're talking about. So it really, it pains me that the conversation is not just between people who are reasonable. There's this side, that side, and then those of us who are reasonable, as someone who wasn't aborted, being someone who is not. I'm not taking aside and saying pro abortion, pro. No, that, that's not what I'm saying. Circumstantially, this needs to happen. That needs to happen. And we need to have like reasonable, you know, parameters for that. Because right now there are none. And had one side or the other, had it there, had the other side, the side that I'm supposed to be on, had their way, I wouldn't fucking be here. And it is really hard for me to fathom how people who weren't aborted don't have more like reasonable views around abortion and the way that people talk about it, because it's very disrespectful to people who can't have kids, want to have kids for people who have the gift of life and fertility to be like, I like, I look at hip hop music, I papa plan B that baby, that kid, I let him like it. It sends this message to the opposition and the general population that people just want abortion access because they want abortion access. And that frustrates me because, like, there's a way to go about doing things like, you can get that you can do whatever the fuck you want behind closed doors if that's how you choose to live your life, cool. But we can't expect for laws to be made and to be taken serious seriously when y'all looking at it like a joke. And we can't force people to do they don't want to do. If my mom didn't want me here, I don't know that I would want to be here under the protection and, and proclivity. I don't even know if that's the word of a parent who doesn't want me here. So situationally. Right. That's abortion. And I. I guess maybe I just needed to say that. But I'm also not supposed to know what the backstory is to me getting here. And I recognize, like, how knowing that has really me up. I have been looking for the love, the unconditional love of my grandmother who has been diagnosed mentally ill. Delusional. Delusional as y'all. Like, my grandma saw demons. I asked my dad one day, I said, dad, am I going, Is that genetic? Like, am I going to look up and be seeing demons? And one day, and, you know, now understanding the I do see demonstration, I see people's demons. Fuck, that just gave me chills. Okay, Never said that out loud before, but I. People reveal their demons to me. I see the ugliest sides of people, and people trust me with that, and I have a responsibility to it. And, you know, this. This genetic thing that I was scared of, making me crazy, it has made me crazy. I obsessively do the work that I do. I don't really take time for myself. I really don't value money in the sense of how I should value money according to what the media says. And instead, like, I choose to invest my time, money, attention, energy into this work that I do, even. Even at the expense of some arguments within my relationship because this feels like what I'm supposed to be doing. And it's gotten me in trouble. Not just leaning into and accepting that, because I've been looking for this love that my grandmother gave to me unconditionally before. I love in the wrong people, in the wrong spaces, where it's not reciprocated in relationships. Like, arguably, I was not monogamous because of my grandma issue, not my mama issue, because of my grandma issue. Grandma issue being, I can't show her. I can't thank her. And that kills me. I cannot thank my grandmother for fighting for me. A lot of us have our moms who, you know, went through hell and back to bring us into this world, who were in pain, who almost died on the hospital table, whatever, and never tell them, thank you. Here I have this woman who protected my mother from her parents, who fought. I don't. I don't know what that fight looks like. I just hear the stories and I can't tell her, thank you. I can't show her what her effort did. And I think that maybe this is why I have an issue myself with, like, I support people. I talk to them, I give them, you know, this support that they need. And then I don't hear from people, I don't know if they're okay. And, like, I had to, like, come to terms with that one hard because I care. I give a fuck because someone gave a fuck about me that I didn't know a stranger. That's why it's so easy for me to give a fuck about strangers. And just the lens of being able to view, be with experience. My emotions has given me the tools and resources that I need in order to be with my emotions. I've been doing this shit. And in yoga, like the throat. The throat chakra, any issues there typically revolve around communication and needing to say a thing that needs to be said, but perhaps fear keeping you from doing that. And this is a very scary thing because I don't know who's going to hear this. I don't know who's going to hear this and be like, oh, my God, Courtney's pro life. He's conservative. Like, no, that. That's not what I'm saying. And you can also. It's so easy to just mix up or only share a clip of something, and then people take that narrative and run with it. That's not what I'm saying at all. I am saying I wasn't aborted. The person who is responsible for that, I can't thank Them and I'm grieving and how the election impacted me probably a lot more than it will ever impact. Some of the people who are yelling about needing to be able to get an abortion because these are people who may absolutely never need to get an abortion. Yes, there are people, women who have gotten abortions. There are women who will need abortions. There are probably some women who are in the process of getting one even as I'm recording this podcast. There are women who want to have kids and are excited about this but have to get an abortion due to ectopic pregnancy or due to miscarriage. There's so many perspectives on this that exist beyond what I'm able to speak to in the short time that I am going to be speaking to it here. And I, I just gotta name that man. There's no space for men to share their experience, experiences with something like this. And it is also a men's issue. Like I, I feel some guilt because people like come to me and talk about this and I'm like supposed to on the surface, like be, yeah, all the opposition to what your beliefs are. And I feel like I'm hiding something by not being true to the fact that I wasn't aborted. And I know the backstory of what went into that. Like, I'm grateful. I wish that I could tell my grandma thank you. Because I've lived my life probably since I was 13, looking for a way to thank my grandmother in people pleasing and being too nice and over giving and under sharing for the sake of not overburdening people and feeling like I need to prove to myself, to the world, world that I belong here. And the reality is I will never be able to prove that to the one person that I want to know that I can't sit across from my grandmother and say, grandma, thank you for fighting for me. I love you. Look at what you did. Look, you did this. I talk that about life being. Not about what happens to you, but what happens through you. And that sound good, but in practicality, like that shit is so difficult to live because I can't reciprocate that from my grandmother. What happened through her was my father who came with my mom, I'm trying to say this in a nice way, who had sex with my mom and around Valentine's Day in 1988 and got her pregnant. And he didn't, he made sacrifices. He didn't go to college for track. My mom didn't get to live out her youth because she became a mom. She had to start Working and I know these things, but it's my grandma. I can thank them. I tell them thank you. I recognize, I acknowledge their sacrifices for me to be here, but I cannot say, grandma, I know what happened. Thank you. Why did you do that? And maybe I won't like the answer. I watched that movie Prometheus where they were hunting down like the their creators and they finally found their creators and they didn't have answers for them. They were just like, oh, we was trying to kill y'all. Like, we wanted y'all to come here so we knew where y'all were at so we can find y'all and destroy y'all asses. That's some up to think about. So from that perspective it's like, oh, okay, well maybe my grandma don't know, maybe she saw demons and you know what I'm saying? I don't know. I don't know. And it kills me, y'all, it kills me. And it shows up in my behavior as, you know, being non monogamous and having had the opportunities to go out and openly explore finding someone who was going to give me that same unconditional love that I would have received from my grandma. That's what that, that might be what I was doing. And through sex, because how I saw my mom engage with men, she prioritized her sexual partners seemingly over non sexual friendships and partnerships. So that was just what I learned. And again, like self reflection, the yoga therapy, I. It wasn't therapy where we talked about this or got to this point. It was through yoga training and my moving and breathing and meditating that my body was able to bring this to the surface. And for me to be like, huh, I'm aware of this. What is this? What, what were my thoughts with that? Oh, I have thoughts with that. To see that the election was triggering for me because the main topic was abortion, which, I mean, there are several topics that need to be brought to the surface, but I don't know that, especially being around my birthday, like, it wasn't the best time for me to engage. So yes, I was triggered. And I want to shout out thank you to everybody who did reach out to me, you know, who. Maybe they didn't think that it was triggering for the reason that it was triggering by any means, like Trump won. And that is alarming to a lot of people. What was more triggering to me and alarming is the, the conflicting like emotions that I have of grieving my grandmother who fought for me to not get aborted in the midst of the conversation. Of, hey, we need to be able to get abortions whenever we want to. That's conflicting. And on top of that grieving process, man, like, it is very difficult to explain grief. I'm even, I've gone through a module in my yoga therapy training about it. And I understand it, you know, a little bit better, but I do need more time and experience with it. And I'm currently reading the grieving brain to understand, you know, what does happen on a neurological level when we're grieving. And the lady said, I forget the author, but she says that in grief, like our brain has adjusted to a reality and it's like the thing that is fixed and should be there is no longer there. And your brain has to now learn this new reality. So like, our body's responding, everything is responding as if this thing is still there, but the brain is having to compute because on a sensory level, that thing is not there. She uses example of ordering food at a restaurant and then the waitress comes back and she only brings back an empty plate. You're like, what the is this? Like, I ordered something, I had expectations I was supposed to eat. Like, you've got this whole future that now has to be grieved because you were going to eat that steak, you were going to put that steak sauce on there, you were going to eat the potato and get a bite of the spinach and then put a bite of the steak on there and then eat it. You're going to have conversation. And it was just disrupted. That event of not having food on the plate after you ordered food disrupted everything. So now having the understanding of the one person who wanted me here more than anybody else did at that time, who was so invested, I don't even, I don't know, I don't know what all went into that. I just have the objective stories from my mom's perspective, my dad's perspective, my grandparents perspective, that's it. That's all I got. And part of the grief is like me trying to formulate that story. Me asking my mom what, what happened around that time? What happened with my girl grandmother? Me asking my dad, like, hey, do you feel like this way? Like, do you have strong feelings? Talking to my brothers, like, man, what, what did y'all feel when that happened? I'm trying to piece puzzle pieces together and that's part of what this grief is. And on top of that, y'all, my girlfriend's grandmother's in the hospital and they saying she might not make it. And my girlfriend's sister's Birthday is coming up, and she was concerned about them not having the funeral on her birthday 23 years later, right? And I met with this in my face election, abortion, now the grieving grandma. This is the hardest birthday time frame that I have ever had. And I'm like, you know, I'm recognizing, too, that I am healing because I'm able to be there with them and, you know, support them, help out with the dog, feeding the animals while they go to the hospital. Hospital. Taking care of my girlfriend, like, making sure that, you know, she has food, trying to keep the house clean, not stressing her out and doing the kinds of things that you just do when you're in a relationship. And her sister asked me. She was like, you know, have you ever had something like this? And I just. I didn't cry. I kept it together. I was like, this doesn't feel like the right way to talk about this. But, yeah, my grandma's funeral was on my 13th birthday. She's like, oh, my God. And I remember that every year. I think about it every year. And the way that I was able to talk about it this time was significantly different. Some healing happened, and I'm so grateful for the spaces that have been held from me. I'm thankful to my girlfriend because she gave me the most memorable birthday gift, y'all. My grandmother bought me Pokemon cards. I was. I was in my single digits of age because I was in elementary school, because I remember I traded the card. I had a holographic Charizard. This was the card to get right. I got it from Target and I traded it. I traded it for the three legendary birds, Zapdos, Articuno Moltres. And I don't even know what happened to those cars, but this was, like, one of my memories of my grandmother was her getting me that Charizard. So after my grief module and training, I. I told my girlfriend. I was like, hey, look, I think I'm gonna need to cry. Like, I held it in all weekend, talking about grief and understanding it. And I. I miss my grandmother. Like, I miss her and the experiences that we didn't get to have together, especially now, knowing how influential she was to me being here. And I told her about the Charizard. And I cried. I cried in her lap. I was like, I miss my grandmother, and I don't cry, especially in front of people. And I did. I let that shit out. And that was over the summer. Fast forward to now. I wake up my birthday morning. She has a card for me. I open the envelope and I open a car and a Pokemon card slips out, and I just start crying. I started crying. I gave her a hug, and it was a holographic charizard. I don't want to know what she had to do to get that card. I do not want to know. And I told her this, too. It's like, I don't want to know what you had to do to get this. But this is literally the best gift because I'm feeling like I'm forgetting her. I'm feeling like I'm forgetting my grandmother. And while I've only had 13 years with her, like, I have 36 years of life now because of her, because of her values, her psychological state, her being who she is, this I was allowed to happen through, through her so that this can happen through me. And, you know, I'm glad I'm recording this on audio because I'm making faces for sure. And when you hear these pauses, I kind of stare off a little bit. And I just, I remember my grandma's face when she was alive. My grandma was pretty tall. She's like 5, 11, 11. You know, I'd be, I'd be a little bit taller than her now. People think I'm six two for whatever reason, but I'm absolutely six foot even. And I just wish that this adult me could just show her, like, grandma, look at this, look at this podcast. Look at this non profit. I got two non profits. And I, I talked to 97 people this year and for 30 minutes or 45 minutes to an hour. And I helped them. I helped them with their herpes stigma diagnosis and their mental health. She would be so proud of me. And I do it for, I do it because I want to. I'm, I'm making a living out of doing a thing that I'm supposed to do. And that's something that I'm, I'm really proud of. I feel like I need to make, like, some clarifying statements real quick because I, I. One of my biggest fears, y'all, is getting canceled over some that I didn't say. So just a recap. Men do need to be able to talk about their experiences around abortion. Women would need to get abortions if it wasn't for men. I'll just say that there, like, if men were to only have sex with women who wanted children, that they also wanted children with when they wanted children, and this is all consented to, we wouldn't even be having a conversation about abortion. So I see how conservatives see, got out of hand. We got to Undo all this with extreme measures. I understand, I understand how this system works and it doesn't make sense. It makes sense because of, if you follow the money, it makes sense financially, but it does not make sense in terms of what's good overall for the people in general. I was not aborted. And I know the backstory. I think a lot of people don't. I, I just so have. This is a rarity that I know the backstory of my birth and what abortion had to do with it. Like, I, you know, it's not my story to tell, but this, I'm sure, I know that this wasn't the hardest decision that my mom had to make about having kids or not having kids. I know that. So I thought that those were things very important to mention, especially as someone who is also speaking to, to men's emotional health and emotional wellness, because this is an abortion is a big part of my emotional health story and experience. And I don't think people make space to really listen to what men have to say. And that's kind of how. That's a contributor to why we are where we are with the presidency. Men being unheard. Women are also unheard. Like, we can't just dive into, into extremes of all the time because when we do that, we get extreme responses and we don't get reasonable ones. We don't get reasonable circumstances and situations and conversations and like, just real. And that's what I'm, that's what I stand for. I stand for real. My grandma was responsible for the birth of real coming through into fruition and into the world. And I, God, I love my grandma and I'm cherishing my holographic charizard for the rest of my life. What else did I need to clarify? I feel like there was something else. Yeah, Like, I please, like, talk to people. Like, ask questions. Like I said, like, I had an ex who got in the abortion and I feel like I got that abortion with her and I feel responsible for the abortion. And there's no space or place for men who know. Like, my mom told me a story about a guy that she knew, that his mom told her, told him. He's like, I don't know what it is, but you got a baby out there somewhere, you need to go find it. And this man, like, found. My mom showed up to him, was like, is that my kid? Because she, she thought I was his. She thought. Or he thought that I was his kid, which I hope not. But my, I'm my dad's kid because I'M my grandmother's grandson, but she told me this story about, you know, he was like, my mama told me like, I got a kid out here somewhere. And I, is that him? Like, it's about the age and about the time where we was messing with around. She's like, nah, this ain't your kid. Come and find out. Like, my mom got an abortion, like, and it might have been with that guy's kid. So I know way too much more than I should. And I think that this might be like the spiritual. My grandmother saw demons, I see demons. Or the ugliest aspects of people and hold space for that in their stories, in whatever it is that they share. And maybe a lot of men, you know, are afraid of talking about this kind of, but because of the criticism. But like, I guess what I've learned from my herpes diagnosis is people don't make fun of me, people don't criticize me for my herpes diagnosis because I, I, my intention, right? Regardless of the impact, like my intention is people with herpes want to kill themselves. So like, yeah, I'm open about my experience. So people don't want to kill themselves. So perhaps me being open about my experience as a man, I guess navigating these dialogues around abortion won't invite the criticism that I expect. Perhaps it's something that can be a conversation even with someone who is, you know, open about and talking about abortion because maybe women feel like they need to be as extreme as they are because men don't talk about it. So if I'm gonna do this, where I'm leading these conversations and being vulnerable, not just in a sex sense anymore, but also in the, the yoga sense, in the emotional wellness sense, the herpes stigma, like the mental health, the men, like we, we gotta, there's a lot to be done and it's hard for me to speak to because I'm speaking to it for the first time in a lot of cases. Like, I don't feel safe in, you know, like I, I don't feel like I can say the things that need to be said. I don't feel like I can speak my truth when it brushes up against topics of, when it brushes up against these kinds of topics and see even that, like, that's avoidant. As for me to say these kinds of topics and not just call it what it is, abortion rights or healthcare for women, like all this gets lumped into things and then we miss like the one offs, we miss the important things, we miss the connections that absolutely should be, hey, And I think that this is why my throat's been lately, is because this is something that needs to be said, that needed to be talked about. And perhaps this perspective will invite other men who have feelings to explore what those feelings are so that they can be more supportive partners to their, their, in their relationship, so they can be more empathetic to the world and the nature of abortion and abortion access. So, yeah, I. This turned into so much that it wasn't supposed to turn into. You see how Greek. This is a great example of grief, y'all. I didn't expect that and I ran with it. I've been trying to record this podcast for five, four or five times now. I stopped it hit rerecord because I was like, it don't nobody need to hear me talk about that. That's not what people come here for. People come here for herpes support. But I think that maybe people actually do come here for the vulnerability and the realness and the real conversations. And I want to shout out, I'm gonna just say, you know who I'm talking about, my man, we, we message on WhatsApp. And I appreciate the real conversations that you offer to me. I appreciate that you encourage me to keep hosting this podcast because it's been a dozen times where I've been like, man, ain't nobody listening to this, man, this. How often can I, how many ways can you talk about herpes? And here we have grief like, this isn't a podcast episode about herpes. It isn't a podcast episode about abortion. This is a podcast episode about grief and the avenues at which that plays out. Like, you can heal and you can do harm and you can grieve all at the same time. And my whole thing is harm reduction. And part of one is it Asteya is not stealing. Ahimsa, I think, is non harm, non violence. And I guess like I'm, I'm harming myself. If we look at the yamas and Niyamas, I forget which one it is. But like, there's how you engage with the world and your own self engagement and beliefs. And one of those concepts is do no harm. It's non harming. So I aim to minimize harm as best I can, both to the world and myself. And I think that my responsibility in that is to be vulnerable. And this is what vulnerability. Vulnerability is. My therapist was right, Derek, he was like, you're not really vulnerable. Like, it's easy for me to talk about herpes at this point, especially when other people are, are doing the talking, and I'm just facilitating the conversation. What's actually vulnerable is this shit. Saying the things that might get you canceled, that might impact your income, that might make you hated, that might get you broken up with, like, these are that. That's what I'm scared of. So this is why I've been afraid of my grief. This is why I've been grieving unconsciously rather than consciously. And now here we are an hour into a podcast episode that was just supposed to be me saying, hey, y'all, I'm offering yoga therapy now. If y'all interested, go to the website spfpp.org yoga-therapy and I'm a yoga therapist in training to offer this. These things. And I got stuff that's going to be coming up to help support y'all. And I hope that this vulnerability with my experience of grief invites you to explore your own experiences with grief. Grief as well, y'all. I got a call to take actually, like, right now, so I'm going to save this. Hit send. And I appreciate if you listen to this point. Thank you. Thank you for listening. And I would like for you to just let me know that you listened, let me know that you heard this. Let me know how it was received. If you can give me any feedback, just let me know. Y'all appreciate y'all, thanks for being here. And I'll dedicate this podcast episode to my grandma, mother, Patricia Ann Johnson. Thank you for. Thank you for helping me get here and for everything that's happening. Through you, through me, through y'all. Right. We all connected, and I hope that we are able to just acknowledge that and stay that way, y'all. Thank you. Thank you, thank you.