Transcript
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Hello and welcome to Something positive for Positive people. Positive Positive People is a 501c3 nonprofit organization serving people who are navigating Perfect. And I'm finally getting around to recording. Episode 400 is February 17, 2026. And I've been promising this since December and I, I want to take accountability. Accountability on saying I was going to do something and then not do it because I very much am the kind of person who I do what I say I'm going to do. And really there's no excuse. A lot of things have been happening I have been really, really busy with in a good way, good way. Just for perspective, in 2025 we had 277 support call signups that I've tracked and more than half of those came after July and 2026. For January we had 78 or 77 support call signups and that was for the month of January. I want to say envelope 10 to 15% of people sign up don't show up. I get a couple like troll people who take the time to fill out the support call form and then I contact them and they're like I don't know what you're talking about. So I can only assume somebody probably signed up for them. They don't know anything about it, but it is what it is. And for the month Of February, roughly 40 people have signed up for support comments and that just speaks to one avenue of how busy I've been. I'm also in yoga therapy training. Almost done. I have two more class modules to complete and then I have a 50 hour project that I have to kind of create on my own and I'm thinking of putting something together for how I've been using yoga therapy with clients to support them through herpes. In addition to that I still work part time teaching them on the genital exams, teaching associate from different schools across the city. New York City is, I don't want to say the state because like anything I can't get to within three hours. I don't know if I, I ain't got it in to to do any travel beyond. But yeah, in addition to that have been dating and I came to some hard realizations very very recently that I'll talk about that in this podcast episode. In addition to that I'm a W2 employee of something positive for possible people which I should have been over the last nine years but timing is everything and now I'm officially registered in the state of New York. They took the money from the check that I had to write to fill out the registration paperwork. So a lot of what I've been doing is taking the time that I would say about five hours a week is what goes into a podcast. If you go and factor in not just the recording and editing, but if I'm doing it with a guest, I have to do outreach. I got to make sure that they're on the same page. I got to also make sure to create marketing materials to make it worth their time. Website and whatever social media platforms. And then uploading. I don't edit. I should, but editing. Typically in my experience, for every 15 minutes of content, there's about an hour of editing that had gone into that at the time. But I. It's just me. So I think that I'm able to save a lot of time. But with that five hours a week I've had to. I've been able to do a lot of admin stuff. I've been able to go back and backtrack and revise things on the website, which I think has really contributed to the momentum we've been building in terms of having people finding the website. There have been a lot of people who have found something possible for possible people immediately after their diagnosis. So within days even leaving the doctor's office, reaching out to hey, those are coming. The results are coming. And my doctor told me to look for support group. And that's another thing I've been able to do the first and third Mondays of each month. I have a women's support group which I lead. And then there is the men support group, probably the second and fourth Monday of the month. All of these are 7:30pm Eastern time. And if there's the fifth Monday, the group's coed and I bring somebody in to share their experience and answer whatever questions people may have. I've been given some opportunities to speak. We have the STARS workshop where I'll be responsible for the sexual health portion with Dr. Evelyn Dacker. That's happening in Courtney, Oregon on March 7th. If you're interested. Hit me up. No, I will be doing some traveling while I'm out there on the west coast night as well. So we go visit some friends and make some time to do some things I really want to do. And it'll be March, so it should be warming up. I want to say it's been a lot of snow out here on the east coast in Brooklyn, so I'm looking forward to escaping from some of that. I have the National 6ed Conference, which is actually next week. I present on the 25th, just talking about how we can minimize her restating. It's kind of not the. I go to these presentations now and I actually made. Not a PowerPoint, but I made it in Canada. So I got slides now looking real professional. I got some feedback from presenting at Coppin State University last year. Shout out to the title nine coordinator there. I don't know how people feel about me, so I can just say that if you want to go find a good luck, go ahead, go for me. But yeah, she gave me some really good feedback and some of that feedback was to make a presentation and it landed really, really well last year, the first half of the year, I said this a few times, but the first, first half of 2025 was not coming to me. And I just passed the one year mark of where my relationship ended, you know, verbally to say, because, you know, it's still like a term you think, you know, somebody might be getting back together or whatever. So I had some really tough feelings coming up for myself over that week. What was today? Yeah, it was a little bit about a week and a half ago that I was hitting the anniversary. And during that time, like, I recognized some high, emotionally intense and charged feelings. And I tried to, you know, set that aside from the other things that I had, but I recognized that was still something that affected me. And yeah, I did some work around that for myself and ultimately came to the realization that, I don't know, people were wrong about me. I can't. I can't listen to what other people say because I let myself be very impressionable. The sense that both I let both my ex and my therapist tell me I was something I'm not. They both were like, yeah, you're polyamorous. Like, no, that doesn't fit. And then in accepting that identity and that label for myself, I think that I started to act in a way that I believe to be polyamorous. But also coming out of the relationship where you think you're going to be with somebody for this in your life, right? Like, I think that maybe there's a cord cutting type thing that needs to happen where there's also time to recalibrate yourself, myself, otherwise what would happen is what happened to me where anybody who came into the picture immediately after, like, not just the breakup, but like the time that I thought was enough time before I started dating anybody. I gave myself three months of grieving from the time that the relationship ended before I saw anybody else. And then I was still finding myself treating people the same way, like treating people like my relationship and not doing a lot of the things that people do when they're dating someone or when they're getting to know somebody new. And it took me until literally mid January to realize, oh, that's what I'm still doing. And when I had that realization, I started to do some research. I reached out to a relationship coach, shout out to Kat. She's a polyamorous dating coach. And I was like, hey, I don't think I'm polyandros. I really don't believe that's a. And so we got into it, like, she has graphs for me, she has some language for me. And one of the things that she pointed out to me was that something worth looking into, working on is appropriate distances with people between, like your immediate circle. And then you've got like your communities, your friends, friend groups, family, and then further outside of that, like people that you associate with. Or this is where you would have a casual relationships. And I've been looking at Adams. No, I had to bring it up. And that, that makes sense because there's the nucleus of the atom, where this is where your core, closest values, beliefs are. And then the second shell, which is where like, that's more community, friends, whatnot. I believe this is where, like, your consistent behaviors exist. And then shell 3 is like the testing ground for new things, new people. How you engage with the world and the reality reflected around you from that's based off of your inner. Your outer world is reflective of your inner. So looking from upward, we're looking at the third shell of an atom as a reality, real world picture of what's happening in your internal world. So if there's inconsistencies between your nucleus, which is your behaviors and your beliefs and your identity, then the 3D world will show you a picture that you're kind of like, wait a minute, that's weird, that's inconsistent. And that, that. That's been the case for me over some time. And I couldn't speak to it because I know at the time, like, coming out of that relationship, I was going to reback for a minute. And so any relationship that would have come to fruition through that there was not a grounded version of me that was sustainably convenient kind of connections, relationships, and ended up seeing people who do also identify as polyamorous. And when I came to the realization that maybe that's not me, I think that what I did was appropriately and quickly give that information, especially because I know that that kind of thing is important to people. Like some. Some conversations that we've had is like, as a polyandrous person, you should date monogamous people or they only date non monogamous people. So and having these conversations, for me, it was like real celebratory thing to like, have some clarity around my identity, recognizing who I am, what makes me up, who I'm not, and where these inconsistencies are for me. And when I presented those to the people around me, I don't know if it was in my presentation timing or what, but I got a lot of like, not what I expected. Let's just say that. And I take responsibility for. I guess it can feel like maybe using people that, that that's the closest thing, like there was guilt initially, because first off, I didn't expect full for the reactions that I got to be the reactions that I got. But in hindsight and talking to people, what ended up happening was I go from my relationship thinking that I had enough time to, you know, be single or like, be by myself. And with what was happening for me and entering into these relationships under the identity of polyamorous and that, that, that means different things to different people. People. But I adopted this label that. That didn't align with me. And I only did it because this is what other people told me, credible people, right? See, one that I thought I was spending the rest of my life with as a partner. And then my therapist, who I've been working with five hairs, right? So entering the world of dating now being like, hey, I'm polyamorous, There were people who, you know, that became close and I want to say, like, grounded me, like really grounded, because I was not. Okay, I was. I can use the word depressed in this context because, like, I'm not somebody who believes in attaching the identity to these things that aren't identifiers, right? You can be depressed and identify in that way or you can have depression, right? Have had depression, right? So the more accurate articulation of this is that I had depression. And it looked very different than what I think it can look like for a lot of other people. And that depression didn't just. It didn't start when the breakup happened in February. It didn't start when the. The reality of this relationships pulled, right? Like, that's. That's it. It didn't start at the point of realizing, okay, like, I'm happy and I'm able to be myself now. It was almost like little. Little itty bitty. It's like death about a thousand paper cuts, right? Because even at that time, My great grandmother went to the hospital, hospital, my college roommate had passed away. I, shortly after like my home was destroyed by a tornado which ultimately ended up being a blessing in the long run. But these were things that were happening in my life that really rocked my world, disoriented me and I ain't even had time to process those things because all, you know, the while I'm still trying to make sure to sustain this right like this vehicle of my passion, purpose and the thing that has in fact kept me grounded to some extent over the last nine years now. And I, I wasn't fit to manage it in the way that it has been managed over time. Like the, throughout the years of it being consistently a podcast, a space where people can go and get herpes information etc, and that was because I was all over the place. I was not grounded. I was very much like I didn't have a job technically I wasn't working. I mean I did work, but I, I wasn't carrying that same momentum from something positive for possible people. And in fact also, you know, previously I was really locked in and focused on the men's emotional wellness Work Through Self, which was a non profit that I had started, you know, while in my previous relationship. And I was ready to abandon this, I was ready to leave something positive alone, right, and do that full like fully. And things were working out to where it could have happened, but it didn't, it didn't work out. And I, I had gotten to a point where I realized I was spread then and I had to make some decisions and, and making those decisions again, all of this stuff happening in the background, undercurrent things, I ended up, you know, losing that relationship, lost, you know, the what Self was. I lost my identity. And yeah, I, I lost, I lost a community as well. In hindsight, you know, I recognize that the sex education space is primarily not all the way straight women at least and I'm one of very few heterosexual men, men that are in this space. And the identity aspect of it I think, you know, it came down to at the end of the day I'm straight man. So like if somebody gotta get elbowed out of his face, you know, between you know, selecting from two people who I guess, like, I don't know what the narrative is, but if there was any issues with Courtney, it's like a sahu choked. And so now having lost that community too, there was so much of a loss of identity despite having learned so much from it. And I would forever be grateful for the opportunities that Came like, I'm a co author in a book. I get the book that I presented at various conferences on my resume. I have the experience language of being able to be a much more supportive personal resource to populations of people that I otherwise would never have had exposure to. And also had a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun connecting with people. Like, I got. Had some great relationships and sexual experiences as career opportunities. So yeah, it. There was a lot both. There was a lot of loss, was a lot of grief. And grief is not linear. That's one of the things Antonio said. That's one of my yoga therapy instructions instructors. And all the while still trying to, like, I still had things that I had to do, but I could only do what was right in front of me at the time. And I. I look up now and it feels like I'm just waking up from that nightmare of an experience. Mind you, stuff still had to happen. Like, I got to New York and I think I was just on autopilot. I was on autopilot from July probably through August, September. And that's where I think things started to really ramp up for me and the reality of, yo, where you doing this? I remember in 2023, I said to myself, I was like, I'm moving to New York. Moving to New York. I was coming out here for things with the health departments and documentary showing and screening, and there was. There were a handful of things that were happening out here. And I was like, damn, you know, if I come out here and just put this here, what could happen? And I'm experiencing that. And it doesn't look nearly as clear as I anticipated when I was making decision fire, but it looks the way that it has to look. I'm now in a place where being forced into, like, not having that support, that community, that foundation, I got to build my own. Like, I lost people. I lost people as a result of that breakup. And you know, one thing that I'll say that I learned, you know, from that relationship ending is like, she used to say to you, everybody ain't your friend. And tying into my relationship coaching call. Or she was like, you need to appropriately place people. I was like, damn, that statement makes a lot more sense now. So is is interesting to be able to receive the same kind of information from a place of having had experiences and then develop a little bit more maturity now. And having been away from a place that, yeah, a lot of my identity was interconnected with that space. And I used to believe that I needed to have like, my own Separate identity from something positive. Positive people. Because it felt like that was making up who I am, but the reality is like, it's the other way around. Like who I am. Like something positive is an extension, Courtney. And I was letting people get in my head about, you know, Courtney being an extension of some positive repository people. That ain't, that ain't the case. And as I, you know, go back to just everything that was going on at that time. Yeah, like I looked up and was just in relationships after being so ungrounded, finally receiving some type of grounding to be able to settle myself into this newfound space that I'm in. Being in New York, being a full time employee of my own non profit organization, and managing all of that and navigating that growth, like the growth that has happened since sitting my ass down in a place that lies in an environment that aligns with my identity as, I mean, I'm different. Like, I'm adjacent to a lot of spaces. And there is no, you know, people say the herpes community. Like, the herpes community is, is like, it's like if you have a lighter and you're flickering the lighter and it's just not catching flight lane. Whereas you have the sex positive community that, you know, you like that. You know what it is? There's a fire there, kink community, fire there, rope, LGBT black men. Right. You have all of these things that have a long lasting fire. Right. Whereas for me with the hurricanes community, it's just like a constant flickering. Right. Maybe people show up to things. Maybe people sign up and show up to things that are in person. Maybe people, you know, engage and maybe people want to do the advocacy thing. And I feel like I was part of a fire, especially in the sex education space until, you know, recent events. And so even in that, I felt the same way about polyamory. I felt the same way about like even being an ally to the LGBT community, even with like, like ropes. And more recently, like, I'm getting into dance classes. I've been going to zoo classes for about six months now and getting a lot of comfortable with that. Like, it feels that everything that I make an effort to involve myself with, like, just doesn't catch. And I, I was listening to or I was scrolling Instagram and Sham Bo did a podcast, but I think one of Nick Cannon's wives, or ex wives, but she made a comment, she was like, Nick isn't polyamorous. You know, she was like, he always says to label me is to disable me. I felt that in my Soul. And I was like, damn. You know, I'm not a. And even I've been hanging out with people who are in the Burning man community as well, which I always have. But I never felt like a burner myself. It was like, you're one of us. I was like, I can't say that. Like, I'm adjacent to y'. All. Like, I enjoy, you know, hanging out with y', all, doing what it is that we do. Like, it's real cool. Like, I enjoy experiencing this. But that's y' all culture. And having to. Haven't gotten to this point. Like, I realized that my. My own identity, own culture, the.
