Adam Has a Podcast Episode 36; YOU CAN DO IT!

Today, I would like to tell a story of my youth that I believe is a definition of my character. I don't know if I'm allowed to tell this story yet, so I'm going to use pseudonyms in the relation of the story. It has to do with the fact that me and this person shared pretty similar names, so I'm going to call myself Cap, and I'm going to call him Can for the context of the story. In the American educational system, they line you up by alphabetical order, no matter what, wherever you are. So, in elementary school, it was a small group of kids, and I kind of knew everybody that would be around me all the time because ABCD. But in middle school, that was when they combined all of the elementary schools together, and it was suddenly a larger group of kids. And this larger group was going to be the larger group of kids that moved up together all the way into high school. And this is where Cap and Can, Cap and met. Can didn't like Cap. Can didn't fucking like me from the beginning. He He just didn't like me. There's something about me that he didn't like. Maybe I accepted. He perceived that I accepted myself a little bit better or he perceived that I was able to be more free with myself. Mainly because my main goal in life was just to make people laugh. That's all I really wanted to do going through middle school was, oh, these kids like laughing at me? Well, how about I turn around and I make them laugh instead? Because I like laughter too. And if I can make them laugh and I can participate in it, then we can have a joint participatory environment where you're laughing. I'm laughing. We're both enjoying each other's company, even if I'm the one that has to force you to enjoy my company by making you laugh. Can was a fucking hard nut to crack, dude. He sucked. I would always try to make him laugh, and he would always give me. I don't like that. And I would always do these little things and he would sometimes laugh, but then he would get upset at me for the fact that I would make him laugh, so he would give me the But then he would he would laugh for a second, but then clamp it down real quick because he had an image to protect. He had to protect his image amongst the group, amongst the peers, and for me and him to accept each other, for some reason to him that threatened his image amongst his group of smart kids that he was with. Mainly also, too, because I didn't mind intermingling with smart kids or dumb kids. I was in the advanced classes, but I chose to do the fucking standard classes. I was in honors classes, but then I was like, hey, man, I'm pushing myself really hard for nobody fucking actual reward or reason. I'm gonna go back and hang out. I'm gonna go have a fun time with the fucking dumb kids. I'm gonna excel past them, but you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna be a classroom helper. She would pair us up into groups. Multiple math teachers did this too, because I was pretty good at math. and I think they kind of they put together the pattern before I put together the patter pattern and they created an environment that allowed me to express the fullness of my pattern So they would put me in groups with kids and they would be like the kids that I got along with, but also were kind of struggling in math and I would joke along with them and we would make math funny. And I remember sometimes we would like, like mix in our other subjects. Like one time we were sitting and doing math and it was really fucking tedious, dude. And I got I got really bad dry mouth because I rips a dap pin at lunch, so I was like, yo baby lawa. And then I picked up water and I just chugged my entire fucking bottle, dude. And, um It made everybody laugh. There was this tension in the room that everybody just didn't get this fucking math. It was new shit that we were learning just then today and we were having to practice it. Nobody got it in and it broke the tension that everybody was like, oh,o, fuck. That's funny. And then and then after the tension broke, everybody kind of understood a little bit better. You know, our minds were a little bit looser. And that's the real value of laughter is it allows you to enact your neuroplasticity to a higher level, to a higher degree than any other emotion can. Laughter, for some reason facilitates the restructuring and the reorganization of your neurons, and it allows your brain to be more plastic. Maybe it's because the the vibration of laughing, the vibration of laughter, maybe actually sends an actual frequency through your body that jiggles all the fucking connections and all the jelly in your brain so that the jelly settles into a more structured kind of fucking structure of structurized jelly. That's pretty much all your brain really is. It's just structurized jelly that can handle an electrical pattern in a very certain circuit. So it's like, you know, if I just fucking shoot a light bulb with a a thousand volts of fucking electricity, it's going to blow up. But if I if I send 120 volts of electricity through a wire and then through a switch and then I mediate it through the switch and the wire, then that light bulb can stay lit and light up my entire room this entire time. And that's kind of what laughter is, is it's that mediating switch that takes something that's a high pressure, high stress situation, and it allows somebody to dissipate the energy over time and allows them to accept the energy more easily so that it can restructure and change the brain. That's the real true value of laughter and comedy and love right there. It's just a unity feeling. Can did not want to give me that fucking feeling, bro. Can hated me. He hated me. And it would have weighed on me if I hated myself as much as he hated himself. But we were pretty equal in how much we hated ourselves. So when he said, I don't like you, I heard there's something inside of me that I don't like about myself that I perceive that you like about yourself, and for that reason, I don't like you. I endured this shit for fucking years. I would always sit next to him and then I kind of just realize that I'm not gonna make him laugh. So whatever. I'll try my hardest though. I'll keep trying my hardest every day to try and make him laugh every time we to sit together and homoom, every time we get lined up for some kind of thing, every time that we're next to each other, I'm not going to let his negativity get to me and I'm not going to stop trying to make him laugh. And I even said that to him in high school. At a certain point, it was just getting silly. It was just getting ridiculous. So I literally went up to him and I went, you don't like me, huh? And that was a shock to him. He didn't ever expect me to walk up to him and confront him and just say it point blank. You don't like me, huh? And when I did, he went, what? Hmm. No, not really. You're kind of mean. I went, well, that's what you perceive, but mean, I can perceive that your kind of mean as well for not even giving me a chance., well, all right, well, well, you know, man, I'm always trying to make you laugh. You know that none of these jokes are meant to make you feel bad. I'm only ever trying to make you giggle because I want you to realize that we share something and we have a shared commonality between us. That's the only reason why I ever try to make these jokes at you and why I will keep making these jokes, because I know that one day I'm going to get to make you laugh. And I'm going to be able to make you laugh and I can do it. I know I can do it, and I know I'm going to be able to do it one day. Aecdotally. I remember we were taking the SATs. I fucking finish. I took the SATs like hung over and high, and I still got like an 1130 and 1120. So I'm just like, yo, what how well could I have done on the SAs if I actually studied and took it seriously? Because I didn't take that shit seriously at all and I was like, fuck it got a pretty good score. So what if I actually did take that shit pretty seriously? I probably would have done pretty good if I didn't take it hung over and high and fucking just wanted to get it done. but I got it done. I kind of read it over and I was like, yeah, I did the best that I feel like doing on this. And I handed it in and I was sitting there and I had a pencil and I noticed that the pencils they gave us were like weirdly rubbery for like wooden pencils. They must have been like composite wood, not actual wood pencils. And I noticed the structural difference in the wood and stuff. And I noticed that you could actually snap pencils really tiny into these really small little, like blocks because the composite material added a structural integrity weakness kind of thing where it was uniformly structurally weak at certain points that could allow you to snap it very cleanly. Some pencils you snap and they kind of shatter because they're wood. This pencil, you could break it and snap it and it was like breaking off like a like a piece of a tubone. Yeah, there we go. It was like breaking a piece of a tub around. It was like perfectly fucking breaking a piece of a candy bar, chocolate bar or something like that. If you don't know what a Tubeon is, I don't blame you, dude. I didn't know what a Te Laon was for like mad years. Even though, like, they were around me and shit, I didn't connect at the triangle chocolate was a Tobe Lon because everybody thought I was allergic to Tobe Lroness because I'm allergic to nuts. But what we found out later on was that I'm actually not allergic to nuts, and I'm not allergic tooblerrones. And Toblerones are actually pretty fucking awesome. So if you've never had a Tublerone and you're not allergic to nuts, I would recommend go try a toone, but always read the ingredients just in case you do have allergies and you know that you have allergies, that's your thing to handle. Anyways, I had this pencil and I broke it up in really tiny pieces and can was sitting in front of me. He was hunched over doing his SATs and I just wanted to see how many pencils I could stack on his shoulder. So I just started stacking these pencil bits and I didn't know that people were paying attention behind me and around me and shit. I was just focused on like really stealthily placing these pencil bits really like lightly and really quickly and really like, you know, unnoticeably on his shoulder, trying to see how many bits I could placed on his shoulder at once. And eventually, I got up to, like, where his entire shoulders were filled and every bit, everybody started freaking out behind me. They were like, no fucking way. They're like, he's doing it me. Shit. Yeah, dude, that was so fucking funny. And eventually, he was like, why the fuck is there handing it? As soon as he went, why is everyone laughing? It's the fucking pencil rolled off of his shoulder. It's. Now we're getting into the part that's speculation, and I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about it. Because that's everything that I know for certain and for fact. Now we're going into the parts where our lives diverge and I had to use spiritual intuition and also just like hearsay from what people have told me around and stuff like that to fill in the blanks that Can was gay. That was all. Can hated himself because he thought he was different. And he hated me because I was able to accept that I was different in a different way than he was different. and he couldn't understand how he was different and in which ways he was different and why he felt different. So he projected all of that difference onto me. He projected all that hate onto me. He was like, yeah, Adam's this, Adam's that, you know, he must Adam's the epitome of what a fucking gay loser is. So we're gonna pick on Adam. And then that's just something that wasn't even true at all. It was just something. They assumed out of their own funings.. And that took me a really long time. It actually took like me finding Prince. Holy shit, dude. Prince? Prince is a sex symbol that took over the fucking 80s. That was who was fucking everybody's bitch was Prince, bro. What the fuck? Dude, Prince. That fucking redefined the structure inside of my brain where I went. Prince, Prince was the fucking sex emblem of a fucking time. He was the guy that turned himself into a symbol. That's the symbol. That's Prince, the symbol. That's what people called sexy. That was what women were throwing their panties at and shit like that, and it's just wow, I had to redefine how I saw my own self, and that helped me completely put that into a new, completely starkly different perspective, because how many people called it Prince Gay. And how many fucking bitches did Prince plow down? I mean, sorry, not to call it like derogatorily. That was kind of an oddward choice and I apologize towards my fellow bitches out there. Bitches and hoes unite. No, man, like, how many women did fucking Prince plow down? How many groupies did Prince fucking plow through? And people were calling him gay and shit. You know what I mean? That was something that I had to learn. That was a lesson that I had to learn about the truthness and the wholeness of what it means to be a complete human. That was wild. And I imagine that's probably what Can is learning now, and he's very happy and stuff like that. And it definitely, I learned through time that like, it's not a choice. He if he was feeling that way and directing those feelings at me since the beginning and he didn't know why he hated me, he just hated me because of this like perceived I accepted myself more than he was allowed to accept himself kind of thing. Yeah. That's, uh. That's really sad. Um.. And I'm I'm glad that he's learned to accept himself and I'm glad that I'm learning to accept myself too. Because if you listened to the energy episode, you would know that I have a stutter, but I beat the fuck out of myself to get rid of the stutter and recently I quit nicotine and the stutter came back really badly. It's really bad. It feels like the circuitry inside of my brain is stuttering. But it's actually a beautiful opportunity, because as a youth, I learned to work through my stutter by self-directing hate and by self-directing anger towards myself and self-directing perfectionism. And I regretted that a few years ago. I regretted. I said to myself, I only ever learned how to treat myself with anger and hate. I don't know how to treat myself any other way. And I tried. for so long. And I sometimes I thought I was treating myself good and I thought I was treating myself better, but it's like, it's it's like, what is better in reference to the worst ever? You know? and it took me a really long time, but now I get to accept myself as somebody who has a starter and I get to love myself for it. And I get to move through this stutter in a different way, because if you're noticing I'm not stuttering on every single word, it's just this feeling of love inside of my heart that if I can keep it going, it will stop me at the right points that sound like I'm Captain Kirk or some shit. Love gives me the pantameter that I need in order to not be stopped up by the stutters and all of the circuitry misfiring and things like that. So I get to learn how to self-direct and redirect love towards my own self this time. And I think that's a beautiful thing, and I think that was a beautiful lesson to that can had to learn too, that he can do it. He could do it. And he can love himself too, just like you can love yourself too. Just like I can love myself too, despite all of my shortcomings, despite all of my, you know, achievements too, all my greatness and all of my failures, I can still learn how to love myself. And I think that everybody can, even after 10 years of nicotine use where it just seemed like it was no change in me, no hope, no use, it just that that was a feature of my personality and who I was. And I did that for 10 years. And one day I just decided enough is enough, and I stopped. And it was it was so difficult that I actually couldn't do anything for five days straight and not even eight. I fasted. And I fasted for five days straight as this current poured through me and I could feel I'm just going to chalk it up to everything. And those that have felt everything will know exactly what I mean. And those that have not felt everything, that's the start of your journey right there. And I just want to close it off on this that my head didn't eat for five days, and I worked really hard to move from somebody that was food restrictive and borderline anorexic to somebody gaining weight and holding weight on their body, it took me a really long time to do that. It took me a lot of hard work to get to a weight that I was proud and happy of having on my body. And I didn't eat for those five days. And my mom's said, you're going to undo all of your good work that you did to yourself. All of that time that you spent gaining weight, she was trying to add this doubt into me. And you know what? I didn't believe her. I didn't let it settle into my body. I went, "No, you're just trying to add doubt to my beliefs, and I know that my faith is strong. and I got weight at the doctor the other day and I didn't lose a single pound. In fact, I gained weight. So... I can do it. You can do it. We can do it.