I started seeing a therapist a decade ago. Why? I bet you’d like to know, you greedy vulture. I get it though. We all want to know that kind of juicy information. The most interesting thing about you is whatever you’re trying to hide. Properly inflated tires are a snooze, tell me why your Check Engine light is on. 

A: I was in a funk. A job I’d had for over a decade and a longterm relationship ended at the same time. (Let’s just say both ended “with cause.”) Also, I was a few years into a middling standup career, which involved spending most nights on the NYC open mic circuit hanging out in basements and dive bars surrounded by (best case) delusional narcissists desperate for attention and (worst case) straight up mentally ill people. (Nothing attracts crazies more than a captive audience and the opportunity for amplification.)

After years of immersing myself in that scene, it started to feel like the stink was getting on me. Or an even scarier thought: What if it was coming from me? A fellow struggling comedian who had been in a bad place seemed to have turned a corner and mentioned how his therapist helped. I got her name and began my weekly visits to an office near Union Square where a kind Jewish lady the same age as me kept asking, “And how did that land with you?”

When someone tells you why they’re in therapy, it’s a real “buyer beware” though. Many people don’t actually know the real reason why – even if they think they do. “The presenting problem” (i.e. the issue that sends a person into therapy) is often just a symptom of a deeper issue, if not a total red herring. 

🧠 JOKE 🧠 The jungle gives you ayahuasca. The desert gives you peyote. The forest gives you mushrooms. The city gives you therapists.

I should mention this wasn’t actually my first time seeing a counselor.

Flashback: One day in middle school, I was walking up a steep hill alongside my mother. She was having a tough time with the climb and told me she’d recently been diagnosed with a disease I’d never heard of, something called Multiple Sclerosis. I didn’t make much of it at the time, but the disease soon began to grow like ivy all over our family. 

The first sign of change was a literal move, to a single-floor house that didn’t require her to use stairs. That meant I had to switch schools in eighth grade, which didn’t go smoothly. I began struggling with my grades and a guidance counselor at the school recommended family counseling to discuss my mom’s diagnosis.

So each week, my parents, sister, and I drove to a shrink’s office to discuss how we felt. My dad wasn’t exactly a talker so he just sat there. And neither my sister nor I really wanted to be there. So we didn’t make much progress. My main memory of that period is listening to my cassette tape of Appetite for Destruction on headphones over and over during the rides there. I had no idea what “Mr. Brownstone” was about, but it felt like I was graduating from pop music to something darker and more adult.

We only made it a few months before unanimously deciding to abandon the process. That cemented in my head that therapy was a waste of time and therapists didn’t know what they were doing. 

🧠 JOKE 🧠 My therapist told me I need to get better at asking for help and stop embracing such a lone-wolf mentality. That’s when I realized it was time for me to stop going to therapy. I coulda figured that out on my own.

But decades later, I was back on the couch. The topic that kept coming up week after week: My fear of getting older and being alone. College buddies and other normie peers were “graduating” into marriage and parenthood. Yet here I was spending my nights gallivanting around the city, getting paid in drink tickets, and pursuing partners ill-suited for a long-term pairing.

At the same time, I was deathly afraid of “settling down.” This Bill Burr quote was my mindset:

Realize that sleeping on a futon when you're 30 is not the worst thing. You know what's worse, sleeping in a king bed next to a wife you're not really in love with but for some reason you married, and you got a couple kids, and you got a job you hate. You'll be laying there fantasizing about sleeping on a futon. There's no risk when you go after a dream. There's a tremendous amount to risk to playing it safe.

I had a lifelong fear of winding up paralyzed in the suburbs surrounded by uptight squares. (Hmm, paralyzed. Interesting word choice.)

Either way, I felt squeezed. I didn’t want to wind up stuck in arrested adolescence, yet I was feeling increasingly isolated. As you get older, it becomes tougher to make friends. Despite living in a city of millions and spending most nights performing in front of crowds, I was lonely. Loneliness is the dirty little secret of the city. All that activity and bustling around is a powerful distraction. But when things slow down, you notice the gaps.

So I showed up to therapy seeking a roadmap on how to make things better. But that’s not what I got. In fact, I bristled at a lot of what went down in our sessions…

Issue #1: Can we please stop obsessing over my feelings?

The constant refrain of my therapist: “How did that make you feel?” Or the aforementioned “And how did that land with you?” (She stopped using that second phrase because I began chuckling every time it was uttered.)

Ugh, again with this feelings crap? I didn’t have a vocabulary to discuss emotions and I didn’t really want to either. Truth is I don’t really feel much of anything. That’s some kind of superpower, right? Turns out being an emotional robot is a mixed bag at best.

After repeated queries from my therapist, I began to consider why I was so numb. Turns out feeling numb isn't the absence of feelings, it’s a response to being overwhelmed by them. It’s a way of shutting down. It’s not that I wasn’t feeling anything, I was blocking my feelings which (along with self-medication) was a strategy for avoiding their root causes.

I remember taking a Meisner class and there was a week where my therapist and my acting coach both gave me the exact same advice: “Let your feelings come to the surface.” I had to get out of my rational, analytical mind and into the messier swamp of anger, fear, sadness, joy, etc.

🧠 JOKE 🧠 My therapist once asked me if I thought I was on the spectrum. I refused to answer the question. She was like, “Is that too personal?” I was like, "I just don't get the phrase 'on the spectrum,' because you know what's on the spectrum? Everything, that's how spectrums work. That's the whole point of the word spectrum. It's a totality that includes the subset. There's nothing that's off the spectrum. So how could I possibly say what's on the spectrum? Can you name a color that’s not on the color spectrum? No, that’d be a black hole. So I reject the entire premise of the question 'Are you on the spectrum?'” She just stared at me. So, obviously, I am on the spectrum. Anyone who cares that much about spectrums is totally on one.

Issue #2: Can’t you just tell me what to do?

What I really wanted was actionable advice. Tell me what to do that will make things right. But my therapist refused to give me the tactical advice I craved. She wouldn’t decide what to do for me – and it probably wouldn’t stick unless I decided it for myself anyway.

Plus, there weren’t actually any simple answers or “one right path” here. For example, the loneliness stuff. Yes, part of me wanted a partner and a family while another part was terrified by the notion. But my therapist encouraged me to consider that perhaps what I was really seeking was connection – and there are a variety of ways to get that. Maybe I could volunteer, mentor, join some kind of group/community, or do something else to fill that hole. Also worth considering: Even if I did any/all of the above, maybe I’d still feel the same way. What would I do then?

There were career frustrations too. The more you climb the ladder, the higher you want to go. How do I level up? Her answer was a non-answer. Instead, she encouraged me to think about why I started on this path in the first place and reconnect to that initial excitement. “What would you make if you weren’t trying to get somewhere with it?” she asked. Instead of obsessing about auditions and the like, she encouraged a reframing: Create something simply because it’s what you want to create. Don’t worry about how the rest of the world feels about it. Get back to a state of play.

It reminded me of the lyrics to a stripped-down White Stripes song:

Well, you're in your little room and you're working on something good
But if it's really good, you're gonna need a bigger room
And when you're in the bigger room, you might not know what to do
You might have to think of how you got started sitting in your little room

You might have to think of how you got started sitting in your little room.

Issue #3: Do I have to talk about my childhood?

I didn’t want to drag up all those old memories. I didn’t want to talk about how I’d faked injuries as a little kid during soccer games. I don’t know why I did it. But childhood is the elephant in every therapist’s room and you’re gonna have to talk it out at some point.

Talking about soccergate made me realize it was probably the only way I had to get attention from my withholding father. Maybe I wasn’t crying out in legitimate pain, but I was crying out for attention. Growing up in the “suck it up”/”walk it off” world of 80s Rambo culture, that left me feeling weak and ashamed. Heck, I still beat myself up about it all these years later.

That craving for attention hasn’t left. I’ve spent my adult life on stage seeking the validation and approval of strangers. Therapy helped me realize how a childhood spent with avoidant, withdrawn parents may have planted the seeds for that.

🧠 JOKE 🧠 My therapist asked me if I have do stand-up comedy because my mom was funny. I thought about it and I said I don't think so, my mom wasn't funny. In fact, I don't really remember seeing her smile at all. So I don't think that's why I do standup. I mean, honestly, my mom was kind of depressed. Nothing I would do would ever make her laugh. So that’s definitely not why I get up in front of a group full of strangers every night and try to make them…Oh, wow. Good job. I’ll be back next week.   

Issue #4: You’re gonna blame it all on my mom, aren’t you?

Blame it on the mother. It’s a therapy cliché and we don’t need to get all hack about it, I thought. Besides, I’d always told myself my mother's illness didn’t really impact me that much.

But that began to feel impossible. How could it not? I saw this wild, adventurous woman get beat up slowly, as if by a feather, transitioning from walking slowly, to needing a cane, to using a walker, to requiring a wheelchair, to being paralyzed. Not to mention what all that did to my dad. It’s said that a family is a dictatorship ruled over by its most dysfunctional member. In many ways, my mother’s dysfunction came to rule our family. 

In retrospect, it was the slow crawl of it all that was especially searing. A car crash or other sudden shift is instantaneous. It still sucks but at least the bandage is ripped off quickly. Chronic decline is a different flavor though. Seeing the sword coming at you yields another level of terror – or encourages one to just withdraw emotionally in order to avoid the oncoming pain.

For most of my life, I tried to see the positive in how my mother responded to her illness: Despite it all, she kept a surprisingly positive frame of mind. She didn't complain or get mad about her fate. She decided it meant her journey was now an inward one. My takeaway: Don’t complain. After all, it could be worse. 

Plus, she had lived a bohemian life filled with fascinating experiences when she was young. With her illness, she seemed grateful for that period of her life. My takeaway here: Your body is your vessel. Use it now, while you can, and squeeze out every last drop. There is no guarantee your 10, 20, or 40 year plan will ever make contact with reality. 

It started to dawn on me these lessons I internalized had a downside though. I had little compassion for the complaints of others (including myself). I began to find kvetching of any sort reprehensible and developed a compassion deficit.

And sure, it’s good to be wild when you’re young, but there’s something out of alignment if you’re intent on staying that way forever. Adulthood and maturation are inevitable and it’s unwise to make an enemy of the inevitable. Even before her illness, my mom had abandoned her bohemian life, moved to the ‘burbs, and raised a family. Wild comes with an expiration date.

This “on the other hand” kind of reflecting became a recurring theme. I was forced to accept that things that helped me in certain areas of my life could be destructive in others. A character trait that aided my career could be harmful within my relationships.

My desire for “right” answers ignored the reality that there simply aren’t binary right/wrong solutions to much of life. Instead, I had to get in the mud, wrestle with my feelings, and figure out what felt in-tune for me.

🧠 JOKE 🧠 Therapy weirds me out because you show up, sit up on the couch, and notice there’s a box of tissues right next to you. It’s like, damn, that’s pretty cocky. What is this, the 9/11 museum? It's incredible you're that confident that at some point in the next 45 minutes I’m going to start masturbating. Whoa, dude. You’re not that hot. I can wait until the subway ride home.

Issue #5: Do I really have to meditate?

My therapist’s answer to everything seemed to be meditation. Makes sense since her specialty was MBSR (mindfulness-based stress reduction), which is what Western people say when they need to launder Eastern philosophy. Start quoting a monk and they’ll kick you out of med school, but if you’ve got an academia-approved acronym like MBSR, they’ll let it slide. “Buddhism” sounds like some religious crap, but “mindfulness” is something we can teach coders at Google and military drone operators. 

For years, I resisted meditating. I didn’t understand what it had to do with my issues. And it was boring (especially compared to the dozens of browser tabs I could be perusing instead). But eventually I gave in (thanks Andy) and began to see a thread through my various struggles. Meditation didn’t solve them, but it built a muscle of reflection and perspective.

I’ve come to see the real gift of meditation as the moment between when you feel something and how you react to it. It’s a moment that contains a lifetime. Instead of lunging at your feelings, you notice them happening and can respond at least slightly mindfully. Instead of being dragged along by the horse, you get to be the jockey.

So what’s on the other side of these years of talking? I wished I could say I’m cured and life’s a breeze now. No such luck. We’re all in the mud. Constantly. I’ve learned it’s how you respond that matters.

Athletes often talk about how playing their sport changes as they gain experience. "The game slowed down for me," they say.

For football players, [this] translates into seeing plays develop more slowly and spotting gaps in the defense with enough time to capitalize on them. In basketball, the spacing on the floor opens up long enough to allow your mind to realize it and thrust a one-arm bounce-pass through it. For baseball players, it's the speed of the ball that slows down, which is important, seeing as it is impossible for the human brain to make a conscious decision as quick as it takes a major leaguer to hit an approaching 95mph fastball.

That feels a lot like what I’ve gotten from therapy. My anger develops more slowly now. I can spot gaps in my own sadness. The spacing in my love life opens up long enough for my mind to realize it and throw a bounce-pass through it. I see patterns developing earlier. And more often, I’m choosing my responses instead of having responses choose me. Being a patient has taught me patience. The game’s slowed down for me.

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[Live] NYC 1/22/22: Misguided Meditation

Misguided Meditation is my comedy show about mindfulness. Come hear me discuss therapy, death, psychedelics, meditation, and more – in a funny way – this Saturday night in NYC. Here’s what Dr. Lisa Levy had to say about the last one:

Attendees also get a free yoga mat and cocktail courtesy of Misguided Spirits. And there are visuals and an ambient soundscape too. It’s a goddamn fandango! Tickets/info here ($5 off with code “breathe”).

🅼🅰🆃🆃 💎 🆁🆄🅱🆈 @mattruby

Misguided Meditation 🧘 1/22 in NYC - We’ve peaked & receded * - Ambient soundscape - Visuals - $5 off with code “breathe” - You get a complimentary yoga mat & cocktail courtesy of Misguided Spirits - Proof of vaxx required * Talking about my hairline. bitly.com/mmshowticketsJAN 22 Misguided Meditation with Matt Ruby: A comedy show about mindfulnessPSYCHEDELICS. THERAPY. MEDITATION. DEATH. TECH. ZEN. COMEDY. Let’s get into it!bitly.com

January 18th 2022

1 Retweet1 Like

Quickies

rubymatt

A post shared by Matt Ruby (@rubymatt)

🌀 People who dabble in QAnon but aren't convinced should be called Qrious.

🌀 Autocorrect changed "monogram" to "monogamy" and now my gf wants to talk about why I got her a monogamy pillow.

🌀 To sum up our society: We’re too busy having work done to do the work.

🌀 I’m now pre-screening any pandemic conversation. Before I listen to your opinion on vaccines, I need to know if you believe any of the following are true:

• Aliens exist

• Angels are real

• The election was stolen

• 9/11 was an inside job

• Jews will replace us

🌀 More and more, I realize how much I actually liked gatekeepers. Before, I thought they were blocking the worthy. Now, I realize they were keeping out the barbarians.

🌀 Online dating: Dudes holding up a big fish and women wearing a fake mustache. Proving yet again we truly don’t understand each other at all.

🅼🅰🆃🆃 💎 🆁🆄🅱🆈 @mattruby

Relationship advice: Your partner is not arguing with you. They are arguing with their parent. You're just in the way.

January 14th 2022

2 Retweets80 Likes

🌀 The closest standup comedians ever get to playing acoustic is doing a show that’s either new material or crowdwork: "It's not me at my best, but it's better than nothing!"

🌀 I’m tired of people dumping on experts. I love experts: people who went to med school, fly planes, build rockets, etc. Their hard work has allowed me to be a lazy bum.

🅼🅰🆃🆃 💎 🆁🆄🅱🆈 @mattruby

Just read some Covid treatment is "100% effective in preventing death." Um, no, it's not. Because NOTHING is 100% effective in preventing death. There's a 100% chance you'll die. I feel like the Men's Wearhouse guy but for death: Eventually you're going to die. I GUARANTEE it!

January 15th 2022

4 Likes

🌀 This "Let's Go Brandon" thing is so goddamn dumb. Adults acting like a bunch of naughty third graders. Next up: "Wrong! What I said was SCHMUCK YOU." OK, cool!

🌀 Pandemic is the final nail in the coffin of the party sub. RIP you too tall/long/mayo’d sandwiches that no one could fit in their mouths, and all the cold cuts slipped off after the first bite, but hey it was a cheap way to feed a third grader's birthday party. We’ll miss you!

Vooza @voozahq

NFTs 1) Provenance - the chronology of the ownership/location of an object 2) NFTs are merely digital provenance 3) Provenance is helpful for items that are of genuine value 4) But worthless crap's still worthless crap, even if you can track where it's been and who owns it

January 17th 2022

2 Likes

🌀 2009: "[Goldman Sachs] is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,” wrote Matt Taibbi.
2022: People pay for Taibbi's Substack using a Goldman Sachs/Apple credit card.
Conclusion: The vampire squid always wins in the end.

🌀 I love the way southerners use the phrase “bless her heart” to mean someone's either a wonderful person or mentally ill.

5-spotted

1) I Was a Bartender at a Strip Club. Here’s What I Learned about the Men Who Went There.

Ready to make it rain? Here we go: Paloma told all the men that this was her first gig as a stripper and she was still a little nervous. She said that she knew she was supposed to act sexy, but it still felt awkward for her and she knew she was crossing the line by being too friendly with the guy. All she really wanted to do was make enough money to enroll in a veterinary assistant course because she loved animals so much. Did he know she had five dogs growing up?

Cha-ching.

This story is chock full of the precise combination of details that make men believe the one enduring fairytale about gentlemen’s clubs that no one wants to debunk: they might find the love of their life there. 

2) Naval Ravikant on anxiety, scarcity, and abundance:

We’re not meant to check our phone every five minutes. The constant mood swings of getting a “like” then an angry comment makes us into anxious creatures. We evolved for scarcity but live in abundance. There’s a constant struggle to say no when your genes always want to say yes. Yes to sugar. Yes to staying in this relationship. Yes to alcohol. Yes to drugs. Yes, yes, yes. Our bodies don’t know how to say no.

3) Marianne Williamson on attracting unavailable people.

"People are always saying to me, 'I keep attracting unavailable people,' " Williamson said. "I used to say that all the time. But you know what I found out? The unavailable person was me. The flip side of being attracted to unavailable people is how bored you are by available people. Available people are terrifying, because they want to hang around long enough to know you, to like you, to accept you. The problem is not that you attract unavailable people—the problem is that you give them your number."

4) Great thread on “the wild visual genius of Hitchcock in the 1950s.” Click through for more images. Reminded me of how Kubrick started as a photographer.

Tony Tost @tonytost

The wild visual genius of Hitchcock in the 1950s:

December 26th 2021

594 Retweets3,871 Likes

5) Penn Jillette: The Sublime Beauty of My Friend Bob Saget’s Filthy Comedy.

The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg understood that this kind of gamble was intrinsic to great art. He is said to have said, “The poet always stands naked before the world.” I think there’s more to it. The artist must bravely say, “I am going to show the world who I am, and I trust that someone will understand.”

Real art, beautiful art, is always a scary act of trust. We look to art to see another person’s heart. That human connection is all that matters. For me, it is a reason to live.

Thanks for reading. Please consider sharing/subscribing! See you next week.

-Matt

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