Get something to write with. Not your phone. Not your laptop. An actual pen and an actual piece of paper. I'll wait.

This episode is about the specific person — the one you're convinced you have to have, the one you're trying to manifest, the one you keep going back to. And I'm going to tell you something about that pursuit that most people in the manifestation world are not going to want to hear.

But first, the exercise.

Draw a line down the middle of that paper. At the top write: What I'd like to have in a relationship. Left side write Me.Right side write Them.

Then leave the left side alone. For now.

On the right side — the them side — write down everything. Height. Weight. Eye color. Personality. What you'd do together. How it would feel. Your specific person if you've got one. All of it. Let it flow all day as things come to you. Don't edit it. Don't judge it. Don't share it with a single living soul — not your best friend, nobody.

The left side is what the next episode is about.

I've been in what I will straight-facedly call the best relationship on the planet for coming up on nine years. I wasn't supposed to have it. Didn't think I was worth it. Here's part of how I got here.

Do the work on the paper. Come back for the next one.

I jumped out of bed to record this one. That's how I knew it needed to be said.

I spent most of my life letting everyone else define love for me. My parents. The church. The culture. Shakespeare. The self-help books. Esther Hicks. Wayne Dyer. The list goes on. And I took all of it in and I tried to live inside somebody else's definition of a thing I desperately wanted and couldn't seem to hold onto.

Four marriages. Four divorces. Multiple DUIs. A drinking problem I was using as a slow suicide. A man who thought of himself in the third person because he felt so separate from who he actually was — so broken, so unlovable, that it was only a matter of time before anyone who got close enough figured it out and left.

That man needed someone to say: you're not broken. Your thinking is maybe a little jacked up, but you're not broken.

This episode is about what I had to do before any methodology or process or tool could work. Before Abraham. Before Neville Goddard. Before any of it. I had to decide for myself what love was supposed to feel like for me. Not what anyone told me. Me.

Until you do that, you're going to spin. I promise you that.

I said all of that and then went back to bed with my wife and ate cookies. That's the dream come true nobody tells you about.

I didn't plan this one. I almost didn't record it.

This morning during my little ritual before I got behind the microphone, something hit me that I've never let myself think before. I was beat with an extension cord as a child. And in that moment, I dissociated — stood across the room watching it happen, holding the hand of what I thought was an angel by the window.

This morning I wondered for the first time: what if that was me? What if it was my 57-year-old self holding that little boy's hand, squeezing it gently, saying it's going to be okay?

I've got tears going down my face recording this. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

This episode isn't about the how. It's not a method or a process. It's a confession and it's a truth — that you are an extraordinary person in a world that has spent a lot of time making you feel like you aren't. And at some point you're going to have to get a little selfish. You're going to have to turn toward yourself with the same compassion you've probably spent your whole life giving everyone else.

Maybe it's time to kneel down, hold your younger self's face, and say it'll be okay.