Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the show. Hope you guys are having a great day, great evening, great week, great weekend, great month, great year. And if not, that's all right. We're going to distract you. We're going to put your mind on other things. We're going to do a healthy form of compartmentalization and distraction because that's what self-care and coping mechanisms are. Sometimes the

world coming out as full force is far more intense than we have the internal mechanisms and

forms of coping to tolerate and deal with. And so we sometimes got to like put a pin in it,

come back to it, step outside. I wanted to open the show by talking about a topic that came in

through my DMs, actually.

I thought it was like a really big question.

And the question was, is it possible that I am too broken, too damaged, too traumatized to be someone's partner and to date or be in a relationship?

And I thought, what an honest question.

My first thought was I at least love the self-awareness that this question

implies.

Someone sitting and paying attention and owning who they are and caring about the fact that,

like I say on the show, over and over and over, whenever we're a part of someone's life

in whatever capacity, professionally, romantically, romantically sexually familiarly whatever it is we impact them and really

looking at what kind of impact am I am I having on others am I making people's lives harder and

worse more complicated more toxic or is my presence enhancing I want us all to want to be the

enhancing option you know that that people walk to be the enhancing option, you know,

that people walk away from having spent time with you feeling better. So I love that inherently

built into the question is I'm tracking this person saying my level of functioning and I'm aware

that that impacts the lives of those around me. And when I'm

in a romantic relationship with someone, especially if it's a primary position or role, right,

exclusive, primary and monogamous, whatever it might be, that then I'm really impacting their

functioning in mental health. What are they taking on in bringing me into their life? And I want

...