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The Pancake, the Puzzle, and the Unlocked Door · Ryan's Journal

• 0:07
  I can't stop thinking about the pancake.
• 0:09
  Ryan says his life flips senior year.
• 0:12
  Wiffle ball on one side, the UFO story on the other, nothing in between.
• 0:16
  And all I can think is, any cook will tell you a pancake doesn't flip clean.
• 0:21
  There's a second where it's up in the air and it's neither side.
• 0:24
  I love that you took it to the kitchen.
• 0:26
  And honestly, anyone who's cooked for a family knows the first pancake is always a
• 0:30
  casualty.
• 0:31
  But your point stands.
• 0:32
  I wonder if the flip is how he tells it now, not necessarily how it felt then.
• 0:37
  We keep a tidy before and after.
• 0:39
  Memory doesn't.
• 0:41
  So wiffle ball is the good side.
• 0:43
  Neighbors in Manson, Iowa, no UFO story anywhere.
• 0:46
  And I get why that side glows.
• 0:48
  But when something glows that hard, I get a little suspicious.
• 0:51
  There's a name for it.
• 0:53
  Rosy retrospection.
• 0:55
  In one study I read about, people on a multi day bicycle trip rated it as mediocre
• 0:59
  while they were living it, sore legs, bad weather, the whole thing.
• 1:03
  A month later they remembered a great adventure.
• 1:07
  The neuropsychologist Alan Hirsch describes nostalgia as a longing for a sanitized
• 1:11
  impression of the past, where the negative emotions get filtered out.
• 1:15
  So the wiffle ball summers probably had an argument about a foul ball and somebody
• 1:18
  going home mad.
• 1:19
  Probably, but I shouldn't claim what happened in Manson.
• 1:23
  Ryan knows that, we don't.
• 1:25
  What I'm asking is whether the clean line between innocent and haunted is one memory
• 1:29
  doing its editing job.
• 1:30
  When he says the UFO story is absent in wiffle ball, maybe it is.
• 1:35
  Or maybe it's absent from the highlight reel, which isn't the same thing.
• 1:38
  Okay, but let me push back on us.
• 1:40
  Ryan isn't just being sentimental.
• 1:42
  He says this thing isn't shared, nobody else was in it, and it brought panic,
• 1:47
  tears, paranoia.
• 1:48
  That's not a rosy edit.
• 1:50
  That's heavy.
• 1:51
  I'm not going to tell a man what he went through.
• 1:53
  Agreed.
• 1:54
  I'm not calling his distress a trick of memory.
• 1:57
  I'm questioning the frame around it.
• 1:59
  One source I read says we don't really miss the past, we miss ourselves in the past.
• 2:05
  Younger, lighter.
• 2:06
  And the research it cites says the years people idealize most sit roughly between
• 2:12
  eight and nineteen.
• 2:14
  So maybe he isn't grieving wiffle ball.
• 2:16
  He's grieving the kid who hadn't picked up the weight yet.
• 2:19
  And notice what he actually asks for.
• 2:21
  He says his brain wants to go back to wiffle ball, minus the UFO story.
• 2:25
  A subtraction.
• 2:26
  The brain wants the childhood with one piece surgically removed.
• 2:29
  Which you can't do with a song either.
• 2:30
  You can't pull out the verse you hate and keep the chorus.
• 2:33
  Same song, different song, whatever.
• 2:35
  You carry the whole record.
• 2:36
  The classroom image is the one that stays with me.
• 2:38
  A teacher who won't let him leave.
• 2:40
  Since 1998, and now it's 2026, so twenty eight years of being kept after class.
• 2:46
  The kid says I'm tired, I want to go, and the teacher says no.
• 2:50
  But who's the teacher?
• 2:51
  He never says.
• 2:52
  And that's what bugs me.
• 2:54
  Somebody is holding the door shut, and we never see their face.
• 2:57
  So here's the question I'd want to ask him, gently.
• 3:00
  What if nobody's standing at the door?
• 3:02
  Whoa.
• 3:02
  Okay.
• 3:02
  Say more.
• 3:03
  Acceptance and commitment therapy, ACT, was created by Steven Hayes in 1986.
• 3:09
  One of its core ideas is cognitive defusion.
• 3:11
  The therapist Emma McAdam describes it as the difference between having a thought
• 3:15
  and buying a thought.
• 3:17
  And one source on intrusive thoughts says ACT tells you to stop looking for answers
• 3:21
  and accept your reality as is.
• 3:23
  Now, it sounds cold at first, but think about the puzzle.
• 3:27
  Ryan says no matter how many pieces he puts in, it's never done.
• 3:30
  So maybe the puzzle isn't the problem.
• 3:32
  The rule that says you have to finish it before you're allowed to leave is the
• 3:35
  problem.
• 3:36
  Right.
• 3:36
  The finishing is what keeps him in the chair.
• 3:38
  But come on.
• 3:39
  It's easy to say from out here.
• 3:41
  If something's been in my head for twenty eight years and I don't know if it's true,
• 3:45
  hearing don't solve it sounds like being told to ignore a smoke alarm.
• 3:48
  Fair.
• 3:49
  And ACT isn't ignoring.
• 3:51
  It's not fighting either.
• 3:53
  A psychologist at Cleveland Clinic, Lauren Alexander, says pushing intrusive
• 3:56
  thoughts away is never going to work.
• 3:59
  So two exits fail.
• 4:00
  Solving it, and shoving it down.
• 4:02
  The third option is looking at the thought.
• 4:05
  Saying, I notice I'm having the thought that, and then seeing it instead of seeing
• 4:09
  everything through it.
• 4:10
  Like a melody stuck in your head.
• 4:13
  You go, oh, there's that chorus again.
• 4:15
  Doesn't mean you have to perform it.
• 4:16
  Exactly.
• 4:18
  And Ryan already does a little of it.
• 4:20
  He says he's skeptical, he thinks it might be a scam, he's sick of it.
• 4:24
  That's someone standing slightly outside the thought, deciding whether to buy it.
• 4:28
  He's got the receipt in his hand and he's squinting at it.
• 4:31
  Ha, yes.
• 4:32
  One honest caveat.
• 4:34
  We're a podcast, not therapists.
• 4:36
  These are ideas from the sources, not a diagnosis or a plan.
• 4:40
  If this loop is wearing him down, a professional who can really know him is worth
• 4:44
  it.
• 4:44
  And I'd add, an unlocked door isn't denial.
• 4:47
  Maybe the teacher's voice is just a thought wearing a teacher costume.
• 4:51
  Can we talk about Alexa?
• 4:53
  A man asks a smart speaker about multitasking and builds an entire ledger out of the
• 4:57
  answer.
• 4:58
  It's a very human thing to do.
• 4:59
  And let's keep the numbers as Alexa gave them.
• 5:02
  About two point five percent of people are true super taskers,
• 5:05
  and switching back and forth can shave off up to forty percent of productivity.
• 5:09
  Up to.
• 5:10
  And that's about switching between demanding tasks.
• 5:13
  Ryan turns it into a standing bill.
• 5:15
  Forty percent gone before the day starts, sixty left for coffee.
• 5:18
  I get the feeling, though.
• 5:19
  Anyone who's stood in front of a crowd knows what it's like when half your head
• 5:23
  leaves the room.
• 5:24
  Worry hijacks the bandwidth.
• 5:26
  That part is real.
• 5:27
  It is.
• 5:28
  And from my side, art plus three kids, my attention is divided all the time.
• 5:33
  The studio brain and the school pickup brain.
• 5:35
  Nobody gets a full hundred.
• 5:37
  What I've learned is that auditing the percentage doesn't help.
• 5:40
  A fixed number turns tiredness into a debt you can never pay.
• 5:44
  It's more useful to ask what I'm doing with what's actually here today.
• 5:47
  But then come the hammers.
• 5:49
  Eighteen months of four to five hours of sleep a night.
• 5:52
  Oxygen since 2015.
• 5:54
  A lazy eye for forty eight years.
• 5:56
  Those aren't metaphors.
• 5:57
  No, and I won't shrink them.
• 6:00
  That's real load.
• 6:02
  Ten years on oxygen is a body doing hard work every day.
• 6:05
  A tired mind with all that on top isn't a character flaw.
• 6:09
  It's what you'd expect.
• 6:10
  And then he turns to us.
• 6:11
  Zero to five.
• 6:12
  Are you gonna give me the goose egg?
• 6:14
  I'm going to decline.
• 6:15
  Not to dodge him.
• 6:17
  A score turns suffering into an exam, and Ryan, it sounds like you've been grading
• 6:22
  yourself for twenty eight years.
• 6:24
  I don't think the answer is a better grade from me.
• 6:27
  Right.
• 6:27
  Give him a five and it's pity.
• 6:29
  Give him a zero and I'm the teacher who locks the door.
• 6:31
  Either way I'm sitting at the front of the room with a red pen.
• 6:34
  And exhaustion isn't the whole measure of a person who journals,
• 6:37
  makes coffee, cooks, and shows up to make a podcast.
• 6:41
  Carrying all of that and still sitting down to talk about it isn't a zero.
• 6:45
  It's not a goose egg.
• 6:46
  It's a whole lot of omelet.
• 6:47
  Ha.
• 6:48
  Okay, back to the griddle.
• 6:50
  Maybe the pancake never flipped.
• 6:51
  Maybe it's still cooking, and he gets to decide what to do with it,
• 6:54
  instead of finishing the whole stack.
• 6:56
  One video I watched on rosy retrospection ends with a question,
• 7:00
  and I'll leave it here for him.
• 7:02
  If your memory is a storyteller, who is the audience?
• 7:05
  Because Ryan, maybe you're allowed to walk out of that room and still tell the
• 7:09
  story.