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Episode 167: How Hobbes Sparked
376 Plays2 years ago
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome back to another episode of the Goblin Lore Podcast! Today it's Hobbes's turn to be solo and he had no clue what to do so he asked all of you... Thanks to Dan we found our topic. How did Hobbes get into psychology. This episode uses Andy Zupke's profile of Hobbes to ask the important question. When/Why/How did Hobbes spark?
Again we would like to state that Black Lives Matter
We also are proud to have partnered with Grinding Coffee Co a black, LGBT+ affiliated and owned, coffee business that is aimed at providing coffee to gamers. You can read more about their mission here. You can use our partner code for discounted coffee!
We also finally have a Linktree with all of our discounts/resources
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As promised, we keep Mental Health Links available every episode. But For general Mental Health the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has great resources for people struggling with mental health concerns as well as their families. We also want to draw attention to this article on stigma from NAMI's site.
If you’re thinking about suicide or just need someone to talk to right now, you can get support from any of the resources below.
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988
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- International suicide hotlines: A comprehensive resource list for people outside the US.
- IMAlive: Click Chat Now to access a live online network of volunteers through instant messaging.
- TrevorLifeline, TrevorChat, and TrevorText (LGBTQ+ crisis support): 1-866-488-7386, or text “Trevor” to 1-202-304-1200
- Trans Lifeline (US): (877) 565-8860
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Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art by Steven Raffael (@SteveRaffle)
Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast, and a part of their growing Vorthos content – as well as Magic content of all kinds. Check them out at hipstersofthecoast.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Solo Hosting
00:00:30
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers and welcome to another episode of the Goblin Lore podcast. Today you have Hobbs Q with you. That's me. My pronouns are he him. I am one half of the Goblin Lore podcast and I'm going to be giving you all a little bit of a solo episode today. Alex has picked up the slack recently. We've just been struggling to kind of be able to record and I can say that a lot of this has been
00:00:56
Speaker
my schedule and just my own mood. And some of these things have really made it kind of difficult for us to be able to have times that work and overlap. And I think that's something that we've
00:01:07
Speaker
Consistently had to battle against over the years and you know, this has just been one of those times the last month or so I have been sick I had family that was sick. I had no voice at one point when we were supposed to record we've been looking to get our guest scheduled that we have coming up and with that Alex really picked up the slack the last couple of weeks and
00:01:27
Speaker
And unfortunately, we were supposed to get a record on Sunday, but I was not able to, and Alex was kind of busy for the rest of the week.
Partnerships and Community Involvement
00:01:34
Speaker
And I thought that I would kind of use it to come and talk to you all. So before we get started, I just wanted to kind of give a shout out to the Grinding Coffee Company. They are a minority-owned LGBT-run and operated coffee company that offers coffee to gamers. I mean, that's really who their target audience is and what their mission statement is.
00:01:56
Speaker
is kind of trying to increase the voices that we would love to see increased. They've been very engaged in the charity events that we have worked on and really engaged with kind of
00:02:08
Speaker
helping us however we have needed to be helped. This partnership has just been so beneficial. Alex always jokes about it. When I'm not here and he has to give this little spiel about them, he's always like, yep, he doesn't really drink coffee and I don't really know what to say. But I do and it is still one of the primary copies that I drink on a monthly basis.
00:02:31
Speaker
Their blends are very good and they make good French press. I've used them in cooking. I've used them in coffee. I mean, I mean, yeah, we'll coffee ice cream. So we just always want to give a shout out to them. We also want to say, you know, check out the fireside alliance. So these are people that Alex had on. He had some of the other creators. So it's a.
00:02:51
Speaker
Progressive community of progressive communities is kind of how the billing is. But it really is just kind of a group of like-minded people that kind of bounce ideas off of each other. And we're working towards more cross-collaboration. So they are a community of podcasters and we are the only Magic the Gathering. They're generally pop culture related.
00:03:12
Speaker
Alex talked about the game Civilization with the two of the groups. One is the Two Shrinks podcast and the other is part of one that does monster movies. And just kind of looking at these
00:03:25
Speaker
Yeah, I would say these kind of social concerns within their own realm. It's kind of a natural fit for us. And so I just always want to kind of give a shout out to them, especially as we look to be kind of improving things.
Event Highlights and Mental Health
00:03:37
Speaker
A couple other things just to kind of talk about since we haven't met in a while and by us, I mean, like I haven't been here, but since we've last all talked, Minneapolis was announced as a site for a magic fest for the magic 30 celebration, which is just,
00:03:53
Speaker
exciting to me and to Alex that we're our community. The local Minneapolis community is going to be welcoming so many people that we've gotten to know over the last four years of doing this show. And one of the things that we've done in the past is we've done kind of celebrations of Minneapolis and of
00:04:10
Speaker
our friends and the creative community. The Goblin Lawyer has kind of sponsored slash co-hosted slash helped with cookouts at my house, Hobbs' house, and we are going to already be talking. I've already started planning with people for what we can do in May, even beyond just a cookout at my house because of the big three-day event celebrating Magic's 30th history is just
00:04:35
Speaker
Something that we are so fortunate to have been selected to be a site for on the city of Minneapolis the other part of that is Alex and I really may is is when the event is may 5th through 7th. It's also a mental health month and
00:04:51
Speaker
The synchronicity of that is something that for Alex and I, we have already started talking about the fact that they've allowed for panel submissions. There have been panels. That's kind of this model of the new Magic Fest. I mean, maybe it's only for the year 30th anniversary, but if not, it's what we kind of talked about on this show, magic events moving towards being conventions, having panels.
00:05:17
Speaker
And I know that for Philly, they are taking submissions. So our hope is that we will be able to put forth a proposal for a Goblin Lore and Friends mental health podcast that really coincides with Mental Health Awareness Month in May. To us, it's like the perfect marriage. So hopefully there'll be more to come on that.
Creativity, Motivation, and Mental Health Struggles
00:05:37
Speaker
So this morning I put out a poll, well, I just put out a tweet asking people like, hey, what would you love for me to kind of talk about for 30 minutes? Because I've been struggling a lot lately with just creativity and.
00:05:50
Speaker
just motivation and energy and just kind of where it's at. I think depression's really been kind of reaching up and kicking my ass a little bit more without kind of clear stressors or indicators. I do my normal best that I can to monitor my own personal warning signs, whether it being my sleep or my tendency to kind of become irritable. These are the things that generally I can notice to kind of assess what's going on. And I've just been struggling to kind of pull beyond that.
00:06:20
Speaker
Um.
00:06:22
Speaker
And creativity and kind of my organization of thoughts is one of the first things that, well that starts to be later signs. And those are the signs that kind of make me worried for things like the show. Like what are we gonna do if all of a sudden I hit a period where I just feel like me personally can't put out the product that I wanna help put out. So I kind of put out this idea to try to get some inspiration. And what's amazing about it is I actually had numerous ideas that
00:06:51
Speaker
really did inspire me but not anything that I could kind of pull together for the short period I had today to be able to record and talk to you all.
00:07:00
Speaker
a couple of those and I do think they are good episodes one is like celiac cooking or cooking for people with allergens um I was looking for a lore tie-in so if anybody listening to this can think of one I mean outside of like azemore or you know the fact that we do have food tokens and stuff within magic uh my wife was diagnosed two years ago with celiacs and part of that was she also developed an egg intolerance which
00:07:24
Speaker
If anybody out there that really enjoys baking in particular knows that, you know, losing both gluten and eggs makes a lot of baking very difficult. It makes a lot of cooking very difficult. And so I think this is a great topic, ways that we've been able to adapt recipes, ways that we've been able to
00:07:43
Speaker
think about eating because it can be, gosh, that's just the whole topic right there, just relationship with food, especially a food that, you know, or an ingredient, an element that is so important to most cooking. So that's a great idea and I would love to find that.
00:08:02
Speaker
The idea kind of about anxiety telling the truth, which Travis, my buddy, Travis underscore LM, the Basil's owner, as he is listed in my phone, brought up this joke about the truthiness of anxiety, which stems from him and I hanging out along with that gal, Carolyn.
00:08:22
Speaker
Dev so toodles dev that in Richmond we were all hanging out as one of the main reason I went to the event was to see them and We were gonna be going out and you know, there's a lot of just pressure we were going to an event with other creators and we were talking about things like depression and anxiety and You know Travis always is very good about kind of trying to remind us all that depression lies and I think that's a common theme that
00:08:48
Speaker
is a reminder but we don't believe it. I mean that's just the way that the nature of most of our brains are that struggle with that. And I just being the smart alec that I am snap back but anxiety does tell the truth. And this is prompted kind of
00:09:03
Speaker
I want to dive deeper into the fight or flight mechanism. Alex and I have brought this up, especially in our episode with social anxiety, which I highly recommend going back to because it's about going to conventions or going to magic events and what is involved in that. But we talked about fight or flight there, and I want to talk about the expansion of that. That's something that I actually had been thinking of for the last couple of days. Once again, the turnaround time to actually come up with it was something that just
00:09:31
Speaker
was not feasible for today. So unfortunately, that topic has also been shelved.
Journey into Psychology
00:09:37
Speaker
The one that I did want to talk about, so this was Swole Dan. So Dan, somebody that I have known on Twitter for many, many years. He was the one who kind of came up with this idea or this topic area.
00:09:56
Speaker
Basically, he asked, how did I come into the field that I'm in? How did I come into psychology? And I think it's a good question. There's a great, so I will say, checking out the article that was written, I did go a little bit into this when talking with Andy Zuppke, and this is something that I will tag in the show note to make sure that I have the article readily available.
00:10:20
Speaker
which basically just covered kind of, well, how did I end up in this field? How did I end up in psychology? Because I will tell you that wasn't my initial plan or initially what I was going to do. And the more I thought about this after reading Dan's question this morning, it made me think of kind of this idea of planeswalkers sparking. We've talked about this on the show a lot, not wanting it to just be, to move beyond this idea that either negative emotionality and
00:10:46
Speaker
I'll caveat that. Trauma in particular or really intense, uncomfortable, unhealthy emotions. I don't like to use the word negative when it comes to emotions as people heard on this show before. I tend to stray more towards healthy, unhealthy, helpful, unhelpful to describe kind of the outcomes of them rather than kind of assigning a weight of positive and negative to emotions because emotions are just natural and emotions just are. It's our responses to them.
00:11:16
Speaker
Either way, for the context of Magic the Gathering, historically, most sparks that we have seen have been in response to either traumatic events or just fear of life or being scared or something really bad happening to a person or their loved ones. And we've talked about wanting to explore
00:11:40
Speaker
this realm of sparking in response to joy or love or just commitment, whatever it is, these emotions that we maybe attach more of a kind of healthy association with. And I always laugh because that's what I say I want to see more of. However, if I'm looking at my quote unquote own origin story, I'm not sure that's exactly what we are going to see.
00:12:09
Speaker
I will also say that this is kind of a topic that is difficult for me to talk about. This is an episode I have thought about doing many, many times over and over again, but kind of just the quote unquote origin story. And that's in part because psychology was not my initial passion. Psychology was not an area that I was
00:12:33
Speaker
particularly drawn to until later in life I mean I guess I would say you know in my
00:12:41
Speaker
late teens early 20s I guess later in life being that being my halfway to where I am now I went into college with a plan to study chemistry and That was what I was gonna do. I really enjoyed kind of science. I still do really enjoy science. I enjoyed data I enjoy kind of understanding the world around us and to me, you know, I Without a lot of guidance that kind of was I just figured those were what my options were and
00:13:09
Speaker
And then I got to undergrad and in my second year took organic chemistry and I think anybody that has had to take that for whatever reason.
00:13:18
Speaker
you actually are, you know, enjoy it great and or you're going to med school or you were looking at other degree like biology or something that might require it. Well, this was the class that I just felt that I had to kind of get through to kind of do the chemistry that I loved. And yet it was not a good fit. I just my brain really.
00:13:39
Speaker
had difficulty thinking in the way that it needed to, to be able to understand organic chemistry. And I didn't seek out help to really remedy this, in part because of pride. I had always been somebody that things came to very naturally, and it was somebody that, you know, that chip on their shoulder almost
00:14:00
Speaker
this prideful belief system about things come easy and natural to me and that was my value or that was my worth. I didn't have a lot of good self-esteem outside of kind of this idea of quote-unquote intelligence and that I didn't have to work hard for things to come easy to me and chemistry was not that at all. And also as I was getting into it, it really wasn't anything that I kind of had
00:14:27
Speaker
a drive or an internal motivation to push me to say, okay, you know what, this is tough, but I want to do it.
00:14:33
Speaker
And I had to make a shift. I mean, I did not go into college well prepared. I mean, this is a story you probably hear from lots of people, especially people I would say of my age group, you know, that late gen X, that early millennial crowd that college really was just kind of the, it started to become the next thing that you did. It was an extension of high school and it did feel a lot of ways like that. But I didn't have a knowledge base to really go into it.
00:15:01
Speaker
Both of my parents had not attended college. My dad dropped out of high school to work in the oil fields. My mom works in printing now. She had gone on to kind of school for potentially dental hygienist when she was straight out of high school, but she had me. My parents were 19 and 21 when I was born, and there wasn't kind of that opportunity.
00:15:23
Speaker
And there just wasn't the knowledge base that we had for what college was like or what to expect and I kind of went in blind and once again not asking for help and I think that's kind of a similar theme to a lot of what young me would have been was somebody who didn't really ask for help.
00:15:42
Speaker
at least a year or two of kind of experiencing symptoms of depression before I ever even entertained the idea of it. And it was a doctor that brought it up just because they handed me some random questionnaire because I was a teenager and I didn't even know what it was measuring. I thought it was just really weird that they gave it to me. And then, you know, it turns out to be a depression inventory that I scored high on. So I didn't ask for help. Right.
00:16:05
Speaker
You know, it was kind of that pull yourself up by the bootstraps mentality that I think that I came with and that chip on my shoulder that I had for kind of a lot of my
00:16:16
Speaker
my childhood and early adult years that really kept me in that mindset of not asking for help. And, you know, I think me against the world or us against them kind of mentality. But either way, I had to switch. I had to kind of come up with a different plan. And I had taken an intro to psychology class because, you know, I would always been interested by people. I do. I've always enjoyed talking to people. I definitely am a very clear ambivert, which is that idea of somebody that
00:16:47
Speaker
Blurs that line between extrovert and introvert. I I I really think that this is a concept that's being talked about more now than it used to And I which I think is fine because I think it's funny to think of things as we've talked about actually this very Topic on the show before when it came to like Myers-Briggs types inventories that how to not use them for proscriptive but descriptive to understand that there are
00:17:14
Speaker
Continuums of personality traits extraversion introversion being one of the main ones, but either way I liked people I like to talk to people I didn't really know what psychology involved that intro to psych course really Gave me a feel for the fact that there were these all these different domains of psychology all these different fields whether it was experimental psychology social psychology You know looking at
00:17:41
Speaker
what's called IO or industrial organizational psychology, there was these ways of kind of trying to understand systems and people and in a way that tries to incorporate science and I will say this, you know, there's a lot to discuss when we come to therapy and I'm gonna try to demystify some of that with just saying
00:18:04
Speaker
You know, there is evidence base for a lot of therapies.
Therapies and Mental Health Stigma
00:18:07
Speaker
Now that, that evidence base is not going to give you a clear cut answer the way that blood tests can, even though we know medical research and even biological research can also be impacted by bias and everything else. Right. Like it's hard to measure the things that we would want to measure in psychology. You know, we can, we can do our best to try to set up scenarios where we can compare therapies against each other.
00:18:27
Speaker
And at the end of the day, one of the things that we find is really that there's kind of these, what are called common factors. Uh, the things that you would think of like befriending or rapport building, or being able to reflect, um, these things that are kind of just generalized skillset that most therapists that I think need to have, uh, trying to avoid using that should word, because that really does set up my expectations for other therapists, but it is true. Uh, I think that there is kind of a, a lack of.
00:18:58
Speaker
introspection when it comes to some of these core tenets and why I also try to talk to people a lot about the idea that therapy is not one size fits all. Not everybody is going to benefit from even what we call quote unquote evidence based medicine and you know the ones that show to kind of have the best once again.
00:19:17
Speaker
the best evidence for what we have. But either way, I started to learn about this idea that there was measurement that was going on. There was these statistical processes that were set up to kind of understand maybe the human experience. And I made the switch into psychology. Even then, I still didn't know where I was going with it. I just knew that I had to pick a major.
00:19:39
Speaker
My senior year of college, I was fortunate. My college had a good association. So I went to school at a place called Brandeis University, which actually one of our first real big professors was Abraham Maslow. People may know it from Tuesdays with Maury, know the university because that's where it took place too. But like Maslow and the concept of the hierarchy of needs was all developed kind of as part of his work at Brandeis.
00:20:05
Speaker
I had ended up at a university that I happened to have a very good fit for me developmentally that I just lucked into. It almost feels like a planeswalker story right there. I happened to be at the right place at the right time, and it worked out. I think a lot of my life comes down to that concept of I ended up in the right place at the right time, failing upwards, as the case may be.
00:20:31
Speaker
My senior year I was able to take part in a, what we would call a practicum. So I got to work alongside doctoral students who were working at a VA hospital. So people may know I work at the VA now. I've worked at the VA for most of my career.
00:20:47
Speaker
in part because it's basically socialized medicine. And if I'm looking at the best standard of care, there's a reason that there is a push for socialized medicine in the US. And it's funny to me when I hear people
00:21:05
Speaker
act like we don't know if it works or not when we do have really good evidence that it does. And there's a lot of developments that are used in general healthcare field that have come out of the VA. And while that's a whole other tangent based on my belief system about kind of stigma and the media and lots of other things, that is just the fact of the matter. But I was able to kind of get an opportunity to work in what's called an intensive kind of outpatient team. So I worked in
00:21:36
Speaker
what is actually called a mental health intensive case management, which is actually a system where people, it's for people who have struggled with mental health concerns that lead to hospitalizations or lead to just frequent utilization of services and could probably benefit from a higher level of care. One of the benefits of that is, care is then offered actually in the home. People could actually meet in public. These kind of things that I would love to be able to do, which is everybody that I meet with,
00:22:04
Speaker
But there is kind of within the world of psychology and especially clinical psychology Services that are kind of aimed at those groups of people that experience that level of distress that was my first experience to kind of actual mental health work and It was fascinating to me to see the differences between that and my own depression and anxiety that I had experienced and
00:22:32
Speaker
But I even had opportunities to view other areas of the hospital with people that were struggling with depression, anxiety, and seeing maybe the judgment and the insight that was able to be impacted there to allow them to better recover.
00:22:49
Speaker
or better engage in a life that they valued and was worth living versus people that I was working with in my program that had a lot of substance use concerns, high levels of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, what is called with the worst name ever serious mental illness.
00:23:13
Speaker
different level of stigma when we get into something like schizophrenia or even bipolar, but I would say schizophrenia and schizoaffective, which if people know at all, that's kind of my bread and butter. That's the area that I actually devoted my training to as we're talking through this and thinking of that initial planeswalker spark. Um, I kind of devoted my life to this because I saw the stigma that was associated with it. And I think that.
00:23:44
Speaker
This is a topic alone, schizophrenia, schizoaffective. We've talked a little bit about the concept of psychosis and what that actually means when we've talked about davriel because he is kind of a stand-in for voice hearing within the magic universe.
00:24:00
Speaker
But we have not done a full episode that's just devoted to these topics, and I would like to. But for the purposes of this, I just want to highlight that idea that the people that I was working with were highly stigmatized. The old treatment model for people with these was either long-term hospitalization, basically institutionalization,
00:24:23
Speaker
or like day treatment programs which is basically well you can live in society but you need to go to these places where you won't bother anybody during the day you can just play some games or hang out with other people and you can do some menial tasks and this the stigma still really exists when it comes to schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder seeing that firsthand
00:24:45
Speaker
probably is my sparking moment. When I started this almost 20 minutes ago, I was thinking along the lines of my experiences within grad school, which did not go well. And I will come back to that someday. And it is in Andy's article, if you ever want to kind of check it out to read. But the more I think about it, that isn't really what sparked. Because if I think of a spark as kind of being
00:25:16
Speaker
something that made a profound impact on my life and caused me to kind of either change directions or commit. And I think commit is one of the words that we could use within acceptance and commitment therapy, which has the name right there, ACT, or it's kind of one of the third wave psychology treatments if you ever hear about it, but it's really one that's based in kind of mindfulness-based approaches and really kind of trying to have a much higher level of acceptance and commitment. And the commitment part of that is committed action.
00:25:47
Speaker
One of the things that we talk about with acceptance is acceptance never means I'm okay with or I don't want to change or this is how things are so there's no point. Acceptance is trying to see things as they are and I'm gonna correct my own language there as I said try. Acceptance, the goal of it is to see things as they truly are without judgment, kind of a non-judgmental mindful approach where at least we have a higher level of awareness.
00:26:15
Speaker
And the second part of that is really living things in a value-driven life, really kind of actually committing to what you were doing with a purpose and with meaning. And before that in my life, I'm not sure that I had it before this kind of rotation. I was entering my senior year. I was kind of thinking about potentially going to grad school, but I really didn't know this class gave me that opportunity to actually take something that I had seen in a textbook and see
00:26:45
Speaker
just how that might look in the real world and where people live and to see kind of the stigma and to see the experiences of humans that kind of have been told that they like life is basically over which is a message that a lot of the people that I have worked with especially older people with schizophrenia were told you'll never work again you'll
00:27:09
Speaker
You know, you have this lifelong disease, this illness, your best hope is to manage it. But to do that, you need to not have stress in your life. I mean, these are messages that were not far removed from people getting. And I'm even going to say people still get some of these. I do think we have had improvements, but it's not gone.
00:27:29
Speaker
And as I'm thinking about this, this almost turns into kind of my sparking moment. Uh, me sitting in a group that I got to go observe where people's concerns were, you know, things that I myself run into my daily concerns. And I don't, this is not to minimize any of those. I would say I never try to minimize. I never, well, there we go again, um, using that tri language, but.
00:27:55
Speaker
I don't like to minimize my own experiences. They are valid. And I also think that there was a difference in quality in the real world experiences between people that I sat in a group with whose concerns were more related to kind of crisis of
00:28:15
Speaker
like narrative about themselves, but still had kind of the ability to have shelter, have housing, have those kind of lower needs of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And it's kind of interesting. This is where I think there is a lot of differences in therapy that we need to be aware of that, you know, there are therapies that are much better suited for people maybe that are at higher levels on the hierarchy versus people who just
00:28:39
Speaker
can't make ends meet or don't have resources available to them and to treat those things as if they're the same is kind of naive. So it's not to invalidate any of those. But my sparking moment was kind of realizing that
00:28:52
Speaker
I was fortunate enough to be working alongside people who were kind of living with stigma. Actually, the facility I was working at was one of the first to really push forward this concept of the recovery model for people with SMI. Once again, that happy confluence or just kind of synchronicity of my luck of failing upwards, being in the right place at the right time, because I was able to see kind of where that movement was going.
00:29:23
Speaker
And it really was at that point where I kind of made a committed decision to what I was going to do after I graduated. Once again, not having kind of any
00:29:35
Speaker
background, having not knowing the resources, I also made a decision to start asking for help. I mean, I think this would be kind of a clear indication of the first time at that point in my life that I was willing to kind of commit to something in such a way that I
00:29:54
Speaker
sought out the information that I had just blindly tried to go forward and ahead and keep hoping that everything would work out in my life. It doesn't mean that things worked out. I mean, this is kind of a spoiler alert. And like I said, go back to Andy's article. I didn't get in till the third time I applied to graduate school. I still was kind of finding out how to refine what my goals were.
00:30:19
Speaker
for even being a clinical psychologist, because once again, there's lots of different ways that I could have approached this goal. And the one that I was working towards, I kept getting more and more experience along the way, but I was still struggling. I mean, and that's the point here.
Personal Commitment and Future Topics
00:30:35
Speaker
I think the point of how I sparked is not the end point or even
00:30:40
Speaker
the trauma that I experienced in grad school of being told, I don't think you'll ever be a psychologist. I don't think you'll ever get a degree by one of the heads of our program. Initially, that's where I thought this story was going. When I started talking to you all, thinking of my own narrative, that was really what I was thinking. It was like, wow, God, just like I always kind of am worried about or complain about, my own is going to be me focusing on
00:31:03
Speaker
what went wrong, and almost the moment that I did, I guess it was a moment of committal, and so we could look at it from that perspective, and this could be a matter of changing planes at that point. I finally leave Dominaria for the first time, I don't know, because I did commit at that point. My stubborn nature helped me out at that point in my life by basically saying F-U in my head to the person who told me this. But as we've been talking,
00:31:33
Speaker
It struck me that this decision that I made really was an example of me.
00:31:39
Speaker
Sparking and and I think that committal piece to it that committed action that deciding that I had a value system that was worth pursuing and Refining and learning what it was to actually examine it and say this is what I want to do I'm going to choose a pathway. I'm staring at a goblin guide play mat right now and that is It's kind of just funny to me as I'm looking down. It's got the Philip Berber and art on it
00:32:09
Speaker
The guide has the map and the hand. There's a rope bridge that looks completely unsturdy and unsafe, spanning a chasm. And it's kind of one of the ways that I describe this concept of either values or this concept of kind of vision. And it is this idea that it's not about an endpoint. It's about a direction that you want to head in and choosing.
00:32:32
Speaker
to cross this bridge even though it looks dangerous, even though there might be pain, even though it's not safe. It's making a decision or a commitment to do it instead of turning back. The goblin that is standing here has the moment to turn aside. I kind of think about this with the speech that Sam gives in Lord of the Rings to Frodo about all the great stories. People had a chance to turn around or people had a chance to give up or
00:33:01
Speaker
to give up the quest to not follow through and to me I guess that is a clearer indication of sparking if we're talking about those planeswalker experiences it's it is kind of a you know an intense emotional state oftentimes is what triggers it within magic even though there's this you know the idea that it's probably late and it's there anyway but that's getting too lore heavy that
00:33:26
Speaker
It really does tie nicely into this idea of a value-driven life, that at some point you are making a commitment to head down a pathway. It doesn't mean that you may not leave the pathway. Each time you come to a fork or each point the pathway gets difficult, you have decisions to make. You have choice points to make, whether you want to head towards or away from your value system.
00:33:49
Speaker
that moment for me I guess truly was kind of this this class and in some ways it was even I can like I can still picture as poor as my memory is that I joke around about a lot I remember sitting in a room hearing some stories from other people that made me realize this is not the same experience of what I'm seeing on a day-to-day basis I
00:34:12
Speaker
I'm seeing people that, you know, uh, society has kind of given up on, I don't know. And like this, I said, this is always the hard part when talking about what drove you to a career path or even within psychology. Like it just didn't feel like it was the right space for me. I just felt like there was a group of people that I better equipped and that I connect better with that.
00:34:38
Speaker
also have had horrible stigma experiences. And I've seen a lot of those firsthand. I've seen working at a group home that was attempting to move into a residential neighborhood where the residents of the neighborhood literally went to a city council meeting to block it. I've seen
00:35:00
Speaker
I wrote my undergrad thesis on representations of mental health in films and in TV, and I was looking at stuff from the 80s. And I will tell you, based on my results from then, that it's not like we've greatly changed in the respect of mental health.
00:35:16
Speaker
I do it because I love it, and I also, because I don't know, it keeps me on my own pathway with my own mental health journey, like separate from my career trajectory, and you can have more than one value system here, or more than one value that we are prioritizing or working on. My own mental health journey is one that, being able to talk about these concepts with you all on this show, being able to do my job every day, I do think is one of the things that's helped keep me
00:35:44
Speaker
as best as I can from sparking away from this plane. So, yeah, so Dan, I swole Dan, you know, one of my longest friends on Twitter is we're in this period of flux with that app. Thank you for kind of setting me up to get this out today. And we're going to be back in next week. Hopefully it's just going to be a fun topic on goblins. And we have some guests that we are lining up. We're getting back on track riding the ship, so to speak.
00:36:12
Speaker
And I'm just going to end now before I start completely just rambling. And that's our show for today. You can find both of the hosts on Twitter. Hobbs can be found at Hobbs Q and Alex can be found at Mel underscore chronicler. Feel free to send us any questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to goblin Lord pod on Twitter.
00:36:34
Speaker
or email us at goblin lore podcast at gmail.com. If you would like to support your friendly neighborhood, God slugs to our link tree on our Twitter account and listed in our show notes, this has everything from our discounts for the grinding coffee company to our Patreon.
00:36:52
Speaker
The music for today's show was by Vindergotten, who can be found at vindergotten at badcamp.com. The art was done by Steven Raphael, who can be found at Steve raffle on Twitter. Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast as part of their growing 4thos content. Check them out on Twitter at hipstersmpg or online at hipstersofthecoast.com. Thank you for listening. And remember, goblins like snowflakes are only dangerous in numbers.