E13 / Coming Out and Letting Go with Chris Ryan

Today I'm speaking with Chris Ryan, author of Sex at Dawn, Civilized to Death and a very active Substack called as well as his long running podcast by the same name. I came across Sex at Dawn several years ago and that book has played a big part in cracking open my thinking about love, sex, and relationship, as it has for many many others. More recently, I took the opportunity to meet up with Chris at a retreat that he co-hosted in Montana, where we connected as fellow writers, van travelers, hot spring aficionados and former-but-not-current-users of psychedelic substances. Chris mentioned that he and his partner would be spending the winter in Crestone and invited me to stop by sometime, and so, just a couple of months later, I found myself recording this interview in his little office studio slash guest bedroom... and so... I think it's fair to say that I've been in bed with Chris Ryan.

Especially since I'm working on building a third career as a writer, I really value Chris' life experience as a working artist who's met with some success—and as someone who embodies warmth, curiosity, irreverence, adventure, equanimity, poise, truth, and openness, just to name a few of the values that I see and share.

I'm grateful to Chris and Anya for the invitation to visit with them in Crestone, and for his support of my efforts with this podcast and as a writer. As you listen, you might scan the questions at the bottom of the show notes, or consider just this one: is there anything about yourself that you have come out about—or that you haven't come out about, but could, or would like to embody more openly?

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Show Notes

Changing the Relationship with Alcohol

“The problem is the lack of problem.” I suggest that perhaps he “suffers from a lack of trauma.” He feels that he didn’t need to stop, but he “wanted to clearly know that I was in charge.” “It works well when the dog knows you’re the boss.” It’s not so much the question of whether there’s a “problem”—if you feel like changing, that’s reason enough. “A lot of people feel like it’s a failure to give up and let go of things that used to work…”

Maia Szalavitz’s thesis in Unbroken Brain that there is no such thing as an “addictive personality,” and that addiction is a learning disorder. Stanton Peele’s book Love and Addiction. If you have a “hole in your psyche,” the problem isn’t the substance, it’s the hole.

Learning to let go… to choose to close a chapter consciously, not as the result of some catastrophe, or of ‘hitting bottom.’ “If you let go, that's empowering—as opposed to having it ripped from your grasp…” “There's something powerful about letting go… There's power in conscious loss.” We have a culture of attachment… of attainment, of accumulation…

When I choose to let go of things, I can look back and see the gold in the past. “Why would you want to carry around the ashes?” “If you don't put it down, then you can't up anything else.” I write about letting go in The Last Time.

Relationships with other men, and with women, and how coming out is a form of “facing a fire.”

“A lot of straight men are just f*****g boring.” “A lot of my closest male friends have been gay… Those relationships had an intensity and an openness that I rarely find wit