There's a version of this episode where we say "okay, we're spiritual" and move on with the day. This is not that one.

Cam almost didn't go to Phoenix. He didn't want to travel, we were in the busiest season of our lives, and the whole thing was a hard no, right up until it became a very clear yes. So he rented a Corvette (a dramatic departure from our decade-old dented Kia Soul, who has never once failed us) and flew out to a workshop with eleven strangers, most of them Phoenix real estate people twenty years older than him.

What happened in that room is the story he tells here. He cries telling it. He almost never does that.

We get into:

- Muscle testing: what it is, how his chiropractor father used it on him as a kid with a bag of cheese, and how a room of high performers used it to locate the exact event underneath a lifelong block

- Why a release can take two minutes instead of two years, and what has to be true for that to actually work

- Why we have never said the words out loud, even though our entire life is the practice

And then the part I've been chewing on for months: what it costs you to keep the most alive part of yourself in the shadows, and who never finds you while you're busy doing it.

Consider this our lovingly passed-along call-out.

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board

Someone on the walk was asked what self-love means to him. His answer: volunteering. Helping the church, helping the homeless, getting out of his own head. Beautiful things, all of them. But is that self-love, or is it the most socially acceptable way to never sit with yourself?

That question opens the whole episode.

We came back from a two-week hiatus mid-upgrade, shedding skins, and this is the conversation that wanted to happen. Not the bubble-bath version of self-love. The version where you notice you cannot pour from a cup that's empty, and that what festers in the depletion isn't generosity. It's resentment, martyrdom, and a very tired face you can spot in a Best Buy.

Some of what we get into:

- The two kinds of selfishness, and why the light one buys back your entire calendar

- Why we've attended roughly ten events in four years, and why no one who walks with us owes us anything

- The relaxation crisis: how doing nothing became a skill you have to build tolerance for

We talk about the obligations so quiet you'd never flag them, the ones decided in microseconds. We talk about your head as an old MacBook with the fan going like a lawnmower, and what we'd do for the laptop that we won't do for ourselves. Elle shares a practice she learned in Sedona in 2021 involving tapping, gratitude, and moving energy out of the head and back into the belly.

We end in one minute of silence. Actual silence. Bring your shoulders down for it.

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board

Cam went on YouTube one afternoon and every thumbnail he saw was a version of the same video: why I went no contact with my family. That observation sat between us for two weeks before we sat back down on the couches to actually pull it apart.

What we found underneath it was not drama. It was obligation. The Sunday Zoom call somebody set up out of love that quietly curdled into dread. The parent who cries "why are you trying to leave me" and means it. The crab pulled back down into the bucket by people who genuinely think they are helping.

We also went somewhere I did not expect: that this whole wave is only possible because a generation finally got what their parents said they wanted for them. You raise a child to stand on their own two feet, and then they may use those feet to walk away. Nobody planned for that part.

In this one:

- Why cutting someone off is almost always easier than telling them the truth, and what the one honest sentence actually sounds like

- The flashlight analogy, and why consequences are a form of teaching rather than punishment

- The friend I finally told the truth to four years ago, what I said, and the response I never got

We land somewhere neither of us expected, on whose job it actually is to ask the question when someone starts drifting. My answer changed while I was saying it out loud.

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board

Cam finished a genuinely huge day and told me he hadn't done enough. Not as a joke. He meant it, the way he has meant it since he was a kid.

So we sat down and pulled the thread while it was still raw, because he is right in the middle of the shift and I wanted to capture it before it smoothed over into a lesson.

He narrates the voice as it sounded when he was a teenager, and you can hear his breath change while he does it. He talks about living in Bali with some of the best sunsets in the world and never letting himself fully see one, because sunsets did not count as productive. He talks about what changed when he started lying down in the middle of the afternoon and building no story around it.

Then the conversation turned toward me, and toward a version of myself I do not usually bring up.

In this one:

- The difference between his wound (impatience: let's not waste time) and mine (urgency: one typo and the world is ending)

- Why the "let me try a new morning routine" hamster wheel is a symptom, not a fix, and what he replaced it with

- A friend in college who slow faded from me, what she said before she went, and the four years it took me to understand it

The last twenty minutes got emotional in a way neither of us planned. I said things about who I used to be that I have not said out loud before.

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board

The microphones were already running. Cam looked at me and instead of opening the episode, he asked what was wrong. I had gotten dressed, gotten ready, and did not want to record, and I couldn't tell him why.

We published that conversation instead of the one we planned.

What we found: I wanted to record to keep a streak that did not exist. I invented it. And underneath that was something much older, a compulsion I've had since childhood to get up and help the second I see someone I love working. I could not sit still in a house where Cam was in his office being productive. So I would go into mine and invent tasks. Small ones. Ones that anybody could have done.

Cam's response is the part I keep replaying. He tells me my actual job right now is to be, not to do, and I spend most of the hour quietly arguing with him about it.

In this one:

- The Japanese office rule I was unconsciously following in my own house

- Why he says the days I lie down are the days he gets the most done, and the pattern that made him believe it

- Something about cherry blossoms, and how long they actually bloom

It is not a polished episode. It is a real one, and I cried in it, and we ended it by watching Avatar with popcorn.

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board

There's a moment about halfway through where I start crying about the X composer, that small text box you type a tweet into. I built my whole way of writing inside it. Brain to post button, no editing, nothing in between. Since we came off the platforms, everything I write goes into a Google Doc instead, and it has felt like a small death I did not expect to grieve.

Before that we lay out what 2025 actually cost us. We ended three communities in one email. I stepped down from hosting the walks on their third birthday, right when I loved them most, and handed them to Julia, who was quietly dropping hints that she was pregnant. We locked the laptops in a closet for two weeks and came out knowing exactly what had to go.

Then the episode turns into something we did not plan, which is the two of us coaching each other in real time.

In this one:

- The two week screen detox, and how to approximate it if you have a job and cannot go dark

- Cam names his real block, and it isn't fear of being seen

- The image of a wave pouring into a red solo cup, and why that is the actual pain

We start in a pumpkin dress joking about a benefit concert and end somewhere neither of us expected, with a solution that took ninety minutes and one cry to find.

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board

A woman wrote about her marriage ending like a house fire. She told her husband there was smoke. Nothing. A room is burning. Nothing. Half the house. Nothing. Only when she said this is the last room left did he finally move, and by then there was no house.

That story sits at the center of this one, and it explains something Cam said that I could not stop turning over: men process their whole lives on light switches. On or off. Fit or fat. Rich or broke. Fine, fine, fine, she wants a divorce. The check engine light being yellow does not count. It has to go red.

We came in planning to talk about weight and this took over instead.

In this one:

- Why "I asked you to take the trash out" is almost never actually about the trash, and what the real sentence underneath it sounds like

- The idea of space: who has it in a relationship, why it is rarely equal, and why "he should just know" is only obvious to the person who has it

- A couple from this season of Love is Blind who acted this out on camera, and what almost nobody watching correctly named

There's also a moment where I tell Cam about a man who spent ninety minutes listing what was wrong with me, and what he was actually trying to say underneath it.

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board

I have hundreds of videos of myself walking around my bedroom. Not for fun. I filmed them on an iPad in high school to check how my back looked in my uniform, door locked. I also practiced sitting in backless chairs so nothing would press when I sat down at school. I was still running versions of that ritual three years ago.

The story I'm most embarrassed by: I overslept on a walk morning, people were already gathered and texting me, and I stopped to put on a full face of makeup before I left. Thirty minutes late to my own event, because being seen without it was not an option my body would allow.

Cam has a phrase for what happens in front of the mirror every morning: a 128 point inspection. Men, he says, get one question. Women get a hundred, and failing any one of them can take the whole day.

In this one:

- The moment in high school where the whole thing started, and what I gave the credit to

- What I could feel in a woman's face on a Zoom call, and why it made me feel close to her instead of judgmental

- A man at the McDonald's drive thru named Matthew who kept saying something I could not compute

I'm recording this with almost nothing on my face, which was months of very small, very uncomfortable steps. Cam is not making me do any of it, though I make it sound that way roughly every episode.

For the ongoing version of these conversations, explore The Board: https://www.theboardwalks.com/the-board