The improvisor/actor (Comedy Bang Bang, UCB, Adult Swim – Mr. Neighbor’s House) shares about dealing with his co-dependency, urge to fix other people, play the resentful victim and how support groups help him.
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Check out Mr. Neighbor's House and Mr. Neighbor's House 2
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Episode Transcript:
Brian Huskey (transcribed by Kajsa Lancaster)
PG: I’m here with Brian Huskey, a fellow performer. We actually shared the stage in San Francisco one night, doing some political satire with James Adomian and – who else was…?
BH: I think Matt Besser?
PG: Yeah, Matt Besser.
BH: And I had – we were just speaking of this – I had pretty much no bit. I was just like – I don’t even remember what my bit was, but I was like ‘I have no bit! Everyone else here knows what they’re doing.’ And meeting you, I was like, ‘He’s got this established character. Clearly he’s invested in him for years,’ and stuff. And I was just there shitting my pants, and you were like, ‘Oh yeah, internally I was probably shitting my pants, too.’
PG: (Laughs) Yes, yes. Less than, no matter what.
BH: That’s the fire that fuels us, though, right?
PG: It is, it is. Spite and insecurity. Boy, what the world has created out of ‘I’ll show you, Dad!’ and ‘I’m a piece of shit!’
BH: Yeah! ‘I’m gonna get up here and run from myself in front of you! Watch thiiis! Oops, I tripped, oh god!’
PG: (Laughs) So, we were talking before we started recording, and some of the broad strokes of issues that you struggle with are co-dependency and kind of being a bit of a love-avoidant in relationships.
BH: Yeah, and this is all a pretty recent discovery of myself. I mean I knew, like –
PG: Earlier this morning? On your way over?
BH: (Laughs) Yeah, earlier this morning. Just walking in. Just being in this environment, I was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s all hitting me just now!’ I guess it started – I divorced six years ago, and – oh my god, six years ago! – and during that time I was trying to figure out what caused it. Why did it all just crumble? The person I was with my wife, and then who I was at the end, was very different, and having someone that I love say that to me – and feeling the same way about her. I was like, ‘Well, you’re different, too! What happened?’ So our contract was broken – the contract of, ‘We have mutual damage, so the contract is, I save you and you save me. And if that doesn’t happen, what do we do?
PG: (Laughs)
BH: And I credit her, she started to do some – what was the verbiage we came up with in the agreement of –
PG: Support group.
BH: Support group, yeah. Because one of the things is anonymity and not, sort of, revealing.
PG: Yeah. To protect the support group from people appointing themselves as spokespeople.
BH: Right, right. And so, she started to do some work with that, and I just saw this change; slowly she was returning to the person that I knew before. And I was like, ‘What’s going on with you?’ And she said, ‘Oh, I’m starting with these support groups.’ At first I was like, ‘Okay, good for you, great, I’m going to still… -
PG: And was this after you had divorced?
BH: Yeah. Maybe a year and half, two years. So I sort of, when we split up I had to – you know, getting divorced is great.
PG: (Laughs)
BH: It can be great.
PG: Did you do a parade for yours?
BH: You know what, we just had a bonfire.
PG: Oh! You went kind of rural and understated.
BH: Yeah, we went and I got a bunch of random drifters that I met, and I was like, ‘Hey, come burn something, express the internal rage you’re feeling with me…’ We ransacked some old buildings and just sort of burned them to the ground.
PG: That’s so beautiful.
BH: It was cool! It was very purging.
PG: Of course they demanded that you buy them Old English 800.
BH: Oh yeah, they rolled me hard. I was found in a ditch later. But we’re still email buddies, so that’s great.
PG: (Sarcastic gasp) They have email!
BH: They all share one email.
PG: Oh, they do? (Giggles) What is their email address?
BH: Uh… desperationclub@aol.com.
PG: (Laughs) Of course! They’re older drifters.
BH: They switched over from NetZero, and I was like, ‘Guys, you’re catching up, which is cool.’ So yeah. I got divorced, and in getting divorced, for me, it was like getting stripped of my identity. Just get stripped away and you’re left naked with this person that you kind of lost contact with a long time ago. For me – we were together six years and then married for six years. And I dove into that in a really good way in that I got to rediscover that women found me attractive, or this one woman did, and I was like ‘Oh my god, this is amazing!’ and I kind of reconnected with sex and stuff. So I was having a really good time. And then I just hit this wall, which I discovered was my co-dependent self coming out where, despite being with this person who did love me, I was unable to feel it, and I was really hollow in her presence. It was a really lonely feeling, like more lonely than when I was away, you know?
PG: And you’re talking about with your ex-wife?
BH: No, this was with a woman I dated.
PG: Okay, after the divorce.
BH: Yeah, after.
PG: Okay. And had you felt those positive feelings with your ex-wife in the beginning of your relationship?
BH: Yeah.
PG: Okay. And then, did they turn to the same feelings you felt with this person you were dating?
BH: The positive feelings?
PG: No, the negative feelings. Had those come up in your marriage?
BH: Umm. Wait, I lost track. So, the negative feelings I had in my marriage today start to pop up in the new relationship.
PG: Right. I’m looking for –
BH: Not the same, not exactly the same way. Like, with my ex, I was experiencing a lot of victimization, blame.
PG: Which is just classic co-dependence.
BH: Yeah! Secret shame.
PG: Resentment. Passive aggression.
BH: Resentment, passive aggression, anger.
PG: Obsession about what it is that they’re doing wrong? Or no?
BH: Yes, yes… And, in kind, it was a total triggering experience. It was almost like, the more passive-aggressive I was, the more she would have behaviour that would, sort of…
PG: Inflame it?
BH: Inflame it! There was thing where she would just not close doors of any kind, and it drove me so crazy. It got to the point where you’d come into the kitchen and it’d look like a poltergeist had been there, because all the cabinet doors and the refrigerator would be open. Or she’d get out of the car and just start walking away, and I’d be like ‘The car door’s open, what are you doing?’ And she wouldn’t realize it. So there was this crazy, kind of, thing that you do to each other, that was happening. But one of the things I was experiencing with the woman I dated afterwards was this thing of someone saying, ‘I have feelings for you, I really love you’ and just going down in myself. Just retreating down in myself, because it was easier and more familiar, probably, for me to go ‘Well, I’m just going to be alone down here and look up at you from the bottom of this well,’ than it would be to be at the top of the well with her.
PG: Right. And are the feelings or thoughts in that moment, ‘She must have low standards’ or ‘She’s going to see the real piece of shit that I am eventually and then leave me,’ or something else?
BH: Something else. She said to me, ‘I feel like you’re always searching for damage in me.’ So it’s almost like I was constantly scanning for the inevitable downfall. Because I think one of the things that I was having that was my issue in my marriage was, my ex grew up with a lot of dysfunction in her house. I love her still, she’s one of my favorite people, and she has consistently been a person who has never given up and has always worked really hard to better her circumstance. She dealt with a lot of stuff growing up, and I was very resentful of having any reminder of a negative childhood. I was like, ‘I’m done with that, I thought about it, I did some therapy on it and put it in this box; it’s gone.’ So I didn’t want to be burdened with her pain. So in future relationship mind, I was like ‘So, any new girlfriend I have has to be… perfect.’ (Laughs)
PG: (Laughs) How could that go wrong?!
BH: Yeah, there’s no way. You just order online and you choose the one you want. And honestly, this girl was – this is the other thing that’s crazy – this woman was genuinely happy. A person who genuinely loved herself, loved her life, lived it great. And that terrified me.
PG: I say fuck her.
BH: Yeah. I was like, ‘I don’t need your sunshine bullshit!’
PG: (Laughs) I look at people like that like they’re Martians. Like, how do you do – how do you sing and dance freely, un-self-consciously… How do you laugh at everything?
BH: Totally, yeah. It blew my mind. And it made me realize that I’ve had this attitude for years where I just see happy people as ignorant and stupid. Ignorance is bliss, it’s a positive thing, but I’d be like, ignorance is bullshit. So, it’s interesting…
PG: And the reality is, they are aware of the sadness and the pain in the world, but they don’t obsess on it.
BH: Right, exactly. So that’s where I started to realize, like, ‘Oh, I grew up in an environment where we didn’t talk about what was going on, so everyone was left to themselves to kind of, like, ‘What is going on? This is crazy? I can’t talk to you about it, so I’m left with myself sort of cycling in my brain and replaying it.’’ And the difference between my – I have an older sister. She went the other route, where she just kind of blacked it out. I grew up when my mum remarried. I grew up with the father that she married. I didn’t mean my real father until I was fifteen or sixteen. He was a drinker, and he had some rage issues. Later on, we found out that he had a problem with paranoia.
PG: The biological father?
BH: The stepfather. But he adopted us, so I pretty much grew up with him.
PG: And was he alcoholic out of the gate, as far as you can remember, as far back as you can remember?
BH: Yeah, I don’t – it’s interesting in that, you know… One of the things I’m discovering, growing up with dysfunction stuff is the lack of memory, lack of clear memory. You just have these vague, like, ‘I think this happened…’ You’re kind of left with a vibe, or a hazy flashback memory in some hot montage. (Laughs)
PG: Yeah.
BH: I do remember, when we lived in apartment with him when they first got married, and then we moved to this house that we were renting. I was suddenly aware that underneath the kitchen sink was where the liquor was kept. And then that started to become a presence. I don’t know if he was kind of maintaining it, and it wasn’t incorporated into our daily life, or something. But probably about a year into it, it started to become a thing. And his pattern was to – I think it was probably informed by his paranoia – he would interpret something in a negative way. He would get quiet and shut down, and then recede, start to drink, build up this cauldron that would start to bubble. And then he would act out against my mum, and sometimes we got in the way of that.
PG: Mm. Would things get physical?
BH: Yeah, yeah.
PG: Ah, I can’t imagine what that would be like as a kid.
BH: You know, it’s amazing – right now, when people talk about the resiliency of kids, it’s totally true, but I find myself – and there is so much in having a child that I’m facing. I think that’s one of the things I feel like I focus on a lot in the support group stuff, like, not trying to get in there and save the kid that I was through my daughter. And not try to interpret – I think she has some touches of co-dependency, and that bums me out. Because they say, ‘Yeah, she probably does, she will.’ I’m like, ‘Goddammit! I don’t want that to happen!’ But yeah, when people talk about the resiliency of kids and stuff, I feel like I want to rescue – I want to rescue me, I want to rescue her.
PG: One of the best ways to fuck your kid up is to try to shelter them from ever feeling pain or making mistakes.
BH: Yeah, yeah. It’s nuts. And it goes back to that thing of, people who don’t have this bonus layer of activity or habits, they can sit in the acceptance and the pain of seeing your kid fuck up a little bit more easily than I can, personally.
PG: And from what I understand, in talking to therapists and people who have good relationships with pretty healthy kids, is how they show up when the kid is hurting. By not trying to ram a lesson down their throat, or take over the whole thing, but to sit and listen. Let them know you love them. Let them know that pain is something everybody experiences and it’s not going to last forever, and I’m always here no matter what you want to talk about. I love you unconditionally.
BH: Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting how, I remember I used to be very frustrated with my mother when I would be talking about something that was difficult, and she would just, ‘I’m so sorry, that sounds really hard.’ And I’d be very frustrated, like, ‘That’s it? That’s all you’re going to give me?’
PG: You would think that?
BH: Yeah. And I experience that a little bit with my daughter, in that I’m not getting the response from her that I need to take care of myself. You know? ‘You’re not giving me the thing that assures me that I’m doing a good dad job.’
PG: Right.
BH: Which is really, she just might not have the immediate wiring to be like, ‘Thanks, that means a lot.’ But this is funny – we were watching a TV show one time where they had a dad sitting on the bed in a ‘Hey buddy, what’s going on?’ conversation. And she was like, ‘It’s never like that.’ And I was like, ‘No, it’s not, right? If I say something comforting to you, you just kind of nod. But what do you think about that?’ And she was like, ‘It works sometimes.’ I was like, ‘Okay, cool.’ Which is great, that she pointed that out and we had this other thing.
PG: That’s awesome.
BH: Yeah. But man, having a kid, it is, for me, the biggest feedback I can get on a daily basis of how I’m doing. The other thing that has been one of the greatest blessings of working in the support groups is that I have seen our relationship change. I think she went through a little period of anger about the divorce, and I was very insecure that she was closer to her mum than me. And I had to go away for work for long periods, so there was a lot of that stuff in play. And just that idea that we talked about, in dealing with control issues, of just detachment and just detaching that love. Just like, ‘I love you, I’m going to back off and let you be what you’re going to be,’ was really hard. But as I did it, I started to see that if she’s having a hard time doing cello, I don’t need to sit down and say, ‘Well, here’s what you should be doing, how you should be feeling about doing cello, and why we need to do this again.’ I’ll just be like ‘Okay.’
PG: Trust that they will come to their own conclusions when they need to.
BH: Yeah.
PG: That has to be so hard. That has to be so hard. Knowing when to, you know, back off and when to get in there.
BH: Yeah, it’s tough. Because, I mean, I think it’s tough because there’s this razor thin line sometimes between – a lot of parenting is, I have to herd you over this way, I gotta do it, you know? And then how much of it is, like, and I’m going to do it with a whip?
PG: (Laughs) Yeah, right!
BH: A whip of my long-winded monologue about how important it is and long-term effects, and you should be this. Now it’s just more like, ‘Eh, just do it.’
PG: When you do that monologue, do you do it behind a podium with notes?
BH: I somehow grow ten feet taller than I normally do.
PG: (Sarcastic) What?!
BH: Yeah. I become this omnipotent giant. In a tunic, you know.
PG: Really!
BH: So maybe kind of a Greek god? Maybe.
PG: What Greek god do you think you’re closest to when you grow into that person?
BH: Uh… God of Self-Doubt but Knowledge? (Laughs) God of False Authority.
PG: (Laughs) So, did you cover what you wanted to cover, talking about the experience dating with this person, and retreating down into yourself once they were present and said they loved you?
BH: Well, I will say, like, it is – there’s been some subsequent relationships, and my most recent one, I hit this pattern where that became very apparent.
PG: Would you call it love-avoidant?
BH: I think so. I don’t – yeah, maybe. It’s hard to even hear ‘love’ – I mean, I don’t think I loved her.
PG: Right. Or intimacy-avoidant?
BH: Intimacy-avoidant, yeah. Which – I think we were talking about this earlier – is consistently amazing to me how my brain, and a lot of people who are wired this way, will go for, like, you think you want this but you’re going to go for the shitty version. You think you want this happiness but you are more attracted to the confusion and chaos and doubt, and the uncertainty you grew up with.
PG: Do you think it’s because that’s a familiar script and that is more comfortable than the unknown of, if things are great, I’m going to fall from that and it’s going to be more painful than…
BH: That’s an interesting thing, because I don’t really – I never think in terms of the downfall of it.
PG: (Mean DJ voice) Well, you’re not thinking hard enough.
BH: I am that person, yeah. That means I’m just living one day at a time, man, so I’m nailing it. One day at a time – until three days, and then I’m done. (Laughs) But it’s almost like I don’t have – yet – and I say that knowing and really believing that I am healing and growing, which is great; I mean, I can even say it. I used to hate those kind of sentences. I would just block –
PG: Healing and Growing was the name of your first folk group.
BH: Yeah, Healing and Growing. It was me, and some of those drifters that I was talking about. We would just sing about – I can’t even think about something to say right now.
(Both laugh)
BH: I am so in the zone of actually trying to, you know, stay sincere, man, stay with it! But I mean, that’s another thing. One of the things I discovered is the defense system of comedy, you know?
PG: M-hmm.
BH: And being a performer and stuff. I will admit that right now, in my life, I feel super boring and I have a really hard time doing bits. I’m in such a sincere place. (Laughs)
PG: When I’m a podcast guest, I walk away from it going, ‘Oh my god, I was so incredibly boring and sincere and took myself so seriously.
BH: Yeah! That’s kind of where I’m – you know, people do a bit, and I have that kind of old man thing of like, ‘Oh, yes… humor… Good!’
PG: (Laughs) I recall that! Before my recovery…!
BH: Yes, I acknowledge that as a thing.
PG: What is the name of the show… Mr. Neighbor’s House? Is that the name of the adults…
BH: Yeah, the adults film special, and then the second one is Mr. Neighbor’s House 2.
PG: You do such a fucking good job of creating that person who is just kind and has – a Mr. Rogers kind of template for it – but then you see that there’s all this shit that has been pushed down by this person and compartmentalized. Did that idea come from your personal experience or was it subconscious?
BH: One thing that’s taken – I learned performance and stuff through improv, and doing that, you can just become whoever you want and stuff. And at a certain point when I realized, ‘Oh, I want to do this as my job,’ you come to terms with the idea of… You sort of have to know what your type is and how people perceive you, and what you’re giving off and stuff. And that’s another co-dependency thing. It was like, ‘I don’t know who I am. I don’t know how other people see me. I know how I see myself, but I can’t tell you how I see myself.’ But I was always really funny, and good at being explosively rage-filled and the tightly wound ticking time bomb.
PG: Prim and proper.
BH: Prim and proper, but sort of resentful of his low status but sees himself as high status. You know, like middle management guys. That kind of thing. And I still love that. Frustration is hilarious to me.
PG: You play it very, very well.
BH: Why, thank you. So I think that just knowing that, that I have fun doing it and am funny doing it, that informed it. But a lot of it was just, we wanted to counterbalance – you know, it is that thing of that you have this innate sweetness and this gentle approach…
PG: Very kind of fatherly.
BH: Very fatherly – and how quickly that can change. Which I thought you would enjoy. But a lot of people are like ‘Whoa! That’s…’
PG: Oh no, I loved it. I loved how dark it gets.
BH: The second one gets super dark.
PG: Oh yeah?
BH: Yeah!
PG: Is the second one out?
BH: It comes out June 24th at midnight on Adult Swim.
PG: And what’s it called?
BH: It’s called Mr. Neighbor’s House 2.
PG: How did you come up with that name?
BH: The second one? We did know the French word for ‘two,’ so we just went with the American one.
PG: Oh! That makes total sense!
BH: And then someone told it to us, and we were like, well, that sounds like poo, and so that would be negative… We don’t want that… So. We were thinking about calling it Mr. Neighbor’s House Mr. Neighbor’s House.
PG: That’s a lot of…
BH: It would not fit in.
PG: I would never text somebody to watch that, because –
BH: It’s also a very difficult title to type, and especially to text. It’s very frustrating. So most people just give up. Give up on it quickly. Meaning me.
PG: (Laughs)
BH: So I assume that one goes to dark places like the first one?
PG: When we did it, we originally did it as a pilot, and then they said, ‘You can do it as a special, we’re not going to do it as a series.’ That crushed me. So once I recovered, and I was like ‘Oh great, I get to do a TV special… And that’s another thing I’ll say about working in support group, is having gratitude and actually being able to receive compliments, receive experience, the positive aspects of whatever is happening.
PG: Talk about how you got to that place, if you can – if there were any things you can identify that were seminal in learning about yourself, any tools?
BH: It was realizing that a lot of people probably want what I have. And I’m not saying that because I’m the shit or whatever, but it’s like, just in terms of what I – in choosing to do this as a career and stuff, I was like ‘I like that guy’s career, I like that guy’s work, I’d love to be on that show.’ And then as I started to get to do things like that, before I’d be like, ‘I’m doing that, but I’m not doing this,’ or ‘I’m doing that but I’m not getting a full season arc or whatever.’
PG: Yeah. Which you will always find something of. When I was doing Dinner And a Movie, the thing that I did was, ‘Well, in TV Guide they list the movie and they don’t list us, and we’re basic cable, we’re not network TV.
BH: Yeah – always conditional; always some little ‘but’ thing. And ‘but’ things are – oh, I was going to make a bad joke. Let me just go back to the grandpa thing of like, ‘humor, yes… so many colors of humor.’
PG: (Laughs)
BH: And the crazy thing is, like, improv is my thing – that’s the thing that genuinely saved me, because I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I was a photographer before but I wasn’t happy, and I always knew I wanted to do comedy. And there are so many tools and philosophies in improv that are just about acceptance and being present, and acknowledging the other person and giving up your ego and all that kind of stuff. But I just couldn’t apply it in life, you know? So, I don’t know any other answer to your question. I don’t remember if there was a moment… I do remember there was a moment where my ex – I was talking about so-and-so, and she said, ‘It’s so great that you’re on the show!’ and I was like ‘Yeah, but… I wanted it to be a series regular and they give us a…’ And she was like, ‘Just take the compliment!’ Like, from across the room, she yelled it at me. And I was like ‘Oh…! I am doing this to such a degree that it’s making her verbally blurt out something.’ It’s funny… They talk about layers of an onion being peeled away like layers of yourself being peeled away. I think that’s the thing, where the things that used to serve you, these protective tendencies or habits, you realize that the layers are kind of moldy and stinky and –
PG: It’s not working for me anymore, or there are better tools to survive than these.
BH: Yeah.
PG: Was it helpful, or is it helpful in your support group when you find what your part is in a resentment towards somebody. Where you find out what your fears are underneath that. Does that help you get to a place of gratitude or not feeling resentful at other people?
BH: Yeah, I think so. You basically verbalized what I wasn’t able to…
PG: Because that’s what I experienced, is I was able to have more compassion because I saw how flawed I was. And the struggle is to not focus on and to not obsess about how flawed I am, but to recognize it when it comes up and, ‘note to self,’ and then move on with my life, and not go ‘I’m a piece of shit.’
BH: Right, right. I do think, you know, they talk about your higher power and stuff. Mine was fear. That was my go-to, because investing in the fear I felt internally, that sort of defined the outside world, of like, ‘There are so many things that make me fearful; I need to always be vigilant and be keeping them away. And if I can do everything to head them off at the pass and have this omnipotent understanding that this will lead to this will lead to this.’ So that I’d know the outcome; I’d always outsmart that. It’s like you’re getting ready for the apocalypse and you’re loading up everything in your fucking house when you just need to maybe grab your computer and some duct tape and just get out the door.
PG: (Laughs) Such a great analogy! Such a great analogy. Finding the difference between self-reflection and self-obsession has been a huge one, and yes, recognizing what the fears are. Filtering a fear through our warped crystal ball is one of the worst life plans ever.
BH: Right. Definitely a phrase that struck me is fears of feeling is not reality. And I’m not trying to tie it back to the show but it’s just that it’s been really cool having to talk about the show and then think about, like, ‘Oh, maybe that sort of means this for me’ and I wasn’t aware of it. But the state of being of fear, you can genuinely – you change the world; your brain is able to redefine the world into something that it’s not, and that’s fascinating to me. It’s fascinating to me in a kind of, ‘I’m going to embrace this and have some control over it,’ but it’s also, ‘I’m going to look at this in a compassionate way and also in a kind of clinical way.’ I take a lot of comfort in knowing that your brain is an organ, and if your kidney shuts down and you have to get surgery, people are like ‘Oh, that’s a bummer’ and stuff. But if your brain shuts down, there’s a lot of fear that people have of that, because you become a different person, you know? And losing touch with yourself I think is frightening to everybody.
PG: It is.
BH: I think that’s a thing in the show, that people can either be like, ‘Oh my god, this is too… I don’t like this,’ or they’re like, ‘Ooh, I like that!’
PG: Right! I was the latter when I watched the first one. I think one of the things at the heart of living a fear-based life is the belief that if we’re not hypervigilant, we’re going to miss the signs of danger, but that is not the case. And the other thing is, we take so many things personally.
BH: Yeah!
PG: Because we think it’s about us. ‘Oh, that person is drinking because I’m not enough, or because they know it pisses me off,’ or… They’re not even thinking of us!
BH: Right! Yeah.
PG: Which is great and horrible!
BH: Right. And that’s the thing when I reflect back on my childhood stuff. I don’t think I ever – I never interpreted what was happening around me as ‘This is my fault.’ And maybe that’s a sort of victimization thing I grew up with. I always thought, like, ‘I didn’t ask for this! I didn’t sign up for this. Who is this guy?! Why did Mom marry the first guy who had a problem and he’s not around?’ I think my interpretation was, despite my best efforts, I’m probably going to end up in a crappy situation. But regardless of that, I still have had these – I take on a lot of guilt feelings. For me it’s like, if I’m trying to execute my job, if I’m trying to do a good job acting and I’m nervous about the job, if I make the smallest mistake, it becomes sort of, ‘They’re going to discover that I don’t know what I’m doing and that it’s a lie.’
PG: ‘That I’m a fraud.’
BH: ‘That I’m a fraud,’ you know. That’s a universal thing with a lot of perf--- people!
PG: People.
BH: People, but just performers, you know.
PG: I see it so much in graduate students, high achieving people who get the job they want, and every day they’re like, ‘When am I going to be discovered for not knowing as much as they think I’m not, or not being capable of this.’ And the reality is, most people are thinking that same thing about themselves.
BH: Yeah. I had a talk to the director one time. I was like, ‘How do you answer questions all day and be accountable?’ And he was like, ‘I used to take the tact of just, no matter whether I knew the answer or not, I would give an answer. And a lot of times it got me in trouble, because I’d end up creating these situations that I didn’t want to deal with and other people didn’t want to deal with, and now I will trust the other person, you know, if they’re in the costume department, I’ll be like, ‘Do you want this or this?’ I really can’t decide. I trust you. What is your first instinct?’’ And he said that creating that trust loop helped the whole production. Everyone felt more invested in it as a result. So he was like, ‘That was really cool for me to discover that if you just…’ I mean, it’s basically like you’re opening yourself up to everyone else.
PG: Saying ‘I don’t know.’
BH: Yeah.
PG: Which is one of the most vulnerable things you can do, and was a fear that drove my life and can still drive my life. And yeah, you can invite people in to help you – and get to see their imaginations in there.
BH: That was like, with the show, I did once – I tried to communicate to everyone that I hired, that ‘I really want you to be invested in this, invested in what you know about yourself that’s good, because I can’t do your job and you clearly can do it great. So if there’s ever a thing where you come to me and you want me to make a decision, don’t be freaked out if I say, ‘What do you think?’ Because I think sometimes, as a director with actors, sometimes that’s the worst, if a director is like, ‘Well, what do you think?’ You’re like, ‘That’s not why I’m asking you!’ In that moment, you’re so, ‘I’m doing this and it’s not working – why?! Help me.’ It’s the perspective thing.
PG: Nuance. Fucking nuance!
BH: Urrgh, we got nuance! And perspective, that’s another big thing that has rocked my brain. And I’ve always known this, that it’s very hard to be self-objective. Like, you can’t…
PG: It is. What is it they say – it’s like trying to see the back of your head. There are some times when it’s good to have other people.
BH: Yeah. Someone told me there’s a book and maybe, not a movement but a school of thought now, where it’s like, ‘You can’t have self-knowledge.’ This whole thing of, in a guru way discovering who you are and true self-knowledge – it’s unattainable. Because if you’re trying to escape the ego to claim that you have true self-knowledge, is to claim that you are the ego. So there’s this weird thing.
PG: Right. ‘I’ve lost my ego.’ ‘How?’ ‘My ego told me.’
BH: Right! My ego said, ‘You’ve lost it.’ Yeah, I know. I love that stuff. I love the thing of like, ‘Hold on… M.C. Escher brain loop for myself.
PG: Yes! (Laughs)
BH: But it’s not great when you’re struggling with something. Like, ‘Oh, this is so unanswerable, that’s great!’ But then there’s that weird click, and going back to improv, it’s that thing – a big adage is, don’t think! And I would see students be like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? I’m up in public and I am responding to somebody and they’re paying money for this to be funny and I’m not supposed to think?!’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, do that.’
PG: If you let go, something will flow through you. If you are a genuine improviser, or do you feel that’s true with anybody?
BH: I feel that’s true with anybody. I wasn’t a sports person, but I’ve become obsessed with badminton. I love badminton. And just when I started playing, and I became aware of those times of like ‘It’s coming at me, alright, I’m about to hit it…’ If I am aware of myself, I will not be playing well. But if I’m just forgetting what’s happening and just doing it. I don’t know, you talked about playing hockey, that thing of just – the idea of, just, flow. Of those people who are in an unconscious state where they’re just doing the thing they’re doing but they’re not aware that they’re doing it.
PG: Yes. Everything falls away and it’s, yeah – I get that sometimes from woodworking, or hockey. Or a human connection. That, to me, is the path to anything that is really good in my life, has come from a result of human connection, which is like the blood source for growth and peace and all those other things. But it can be so hard if we don’t have a sense of who to go to to connect, because some people are toxic and unsafe.
BH: Right.
PG: I think it just takes time to be able to suss out who is helpful to connect to and be vulnerable to, and to also be of service to when they need it.
BH: Well, so much of it – I was going to ask, was there a point where you were like, ‘Oh, I can make human connection now, or my human connections are very different…’ Did that just happen, or are you aware of patterns that were…?
PG: Yeah, that happened, I think probably a couple of months into being sober and I started having an awareness of people who were newer than I was, and seeing them struggling, and suddenly realizing, I could be the person that other people were to me – a comforting hand to say, ‘I know what this feels like. Let’s go have a cup of coffee.’ And just listen, and assure them, ‘Hey man, if you take this path that a lot of us has taken, which we instinctively do not want to do, your life can get better.’ And to see the light come on in someone’s eyes when they think that maybe there’s hope – that, to me, is one of the greatest moments of human connection.
The other one that’s really hard for me to get to – and I fight it tooth and nail; I’m sure it’s my ego – is for me to be the person who is laying themselves open and asking for help, and saying, ‘I don’t know.’
BH: Yeah, that’s a big control thing, of asking for help. I come back to that a lot, like, I think I ask for help, but even now – you know, this is an amends or a share or something, but just in this week, I’ve found myself – and this is what I love, where I can – the gap between my action or behavior and my reflection on it is much shorter now. I’ll do something, and I’ll go, ‘Oh wait, that was a little dysfunctional, a little bad-habity.’ But I’ve had a lot of weird resentments of hearing other people getting work, and I’ve felt that, like ‘Oh, why not me?’ You know. And it’s good for me to be like, ‘Oh, okay, you got a lot of fear going on, because there are some uncertainties,’ so you go to this and you go to that.
PG: And to be able to recognize that fear as not reality, is – phew! It’s so helpful.
BH: It’s great. And the other thing for me is, being able to hear other people extend that – this is going back to what I was saying as far as the help thing – being able to hear that people are saying supportive things or assuring things, and not go back to my reaction to my Mom, like, ‘I’m sorry that happened,’ and that not being enough. Like, ‘What you’re saying is not fixing this! Why aren’t you going inside me and…’
PG: ‘Scooping out my pain.’
BH: Scooping out my pain. I think that, as far as relationship stuff, that is probably one of my biggest things that I’m working on. That, still, deep down there’s this fear of, I’m nervous that it’s still not going to fix it, you know? And it’s funny – just saying that, I’m like, ‘Yeah, I guess so.’ I don’t want that to be the case. It’s interesting, my own personal experience of learning all this stuff is that you get to these little plateaus, and you’re like, ‘Cool! That’s great.’ I definitely had a thing where I plateaued up, and I was like, ‘I’m good! This is great.’ And I went away for some work for a long time, but I came back, and a lot of good stuff was happening, and I’m like jamming, doing great. And then I just hit a bottom, where I was like, ‘Whoa, I am back in the well again. I gotta get out of this.’
PG: Of self-obsession and everything is negative?
BH: Yeah, and just an emptiness. It was like, everything I acquired and learned and had been feeling just evaporated.
PG: And do you think that was because of the lack of human connection in your support group?
BH: I think it’s because I stopped doing support group stuff. I think for a lot of people you kind of approach it, like I’m going to audit this, circling it.
PG: Yeah. I’m going to wash my car, and then my car is good for the rest of its life.
BH: (Laughs) Yeah, yeah. I mean, my rationalization is, it’s exercise. If I don’t do this, I’m going to get brain fat. (Laughs)
PG: That does it! Atrophies. Human connection –
BH: Or for me, because I’m a skinny guy, I’ll just become this withered, frail little bird person. And at first I was like, ‘Urgh, I don’t want to do this for the rest of my life!’ but now I’m like, ‘I kind of like having this thing that is – it reminds me of my grandmother. It never made sense to me that she went to church. And I think a lot of people who do the support groups have an issue with God as an authority and stuff, but I was like, ‘What, this is just an idea.’ And also I had that kind of teenager, like, ‘God’s a lie!’ Leaning into that atheism that I didn’t quite believe. But now I’m like, ‘Oh, that is one of those facets of, like, it made her happy, she had a community, she had something to go to.’ She had a place to set everything aside and just be there. Now I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s good!’
PG: Yeah, you know, it just occurred to me, if you think of God or whatever as a higher power, focusing on what it is that is at the end of the road where you will discover what God is – which you never can – is really how much fun you can have on the road to not knowing if God exists, but pretending as if there is something in the universe that is perhaps benevolent and understands you… Whether it’s just energy, gravity, or a conscious entity – just knowing it’s not you, and knowing that your crystal ball doesn’t work, and it’s okay to say ‘I don’t know.’
BH: Yeah. And I think the other thing – I, surprisingly, talk with my daughter a lot about, she’ll ask, ‘What, are you an atheist, or?’ and I’m like, ‘I think I’m agnostic.’ I believe that there is a collective force that we give off, and whether that’s a negative force or a positive force, that has ramifications. The herd can really affect the Earth. And I like that. I like that whether we understand what that force is, if we choose to make that a positive thing, it has positive effects. And recently she’s like, ‘Well, I still think God is probably a guy with a beard, but I like that idea.’
PG: (Laughs)
BH: I’d be curious, if my grandmother was still around, to ask her if she thought it was a guy or what her definition of being a Presbyterian, of being a Christian, was. And it could just be like, ‘Here’s a set of rules that I follow, and I see the benefits of it, so that’s it.’ But my Dad that I grew up with, he used to be a Pastor. He was a Southern Baptist Pastor that was betrayed by his church because his marriage fell apart, and when he came back to them he was like, ‘I’m just glad I have the church as a community,’ and they were like, ‘Yeah, we’re not comfortable having a Pastor who can’t keep his marriage together, so…’
PG: Wow.
BH: And he was deeply disillusioned. And he was like, ‘Screw you,’ and ‘Screw you, God.’
PG: Yeah.
BH: And later in life he came back to the church and he told me, ‘I realized I was kind of – religion was more of a philosophy for me than a faith, and when I was trying to tell myself, like, I believed in God, I believed in the words of the Bible and stuff, as his words that I should follow, my way in was like, this is a life approach.’ That was the way that he freed himself up later in life, which was good.
PG: Yeah. And to not take what people who believe in God say as coming from God!
BH: Yeah. I think now I’m sort of like, whatever you believe is good as long as –
PG: It’s a personal thing!
BH: As long as you don’t use it badly.
PG: Yeah.
BH: I used to have such a thing, like, ‘You’re an idiot because you’re quoting the Bible.’ If I had been able to listen, I’d be like, ‘Oh, that’s cool, that’s a cool phrase.’
PG: Yeah, I mean, the teachings of Jesus are beautiful.
BH: They’re very popular.
PG: (Laughs) They’re catching on!
BH: They’re really catching on!
PG: This Christianity thing might work.
BH: Yeah, if they could get a Twitter account, they’re really going to get some followers! That’s cool.
PG: Once somebody is in charge of something, it’s ruined.
BH: Yeah, yeah.
PG: That’s where religion, I think, its downfall was having a hierarchy. That’s why I can’t get with most religions.
BH: Yeah, probably nicer when you get more into, like, ‘I wonder what costumes they’re going to have?’
PG: Yeah. If everything is gold, doesn’t that mean God definitely exists?
BH: Yeah! Because we love gold, and he must love gold. He makes us love gold, so that’s all it is.
PG: (Laughs) It’s been great talking to you.
BH: Thank you so much. This – I was genuinely so excited about this.
PG: Oh good, good! It’s nice to see you again, and it’s called Mr. Neighbor’s House 2, is the thing that’s coming out at the end of June.
BH: Yeah, it’s Sunday, June 24th, at midnight on Adult Swim. I can do the time math, whether midnight starts on Saturday night or Sunday night. I think it’s literally Sunday night at midnight, so if you have a DVR…
PG: Yeah. Most people tuned us out about two minutes ago in the podcast and right now they’re just staring at a wall and they’ve been lost in thought thinking about themselves for forty-five minutes. So don’t worry about it.
BH: Yeah, and then occasionally they would hear, ‘Oh, they’re struggling to do a bit in the middle of this, meh, they failed.’
PG: (Laughs) ‘Back to myself.’
BH: ‘Back to myself!’
PG: Thanks, buddy.
BH: Thanks, man.
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