01/08/2021 In Podcast Episodes
Tim Minchin
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Episode Transcript:
Welcome to episode 521 with my guest Tim Minchin. I’m Paul Gilmartin, this is the Mental Illness Happy Hour, a place for honesty about all the battles in our heads; from medically diagnosed conditions, past traumas and sexual dysfunction to everyday compulsive negative thinking. This show’s not meant to be a substitute for professional mental counselling. I am not a therapist. It’s not a doctor’s office, it’s more like a waiting room that doesn’t suck. The website for this show is Mentalpod.com. Mentalpod also the social media handles you can follow us at. I’m recording this today, mid afternoon on Thursday the seventh of January, and, whoo, I saw my shrink Tuesday and boy was that good timing. He increased my dosage of Buspar, and I started feeling better almost immediately which is always helpful when the capitol gets stormed. Buspar: your friend during anarchy. I debated whether or not to touch on what happened, because I try to avoid politics where possible in this podcast, but sometimes it’s… when it leaks into my mental health and the mental health of people around me, I feel like it’s something that needs to be mentioned, and watching the people on Fox News be outraged by the storming of the capitol is, it’s like Dr. Frankenstein being upset that his monster broke the china. You know, I watched both, I actually watched probably three or four different network’s coverage of it, and as much as I dislike him, I was watching Tucker Carlson because, you know, I think it’s important to find out what is feeding the discontent, and the craziness in our country, and Tucker Carlson said about the woman who was shot, that she looked like a “solid citizen, not some androgynous blogger.” [scoffs] I mean, I don’t even know where to begin with that. I don’t even need to-- and people saying that Mike Pence showed bravery. You know, bravery would’ve been refusing to be a running mate, or at some point resigning, not enabling for four years. He’s a coward and he’s a hypocrite, and just because he refused a single instance of participating in an insane lie, it is not bravery. [sighs] You know, one of the things that I have been taught to do in trying to stay sober and emotionally balanced is to pray and meditate and a lot of times it’s on autopilot, and man, did I mean it when I prayed this morning. It was—the things that I’m told to pray for is for the happiness of the people that I resent, and boy did I have a lot of people. A lot of people to pray for. And I didn’t automatically feel my anger or my sadness or my resentment lifted, but, you know, I’m powerless over what’s happening, and the only thing I can do is control my attitude towards it and I’m willing to try anything except things that I think contribute to what we have going on. And who knows, maybe me talking about that on the show is contributing to it, I don’t know. But I also gotta be honest about how I’m feeling. You know such a big part of mental health is being honest about what’s going inside of us, and even asking ourselves “what’s going on inside me? Am I sad, am I angry? Am I resigned? Am I isolating? What am I doing?” One of the things I’ve been doing a lot to escape, I think in a healthy way is I’ve been reading. Probably read five books in the last couple of weeks and I’ve been finding that it’s really been helping me. I’m reading non-fiction, I’m reading fiction, and it’s, I find that it kinda recharges my mental battery, and I find myself feeling more creative and less kind of stuck in a creative limbo of not feeling inspired by things. One of the books I’ve been reading is Walter Isaacson’s biography on Da Vinci. If you’ve never read anything by Walter Isaacson, he’s such a good author. He wrote the biography of Steve Jobs, one on Einstein, and he’s just a great writer, and one of the things that he talked about is Leonardo Da Vinci’s to-do lists. And I would say they’re slightly different than my to-do lists. And so I’m gonna combine Da Vinci’s to-do lists and my to-do lists and I’m gonna see if you guys can figure out which one’s which.
-Learn the measurements of Milan and its suburbs, then draw it.
-Get the master of arithmetic to show me how to square a triangle.
-Ask Gianino the bombardier how the tower of Ferrara is walled.
-Ask Benedetto Protanari by what means they walk on ice in Flanders.
-Buy Raisin Bran.
-Get a master of hydraulics to explain how to repair a canal, a lock, and a mill in the Lombard manner.
-Get the measurement of the sun promised me by maestro Giovanni Francese the Frenchman.
-Observe the goose’s foot.
-Inflate the lungs of a pig and observe whether they increase in width and in length or only in width.
-Find my other slipper.
-Find out why the fish in the water is swifter than the bird in the air.
-Describe the tongue of the woodpecker.
That one. “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker”. That is one of the things that Walter Isaacson said is it is apparent that he suffered from depression and also ADHD. A ton of his projects were left unfinished. And somehow that brought me this schadenfreude bit of comfort.
This is from the Loves survey filled out by Misery Loves Company and they write: “I live climbing into bed with a pizza and watching dark crime stories on Netflix. Why’s it so comforting to watch other people’s misery?” Well, I think I just touched on that with the thing about the stuff that Da Vinci did not accomplish. I think we all kinda look at our life as being graded on a curve, and we’re so confused about whether we’re doing it right or not. The only waypoints we use sometimes are how other people are doing, and since we don’t really know what’s going on inside them, we use their accomplishments, which is, boy, talk about a recipe for disaster.
[BetterHelp Ad]
This is an Awfulsome Moment filled out by Brittany Jane and she writes: “It’s currently six a.m. I’ve been up all night doing drugs alone. I finally settled in to try and rest. I decided to watch Intervention and the subject is a 21-year-old meth addict. I openly weep watching this girl get treatment for her meth addiction while I, a 31-year-old meth addict gaze beyond the TV to the table where my meth and syringes sit. I cringe through tears and think ‘time to do a shot’. WTF?” Aw man, I’m sending you some love. Oh, addiction—you know I’ve been sober 17 years, and addiction and alcoholism are a motherfucker. And, I had to finally ask for help because I could not do it alone. And I think Gracie is about to bark. She just jumped off the bed with a sense of purpose. But anyway, I really hope it gets to the point where you do reach out and ask for help, because it’s—just might save your life. [Gracie barks] [chuckles] Gracie, God damn it. Gracie come.
This is an email I got from Ron Hamady, and he writes: “I didn’t expect to find such a wonderful thing”. And then he included a link, and [Gracie continues barking] Gracie! I don’t know who Ron is, but it sounds like a nice name, and I went ahead and clicked on the link, and instantly my computer burst into flames and the room filled with raccoons. Up to my neck. But they were friendly raccoons. And I have to wonder if Ron didn’t give me a nefarious link. So if I ever bump into Ron Hamady, I got a bone to pick with him.
Then finally before we get to the interview with Tim, this is an Awfulsome Moment filled out by a woman who calls herself Ace. She writes: “this happened when I was in grade one or two when I had lost some baby teeth. My male friend and I were playing at the babysitter’s and pretended to be different animals. He had learned about skunks and their spray, and if you were the skunk in the game, you could chase the other kids, quickly turn around with your butt facing them, and yell “skunk juice!” to spray them. It was a lot of fun running around until my friend’s mom came to pick him up. As he was putting on his shoes I quickly ran up, turned my butt upwards towards them and happily yelled “skunk juice!” This was met with silence. I still remember the feel of the babysitter’s hand tightly gripping my arm, pulling me away and sending me to the living room. I knew I had done something wrong but had no idea what, and started crying. No one said anything to me, but I knew I was in trouble. When my mom picked us up, she asked why I’d said something bad. I tearfully tried to explain ‘why would I say anything bad to my friend? I like him.’ While still not knowing what was wrong. I found out later from her that I had cried all the way home until I fell asleep. I later understood that they thought I swore at my friend. I had no idea what the swear was, though. No one would tell me, and determined that it had to be ‘fuck you’. Fast forward, I’m in high school and I’m retelling the story when I explained how the baby misheard ‘skunk juice’ as ‘fuck you’, my mom says ‘that’s not what was said’ and told me to think about it. Puzzled, I asked what she thought it was. That I had gone through all the swears, and to me, ‘fuck you’ is the only one that fit. She finally clarified that the babysitter, her daughters, and my friend’s mom all thought that I had run up to my friend, turned my butt to face him, and yelled ‘cunt juice’. My mom then had to explain what a cunt was, thus proving my innocence all along.
[intro]
Paul: I’m here with Tim Minchin, who I’m sure many of you know. He’s a singer, songwriter, actor, producer, um, vagabond? Would we include that? Ne’er do well?
Tim: [chuckles] I don’t know if I’m a vagabond. I’ll take vagabond. I mean, it’s not on my Wikipedia page, but maybe it should be.
Paul: Would it be fair to call you the Mozart of low self esteem?
Tim: [laughs] Yeah, go on, except I’m not dead yet.
Paul: Uh, dude, I love your stuff, man. You’re—the breadth of emotion and mental battle that you’re able to express through your music it’s both funny, sweet, silly, heartbreaking. It reminds me in a lot of ways kind of the—I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m blowing smoke up your ass, but the breadth of emotions that The Beatles expressed in their music.
Tim: I will take that Beatles ass smoke any day, Paul. That’s my kinda ass smoke. Well, that, I—I mean, God. I do—I feel like I’m on a long journey and it’s interesting being 45 and kinda putting out my first studio album. In that way I’m quite different from The Beatles. But, uh, I think what the kind of circuitous or serpentine nature of my journey has allowed me is to be—I’ve had all of these experiences and lived around the world and made different genres of art, and it’s allowed me to kind of focus on this particular type of song writing that’s storytelling and slightly unashamed linguistically and not trying to be cool. But trying to reaaaally poke into little corners of what we feel, and then try to express them in quirky, whimsical ways, and, I dunno, I feel--I feel weird about this record in a way because It’s me and I don’t, you know, I’m not here to listen to my own stuff, but I’m also really proud of it ‘cause I think what I set out to—
Paul: we should mention the name of the album is Apart Together.
Tim: Apart Together, yep, very Covid title even though it was written before the plague. And yeah, it’s just, I’m, I’m proud of it, because what I wanted to make sure I did was make a record that is me, without it being sort of redundant, because I’m just a sort of ‘90s, muso—you know I wanted it to be allowed to live now but to not deny the fact that I come from a theatrical background, I come from a comedic background, and yet, not be trapped by those precedents sort of thing.
Paul: well, I have to say, as a former stand-up comedian—I was touring stand-up for 20+ years—We, as you probably know, it takes a lot to make comics laugh. We’re pretty jaded, we see the joke coming, and I’m just—
Tim: And we’re jealous, so we don’t wanna laugh.
Paul: Yeah, and I’m consistently impressed at the twists and turns you take with your stuff and how really kind of refreshing and non-hacky it is. A lot of musical comedians are so hard for other comedians to listen to ‘cause there’s no real craft when it comes to the comedy of it. It’s almost used like a camouflage to get mediocre comedy through.
Tim: And usually there’s not a lot of craft to the music of it either.
Paul: Right.
Tim: With many, obviously notable and exceptional exceptions, but often the reason musical comedy gets a bad rap is that it’s neither really music nor really comedy, at it’s worst, because it is someone who’s got an instinct for a funny rhyme and entertaining, it doesn’t mean it’s terrible, and a lot of people might love it, and I’m not even really judging it, but the problem—
Paul: Well, I am. Leave that to me. They should be sentenced to death.
Tim: [laughs] A rhyming death.
Paul: Kidding. Kidding of course.
Tim: But um, but I guess the--where I got to build a little niche or find my audience is that I am a musician, and I’m inclined towards talking about subjects that songwriters don’t usually talk about: God, and sex and death, and I love a rhyme, and I love ranting, and I’ve got some facility with language, I suppose. I hope. Otherwise, it’s all built on—built on--
Paul: that is an understatement.
Tim: --and so I, I didn’t go watch. I had never seen someone do a stand-up show before I started. I come from Perth in west Australia, where there was like on pub that did stand-up, and it just wasn’t my world, I came from a more theatre world. So like the first thing I did was put on a two-act, 90 minute show. I was basically a cabaret artist that people started laughing at, and I just followed that laugh. You know? And so I guess if I’m not hacky, if I’m not hackneyed, it’s because I didn’t know what I was meant to be either adhering to nor avoiding. I wasn’t referencing anything.
Paul: Yeah, it’s such a good petri dish to grow in: the theatre world, because there are few places where you’re given as much leeway, as much time between punchlines to be weird, or whatever it is that you need to do to find your voice. And the first time I became aware of you was somebody forwarded me a link to your song Fuck The Poor.
Tim: Oh, great. Wow.
Paul: And it—And I know we’re diggin’ way back deep into the archives but it made me laugh because clearly you weren’t punching down, you were making fun of the middle class guilt of enjoying your life while people around you are suffering, and feeling for them, but I mean, one of the lines in there is something along the lines of “If I give you this money, it will allow me to not feel guilty about the future purchases I make that I don’t need”.
Tim: Yeah, and that—yeah, the concept was “If I put 50 cents in your bucket, I’m buying some guilt-free indulgence,” You know, and it’s what we do. And that’s okay, right, I don’t really believe in altruism in its purest form: the only reason you ever do something good is that it makes you feel good, you know. But it’s very, very important that we understand and promote the idea of making yourself feel good by making other people feel good. So just because in my worldview there’s no such thing as pure altruism because you’re doing it to make you feel good, it’s better to make yourself feel good by giving someone at a traffic light 50 cents or by paying your tax or donating to a homelessness charity than it is to make yourself feel good by, you know, I dunno, like, having group sex with—I dunno, I’m now so scared of saying a dark joke on the internet that all of my jokes are—
Paul: That makes two of us.
Tim: --I will avoid all those dark jokes.
Paul: That makes two of us.
Tim: But we live in a lovely, shiny new world where there’s no dark jokes. But I mean it’s—I’m sorry, I’m now rambling on about survivor guilt, which is a subject I’m very interested in because, you know, I live in it.
Paul: Uh, talk about that.
Tim: Well, the trouble with talking about survivor guilt is it sounds self-pitying because you’re privileged, but I think it’s an interesting and okay thing to talk about. You have to be careful of your audience because you need to be very clear that you’re not saying “I’m suffering because I’m lucky”. But, there’s a suffering that happens when you’re lucky if you are sensitive. If you’re like me where you have no-- I don’t believe I deserve my luck more than someone living in a cardboard—I don’t think someone living in a cardboard box under a bridge is to blame for their poverty, and I don’t think I’m to be credited for my relative wealth. I don’t think I’m to be credited for my talents, I didn’t make them. I got gifted a brain with a certain wiring and an environment in which I grew up which was not perfect or easy, but the various pressures that I came under meant that when combined with my wiring, I was able to become someone who has a—makes art that audiences come to, it’s all arbitrary. And, if you spend a lot of time in these thoughts, I have to work very hard on letting myself enjoy myself. And again it’s really important that no one thinks I’m saying “poor little rich me.” It’s just—
Paul: I think you’ve made that clear.
Tim: But it has to be a conscious choice for me to go “so I’m sitting in my office and I can see the ocean from my window here, and that’s—I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I got to buy a house where I can see the ocean. It’s like all I ever wanted. And I really have to work to let myself enjoy it because of my consciousness of how unfair it is that some people don’t even have a window, let alone an ocean through it. And I do enjoy it, but usually only after I’ve had a couple wines and I can let go of all the id, or whatever it is, no, the opposite, the superego.
Paul: Are you comfortable talking about what life was like for you growing up and where the need to escape and create kind of came from, if you feel like you’re able to.
Tim: yeah, I’m comfortable with talking about anything. Yeah, I mean I—that…
Paul: Give me some snapshots of your life growing up. Start with when you were a kid that you think were emblematic of your world, whether it was your inner world or the world going on around you.
Tim: Ooh, God, I don’t know if I’m good at that. I mean the headline is I’ve had a fantastic, privileged, happy life with a very—my—here’s something I’ll share that’s a little bit personal, but I don’t think anyone involved would mind: my uncle Jim is a musician and he’s had a very difficult time with mental health and addiction and stuff, and has survived all sorts of stuff. Transplants and cancer, and just last week open heart surgery. And off the back of that, he sent me a message about my mom and dad, ‘cause my mom’s sick now too, and he said “I just wanna tell you guys,” ‘cause dad and mom really looked after him a lot in his life, but especially just in these last few weeks, and he just wrote this email about my mom and dad: just went “I want you to know that they’re not normal. I’ve never met anyone like them. They are—they are the closest thing to soulmates I’ve ever seen. They’ve been like this since they met at 18 years old,” and my mom and dad are such different people, and my memory of them is that there was some tension: dad worked all the time and mom had four kids and, you know all that. But I realize now how incredible it is to grow up with those role models, and I’m afraid there’s no inciting incident that made me a comedian. I’m the second of four kids, the other three of my siblings are my closest friends in the world, as are my mom and dad who are still together. I went to a boy’s school and, I suppose it wasn’t a school that particularly valued what I’ve ended up being valued for, but I was lucky because I was also good at sport, you know, I—my childhood is just playing field hockey, basically. There’s your snapshot. My brother and I hitting hockey balls at a goal. I mean, honestly, a LOT of that. And then going to my granddad’s farm. I mean, it’s just privilege all the way through. Honestly there’s nothing scary there.
Paul: I believe you. I believe you. There’s a melancholy in a lot of your songs that is so palpable and, you know, your song Summer Romance, don’t let me read too much into it but as I was listening to it, it spoke to me of that feeling when summer ends and fall starts with the short days and it gets kind of depressing and I could be way off base but I’m sure as most artists you know, don’t wanna tell somebody what their song means to them, they just are happy that it resonates with them.
Tim: Oh yeah, but I’m like the opposite. I’m tediously willing to unpack my own songs because I’m a narcissist [laughs]. Look, I think that your sense of grief that you’re getting out of Summer Romance is incredibly gratifying to me that you get that because for me it’s also about letting go of just time. Of the shiny days in your life ‘cause I—Sara and I both really struggle. We’ve lived Perth, Melbourne, London, L.A., now Sydney. And we really have been rocked by leaving those places, which we’ve done for reasons of grand adventure and my career and wanting to come back to Australia and all that, but I grieve my young children. Like no one told me that when your children grow up, you’ve lost—you love the new ones, but the old ones are dead. You know, like-- sorry if that’s triggering to anyone-- but you know what I mean. Figuratively, I don’t have my 5 year old Violet anymore. I don’t have my 7 year old Casper, and I can’t bear that. And because we’ve moved so much, we’ve connected those periods to places, so Summer Romance is my London song, and it’s the loss of those years of innocence. Now the kids are older and they have some struggles, actually, that’s the thing that I won’t talk about that is actually the prominent thing in my life is that one of my kids has some struggles at the moment, and you just can’t believe that their innocence goes so quickly, anyway, this is boring.
Paul: No, it’s not boring! It’s not boring it’s something that I’ve heard parents touch on before but I would imagine it has to be a really melancholy feeling that yeah, you did get to experience those moments when they were innocent and exploring the world and you could have a front row seat for it.
Tim: Yeah, yeah.
Paul: but it’s not there anymore.
Tim: But we have also, of course, we do this thing with our memories where we edit out the hard bits so they become the halcyon days of pure joy when actually of course they had their struggles as well, but, yeah I think there’s something in my—I think I’ve got to a point in my life where I just feel like I want to talk about--I just wanna try and write the melancholy or try and find expression for it. And I don’t think I’m writing—I don’t write because I need to express something particularly, although in my angry stuff it’s probably that. In my political stuff, it’s like “Argh, fuck these guys, I’m just gonna say what no one’s saying” and looking back sometimes, I was right. And other times I was also right [laughs]. And, but now I’m—I have had a few years where I’ve been a bit down and we can talk about why that is, because I think it’s environmental, I think it’s about the internet and, you know, Donald fucking Trump, and there’s a global anxiety going on that I’ve tapped into a main vein of because of my addiction to news and to—you know—and a terrible part of my survivor guilt, part of my guilt of my privilege is how I think I should be able to do something. This complete delusion that maybe if I just say the right thing at the right time, you know. Even as I have that thought I know it’s ridiculous, but I think a lot of us have it. Not just people with big platforms, but all that anger on the internet is people going “I just need to fix this.” And so anyway I’ve just had this sort of anxious time and I’m just trying to work out how that looks in songs a bit.
Paul: Yeah, I mean, if somebody isn’t depressed these days, they’re not paying attention.
Tim: Yeah.
Paul: It’s a hard time to be out of bed.
Tim: In my musical version of Groundhog Day, there’s a song called Stuck. And Groundhog Day is a musical about depression, without a doubt. Moreso than the movie. It really leans on the trap of depression, really, and it gets very, very dark, but there’s a lyric in Stuck, which is a comedy song, where he keeps going to various specialists to try and get him out of what he sees as a mental breakdown, and the psychiatrist says “we’ll treat your depression with a course of Fluoxetil[sic]” and he goes “I’m not depressed!” and the psych goes, “you’re not? You must be delusional”, which is exactly what you’re saying, like you’re either anxious about the world or you’re not looking.
Paul: Right.
Tim: And so I’m trying to look less.
Paul: So, talk about the depression when it comes to you, how does it come at you?
Tim: I don’t think I know what—I don’t think I’ve experienced depression. Really, knowing, having loved ones with depression, it’s important that I don’t—
Paul: Then let’s say the sadness. What if the sadness comes to you?
Tim:Um, I don’t…
Paul: Does it ever make it a struggle to go about your day, to connect to other humans, to feel comfortable in your skin?
Tim: I don’t know, and I think—those descriptions you just gave don’t resonate with me hugely, which is why I—it’s important that I don’t couch it as depression. Not because I would have any problem acknowledging depression, but because I don’t wanna, sort of, I think it’s a very important designation, just—these words matter because they need to be taken seriously for the people who suffer, and I think I have—it’s more akin to anxiety or an incapacity to feel at peace. But it’s—I have a lyric in Groundhog Day that goes “there will be mornings when you are utterly defeated by your laces” and that—and he also says that this stunning stasis. That sense of stuckness I experienced in my 20s when I couldn’t find my way and I didn’t have a career and I was playing gigs that were underpaid and I just didn’t know where I was gonna go, so that moment sitting on the side of your bed and going, “oh now I have to stand up as well”, you know? “I’ve got this far and now I have to fucking stand, and what am I gonna do then? I suppose I’ll get some breakfast”. You know, that malaise, what I describe in my loose-- sorry I’m gonna keep quoting myself cause I’m meant to be advertising my album. That—and fuck advertising my album, but anyway, I guess I express all these feelings in song so it’s inevitable, and I’m a narcissist and I’m gonna quote myself, but I talk about the improvisors at the UCB trying to improvise their way out of ennui. It’s actually ennui that describes that side of my life: the numbness of not quite knowing how to proceed. The stuff I experience these days, which I think is very, very common, and I see it leeching into my children in a way that makes me—I’m just trying so hard to figure out how to not—how to protect ‘em. Is a sort of global—this global anxiety that something’s amiss in the world and that we should be doing better, and I think it’s like we’re consuming poison, and I don’t think it’s real. I actually genuinely believe that the world’s getting better and better. And, well I don’t even believe it, I think it’s demonstrably the case in many, many meaningful ways, but where it’s getting worse is we’ve got this technology where a bunch of people are profiting out of our anxieties and we are complicit in it, right? So I know this has been talked about a million times, and I’m the least conspiratorial thinker in the world, I don’t think anyone’s in charge, I just think the model, I keep writing on Twitter, which I’m better at not being on these days—I keep wanting to say, every day I wanna say “Guys, you—these—all this news is designed to make you angry and anxious. Not designed by a person, but designed by Darwinian evolution. The more you’re cross, the more you retweet going “fuck this person”, the more hits it gets, and the more you have made that news the only think you read, so just, you’ve gotta stop, it’s not real. You know, that week where us progressives and liberals, all we could think about was Black Lives Matter. That wasn’t—there wasn’t anything—that wasn’t the only terrible thing going in the world or the only hopeful thing going in the world, it was just that that’s all my progressive friends and I were reading about, and I was so anxious about it, and I’m anxious about stuff on a broad sense, I’ve been interested in the politics of race for years, I suppose, but I’m on the hook. I’m being controlled by an algorithm, and I’ve sort of segued from talking about mental health to talking about internet mental health, but I think that’s my main problem.
Paul: And, yeah, I think for a lot of people you can’t parse out where one thing starts and the other begins. It’s one of the reasons why I started this podcast was it’s a tangled bowl of spaghetti sometimes. You don’t know: “am I not exercising enough? Should I be taking a different med? Are there toxic people in my life, am I being too selfish, am I self-obsessed? Is it the world around me? What the fuck is it?” Well, who wouldn’t wanna stay in bed when that’s your first thoughts?
Tim: Yeah, that’s right, and managing—and then you’re down a different rabbit hole because then you think “the problem is I’m not in control of my thoughts. My thoughts are running me, and they’re anxious and I need to find a mechanism by which I’m more able to control my runaway anxious thoughts”, and then you start looking into mindfulness and then you’re feeling guilty because you’re obviously not very good at meditating or you’re—like when you’re a parent you think “Oh god, what have I done, my kids are on their screens! They should have an app. There should be an--I need to get them that app that makes them meditate. I’m gonna force my kids to meditate. I’ll use a different robot to make them meditate to stop the other robots”. Like it’s insane. And then if you’re privileged like me you go, “you know what? The kids are in the city too much in the eastern suburbs of Sydney surrounded by capitalism, and I’m going to buy a small farm! And I’m going to take my children to the trees! And then you buy a small farm! And you take the kids to the trees, and the kids fuckin’ hate the trees because they’re on their own and the internet’s there and, Jesus, I mean I’m being harsh on myself it’s not that simple, but you start—there is no end—it is too much information for these kids and for WE kids. It’s too much. I really, weirdly the bible said it in the first chapter: “The apple of the tree of knowledge is something to be really careful with”. I don’t suppose the bible knew this was coming, but this unfettered and yet, because of algorithmic editing, constantly anxiety-making feed of information. I don’t think we’ve evolved to cope with it. I’m a bit worried about it to be honest.
Paul: Yeah, I, that makes total sense to me. As I was laying in bed this morning trying to will myself to get up, I flashed back to when I was a kid growing up in the 70s, and there weren’t that many options for what to do. There was three channels of TV, we lived near woods. It was so much easier because your choices were limited. Today: “what podcast do I listen to? oh my God I’m gonna make a mistake and miss whatever great podcast is out there, and I’m gonna waste my time listening to a bad one, and I’m not doing life right.”
Tim: Yeah, and I—I don’t think I’m particularly addicted, like, as in I don’t think I’m an outlier, but I took my dog for a walk yesterday, and I just wanna say this: I know I’m talking in cliches and I know I’m also ignoring the bit of the conversation which is, “look how the democratization of information has freed people and amplified voices that were otherwise hidden” and, yes, my, you know, white heterosexual cisgendered anxiety is because the structures that allowed me to be at peace are crumbling because you’re finally—you’ve had the scales taken from your eyes and you’re seeing the world for what it is. That’s a really interesting conversation. But a lot of people who listen to this podcast I’m sure will relate to a very conflicted relationship with news and information and podcasts and art. Yesterday I was taking my dog for a walk and I left my phone in the car, so I didn’t look at my phone while I was taking my dog for a walk. And taking my dog for a walk just means sitting on a bench and throwing a ball while he obsesses over balls. Because obsessing over balls is a funny sentence. And I’m sitting on the bench without my phone, and there’s a 10 minute period where I’m incredibly not at peace. Because my brain’s going “There’s a thing over there in the car that you could be reading some stuff that gets you angry, and then there’ll be other stuff that makes you feel good about yourself,” because being in my career there’s always someone saying something that gives me a little boost to my self esteem, little dopamine hit, and then after about 10 minutes it just went away. And I was finally walking my dog. And I just can’t believe I’m an intelligent 45-year-old grownup man that can’t stop this little machine getting up in my fucking brain, and I just, I just hope that I can do better at that and I hope people listening go “Yeah it is like that. We just gotta walk away from the information as much as possible”. I don’t think it will cure you if you have chemical depression, that’s not the key, but surely it’s all intertwined.
Paul: Yeah, I do definitely think it is, and those moments are hard when you feel like you’re crawling out of your skin in a vague way. It’s you feel restless, you feel a bit irritable, nothing seems to bring the pleasure. Do you think it’s one of those things of you get so used to being stimulated at a certain level, when it’s not there, the silence is deafening?
Tim: I absolutely think so. And so to come back to your 70s upbringing, you weren’t anxious about the silence. I mean, I didn’t love school, and I didn’t—it’s not like it was bliss, but I wasn’t—I wasn’t trying to fill the holes. And it wasn’t because we were dumber back then, or more satisfied with less cognitive movement, we were just less addicted. It’s just an addiction to stimulation, it’s exactly what you just said. If you train your brain to get all these little—it’s all chemistry right?—so getting angry about something induces a chemical that’s addictive, it make you--it’s like a fight or flight response, it’s a little tiny fight response. Being outraged is an addictive chemical, being complimented, having someone put a love heart on a photo, they’re all addictive. Not because they’re doing you good, just like booze or drugs they’re not doing you good. They’re addictive because they say to your brain, “this is the new normal. This is the new normal”. And any neurologist or psychiatrist or psychologist out there saying “Tim you’re talking absolute bullshit” Please write in, ‘cause I wanna know if I am, but it strikes me that of course your brain—it’s plastic and it will adjust to the new normal, whatever you’re feeding it, and that can be information or booze or sex or whatever, and if you then try and deprive it of those stimulations, it will feel like you’re missing something, so you’ve gotta go cold turkey. You’ve gotta break it somehow. You’ve gotta discipline yourself to go through those uncomfortable moments of not getting that stimulation so that you can get out the other side, just like any addiction. It’s so important, I think.
Paul: How frequently do you find yourself in the place where you go “I need to take a break. I’m just starting to feel the effects of this, and then what do you do? What do you replace that with, if anything?
Tim: well, I’m sorta constantly there. I mean, I run, right, so, I’m actually injured at the moment which is part of why I’m going slightly mad, so I use exercise as a circuit breaker, and of course I play piano, you know, most days. And I’m not on my phone when I’m playing the piano and I’m not on my phone when I run. Generally I don’t even run with a podcast or music, that’s my, you know, but I can go running for 40 minutes along the cliff, and the ocean in Sydney is the most beautiful thing ever, and not be present to it at all because I’m arguing with some critic in my head or, you know, that. Ugh, God I’ve gotta do better, but I’m constantly, every day I feel like “Fuck! Stop! Looking at your phone Tim! Stop it!” All day every day. Well not all day every day, but a lot of every day.
Paul: The feeling that you get, you know, you described, when you have a couple glasses of wine, then you can appreciate the view, you can appreciate your life, is it really hard to get to that place without the wine?
Tim: It’s a conscious—it has to be conscious. And I don’t know whether that’s just as you get older, the world gets more complicated, and there’s no doubt that shit’s got more complicated for me in the last couple years, you know: family illness and family mental illness and some shit stuff, you know, and I think that’s just you getting older: you don’t get to go into your room and play Nintendo, you’re the boss and you have to figure it out. I think as you get older, unless you’re very, very lucky and are wired just to be, you know, candied and be positive about everything, I think you increasingly have to do work to be grateful, and I do it—and this comes back to guilt and stuff--you know I’m, I have to work to let myself enjoy my luck, my privileges, and I have to work sort of in parallel to remind myself how lucky I am. And I think this is everyone, right? I’m just talking as a human, and I think as you get older it’s inevitable that you have to work on it more. I don’t think the internet’s helping, and unfortunately for me, alcohol does help, and luckily for me, I’m not bingey, so I have a, you know, I drink too much, I drink every day and I drink two or three glasses of wine and I just have an off switch, which is very lucky, because the people I know who have problems with booze have the slippery slope. It’s a very good drug for me, but I don’t necessarily recommend getting into that habit, because it’s not amazing for you.
Paul: Is there anything you’d like to share with us before we wrap up? Are you near a piano?
Tim: Yeah, I’m near a piano, [plays discordantly] always.
Paul: Would you mind taking us out with maybe a tune from your album Apart Together?
Tim: My God, well, I never do this: I never put myself in a situation where I can’t control the sound. How long do you want?
Paul: How about Airport Piano?
Tim: Oh my God, well I’m not gonna play—oh God that goes nuts. I wouldn’t even know how to
approach that.
Paul: Well, what one feels comfortable for you?
Tim: Um--
Paul: None of ‘em?
Tim: No, none of ‘em. Do you wanna--I’m worried it’ll sound terrible, right?
Paul: It sounds good from where I’m at right now. I can hear the piano and I can hear your voice.
Tim: Okay, well here’s a slightly melancholy but pretty song about the limits to which we can help other people, I guess. You want melancholy? You’re gonna get melancholy.
Paul: Yeah. This is I Can’t Save You?
Tim: Yeah, I Can’t Save You. This one [indistinguishable] solo. Alright.
[Singing]
I’ll walk to the freeway, to help change your tire.
I’ll wake you to warn you your house is on fire.
And I’ll lend you money if money will help.
But darling I can’t save you from yourself.
I can’t save you.
When you’re feeling blue, I’ll send you songs to sing.
If the flood pulls you down, mine’s a hand you can cling to.
And if you fall ill, I will nurse you back to health.
But darling, I can’t save you from yourself.
I can’t save you.
And if you lose your passport in a country where no one speaks English, I will call the consulate for you.
And if you one day have a kid who, god forbid, should need a kidney, I’ve a spare I will donate for you.
If you need me to, you know it’s true.
No lover will hurt you, no ally will flee.
Without someday having to answer to me.
I’ll give you my heart if you think a heart will help.
but darling I can’t save you from yourself.
I can’t save you from yourself.
I can’t save you.
Paul: [claps] Thank you man, I really appreciate that. I know that was probably a little uncomfortable for you to lose control of the quality of your sound.
Tim: that’s alright, I really appreciate the chat and I, you know, I think what you’re doing is great and I’m not sure how useful I am in these conversations ‘cause I’m so “#blessed” but it’s—I guess you just gotta keep—we gotta keep sharing. We gotta get that balance between sharing how it feels to be a person and also just walking away from all the information. And, you know, going to find some trees.
Paul: Well, Tim, thanks so much. The album is Apart Together people can find more about you at Timminchin.com. What are the social media handles they can find you at?
Tim: Oh, they’re all Tim Minchin. I managed to get them all early so they’re all @timminchin.
Paul: I like how that right after talking about that we’re like “okay so get on social media and go find out what Tim is retweeting.
Tim: Yeah, come and feel guilty in my world.
Paul: Yeah.
Tim: Thank you, Paul.
Paul: Yeah, appreciate it.
Tim: alright, see you around.
Paul: That was so nice to get to know him. What a nice guy. Before we jump into some surveys, if you guys can support Patreon, that would be awesome. We’ve, as you can imagine with the economy we’ve dipped down a bit over the last year, and I know finances are tough for a lot of you, but if any of you got a little extra change and you wanna help support the podcast just go to the website. You can actually donate also through Zelle or through Paypal, but it would be greatly appreciated.
This is from the Struggle in a Sentence survey filled out by a woman who calls herself Maladaptive Nightmare. Ugh, you guys remember when Maladaptive Nightmare won the Kentucky Derby? What was it? Like 9 lengths over Chocolate Cock? For a long time it looked like Chocolate Cock coming out of the third turn, certainly. It looked like. I mean, it had a head of steam. And then I dunno where Maladaptive Nightmare finding a second wind. Back to this survey, Struggle in a Sentence. About her depression: “feels like everything around me is dirty but no one else sees it.” About her anxiety: “constantly wondering what people really think of me, feeling judged every single day.” About her alcoholism and drug addiction: “coming to a realization it’s not ‘social’ anymore and feels too enormous to conquer.” About her love addiction: “if there isn’t drama, I will create some. I will make you fight for me even though I know it won’t last long.” About her codependency: “described by all as independent, but really I am just a sad girl who needs to be taken care of.” About being a sex crime victim: “’it wasn’t that big of a deal, he did that to me too’ my mother, describing our abuser. Watching my dad, my once hero, sit in a chair and pretend to not hear the conversation. I left the house and said ‘bye’ like nothing happened. No one mentioned it again. I just wanted them to hug me” Aw man. Maladaptive dreaming: “life in my head is exciting, fun and I am the best version of myself there. Taking out the headphones and going back to life is torture because I am none of the things I dream about, although I try.” Snapshot from your life: “when my uncle put his hands under my ballet leotard and touched me. I would like to think it happened so quickly because he immediately felt bad and not because he was scared my mom would walk in the room. For years I felt sorry and embarrassed for him. It has taken me 30 years to realize how confusing those feelings were for a child, and that those 15 seconds were not ‘maybe it was abuse’, but realizing it was and I can call myself a victim without feeling like my abuse doesn’t make the grade.” And that is such a struggle for so many people. Kind of like the comparing on a curve thing that we do about how successful our lives are. I think we also use that curve to judge whether or not our abuse is valid, and it’s such a mean thing to do to ourselves and to do to other people.
This is an Awfulsome Moment filled out by Bergamot and she writes: “I became accident prone and cognitively impaired during the late stages of my drinking, putting my keys in the fridge, sleeping on unfolded laundry, bruises, etcetera. One day I cut my thumb while cooking and didn’t have bandaids. Not a problem, I’d just use whatever was around. Fast forward to my colleague after an all staff meeting ‘is your hand bandaged with a pantyliner wrapper?’”
This is Struggle in a Sentence filled out by a woman who calls herself Probably Would Have Let Voldemort Live on the Back of My Head Too. About her ADHD, I love this one: “I am brilliant for a useless amount of time”. Oh, that is so good. Oh my god is that good. About her anxiety, generalized anxiety disorder: “my heart is racing. I’m so unbelievably awkward. You see it, I see you seeing it. I stop making eye contact. I know you notice. I escape the situation and finally breathe. Fuck, I’m alone.” About her OCD: “Did I lock it? Maybe. If I didn’t my dogs will get out and get hit by a car and I will have no one and then I will kill myself and then my mom will be so mad and sad and have to deal with all of this. Check lock, drives away. But I was thinking of everything. Did I really lock it? I’m gonna be late. Dogs are more important than work. Picks fingers.” Oh my God that’s so good. About her codependency: “He calls me at 1am on Thanksgiving because his dad is drunk and passed out again. He is crying and disappointed. He believed he was sober again. I can’t stop worrying about the lasting damage this has done, wishing I could find him a therapist, take this pain away, get his dad into rehab, find them both the help they need, and oh yeah, we aren’t together anymore.” Ohh, my God. Thank you for that.
This is from the Babysitter survey. This was filled out by a guy who calls himself This Shit’s Too Dark for Me to Think Of Something Witty, Man. And he writes: “my parents hired this girl across the street who was about 14 to babysit us. I have no clue if I was touched sexually, but my brother was. I was around the age of 4-5 and he was probably 10. A few years ago, we were talking about sex stuff when he shuddered and admitted losing his virginity to her. Basically, he was molested by her. My parents also had her give him rides to school when she didn’t even have a driver’s license yet, and he told me that she used to blow both him and his friend together in the back seat before dropping them off for their fifth grade classes. Wow. Like I said, I’m not sure if she ever touched me but my guess is that she did and she probably touched my brother in front of me. I do remember her tickling me a lot and feeling like I had a huge crush on her. I don’t think anyone ever found out what happened. My parents wouldn’t have been able to accept it if they ever found out anyways. She was there for all our birthdays and other events and all through my childhood I’ve always felt like I had the biggest crush on her. I must’ve been sexualized by her from an early age. I’ve been molested most all of my childhood, though by my brother and his friends too, though I believe, so who knows.” What feelings come up remembering this? “Probably disgust is the biggest feeling around it, definitely sadness too. Also the sad thing is she wouldn’t have known to touch us like that if she wasn’t shown that by someone else. I’m sure she was getting molested too. In that sense, I feel bad for her. Not knowing what happened to me exactly is also strange to think about. Maybe I’m better off not knowing.” Do you feel any damage was done? “The damage to me was being sexualized at such an early age. I had sexual thoughts and feelings towards older women since I was a small child, and I know it must’ve been from those situations. I remember hating being a kid because as a kid I knew I couldn’t experience sexual things until I grew up. It’s really weird even now to think about.” If you’re a parent has your experience influenced how you view your child being babysat? “I’m a parent, yes. I make sure to educate him about his privacy and where it’s inappropriate to be touched.” Thank you for sharing that. And that’s—the things that he described are so common. You know, the struggle to know exactly what happened, the way that abuse and being sexualized at an age when our brain is forming, how it informs the things that we think about or get turned on by is such a ball of fuck.
This is an Awfulsome Moment filled out by a woman who calls herself Electra is My SW Name. And SW means safe word. “My mom was killed by a drunk driver just a few days before Christmas last year. It’s well known in my family, or at least known, because my mom always expresses this as how things are, AKA her opinion that I’m the family member that always ruins every holiday. Thanksgiving, Easter, I hate my birthday, it’s always something she would say. We had a very close but at times volatile relationship. She’s a rapid cycler like me and you know the kind of people that are like ADD, can talk about 3 different things in a conversation, jumping from one to the other like frogs on a lilypad? She always liked that I could keep up with her in that sense. The other thing is she was always done with Christmas shopping probably in November. We didn’t get to have her with us on Christmas day, but there were all the gifts and cards that she had gotten us. My brother, sister in law, me, and my dad. It was bittersweet because she’ll never get to open hers, but it was like she was still with us. After we sadly and slowly opened everything, we were just all sitting there in silence, walking through all the empty rooms of memories in our minds. I started chuckling to myself. My dad looked at me like ‘what?’ I smiled and said ‘who ruined Christmas now this year, huh?’ and he smiled with a little laugh and rolled his eyes. I like that even though it was so soon after it happened, we never stopped talking about her or making jokes about silly inside family things. Like how she accidentally shit in a department store, and would definitely kill me for saying something, but now she can see how everything is big picture, I’m sure it’s okay.” Wow. That is the definition of awfulsome. For those of you that are new to the podcast, awfulsome means something that is awful and yet has something awesome in hindsight about it as well.
This is from the Struggle in a Sentence survey filled out by a woman who calls herself Am I Crazy If You Have To Ask The Automatic Answer Is Yes. And about her OCD, she writes: “like my life depends on placing marbles in a perfect grid on a floor that’s uneven.” That is descriptive. That is descriptive, thank you.
This is a Happy Moment filled out by a genderfluid person who calls themselves Linda. And they write: “on this day I was extra exhausted from an already exhausting job, so I started my nighttime routine a bit early. I was in the kitchen with two of my roommates waiting for the electric kettle to start singing. One gently asked my other housemate ‘how was work?’ they softly responded, ‘I don’t like my job.’ I proceeded to laugh my ass off. One of those uncontrolled laughter that I just couldn’t do anything to stop. I laughed until I was breathless and just making weird, dry puffs of air, tears pouring out of my eyes, my belly juggling with every laugh. After a few minutes my housemate asked, ‘how was work?’ I did my best to take some deep-ass breaths and replied ‘I hate my job too.’ The moment was a perfect release from the struggle of the day.” I love the laughs when somebody says something that isn’t as funny necessarily from the words that they say but the way they say it. That, to me, that’s my favorite comedy. I’ll never forget this friend of mine, Adam, I was at the gym one day and one of the things I do sometimes is plank, which I hate, and I can barely make it a minute. Even doing it a year, multiple times a week, I can still barely get past a minute, and I read somewhere that a guy in his 50s or 60s did a plank for 8 hours, and so that day I can’t get it out of my head, and I’m telling everybody I know. And I tell my friend Adam “this 60 year old guy did a plank for 8 hours” and he goes “Oh my God! What a waste of time!” [laughs] And he said it so sincerely! He truly believed what a waste of 8 hours that was. It just--Ugh, I must’ve laughed for 24 hours. Which was also a waste of time.
This is filled out by Big Wreck and they write “I did some housesitting for my mother awhile back. For 3 days I used her bed for jerking off while talking to a few “guy friends” who enjoy phone sex with me. Not because I’m attracted to her, but because the taboo would make me cum so hard. Later, mother was perplexed when she found one of my socks under her bed since I was supposed to be staying in the guest room. Whoops.” Oh my God. Oh.
This is also from the Babysitter survey filled out by Redneck History and she writes: “our male cousin would pester us for kisses and thrust his tongue in our mouth. We refused afterwards, but he would promise and pester until we relented and do it again and again. He would lie down on the couch and have us straddle him to play. One day I asked if he had to go pee because I could feel a throbbing. I didn’t understand what was happening until years later. Our other male babysitter apparently exposed himself, but I don’t remember.” Did you ever tell anyone? “Yes, we told our mother. She said, ‘just don’t kiss him’. I didn’t understand enough to tell her the rest.” Remembering these things, what feelings come up? “Anger. Decades later I asked my mom why she didn’t tell his parents. She said, ‘I couldn’t tell his mom, it would’ve killed her’.” That is just sadly not uncommon as a response. I don’t know why. I don’t know why. It’s like that judge when there was that campus rape at Stanford and that judge talked –who gave the attacker like a 6 months suspended sentence or something and said “This young man has a promising future, and we don’t wanna ruin his life”. It’s like, why is that instinct there to make your first concern the person who was the perpetrator? Did you feel any damage was done? “Add it to the pile of why I don’t have a good relationship with my mother and why I never really feel safe or loved.” Does this influence how you view your children being babysat? “I don’t allow my sons to babysit, and we never had male babysitters”. Well, I can tell you from having read hundreds of these, the gender of the babysitter does not have that much to do with it. I would say it’s about 50/50 of the surveys that I read where the perpetrator is male or female. Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate it as uncomfortable as some of that stuff is to read, I don’t wanna be a broken record, but the stuff that’s hard to talk about is the stuff that I feel like this podcast should talk about.
This is from the Loves survey filled out by Emma. She writes: “I love those rare moments where I can look at something and see the beauty in it when others can’t. I love putting folded clothes in my dresser. I love when there are no cars on the road,” oh, that is a great one. “I love feeling nostalgic and can relate to childhood memories with someone I don’t even know. I love it when I finish cleaning, put a candle on, and finally, finally sit down and just knowing I have nothing else to do.” That is a great one. I love that feeling. I love looking at my calendar and seeing just a wide-open, empty day, and it also kinda fills me with anxiety like “Oh, I’m gonna fuck it up. I’m gonna misuse that time. [coughs] Excuse me.
And finally, this is an Awfulsome Moment filled out by a woman who calls herself Parentheses, and she writes: “I grew up with two pretty dysfunctional and abusive parents who saw my sister and me as their emotional support while we were kids. In high school the only goal I could put into words was to move away, never come back and not be like my parents. Periodically throughout my adult life, my high school coach who basically became a second father to me would tell me that he was amazed at how I was so resilient and that I had succeeded in spite of my parents, not because of them. Every heartbreaking moment with my parents and after each time a coworker sexually assaulted me, I would talk to him through email or phone call and end up crying and thanking him for always being there for me. His responses have consistently been ones of surprise and compassion. ‘Of course. You are the strongest person I know. I’m glad you feel like you can trust me,’ etcetera. This morning I was sitting and ruminating on how guilty I feel for not talking to my parents. My mom told me she should have aborted me five years ago,” and I assume she told you that five years ago and not that you are five years old, “and has sufficient insight to tell me she is ready to forgive me for not talking to her whenever I’m ready to come back. My dad has been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, with significant antisocial tendencies and has always treated me as an extension of himself. Like one of his arms that he can do what he wants with. On numerous occasions he has told me I am fucking up my life. Literally exacerbating his heart condition and essentially inept, while simultaneously expecting me to be his therapist, cheerleader, and surrogate spouse. In order to have any chance at recovery and to learn how to develop close relationships with other people, I cannot keep them in my life as long as they are unwilling to take responsibility for their own actions. I know this, but I still sit and spin almost daily on how badly I feel about letting them live out the ends of their lives in pain, illness and loneliness. Cognitively I know I’m not responsible for them, but emotionally I see two adult children who I am failing and abandoning. This morning, while I went through my usual rumination cycle, a completely new thought broke through. My coach/second father’s voice telling me ‘you made it in spite of, not because of your parents.’ And his constant support over 20+ years had finally sparked the realization that I am gonna be okay. That I don’t owe my abusive parents anything and that my success, resilience, and progress towards vulnerability and genuine human connection are all because of him and his presence in my life. I’ve spent my whole life searching, hoping, and pining for parents because mine sucked so bad. But today it really sunk in that I have truly had the best parent I could have ever asked for the whole time. And I love my coach/dad so much. I felt a moment of peace and joy I don’t recall ever feeling before in my life. It faded after awhile, but It’s not gone, and I finally feel like I’m gonna be okay.” Wow. That, that is so awesome. Thank you for sharing that with us, and I love seeing people turn the corner. I love it, I love it, I love it. It’s so hard, though, when we’re caught in that pit of despair and, you know, our history is littered with people abusing our trust and violating us, and it’s so hard to take that leap of faith to find a new supportive network of people and to open up and to not go to the doomy crystal ball in our minds, but you just take things moment by moment, but kudos, man, kudos. I love reading that. If you’re out there and you’re feeling stuck. You are not alone. You are not alone. We are all in this anarchy—well I wouldn’t say together, but yeah together. I suppose together. We may not agree, but we are, we’re each other’s neighbours. Ew, I’m starting to make myself nauseous. Just shut up. Wrap the fuckin’ show up. Get off your pulpit you pompous ass. Ugh. You’re not alone. Thanks for listening.
[outro]
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