Cringy Confessions and Guilty Pleasures

Hey there.

Welcome to the deeper podcast and a.

I hope you're ready to confess your sins.

Just kidding.

Well, sort of.

If you're just joining us for the first time, that deeper podcast.

As a podcast, that's all about how we can live lives.

Then Alicia, a little bit more courage to love the hell out of this world, which.

Needs it.

And Reverend Shawn, one of your hosts, and I'm only sort of joking about the confessions because today's episode.

Gretchen Reverend Gretchen is sharing a message entitled, cringy confessions in guilty pleasures.

Where she explores the relationship between shame.

And pleasure.

And wonder is what it would be like for us to come out or confess.

What brings us pleasure that we are afraid others will judge us for.

You know, it's, it's interesting, as I was thinking about what my cringey confession or guilty pleasure is, um, And I realized that depending on the audience, I would have different things.

At church.

I shared that I a.

I love this one YouTuber who plays this one video game.

And I literally have watched more than 400 hours of this guy.

And he plays a game where you design cities and especially traffic.

Infrastructure and you paint the lines.

You make the turn lanes, you set the traffic tight, like the traffic light signal timers.

And I just find it so relaxing.

And he's the city planner.

And so, um, I'm learning a lot about urban design, but it's really a weird thing to say.

I watched someone play a video game for hours.

That's church, but you know, amongst some of my friends.

Who play video games all the time.

It's not weird at all.

Nice on wouldn't think it's weird at all.

So part of this is context specific of course.

And yet there still is this crowd of shame, especially when we've inherited this Protestant work ethic.

That tells us that we're only defined by our productivity.

And we're in this series called time, well wasted, which is all about.

How do we rejigger our relationship to.

Pleasure and leisure.

Not as something that needs to produce something.

Nope.

Don't productive, not efficient.

But something merely because we are human.

And that's what the series is all about.

So I'm going to turn it over to her from Gretchen and have her share her message on cringey, confessions, and guilty pleasures.

I can't wait to, to hear.

From all of you of what your cringey confessions.

Might be.

For the first decade of our relationship, I was pretty sure that everyone's answer to today's community time question.

Would be the same as the answer to how Carrie and I met.

See we met in 1999, which amazingly was 24 years ago, and in 19 99, 1 thing you could definitely anticipate people judging you for is if you met your partner online.

Online dating, you might remember, was a thing in 1999.

match.com

actually started in 1995, but it was not something you admitted to and like if somebody you knew did it, you're like, they met online.

I mean, first of all, not everyone was even online at all in the first place, let alone regularly enough to think of it as a legitimate source for romance.

Home computers were still kind of a new phenomenon, and phones that connect to the internet were still a number of years away.

The worldwide web, as we all called it, uh, was still kind of weird and especially useful if you tended to be antisocial or incapable of meeting people in real life.

At least that was the story a lot of us had, which is why for a long time, instead of admitting that Carrie and I, my partner, uh, that we met online, we would say we met through mutual friends, which was kind of true, at least in some sense.

Eventually, however, and happily the wor world caught up with us, I like to think of us as like we were advanced.

And so using the web to date and even to meet someone that you would marry, it became not so unusual.

And so we would tell people more regularly that we just, we met online, except that this too was a partial truth because the whole truth was even cringing than that.

You might even say the whole truth was out there.

Some of you just caught the reference.

Some.

A few of you know the story, but for the rest of you, I will now confess the real story of how Carrie and I met.

See, in 1999, I was in the middle of my graduate program in theater where I admit I was very well practiced at wasting time.

Well, and one of the things that I wasted time with was what is now an unnecessary phenomenon, which is called the Marathon Marathons, if you remember, are when a channel reruns, whole seasons of shows back to back over like a long weekend.

Marathons can either be enjoyed live, or you can pop your VHS in and hit record, and then you can enjoy the show on your own time where bonus, you can fast forward through the commercials.

Now here I need to pause and admit to you that this was not an anomalous moment in my life.

I have loved TV for as long as I can remember.

Now for a long time, I really did not say this out loud in Unitarian Universalist circles where not infrequently, people proudly declare, I don't even own a tv, let alone would they ever say I love tv.

Now, this has changed somewhat recently I've noticed, but still TV shows, especially non documentary types, can be seen as insufficiently, intellectual, and literally a waste of time in our religious tradition.

That includes Henry David Thoreau and his whole Suck the Marrow out of Life and Mary Oliver and treats Mary Oliver's one precious life like scripture.

And sometimes TV is a waste of time and sometimes that is the point.

It isn't productive, it isn't purposeful, it's just pleasure.

Especially as someone whose life is so oriented towards productivity and purpose.

TV has been a clear way for me to claim my own time and to remind myself that joy for joy's sake is enough.

Now my love for TV can probably be traced back to Sesame Street, which was like the Gen X version of being put in front of an iPad, maybe some of you know what I mean.

Later TV time became a way for my sisters and I to connect with my dad on Friday nights after a long work week where we would watch T G I F.

We'd watch different strokes, full house family matters, perfect strangers.

Just a few.

Maybe you might Remi remember those.

Now before streaming became a thing, I was as devoted to curating my Netflix queue of DVDs as I have ever been to a spiritual practice.

And after streaming with its searchable database of infinite shows of all sorts, my TV joy reached euphoria.

And yes, that does include the hbos and data show euphoria, which to be honest, I have really mixed feelings about.

Now.

I take the work of discovering new shows very seriously, and I have strong opinions about which streaming service is the best value and how to maximize your monthly subscriptions in case that is ever the kind of pastoral care you need.

I am here for you.

I have broad taste in shows, although I trend towards scripted over reality, although I probably could play your game, and I've come to realize that horror doesn't really scare me as much.

It really kind of makes me depressed, so I tend to avoid horror, but mostly I just love shows that know what they are and then do that really well, especially those that are trying to do something kind of new or doing an old thing in a new way, whether in form or in topic.

I really love actors and writers and long story arcs with complex character development.

I also really love making recommendations about TV shows and hearing about your T favorite TV shows as I love talking about TV almost as much as I like watching tv.

More on that in a minute.

So as a part of this worship series, actually I've been waiting for this.

This is my 11th year here.

I've been waiting for this for 11 years.

I'm doing a series where you can subscribe to get my recommendations for tv.

So you can sign [email protected]

slash tv time.

Okay, so now that I've confessed all that, I'm gonna go back to the cringe or confession about how Carrie and I met.

I was talking about TV marathons, remember, and how one day in the fall of 1998, I came across an X-Files marathon.

And I was immediately hooked.

Now, I had heard about the X-Files before, but given that it came out while I was in college without regular access to tv, it was horrible.

I had never watched it.

So over the course of that year, that school year, I steadily caught up on nearly all five seasons that had already run.

And then I watched them again and again and as I did, because I do love talking about TV with other people.

I longed for a community who would talk to me about the stories and the mysteries, and also Jillian Anderson, who was and is obviously a goddess because there, these were reruns.

I couldn't just ask anyone randomly if they were watching the X-Files.

I had to find people who were also watching and rewatching old reruns of the X-files, and so I did what any computer-oriented young adult would do.

In 1999, I went on AOL into an online message board dedicated to the X-files.

Now I lurked for a while and he soaked in all the conversation and the personalities, and eventually I got brave enough to post responses and eventually questions of my own.

One poster I noticed was especially enthusiastic and encouraging to everyone's ideas.

She called herself Carrie, which if you know her, you won't be surprised that unlike literally everyone else on the board, she saw no reason to use a clever and or cringey name as her board name.

And no, I'm not gonna tell you my handle.

This is enough Cringey confessions for one sermon.

One day.

So one day Carrie and I started direct messaging.

We kind of took our conversation off the board onto direct messaging, you know, AOL Instant Messenger, and then eventually started talking on the phone, and then I was telling my friend about her and she was like, you love her.

At that point, I hadn't even seen a picture, but once that idea got planted in my mind, I just, I couldn't shake it, which is why on Memorial Day, 24 years ago, I got on a plane to meet her in person.

She lived in California until here we are two children and three wedding ceremonies later.

Just as a side note, we had to get married before it was legal.

We got married when it was civil union legal, and then we got married again when it was like real married legal.

Three.

Now, even now, Carrie and I mostly don't tell people the truth about how we met seriously.

Uh, unless you might say to me randomly how much you love the X-files.

And then I might be like, you know what's funny about the X-files? Maybe? So I've been calling this story my cringey confession, but you might also call the story of discovering the X-files and then getting seriously into X-files message boards where I eventually fell in love with and then married the fellow fellow poster.

A story of guilty pleasures.

Guilty pleasures are after all those things you enjoy and fi find pleasure in, but also kind of feel a little or a lot embarrassed about, like say, betting on reality tv.

Or maybe it's a video game that you're super into or maybe for you your guilty pleasure is like a magazine you recover to cover or your commitment to getting your nails done regularly or watching true crime shows or whatever it is.

A guilty pleasure is embarrassing because you have the sense that enjoy, you're enjoying something that you maybe shouldn't enjoy.

You should probably be doing something more productive.

More respectable with your time.

Something smarter, more sophisticated, more educational, something that contributes to the world in some way.

I mean, your guilty pleasure usually doesn't help anyone you have to admit, except maybe you and sometimes you're not even sure if it helps you.

Now really these feelings, uh, that I'm calling are, they say guilt are really less guilt than they are.

Shame.

It is like our C collective and continuous version of middle school rules, right? We're the things.

There are things that are worthy of being enjoyed and other things you must refuse to find pleasure in, or there must be something wrong with you.

That's the shame.

Now, unlike guilt, shame isn't about doing something that's wrong.

It's something about you.

You are wrong.

Whereas Brene Brown says, shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love or belonging.

Shame is something that finds us all in one way or another across our lifetimes, but its special power only really takes hold when it's kept in secret.

When we work really hard to keep the thing that we are afraid makes us wrong or potentially unworthy of love, a secret, especially when the thing we are afraid makes us unworthy of love is also a thing that brings us a lot of joy.

It's why the closet is such a destructive experience.

It hands all the power over to shame.

And this story where the place that you, where you are most alive and filled with delight is also the place where you are unlovable.

Now, what I know about closets, whether we're talking about sexuality or your nerdiest fandom, is that closets are extremely effective liars.

You go into the closet because you believe the lie that there's something wrong with you.

And then the closet knits that lie even deeper into your sense of self so that you start to believe the only safe place.

The only place where you could be okay is in the closet.

You start to believe that the isolation, loneliness, disconnection, inherent to the closet are they're just what? Who you are, what you are meant for.

You go to the closet to defend against shame, and then the closet makes you feel like shame is your only truth.

Which brings me to the other thing I know about closets, which is that the only way to defeat their power is to leave them to come out with the truth of your joy and to say over and over again, this truth is good and right and beautiful until you believe it.

To come out with the truth of your joy and then discover there a community of others who wanna play fantasy football, reality TV, or chat on an X-files message board to discover a community of others who have been waiting for you and who will celebrate with you and claim you for their, your joy is also theirs.

Now, this requires, of course, a leap of faith to suspend your disbelief that instead of this joy being what makes you unlovable, that it could be the opposite.

That this joy itself could be a source of connection and belonging, not just for you in that moment, but also because immediately in ways you often do not realize your coming out will become a source of courage and hope for someone else to come out in their truth like Grace and her coworker, and wanted to read romance novels all along.

So that is why right now I wanna invite you to come out with your cringey confessions or guilty pleasures.

We're gonna have some papers going around and the papers say on them, my name is blank, and I love blank.

And so what I want you to do is fill out this statement with your name and I ask that you follow Carrie's example, not mine, and use your actual name.

And then in the second blank, I want you to write the thing that you love, that you believe people would judge you for loving.

Even if it is what your neighbor said earlier, they would outright judge you for, okay? And after you fill these out, you're gonna like, once you get yours done, then just raise it and put your, like raise your card in the air and then somebody's gonna come forward and collect it.

And then I'm going to read them out loud.

Just a few of them, not all of them.

Now, if suddenly you are feeling unsure, I have three words for you.

X files message board.

Okay? So go for it.

With your cringing, AST confessions, whatever you got, we can take it.

Remembering your joy is our joy.

My name is Heidi and I love video games.

I feel like you should say which one, but she does also say I play on a team with 20 something boys.

Yes.

My name is Christine and I love Royal's coverage.

All of it.

My name is Julie and I love watching dog videos on YouTube with my dog.

Yes, you do.

My name is Cleo and I love jewelry.

I wonder what kind of jewelry I feel like That's okay.

My name is Terry and I love naps.

Good job, Terry.

My name is Jeanie and I love cosmetics.

Oh yes.

My name is Mary and I love Rule Paul's Drag Race.

My name is Polly and I love crossword puzzles.

My name is Diane.

I love fantasy books.

My name is Dick and I love watching Storage Wars.

That is such, such a good show.

my name is Jane and I love eating anchovy pizza while reading spy novels.

Was I supposed to combine them? Anchovy Pizza, I judge you.

Just kidding.

My name is Sunny and I love pinball.

They're so good.

My name is Marty.

I love TV Mysteries.

Yes.

My name is Lola and I love spider solitaire.

Okay.

There's like, these are gold.

Gold is what these are.

You thought Unitarians never did confession.

So last week I was at a family ministry conference and one of my favorite presenters at the conference, she started with her bio, which I mean, she went on and on.

She had lots of wonderful stories.

And then she told about her absolute fanaticism for Tigger.

I mean, this is like a, a middle-aged woman in the middle of a serious conference.

She's, so she told the story of how she'd met Tigger at Disney.

She showed a picture of her home with a guest room that was filled with a hundreds of stuffed Tigger's.

It was amazing.

And I have to say, at first I was like, wow, that is really weird.

But then she was just so happy in her Tigger joy, she was so at home.

It disarmed every judging instinct I had.

And instead, it made me feel connected to her.

I was like, I love you for loving Tigger.

So one of my core beliefs is that we all have our tickers.

We all have our X-files, we all have our reality tv.

We all have that thing that brings us so much joy and yet we're not sure that we should share about it.

We all have these little pieces of ourselves, these treasures, that need and have no other purpose but pleasure and that actively disrupt the idea that everything we need we do needs to make sense to anyone else.

Remembering this doesn't just help us break free of our own shame.

It helps us break free of the grip that shame has on all of us.

It helps disarm the divisions that we put up.

Between us and them and reminds us that we are all worthy of love, connected, and held by an often invisible thread of cringey, nerdy, awkward, strange, silly, frivolous, beautifully human, un guilty pleasures.

Amen.

And blessed beat.

Well, another one of my cringy confessions, um, is that I am in love with using artificial intelligence.

Models, large language models.

Um, I think they're so interesting and so much fun.

And so one thing that I did during the service is I took some of the cringey confessions.

And I inputted them into a, um, AI language model.

That I had prompted it in a specific way and it outputted some beatitudes.

Um, blessings.

That were tailored to the specifics of what people had said, right.

Someone said they loved pivot tables and one of the services.

And so I had it right.

A.

Blessing for.

Someone who loves pivot tables, which I got a kick out of.

Um, I bet, especially got a kick out of the fact that.

This was one of my kind of secret pleasures that other people may not have known.

So I'm going to read you some of those beatitudes.

As a way of blessing us into the future.

So this one is for Gretchen.

Blessed are those who met their lovers on X-Files online message boards for they shall bond over a mysterious phenomenon.

Knowing the truth is out there.

And that truth is love.

Plus it are the Excel pivot table to vote teas.

For, they shall find Nirvana and the holy Trinity of rows, columns and data fields, bringing order.

To chaos.

And becoming spreadsheet, whispers and a world of unruly numbers.

Bless that are the Royal family drama followers for, they shall be enthralled by sagas of crowns, corgis, and controversies.

To put daytime soap operas to shame.

Plus that are the romance novel enthusiasts for, they shall dive head first into the passionate sea of literary love.

Emerging breathless and invigorated.

With a new found appreciation for throbbing hearts.

And stolen glances.

Bless it.

Are the procrastinators.

For, they shall master the sacred art of I'll do it later.

Well discovery while uncovering life's.

Most obscure wonders.

And finally.

Bless it are those candy crush fanatics for they shall match their way to sugar coated enlightenment.

For whatever your guilty pleasure is.

I offer you a B attitude.

If you want to send me what your guilty pleasure is, you can send it to me at Shawn.

I foothills U u.org.

I will send you a beatitude.

That is unique to you.

Thanks for listening to this episode.

We'd love to hear from you to know if you like the podcast, what we should do.

Um, in the future, if there are certain things that speak to you.