Why We Must Communicate With Meaning

All right, here we go.

By a round of applause, how many of you think you could recall the most delicious meal you’ve ever eaten?

How many of you think you could recall the most beautiful sunrise or sunset you’ve ever witnessed?

How about this one? How many of you think you could recall the most mind-melting orgasm you’ve ever had?

Thank you for your honesty.

I’m willing to bet that most of you would have a harder time recalling the most satisfying breath you’ve ever taken.

Breath appreciation is something I practice every day. There’s a simple exercise I love to do, and I haven’t done it yet today, so I figured now would be a better time than ever. I’m going to ask all of you to do it with me.

We’re going to take a nice, long inhale, drawing it out for four or five seconds. At the top of that inhale, pause. In that moment, see if you can tune in to the physical sensation of the breath.

Feel your diaphragm drop to pull the air in. See if you can tap into the feeling of oxygen-rich blood coursing through your veins. After that brief pause, we’ll exhale together with a big sigh.

Come to the edge of your seat. Plant both feet and feel grounded. Let your shoulders soften. Rest your hands, let your belly relax and close your eyes.

Together, take one long inhale.

Hold it for a moment.

And let it go.

To me, that is more delicious than the best meal I’ve ever tasted. It is more beautiful than the most miraculous sunrise or sunset I’ve ever witnessed. Hell, that felt better than the best orgasm I’ve ever had.

That’s debatable, but I think you get the idea.

Breath appreciation matters to me because I live with cystic fibrosis. A very real part of living with cystic fibrosis is knowing that my time on this earth is more limited than the average person’s.

I’m 30 years old, and I already know that I only have so many of those long, rich, deep breaths left.

My lungs currently function at about 50 percent, which isn’t bad. I learned in high school that 50 percent is still considered a passing grade, so things could be much worse.

But consider for a moment what it means to apply 50 percent to your ability to breathe. It can have profound effects on how you live your life.

For the past 10 years or so, my lungs have been in a slow but steady decline, which is kind of a buzzkill.

It depends on how you look at it.

From my perspective, cystic fibrosis is the ultimate gift. It has given me a worldview in which I can embrace the fact that I don’t have much time left, and I’m okay with that.

In fact, it is the driving force that propels me forward, pushing me to squeeze out every last bit of life I can while I’m still here.

It might sound strange, but I can stand here today and say that, without a doubt, cystic fibrosis is the best thing that has ever happened to me. It has made me who I am.

At the risk of sounding full of myself, I love who I am.

I often hear people say they would never want their illness to define them. That isn’t true for me. I proudly let my illness define me, but I let it define me on my own terms.

I think that mindset comes from my lifelong affinity for laughter.

Growing up, my heroes weren’t people like Wayne Gretzky or Michael Jordan. My heroes were George Carlin, Chris Farley, Maya Rudolph and Adam Sandler, back when he was funny.

Through their writing, characters and stand-up, they gave me the ability to see the world through a lens of mockery and satire. In turn, I could look at my life and everything I had experienced and find the elements that brought a smile to my face.

Laughter became an incredibly powerful form of therapy for me.

I want to share an example of how I put that to use by telling you about the scariest moment of my life, which happened fairly recently.

In October 2017, I had a major hospital scare. I was rushed in with a condition called intussusception, which should not be confused with the popular Christopher Nolan movie Inception: a dream within a dream within a dream.

Intussusception isn’t actually that different. It’s an intestine within an intestine within an intestine.

Essentially, my large intestine started swallowing my small intestine, like rolling up a pair of socks.

This is not good. You can die from it.

I was brought in for emergency surgery. They removed 75 percent of my large intestine and threw it away.

But before all that fun stuff, I went through a round of preliminary tests as they tried to figure out what was happening inside my body.

One of those tests was a rectal exam.

I was sitting in the office waiting when the doctor walked in. I looked up, and he was this six-foot-five, 250-pound beast of a man with mitts for hands and huge kielbasa-sausage fingers.

I thought, “This guy? I have to get a rectal exam from this guy?”

He said, “No, no, no,” and ushered in the resident surgeon who would be performing the exam. She was a petite young woman with regular human-sized hands.

Okay. All right.

She put on a glove, took her finger and buried it knuckle-deep in my butt.

I’m not going to lie. I’m not a stranger to having a finger in my butt. But I’m less familiar with having a stranger’s finger in my butt.

Here’s the thing, though: She didn’t feel like a stranger. I felt like I knew this woman. I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Pun fully intended.

She finished the exam, pulled her finger out and walked into the hallway to deliberate about whatever you deliberate about after putting your finger in someone’s ass.

A moment later, she walked back in. I thought, “Screw it. I’m going to ask her.”

I said, “Ma’am, how do I know you?”

She looked at me, making eye contact for the first time, and said, “Yeah, you were my yoga instructor.”

I had been teaching yoga for eight years. Needless to say, she has not returned to the studio.

That may have been the scariest moment of my life. It was definitely the most embarrassing.

But this is exactly what the Sickboy podcast is about.

Sickboy is a project I started three years ago with my two best friends, Brian Stever and Taylor MacGillivary. The original idea was simple: We would make a podcast in which we talked to sick people, but with a twist. It would be a comedy podcast.

To be honest, it started as a joke. It was an excuse for the three of us to sit down and try to make one another laugh.

The first recording we ever made was just the three of us. We recorded for about an hour, and it was essentially a free pass for Brian and Taylor to ask every question they had ever wanted to ask a sick person.

We went home, listened to it and thought, “Hey, maybe we’re onto something.”

It was the first time we had heard a conversation about illness that wasn’t a complete bummer. It was funny, informative, uplifting and empowering.

But we wondered whether it was a fluke. We were three best friends with a very dialed-in dynamic. Could we recreate it with someone else?

We put our heads together and asked, “Who is the sickest person we know?”

That happened to be my friend Matthew Amyotte, who had recently undergone surgery to remove a brain tumor.

Matt agreed to come in and sit down at the microphones with us. That was the moment we realized this could become far greater than anything we had intended. It was much more important than a few friends trying to make one another laugh.

Matthew was incredibly open and vulnerable with us. He almost immediately invited us into some of his most intimate and private thoughts.

He chronicled his cancer journey and explored the challenges of confronting his mortality. He talked about barely recognizing himself when he looked in the mirror and how the experience had stripped away his self-confidence.

That conversation was raw and powerfully authentic.

It sounds heavy, but it wasn’t. It was light. It was filled with playful curiosity and inappropriate humor.

That conversation taught us that laughter can be a beautiful tool for reaching the heart of the real stuff, the things that matter. It shouldn’t be used as a crutch. It can be a bridge that helps us access the things we find difficult to talk about.

Fast-forward three years. We have now recorded more than 200 episodes of Sickboy. We have spoken with people from across Canada and the United States.

We have covered everything from cystic fibrosis and terminal cancer to PTSD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, spinal muscular atrophy and endometriosis. You name it, we’ve probably touched on it. And if we haven’t, we will.

More than 800 people from around the world have applied to come on the show and share their experiences.

As you can imagine, these conversations have given us many opportunities to learn. But I can narrow those lessons down to three big takeaways, my three “aha” moments.

The first is: Be vulnerable.

For whatever reason, we as a society, and especially men, have been taught that vulnerability is a sign of weakness.

I would argue that it pays to be vulnerable.

Think about what it means to truly know someone. You know their deepest, darkest secrets. You know their wildest hopes and dreams, their greatest fears and their most embarrassing moments.

Those are the relationships we value most.

When someone enters our studio, they come in as a stranger and leave as a true friend because they have chosen to trust us and be vulnerable. We have chosen to reciprocate.

It pays to be vulnerable.

The second lesson is: Life is too short for small talk.

I friggin’ love this one.

Taylor tells an amazing story on the podcast about snowboarding in Utah. He sat down on a chairlift, and an older gentleman sat beside him.

As the chairlift started moving up the mountain, Taylor was minding his own business and enjoying the scenery.

The man said, “Hey, I’m Bill. Nice to meet you.”

Taylor said, “Hi, Bill. I’m Taylor. Nice to meet you.”

Bill then asked, “Taylor, what’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done in your life?”

Taylor thought, “Who opens a conversation with that?”

He said, “I don’t know. I guess there was this time in Brazil when I almost died. It’s a long story.”

Bill followed with the craziest moment of his own life. Then he asked, “Well, Taylor, what do you like more, snowboarding or sex?”

Taylor said, “Oh my God. I don’t know. Snowboarding is fun. I really like sex. It’s kind of a toss-up.”

The conversation continued like that all the way up the mountain.

When they reached the top, Taylor went right and Bill went left. Taylor never saw him again.

But he will never forget the five-minute conversation they shared from the bottom of the mountain to the top, because Bill didn’t choose to talk about the weather. He cut straight through to the shit that mattered.

Life is too short for small talk.

The final lesson is: Everyone has an incredible story to share.

We rarely have celebrities or well-known people on the podcast. Most of the time, we speak with regular, everyday people.

When they feel that they have been given a platform and a voice that will be heard, we hear incredibly rich stories about their lives.

Every one of those stories contains lessons. There is something to learn from each of them.

All it takes is for someone to feel that they have permission to speak and for someone on the other end to truly listen.

Everyone, including each of you here today, has an incredible story to tell.

Our mission is to fundamentally change how the world deals with illness and death.

But it goes further than that.

This isn’t only about talking about what it is like to be sick. We want this to become a catalyst for changing how human beings communicate about all the things we find difficult in our lives.

At the heart of what we are doing is an effort to cultivate open, unpolished, unapologetic and meaningful communication with the people in our lives.

That is how we make the most of the time we have left and squeeze out as much life as possible while we are still here.

Before I leave you, I want to share a study from Harvard University. It was one of the longest-running social studies ever conducted. It began in 1939, lasted nearly 80 years and followed 268 Harvard sophomores.

The study concluded that the building blocks of happiness are the relationships we foster.

Essentially, if you want a life filled with lasting happiness, foster great relationships.

It sounds easy, right?

But fostering great relationships requires the ability to communicate meaningfully.

I truly believe meaningful communication is not something we are born knowing how to do. It is a skill learned through practice and repetition, honed over the course of a lifetime.

Before I leave you to go out into the world and practice meaningful communication, to begin a conversation in which you allow yourself to be vulnerable, push yourself to cut straight through to the shit that matters and become fully willing to listen, let’s take one more moment.

Sit up tall. Soften your belly. Relax your shoulders and close your eyes.

Together, take a nice, big breath in.

Hold it for a moment.

And let it go.

Thank you all so much.