On this episode of THIRD CONCEPT, Alan Hevelone joins us to discuss creativity, music, design, ADHD, authenticity, and, of course… The Egg.
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Transcript
Lisa: Hey, everyone! Thanks for joining me for another episode of Third Concept. Today my guest is a very talented creative director; we know each other from working together at the same agency for about five years. He’s also a husband, a father of twin boys, and honestly, he’s one of the first people I thought to invite on the show because he has a very strong reputation for telling it like it is, and he’s always full of surprises…
Dialing in from Kokomo, Indiana, I introduce you to Alan Hevelone. Welcome, Alan. Thank you for joining me today.
Alan: Hi Lisa, thanks for having me.
Lisa: I’m going to start kind of weird. You have this fun tendency to be self-deprecating at times, which I love. I think that it’s a great quality and certainly one where I know I want to be friends with somebody if they’re making fun of themselves.
But I got-
Alan: Tell that to my therapist.
Lisa: Got some feedback from people before and just wanted to share. You look terrified. It’s not a ton, so don’t get too excited. Someone who is your direct report said, “Alan was great to work with and always had my back.” And I feel that’s definitely indicative of what a lot of people have said in terms of you having other people’s backs. So another person said, “Alan is literally the voice of the people. He’ll say the hard or awkward thing and is always the first to call out bullshit. He is 100 percent an ally for other creatives.”
Alan: That is true. I just wish other creatives would line up behind me so I could not be the mouthpiece all the time.
Lisa: Agree. One more. “Alan’s creative instincts are classic and trustworthy. His desire to break the mold and do new things is palpable and inspiring. He’s a super creative force.”
Alan: Wow, it’s great to hear so many people say such nice things about me.
Lisa: So I have a totally random curveball question for you. Are you ready? Tell us about your experience inside the egg.
Alan: The egg. The harmonic egg.
Lisa: What is the egg?
Alan: The egg. The harmonic egg, you should look it up. It is an egg-shaped pod. This is, well, first of all, getting inside the egg is an alternative therapy technique that has recently been brought to my attention.
There’s only about 150 of these things in the world. They’re super expensive, but for some reason, a dude has decided to put one in Kokomo, Indiana of all places. He discovered it on his own healing journey that was taking place in Thailand or something. And he just found it so profound that he knew he had to bring it back to his home life and expose his community to it.
So it is this egg-shaped pod that you sit in a zero gravity chair. So you’re essentially in a lazy boy. Your feet are up and you’re kind of back, but you feel perfectly supported and comfortable. You have a blanket on, and there’s a speaker at either end. It’s oblong-shaped and there’s a speaker at either end.
The internal is actually kind of 12-sided. So there are 12 facets, and it’s the way it carries the sound. They use specific therapeutic frequencies in the sound construction, and that can be programmed based on what you are trying to work on.
You sit, and you are exposed to the sound, and basically all your other senses are cut off in the sense that you’re cut off from the outside world. It’s just you and the sound. And you get sound for 40 minutes and then 10 minutes of silence to reintegrate your mind to stepping back out of the egg.
I am totally into the idea of alternative and new age style therapies, but I’m also inherently skeptical as all get out. A lot of faith in science and western medicine, not as much inherent faith in alternative therapies, but I the idea of them. So I went into it with an open mind, but a healthy amount of skepticism. And the first session of anybody’s healing plan is the same. In the sense that it’s meant as an autonomic nervous system reset. So basically just chilling out your autonomic nervous system. And I came out and immediately just felt more in tune, calmer… And, backstory on that- I have a very chaotic household, twin five-year-olds, nearly five, both autistic, both with a lot of challenges, my house is very loud, is very messy- as a result, my autonomic nervous system is on edge all the time. And I have some of that already kind of built in. But immediately everything shifted for me and that, in other communities, they would call it a pink cloud. That pink cloud was really pronounced. And it lasted for a few days, so much so that my wife was, “Wow, you are so different than you were yesterday.” Or, and- but as with all pink clouds, your brain accommodates or reverts back to your normal modality.
Or way of thinking, and way of inherently behaving in the world and reacting to the world around you. So I went back.
I’ve done 2 sessions
Lisa: Oh, you’ve done 2 eggs?
Alan: In the egg. I did one yesterday. And that as an end result has resulted in a much calmer demeanor, less anxiety, palpable.
Lisa: I share your interest slash skepticism in alternative therapies, but at the same time you’re saying it’s palpable and how would you measure that?
Alan: There’s no other way. It’s not quantifiable.
Lisa: I think you can though, with heart rates and you-
Alan: Oh, yeah, well sure, but for me I’m not doing any of that. I’m not sitting here trying to attach scientific metrics to it. My metrics are anecdotal.
I feel them and that’s the difference.
And that goes against the grain of what I generally choose to use as measurement.
Lisa: I love sound therapy of any- I adore it. I’m much more of a sound person than a visual person. You have a background obviously of both. So can you talk a little about maybe, creatively, energetically, what the two different, visual arts, as opposed to audio arts, what influence they’ve had on your life.
Alan: I would say that they probably have almost equal impact on me and my creative process. I have been obsessed with music since I was a kid. I can still remember one of my favorite songs when I couldn’t have been… I think it came out in 81. So I was probably three ’cause it was on popular radio because that’s all we had to listen to if it wasn’t on a track or records or whatever.
So there was a lot of time spent listening to the radio in my family. And my favorite song was “You Can Do Magic” by America. “You can do magic. You can do anything. Your heart desires.” Oh my gosh. To this day, I can still be transported back to being three years old when I hear that song.
And I’m not somebody who… I don’t have a tremendous amount of memory of even pre-adolescence and earlier, I just don’t have a lot of concrete memories. And I mean, I get that not many people do, but I can be taken back emotionally and psychically back to that space by the power of music.
But even music, in the sense of trying to figure out how to play a guitar, or play a piano, it didn’t hold my interest long enough, it felt too difficult, and I couldn’t engage, but I could engage in listening, and being carried away, emotionally. And it stayed with me obsessively and it still does.
And then the other part of that is that I was exposed to album art.
Album art used to be- well, I mean, it used to be a thing at all. It’s coming back as a thing, I think, but that physical object and that, I had a romantic passion about a physical object.
Lisa: Yeah.
Alan: And the whole process and everything, it’s…
Lisa: The way new CD’s would smell, the booklets.
Alan: And so to that idea of, oh, that’s the smell of ink. So then when I’m becoming a graphic designer and I’m going on press runs and I’m doing all this stuff, it again takes me back to those spaces. Because the smell of ink is something that is reminiscent of a record or a CD or, book lovers talk about that dusty smell of books. I that smell, but I’m not an avid reader. So it doesn’t do the same thing for me. But music and the smells around music, that faint electronic smell sometimes that comes from the equipment, all of that stuff had served, unconsciously or subconsciously my creative workings.
I wanted so bad to work with music, those kinds of things. I feel are your chances of becoming an NBA star.
I kind of shelved some of my internal creative fires in favor of, okay, I have these skills.
Because they’re technical skills at the end of the day, mixed with creativity. I can take the technical skills and apply them and it doesn’t matter that I’m not that creatively interested in this. I can still do it and I can still bring about creativity, and I can still activate that.
But it never has excited me in a way that I’d hoped.
Lisa: I mean, I think there is a concession at some point where if you are a creatives creative, where you really love art, but you’re doing this because you also love to eat and have a place to live. But at the same time, I can see with designers, even in the simplest projects, you could show me three different heroes and I could tell you which designer did which one, even if they’re all equally competent, because they still bring their own…
Alan: Mine are pretty obvious.
Lisa: Why do you say that?
Alan: I don’t know. I say that because people have said that about me. I’m always, I can’t tell if it’s ever a backhanded compliment or if it’s…
Lisa: What do you think they mean?
Alan: After enough years in the industry, it’s that I finally do have a noticeable style.
I love color. I’m not afraid of big. In fact, I think you can always tell mine. It’s going to be the boldest one.
Lisa: Do you see the industry going somewhere? Where do you see it going? Do you have any predictions? Because it’s not great right now.
Alan: No, it’s hard for me to believe that the way it’s going right now is sustainable.
Lisa: Right, agree.
Alan: We are, as an industry, increasingly agencies are now owned by these holding companies which are just private equity firms which are just looking at bottom line, and they’re not looking at anything else.
It is the natural derivative end of capitalism.
It just all comes down and humans are humans and by extension then human creativity is going to be sacrificed.
Lisa: I think it’ll just transform into something else, because I think the creative spirit is water finding its own level. It’s just going to find some other way for us to do something different. I’m just not sure what.
Alan: Yeah but I mean, so, my concern becomes, well, whatever that is, how do we feed ourselves and our families and our future? How do we feed the future with that? It’s hard. It’s a really tumultuous time right now. I think technology is getting smarter people are, the people that have been in the industry for a long time and are seeing this new technology and they’re seeing the way younger people adapt to this technology or use it in a way I mean I start to sound boomer at this point but it is a really kind of angsty thing.
I think it’s… I hope that it all feels that it’s all going to allow us to evolve and, we’re gonna find our own level and things are going to work out. But I just- it’s hard to believe from my viewpoint right now. I can’t see what that’s going to look. It’s just so out of focus for me,
Lisa: I just think- creative not having its own presence within capitalism, as we know it, just it ceasing to be, that doesn’t seem reasonable to me. It’s technology stopping, AI just then now takes over all the IT jobs. There’s always going to be something.
And I think because we’re creatives, we’ll create another way to sustain ourselves. Maybe I’m just too idealistic, but we’ll figure something else out. Ways to- because people are consuming stories more than ever, even though a lot of it is just fluff.
Alan: Yeah.
Lisa: Were there artists or what was it about design pre-college where you were, “Oh God, I’ve got to do this.”
Alan: It was being involved with the yearbook at school.
I’m kind of getting involved and all these misfits worked on the yearbook at my school. And I totally fit in with those guys, ultimately, and actually, I should say I wanted to fit in with those folks, those were the kids that I really wanted to be accepted by,
Lisa: Why?
Alan: I don’t know, there was some kind of inherent coolness in my mind, to being a misfit and I never really felt that I fit in with all these other groups entirely I could but I felt I was faking it a lot of times and to be honest, I felt I still feel I’m faking it as a misfit a lot of the time.
Oh, yeah I mean imposter syndrome to the max
And the fact that I could at least identify, I really don’t know where I fit. So this feels best because I feel all these people don’t really know where they fit except everybody else seems so effortlessly cool in this group and I just wasn’t.
Lisa: In my experience in school, I definitely didn’t fit in anywhere. I was not nerdy enough to be friends with nerds. I definitely wasn’t cool. So I was part of, we called them freaks. We were not misfits. It was freaks. But I wasn’t in the freaks. There was also that, here’s what you wear. Here’s your, you’re the goths, part of the freaks.
Or you’re, this is you’re a skater. I wasn’t any of those things. I just didn’t fit in. So it was, I was a miscellaneous.
So I feel similarly to you where it’s kind of, by default, you’re in the only group that’s going to accept you.
Alan: Yeah, and honestly, I’m in the only group that I really want to be a part of in the long-
Lisa: ‘Cause they listen to better music.
Alan: That was 100%. They were listening to punk rock and techno. And those were the two things that I wanted to listen to.
Lisa: So, we know why you went into design and you’re a fake architecture major. I don’t, that’s, is-
Alan: It was, yes. And I totally, I did it to fake out my parents. To get them to agree to pay for college. Which they did. And then I switched to graphic design very early. And my dad said, well, I’m not going to pay for college anymore. And I was, okay, let me show you what a graphic designer does.
And I literally took him to the supermarket. And- and I just said, look around. Said, almost everything you see that’s not produce, started on the desk of somebody I’m going to be.
Everything.
Lisa: That’s awesome.
Alan: And he was, okay, you’re right. You’re right. There’s going to be no shortage of work.
And that was also, what is that? 96, 97. So the internet was in its infancy. So we didn’t even really know how it was going to explode at that point.
That’s how I ended up in graphic design. And then, I really didn’t know what avenue I was going to go in. I mean, as a starry-eyed college graduate, I wanted to go into music, posters and record art and CD art and all that stuff. And that was never to be. I mean, I’ve dabbled in it.
I have some-
Lisa: I saw a little bit. So tell, so when you became a DJ…
Alan: We didn’t even talk about this.
Lisa: Well, I don’t
Alan: That just came out of nowhere.
Lisa: Well, it’s been established. You’ve told me… we know each other, so I know this about you. And this is, I’m actually most curious about this because I know nothing about any details. When did that happen? How did it start? How old were you?
Alan: Okay. So my introduction to it was ninth grade. So what is that? You’re 13, I think.
Lisa: Yeah, 14. Or, yeah.
Alan: So, and I had already kind of rebranded myself as, I was into The Cure and Red Hot Chili Peppers and all these popular alternative artists of the time.
And I was accelerated in math. So as a freshman, I was in 11th grade math class right away. And so I was in there with these juniors, and these juniors were going to these things that were new called raves. And I was just, whoa, what’s this? Or all these bands called, that was classified as rave music, but it was Jesus Jones before they became popular here.
Primal Scream, just all these British, newer indie bands that were tied to these big field raves and all these illegal things.
And then that was starting to happen. But in the U.S. by the time I came into high school and these older kids were doing it, I just became totally enamored with it.
For better and worse, right? Because I became enamored with the drugs. I became enamored with the lying that you had to kind of do, the secrets that you had to keep, the status of being in on something that not everybody was. I never went to a party in high school and I thought that was like status, right? I didn’t go to parties of my peers. I just went to these raves.
Lisa: Yeah, my friends did too, and I… I didn’t go because I didn’t do drugs, so I was like, I’m gonna skip the scene, but I do like the music. I thought the music was fun.
Alan: So there you go. See, it’s… you didn’t miss much. Oh, no, the drugs were fun. I’m not gonna lie. The drugs were fun. But I am also a person who struggles with moderation, right?
Lisa: What was it about the music that you liked? Like, why that genre? Or was it just because it was part of the scene? You just must have liked the music.
Alan: No, I did. I liked the music, but I do think initially it really had to do with the status factor of it. But I grew to really appreciate the music. So that guy from that math class, who actually went on to become a pretty well known DJ. At least on the East Coast, it’s not like worldwide, but he would… he was responsible for bringing all these DJs from the UK to the U.S. for the first time. And he himself has had some success in that scene.
So he was starting to DJ and he was getting… and then he would also DJ our school dances just because he was like the one who had the stuff. And so I started doing that with him.
And kind of renting the P.A. Equipment and being like, almost like his lackey, roadie kind of thing. But I mean, just helping. And so that exposed me to it and exposed me to the concept of it. And then he sold me his first set or my first set of turntables, because he was upgrading.
So I got his old ones. And I loved it, but I didn’t have the work ethic to really invest a lot of time in it. But I loved collecting the music. And that’s really what I ended up zeroing in on. Which is the reason that I have a record collection now that is not allowed in the house. It is in the home office, which is on the far side of the garage. Because there’s thousands of records out there.
Lisa: So no matter how many years I do this, I have a certain, especially if it’s an important project, I have a process that I go through, which is… I’ve noticed that energy is such an integral part of our everyday, like every single thing we do. And when it comes to creative, it’s even more so.
I know I have to just go through this very lengthy process of feeling what I feel in response to either brainstorming or critiquing other people’s work. And it comes through as an energy and I have to sift through it and understand what does that feeling mean? Even if it’s like the letters are too big, it starts as a feeling like, “eh.”
So, when you’re creating one of those bolder concepts that are a little bit less the norm and more of like you, how do you get there to the right one? Because for most of us, it’s not immediate. So how is the process of coming from the blank page into the final product? Like what types of things do you go through to get there?
Alan: A lot of obsession. A lot of mess. A lot of the wrong thing. Like, rarely is my first instinct ever right. But I would say 8 times out of 10, my first instinct still comes through in that final idea, right?
Like, and that’s all raw feeling, right? I mean, that’s just like the… okay, my instinct tells me that this is what it is and I lay it out and it’s totally all wrong, but the idea of what it was still makes its way through as I start to kind of fine tune and shift and rotate and flip and add whatever it is to it.
And I can’t necessarily… I’m not looking at something unless I’m critiquing somebody else and kind of looking at the work and evaluating it, and I can’t necessarily look at it and go, “Oh, the type’s too…” I don’t like that typeface or… I mean, that, but it’s not that, it’s just like, that just doesn’t feel right. I don’t know why it just doesn’t feel right. And so I just sit there until it does, right? And that literally involves me pushing like one pixel at a time sometimes.
And then going back and then going back again. And then, let’s increase that by 2%. Okay, let’s shrink that. But it gets to be these just tiny little minutiae.
Alan: But it’s all, all, all, all based on feeling. None of it is really, unless I’m working directly from somebody’s dictated brand guidelines, I’m rarely ever… and so, and that’s the way I kind of even bring to creative reviews too of other people’s work is that I don’t know, it’s just a feeling.
So it’s all gut. I don’t know. It’s literally all gut. And if I don’t care about a project, my gut only allows… my gut has a very low threshold for what’s acceptable, right?
Lisa: Wait, so…
Alan: It’s other way, right? Or is it…?
Lisa: Yeah, it’s, it doesn’t care, it’s just like, “Yeah, sure. Great, it’s done, I don’t…”
Same, yeah, it… which is, it kind of gets me to my next question when I was going to ask you, like, how do you feel about your process, because I feel like the more we care, if we do have this tendency to overanalyze and just submerse ourselves completely for weeks in this thing and think about it constantly, constantly, I know I have this other voice in my head saying, “Holy shit. Just fucking finish it. Like what? What is all this thinking?” Like, hurry up! But that’s part of the beauty of it is the painstaking…
Alan: Yeah, I think we need it, right? I think you need that level of obsession. But to your point, you do need, and I think you only develop over time and experience of that. Like knowing when to say when like it’s okay, this is… I could sit here and noodle this thing for the next three days or I could say, literally nobody but me and maybe you is going to notice the difference.
Increasingly, as I get older, strangely, it’s harder… Well, I just I can’t show enthusiasm for work I don’t really care about. I can sell something, but I don’t think you actually have to have passion about something to sell it. And but you’ll know when I’m passionate about something.
Lisa: Right. Yeah.
Alan: And not necessarily in a good way, right? I’ll be more defensive. I’ll be more aggressive a lot of times about trying to push the idea. And, but for me, well, for others that can be alienating. But for me, I’m like, I don’t know how to live any other way. I can’t hide this the way I can mask my indifference. I can mask indifference. I can’t mask-
Lisa: I’m not so sure because I think that when people are passionate, their tone of voice changes and if you don’t hear that, like people can hear indifference. Even if it’s, even if you sound good, you can still, I can hear it. I think people can feel it.
Alan: You’re a creative.
Lisa: True. Yeah.
Alan: Right? I mean, I can’t shit a shitter.
Lisa: Yeah. In terms of this authenticity and also you’re an outspoken person who doesn’t ever really actually bullshit people, even though you’ve had a people-pleasing past, but being a fairly authentic person, would you say that you care about what other people think?
Alan: Sadly, yeah.
Lisa: Do you? Is that like across the board or in only specific types of relationships?
Alan: I think it’s usually only ever in hindsight.
Lisa: Interesting.
Alan: I’m going through a situation now, right? Where there were some differences, a relationship, the relationship was severed and I’m essentially being ghosted by the other party. And I… it is driving me crazy. I have no problem with the ending of a relationship but when you’re ghosted, or you have no context for the ending from the other party, you’re… I get like obsessed with like, what was it? It’s almost like you’ve died, and nobody told you how you died. And you’re just kind of left with this gaping, “why?”
That may be, I don’t know, that could be mental illness that I care so much in this, in only these instances, but I care how I’ve made people feel. And it oftentimes happens in hindsight again, because I tend to run and run and run and run and not know what I’m leaving in my wake.
So running my mouth and then people are like really offended by something I said. And I’m like, wait, what did I say? And when they tell me how what I said made them feel, I care deeply that I made them feel that way. And I’m just overwhelmed by not regret, remorse, and a desire or willingness to make amends that isn’t just rooted in satisfying my own ego. It’s like this genuine, like, shit, I hate that I made you feel that way.
And, but it still doesn’t stop me from running and running and running and with little to no awareness of the implications of what I’m doing sometimes.
Lisa: True, but I think that everybody is gonna hurt people unknowingly, whether they’re running, walking, crawling, or sleeping, like it’s always gonna happen no matter what. Do you feel, do you want something specific from this person or you just want clarity?
Alan: Clarity, but that’s only to satisfy me, but under- but clarity can also be like, oh, I can better understand what happened and what my role was in it, right? And at the end of the day, you’re only responsible to keep your side of the street clean.
Alan: And that’s something I was never aware of before, kind of exposure to that type of a therapeutic environment in the sense of like, oh, right, and so I don’t think that I necessarily cared what people thought of me or what I said until then, until it was like, okay, somebody sat you down and said, okay, go over all the times that you’ve been hurt.
Alan: Right? Or that you feel that you’ve been wronged. And part of that process is to go, Okay, well, what was your role in that?
Alan: What did you do? And you have to kind of face that, and then you’re like, oh, with that kind of came this advent of like, oh, I do greatly care about what other people think about me. But more in the sense of I care about how other people feel and if they’ve felt something as a result of my action, right? So I don’t care what people think of my work necessarily, but I care what people think about me as a person and how I’ve engaged with them honestly, authentically, with integrity. With compassion. And if I haven’t, I seek to right that wrong.
Lisa: Yeah, it’s interesting how sometimes, we seek to have a greater awareness of self. I would hope that anybody would, but sometimes that awareness causes so much more complexity into our life. And sometimes additional negativity, because if you’re ignorant, then you just keep going and if you have awareness, you can, usually you’re living a better life, you know, because the more aware you are, the more conflicts you usually should avoid.
Alan: To, you know…
Lisa: Yeah. So it’s just funny how sometimes it can actually over complicate your life, even though-
Alan: Well, yeah, because you start to obsess and you game out all the scenarios that could have happened. There’s a fine line between humility and humiliation, like are you gonna humiliate yourself in pursuit of making, to undo the wrong, or are you going to be humble enough to admit and just not blow it out of proportion, but, hey, I was wrong, and that’s it, and let it be, and then it’s on to the other party.
Lisa: You once described yourself to me as always for better or worse, a work in progress on display, which… I like that phrase and it sort of ties into this because when I hear that it feels like an acceptance of… Just a fluid state of being and to me sometimes when you have these unfinished conflicts with people or where they just don’t speak to you again or whatever. I’ve definitely dealt with that a lot in the past couple years of my life. And one of the major things is the lack of acceptance. And so it’s kind of the same energy of like, just I’m just here and I’m bobbing around and I’m just… I did the best I could with this person, you know? And that’s all that I need to be is like…
Alan: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a lot of that comes, you hope that comes with age. Some people are obviously more immune to that level of growth than others, but I guess when I said that I wanted to be just kind of a work in progress on display. I joke that I want my tombstone to read just “work in progress” as if whatever’s happening beyond is just part of the work.
Everybody wants to inherently hide their mess, nobody wants to see the mess behind the finished product. They just want the finished product. So you just try to pretend that the mess doesn’t exist.
Lisa: I think people love watching a mess.
Alan: People love watching other people’s mess. They have no tolerance for their own. Right? And they judge themselves on their own constantly. I’m as guilty of that as anybody else. But that’s what I mean by it is that I strive not to live that way and be like, you know what? I am like, I’m a sick person. You’re a sick person. We’re all sick people. We’re all just people kind of bobbing along. Like you said, and we’re doing the best we can. And that’s okay. And if I show that as myself, then hopefully other people will reflect that back to you or be willing to allow themselves that vulnerability too, because vulnerability is where the action is.
I don’t really like… I like small talk in the sense I’m very good at it because I developed it as a skill, but I really love to get people talking about themselves and get to a point where they’re comfortable with me asking questions. Vulnerable questions, right? Or questions that will make them feel more vulnerable. And to do so, you have to be vulnerable yourself. Cause you have to be like, I’m not shitting you. This is my experience. You can believe me because I am telling you this.
And that’s what I mean by being a work in progress. And I think that inherently becomes a creative way of existing.
Lisa: Do you feel that being vulnerable has gotten you in trouble?
Alan: 100%.
Lisa: And was it worth it? Do you typically stand- was it worth it? Do you typically stand by like say, well, yeah, it got me in trouble, but I was true to myself, and-
Alan: Yeah, I mean, I think, listen, I’m somebody who will say all the things that everybody else is saying or thinking, and they’ll all pat you on the back later and be like, thanks for saying everything that we’re thinking. I don’t regret speaking my truth in general. And I think I had a lot of time where I never really knew what my truth was growing up. And so to have that voice now, I do it unapologetically.
And it gets me in trouble, and I have to backtrack, and I have to make amends, and I have to do things. But that’s just because things have consequences, right? And if you’re living authentically, I can wake up and choose to be an asshole as long as I’m willing to accept the consequences of being an asshole. Right? Or I can… but I don’t want to be known as an asshole, but I do want to be known as a both passionate and compassionate real human being, and I’m not going to apologize for that.
Lisa: What do you think speaking your truth means? Like, how would you quantify that?
Alan: I guess living your truth or speaking your truth is being willing to play your cards even when you know you might have a losing hand. This is what I’ve got. This is what it is from my point of view. I think it’s just that willingness to kind of bring your vulnerabilities to whatever the situation is being just willing to… I’m not saying you have to in every situation, but being willing to put those on the line in order to be understood or to be… human, I don’t know.
Lisa: I’m trying to think of other people that I know who are outspoken and typically those people are not described as big connectors, like it’s not like, I think the people who are talented at the lip service, maybe get more of the credit of like, “oh, he’s a good guy, he’s a great guy. You could talk to him.”
But the people who are outspoken, the outspoken people have a bit of a bad reputation sometimes for their people skills because they are honest. Yet, those are the people where you’re going to have a much more genuine connection.
Alan: Yeah. I think that’s a hundred percent true.
I think that’s who I am. I’m not everybody’s taste, but I can get along with everyone, right? I can get along with everybody if I keep my true self subdued.
I think some of my more excited and authentic self is still attractive, but eventually, it might get to a point where it becomes abrasive to somebody because I’m willing to unfilter the way I speak to them.
And then it turns out I made the wrong gamble and I should have been more filtered. I make an assumption sometimes, “Oh, you can take this. You’re going to be able to.” But other times, I do it subconsciously, and I don’t intend to hurt.
And then I have to, like I said, I have to be willing to go back. And that’s that thing, right? I am always willing to go back and re-examine.
Lisa: Yeah.
Alan: And better understand from that other person’s perspective what went wrong.
Lisa: I was extremely unfiltered in my teens and early twenties. Some people have opinions about me, and I’m like, “Boy, you should have seen me 20 years ago.” But I do feel- Oh God, it was just terrible. But-
Alan: Have compassion for yourself.
Lisa: I’m having a montage of flashbacks. Actually, it’s a pretty fun montage. You would enjoy it. So I’ll take that back. But, oh boy. But I found that this self-awareness work does kind of stop the unnecessary over-the-top unfilteredness.
Alan: Haven’t gotten there yet. Or maybe I’ve gotten worse. No, I was definitely worse when I was drunk.
Alan: Now, in general, I think any level of roughshod lack of self-awareness… Yeah, I know. I mean, I think everybody’s different, right? For me, any level of roughshod outspokenness before lacked self-awareness. What I have now, sure, maybe it has been subdued or honed. You learn to care about this or that, or when not to care about something, but I don’t think it’s necessarily tempered my inability to stop from going over that edge in moments that really matter to me.
Lisa: So tell me about New York City.
Alan: So New York City. 2002. The summer of 2002, I’m 24 years old at the time, and I decided that I would waste all of my money and move there instead of just visiting. So I made a deal with myself. I ate nothing but ramen noodles and peanut butter and jelly for six months, sold my car, and moved to New York City with no plan. I trusted a friend to find an apartment. He found an apartment. It was the most expensive apartment I lived in because I moved in with this rich kid who didn’t care how much an apartment cost.
So I struggled. I paid $1,000 for a room that was the size of a postage stamp. But it was in Williamsburg, which was the epitome of cool at the time. Then I started working in Connecticut, in Darien, Connecticut. So I did the reverse commute for three years from Brooklyn, New York, to Darien, Connecticut, just to get myself a foot in the door in New York because nobody in New York cared about me.
And then eventually parlayed that into a job in New York.
Lisa: So that whole time in your life, you took a bit of a risk, but also it seems like you made smart decisions because it really kind of launched your career. I mean, it worked out. You made correct choices.
Alan: It did. But looking back on it with 46-year-old eyes, it feels really…
Lisa: That’s what I was gonna say. If you had to do it again, you probably would do things completely differently. But at that time…
Alan: It was the only way I knew.
Lisa: But it probably also didn’t feel as much of a risk as when you look back at it now and say, “Holy-”
Alan: Yeah, no, because apart from the rich roommate, everybody was broke. Everybody I knew was broke in New York. We were all young. We were all dumb. We had no money. So we all got along because we were all in the same situation.
Lisa: Yeah.
Alan: It’s interesting sometimes when you look back at your younger years. When you’re very young, you have a lot of self-limiting beliefs that you get over when you get to be an older adult. At the same time, it’s kind of the reverse because even though you may not have the best self-esteem or confidence, or maybe just dumb self-esteem, you’re not a well-developed human.
Lisa: Right. You’re making very uninformed decisions, but they work out often. My parents, I’m sure they were quivering, like, “What is he doing?”
Alan: There’s a thread through it, like maturity and good decision-making. That’s a throughline.
Lisa: That’s the bedrock, yeah.
Alan: And I say that about my parents, that I’m sure they were quivering. I made that assumption, though. My parents have gone on to tell me, “We would have never been that brave. We can’t even express to you how much we admire that you were willing to do that. For that, I always internalized this feeling of shame, when in fact I was actually doing something quite courageous and admirable, no matter how stupid it was.
Lisa: Yeah, I think, I can’t imagine anybody who doesn’t struggle with some degree of shame in terms of the structure you’ve been given by your parents. Am I fitting into it? Nobody’s usually proud, deep inside. It’s like, do I fit into what I’m supposed to be doing? And then as you get older, you’re like, “Oh, actually it doesn’t matter.”
Alan: Yeah, I mean…
Lisa: Just a random person’s rules, basically.
Alan: Yeah, essentially, which is kind of everything you’re ever given, right? And as a father, it’s the same thing. I can see me doing it to my kid, imposing these arbitrary rules just because I was given these arbitrary rules at some point. My kids, God bless them, for background, my twin boys are both autistic, and they both have difficulty with social norms, not just because they’re autistic, but because they’re five or not even five. They’re still essentially aliens on this planet. Everything feels arbitrary when you set these guidelines and limits on them. So I’m now working hard to try to undo some of that stuff because I know how toxic it’s been for me.
Lisa: Right. Yeah. I think it’s kind of a catch-22 because you have to have guidelines and things, but as a parent, you’re never going to win.
Alan: No, no, no. I mean, listen, my therapy bills are enough to… The only reason our parents don’t have these therapy bills is because they thought it was bad to, or there was some evil black mark on them to go.
Lisa: Yeah. Well, I think therapy also itself has changed. It’s become a lot more per- individual focus and empowering as opposed to whatever it used to be. It’s just-
Alan: Trying to figure out what’s wrong with me. As opposed to, I’m just trying to understand why I do the things I do. Not that they’re wrong, I just want to understand them.
Lisa: Right. And all like compassion based because it’s a lot easier to work with all your, all your shadow selves when you’re looking at them with compassion, as opposed to let’s fix this. Like, let’s get rid of it.
Alan: I want to eliminate that shadow.
Lisa: And they’re not going-
Alan: They’re not going anywhere. Wherever you go, there you are.
Lisa: So tell me about your recent diagnosis that surprised you and how, I know you had mentioned once how it kind of changed the way you viewed your past and things that happened. Tell me a little bit about that.
Alan: So, okay. I mean, I’ve been in therapy. I’d been in therapy a long time with one therapist, and that was really Freudian. So it was a lot of analysis, and she always wanted me to be sitting on the couch to free myself. It wasn’t really rooted in anything practical in the sense of there was no practical application, but I gained a lot of self-awareness. Nothing was ever mentioned about possible biological reasons that I might be this way or what have you.
And then, I kind of excused myself from therapy for a while, and then life became kind of untenable for me and everybody around me. Unless I started to revisit some of this stuff. And I found a therapist who was much more action-oriented. Based.
Early on from the first few sessions, I think with that guy, he was just like, has anybody ever told you that you are a textbook case of ADHD? I said, no. Why would, no, I’m not ADHD. It didn’t even enter my mind and nobody, and there’s a reason for that because our generation, there was a lot less understood about neurodivergences and what these diagnoses meant.
It was only the most extreme cases who ever got a diagnosis ever, right? And so I would not have been diagnosed. And when you have something like ADHD, but you don’t know it, you start to internalize, Oh, I’m just lazy or I don’t have a, or man, I’m a space cadet. Like my grandma was a space cadet, she could lose anything immediately and I’m just like her, right? So I was just like, oh, genetically I’m like my grandma, whatever, doesn’t matter. But you learn your coping skills to acclimate yourself to the world as it is laid out to you and is defined to be. So as your parents put the arbitrary rules and you’re just like, I learned to fit the rules as best I could.
And I learned the skills that it took to operate within that system well.
That led to a lot of self-loathing, a lot of shame. A lot of misunderstanding myself, a lot of hurting others and myself. And I was just as confused at 45 as I was at 15, right? It also took watching some of these things start to play out in my children.
Even at a very young age, you can see these things, and we have the benefit of both my children being diagnosed very young, so we can be on the lookout, but it turned an additional lens on me of like, oh, wow. And for better or worse, again, I’m somebody who doesn’t dive too deep, so I didn’t research everything on ADHD, I don’t have time for that.
And I didn’t have the obsessive self-interest around it. Instead, I turned to memes and all these meme accounts of people writing these little missives, and I’m like, holy shit. That’s me, you know? And oh my God, that’s me too. All the things made sense that all these people were obviously saying to be funny, but they were just so relatable.
And then I could sit there and go, wow, I could look at these major points in my life and go, man, I thought I was just lazy. I’m not just lazy. I couldn’t develop, because I didn’t have that inherent self-interest in that, I could not apply myself to that. Or, I lack executive functioning around bill paying or something.
Turns out that’s really common. I didn’t know. I thought I was a piece of shit who just couldn’t do anything. No, it turns out that this is actually really common. On top of it, ADHD folks are constant dopamine searchers, right?
We’re constantly looking for novelty, we’re easily bored, we’re susceptible to losing ourselves, losing time. It’s not just hyperactivity, it’s not physical hyperactivity necessarily. It’s also a very mental hyperactivity in the sense of we’re just never really sitting in the same place mentally for very long. Or the opposite is also true of ADHD, where we can obsess about certain things. I will re-litigate conversations that I had in the third grade over and over, and then a year later I’ll do it again. And I’m just like, where did this come from? But I can’t not do it.
And so then when put into that context and I could work and partner with a therapist, a licensed professional to say, here, let’s try these over-the-counter ways to regulate some of this stuff and see how you benefit.
The first thing I started was anxiety meds because there’s a tremendous amount of anxiety for people with ADHD, but I think I also suffer from general anxiety disorder as well. So we did that and that made an immediate difference, kind of raising my tolerance threshold before I would bug out and become overwhelmed.
And then finding a stimulant-based treatment medication to focus this overactive brain, which is hilarious that a stimulant does it, but it’s controlling that dopamine release in the sense of regulating it, as opposed to constantly seeking huge, and then having a depletion.
There’s a lot of forgiveness I had to give myself because I have told a really negative story to myself about myself my entire life. And so now it’s like, Oh, you know what? It’s okay that I have to get up every five minutes. Sometimes it’s not all the time, but it’s fine. And that’s part of the process. I was always one of those people who had two weeks to finish a project and did it in two days, but I could always get results in those two days.
And I always felt like, well, that’s just the way I work, right? No, I needed the added urgency and dopamine hit that urgency brought. So now, if I can have it regulated, I can at least bring some level of moving the ball down the court before I need a full court shot at the end.
Some of the things that I’ve learned to cope with or survive, I have to undo and then others I have to accept. But the first thing I have to accept is that it’s okay, I have a neurodivergence.
There’s a biological reason that I am this way. It is not a moral failure. It is not a failure of integrity or ethics. It is a biological difference that makes my approach to living different than yours or what has become the standard bearer that we’re all expected to live by.
Lisa: I have these final three questions that I’m going to try to ask everybody. So, here we go. Okay. What’s something you do a lot of when you’re in a good place? Like a habit or a hobby.
Alan: I’m trying to think the last time I was in a good place. I listen to music, and that’s good or bad place to be perfectly honest.
Lisa: Do you have a genre that you gravitate towards when you’re feeling good?
Alan: Soul, R&B, funk from the late sixties to the early nineties. The sweet spot’s really the mid to late 70s and early 80s.
Lisa: Would you rather be peaceful and bored or inspired and restless?
Alan: I don’t know that those two states are possible for me, but for the sake of the question… I’d rather be peaceful and restless. Honestly, probably peaceful and bored.
Lisa: Really? Okay.
Alan: Yeah. I mean, if you’re bored, it’s possible to be bored, but there’s way too much to experience out of life that you can’t cure that boredom without necessarily affecting your peace.
You are capable, whereas restlessness and inspired is taxing all the time. It’s a constant drain of energy, or at least it requires a constant feeding of energy.
And again, I do think that answer is probably influenced by my age and kind of position where I’m at in life. Why I say it wasn’t realistic is my life is both inspired and restless at all times, and that’s before you get to my job. Right, like that’s just my chaotic inner workings of my house. And that is so exhausting. I would really appreciate some peace and boredom.
Lisa: Last question.
Alan: Okay.
Lisa: The most moving piece of art you’ve ever seen, heard, or experienced?
Alan: Guernica. Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.
Studying in Art History, I was fortunate enough to have an art history professor who was super pretentious but super passionate, and he really brought stuff to life in a way that nobody had done before for me in terms of any kind of history. Political or art, and I love history, but this guy really put things contextually. It didn’t stop me from falling asleep in his class. I definitely did that because the lights go out and the slides go on, but I still remember all of my neurons being fired up talking about Guernica. He spent an entire class talking about it and the context around it, the color choices, the composition, the terror, the political upheaval, and the war that went into it, and just how tragic it was. Then to go see it in person…
I rarely tear over stuff like that in public. That doesn’t mean I don’t cry. I can cry at a Hallmark commercial if it’s written right. But I was moved to tears. It was super overwhelming. I sat there for hours looking at it. I used to keep a copy of it. I haven’t put it up in a while. Right above my desk. And I’m not even somebody who’s particularly gaga about Picasso or anything. Then it’s followed closely by Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Because it’s psychedelic and weird, really crazy, awesome, and also a glimpse into that life of the 1500s or late 1400s. It really brings that to life too, in these little scenes. But, yeah, Guernica.
Lisa: What’s ironic about my interview with Alan is we never recorded a goodbye. And so true to Alan’s status as a work in progress, the work never truly ends, right? So as we close this episode, I propose stopping for a minute to consider, are you okay with the unresolved? Are you comfortable with never being done? Would your strength increase if you accepted the fact that the only constant is change? And maybe that’s exactly where your joy is hiding. I hope you enjoyed meeting or reconnecting with Alan. I will see you next time on 3rd Concept.
