This Is Twenty..

Twenty episodes later, Even If You're Scared takes a moment to look back at the journey so far — the fear, the uncertainty, the growth, and the decision to keep showing up.

A reflection on what it means to hear your own voice change over time, this episode explores the unexpected lessons that come from creating something consistently and allowing yourself to grow in public. From grief and relationships to boundaries, vulnerability, and learning to trust yourself, Episode 20 looks at the moments that shaped the podcast and the person behind it.

More than a recap, this episode becomes a checkpoint — a chance to recognize what has changed, what still feels the same, and what conversations are still waiting to happen.

Looking ahead, the podcast continues to make space for discussions about music, culture, intimacy, identity, relationships, and all the complicated, beautiful, frustrating, and meaningful parts of being human.

Twenty episodes in, the story is still unfolding.

If this episode felt familiar in any way—like your mind, your room, your routines, or your quiet—you’re not alone in it.

You can reach out anytime at 7amkingsil@gmail.com or on Instagram @abstract_catalyst. Messages don’t need to be perfect. They don’t need to be important. They just need to be yours.

Everything sent gets read. Even if it takes time to sit with it.

And wherever you are right now—whether you’re moving fast, standing still, or somewhere in between—you don’t have to force clarity out of it today.

Just keep going gently.

Even if it’s messy.

Even if it’s uncertain.

Even if you’re scared.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hi, my name is Phil, and welcome to Even If You're Scared. What kept stopping me wasn't the lack of ideas. It was it was fear. And today I want to talk to you about boundaries. And for the first time, I moved at my own pace. Time feels different. You notice the gaps. You learn how to be close without actually being close. I want to talk about love. I just want to talk about my mom. Happy Mother's Day. She's not just my little sister, she's my best friend. This thousand square foot apartment in Brooklyn. Happy Pride, y'all. Happy Juneteenth. Happy Freedom Day. Happy survival. Tracy, welcome to Even If You're Scared. She's so incredibly cool. I'm black. I'm queer. I'm trans. Sometimes I wonder if she really understands how much I love her. And then I wonder if she did. Would she run? This is even if you're scared. Welcome back to Even If You're Scared. Even if you're scared. Even if you're scared. And this is me starting. Damn. Listening to yourself is weird. Not hearing your voice. You get over that eventually. I mean like listening. Really listening. A few days ago I went back and started playing old episodes, and I don't know what I expected. I thought I'd hear all the things I wanted to fix. I thought I'd cringe a little even. I thought I'd spend the whole time criticizing myself because let's be honest, I'm pretty good at it. But that's not what happened. What happened was I met versions of myself that I forgot existed. I remembered exactly where I was sitting when I recorded some of them. I remembered what happened five minutes before I hit record. I remembered what I was afraid to say, the parts I almost deleted, and I remember thinking, nobody is gonna care about this. And apparently I was wrong. Not because thousands of people listened, let's be real. That's not what's happening over here. But because somebody did. Somebody spent part of their day listening to something I almost talked myself out of making. And that's a weird feeling. I don't think I've ever sat with that before. Hi everybody, and welcome back to Even If You're Scared, I'm Syl, and apparently this is episode twenty. Uh, which honestly doesn't feel real. Twenty. When I recorded the first episode, I don't think I was thinking about episode twenty. I was thinking about episode one. Actually, I wasn't even thinking about episode one. I was thinking about whether I was going to hit publish. Those are two completely different things. Because recording something is easy. Publishing it is terrifying. Especially when it's your voice, your opinions, your stories, your grief, relationships, insecurities. Your name attached to every word. There's nowhere to hide. Once it's out there, it's out there, and every single week I make the decision to do it again. That still surprises me. And I'm not fearless. To be honest, I'm scared shitless. If you've been here for any amount of time, you already know that it's not true. I'm not fearless. It's hard to hit record. I'm I'm still convinced every now and then that I have absolutely nothing interesting to say. I still have weeks where I stare at the microphone longer than I actually spend talking into it. That's has that hasn't changed. What has changed is that I've stopped waiting for the fear to leave. I don't know exactly when that happened. I wish I could tell you there was one episode where everything clicked and suddenly I became confident. That would have been nice. That also would have made a much shorter podcast. It doesn't happen like that. It didn't it didn't happen like that. It happened slowly, quietly, week after week, episode after episode. I don't think confidence showed up one day and knocked on my door. I think consistency did. And I almost missed it because I was looking for confidence instead. That's been one of the strangest parts of this whole experience. People talk about confidence all the time. Nobody really talks about consistency. Confidence feels exciting. Consistency feels kind of boring until you realize consistency is the thing that is quietly changing you while you're busy looking for some big breakthrough. That's probably what these 20 episodes have really been. Not twenty lessons, not twenty breakthroughs, just twenty times showing up, twenty times deciding that maybe whatever is sitting in my head deserved to be placed outside of it. Some weeks it was grief, some weeks it was relationships or boundaries, some weeks it was something I wasn't even sure I wanted another person to hear. There were definitely episodes where I hit publish and immediately thought, well, I guess that's out there forever, and I don't know if that feeling ever goes away. Maybe it shouldn't. Maybe that's a sign that I'm still saying things that matter to me because if I ever get to the point where none of this feels vulnerable anymore, I think I'd probably stop making this show. Something else happened when I started listening back. I noticed how different I sounded. Not just my voice, my pace, the way I thought, the questions I asked. There were moments where I could hear myself trying so hard to make every sentence land. Like every thought had to be complete before I let anybody hear it. I don't really do that anymore, at least I don't think I do. No, that's a lie. I think I do. I I think I do. Now I also just I catch myself thinking out loud a lot more. Sometimes I'll start a sentence having no idea where it's going, and somehow by the end of it, I've learned something that I didn't know I believed. Sometimes I'm still lost. That's been one of my favorite parts of podcasting, not teaching or or anything, just discovering. There's a difference. I'm not sitting down every week because I have answers. Half the time I'm sitting down because I have questions, and somewhere in the middle of talking, I usually find one. Not always an answer, sometimes just a better question. I think better questions have changed my life more than quick answers ever have. One of the things I kept asking myself while I was listening back was, when did this start feeling normal? And honestly, I don't think it has. I don't think I'll ever get used to sitting in a room by myself talking to a microphone, hoping something I say finds the person that it needs. That's still weird. Actually, no, it's still I said terrifying before. It's just scary as fuck. I think the difference now is that I trust myself more. Not because I think every episode is good. I know most of them. There are definitely episodes where I finished recording that thing, eh, I don't think I don't I don't know what I think about this one. I don't know about this one. But there's also episodes where I wonder if I'm just talking to hear myself talk. I definitely think I've repeated myself somewhere. There are episodes where I wonder if I should just delete the whole thing and try again next week, and then I fucking hit publish anyway. That might actually be the biggest lesson these 20 episodes has taught me. Done is almost always better than perfect because perfect doesn't exist. If I waited until every episode felt perfect, there wouldn't be twenty of them. There'd probably be like two. And something else. Some episodes still hit me exactly the same way they did the first time I recorded them. The Mother's Day episode? I don't think I can listen to that one without going right back to where I was emotionally. Grief is weird like that. Time moves, life keeps happening, you keep laughing, you keep paying bills, you keep grocery shopping, you keep living. But grief has this funny way of reminding you that it never actually left. It just learned how to sit a little quieter. And hearing myself in that episode, I don't know, part of me wanted to hug that version of myself. Part of me wanted to tell them they were going to survive. Even though sitting here today, nothing got better. But they kept waking up, and that has to be enough for now. Then there are episodes that surprise me for completely different reasons. Like the one about boundaries. When I recorded it, I thought I was talking about other people. Listening back, I realized I was talking about myself, about how much of my worth I had tied to being available, being needed, being the one that fixes things, the one that says yes and makes it work. I don't know if I realized that while I was recording. I think I did maybe after listening back though, and again months later when I listened again. I don't think I ever realized that while I was recording. I think I did maybe after listening back though. And again months later when I listened again. When I heard myself say it back. That's another trippy thing about podcasting. Sometimes you don't understand what you meant until you're the one listening. There are other episodes that make me laugh because I can hear myself trying to figure out something in real time. Like I genuinely had no clue where I was going. I just kept talking until something made sense. It usually does. I'm pretty good at making things come full circle. Not every time though. Definitely not. I don't know if I started trusting that process either, but I'm hopeful. That's new for me. Trusting that I don't have to know exactly where a conversation is going before I started. Honestly, sort of like now. I think that's true outside this podcast too. Maybe it's just true in life. I don't know. I'm still working on that one. I'm still working on that one. I'm letting the wheels turn. Yo, something that made me smile, my voice changed literally, and in the way I use it. Just the pauses don't scare me as much anymore. Silence used to feel like I was doing something wrong. Now, sometimes silence says exactly what I couldn't. Along the way, I stopped trying to sound like somebody who had a podcast and started sounding like more myself, or maybe started letting myself sound like myself. Hmm. It's funny. When I started this, I thought the scary part was going to be sharing my life. Turns out the scary part is letting people watch you change and being vulnerable because that means there are episodes where I might disagree with myself now. There are opinions that I have shifted, there are things I'd explain differently, there are conversations I'd have more patience with. There are moments where I I'd probably interrupt myself and say, hold on, I don't think that's exactly how I see it anymore. And I actually fucking love it because if twenty episodes later I believed every single thing exactly the same way, what would that say? I'd rather be growing than trying to be right all the time. That's probably been the biggest surprise. Not that the podcast changed, that I did. Not all at once or dramatically, just a little, a smidge every week, conversation by conversation, rant by rant. I think that's what people mean when they say consistency changes you. It isn't that you wake up one day and suddenly become someone else. It's that one day you listen back and realize you're not the same person who hit record on episode one anymore. It's the main thing that surprised me. Not only that I made 20 episodes, that feels dope, don't get me wrong. I I'm proud of that. I don't celebrate myself nearly enough, so I'm gonna let myself have this one. Twenty episodes is kinda wild. But that's not the part that keeps sticking with me. The part that keeps sticking with me is that I kept coming back every week, even when I didn't know what I wanted to talk about, even when I thought I had absolutely nothing to say, even when life was lifing, somehow I kept ending up right back here, talking to a microphone, talking to myself, talking to you. I think a lot about where this show is going because I don't think it's the same show I started. I don't think I'm the same person who started it. At first, I thought this podcast had to be about one thing. I thought maybe it had to stay in one lane. Maybe it had to be about grief or vulnerability or mental health or relationships or being trans or whatever. But the more I make this show, the more I realize none of us live our lives in categories. One day you're thinking about losing someone you love, the next day you're arguing with customer service and you're dancing in your kitchen because your favorite song came on. You're questioning your entire career, you're laughing so hard your fucking stomach hurts. Or you're crying over something you thought you got over three years ago. That's life. Life doesn't stay in one lane, so I don't think this podcast should either. There are so many conversations I want to have. I want to talk about music, not just favorite artists, I want to talk about how the lyrics make you feel. I want to talk about seeing the sound, I want to talk about hearing it in your chest. I want to talk about the songs that become time machines, the songs that can pull you right back into a memory you forgot you had. I want to talk about sex, not just sex, I want to talk about intimacy and comfort and body image, communication, the awkward conversation nobody teaches us how to have. I want to talk about race and culture, the country we're living in, the things that make us hopeful, the things that make us angry and tired. I want to talk about friendships, the ones that last and the ones that don't, the people we outgrow and the people who outgrow us. I want to talk about long distance relationships, about choosing people every day, about what love looks like when you can't drive across town. I want to talk about joy because I think I've spent enough time talking about surviving. I still want to have those conversations. They're important, they're a part of me, they always will be, but I also want to laugh more, I want to be more curious. I want to have episodes that end with somebody smiling because they never thought about something that way before. I want this to be a place where literally nothing about being human is off limits. I don't know what this podcast is going to become, and weirdly I like that because it means I still get to discover it. I still get to surprise myself and change my mind. I still get to grow. So, if you've been hanging out with me for the last 20 episodes, or maybe this is your first one, or fifth, or twelfth, thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. You could be spending your time doing literally anything else, and the fact that you've chosen to spend even part of your day hanging out with me, listening to me, think out loud, question things, ramble a little, and figure life out in real time. It genuinely means more than I know how to put into words. I hope you'll keep taking this ride with me. Truthfully, I don't know where it's going, I don't know what episode forty looks like, I definitely don't know what episode one hundred looks like. I don't even know if this podcast will be a part of my life forever. Maybe one day another chapter opens and this chapter comes to a close. If that ever happens, I'll be incredibly grateful for what this became and for every single one of you who came along for the ride. But I know we're not there yet. I think we've got a lot more conversations to have, so I'll be here next week and hopefully you'll be here too. If this episode resonated with you, if it made you think if you listened to some of those old episodes with me in your head, or if you had an idea, a question, feedback, or even something you think would we should talk about in the show, please reach out. I read everything, every email, every DM, every message. If you've ever thought, I wonder if I should send that. Do it. You can email me at the number 7amkingstill at gmail.com or send me a DM on Instagram at abstract underscore catalyst. If you ever wanted to be a guest, or if there's a conversation you think is worth having, or if there's something you've been carrying around that nobody seems to be talking about, I'd love to hear from you. It's still kind of unbelievable that this is episode 20. 20 isn't some magic number, but 20 weeks ago, I wasn't even sure there was going to be an episode one. So the fact that we're here, that's pretty incredible. And if you're sitting on something you've been wanting to create, a podcast, a book, a painting, a song, a business, whatever it is, stop waiting for permission. Stop waiting until you feel ready because you might never feel ready. Just enjoy the ride, keep learning, keep growing, keep changing your mind, and most importantly, stay unapologetically and undeniably you through all of it. Thank you for spending these 20 episodes with me. I appreciate every single one of you more than you know. Until next week, keep reaching, keep going, keep asking questions. Question everything. Don't be afraid to speak up, don't be afraid to be different. And whatever it is you've been putting off, push record. Even if you're scared. This is even if you're scared. This is even if you're scared. I am still thank you for being here with me today. Even if you're scared. This is even if you're scared. This is even if you're scared. Wherever you are in it, just keep showing up. Even if it's heavy.