November 2, 2024 • 24 mins
Dave Tarnowski, author of The Disappointing Affermations book based on his wildly popular Instagram account of the same name, counters the culture of relentless “toxic positivity” with a realistic take on a disappointing world where failure is always an option, but that’s okay.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is What's at Risk with Mike Christian on WBZ
Boston's news radio. Hi, Mike Christian, here of What's at Risk.
First up on tonight's show, we have Dave Tarnowski, author
of the Disappointing Affirmations book based on his wildly popular
Instagram account of the same name. Dave counters the culture
(00:25):
of relentless toxic positivity with a realistic take on a
disappointing world where failure is always an option, but that's okay.
And in our second segment, we welcome Crystal Banfield and
Missel Martinez of Berkeley College of Music. They discuss Berkeley's
unwavering commitment to cultural, artistic, and educational development to leverage
(00:50):
the power of contemporary music and enable youth from underserved
communities to develop musically, academically, socially.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
And a.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
And now this from ABC News have a panic attack.
The affirmation reads You've earned it. When Dave Tarnowski, an
introverted forty six year old author from Queens, New York,
posted these words on Instagram over a picture of a
pink cloud strewn sky, he had no idea they would
(01:21):
catapult him to online fame. He had spent years posting
memes online in various guises and writing unfinished novels. But
it was these eight words that exploded in August twenty
twenty two, going viral. Three months later, to his astonishment,
he had an agent and a book deal. It's okay
(01:43):
to not be okay is the message of the Disappointing
Affirmation's book, based on Dave Tarnowski's wildly popular Instagram account
with almost two and a half million followers, known for
pairing peaceful nature photos with sayings that are amusingly so, critical, encouraging,
disillusioned are all three at once. Tarnowski points to feelings
(02:06):
often unacknowledged or hidden, and spotlights them with humor, wit,
and empathy. Tarnowski's willingness to approach depression and failure with
humor and pragmatism has won millions of enthusiastic fans who
bristle at the culture of relentless toxic positivity. Failure may
(02:27):
be an option, but that's okay. Our guest is Dave Tarnowski,
author of The Disappointing Affirmations book that's based on his
(02:50):
wildly popular Instagram account.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Dave, how you doing, I'm doing well, Mike how you
doing great?
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Great, Nice to have you. Maybe a good place to
start to tell our listeners a little bit about your background.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
I used to work in banking, and I think that
it informs a lot of the pain that is inside
this book, including I was I was a collector for
the bank for some time, and doing collections is it's
not fun, not fun. It's like I understand people on
(03:26):
both ends, you know, having been on both sides of that.
But before that, for many, many many years, I've been
a I guess I could still say aspiring fiction writer.
I've written a ton of unfinished novels and eventually ended
up going to memes, which are not easy to finish
all the time, but a lot easier to finish than
(03:49):
a novel. One page. That's it.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
So you have a wildly popular Instagram account. It's also
called disappointing affirmations. And just for our listteners who are
not might not be familiar, I'll just give a couple
of them. No one is coming to save you. You
are the adult. I'm so sorry. You're doing the best
you can, which is pretty sad. I love these things.
(04:13):
Just in preparing for this, I went through and looked
at some of your quotes, they're spectacular. What prompted you
to start writing and posting these affirmations.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
You know, it was serendipity. And that's one of the
things that I love in life is you really need
to pay attention to those serendipitous moments because when they
come around, and they don't come around often, it's just
such a beautiful feeling. And so I had been making
memes on other pages, and i'd come up with I
(04:45):
started being a lot more introspective, and I came up
with the very first disappointing affirmation, which was I might
not get it right, but if I can go back
and do it all again, I would have just my
life a different way. But I posted that on a
page I was running at the time, and a lot
of people seem to like it, and so I thought,
(05:06):
you know, let me just start another page, and it
took off almost immediately. It was just incredible. And what
I loved about it was all of the other pages
that I had run, they were what's known as niche memes,
you know, they used photos that weren't my own, and
I wanted to do something that was purely my own.
(05:29):
And I was sitting on years of vacation photos. You
remember old photos, right, You had to get him out
and you put them in a nice little binder and
you can pull that out, you know. Now we just
have tens hundreds of thousands of photos on our phone.
They were like, oh my god, let me go back
and see where I could find that. So having these
(05:51):
idyllic scenes was just perfect. And so I just started
coming out with the you know, whatever was coming to
my mind, and then I got to have a panic attack.
You've earned it, and that completely blew the page up,
you know, I would say overnight. And it was a
(06:13):
crazy experience ever since then.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
And you have over two million followers now, right, isn't that.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Yeah, it's almost almost two and a half.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Yeah, that's spectacular. And so you just said it was amazing,
so that that had to be completely unexpected. How's it
changed your life?
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Well, several different ways. I was able to leave my
day job and focusing on licensing deals for different products
because these can be on so many different things, on
so many different shelves. And I just love the idea
of it being not just a book, or not just
(06:51):
a series of books, but things that people can share
with each other chronicle books. My publisher. It's that's what
they do. I mean, it's gift books, and you know,
I've got a postcard set and pencils that go along
with us, and a few things coming out over the
following year. And they just do such a great job
(07:13):
at tangible objects, you know, things that people you know
want to have on their desk, around their wall or whatever.
So it's it's been a great partnership in getting out
these very relatable affirmations.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
So these are like the opposite of a beautiful suns
that make it a great day. You're the you know,
you've got your inner strength and all those types of things.
And so I think you've termed it. The society has
a pension to push what you call toxic positivity, and
it feels like brainwashing. Tell us about toxic positivity.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
It's just you know, the people who just like it's this.
They call it positive mental attitude, where you know, you're
just like no negative thoughts, no negative thoughts. And one
thing that I've learned, and I think I owe a
lot of it to meditation is particularly I practice transcendental meditation,
(08:09):
and that form allows for negative thoughts to come in
because you just allow them to flow. And after doing
that for years, I kind of came to understand that
it's like, look at these things that you fear, kind
of stop them, and you do hold on to that thought,
don't push it away. And so that's a lot of
(08:29):
what I focus on in here is things that you
fear about yourself and things that you know you could
do better at. You know, it's like when I say
something like you are enough, we don't need more of you.
You know that is you know, it's sort of taking
the positive affirmation and turning it on its head.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
But in a humorous way, which, of course, which is
always which is what makes it so compelling, and I'm
sure attractive to millions of people.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
So it's a delicate dance too, because they could come
off as quite nasty if I don't do them the
right way. And by this point I've gotten the sense
of what's too.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Far that little bit about the stats for mental illness,
because I know you're totally cognizant of that, and you're
trying to weave into some of that consciousness into the
things that you're doing. So over twenty percent of American adults,
that's more than fifty million people experienced some sort of
mental illness every year, according to the National Alliance on
Mental Illness, and twenty to thirty percent of young people
(09:35):
ages six to seventeen in the United States experience of
mental health disorder and suicide. This is the craziest one.
Suicide remains a second leading cause of death among all
US children ages ten to fourteen. A lot of this
has been exacerbated since COVID. For sure, that isolation became,
that isolation that came from COVID, and we haven't seen
(09:56):
to come out of that from a mental illness perspective.
Can you, besides COVID and just that reality of what happened,
can you venture some other guesses or ideas or thoughts
about why we're experiencing such a deep mental illness now
in our society.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
I think the thread goes through everything that is happening
in the world right now. You know, you've got this
very divided presidential election in the United States. We've been divided,
you know, and just getting worse and worse. And we
as adults, oh, you know, this is just more of
(10:32):
the same. It's just getting worse or whatever. But you
have a child, you have a child who is growing
up in schools that are having to have safety measures
for guns and go through things like that that we
never had to do, you know, to think, you know,
the only kind of equivalence I could have is the
(10:54):
Cold War and the getting under your desk and waiting
for that test to pass, which I was at the
very end of you as born in seventy seven, so
I was doing that and having to deal with some
very very scary things on a daily basis. It's definitely damaging.
And so you could look at the different generations and
(11:17):
see how that COVID period hurt them. And I'm not
surprised about that number for suicide because one thing that
a lot of the feedback that I get and have
gotten since I've had since I've started an open dialogue
with people online social media is a lot of people
(11:39):
have suicidal ideation. And one of the things that I
am glad is happening now is it's starting to be
spoken about in a freer way. It's like the training
wheels of speaking about suicide are starting to come off
(12:00):
because a lot of places, especially social media, it's a taboo.
I mean, you can't you can't really talk about it.
It's a hard thing because I've dealt with it in
my life many times. I struggle with bipolar disorder and ADHD,
and so having mood swings like that. It's not an
(12:23):
easy way to live. And I hate thinking that kids
are going through it, but kids were going through it
when I was a kid, and so at least now
it's being seen, it's being talked about, and hopefully they
can be addressed in a way that actually affects change.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
And I think by using humor, gallows humor, as you say,
you're able to maybe strike a balance there that allows
people to not laugh about being so depressed that they're
thinking about suicide, but to strike a balance so that
maybe they can talk about it with different language and
in a different way than just being completely depressed all
(13:09):
the time. That's where I see your affirmations. It's being
so helpful.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
No, thank you, I appreciate that. I mean, the biggest
honor for me is any time I read someone and
write something like I feel seen, you know, because those
are the people that I am doing this for. You know,
It's sure, you know there are a couple of million followers,
(13:34):
but I want the ones that need me the most
to be there, you know, and to have access to
this and to find this, you know, because I've had
people comment, oh my god, I didn't realize the book
had a page, So people are finding it in different ways.
And I just love seeing how I can look at
(13:57):
the stats and see how many people shared it, and
the shares are way more important than any likes, because
shares they're getting to other people who wouldn't have seen
it before, you know, and it's providing them with a laugh,
it's providing them with oh my god, I don't feel alone.
(14:18):
This just made me feel so much better. I was
just going through something.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
The list goes on and on, and I think your
books you just brought up called disappointing affirmations unfollow your Dreams,
which I love that tagline. You know. The essence is
it's okay to not be okay, right, And I think
that opens the door to for people to just say, well,
I'm not alone here. I think that's maybe the thing
(14:43):
that most people feel when they're that depresses it that
it's just them. But it's not just them, not with
the feat of sixty million Americans suffering from mental illness
at any given time.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
And I mean, if you think about the number of
actual Americans we have, hear that is that's what a
sixth That's yeah, that's that's pretty bad to be a
voice out there, to just be there, you know, even
if I'm not, you know, talking directly to people, because
once you get through a certain number, it's like it's
(15:18):
almost impossible to speak with everybody and reply to every comment.
I mean, I have I need to do other things
in my life or else I could go down that
rabbit hole of talking to every single person, which you
know is a beautiful thing. And I do enjoy it
when I can have these one on ones because the
whole thing is it's not about. One of the things
(15:41):
that I like about it is it's not about changing
somebody's mind. It's either you feel that way or you don't,
and you move on.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Now. I read where you cite Frederick Nietzsche, who's the
philosopher one hundred years ago, and the quote is, if
you know the why you live anyhow, what does that mean?
I love Nietzsche. He's the guy that said sometimes when
you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back. And
I've always loved that.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Exactly exactly you know, so the how in finding your
why is getting through life if you could find your
reason for being here, your purpose, find your purpose or whatever.
But sometimes it finds you, right. I do think what
happened with me with disappointing affirmations and how it's taken
(16:31):
off has been serendipitous. It's it's been a product of
its time. You know, as we've been talking about, you know,
a lot of people are feeling this way and they're
finding something that is going, Oh, it's okay to talk
about this. It's okay to laugh at my mistakes, but
to understand that your mistakes are not I don't want
(16:54):
to put them down and say they're not unique. They're
unique to you, but the feelings behind them are so universal.
And it's just like AA support groups. You know, you
get together and you're there and you're talking. You're talking
all different experiences, but it's all revolving around the same thing.
(17:15):
You know, it's all revolving around that alcohol. This is
revolving around mental health. I mean, I'm so thankful for
how much wider, broader the conversation on mental health has
become as you've gone It's you know, it's it's almost like.
That's why I love the fact that the page and
(17:39):
the book and everything it transcends politics, it transcends any
of that stuff, because whoever you're voting for, whatever rights
you feel, you still have feelings inside. I want this
to be a safe space for all stripes.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Yeah, more universal sort of messages that are appealing on
a better basis. Yeah, because part of the stress, I'm
sure is just that divisiveness that we have here. Oh yeah,
staggering at times. I'll give you another one of your quotes.
Don't you hate when people give you your own quotes back
and then you have to explain what you said yourself.
(18:19):
But I think it's vulnerability. You used to feel like
a weakness to me, but I know it's a huge strength.
Maybe talk a little bit about that. I think that's
a great quote.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Yeah, it's thank you. It's I grew up in an
all male household, I mean, aside from my mother, and
I don't know how she made it through live, but
you know, and I have two older brothers, and so
I was born into this sort of machismo sort of thing.
(18:53):
And I was not that person, you know, I was
what I would get it. They would call the black
sheep of the family or whatever. And growing up I
would always be put down for being too sensitive, you know,
or being depressed or being whatever. I wasn't allowed to
(19:15):
feel what I was feeling. And so maybe it was
just discovering the truth behind that years and years later,
that it's like, no, what everybody was telling you was
a weakness was a strength. You know. It's just a
matter of taking you know. It's like they say, write
(19:40):
what you know. Well, I started writing what I knew,
and what I knew was being depressed, being sad, being this,
being that, and I just kept doing it, you know.
It was just this thing. It was a constant thing
in my fiction. And one day one of the best
(20:01):
things was I discovered the the beauty of the personal essay,
even if nobody's going to read it, even if it's
just something that you tear up or you delete or whatever.
And it's in those things that I first found, you know,
(20:22):
getting away from fiction and getting into being introspective, which
is really fiction is just you know, stuff that you
want to say anyway, but you put behind characters. You know,
at least that's that's how I have experienced it. So
(20:46):
stripping that all away. Like you know, in one of
the sections in the book, I talked about how I
gave up on the idea of, you know, writing novels
and went to writing, you know, the smallest things possible.
And you know that's that's tongue in cheek because I
didn't really give up on it. But that's also where
(21:07):
Unfollow Your Dreams comes from, because had I not decided
sort of consciously but to give up the ghost on
writing fiction. I found my why in the affirmations, and
you know, putting things out there. I think I just
(21:31):
did a trump weave.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
All the time. We're probably all subconsciously. I wonder it's
all such an unsettling time. The name of the book
is Disappointing Affirmations Unfollow Your Dreams by Dave Tarnowski. Dave,
thanks a lot. Speaking of disappointing affirmations, got a couple
of new ones you want to share with the listeners?
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Oh no, I'm sharing them all for the all for
the book. But you know what, I'll share one because
I think it might actually be the title for the
next book. I came, I saw, I felt awkward and left.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
Take on Julia Caesar.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
Yeah, actually I think I did post that, but it's
still so it still counts.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
There we go listen Dave, I really enjoyed the conversation.
Thanks so much as well, Mike, thank you. We'll be
right back after the news at the bottom of the
hour a
This is What's at Risk with Mike Christian on WBZ
Boston's news radio. Hi, Mike Christian, here of What's at Risk.
First up on tonight's show, we have Dave Tarnowski, author
of the Disappointing Affirmations book based on his wildly popular
Instagram account of the same name. Dave counters the culture
(00:25):
of relentless toxic positivity with a realistic take on a
disappointing world where failure is always an option, but that's okay.
And in our second segment, we welcome Crystal Banfield and
Missel Martinez of Berkeley College of Music. They discuss Berkeley's
unwavering commitment to cultural, artistic, and educational development to leverage
(00:50):
the power of contemporary music and enable youth from underserved
communities to develop musically, academically, socially.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
And a.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
And now this from ABC News have a panic attack.
The affirmation reads You've earned it. When Dave Tarnowski, an
introverted forty six year old author from Queens, New York,
posted these words on Instagram over a picture of a
pink cloud strewn sky, he had no idea they would
(01:21):
catapult him to online fame. He had spent years posting
memes online in various guises and writing unfinished novels. But
it was these eight words that exploded in August twenty
twenty two, going viral. Three months later, to his astonishment,
he had an agent and a book deal. It's okay
(01:43):
to not be okay is the message of the Disappointing
Affirmation's book, based on Dave Tarnowski's wildly popular Instagram account
with almost two and a half million followers, known for
pairing peaceful nature photos with sayings that are amusingly so, critical, encouraging,
disillusioned are all three at once. Tarnowski points to feelings
(02:06):
often unacknowledged or hidden, and spotlights them with humor, wit,
and empathy. Tarnowski's willingness to approach depression and failure with
humor and pragmatism has won millions of enthusiastic fans who
bristle at the culture of relentless toxic positivity. Failure may
(02:27):
be an option, but that's okay. Our guest is Dave Tarnowski,
author of The Disappointing Affirmations book that's based on his
(02:50):
wildly popular Instagram account.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Dave, how you doing, I'm doing well, Mike how you
doing great?
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Great, Nice to have you. Maybe a good place to
start to tell our listeners a little bit about your background.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
I used to work in banking, and I think that
it informs a lot of the pain that is inside
this book, including I was I was a collector for
the bank for some time, and doing collections is it's
not fun, not fun. It's like I understand people on
(03:26):
both ends, you know, having been on both sides of that.
But before that, for many, many many years, I've been
a I guess I could still say aspiring fiction writer.
I've written a ton of unfinished novels and eventually ended
up going to memes, which are not easy to finish
all the time, but a lot easier to finish than
(03:49):
a novel. One page. That's it.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
So you have a wildly popular Instagram account. It's also
called disappointing affirmations. And just for our listteners who are
not might not be familiar, I'll just give a couple
of them. No one is coming to save you. You
are the adult. I'm so sorry. You're doing the best
you can, which is pretty sad. I love these things.
(04:13):
Just in preparing for this, I went through and looked
at some of your quotes, they're spectacular. What prompted you
to start writing and posting these affirmations.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
You know, it was serendipity. And that's one of the
things that I love in life is you really need
to pay attention to those serendipitous moments because when they
come around, and they don't come around often, it's just
such a beautiful feeling. And so I had been making
memes on other pages, and i'd come up with I
(04:45):
started being a lot more introspective, and I came up
with the very first disappointing affirmation, which was I might
not get it right, but if I can go back
and do it all again, I would have just my
life a different way. But I posted that on a
page I was running at the time, and a lot
of people seem to like it, and so I thought,
(05:06):
you know, let me just start another page, and it
took off almost immediately. It was just incredible. And what
I loved about it was all of the other pages
that I had run, they were what's known as niche memes,
you know, they used photos that weren't my own, and
I wanted to do something that was purely my own.
(05:29):
And I was sitting on years of vacation photos. You
remember old photos, right, You had to get him out
and you put them in a nice little binder and
you can pull that out, you know. Now we just
have tens hundreds of thousands of photos on our phone.
They were like, oh my god, let me go back
and see where I could find that. So having these
(05:51):
idyllic scenes was just perfect. And so I just started
coming out with the you know, whatever was coming to
my mind, and then I got to have a panic attack.
You've earned it, and that completely blew the page up,
you know, I would say overnight. And it was a
(06:13):
crazy experience ever since then.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
And you have over two million followers now, right, isn't that.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Yeah, it's almost almost two and a half.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Yeah, that's spectacular. And so you just said it was amazing,
so that that had to be completely unexpected. How's it
changed your life?
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Well, several different ways. I was able to leave my
day job and focusing on licensing deals for different products
because these can be on so many different things, on
so many different shelves. And I just love the idea
of it being not just a book, or not just
(06:51):
a series of books, but things that people can share
with each other chronicle books. My publisher. It's that's what
they do. I mean, it's gift books, and you know,
I've got a postcard set and pencils that go along
with us, and a few things coming out over the
following year. And they just do such a great job
(07:13):
at tangible objects, you know, things that people you know
want to have on their desk, around their wall or whatever.
So it's it's been a great partnership in getting out
these very relatable affirmations.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
So these are like the opposite of a beautiful suns
that make it a great day. You're the you know,
you've got your inner strength and all those types of things.
And so I think you've termed it. The society has
a pension to push what you call toxic positivity, and
it feels like brainwashing. Tell us about toxic positivity.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
It's just you know, the people who just like it's this.
They call it positive mental attitude, where you know, you're
just like no negative thoughts, no negative thoughts. And one
thing that I've learned, and I think I owe a
lot of it to meditation is particularly I practice transcendental meditation,
(08:09):
and that form allows for negative thoughts to come in
because you just allow them to flow. And after doing
that for years, I kind of came to understand that
it's like, look at these things that you fear, kind
of stop them, and you do hold on to that thought,
don't push it away. And so that's a lot of
(08:29):
what I focus on in here is things that you
fear about yourself and things that you know you could
do better at. You know, it's like when I say
something like you are enough, we don't need more of you.
You know that is you know, it's sort of taking
the positive affirmation and turning it on its head.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
But in a humorous way, which, of course, which is
always which is what makes it so compelling, and I'm
sure attractive to millions of people.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
So it's a delicate dance too, because they could come
off as quite nasty if I don't do them the
right way. And by this point I've gotten the sense
of what's too.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Far that little bit about the stats for mental illness,
because I know you're totally cognizant of that, and you're
trying to weave into some of that consciousness into the
things that you're doing. So over twenty percent of American adults,
that's more than fifty million people experienced some sort of
mental illness every year, according to the National Alliance on
Mental Illness, and twenty to thirty percent of young people
(09:35):
ages six to seventeen in the United States experience of
mental health disorder and suicide. This is the craziest one.
Suicide remains a second leading cause of death among all
US children ages ten to fourteen. A lot of this
has been exacerbated since COVID. For sure, that isolation became,
that isolation that came from COVID, and we haven't seen
(09:56):
to come out of that from a mental illness perspective.
Can you, besides COVID and just that reality of what happened,
can you venture some other guesses or ideas or thoughts
about why we're experiencing such a deep mental illness now
in our society.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
I think the thread goes through everything that is happening
in the world right now. You know, you've got this
very divided presidential election in the United States. We've been divided,
you know, and just getting worse and worse. And we
as adults, oh, you know, this is just more of
(10:32):
the same. It's just getting worse or whatever. But you
have a child, you have a child who is growing
up in schools that are having to have safety measures
for guns and go through things like that that we
never had to do, you know, to think, you know,
the only kind of equivalence I could have is the
(10:54):
Cold War and the getting under your desk and waiting
for that test to pass, which I was at the
very end of you as born in seventy seven, so
I was doing that and having to deal with some
very very scary things on a daily basis. It's definitely damaging.
And so you could look at the different generations and
(11:17):
see how that COVID period hurt them. And I'm not
surprised about that number for suicide because one thing that
a lot of the feedback that I get and have
gotten since I've had since I've started an open dialogue
with people online social media is a lot of people
(11:39):
have suicidal ideation. And one of the things that I
am glad is happening now is it's starting to be
spoken about in a freer way. It's like the training
wheels of speaking about suicide are starting to come off
(12:00):
because a lot of places, especially social media, it's a taboo.
I mean, you can't you can't really talk about it.
It's a hard thing because I've dealt with it in
my life many times. I struggle with bipolar disorder and ADHD,
and so having mood swings like that. It's not an
(12:23):
easy way to live. And I hate thinking that kids
are going through it, but kids were going through it
when I was a kid, and so at least now
it's being seen, it's being talked about, and hopefully they
can be addressed in a way that actually affects change.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
And I think by using humor, gallows humor, as you say,
you're able to maybe strike a balance there that allows
people to not laugh about being so depressed that they're
thinking about suicide, but to strike a balance so that
maybe they can talk about it with different language and
in a different way than just being completely depressed all
(13:09):
the time. That's where I see your affirmations. It's being
so helpful.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
No, thank you, I appreciate that. I mean, the biggest
honor for me is any time I read someone and
write something like I feel seen, you know, because those
are the people that I am doing this for. You know,
It's sure, you know there are a couple of million followers,
(13:34):
but I want the ones that need me the most
to be there, you know, and to have access to
this and to find this, you know, because I've had
people comment, oh my god, I didn't realize the book
had a page, So people are finding it in different ways.
And I just love seeing how I can look at
(13:57):
the stats and see how many people shared it, and
the shares are way more important than any likes, because
shares they're getting to other people who wouldn't have seen
it before, you know, and it's providing them with a laugh,
it's providing them with oh my god, I don't feel alone.
(14:18):
This just made me feel so much better. I was
just going through something.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
The list goes on and on, and I think your
books you just brought up called disappointing affirmations unfollow your Dreams,
which I love that tagline. You know. The essence is
it's okay to not be okay, right, And I think
that opens the door to for people to just say, well,
I'm not alone here. I think that's maybe the thing
(14:43):
that most people feel when they're that depresses it that
it's just them. But it's not just them, not with
the feat of sixty million Americans suffering from mental illness
at any given time.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
And I mean, if you think about the number of
actual Americans we have, hear that is that's what a
sixth That's yeah, that's that's pretty bad to be a
voice out there, to just be there, you know, even
if I'm not, you know, talking directly to people, because
once you get through a certain number, it's like it's
(15:18):
almost impossible to speak with everybody and reply to every comment.
I mean, I have I need to do other things
in my life or else I could go down that
rabbit hole of talking to every single person, which you
know is a beautiful thing. And I do enjoy it
when I can have these one on ones because the
whole thing is it's not about. One of the things
(15:41):
that I like about it is it's not about changing
somebody's mind. It's either you feel that way or you don't,
and you move on.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Now. I read where you cite Frederick Nietzsche, who's the
philosopher one hundred years ago, and the quote is, if
you know the why you live anyhow, what does that mean?
I love Nietzsche. He's the guy that said sometimes when
you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back. And
I've always loved that.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Exactly exactly you know, so the how in finding your
why is getting through life if you could find your
reason for being here, your purpose, find your purpose or whatever.
But sometimes it finds you, right. I do think what
happened with me with disappointing affirmations and how it's taken
(16:31):
off has been serendipitous. It's it's been a product of
its time. You know, as we've been talking about, you know,
a lot of people are feeling this way and they're
finding something that is going, Oh, it's okay to talk
about this. It's okay to laugh at my mistakes, but
to understand that your mistakes are not I don't want
(16:54):
to put them down and say they're not unique. They're
unique to you, but the feelings behind them are so universal.
And it's just like AA support groups. You know, you
get together and you're there and you're talking. You're talking
all different experiences, but it's all revolving around the same thing.
(17:15):
You know, it's all revolving around that alcohol. This is
revolving around mental health. I mean, I'm so thankful for
how much wider, broader the conversation on mental health has
become as you've gone It's you know, it's it's almost like.
That's why I love the fact that the page and
(17:39):
the book and everything it transcends politics, it transcends any
of that stuff, because whoever you're voting for, whatever rights
you feel, you still have feelings inside. I want this
to be a safe space for all stripes.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Yeah, more universal sort of messages that are appealing on
a better basis. Yeah, because part of the stress, I'm
sure is just that divisiveness that we have here. Oh yeah,
staggering at times. I'll give you another one of your quotes.
Don't you hate when people give you your own quotes back
and then you have to explain what you said yourself.
(18:19):
But I think it's vulnerability. You used to feel like
a weakness to me, but I know it's a huge strength.
Maybe talk a little bit about that. I think that's
a great quote.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Yeah, it's thank you. It's I grew up in an
all male household, I mean, aside from my mother, and
I don't know how she made it through live, but
you know, and I have two older brothers, and so
I was born into this sort of machismo sort of thing.
(18:53):
And I was not that person, you know, I was
what I would get it. They would call the black
sheep of the family or whatever. And growing up I
would always be put down for being too sensitive, you know,
or being depressed or being whatever. I wasn't allowed to
(19:15):
feel what I was feeling. And so maybe it was
just discovering the truth behind that years and years later,
that it's like, no, what everybody was telling you was
a weakness was a strength. You know. It's just a
matter of taking you know. It's like they say, write
(19:40):
what you know. Well, I started writing what I knew,
and what I knew was being depressed, being sad, being this,
being that, and I just kept doing it, you know.
It was just this thing. It was a constant thing
in my fiction. And one day one of the best
(20:01):
things was I discovered the the beauty of the personal essay,
even if nobody's going to read it, even if it's
just something that you tear up or you delete or whatever.
And it's in those things that I first found, you know,
(20:22):
getting away from fiction and getting into being introspective, which
is really fiction is just you know, stuff that you
want to say anyway, but you put behind characters. You know,
at least that's that's how I have experienced it. So
(20:46):
stripping that all away. Like you know, in one of
the sections in the book, I talked about how I
gave up on the idea of, you know, writing novels
and went to writing, you know, the smallest things possible.
And you know that's that's tongue in cheek because I
didn't really give up on it. But that's also where
(21:07):
Unfollow Your Dreams comes from, because had I not decided
sort of consciously but to give up the ghost on
writing fiction. I found my why in the affirmations, and
you know, putting things out there. I think I just
(21:31):
did a trump weave.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
All the time. We're probably all subconsciously. I wonder it's
all such an unsettling time. The name of the book
is Disappointing Affirmations Unfollow Your Dreams by Dave Tarnowski. Dave,
thanks a lot. Speaking of disappointing affirmations, got a couple
of new ones you want to share with the listeners?
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Oh no, I'm sharing them all for the all for
the book. But you know what, I'll share one because
I think it might actually be the title for the
next book. I came, I saw, I felt awkward and left.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
Take on Julia Caesar.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
Yeah, actually I think I did post that, but it's
still so it still counts.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
There we go listen Dave, I really enjoyed the conversation.
Thanks so much as well, Mike, thank you. We'll be
right back after the news at the bottom of the
hour a
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