Lesson 5. Release

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What do you do with the pain you can’t talk about?

In this episode of The Time Smith, we go deeper into the lesson of coping—not through venting to others, but by exercising something more sacred: writing. Through powerful personal memories, Joseph revisits two defining moments in his life that taught him how to release pain onto the page when words failed him in real life.

From a fifth-grade journal entry to a 16-year-old’s midnight letter to the desert sky, this isn’t just about processing trauma—it’s about reclaiming your inner voice when no one else is listening.

🛠️ You'll hear:

• The difference between venting and healing
• Why journaling can become your most private form of freedom
• How silence, isolation, and unspoken thoughts can be transformed
• Why writing isn’t just release—it’s resurrection

If you’ve ever been stuck in your own head, this episode invites you to step down into your memory, pick up the pen, and let it out in a way that changes you.

Because sometimes, the real breakthrough comes when no one else is watching.

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Forged in thought. Built in Truth. Spoken from experience.

Episode Transcript

SPEAKER_00 (00:10):
ever been lost in your thoughts?
Randomness?
A thought pops into your headand you don't know where it came
from.
Many times it's your past.
Things that have happened thathave not let you go.

(00:32):
Why have they hung on?
Let's talk about that.
Hi, I'm the Timesmith, andwelcome back.
I hope you had time to check thelast lesson.

(00:54):
Coping.
Something stayed with me aboutthat.
Maybe the conversation needed tocontinue a little bit more.
But I wanted to go down intomemories again, as there was
something I was taught when Iwas young.
Recently, I was able to find ajournal, but I wanted to talk

(01:19):
about that journal.
So, as usual, here we are in theforge.
And remember, there's a counterin front of me.
There's an elevator to the leftand stairs to the right, and
there's a couch in here.
I usually use that for thinking.

(01:39):
And yes, even though I say weshould leave the forge at times,
I do come back in here just tomake sure that everything's
right before I lock it up andface reality.
But I want to go down in thememories.
That's on the first floor, ifyou remember.
So again, let's take the stairs.

(02:01):
As we go down the stairs, youmight hang on to the handrail.
At times, I've ran my fingersthrough the walls as the walls
have the texture of stones, coldstones.
But here we are, the firstsubfloor.
Memories.
Let's walk down a few doors.

(02:23):
And in this door, I was taughtsomething about exercising.
Exercising what exactly?
Exercising the ability to voicewhat's inside of me.
Whether by writing or talking tosomebody that I trusted.
In this case, it was justwriting.

(02:43):
So if you care to step in, Inthis memory, I was in fifth
grade.
My teacher had a habit ofwriting down on the chalkboard,
what did you do this weekend?
What did you eat this weekend?
Did you do something fun?
It was her way of engaging us,and we were able to pull out our
journals and jot down ourthoughts, turn them in, and she

(03:08):
would reciprocate an answer.
Well, I didn't entirely remembereverything she asked, But the
way I found this memory wasactually when I was older.
I was doing some cleaning in mygarage and I had this box, a
clear box, a storage container.
And in that storage containerwere old journals from when I

(03:31):
was a kid, report cards that Ikept of my elementary years.
And I decided to go through themto kind of remind myself where I
had been and how well did I do.
I did find that I talked a lotin elementary.
There was a lot of needsimprovement on sitting down and
talking at a turn.

(03:52):
But a pleasure to have in class.
But in that search, I found ajournal.
And sadly, it had beenwaterlogged.
And I separated the pages.
But on one of the pages, it wasclearly preserved.
And the question was this.
And here's the memory.

(04:13):
What are your thoughts on abuse?
That was the question my fifthgrade teacher decided to ask us.
Well, my answer was this.
I think that those who have beenabused hide it.
They might want to try to live anormal life because it's

(04:35):
painful.
I said some more, and it's notentirely verbatim, but I'm
paraphrasing.
When my teacher would askquestions like, what did you
eat?
This weekend, I would say macand cheese with chicken.
I drank a root beer.
Or she would ask, what's yourfavorite TV show and why?
At that time, it was KnightRider.

(04:57):
I loved how Kit would just talkand take over.
Before I was a car guy, I was acar kid.
But on this question, I couldn'thide what was inside of me.
Most journal entries werereceived with a smiley face,
with a good answer.
But on this one, She respondedwith, You're really

(05:18):
knowledgeable about abuse.
Hmm, I don't ever remember herasking me anything other than
the question on the chalkboard.
I don't remember her evertreating me special or separate
from others.
But I enjoyed being in herclass.
Let's step out for a second.
When we talk about the traumathat's happened to us, and you

(05:40):
find a friend who wants to hearabout your problems, and you
tell them that problem, Atfirst, you tend to feel okay,
being set free that you canfinally tell somebody about what
has happened.
But then you might want to tellsomeone else, and that freeing
feeling isn't the same.
Well, you might go on to tell athird person, and a fourth

(06:04):
person, and a fifth person.
And I'll say this clearly, thatright there is just venting.
It's another form of coping.
nothing really is happening inthe sense that you are improving
your quality of life temporarilymaybe but not permanently it's

(06:24):
not a very good route for thelong-term healing writing is
something a little more sacredthan just telling somebody who
wants to hear understandablythere are people who listen and
can help and i don't want tominimize that but what i am
saying is The constantrepetition of repeating the

(06:44):
trauma in a form of ventingdoesn't do much.
It actually causes you to latchon to people.
It's a coping mechanism.
When I look in this room and Isee a young version of me in
fifth grade grabbing thatpencil, being able to share
something, write it down andclose that journal and put my

(07:06):
pencil down.
It's something that I stillpractice.
At times there's things I wantto say that I cannot even get
out of my mouth.
But I write them down.
Writing things down.
How does that help?
Why don't we visit another room?
In this memory, I'm 16 yearsold.

(07:26):
And I had just gotten home froma youth group.
And something happened therethat really spurred me on that I
wanted to write.
And when I got home, I kind ofjust walked past my mom.
She said, is everything okay?
I said, yes, I just need to gowrite something.
So let's walk in that room.
I was in my bedroom.

(07:47):
I had bunk beds.
My older brother slept on thebottom.
He wasn't always there.
So sometimes I would sleep ontop and other times I would
sleep on the bottom.
But I sat on the bottom bunk asI reached for a piece of paper
on a desk that sat next to thebed.

(08:08):
And on that desk was a radiocassette player, the type that
has two cassette players onthem.
And I grabbed a piece of paperwith the folder and put it on my
lap and I began to write.
I began to write how I felt, howbroken I felt.
There was times that I wouldlook at teenagers and I would
see them happy, well puttogether.

(08:29):
I really couldn't see outside ofmy problem.
Well, the content of that letterwas something that I hid from
everyone.
Still, I wrote it down.
Consisting of pain andsuffering.
How at times I want to cry andhow at times I want to hurt
myself.

(08:50):
I want to hurt others.
As they say, hurt people.
Hurt people.
The pattern continues.
And I didn't want to do that.
In fact, I didn't want to dothat any longer.
So I wrote the letter down Allthose thoughts in that letter.
And I held it in my hand.

(09:11):
And I didn't know what to dowith it.
I didn't know who to send it to.
I didn't know where to mail itto.
But I proceeded to walk outsideand it was already kind of late.
It was dark outside.
And behind our house, there wasa desert.
A large field.
So as I walked down the streetand around the block to reach

(09:34):
the desert...
I walked up to a dirt jump and Isat on the top of it.
The sky was clear and I justlooked up and said, I'm not sure
if you're listening and ifanyone's listening, but I wrote
something for you.
And I left it on that jump.
And I walked back home.
I didn't put my name on it.
Didn't address it to anybody.

(09:56):
I just wrote words.
And I went back home.
Let's walk out of that memory.
Here we have two memories.
almost five years apart.
And it consisted of an exercise.
An exercise that allowed me todo something more than just
cope.
It allowed me to put it down andsay the things that I couldn't

(10:19):
speak to anybody.
It allowed me to open myself upin thought, in prayer, in
thinking.
I didn't entirely know howbeneficial this would be to my
life to just begin to write.
In fact, it's because I writethat it allows me to speak the
way I do.

(10:39):
At times I would becometongue-tied and not be able to
format a sentence.
Again, going back to feelingstupid and dumb.
But I kept writing over andover.
I don't want to feel like thisanymore.
I want to be healed.
Can I please be normal?
Can you take away this pain?
And can you take away thissuffering?
My response when I was 16 was awhole lot different when I was

(11:02):
in 5th grade.
In fifth grade, I would writethings like that and just go on
about my business as thesuffering wasn't always ailing
me.
It would rear its ugly head, butas I got older, it wasn't just
rearing its head, it was comingalive in me.
The anger was solidifying itselfin my life.

(11:22):
The emptiness was filling mylife.
The rejection and theabandonment, it was consuming
me.
And I wanted it to end.
So, If it is just venting,nothing's happening.
But if you're exercising, youcan create the change.
Why don't we start walking awayfrom these rooms because what

(11:45):
this was today was more justabout me sharing about the
exercises that we can do, theexercises that changed my life,
of when it had to come out.
I didn't always feel that Icould trust somebody enough to
tell them.
Even now, I don't always want totell everyone.
This podcast here isvulnerability for the sake of

(12:07):
growth, for the sake of sharingand the potential of your own
healing.
Please keep in mind that I'velived these steps and there were
many days of silence.
There was many days of isolationand not just loneliness, a
personal rejection of my ownself, not wanting to fit in, not

(12:29):
feeling special, but thrivingand wanting to be An outcast.
But I had to come back toreality.
And I had to see that there waspeople around me that wanted to
care about me.
That wanted to see me okay.
That it wasn't just thequestions of what's wrong with
you.
It wasn't just the questions ofwhat happened.

(12:49):
The identification of somethingthat happened in my life.
And those that saw something iswrong with you.
Well...
When I ended up alone, I wouldjust grab a piece of paper and I
would answer their questions tomyself.
Sometimes I would just tear thatpaper up that no one can see.

(13:12):
So I'm not sure exactly howyou're going to play this one
out, but I will admit to youthat that paper began to free
me.
The things I wrote, those wordsI jotted down were beginning to
bring me life and a life that Inever knew.
And at times it felt safer justto live in my anger and my

(13:36):
rejection and my isolation.
Because being accepted was newto me, including accepting my
own brokenness.
Let's walk up and out.
Can I ask you something?
How do you exit your own head?
Maybe you're not even in yourhead.
Maybe you just listen becauseit's interesting.

(13:56):
But for those who remain intheir head, What exactly do you
do?
Have you come out and accept thereality that your life can be
fractured and broken?
That there's situations andmatters that have happened that
you might be too embarrassed totalk about?
Ashamed?
It's humiliating?

(14:18):
I nod my head as I say the wordhumiliation.
That has overshadowed most of mylife.
But I've written that down.
And I can talk about it.
And yes, at times I look atmyself in reality and I just
tell myself, it's all right.
It's okay.
So if you haven't heard that ina while, let me remind you.

(14:43):
Write that down.
It's okay.
It's fine.
I'm not alone.
So it's not just coping.
It's doing things that actuallychange a life.
And this is just one of them.
So you might write a letter to aperson that hurt you and they

(15:04):
might not ever see that letter.
You might write it to God andthrow it into the wind.
You might throw it in the trash.
You might burn it up.
But don't just tell it tosomebody who's just wanting to
hear your business.
Write it down so that your lifecan change.
So remember, if you feel lost,you can be found.

(15:26):
If you feel unloved, You areloved.
Now is the time to change.
Have a great day.
I am the Timesmith.