A Birthday Wish From Your Favorite Life Shift Host (the only one) + Sneak Peek!

I'm Matt Gilhooley and this is the Life Shift.

Candid conversations about the pivotal moments that have changed lives forever.

Hello, my friends.

This is a special little bonus episode.

Today is February 17th, which is my birthday.

I'm just jumping on here because I have the day off, which is n.

I work tomorrow and then Wednesday I head to New York City for my annual birthday trip.

You probably heard me tell you about that if you listen to those 30 days in November where I did an episode every day which was super fun.

And at the end of those 30 days, just a little update here.

I put together a little clip on Riverside, which is the tool that I use to record these podcasts.

And now I edit within Riverside and they had a little contest of show us what you do or what you've edited in Riverside.

So I put together a short video of the opening segments of all of the episodes.

So it was like day one, day two, day three, all the way to day 30.

And it was a fun little edit.

It took, you know, I had to put 30 episodes together and just clip out the front.

And I did it all in their system and everything like that.

And I was like, here, this is what I did here.

And turns out I won the prize, which was super awesome.

I won a thousand dollar gift card to Amazon to update my studio.

So I think I'm gonna get a new mic and a new boom arm, which is super cool.

I don't necess really needed, but I like it.

So maybe I'll sell the old ones and we'll see what we do from there.

But I'm excited about that.

So thank you to Riverside.

For one, everything that I've ever recorded for this podcast has been through Riverside.

Plus I won.

So that was like really cool.

And the application just keeps getting better and better.

And I actually edit the two work podcasts that I do through Riverside.

We record it remotely with people across the country and then I edit them right in Riverside.

So it's been super awesome.

So thank you to Riverside.

Anyway, so it's my birthday.

I came on here and I was thinking, you know what, if you don't ask for it, it's not going to happen.

So if you are listening to this, what I would love if you want to give me a birthday present that is not gifts or money or anything like that, I would love it if you would share your favorite episode of the Life Shift podcast with someone that has maybe never heard of the podcast.

I'm an indie podcaster.

I don't have the resources to really grow like maybe Dateline NBC or something, Crime junkies or something like that.

So any kind of word of mouth sharing would be fantastic.

So one, I would love it if you would share an episode with someone, encourage them to subscribe to the show.

Another thing that would be lovely is if you could post something on social media and share it.

I'm happy to send you some kind of resources like the COVID art or I don't know, some kind of story maybe I'll put that on there.

So social media, if you go to thelife shift podcast.com just kidding.

You go to the Life Shift podcast on Instagram and Facebook and I think on TikTok and then on Twitter it's or X it is the Life Shift pod.

So if you just share about the show there, you can share thelife shift podcast.com and that will take anyone to the show and be able to subscribe and everything like that.

And I think that is it.

If you want to support the show directly, you can go to patreon.com forward slash thelife shift podcast and you can join for $3 and that's supporting me every month.

Or $5.

And you get the episodes early.

I got rid of the higher tier episodes so that I could just focus on the show and having great conversations.

But you do get it early there and it's a special fee just for you.

So if you want to do that, there's paypal, there's all sorts of things.

So again, asking doesn't hurt.

Right?

And you don't have to do anything.

But I would love it if you would share the show with people, share it on social media, whatever works for you.

Continue listening.

That's so wonderful.

And so the way that I'll cap off this episode is I am to share the opening little segments of the next few episodes.

So I guess that's five episodes that I have planned out.

These are all.

These are the last five episodes of year three of the Life Shift podcast.

And then the one that comes after the last one you hear today will be the first episode of my fourth year of this journey.

And that will be episode 175 that will come out the end of March.

So March 25th will start year four, which is kind of crazy and kind of awesome.

Awesome.

So thank you for coming along this ride.

I am so very grateful for everyone that has shared their story for people that are listening, for people that are connected on social media.

Thank you for this wonderful birthday Monday.

And I am excited to share the openings of tomorrow's Episode with Lydia Knight, and then next week with Kathy, Kristen, then Martha S.

Jones, Audrey Faust, and Tristan Reese.

All of these are really inspiring stories, different stories, super important stories, and ones that I think everyone will find a little element that will resonate with them.

So thank you for being a part of this journey once again.

And I will see you tomorrow for the episode with Lydia Knight.

This hiding and this.

This double life that I was living just became unacceptable to me.

So what happened was there was this.

This national Habits of Health call.

It was at the end of the year.

People thought they were tuning in for, like, healthy tips during the holidays.

And I just decided I couldn't do it anymore.

Like, I had to be authentic.

And at this point, Matt, I had not found the solution I'd been searching for years.

And I was like, I just.

I've got to be real.

So on the call, I told thousands of people that you think I'm a healthy person, but here's the truth.

I told them I was out of control with food.

I told them how I felt, and it was terrifying.

And I cried myself to sleep.

But I knew I had to be real.

And what happened was, the next morning, I woke up to hundreds of messages.

And I thought at first, like, these are people that wanted to, like, yell at me because it's like, how dare you mislead me?

But the reality was, it was hundreds of messages of people saying, me too.

I thought I was the only one that was doing this.

And that was a big thing that happened at that point for me, was going, okay, like, let's stop.

Let's pause and think about if I'm blessed to be here in 10 years.

Like, what does that look like?

What excites me if I'm watching my life in a movie and I'm like, oh, wow, look what we're doing now, and look what's happening.

And look at how we're contributing.

And whatever it is.

And what is it that it actually excites?

Excites me, and then going, all right, cool.

What do we need to do now to make that a reality?

And let me start making choices in my life that are aligned with that, and let me put boundaries in place that actually give me the time and space for the things that are important.

Because, Matt, another thing for me, like, I had become a workaholic.

And about a year and a half after this point, I had a real, like, coming to Jesus moment.

And I take the front of the room.

I'm sort of shaking, you know, with my little index cards in Front of me.

There's no iPads, people.

I've got my little index cards, and I begin to present.

And up stands a classmate, Ron, who is really outraged that I am standing in front of a class and purporting to speak about someone as important and profound as Frantz Fanon.

And he lets everybody know, in no, you know, in.

In explicit terms, right, that he thinks I don't belong.

He thinks I'm not a person who should be.

If not, maybe I.

Maybe I could sit in the class, but I need to be quiet and not sort of take, you know, responsibility for these ideas or the learning that was going on.

And I.

And class ends.

I finish the report, you know, a class ends, and I go back to my dorm room, you know, really, really shaken.

But I share this as I do at the beginning of the book, because in some ways, it was just an indelible moment that let me know that the questions that I had once thought were teasing were deeper or much more profound than that, that my presence really troubled people so much, so right, that someone would interrupt a report and stand up in a class and object.

It also connected, you know, to questions that I also had, right, about who I was and how I fit into a world that seemed to be divided between black and white.

And so as painful as it was, it also set me on a course of, you know, self exploration, of learning more about my own family.

So I was working at the mall at Income Tax Place.

I did my tax return for the first time, and I put it in the computer, and up came my refund.

And I was, like, shocked.

I was so big.

In a good way.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was so big.

And I'm like, well, I must have did something wrong, right?

I'm like, go and check it.

Windfall.

Anything wrong.

And as I checked it, I realized that we qualified for what was called an earned income credit.

And you get an earned income credit from the government.

It's additional money from the government when you're, like, right at the poverty line.

And that was kind of the slap in the face because, you know, my mom brought me up to be independent, right?

And financially independent.

So not only was I not financially independent, like we were at the poverty line as a family, and I was just, you know, it threw me back.

It really threw me back.

And I realized that this isn't what I want for myself.

This isn't what I want for my family.

And I'm right there, Matt.

I'm right there where my mom told me not to be.

But at the time, it was, you know, it was really lonely.

Who.

How was I to explore love and dating?

How was I to, you know, sort of figure out what do you wear to prom when you're like this sort of tomboy, but also sort of femme weirdo, you know?

So it was really hard.

And it wasn't really until I was probably 19 or 20 that I met a trans masculine or, you know, a transgender man, someone who is assigned female at birth, was navigating the world as something else that I was like, oh, that's what I am.

I'm not broken.

I don't need to be fixed.

I'm just transitioning.

For more information, please visit www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com.