SPFPP 383: My Story
For timeline referencee, I got my herpes diagnosis I believe in March 2013, and I didn’t start the SPFPP Podcast until 2017. Here, in this episode, I give the pre-SPFPP Courtney you hear in podcasts so hopefully this helps ask general questions people have about my personal experience. I struggled with my relationships during that time, was in unhealthy relationships, feared rejection, and while herpes is a big part of my life now because of what I do here, I think it still was a big part of my life, only out of avoidance of it.
I interconnect some hindsight and metaphors from my life about how I think the way I was impacted my experience not just with herpes, but with the stigma which encompasses mind, emotions, and spirit, but most importantly, the identity. Identification with mind, body, emotions, experiences, it’s difficult to get the quick message of our life experiences nudging us into alignment when we aren’t connected to it. I talk about how Yoga helped me detach my identity from the five sense self to something greater and in that path, I’ve found peace with not just my diagnosis but all the intangible parts of what it represented as well. Relationships, my relationship with sex, being on auto-pilot and in survival mode, how I ate, becoming stagnant, my environment, etc. Herpes was a physical expression of my nervous system trying to communicate with me about a need to change these other things about my life and it took me to receive the message where I was MOST identified, on my penis, for me to “get” the message.
As I brought my awareness there, I started to see where my awareness wasn’t, and that’s in the present moment. Since my diagnosis and now having created the resource I needed, what comes to me as the most valuable healing thing is the community we’ve built here at SPFPP. People here want to heal and support each other and sometimes go as far as to engage in their own form of advocacy as well. Hopefully this helps and if you’re someone wanting a support call this episode is a great starting point to maximize our time together and focusing on you!
SPFPP 383 Transcript
00:00:00
Courtney Brame (Host): Welcome to something positive for positive people. This one's a little bit of a special episode. Um, over the past couple of weeks, I've had people reach out to me for support calls and they ask me a lot of questions about myself. Um, I think that it is most efficient that I just direct people to this podcast episode. And I'm going to keep it as short as I possibly can. And I realize um that there's value in maybe y'all having more of my own personal experience and not for the sake of feeling like you know me better, but just so that our time, the 30 minute calls that we have are maximized as best as possible and are about what you come for. So, I want to start by saying thank you for listening to this episode. Thank you for finding seeking out the resource that is something positive for positive people. I want to let you marinate on the question that I ask everybody when we meet for the first time if they're coming to me for some kind of support.
00:01:51
Courtney Brame (Host): And that thing is what do you want to make sure that you get from our time together? And this is something that people, you know, are kind of shocked by and taken aback by. Maybe because you've just never had to think about it before, but think about that. Just think about what it is that you want out of the time that we have together. And as you do that, um, what should happen is whether you can or can't answer the question, right? That'll get you that'll get your brain firing in the direction of trying to figure out what kind of support you need and get you a lot clearer on what your intention is for our time together. always ask if people need to just vent, get things off their chest, or if you just need to be witnessed in whatever emotion it is that you're experiencing. I always notice uh sort of a depressurization whenever I have a call with people because they're they're usually video calls um and we have the call and yeah, people just kind of feel lighter, right?
00:03:05
Courtney Brame (Host): I don't know that I feel how heavy it is for a person that comes in for a support call or that reaches out to me for the first time, but over the time, right, you just kind of notice a lightness to just being witnessed. So, uh that's happened for me now. I I didn't lost count how many times uh between my friends, family, uh and also doing it for other people. And yeah, I want to make sure that in the time that we get together, should you reach out for a support call um or you attend a support group to just kind of give you something that is a lot easier and quicker to access that a lot of people, I guess, need to know. But, um, I'll go ahead into it. So, I was diagnosed with genital HSV. I was told type two in 2013. And in 2013 at the time I had just finished college maybe 2011 I want to say u and then I was working so I had been working for almost two years a little over a year and then one day I had woken up I was staying with my grandmother and I had bodyaches I had a fever.
00:04:22
Courtney Brame (Host): I had chills and I kind of did this waddling thing to the restroom and I started to pee and on the right side of my penis right underneath the corona area which is the glands head of the penis like where it starts to kind of turn into a mushroom top if you're circumcised or where the foreskin catches when you retract it if you're uncircumcised. There was about there was a a cluster of bumps about the circumference of a nickel and that was what I touched when I made contact with it. I didn't know it was there. I didn't feel any sensation. It was when I touched it that I was like, "Oh, what the f word is that?" And my grandmother, who's a nurse, she came knocking on the door. She was like, "Courtney, you okay?" I was like, "No, we need to go to urgent care right now." And so my mom uh had ended up taking me and shortly after um I waited in the lobby a little bit and then the doctor came and got me and uh looked at it told me that it looked like herpes.
00:05:30
Courtney Brame (Host): There was no like you know gentleness or anything to it but also like I wanted to know what it was. So I don't care how the news was delivered just tell me what it is. And so um he had given me medication for if I were exposed to chlamydia or ganorrhea. Did the test and sent me home with a pamphlet and a prescription for val cyclloid. I was given I believe six tablets. He told me to take two a day uh six hours apart and it should be gone. So, actually, I think it was a week's worth of medication, but I noticed that it was gone after three days, and that shocked me because I thought that that was just what I was going to have to live with for the rest of my life, only to find out that that wasn't the case. So, I get home from the doctor's appointment and uh my mom and my grandmother, they were very supportive. you know, we all they assume they knew who gave it to me because they didn't like the girl I was seeing at the time.
00:06:38
Courtney Brame (Host): Uh, actually, they ain't like nobody I was seeing, but that's another story. Um, I called my most recent sexual partners and just asked. I was like, "Hey, do you have herpes?" And everybody said no. That left me with a sense of relief because it would have been really embarrassing to me if I were to have given herpes to somebody. And I think that that's what I was looking for. I was looking for someone to tell me I gave them herpes. I wasn't necessarily looking for who gave me herpes. And so everyone said no. And it didn't make sense to really go back any further than that. Um, and yeah, one of my my girlfriend that was on and off, um, that my mom and my grandmother didn't like, we had ended up dating again, trying to get back together because her attitude was, well, if you got it, we got it. Because, I mean, even prior to her, uh, I had always worn condoms.
00:07:43
Courtney Brame (Host): And I always wore condoms, not out of a sense of protecting myself from SCIs, but I ain't want no kids. And I was raised not to trust or believe anybody who said they were on birth control. And I at this point in time in the relationship, like she and I had not worn condom, so it wasn't an issue. So her attitude again, if you got it, we got it. It is what it is. So, obviously, if you keep breaking up and getting back with somebody, that's probably not the healthiest or best relationship dynamic for you to have. And that's what we were doing. And the relationship wasn't healthy for either of us. Um, in fact, once I I got into another relationship, a different one with someone who uh was accepting of my herpes status. And this was just a relationship to me at least that that wasn't a factor in because me and my ex had gotten back together simply because we both had herpes or she we assume she did.
00:08:55
Courtney Brame (Host): Uh, I've talked to her like years after and she's not tested positive for herpes, which is really like something worth noting that you can be with someone if you have herpes and they don't and you cannot pass it to them. Um, and this has been an ongoing experience for me even 10 to 10 plus years ago. So, um, when I got my diagnosis, I did not find anything useful for me. The pamphlet that was given to me, all it told me was how many people have herpes? And that wasn't really useful information to me because I don't know any of these people. If the idea is to make me feel less alone, why would you tell me, "Oh, there's a million people over here that have this thing." And then I'm like, okay, well, I'm looking and it's just a bunch of strangers, right? Like, how many people around me or who live like me, look like me, uh do the things that I do, right? How many of those people have it?
00:10:03
Courtney Brame (Host): So that I can find myself and some sort of common ground between what I'm feeling and some sense of normaly. So the numbers didn't do anything for me. I did uh early on want to know how do I minimize the possibility of having outbreaks. So that was what I Googled and I started to do my research on and that research led me to three main things. Uh nutrition, movement and stress management. Nutrition, movement, stress management. Now, I played football in college and we were always working out. We worked out, ran or practiced. We do something just about every day with minimal rest days. So, I was kind of conditioned to that. And with all the calories I was burning, we'd be eating at Chinese buffets. We'd be eating at our cafeteria. Easily 10,000 calories. And that was playing a sport, playing football. And uh after college, that stopped. Not only did the sports stop, the working out stop, uh all of the constant going stop, but what also well what stayed the same was the way that I was eating.
00:11:22
Courtney Brame (Host): So I'm still eating like I'm working out every day. Like I'm playing games and exercising and running have always been punishments for me because of playing sports. So, I kind of just stopped doing all of that. And I don't really remember I remember getting up to 265 pounds. Uh, for reference, if you're listening to this now and you like follow me on social media or see me, uh, I'm under 230 lbs. I'm trying to get down to 15, but I just been kind of stuck here. It takes effort for me to get under uh, 225 pounds. it it takes a lot. But um I know that living with my grandmother uh on top of that didn't help. And then I was also going to a job where I was sitting down for eight hours a day and like you know getting up for lunch breaks or whatever and popping around the office to talk to people, right? It was that kind of an environment.
00:12:20
Courtney Brame (Host): But it wasn't the same thing. So, I spoke to a nutritionist friend of mine. We went to high school together. And I knew he ran his own uh fitness uh company. So, he and I got together and he taught me how to eat. He asked me, "Hey, write down everything it is that you're eating." I sent him my food log. And he was like, "Courtney, you eating f****** Popeye's chicken?" And I was like, "Yeah, I got the grill kind." He's like, "Courtney, it's still f****** Popeyes." I know it was KFC. He's like, "It's still f****** KFC." And he gave me so much s*** about how I was eating. And that was all I knew because my grandma, she would cook. My grandma, my my grandparents are from the south. My grandpa is from Mississippi. My grandmother, she lived in Alabama. And I was raised in St. Louis, which I don't know why people think is the south, but it's the Midwest.
00:13:13
Courtney Brame (Host): And this was just how we ate. Like wasn't nothing healthy. I think it was very rare that our meals had any type of vegetables with them unless the vegetables was a pot of greens with a damn turkey neck or neck bone, some type of pork in it. Right? So, this is how I've been eating all my life up until I was 24 23 24 years old. That's all I knew. Everything fried, greasy. And then on weekends, my grandma didn't cook. So, what we would do is we'd order out. we'd get like pizza or we'd get Chinese food or we'd get um there's this uh like a fried fish place or something and I wasn't I wasn't doing well. So I think that the abrupt stopping of all of the movement, the activity, the sports, the having something that I was focused on. I think that that set the perfect climate and environment for me to have a herpes outbreak like I stopped.
00:14:21
Courtney Brame (Host): So, and that's with the movement, right? So, exercise, the uh nutrition as well because I it's not there was no balance. There was no balance between how I was moving my body and how frequently I was moving my body and what was going into my body. Right? So the third factor in this was stress management. I think that we manage our stress best when we doing what we supposed to do. And what I mean by when we doing what we're supposed to do, what I'm saying is I had a goal. My goal was to play football as long as I could. I remember to this day the summer after I graduated high school, I knew I was going to University of Northern Iowa. I told myself, I'm playing division one football. I don't give a f*** about nothing else. I'm playing division one. And I thought I was going to that school and I thought I was going to another school cuz these were people who were recruiting me.
00:15:23
Courtney Brame (Host): They were talking to me. They were looking at me, watching my game film. I was in conversations with them and they just dropped off. All these people just dropped off. And then uh one of my coaches had a connection at uh the school that I ended up going to, Southeast Missouri State, and he uh had me send my film to him. And I I remember like I sent the film in, and there was nothing else I could do. And this kind of goes back to maybe the first time that I had to do nothing, which was hard because there was nothing I could do. I was forced into rest. And in that forced rest, what ended up coming up for me was like just this this this need for surrender, right? And that's what I had to do. I mean, I made backup plans and, you know, was like, well, s***, I can always go put floors in like my dad. I had that job to fall back on.
00:16:25
Courtney Brame (Host): But it was in those moments where I couldn't do s*** that s*** was happening. So, I remember I prayed I prayed my ass off. I told God I was like, "God, if you just let me just just let me get this, let me go to college, right? I'll remember what the promise was, but I remember that I f****** cried. Like, I cried so hard because all I wanted to do was play football. That was what I wanted to do for as long as I could. I didn't give a f*** about going to the NFL. I just wanted to play as long as I knew I could play. And then like three years into college, I was like, man, this s*** I I need this to be over. So, I ended up going. I ended up uh I was invited to camp. I walked on. I earned a partial scholarship, half scholarship, full scholarship for my last year.
00:17:20
Courtney Brame (Host): And I took the most I could get out of that. I double majored, double minor. Made sure that I was on top of my s*** grades wise. And this was the mission. This is what I committed to. This was what I dedicated myself to. and having that intention and aligning my beliefs and behaviors with it and understanding what my why was. That was my stress management. As stressful as the s*** was that we did in football practice, football games, in the weight room, working out, for as stressful as that stuff was, I gave the the stress something to do. I I I focused it to something. And this is uh if you are new here, you'll hear me talk about atomic living, which is just taking the atom and its three parts, the proton, neutron, electron, and being able to like put language to that at a microscopic smallest level of us being. But I'm not going to put that on y'all now.
00:18:27
Courtney Brame (Host): But I believe that the presence that I had from what was my intention, what was my why, what was my purpose expressed itself in alignment between my behaviors and beliefs and the way that the outcome had to reflect what was going on between the consistency, the relationship between my beliefs and behaviors. And I think that that's really the key to stress management. uh because so much stuff takes us through the body, the mind, the emotions and very few things take us through the nervous system. And what people don't realize too is that herpes is a nervous system condition. Uh it's a nerve condition and it expresses itself on the skin. And what's beautiful about it is that a lot of times our nervous system will try and communicate something with us and we won't get it until it's physical and we have to put our hand we can't put our hands on it because we're so caught up in like our bodies in the real world and we identify so much with these things that the nervous system is trying to communicate to us.
00:19:34
Courtney Brame (Host): But because we're so identified with that rather than the intangible aspects of ourselves, that's the only way that it can reach us. So physically, right, my blood pressure was high, my blood sugar was high. Uh I wasn't hearing that. I was in fact like not taking care of the mechanics of my body and through the weight gain, through the sluggishness, the fatigue, I wasn't listening to that. I wasn't giving my stress any kind of direction and in that I would probably just be a little bit more like bored or stagnant and that wasn't what I was listening to. So, I got all these messages that are coming into me through my nervous system, but I'm so identified with my body that I'm not even I mean, I'm not even hearing or able to experience the things that are happening in my body because these aren't things that you see. When I got my herpes diagnosis, I saw that. I saw that and the physical representation of how I wasn't taking care of myself.
00:20:54
Courtney Brame (Host): Even the way that I've done relationships, my relationship to sex and sexuality, all of that had to come to the surface some kind of way. And what better way for it to come to the surface and on my genitals, the thing that I was given the most attention to. So what herpes became was a physical manifestation of information that my nervous system had tried to communicate to me between my physical body, my mental health, and my emotions. All of these things tied up. My social well-being, community, right? All of these things I was I was ignoring. I was ignoring the the messages until it came on what I had most of my attention to, conscious or unconscious. Because before, right, my attention was on football. My attention was on graduating college, but playing football as long as I could, right? That was what my awareness and attention were on. Playing football as long as I can. Bet.
00:22:06
Courtney Brame (Host): So my behaviors and beliefs align with that. And the world around me was the circumstances where I could play football for as long as I could, which was through college. And I didn't have my first symptoms, right? Like I could have, you know, been exposed as early as high school, but it was under control. Like what people don't understand is that herpes is mostly dormant until it has a reason to be activated. almost like we could have trauma and it would take for a trigger, some type of an event to open that uh and activate and trigger us, right? So, very similar to that, but trying to keep this focus on my story uh and keep this episode as short as I can. Um, that's something that I hope y'all are able to hear and really hear that when I lost focus on you, a sense of purpose, a thing that was like an ongoing like fuel source for me of presence. when I lost my connection to that when football was done.
00:23:14
Courtney Brame (Host): I think that that's where we can say I lost my anchor and I just kind of floated around and that was it. Like I just was floating through life and I'd go drinking with my friends on weekends. I get up, I go to work every day. I'm there for eight hours. Sometimes we do happy hour, but that was it. It was just this constant floating through my life. And that was the perfect conditions for her piece to present itself. And so it did. And then when that happened, I had to ask questions. I had to ask a lot of questions. I had to ask myself, okay, what does this mean? How do I keep this thing from happening? Right? the same kind of questions that had I asked myself about my body, about my mind, about my emotions, then maybe my stress, my nervous system wouldn't have gotten to a point where it had to present this thing, right?
00:24:15
Courtney Brame (Host): Because it presented itself after being ignored for so long. So, I had to ask myself like, what have I ignored? And it ain't always what you ignore, but what are you what are you unconscious of? Right? So, we have attention. We're either focusing it on something or we're not. And when we're not, that attention is still going outward in every which kind of direction. And that's what it was for me. I was not focusing on a lot of things that I could have and should have been focused on and therefore attracting a lot of life situations that really conflicted with my behaviors and beliefs because there was no awareness on even what my behaviors and beliefs were for me to even be able to point out any inconsistencies. So bringing it back to you know to chronologically for my personal experience right um my in and out of that relationship that I was in came from the compatibility of having herpes. I got into a new relationship with someone who understood.
00:25:24
Courtney Brame (Host): This was someone that I had known for years and she was okay and understanding because she knew someone who had herpes and was able to talk to that person and get comfortable with it. and we had a relationship that was progressing towards uh long-term family, all those things. And the relationship ended, you know, for a few reasons, but uh I distinctly remember that there was a day where she and I were having sex and I know that she had just recently gotten tested and her herpes test came back negative. So, we're having sex and I remember like she did the double tap thing. We we negotiated like, "Hey, this means stop if you can't use words." She did the double tap. I was like, "What's up? Stop. Check in." And she was like, "I can't do this." So, I removed myself and I just went to the bathroom just I I knew what it was. I knew that she had been given a quote second chance.
00:26:25
Courtney Brame (Host): And that second chance was her not having it. And you know, we've even after that, like we've consensually had sex again, but I think that that was the end of the relationship. And honestly, I should not have had sex with her again simply because like it's been made clear that this is not something you're okay with. So, how little did I value myself at the time to allow myself to what's the word I'm looking for for me to have allowed myself to put myself in a situation to have my feelings hurt again, right? That that short burst of oh my god connection, someone wants me, someone's okay, that ain't worth it. And if you somebody right now where even if you thinking about reaching out or you pondering this, it ain't worth it. It ain't worth it. So when that person tells you that they can't do this, believe them when they say they can't do this. All right, that's that's quick advice. You don't have to hit me up for a support call.
00:27:32
Courtney Brame (Host): Um, so it was after that relationship ended, which was in 2020 2014, I want to say 2014 or 15. Um, again, I got back with my ex, the one I shouldn't have been with. I ain't got to go into all the detail of like what happened there, but that relationship had nothing to do with herpes. And because it had nothing to do with herpes, that's why I want to say it had everything to do with herpes because it didn't directly, it wasn't like a this person is rejecting me for having herpes. It was a oh great, I don't have to worry about herpes. So, it was me shoving that into my subconscious because of what that also represents. Uh, the possibility of rejection, the possibility of loneliness, not being able to have sex. And she took all of that away from me with her acceptance. But in taking those things away from me, what happens is I don't have any reason or opportunity to explore that and interrogate that for myself and be curious about it.
00:28:31
Courtney Brame (Host): like, okay, well, what what why am I fearful of rejection? Why am I fearful of being alone or lone having loneliness? Right? She took that away. But what was it worth? What was the exchange? The exchange there was that while I didn't have to worry about those things, I was both of us, we were hurting each other. by forcing a relationship that didn't work. It wasn't working. It was always conditional. It was this relationship would be perfect if Courtney blank. Like, and and I I named this because I've recognized that this has been a pattern in the handful of relationships that I've been in since that. And I mean when I say relationships, I mean like boyfriend girlfriend relationships because that's always been a pattern. Like I'll get into a relationship and the person loves me for who I am as I am and then there's just little things about me that they wish that would change or that they wish weren't there.
00:29:46
Courtney Brame (Host): And I would always I would always allow that. I'd always take that into consideration like okay well maybe maybe I could grow in this way or maybe this is like an immaturity thing but these things that they wanted me to change or that I would start to change it's not consistent with who I am. So the the inconsistency between me knowing who I am for example uh there was an ex I had who flat out told me she was like I'm jealous of you. you know what you're supposed to be doing in this life and I don't like you like what you do, you enjoy it, you love it and I don't I don't have that for myself. And when she said it, a lot of things made sense because of the uh her inability to be supportive of me, be happy for me, be happy with me. And I I didn't realize it until after she said that. And then even after she said that like you know other things started to make sense in how I was being treated.
00:30:53
Courtney Brame (Host): So I'm a very positive person and I make it a priority to be present with people. You can hear it in a podcast when I'm listening to people and that's like what I would say my gift is. This is my playing football. I have all of my leaking energy from stress that if I didn't have any sort of sense of purpose, I have it focused and directed uh internally for me to take my lived experiences, my herpes, stigma, the PTSD, traumatization, whatever of my life experiences uh from the environment that I landed in and I'm transmuting that into healing. It's healing for myself. I talk about the nervous system and the solar system being essentially the same thing but in human form. Right? All the sun does is transmute uh hydrogen to helium and in turn we get light, heat and gravity. So what Courtney does through something positive for positive people is transmute herpes stigma into truth. I transmute my own experiences into healing.
00:32:08
Courtney Brame (Host): Like I take all this negative and I take the positive from it and I just do it in a way that's out loud so that people can orient themselves in a way where they can experience the warmth. They can experience the light. they can experience the gravity and be able to find some kind of grounding among that floating that floating experience that I spoke to. And I do that in a way where I just witness people with presence and I make attempts to uh create that same feeling through community. And that's what something positive for positive people is through my being, through my doing. And so it's been my focus, my intentional focus on who I am and being myself and not letting anybody change me because every time I have let someone change me, right? Like that still hasn't been enough who I am. I think that the inconsistencies of my behaviors and beliefs or even an unawareness of my behaviors and beliefs can lead to the outcomes that yeah it can lead to the outcomes that don't nobody want that I don't want for myself.
00:33:51
Courtney Brame (Host): It leads to a kind of change that doesn't need to happen. Right? Like who we are doesn't need to change. Maybe some behaviors do, but interrogate that s***. Bring your curiosity in. Challenge that. Challenge everything. If you don't like the way things are going, you don't like, you know, stuff about yourself. Like, let that be your call. Don't let other people just come in and you blindly accept regardless of what they say they want their role to be in your life or who they how what power you've given them. Right? Interrogate it for yourself. Cuz I didn't. And in not doing that over those four years before I started something positive for positive people, I was floating in everybody else's orbit. I recognize the mindless pursuits of acceptance, of validation for somebody to still see me as a sexual person, for somebody to still see me as attractive or worthy of a relationship or valuable.
00:34:59
Courtney Brame (Host): And I ain't got to go too deep into the the trauma history there, but I recognize those things for myself now in hindsight after talking to as many people as I have. You know, we're almost at 400 podcast episodes. And I can't tell you how many support calls. I only started tracking this year or at the end of last year. And there were more than 130 on the Excel sheet from people who filled out the forms. That's not even including the messages I get on social media or the people that I just like tell call me if they're struggling. So I think that the world around me has reflected back to me a consistency of what my beliefs and behaviors are in the sense of them. Sorry, some this very attractive woman just ran by me and like we made eye contact. I don't know if she thought I was crazy because I'm talking to myself or what, but I'm almost at the gym. So I'mma uh let me go ahead and get this thing concluded.
00:36:04
Courtney Brame (Host): I done lost my trade, though. I love I love where I'm at. I'm in Brooklyn, y'all. Um, and it's nice. It's It's been nice, especially being warm outside. But, um, yeah, bringing this whole thing to a close, like that four years was four years of unawareness. And this is even after like awareness of the thing being brought to the surface. It took me a while to figure out how even an avoidance of it and thinking that it wasn't impacting me, how it still impacted me. Having herpes really did impact me, not just, you know, the physical symptoms and my relationship to sex, but it made me have to ask these hard questions about my relationship to my identity and who I am, right? So, that was the guidance that I needed. And I kind of I left this out intentionally earlier because I ain't want it to come off, you know, wrong. But doing yoga and immersing myself in yoga philosophy really gave me language.
00:37:09
Courtney Brame (Host): It gave me skills. It gave me tools having nothing to do with herpes, but everything to do with identity. So that my identity wasn't fragmented and scattered into all these different directions of who other people expect me to be or who I believed myself to be or who I believed I couldn't be as a result of having a herpes diagnosis. So getting into yoga and mindfulness and meditation, I know that these are buzzwords, but let me explain to you what they did for me. They gave me the language of navigating my nervous system, of navigating my identity outside of what my physical body, mind, and emotions, you know, are they've controlled me for so long because of my over identification with those things. And it gave me something else to identify with and those are my identities. I consider myself to be curious, creative, communicative, challenger, challenging, whatever. Like challenge, choice. What was the other one? I used all C words. Connecting.
00:38:21
Courtney Brame (Host): Yeah, connecting. Right. like I identify with these intangible aspects of me. Can't nobody see those things. And when you bring your awareness to that, you start to experience more of it regardless of the form of it. And in God of War Ragnarok, Brock is one of the characters in the video game. He says, "The nature of a thing is more important than the form of a thing." And that is something that I've lived by since I heard it. The nature of a thing is more important than the form of a thing. So having herpes guided me towards my nature. Having herpes guided me towards my nature. And while I may not, you know, dwell in it 100% of the time, I do recognize that this is this is where I belong. Being identified with that which is not identifiable. having faith which is just an awareness and giving my attention to that which we cannot sense when I say sense like touch see here taste smell touch here see taste smell yeah those right so it's something that you just have to know and that knowing is what's brought me so much peace and in the knowing there's like this there's this sense of f****** around and finding out but playfully.
00:39:52
Courtney Brame (Host): And that's what my that's what that surrender has been. The same surrender of when I sent off my college football highlight tape and I waited. I didn't hear anything and I was like crying and praying and hoping and still making backup plans. That's what I got now. I had to surrender that. I had to surrender in order to let that go. in order to let that happen and not put any resistance through force trying to make something happen or chasing or pursuing, right? And it happened. And for me now, I think that after not finding any useful support or resources, I had to realize like it just wasn't out there. Like that was me. I had to become that s***. I had to become the person that asked the questions. engaging what would naturally came to me from the environment that I was born into. My early lived experiences, what made me so curious, what made me value choice and challenge, liberation, what made me value these things and I had to become a physical embodiment of that for myself to heal.
00:41:06
Courtney Brame (Host): And it just so happens just so happens that this is also the healing that others in the same environment, similar environment or who find themselves floating and are touched by reached by this light that I'm emitting. Not because I'm trying to reach y'all are trying to emit the light, but because I'm doing what I do. The same way the sun transmutes hydrogen to helium, Courtney transmutes herpes stigma into healing, which is kind of poetic because hydrogen is H and herpes is H and then helium is H E and then healing is H E, which I guess herpes is H E as well. But I just thought that uh that was a very beautifully connected thing there. So that is my story up to the point of I found the dating app positive singles. I got on there and all my problems went away. I remember that. Uh and obviously there's more of the story, more ways to tell it and you know more questions people might have that get answered in different ways.
00:42:17
Courtney Brame (Host): But it was after finding that that I learned that people with herpes wanted to kill themselves. And that led to me bringing that curiosity um into podcasting and asking if people would be willing to just share their experience. That turned into the podcast in 2017. And since then, I've been posting almost religiously an episode a week um of an interview with somebody living with herpes or someone in the medical field, mental health professional, sex educator, sex therapist, and I've shared some of my own experiences on there as well. um and 2019 turned this into a nonprofit organization that raised money to pay for people to get uh therapy if they were struggling with herpes. That is not a service that we offer right now because we ain't got the money for it. But should we ever at some point get it, I would absolutely go back to that. Um because I I just ran out of my pandemic money when I was paying for it myself. But we were able to get 40ish people into therapy and um it was it was nice.
00:43:23
Courtney Brame (Host): We got some exit interviews. Uh if you type in the search bar on the website podcast, type in uh therapy and you should see each of those pop up if you want to listen to them. Um, but that's for the most part my backstory. And I hope that you found a little bit of useful information in that prior to reaching out for a call. Like this is just my story, my experience up to the point at which I started something positive for positive people with some hindsight woven in there that allows for you to hopefully feel a little bit more uh able to identify an intention of reaching out so we can make the best use of our time uh together in the event that you decide that you want to have some call or something. All right, and that concludes this episode of Something Positive for Positive People. um check out everything on the website. No matter when you listen into this, if you go to the website, you'll find that there's useful resources there.
00:44:24
Courtney Brame (Host): You can go to the events tab to figure out what we got coming up. Uh whether it be a virtual event or an inperson event, uh it'll just be there. All right? It'll be there. And you can subscribe to the newsletter if you're at spfpp.org/herpies-newsletter. That'll keep you up to speed on things. I generally just post one newsletter a month um to keep it simple for everybody and I put everything there. Here's what happened. Here's what's happening now. Here's what will happen in the near future. That's my that's my framework for it. All right. Um if you happen to be in New York and still listening, December 19th, we're going to be celebrating our 400th podcast episode uh in Brooklyn. I got the venue reserved. You can go to the website and get a ticket for the event. These are donations that are going to help us make the event awesome. Um, so yeah, if you're located in the NYC area or if you happen to be in town December 19th weekend, it'll be Friday from 5:00 p.m. to 900 p.m. And then afterwards, like people can branch off and do their own thing. Uh, but yeah, that's it. Let me know what you thought of this if you heard it. This just me again just sharing my own experience so that we can get the most of our time together. Should we be doing a call? 45 minutes. Wow. I thought this was gonna be 20. All right, till next time, stay present.
