Mental Health Matters - Let's talk about the piles of stuff in your life
In this live‑stream episode of Mental Health Matters (Saturday night, ongoing series since 2018), host SPEAKER B, joined by co‑host/producer DJ, engages an online chat community to explore the metaphor of “piles” – both literal clutter (mail, bills, junk) and mental burdens (stress, grief, insecurities). The discussion opens with a stark statistic that two‑thirds of gun‑related deaths are suicides, framing the urgency of mental‑health conversation. The hosts describe how everyday piles accumulate, how they can be categorized (gratitude pile, future‑planning pile, life‑purpose pile, etc.), and why unchecked piles become overwhelming. They share personal anecdotes (post‑spinal‑fusion recovery, family loss, childhood fire‑burning experiments) and introduce coping tactics: gratitude practice, symbolic burning or writing‑and‑destroying worries, seeking help, and community connection. DJ reads chat comments, reinforcing the communal aspect. Fire symbolism is explored as a primal, therapeutic ritual tied to human history of gathering around flames. The episode concludes with practical advice – keep an inventory of piles, share burdens with trusted people, and remember laughter and togetherness as medicine – before signing off and promoting upcoming community events. The tone remains informal, supportive, and conversational, aiming to normalize discussion of mental health and provide actionable strategies for managing both physical and psychological clutter.
Chapters
And good evening.
So welcome to Saturday night Mental Health Matters. I am laughing because somehow or another— welcome to Saturday night. Oh, hold please.
Hold on.
All right, so I'll figure this out eventually. Anywho, one does not open another YouTube channel while going on YouTube, because that's why I was very confused that I heard different things. All right, try this again. Welcome, Saturday night. It is Mental Health Matters. Tonight we're going to talk about our piles of stuff. Why are we here? Because 2 out of every 3 gun deaths you hear about are suicides. And if we talk about mental health, not only can we possibly help those who are considering suicide by firearm, but you know, those people who commit suicide in all those other ways, possibly can help them as well. And maybe it just makes your day a little bit better because the show that is on at the next top, top of the next hour, Hillbilly, he always says, make somebody's day better. So that is one of the reasons we pop on here every Saturday night since 2018. Um, I'll let y'all in on a little secret, is that my thought is if I actually get to 2028, that's gonna be the last show. Um, just because I figure 10 years of doing this every Saturday or every weekend, because I try to get something up here sometimes this Sunday because life does not always go according to plan. Sometimes it is prerecorded. However, there is usually something here to help you with your mental health, at least a little bit. If nothing else, I got nothing else actually. All right. So over there, right, right there, right there. Uh, not the best camera. And if you're watching on a phone, you're not gonna see what my finger's pointing at. However, this is my DM Foss, uh, sticker. And since we're talking about piles tonight, the idea is my DM Phaw sticker had been sitting in a pile, and the pile had been moved around a whole bunch of times, and I finally got my Phaw sticker up here. And I love sparkly, so I love that I have a DM— a sparkly DM Phaw sticker, not to be confused with my Guns, Beer, and Therapy um, magnet, because, you know, that's different than having a sticker, and we can move that. So, sparkly sticker. Well, that was a good job because I think it's been in my home maybe 2 or 3 months. I'm not sure exactly, uh, but I don't know about you, and like I said in the comments or in the description, I know we're not all the same. I know we all do different things, but piles seem to be something that many of us have. In that, when I was in the corporate world, I would sort my work, right? And literally back then had a thing on my desk where there'd be incoming, outbound, and other stuff, right? So I'd have at least 3 piles. And then now that I'm home all the time, there's the pile of bills, and then there's a pile of stuff that's got to get, uh, filed, and then there's the pile of stuff that quite honestly I'm not quite sure what to do with. And for whatever reason, I don't want to throw it away, but I'm not sure why I haven't thrown it away. Oh, maybe it is that it has a cool magazine in it, or maybe those coupons that I might use at some point in time. So like I said, I know we're not all the same. However, I feel as though we have piles up here too, right? We have little things that will stick in our heads and we'll be, okay, okay, okay, I am going to compartmentalize. I'm going to think about this or I'm not going to think about this right now because of whatever reason. And that's what I think of like the mental piles. It's like, oh, things that I mean to do, things that I think about and focus on on a regular basis, things that I really shouldn't think of because they're not very empowering. And those are kind of my thoughts up here. So let me know in the chat and I'm not looking at it. So DJ is here in the back room watching you guys all chat because I'm trying very hard to stay on target. It's been a full week since Goshen Fair has been over. Well, not quite, um, but let's see. Yes, at this time last week I was at the Goshen Fair in my car chatting with you all. I'm still recovering from that. So anyway, let's talk about our piles. All right, I'm gonna— no, I'm not gonna. If DJ sees a comment that needs to come up the screen, he's just gonna grab that and throw that up there. Just because I'm not even gonna look because I need to stay on focus. All right, number 1, do let me know, do you have piles? What do you, what are your piles? Let's go there, right? So I said I've got my bill pile, I've got my stuff that needs to be filed, and my I don't know what to do with this pile. Now, are there more piles? Yes. Mental piles, right? And it's like, what do we focus on? If I could, I would say, all right, I want to have this big honking gratitude pile. I've been trying to work on my gratitude pile in my head, right? What am I thankful for? Thankful for my husband, for my kids, for having dinner, for having friends over today. I'm thankful to be here to talk to you because I get to do this with you guys. Versus not. That's kind of that. And then there's the, oh my gosh pile of, whoo, tomorrow, what happens? Oh, I have to work. I'm working all day. Gonna start at 8 o'clock in the morning. I'll be done 5 or 6 o'clock tomorrow night. And then Monday I get a day off. What does my day off look like? Mm, running around, of course. So that's the future pile. What's gonna happen? What's gonna go on over the next 24 to 48 hours? And then there's the life pile. I'm going to call that the pile I don't quite know what to do with, in that there's so much to life, right? What is it that's important about life? What is life? We could get very— DJ, you've got good words. What's another word? Not heavy, but when we're talking about what is life, what kind of question is that?
What kind of question is what is life?
Well, yeah, like not theoretical, or is it theoretical? Is it existential? Existential. Okay. All right. That's a good word. So yeah, the what is life is like, that'd be a really a pile I wouldn't know what to do with really. So there is that. All right, I'm scooching over because I'm going to look. All right, uh, let's see. Guns and Barbecue is there. Um, the chickens and the, the horse. Um, so yeah, my piles are junk mail and empty brass is what, what Jamie said. And, uh, yes, we have— we don't have piles of brass, we have buckets of brass. I'm not gonna lie, and we certainly have plenty of junk mail. However, I do have some cool catalogs that I get. The— oh, for those of you out there who are my USCCA members, the August-September magazine, definitely my favorite. It was like all the FAQs that all of my students have always had. Huge pile. I also have gasoline. Sometimes we need to start a new pile. Yes. Burning down the piles. That is not a bad idea sometimes. And when we are out here and thinking about our piles of stuff, right? Whether it's the physical stuff or the stuff that's in our brains, Sometimes we do need to burn them down. I'm with Tara on that one. It's like, take that lighter, torch that sucker, and let it go. Because we only have so much bandwidth, no matter which pile we're talking about. Today we had that lovely picnic at the house, and so my house is currently cleaner than it's been since the last holiday, which I think at this point was Christmas. We didn't do Easter this year because we were in Japan for Easter. Um, but getting rid of stuff, letting go. Mr. DJ, it's almost 10 minutes. Would you like to say hi to everybody for me before I finish going through all the rest of the piles?
I would love to do that. I think that, uh, Crabby Turtle was out there early because you mentioned him by name, but I don't see a comment out there, so I certainly hope that he swings back through to say hi with that big pink waving hand before the end. After Grabby Turtle, we had Chasing Ghosts dropping in the room. Mike Ballinger is also out there. Sorryfan93 is in the room. Matthew Isham is out there tonight. So is Jamiejh586, Guns and Barbecue, Memin' It Up, and Gun Websites, the most recent drop into the room. And that's your roll call for right now. You know, pile to me means a lot. It's not, you know, you could have a small pile, but a pile means that there's an excess. There's a bunch of something. And when you think about piles being a bunch of something, a bunch of something is often a burden. Too much of something, well, that can be too much of a good thing, but too often when it comes to the bad, sad, mad feelings or experiences, those are burdens that, yeah, cut them loose, burn them up symbolically. I've done that kind of thing before, so I'm vibing with what it is that Tara had to say out there quite a bit. Yeah, cutting the bad burdens loose, reducing the piles that you're carrying around. Like, get rid of it. Yeah. Let's go.
And what you said too about symbolically, one of my favorite symbolic ways to get rid of stuff is writing something down on a piece of paper, then throwing it in an ashtray or somewhere that you can actually burn it, like your sink or something like that. That being said, um, make sure you're not burning it in an acrylic bathtub because that leaves marks.
So, oh wow, personal experience there, eh?
Well, not sounds like it for me, but my children decided one day that the bathtub was a safe place to practice burning things, and well, that leaves marks.
Well, the water was nearby, they had that right.
It was, it was, it's just that, yeah, the rest of it, not so much. Um, they were younger then, to be fair, and Like I said, relatively, it was relatively safe, but it was not with parent supervision. So yes, make sure if you're gonna literally burn things that it's a safe platform for that sort of thing. So let's see. Yeah, so gun websites, thank you for that. And yeah, so I'm just gonna move this so I stop jumping out of screen to go to my mouse. Um, so yeah, piles. Like DJ just said, it's like the idea of a pile is like a whole lot of something, and the overwhelm is real. And I'm definitely vibing towards that because with all the changes that happen in life all the time, the piles can get big if we're not tending to them. And burning it down physically, mentally, however you want to do it. Uh, we actually are physically doing a lot of burning currently because it's wet out. It's, um, fall, it's the rainy season, so we can burn stuff all the time. There is absolutely something cathartic about seeing flames devour stuff. So like I said, one of my favorite things symbolically is if there's stuff that's bugging me or stuff I want to get done, I will get rid of. I will write it down and, you know, say a prayer and let it go. And then watching it just go poof into ash, into nothing, allows you to realize that this is just one more part that goes. Um, let's see. Uh, Matt is mental health, physical health, bills, strained relationship with my mother, insecurities, multiple aspects of insecurities. Yeah. So let's be real. So Matt is recovering from surgery. He's just had his entire spinal column fused and it has not been fun. And so he's physically recovering from a bunch of stuff. And then you throw that emotional stuff that you're talking about, the insecurities and that sort of thing. Because as far as I know, most of us are always worried about measuring up. Now, sometimes we're aware of these things, sometimes we are not. Sometimes we have them handled, sometimes they're a pile, sometimes there's a little feather on our back. So our piles shift and change. And just like everything else in life, we will pay attention to stuff and we'll be locked in. And we'll pay attention to that one thing and then, oh wait, what, what am I doing now? So, uh, this is at the point of where Barbecue will probably put over squirrels in the chat, chances are, maybe not, but we can't focus on everything all at once, which is part of why we are chopping things up into our piles. Once we have our piles, then we need to actually pay attention to which ones we're paying attention to, if that makes sense, which it sort of does and it sort of doesn't.
It makes sense to me.
Okay. I'm trying not to be circular, but I kind of am a little bit. So tell me.
I mean, you got to, you got to keep track of that stuff. As overwhelming as it can be, if you're not keeping track of what is piling upon you, you're not going to be able to excise and remove the stuff, anything really. And that's the overwhelm part. That's where burdens are sometimes their heaviest. You don't feel like you can shoulder it anymore. And I don't like to give like standard advices, but I gotta say a pretty standard advice I can offer people is if you're feeling burdened by something, if you're able to share it, that burden will sometimes lighten, if not disappear. And you might end up in that disappearance with somebody who is helping you with whatever that burden is, be it the ear, be it the, you know, arm that you need help moving, whatever it is that's piling up on you. And also, you know, encouraging people to take that as, you know, after their self-inventory, then make that the next step. And if you can't do a self-inventory, then your first step is to ask for that help, that open ear. You know, gathering, you know, together with friends and letting people know what's going on in your world. The virtual one is a little bit harder sometimes, but telephone communication, text messages, and emails are pretty damn easy. So, yeah, just gotta— yeah, you have to get off the button. You have to get it going.
Yeah, yeah, without a doubt. And yeah, and, and one of our challenges in today's world is that we don't have a lot of one-on-one real time. And it's, we're going, going, going from one place to another. We're doing, doing, doing, because we have so much that we can possibly do. And as Tony Robbins would often say in his presentation is like, we have to remember to be human beings and not human doings. And so that connection of being able to talk to somebody, wait, talk to somebody, see how like it's backwards. Um, um, just that connection, that little bit, can, like DJ said, get rid of the burden that may feel like it's on your shoulders.
And I'm going to bring this up from Chasing Ghosts, saying, uh, I think we are connected, uh, connected to fire. Sorry, on the phone here, it's a little small. Especially in gathering food, uh, in gathering like food we have gathered for thousands of years around a fire and food as families and tribes. It's in our DNA. Yeah, yeah. And then gathering in community—
I, I can't imagine there's anyone out there— I could be wrong because I'm wrong before— but it's just like, have— as far as I know, all of us at some point in time get lost in the flames. And it's just like when you watch something burn, whether it's a simple— something as simple as a candle, or if you're outside at a campfire, or you're indoors at your, you know, I don't know, for our wood stove, we actually have windows in it so you can see the fire in there. So I find that fire can be very trance-inducing, and so it's a beautiful moment to pay attention to. You're literally watching energy just dance around. Because that's essentially what fire is. And part of the symbolism of, like, watching something burn is you're changing it from that burdensome pile that you had and letting it go. And you're literally watching something go from a solid into dust and air and energy and all of the things that happen in that moment where it goes from one thing to the next. You get to see like the caterpillar into the butterfly kind of thing. Another thing about our challenges in life is that— we were talking about this today— is stuff that seems like it's really horrible right now may truly be a blessing. Now, when you're in the horribleness, it's very hard to figure out what the blessing is. Um, my One of my more favorite examples is my sister got killed in a car accident, and my mom and I said, okay, what's good about this? And one of the things that turned out a couple months later was mom got to go to a retreat and kind of check back in with her spirituality and, you know, get closer to God because she had time and she needed grieving and she had to get better. For me, I don't know that I've ever found anything that was good about my sister's death, but at least I asked the question to give that opportunity. So, um, and then, uh, let's see, then there's a gun at a barbecue can be very body altering if you are drunk and fall into it. Yes, actually, that was actually part of our conversation today as well. Because one of our friends does tend to get burned often, and we're discussing how he'd been burned 7 times in about 7 years by 7 different types of things, one of which was phosphorus. And then what G-Webs asked about what percentage of people gather to eat in 2025. Well, I know my family does. Um, we had a picnic together with a bunch of friends who I haven't seen since last month at one of my friend's wife's funeral. And prior to that, I hadn't seen them for about a decade and a half, probably, if not more. But we do— my husband is very good about making sure that we do have dinner together on a fairly regular basis, or as regular as we can now that my son is away. At college. So there is that. And who doesn't like gathering around a campfire and lighting your marshmallows on fire? I know they're supposed to get toasted, but I feel as though half of us just light the suckers right on fire. Because yeah, sorry, I read Saria Fan's email— or email comment. And that's why I thought of the marshmallows, because I have marshmallows up at the house. But after this, I'm just gonna lay my little head down and go to sleep because tomorrow morning Mr. Ballinger will be here with 3 of his friends, 1 daughter, and some kids or some, uh, friends from work. And we're just gonna go play on the range, uh, to have some fun. And that's the other thing, eating together. How many people do that? But then just playing, just having fun, doing something that's entertaining or a new experience or those sort of things. And these are other ways to get through the piles. And I don't know about you, Saravan, but I will say that I will light them on fire, I will blow them out, I will eat the charcoal, and I'll light them on fire again, eat the charcoal again until there's nothing left. That is definitely one of the things I do. Once in a while I have the patience to actually toast those suckers, but in general, not so much. All right, so another thing right over my corner there, 55 and Fabulous. One of my students and friends gave me my little, um, whatever that's called, the sash. There we go, for my birthday. And it's just that thankful thing that I was talking about, like, I really want to be more there in my pile. So what is my purpose for tonight? Well, mental health matters, the 2 out of 3, right? What can you do to make your mental health a little better? Because when you're mental health is a little bit better, then those around you have it a little better as well. So, sorry, laughter is fun. And G-Webs, for those of you who don't know, doesn't believe in 9mm. He doesn't think that's a real round. If it's not.45, it's absolutely nothing and it doesn't count. So It makes me laugh because he's just being funny. Well, he's being serious, but he's— yeah, we're just gonna leave him there anyway. Um, oh yeah, see, that's what I get for laughing. So laughter is good medicine, we know that. Your piles— be aware of your piles. Don't let them get too big. Don't get them overwhelming, regardless whether they're physical or mental. And, um, 9mm, you can have fun with it, and you can have fun with.22 and.380 and.45 because one size never fits all. So there is that. All right, Mr. DJ, I think it's your turn. I think it's your turn. Uh, you can take the pile of folks and, and tell them all thank you for coming and all that fun stuff, and I am gonna go put my little head down and like pass out, I think, and then be super excited tomorrow morning when I wake up. But I get to spend a couple hours with Mr. Ballinger and his friends, and then my other students later on in the afternoon.
Right on, well-deserved rest. Go grab some. Uh, tonight we were joined by Chasing Ghosts. Mike Ballinger is out there, so is SorryFan93. Matthew Isham joined us tonight, so did Jamie J. H586. Guns and Barbecue came into the room, so did Gun Websites, Hidden Hillbilly Up. And speaking of Hillbilly Up, he has a chat coming up half an hour, 40 minutes or so. Drop the link in the chat out there. Go ahead and join him and remember to bring a friend, as I'm sure you will all do next week when we join together here on Saturday evening to talk, to talk about one of the things that really matters— mental health matters. I want to thank everybody for coming out. Be safe, have fun, take care of yourself and your crew, and rawr! We're out.
