Michael Edward is lucky

(because he believes it!)

Whether I just perceive that I'm lucky or I am lucky is kind of irrelevant—because I feel that I am.

- Michael Edward, writer, philosopher, skateboarder, un-pigeonhole-able

What do you get when you cross a philosopher, a skateboarder, a pain survivor, and a platypus? You get Michael Edward and a conversation I didn’t want to end.

At once deeply philosophical and irreverently funny, poetic and profane, grounded in pain yet soaring in authentic curiosity—Michael lives with a kind of radiant tension, and it’s this tension that makes his voice unforgettable.

He writes under the name The Curious Platypus, a totem he chose not only for its uncategorizable nature but because, like him, it doesn’t belong to any one place. A writer, thinker, former tradesman, athlete, recovering addict, and lover of skateboarding and philosophy, Michael resists the neat boxes that so often try to hold a person’s identity still. And in that resistance, he has found a way to stay wildly alive. Whether he's reflecting on chronic pain, existentialism, or his grandfather’s mischievous belief in his luck, there’s always a sense that Michael is mid-transformation—and that we’re lucky to witness it.

What strikes me most is not just his intellect, though it’s sharp, or his gift for storytelling, though it’s rare. It’s his heart. There’s an immense trust in the way he moves through the world, a refusal to look away from suffering—his own or others’—and a capacity to reframe hardship without denying it. Unafraid to lean into vulnerability, he says that during some of his harder moments, “Doing the journaling and doing the therapy and curling into a ball and crying—I wasn't sure if they were exactly going to help, but they felt right. And so it was right.” He’s a young man, but you’d never know it by the way he speaks about healing, or the slow, sacred process of staying curious with life even after it feels like it’s betrayed you.

Spending time with Michael is like sitting around a fire with someone who’s burned down a few old lives and is slowly building something luminous from the ashes. He’s funny, self-aware, open to mystery, and the kind of person who reminds you that maybe there’s no right way to do this life—only your way, the honest way, the whole way. I couldn’t be more honored to share this brilliant young man with you.

TRANSCRIPT:

Kimberly

Welcome Michael. This is really cool to see you here, especially because you are graciously awake at 10.30 at night in Perth, Australia. And I have woken my brain up as much as I possibly can over here in Oregon at 7.30 in the morning. So we are literally spanning the earth right now. So thank you for making this happen.

Michael

Well, thank you. really appreciate you inviting me. And it is funny to be like balancing the time zones. It's a hard thing to make it work. And so I'm glad we could make this happen.

Kimberly

Yeah, I think we couldn't be further apart. I've interviewed people from Melbourne before and I thought, you know, that extra two hours gives us a little bit of grace. But I think Perth is just about as difficult as it possibly could be.

Michael

Yeah, it is. I mean, I'm not sure if it still holds the title, but lots of people say Perth is the most isolated city in the world. The next major city is Adelaide and it's on the basically the east coast of Australia. I don't know exactly what it is. Maybe 4000 kilometers away. And then there's the Indian Ocean, which eventually you would hit Africa. If you go down, it's Antarctica and you'd have to go all the way up to Indonesia. So it's like…

Kimberly

My God, I could spend an hour talking to you about what that does to a city. I mean, growing up in a town like Perth that's that isolated must have its own unique peculiarities because of that isolation.

Michael

There's like a love hate relationship to it in a way, because I love how beautiful it is, the beaches and the sand. But there is a lot of things in which people come from America or bands on tours and they do the East Coast of Australia and they miss West Australia because of the time zone. And few people who have broken out—like Heath Ledger was from Perth—there's not that many people who are from Perth, but they all leave and they go to the East Coast and then they go off to America or England because it’s harder to make a name for yourself here. Now with the internet, it's a lot easier. Perth itself isn't that small of a city. It's not like a country town or anything. It is pretty big. But yeah it's a bit of a weird experience.

Kimberly

Wow. Well, let's get into how some of that shaped you. I want to introduce for those of you that don't know Michael, Michael Edwards, which actually I think is your middle name.

Michael

Yeah, Edwards is my middle name. I'm not going to reveal my last name. I just decided that that would be my sort of writing pseudonym.

Kimberly

Okay. Nope, you don't have to.

Well, you're definitely not somebody that we can neatly categorize. And one of the things I love about you, you're certainly a writer that's tackled chronic pain and addiction, identity issues, loss, creative rebirth. But all of these are just stupid little labels. And as your Substack tells us, which is called The Curious Platypus, you are much more like a platypus. And you even wrote a really great essay about that. Strange, brilliant, unexpected. I love that I never know really what you're going to write about. But that I'm always completely engrossed in those topics. Even horse racing, I'm like, why am I reading about horse racing? And why do I love this story so much?

So I've come to know you as the creator of The Curious Platypus, but also the super brave, sometimes hilarious and beautifully stubborn voice behind The Chronic Pain Series. It's a book that strangely—it was full of heartbreak and full of healing, but it also kind of felt like a campfire story.

You have this strange ability to make your storytelling feel like it's not just something that happened to you, but you want me to feel, to wrestle with it, to laugh at it. And I think that's a real gift of your storytelling. So your curiosity and rebellion and tenderness and grit, all of that is part of this conversation.

Michael

Thank you, I appreciate that.

Kimberly

Welcome, and I want to open by talking a little bit about this platypus. And since you actually recently wrote about it, and it's as a symbol of resisting labels, even though I just gave you some labels there. And this uncategorizable nature of your identity. So can you share a little bit more about why this creature felt like the right totem for your work and how its spirit is sort of the way that you approach your life, not just writing, but also everything.

Michael

There were actually a few reasons why The Curious Platypus ended up as the name for the substack. I sort of always liked platypus, platypi. But yeah, so there's actually a few, the plural can be platypi or platypodes apparently. But so I thought it would be cool if there was a way to imply that I'm Australian with my substack. And so the platypus works for that. There's also, which I'll get into the whole categorizing thing, but before I actually started my substack, I was on it and I was reading people's work and I just kept hearing this mantra that “you have to have a niche,” “you have to have a niche,” you have to have this sort of like—this is what you're going to talk about.

And that just didn't sit well with me because as you already mentioned, I've written about horse racing. I've written about skateboarding. I've written about the universe. I've written about like platypus. I've written about pain. I kind of look at the world and there are things that excite me and interest me and writing is a way for me to explore them and play with them and express them. And I just didn't want to limit it. And so I also thought it would be really cool if I could have a way to imply that without explaining it in a post.

And so if you actually read my about, in my about page on my substack sort of hinted at it because that was another part of the reason because the platypus is just like the perfect animal to defy categories, in that when it was first discovered, they didn't know whether to call it a mammal or a marsupial because it sort of has traits of both. And they ended up calling it a monotreme, which they made a whole new category for this animal, which to me is really funny because it kind of points at the fact that we, there's a way in which kind of we kind of pull these categories out of our ass where we're just like—I'm going to simplify this really complicated world by putting a box on this thing. And I'll know this other creature has come along and it doesn't fit in the box. And so I'm just going to make a new box so that we can now make it neat again.

And it doesn't, like the world is messy. And at the time I had just finished studying philosophy at university and philosophy just sort of breaks down a lot of your concepts about any of the things that you hold blindly and you just assume. And one of them was the arbitrary nature of categories.

And so all of those things coalesced in that I had different ideas for what it could be. And it just felt like the right one. And there was also the fact that I did tell

Evelyn Fox

about it and she just said it sounded really cute and cool. And so like that was just the—

Kimberly

All three of those. And do you have them actually running around your backyard?

Michael

This is, this hurts me Kimberly. This is sad. So like I said, I live in Western Australia. The platypi are only they only inhabit the East Coast of Australia. So they're on, yeah, they're on the other side of Australia for me. So I've never actually seen a platypus in person, like in the wild. It's one of the, it's one of my goals is to go to—I've been to the East Coast, but they have an actual platypus sanctuary because they're an endangered species. There aren't that many of them anymore. Their habits have been breaking down, we’re tearing them down. And so, yeah, they have a sanctuary that I want to go to. And I'd love to get a photo of one and like see the actual animal because they're not as big as— they're kind of confusing. Sometimes they look really big, like a small dog. But really, most of them are only the size of a forearm.

Yeah, they're not that big. And yeah, they're not like what people would think, like kangaroos. They're not they're not all over the place in.

Kimberly

So you definitely have got to see one and write to us about it at some point.

Michael

When I do, it'll be like, I'll probably just change my photo on my substack to me with it, yeah, so it'll definitely happen. That's a major goal.

Kimberly

It really is the perfect animal for you. And I, you know, I only know you through what you've written and a few things that you've shared with me. But what I do know is you're young and you have so much life experience. And these boundaries, these assumptions that we make about human beings, somebody would never be able to put you into a box, knowing all the things that I even, the few things that I know about you. And that's exciting. And I know that those labels, those parts of you are gonna continue to just expand because of this curious mind that you have.

Michael

Another somewhat famous, I don't know if you would know who he is, another famous, he's a writer, a theater person, an actor. He's done a bunch of music. His name's Tim Minchin. He is from Perth, Western Australia, but he's like, you know, known in the world stage. He once said that he has tried his whole life to be un-pigeonholable. Like he doesn't want to be put into a box. And that really resonates with me. And yeah, the platypus just works for that. There have been a few different iterations of my life so far and I liked the idea of there being many more and I don't want to be tied down by or defined by any one of them.

Kimberly

Yeah, absolutely. The Chronic Pain Series revealed a lot to me about you, but there was also a new quality that I discovered. This depth of relationship, the softness that I experienced when you talked about your grandfather in the story, As Sure as Seven Sevens.

In this story, he tricked you into believing that you were lucky, which is just, I mean, this is just so touching. Like what a cool grandpa. I'm gonna start crying. Especially what this did for you, how it helped you believe when you really needed to believe. And I wanna know how did that carrying that sense of luck that he tricked you into believing that you had, how did that work in your favor in your life?

Michael

That's a good question. So. Yeah, my my granddad sort of made me feel lucky in a bunch of different ways, but I talked about how he used to ask me to pick horses. I was a kid and would be at the horse track and he'd go off and supposedly put money on the horse that I picked and then he'd come back and say the horse won and I’dget a share of the winnings, but like I later realized there's no way I picked the horses correctly with that much regularity. And he was sort of just like, yeah, making me feel special and lucky. But the way that I think that has helped me is because I really did believe it. I believed for a long, I mean, I still believe it, but I believed that I was lucky. And there've been a bunch of things that have happened in my life that I consider to be really lucky. I could give examples, but.

I mean, for one or two examples, I was lucky enough to go to a skate—my local skate park was a skate park where there were a few guys who ran a small skateboard company in Perth and I ended up getting sponsored by them. I won some local skateboarding competitions. I've, you know, been picked out of crowds for certain things. I've been lucky in random ways. Like with horse betting. And I actually think because I believed that I was lucky, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The believing that I am just made me luckier than I was or luckier than I otherwise would have been. And I also think that I sort of—

Whether I just perceive that I'm lucky or I am lucky is kind of irrelevant because I feel that I am. And so there have been things that have happened—so this wasn’t in the Chronic Pain Series. This was before it. But when I was still working as a tradesman, I actually broke my right wrist skateboarding and I didn't want to work as a tradesman. I didn't want to work a tradesman at all. I kind of fell into it. It was this thing that happened and yeah, I was not really that happy doing it.

And when I broke my wrist, I had enough time off that I had to think about what I was doing and what I wanted to do. And in that time, I decided that I wasn't going back to the building site and that I was going to go to uni, because I'd always felt like I wanted to. And I didn't go to uni because I'm going to study philosophy and become a philosophy professor. I just wanted to know more about the world and philosophy interested me. And so I left my profession of like 10 years as a tradesman at 29 and decided to go to uni because I broke my wrist. And then because I went to uni, I met Evie at uni. I started writing because of uni. And so breaking my wrist was a really lucky thing. The way I perceive it, you know.

And so there's lots of things like that. I thought of a kind of another good example in that if I hadn't hurt my back and I hadn't written the Chronic Pain Series, I don't know if I'd be having this conversation with you. And I consider myself lucky to be having the conversation with you. And so it's like, the luck is kind of there if you're willing to see it or if you're so yeah, but yeah, I've definitely carried it and it's definitely helped.

Kimberly

Well, it really does. You said that perfectly. And it reminds me of how, for example, when I'm writing an essay for In Defense Of I'll be thinking of an idea, and that whole month I’ll be like, “I'm thinking about longing.” And everything I start to see or everything that comes to me is in that frame then of longing. And so it just goes to show that the world is so much of how we are perceiving it. And sure, there are things outside of our control and we can't experience everything the way we want to see it, but there is an overlay of how we are orienting ourselves. And it sounds like not a lot of people would say a broken wrist and a broken back or chronic pain would be good luck, but it really seems like it shaped you in a way to continue seeking the luck in unlucky situations.

Michael

Yeah, it's sort of as if it helped me still see the silver lining in things that I may not otherwise have seen, or it gave me a different way to frame them. And that doesn't mean that like when I first hurt my wrist or hurt my back, I was like, “Yeah, this is going to be wonderful. Something good is going to come!” I was definitely not happy about it. But over time, it's a good, as you said, with your noticing things when you're writing about a certain essay, you are able to frame the world through—you almost have a filter.

I actually have two things I have to say. I love your In Defense Of series. I just, really enjoy it. It's, it's always so enjoyable to read. I also like the things that you defend or pick too, because some of them wouldn't be things that people feel as though they need defending, but I like that.

Kimberly

Oh! Thank you Michael.

Michael

But yeah, I heard something about luck or not luck, but that noticing things, situations, I can't remember what the name of it is, but there's a part of the brain that will, if you decide that this is the stuff I'm going to focus on, your brain will start to pay attention to those sorts of things. And that's the sort of sciencey way of saying it. I also think there's a way in which if you decide to focus on these things, the hippie spiritual way of saying it, is that the universe sort of like takes you that way. And I'm open to both.

Kimberly

Yeah, absolutely. I straddle both as well, the science and the mystical. I think there's room for both of those since we know very little on this planet anyway.

But it's fascinating to me because, you know, here you write in the Chronic Pain Series, you literally said, “I want to run, I want to hide, I want to escape this agony, but no matter where I go, there seems to be no way out.”

So that's your falling to the very bottom, and that's just one sentence of many, many chapters where you talk about this excruciating pain and the way that it bleeds over to your mental anguish and now, here we are talking about luck, your lucky life. I want to know during those deep, deep dark nights of the soul, was it harder for you to deal with the physical reality of the pain or more of the psychological challenges that it built? Or did that shift for you over time?

Michael

This is pretty easy. This is an easy answer for me in that it was definitely harder mentally for me. I've had pain—so I've broken my ankle skateboarding, I've broken my wrist skateboarding, I've knocked myself out. Working as a tradesman, 12 hour days, I've had pain plenty. And it's not that I enjoy pain or I'm some sort of masochist. It's just I think I've always been somewhat up in my head. And so the uncertainty, the worries, the what ifs, the different like diagnoses from different doctors or specialists, the What does this mean for my future? Am I always going to be like this? Will I be able to work? Will I be able to skate? How is this going to affect my relationships?

I definitely ruminated and spiraled for a large period of it. And so I did say something towards at the end of that pain series to the effect of—my resistance to the whole situation essentially made it much harder than—I mean, I don't think I could have done this either—but made much harder than if I had just been like, There's a sensation of pain right now. Full stop. I'm not going to dissect and figure out and try and solve and fix and plan what that means for the rest of my life. But that would have been a very hard thing to do as well. But yeah, so for me, it was definitely the mental.

Kimberly

That's the same for me. I totally agree. And I find it so fascinating that still to this day right now, I'm dizzy and it's certainly not to the same degree that it was 10, eight years ago but there is a completely different orientation with it and because of that orientation of like, “I don't have to fix this” and “Why the fuck is this happening to me?” It doesn't affect me the same way either. So there is this blending of the physiological and the psychological.

Michael

Yeah. I relate completely to what you said. I still, I still have some pain now. I've actually had a flare up recently. It's kind of funny to call a flare up because it was pretty fucking shit. And I was off work for four months from December to April.

Kimberly

More like a bonfire.

Micheal

It was rough. Yeh yeh, Bonfire is better, but that idea that you said—I still get dizzy, but it doesn't affect me as much or it affects me differently. I heard somebody, I wish I could attribute, but I can't. I heard somebody say that there's a difference between hurt and harm. So once I started to understand that even though there's pain, it’s not harming my body. It's like, let’s say I've broken my arm and the is bone sticking out. And if I move the wrong way, the bone's going to damage the tendons or whatnot. It's just there's pain because—whether it's the discs or the inflammation or it's just the emotional stuff hasn't been resolved. There's pain, but there's not harm. And so I don't have to worry about what it means for the rest of my life, what it means for how I'm going to cope. And because it's happened, it's gone for like four years now. I also know it more intimately and I know, okay, I know what to do to calm it down.

I lay down and I breathe—there's certain pain I need to lay down and I need to actually immobilize and then there's other pain where I need to actually move and exercise. like I'm sitting up in my bed but I'm kind of reclined because it takes a bit of pressure off of my back. Sitting straight up I don't find it very comfortable and I didn't want to do that for an hour or however long this would go for.

But yeah, I totally resonate with the changing of it, like how you actually make the experience.

Kimberly

Yeah, it goes back to what you were saying about luck and it is, I truly believe that for me, when I finally said, “Okay, this is hurt, but not harm.”My brain was able to chill, as long as I was saying, “Oh my God, this is going to change everything in my life and why can't I do this? And I need to fix it. I need it to go away!” My brain was basically, because it's designed to do this, saying, “Shit, she's in danger. She's in danger. So we better focus entirely on this and release all the arsenals that I have in order to protect her from this so she's going to become hypervigilant.”And it's just the brain doing what it's meant to do as long as we're telling it that something is a really big fat problem. But if we're like, “Oh here's the pain again, or here's the dizziness again,” it goes, “Looks like it's not such a big deal, so I guess I'll focus on something else.”

Michael

Yeah, I've heard other people say that and I have the same experience in that, you throw your back out and then you're scared to bend forward. You're scared to bend over. You're scared to sit down. You're scared to do a bunch of things. And then the fear of, “Oh God, I have to sit for an hour or I have to bend down” makes you tense. Your brain is tense and then your muscles tense up and then you sit and it grabs and it didn't grab. It didn't actually grab because there's an issue with bending forward. It grabbed because you're freaking yourself out and you're telling your body to grab before it's—

I don't know, maybe some doctors would say I did grab because bent forward, but for me, it's definitely felt as though it was the latter.

Kimberly

There's a huge trajectory here and you talk about this so beautifully in your book. I know you saw everybody just like I did: physiotherapists, chiropractors, the psychics, the same thing. And all of that often contributes just to more of that spinning. So how did you get to that place of trusting yourself again? To the sort of the grounded center where you were like, “Yeah, okay, this is pain, and yet what else is happening here? Pain/And. How did you get to that place?

Michael

I'd like to say I did it gracefully, but I think really I did it kicking and screaming and trying to look for like every bit of logic and reason and understanding I could find. And eventually when so many different doctors or specialists or physios or whoever told me conflicting information, it's like, well, they can't all be right. And so I don't know who to trust.

And I've tried this thing and I've tried that thing and none of them seem to work. And I haven't tried them for a week. Like I've really committed to trying these things and they haven't seemed to work. And so I got to that place of trusting myself because I felt like I'd exhausted all options. And the only option left was to do what felt right for me. And I didn't always know what felt right for me, but what felt right for me essentially was—the people who I was seeking help from, it was words that they said, or what you just said a second ago about the way your orientation changes. People would say something and it aligned with my experience. And I'm like, this feels right. This feels like where I'm, where I need to go.

And so, yeah, I mean, it was basically because I exhausted all options and I felt like, well, now I have it thrown back on me.

Kimberly

Yeah, yeah, it's I totally relate. In a way, it's lucky, it's lucky that none of them were able to help you.

Michael

It is! There's also this thing of looking outside of yourself for the help, always. And there's a point where, well, Maybe I need to help me, you know, but that's just not the, I don't expect myself or most people for that to be the initial reaction. You have to stumble your way there.

Kimberly

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You also described too, one of the things that you ended up doing was just curling up in fetal position and crying. I mean, some of those descriptions and the way that you went there were so powerful and so true to the not needing to know, but just the allowing of the feeling and going there and the trust that you had in that part of the process was pretty tremendous. Yeah.

Michael

Yeah, well that goes to the same thing as I said, I got to this point where I didn't really know what else to do. I was still doing the exercises and I had decided I wasn't getting surgery at that point and so doing the journaling and doing the therapy and crying in a ball or curling into a ball and crying—I wasn't sure if they're exactly going to help or not, but they felt right. And so it was the same thing. I didn't think they could hurt as well. Like they weren't going to harm me. And, I don't think it's like a radical idea to think that if you feel better mentally, you're to feel better physically. And so it felt like the right thing to do. And there was a point where I also realized that I am causing myself a lot of this suffering with my mind and the way I'm handling it. And I'm not saying I should have handled it better, but it's just like, “Is there, is there a different way I can meet this? And is it possible that I can go in and find a way out?” And like in going in, I found a whole bunch of like tears and things to cry about. But that was, I guess that was the way through.

Kimberly

Yeah, I love how you just said that. And isn't it interesting that going in, which sounds “Oh painful!” but you still said that that was what felt right. Isn't it interesting that going towards the pain can sometimes be what feels the most right?

Michael

Yeah, that yeah, it's so strange because you resist it and you resist it and you resist it and then eventually you’re like, “Well, I'm causing myself more suffering and resisting and so if I don't resist it and I open myself up to it…” You have to exhaust all other options first and then you open yourself up and you're like, “Well, now that I'm actually open to it there's almost a space or a lightness that wasn't there before and that's super helpful. Did you have that?

Kimberly

Yeah, absolutely. But for me, it came not through crying. Any sort of emotional—I had to sort of flatline myself because anything in the extreme, whether it was too much excitement or too much sadness, would just make the dizziness so freaking bad. There's a vestibular migraine component to Mal de Debarquement, and so when you get any kind of inflammation up here it just sends the nerves into chaos. So for me I got into needle felting and it was this craft that focused me and calmed me and allowing these shapes that I was crafting to express what I was unable to express myself was part of what I was doing.

And even my first, you know what, Michael, I'm just realizing—it's sitting over there—my very first needle felted creature was in a fetal position. And I needed that. That was like, oh no, I'm going to cry again, but I needed that position. I needed to feel like I was completely safe again. And something about that fetal position was the most safe for me.

Michael

Yeah, I have to say two things that are super interesting. First thing was that when I actually cried, the pain was really bad, worse than just normal. And so like I would cry and I would wail and it would almost like the pain would almost yell or flare up. I would feel it surge around. And that was just like I was very curious and interested about that. That was super strange. And so it made me really feel as though they're connected in this way that I hadn't realized before.

And so then that made me go deeper into that, OK, let's keep crying. Let's let's go really into this, because it didn't feel as I was going to hurt myself. It just felt as though the pain and the tears and emotions were all connected.

When I said it felt like the right thing to do, definitely felt like the right thing to do after that, because I'm putting all of that together because I would get up eventually after the crying session and I'll feel a little lighter. And there's a probably the way in which you felt while you was doing the felting, you sort of dropped the worrying. You felt a little lighter and then you begin normal life again and you kind of pick it back up.

And the second thing that I wanted to say is that there's a lot of things I realize now that I didn't add to that chronic pain series that I wish I did. And I think maybe one day, like I will actually try and write a much larger, extensive thing that goes more into addiction and other stuff. But one of the things that really helped me in that time was I did a whole bunch of drawing. I wouldn't call myself like an artist, but I like to draw. I did cartooning and stuff when I was a kid. I've done a lot of drawing and in the same way that your first felted creature was in the fetal position. I kept drawing essentially the same picture. There was always a central image— and the central image could have been an animal, it could have been a platypus or a lion or whatever, there was an animal or some central image and that was always black and white—and then there was always patterns behind it. And all the patterns were vibrantly coloured. And I actually read it in, I think it was Stephen King's book. He mentioned that he would draw these themes—I don’t know I made the connection somehow—but something I was showing the world this black and white version of me. And there was all this colour that I didn't want to show because there's this sensitive side and this weird philosopher platypus side. But that was there behind, and my unconscious was trying to let me know that somehow. Because I have like 20 images and they're all black and white central and then color at the back, and then eventually I kind of caught onto that as well. And that became another thing.

I didn't really do it consciously, but I drew an image where there was color at the front, things like that. But yeah, that was something I realized later that should have been in my pain series.

Kimberly

So I used to volunteer at a bereavement center for kids and young adults that have lost parents and siblings and all of that. This wasn’t a kid that was in my group, but they always told the story. They have lots of arts and crafts and rooms and stuff for these kids to explore their emotions, especially the younger ones that don't like to sit in talk circles and all that.

One kid, his dad had been murdered. And he was like, I think four or five years old. And every time he showed up, he would just go into the room with the paint and he would take the black paint and he would do whatever, squiggles and all that stuff all over the walls. And for a full year, that was the only color that he wanted, just black, black, black, black, black. After a year, one day he walked in that same room—he never verbalized any of what he was experiencing or anything—he walked in, he asked for the whole thing of paint and he just splashed rainbows all over those walls. And I'm like, come on, man. I mean, what a testament to time and to the intelligence of what's coming from within. And it knows, and art is such a great way for us to get out of our way and go, yeah, I'm just going to do this right now. And outside of here, can be all these colors and when it's time, they're going to come in.

Michael

Yeah, it's amazing how art almost gives you a window into yourself in a way that you don't even realize. You think you're just making a picture or writing a story. The story about my granddad, I read that out to my mom. She doesn't read my stack or anything. But I read it out to my mom. And when I read it to her, I kind of teared up. And it's just interesting how art pull things out of us that we didn't even know were in there. And in a time of distress or when you're trying to heal or figure things out, I think it can be super helpful. I know that there are things like art therapy for that reason. But again, I didn't do it for that reason. I did it probably for the same reason you did. And it was like, it was just a distraction in that it helped you not ruminate and worry and think about things, which is wonderful in and of itself.

But the fact that it like reveals things to you, the intelligence is always there telling you stuff if you are paying attention and willing to hear it.

Kimberly

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, it's always in hindsight for me. I think some people have that ability to have oversight and they're able to analyze while they're doing it. But for me, it's always after, sometimes years later, the insights don't come right away. And I like it that way because I, my brain otherwise would just get too involved and that's stupid.

Michael

Yeah, it's always after for me as well. There was a, I hate to do this, but so there's a philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, and he said that “Life is understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards.” And that resonates.

Kimberly

Yeah, on our deathbeds, we'll understand it all Michael. So even the Chronic Pain Series, are you saying, you wrote largely from this intuitive place, even though there was so much insight in there? Where were you with the pain when you were writing it?

Michael

So essentially I had the major issue with my chronic pain ordeal in like 2000, 2021. That was the worst of it. And then I wrote it in the middle of 2024. 2022, 2023, there was pain, but it wasn't that bad. I was skateboarding. I was driving. Everything was pretty good.

I shit you not. The week that I posted the last piece of the pain series is when I had this flare up that has made—and the pain that I've had since I posted it in like December or whatever it was until now—has been as bad as it was in 2020. And I've been off work and all of that sort of stuff, but I've been, yeah, like managing it in different ways, but like, obviously it's a lot different now because I know a lot more. I'm able to handle it in different ways. And one of the biggest differences is, I just sort of met Evie then, but now like Evie is my partner and I live with her and she has just been so freaking amazing and helped so much that I don't really know how I got through it the first time without her. Somehow I did obviously, but this time she's just made it so much easier. So yeah, that was the timeline, but yeah, I wrote it when I was actually in a pretty good spot. And by the end of it, I was not as good of a spot.

Kimberly

So your psyche's like, okay, Now let's test it again after you've had all this wonderful insight.

Michael

Yeah, I mean, this recent flare up there were a lot of the same lessons. Funnily enough I think the first line I wrote, in the pain series was like, “You should never help someone out on the weekend.” And I agreed to help out someone and do a job on the weekend. And after that my back bothered me again. And so I'm never fucking helping anyone out on the weekend ever again.

But I made a lot of the same mistakes. I started asking everybody seeking help outside myself. Maybe this time I just need to get an injection. It was different. There was some like sciatica pain this time, which I hadn't had last time. And so that worried me because it was going down. Sciatica is when it goes down your leg, pain from the nerve. Yeah. And that worried me because it never happened before. But a lot of the same lessons. And I was like, I thought I learned this! But no, You've got to keep going deeper and you've got to keep it up. This isn't this thing that you just—this is new way of being. You don't just learn and then get over it then just ignore it get back to life. I have a bit of a, not a bit of a—I'm kind of a go go go. I'm very driven and sort of conscientious and “I'm gonna ride and we're gonna save money. We're gonna do this thing.” I used to be like, “I'm gonna get drugs. I'm gonna get alcohol. I'm gonna gamble”— like it didn't matter what it was. I was gonna do shit and my body is like, “I need you to learn how to just relax, like draw, do some coloring in, go for a swim, just even speak slower, just, just relax a bit.” And that's a that's a lesson I seem to be constantly learning.

Kimberly

My question was about What was this pain saying to you? Or if you could sit across from the pain that you're now experiencing again, what would you say to it? And then what is it saying back to you? But you might've just answered that.

Michael

I guess I have two answers. First, I’d just tell it to leave me the fuck alone, please, you know. But on a on a more serious level. I would thank it because it's driven me deeper into myself, it's helped me understand things that I wouldn't have. I don't think I would have investigated my past and trudged up these emotions and tried to understand myself. I don't think I'd be, I don't think I'd be having this conversation with you expressing myself authentically about why I love like platypuses and that I used color, I'd be a lot more closed off and walled off and wondering what people are going to think of me or what expectations. It's helped me flourish a lot internally or spiritually or mentally, but as far as in the real world physically it's, it's limited my ability to do certain things or skate as much. I have a love hate relationship to it, it feels to me that what it's always telling me is to be patient, to slow down, cause a part of the reason I'm always pushing myself is cause I definitely have had feelings of not being good enough and needing approval. And so I'm pushing to do more and be better. And it's like, “Slow down, calm down, relax. You're enough. Everything's okay. You're safe.” And I also think that it would sort of just say to me, “You're welcome. You needed that.” And it would kind of be a little cocky. And I would be like, “Yeah, well, you know.”

Yeah. So yeah, it's a weird, it's a weird relationship, isn't it?

Kimberly

Yeah, yeah, but wow. I mean, you reminded me when you just shared that, a little bit of Dylan's story that you've watched some of his stuff around with the ALS. He's, you know, gotten also to this point of just saying thank you to this extraordinarily debilitating disease and the way that that shapes us is everlasting and you you and I both will go through periods of our lives where we'll feel more pain, more dizziness, more, and we'll have our relationship with that. But I think as we continue on and kind of hold hands with it and say, “All right, what is it this time?” And it doesn't mean we can't be human and go, “God damn it, go away.” But it really does change how we relate to it as a guide in a way. We talk about like guardian angels. Well, what if our pain is a form of a guardian angel?

Michael

Yeah. That’s what I really love about your work with Unfixed. I don't have to be fixed in the traditional sense of things to live a happy fulfilled life. And I also don't even know now that if I had the—I don't know, it's so hard. I go back and forth with this all the time, but I don't know now that if I had the option to just never have this pain and to have just carried on the way it was, if I would choose that.

Because I don't know who I'd be or where I'd be. And I'm happy with where I am. And I want to go down this road. And like you said, “Why can't suffering be something that guides you? Why does it have to be bliss and rainbows?” And it's also, Evie said something the other day, she's always saying profound things. But she said, “You were never guaranteed some pain free, comfortable life. That was never a signing up for that. You know, you're not guaranteed tomorrow. And so you know, people like like Dylan’s stories, people who just say yes to it no matter what, it's so moving. There’s like an enlightenment almost to that approach.

I don't think you could get there if you weren't pushed. I mean, I don't know, maybe somebody, but, so it's kind of like, that's why I'm lucky. I'm thankful for it. It's a positive thing if I choose to frame it that way. And that is a legitimate way that I can frame it.

Kimberly

You have such a philosophical mind too. You’re very, very bright, very intelligent and deeply like penetrating. And I have a sense that this journey is asking you, this companion is always asking you to nurture that part of yourself. Cause you're obviously also very athletic and you could just be out there doing your thing and join the Jackass crew and never really have to go deeper. But it's almost like this pain is going, you know, “There's something else here. I want the whole Michael. And that's going to involve these deeply philosophical aspects of you.” That's how I perceive you.

Michael

Thank you. I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, I was drawn to philosophy for a reason. What it was at university wasn't exactly what I was looking for. That was a bit more like academic, like analytical than I guess I'm looking for more of a how to live, what's the right way and what's the correct deeper way. Well, it's not correct, but like what's right for me. So the ideas and philosophy that did resonate with me was existentialism, which I don't know how much you know about that, but is essentially like the simplest explanation is the—existentialists say that there isn't an inherent meaning to life. You have to find and make your own meaning. I was like, that's what I've been trying to do since I was like seven and I just didn't realize it. And I've done it with skateboarding and I heard something about people who become addicts. It's not just that they're falling for some substance. It's that they're in a meaning crisis. They are lacking that and whatever they use is the thing that fulfills it or at least pseudo fulfills it.

Kimberly

Yeah, the way my husband describes it is, “existence precedes essence.” And a lot of the religions say essence precedes existence, but it's like you said, we make our meaning. And there's something incredibly freeing about that.

Michael

Freeing and terrifying because now I have to do it. Now I have to figure this out. But yeah, both of them wonderfully. Yeah.

Kimberly

Yeah. Yeah.

Oh boy. Michael, I want to ask. So we've covered so much ground and there's this returning to pain as you just experienced that, you you wrote about it, then you were sort of free of it, then you're returning to it. You've talked about a little bit about the addiction and this creative rebirth that happened through some of the dark night of the soul.

After everything you've been through, has this definition of healing changed for you? Healing is such a wonderful and awful word at the same time. So what does healing look like to you now and how is that shaping you as you move forward?

Michael

I definitely think it's important to focus on the “ing” part of it, like healing as opposed to healed. I think it's a constant, it's a constant thing and I think part of where I slipped up with this recent flare up is that I felt like I was over it and I could get back to being busy and pushing. Yeah, healing is—I know in myself in a way that's hard to describe that there's still more to do and that I have to figure out and that I have to understand and that I know there's a more authentic me that needs to be expressed that hasn't let himself express, I haven't let myself express yet. And I try to do that. And a part of my healing is allowing that little seven year old kid who—I haven't already said, but I learned to be a chameleon. I could blend in and fit in and say what needed to be said to get by or to not be bullied or to appease my parents or whatever needed to be done—but it wasn't what I felt and what I believed and what was true to me.

And so a lot of that, I think added to or exacerbated the emotional things that led to the tension and led to me pushing too hard and, because I can chameleon really well and get approval, but all of that has to go away so that I can let my true—whatever that is—my true self out. That's where the healing is for me. It's not really even a physical thing because I'm going to heal myself physically until my body dies. So what I need is to heal my soul so I can go wherever it goes next with more I don't know peace or solace or whatever it needed to do and learn here. So yeah my idea of healing at the first was like “I want to fix my body” and after this whole experience it feels like “I want to heal my whole being.”

Kimberly

Yeah, wow. And you've written about that, you are in the process of that. And it's almost like healing becomes instead of this endpoint, it's just a discovery. It's the title of your substack, it's the curious platypus, it's the discovery, but also the constant pushing of boundaries. And it seems boundaries are endless. And man, I'm excited to see all the different ways that you're able to express that and share that with the world because it's—I already knew you were special by reading you—but talking to you today, wow, there is a really deep thinker in there. So what an honor.

Michael

Well, thank you. I really appreciate that. That's so lovely. And I have to say, I said before, I love your work. The amount of times I read something that you've written, I was like, “My God, she just said it like so perfectly. I wish I had—that's exactly how I experienced that. That's how I felt that.” And it's resonated with me so much. And I really appreciate that I was able to like have the conversation with you.

There's a reverence—there's a few people on substack—so like you definitely have it,

Holly Starley

,

Chloe Hope

. There's a few people like you guys have this reverence for life in that you're open to it and you appreciate it you're in awe of it in this way that I marvel at, and I don't know if it comes with age but you are inspiring to me in your authenticity and your boldness to say it and feel it and live it in a way that feels so authentic. And I really appreciate that.

Kimberly

Thank you. Wow. What amazing company. Holly and Chloe, my two favorite people.

Michael

Yeah, they're lovely.

Michael, this was just incredible. Thank you so much for being here and I hope you get a good night's sleep.

Thank you.