Your Pain Is Killing a Future You Never Knew You Had with Justin McRoberts and Scott Erickson

What if the most healing thing you can do in a season of pain isn't to fix it, process it, or even talk about it — but to make something?

Jamie and Blake are joined by two of their favorite people — artist Scott Erickson and musician, poet, and coach Justin McRoberts — for a conversation that goes places none of them planned. These four have been in each other's orbit for a while now, and it shows. What starts as a question about art and the low seasons of life quickly becomes one of the most honest, unexpected, and quietly stunning conversations this show has hosted.

Scott offers a definition of pain that stops the room: most pain is the death of future memories — the slow grief of realizing that the life you quietly expected to have isn't coming. Jamie opens up about being in a low himself right now, triggered by story work around eight years of abuse he's never fully shared, and what it's costing him to look at the mountain of those stories. Justin reframes the entire practice of making things — not as self-expression, but as a way to have a conversation with the parts of yourself you don't yet know how to talk to directly. And Scott, who spent a season this spring genuinely questioning whether he wanted to keep being an artist, closes the episode by inviting Jamie to throw himself the high school party he never got to have.

Bring a casserole to the wake. You'll understand by the end.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Why the practice of making something matters more than what you make

Scott's definition of pain as the death of future memories — and why processing it enlarges you

How art functions as an intermediary — a way to have a conversation with yourself about who you are and who you thought you'd be

Why evil has an agenda and good asks a question, and what that means for what you create in uncertain times

What "faith freely chosen" looks like when the world feels like it's falling apart

How to give hospitality to the wounded parts of yourself through ritual, creativity, and community

Why your artwork — whatever form it takes — is the casserole you bring to the shared wake