This is the last conversation of my first season, and I almost didn’t finish it.

Chris Schembra came to me the way the best guests do, as a name pressed into my hand by someone I trust. Aliza Kline told me I needed to talk to him, and Aliza is rarely wrong about people. What I didn’t expect was how quickly the conversation would stop being about him.

On paper, Chris is the gratitude guy: the 7:47 dinners, the pasta, the rooms full of leaders he teaches to thank the people they have forgotten to thank. I’m fascinated by the keynote version. And I wanted to talk to the kid underneath it, the one who couldn’t hold onto his own memories, who got marched into the isolation room, who learned early that loss arrives whether or not anyone gives you permission to grieve it. We went there together, and Chris went willingly, all the way down to the tattoos and the rehabs and the version of himself he is still learning to forgive.

And then, somewhere near the end, he did the thing he does to everyone else. He turned the question on me. He asked what was coming up, and I told him about a lost friend, and from there the conversation belonged to both of us.

I sat on this recording for months because I was afraid of that stretch. I am not afraid of it anymore. If you have ever wondered what gratitude actually costs, and what it gives back, this is the one. It lands on a single word, the one Chris wants on his headstone. It’s a good one, and a reminder of what a blessing it is to be alive.

This is the season one finale, finally. I’ll see you back here for more soon.

Links & Notes

• Chris Schembra
• The 7:47 Gratitude Experience / 7:47 Club
• Podcast, Gratitude Through Hard Times
• Books: Gratitude Through Hard Times and Gratitude and Pasta
• The Anatomy of Peace, The Arbinger Institute
• Johann Hari TED talk, “Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong”
• Tony Lo Bianco and his one-man Fiorello LaGuardia play, “The Little Flower”
• “Just a Common Soldier (A Soldier Died Today),” poem by A. Lawrence Vaincourt (basis for the Memorial Day 2015 veterans video Chris produced with Lo Bianco)
• Dr. Edward “Ned” Hallowell, ADHD author
• Curb Your Enthusiasm, “Bad Middling”

Sometimes at fifteen, sometimes much later, we finally stop running from ourselves. We sit down and ask the quiet but impossible question: Who do I want to be?

This conversation begins with a name. I first knew him as Michael — the professional veneer that felt safe, pronounceable, uncontroversial. But today he is Nachi, reclaiming the Hebrew name that always held the truer story of identity. That shift, simple on the surface, opens a portal into something tender and universal: how identity is shaped not by the roles we play, but by the courage to show who we really are.

Faith plays a profound role in that evolution. Nachi talks about Judaism not as dogma, but as structure, clarity, and purpose — a lens that helps him understand endings without fear and see value in existence itself. He points out that death, in his tradition, gives life its shape, its urgency, its meaning. Mortality becomes not the enemy but the clarifier.

We talk about rage, comfort, goodness, the pursuit of happiness versus the pursuit of pleasure, and the strange wisdom of a terminally ill teenager named Jonathan who taught Nachi how to be happy. We explore the liminal space between clarity and acceptance — how seeing ourselves honestly requires surrender to the things we cannot control, and gentleness toward the things we can.

This episode is about identity, yes. It’s about faith and behavior and clarity and death. But more than anything, it’s about permission: the permission to evolve, to reclaim ourselves, to choose again and again and again who we are becoming.

This is Headstone with Dr. Nachi Felt.

Some people study chaos because they have to. Others because they can’t look away.

James Ochoa has spent his life inside both camps—born into a noisy, loving, impossibly crowded family, raised amid the unpredictable rhythms of mental illness and grace, and shaped by a series of accidents and near misses that could have ended him. Instead, they gave him a reason to begin again.

For more than three decades, James has been a counselor, teacher, and writer—founder of The Life Empowerment Center in Austin, Texas—helping adults with ADHD navigate the emotional turbulence of their minds. His first book, Focused Forward: Navigating the Storms of Adult ADHD, reframed ADHD as more than a matter of focus and distraction. It was, he argued, a lifelong relationship with uncertainty—an emotional weather system that required compassion as much as strategy.

Now, as he works on his forthcoming book, When the Shiny Wears Off: Navigating the Lifetime Storms of Adult ADHD, James has turned his attention to what comes after the breakthrough. How do you sustain meaning once the novelty of self-discovery fades? What does peace look like for a person whose entire life has been about motion?

Our conversation isn’t about diagnoses or treatments. It’s about the quiet courage of someone who’s spent a lifetime learning not just how to endure the storms of life, but how to find wonder inside them. From the bathtub sanctuary of his childhood to the long, slow work of recovery, James’s story is one of transformation through reflection—proof that even the noisiest lives can contain a deep stillness at their core.

When he talks about mortality, it isn’t abstract. He remembers the hospital bed at four years old, the blue light above him, and the promise he made then: I’m here for a reason. Decades later, he’s still living out that reason—helping others hold on through their own tempests long enough to find meaning in the calm that follows.