This is the first-ever bonus episode of Captn OffScript. And it’s not really an interview. It’s two people, both at different ends of Europe, both with similar stories that neither of them has talked about much in public, finding out in real time that the other one understood.

When CJ Cawley and I sat down to record the main S02/E32 episode, we covered the things you’d expect: the clone, the parody video, the wedding, the McDonald’s theory of AI, his podcast Sticky Notes. But somewhere around the hour mark, the conversation took a turn I wasn’t expecting, and neither was he. I asked him about his family. He went somewhere personal. I went there with him. And what we ended up with was a stretch of conversation that didn’t belong in the main episode and didn’t deserve to be cut either.

So we held it back. It went to newsletter subscribers first as a private YouTube link, and a week later it became public on YouTube and arrived across all the podcast platforms. This is the page that lives here for it.

The script you’re given as a kid

CJ grew up on a council estate in London. He’s careful with the word abuse but he uses it. He talks about a household where good things didn’t happen, only bad ones, and where blood is family was the line he kept being told. He left home at 16. He lived above a pub. He lived inside a hotel where he was working. He looked after himself from a very young age, and he grew up too fast.

He calls what his parents handed him a script. The script said: we don’t get to do anything, we’re cursed, this is the way things are. He believed it for twenty-seven years. He says that the script changed only when his partner, and one of his best friends, looked at him and said the story doesn’t have to stay the same.

I told him my script wasn’t all that different. I grew up in Bosnia, with my own version of the same things. I have a relationship with my mum that I’m grateful for. Outside of her, the rest of the family is almost non-existent. My husband’s family has become my family, and I’m closer to them than to most of the people I share blood with.

Neither of us said any of this lightly. Neither of us went into any more detail than we needed to. The point of the bonus episode is not the specifics of what happened. The point is what came after.

“Maybe I just had to”

The thing CJ said that I keep returning to is this: he’s found a kind of peace in accepting that maybe he just had to. He doesn’t ruminate on shoulda-coulda-woulda anymore because it’s torture. He doesn’t pretend it was good. He just acknowledges that the version of him sitting in his own studio, welcoming brands from around the world, marrying his partner this weekend, vlogging his life — that version exists because of, not in spite of, the version that was sleeping on his boss’s floor with everything he owned in a brown kangle bag.

We both said it, almost at the same time: we wouldn’t change it. Not because it was good. But because if we changed any of it, we wouldn’t be us.

That’s not a tidy lesson. It’s not a wellness reframe. It’s just what you arrive at after enough years of working with what you were handed instead of fighting it.

Cutting ties

Two or three years ago, after years of trying, CJ cut ties with his family completely. He talks about how long he held on, how much he wanted to make it work, how much his partner supported the trying — until the day she looked at him and said I think you need to cut ties now. He says that when she said it, he knew.

He still has a relationship with his brother. He’s careful about how he describes it. They share the same experiences but the relationship is, in his own words, based on past trauma, which isn’t an ideal foundation. They’re working on it.

I didn’t go as far as cutting ties. I don’t think either of us thinks one version is the right version. There isn’t a right version. What there is, is the version that lets you stay alive in the way you need to.

Finding home

CJ now lives in a small seaside town in Somerset that, by his own description, would sound like hell to most people in their twenties or thirties. There’s nothing around. He says he’s the scariest thing on the street at three in the morning, which is a way of saying he’s safe.

I now live in Madrid. I’ve travelled all over Europe and never felt at home anywhere the way I do here. Three and a half million people, and I’ve never been afraid walking home at four in the morning. CJ pointed out, gently, that if you don’t have a stable home to begin with, you’re always searching for one. So when you find it, you know.

That was the closest the conversation came to a thesis. Both of us, in completely different parts of Europe, having found a kind of home neither of us was supposed to find, married or about-to-be-married to people who saw the good part of us first.

Why this is a bonus, not a main episode

A few reasons.

It deserves a quieter audience. The main episode is loud and bright and full of stories about cloned websites and surf simulators at weddings. This part of the conversation needed a different room.

I also wanted the first bonus episode of Captn OffScript to be worth the subscribe. If you’re on the newsletter list, you’re someone who chose to be in the room. That feels like the right audience for this.

And honestly, we didn’t plan it. It wasn’t a topic we agreed to cover. It came out of the conversation organically, and the right thing to do with material like that is to hold it gently, not load it onto the main feed where someone might press play on it from a stranger’s recommendation.

If this conversation is one you needed to hear, I hope it does for you what it did for us when we were having it.

— Alen