TRANSCRIPT
What does it mean to have an adventure? Having an adventure is heading into the unknown, going somewhere in the world that you don’t know, that isn’t familiar, that probably is scary. I think inevitably it’s scary. It’s like, it’s not an easy thing to do to explore something that’s beyond the realm of one’s own experience.
I think an examined life, by definition, is an adventure. An examined life that looks within, into the unknown, and looks outside of us, into the unknown, is an adventure. And that’s what I would say are the two parts of an adventure: exploring the unknown outside of us, out in the world, and exploring the unknown inside of us, that inner adventure.
Well, I’ve heard people say, because I take a lot of quote adventures now, out into the world, travel a lot, go on wild places, heading into Central Africa and Central Asia, and hitchhiking all over in wild places, and camping out in the jungles and things like that. People say, “Oh, but it takes so much money.” Well, actually, ironically, it doesn’t take so much money. A lot of times, the real adventures, the real ones heading into the unknown, sometimes they’re the cheapest of all. Sometimes they cost nothing financially. Cost nothing, that is, as long as I can face my fears and be with my fears and go for it.
Sometimes it’s really the cheapest, bringing just a little bit of food, bringing some water, maybe even just some water purification tablets, and doing a lot of walking far from people, often way off beyond into the land of animals and plants and birds singing at night and bats flying overhead and crabs running around. Who knows? But people say, “Oh, it’s so expensive and so difficult.” Well, although I could argue it really isn’t, I think of my time, well, between the ages of 23 and 38 when I lived in New York City. Ten and a half of those years, I was a psychotherapist. A few of them before I wasn’t a psychotherapist, but I never left New York. Maybe once I left, twice I left New York City for a short time. Never left the United States at all. Had almost absolutely no external adventures, but it was a time for me to go within. And that, that was the biggest and most profound adventure. That was the adventure that brought me to myself, that brought me right into the heart of my traumas.
All the things that had happened to me as a child brought me into all those unknown feelings that my family system, in its sickness, in its denial, in its self-protection, had never allowed me to feel or know. That’s why I was traumatized. All those rotten things my parents did to me, my extended family system did to me, school did to me, society. And I had to push it all down and bury it in order to look normal, to seem normal, to be normal, to feel normal. I hated the idea of being different when I was young. I remember, especially as a teenager, I just wanted to be like everyone else. I wanted to fit in and be normal. I remember even saying to myself, “I don’t have problems,” and deep down I know that I’m a normal person.
Well, guess what? I had a lot of problems. And guess what? I actually wasn’t normal. Not normal. I think in some ways I was really exceptional. I had the roots of being exceptional. I think I was also very hurt and very screwed up in a lot of ways. Perhaps that is normal, to be hurt and screwed up and in denial of it. Maybe I was more normal in that way than I realized. But I think I’d figured it out. I had figured it out by my early 20s that if I don’t head into the unknown of my psyche—and I hadn’t even really been interested in psychology. I’d taken one psychology class in college and hated it—all this rats and pigeons and defense mechanisms and these stupid boring professors who I didn’t respect, and talking about all this weird stuff and theories and neurochemistry, all this. And it’s like, wait, I figured it out by my early 20s after college. I need to go within. I need to study myself. I need to study my psyche. I need to study my behavior. I need to make sense of my history. I need to put together the pieces of what has happened to me. I need to put together the pieces of why I feel so unmowed, so lost, so unhappy, so disconnected. What’s wrong with me and what is right with me? ‘Cause some part of me also, there was a little bell, and I think that gave me the confidence to go on the adventure into the unknown inside of me.
In here and in here, with some part of me that said there is something right about you. And exploring the truth of what happened to you, the truth of what they did to you, and the truth of who you became and what you expressed as a result of what they did to you. This is what you need to do. This is fundamentally self-loving, and it’s terrifying. At first, I was still kind of ignorant. I still thought my mom loved me. I still thought my dad loved me. I was disavowed of that fantasy when I started sharing about, well, sharing the result of my self-exploratory process. I realized it threatened the hell out of them, and rightly so, because what I was really saying subliminally—I didn’t know it at the time, but what I realize now for many decades of perspective—as I was saying to my parents, “You need to explore yourselves also. You need to find out who you really are.” And I think deep down I was hoping they would, so that they would grow and mature and process all their unresolved traumas from their childhoods and then love me.
Well, guess what? Surprise, surprise, they didn’t. And I think it’s because whatever was exceptional in me, that driving, motivating force to exhume the truth within me, the ugly, painful, bitter, sad, and awful truth was, well, that motivation was not within my parents or anyone in my family system. They all eventually, the further I got on my adventure into this unknown, the more I knew, the more dangerous I became. The more that they circled the wagons, battened the hatches, took out their weapons, and showed me how they really felt about me exploring this forbidden unknown. I had crossed the fence into dangerous, dangerous locked-away territory. And yet I couldn’t go back. I heard someone say it long ago, 25, 30 years ago. They said once the cat comes out of the bag, she’s not going back in. And all the claws come out, that cat won’t go back.
Well, that was true of my true self, because the more I explored the unknown, went into this adventure of who I really was inside, the more there was no way I could go back into denial. And I still wanted to, because deep down some part of me still wanted my parents to love me, wanted them to see me and acknowledge me, which was fair and just. That was their responsibility for having created me long, long ago. That was their responsibility to love the little baby I was, the beautiful little boy I was. But they didn’t. They couldn’t. They were too screwed up and lost, and they really didn’t create me to love me. They created me to love them. They created me to use me, to project onto me, to live through me in different ways, to abuse me. It felt good in some ways to have someone powerless and under their control and ownership, even to take advantage of that could make them feel strong by comparison. They couldn’t get away with that with a lot of other people. They couldn’t even get away with that with each other. It’s hard to get away with abusing consenting adults who are mature and have rights. You can abuse your own children in all sorts of different ways in our society, in all societies of the world.
Well then, I think about the external adventures I took starting when I was 20. I went out to Wyoming and Idaho and Montana, and I was hitchhiking around and meeting all sorts of odd and interesting and wonderful people and camping out in the forest and watching herds of buffalo go by me, bison, as I hid behind a tree. And then the next year, traveling to Australia and hitchhiking all around there and having wild experiences with…
All sorts of people and animals and crocodiles and Australian Aboriginal and all sorts of different things. And then the next year, going to Europe and taking all my savings from all the work that I’d done, all that money that I’d squirreled away, and hitching all around Europe and taking the Trans Siberian Railway to China from Russia and da da da da and all this.
I remember talking about it with my parents and that adventure. They were proud of it. They loved it. My dad bragged to all his friends, “My son studied Mandarin in college and took the Trans Siberian Railway,” blah blah blah blah blah blah. And that’s something I found interesting. People often brag about their external adventures in the world. It doesn’t really threaten anyone. Yes, I did some of it myself in my early 20s, sort of feeling very proud of myself. Sort of gave me an identity. I held the identity of traveler. This is going back 30 years ago, and it seemed like my parents loved me more for it. My dad was proud and told all his friends.
But it wasn’t the same when I went within, took that adventure. I think some of my external journeying, yes, terrifying. Terrifying to go to Russia. Everybody told me, “You’re going to get robbed. You’re going to die. This is just post-Soviet Russia,” and blah blah blah. “People are going to rob you blind. And I had a guitar. They’re going to steal your guitar.” And China, who knows what’s going to happen? “You might die there.” And my mom was a nurse. “Oh, you could get Hepatitis and this and this and this and rabies and meningitis.” And you know, culturally, I was terrified. But it was scary. But when I got there, nothing bad happened. Kind people everywhere.
A lot of what I learned about external adventures is the fears beforehand are much worse than the reality. But it wasn’t the same when I went inside and really started exploring my psyche and my history. Sometimes I went into exploring my psyche with a lot of passion and joy, but it was afterward or during. That’s when it got really scary, where I was like, “This is confusing. This isn’t like sitting on the Trans Siberian Railway and being around nice people, kind people who want to help me and share with me.” This is painful. This is full of tears.
Probably in any three days of those 15 years I did of all that journaling and all that self-therapy and self-exploration, I experienced more terror and pain than in any three days of my adventures before that. Adventures out in the world. And it’s the same now when I go out and explore the world and collect data about what’s really happening in the world culturally, in different nationalities and different languages and in nature, out in the world, all these different regions. It’s scary beforehand, but during, usually it just seems pretty normal. It seems pretty okay. I usually find kind people everywhere.
But the journey within is so lonely. Go solo. Being with myself, often having no one to lean on except me, which is so much better than what I had as a kid. Because as a child, not only was I not old enough to have a developed self to lean on, but I wasn’t even allowed to have a self. It was forbidden. As an adult, especially now, it’s like I’ve got this person who loves me and cares about me, and that’s me. And I can fight for myself, and I can write about that more, and I can journal and have all sorts of different ways to develop my relationship with myself, to become stronger, to be more there for myself, to feed my growth process, to feed my healing process as I travel further into the unknown.
I’ve long since lost my family system. They long since hated me and realized, “Daniel’s a hopeless case” from their perspective. But really what was going on is I realized they’re sick. They’re never going to grow. They’re never going to get it. They’re never going to love me. They never did. They’re never going to love themselves. They’re never going to be honest. They’ve always accepted some limited, comfortable, easy life of denial and projection, falseness, dishonesty, fake relationships, shallowness. And they figured out that I don’t fit into their world, and I figured out that they have lost their right to have a place in mine.
And so what I do now is continue forward with the external allies I have found in the world. Not my biological blood relatives, but a family of truth, a family of sharing and compassion. Other people who are also heading into the unknown within themselves. People on the deepest adventure of life, the adventure of self-development. People who support me on my journey, and people who I support on theirs, such that I grow, I heal, I continue to heal, I continue to know more about myself, continue to become a better person, and continue to share with you.
[Music]