TRANSCRIPT
If anybody tells you that you can grow and heal, work out your traumas, go through a grieving process without anxiety, they don’t know what they’re talking about, and I wouldn’t trust them. Anxiety is such an intrinsic part of growing. Growing is stressful. Growing is painful. Growing is wonderful. Growing is amazing. Growing is an inspiring, fantastic thing. I’ve done so much growing in my life, and I love it so much. I’m so happy that I’ve had the good fortune to figure out how to do it and to continue doing it, and to even help inspire other people to do it.
But to grow is difficult. It’s very, very difficult. I reflect on my life, having recently done five months of traveling, so much of it off the grid, away from the internet, away from my computer, away from telephone service—anything that was like a respite from my difficult, stressful life. And it was difficult in its own way. A lot of hitchhiking—that’s stressful. Living in a lot of different people’s homes, people I just met—stressful. Difficult living in the same room with people a lot. Sometimes staying in hostels, listening to people snoring. Things like that can be difficult. People turning on the lights—stressful, difficult. But very different from the existential angst, the anxiety of healing, growing, and being so public about it like I am.
So when I think that people say, “Oh, you can grow and heal. You can heal your traumas, and it can be a wonderful, easy, loving process. You can find yourself and not have to go through so much worry and pain,” I don’t buy it. I look at the people who talk about living such peaceful and happy lives in their supposedly healed states, and I think, “No, I don’t.” I look at them, and I listen to what they say, and I listen to the little clues, and I think they’re just dissociated. They’re in, what is it, spiritual bliss? They’re not in touch with themselves in a way. They’re just like drug addicts. Just their feelings are buried. And some of them are really, really good at so strongly burying their feelings that they really don’t feel anxiety. But man, what I’ve seen is they’re not moving forward. They’re fake. And the message that they are sharing, it’s dangerous because it’s false. It’s false because it’s giving people false hope. It’s telling people that if you do feel anxiety from growing, that you’re doing something wrong. And you’re not doing something wrong. You’re doing something right.
There is no way to escape the stress of growth. There’s no way to avoid the anxiety from expanding as a person. There’s no way to heal from trauma without feeling some of that ancient historical pain and the pain of transition. It’s hard to change. I wish I had that list somewhere, that list I read once upon a time—the most stressful things in life: death of a partner, death of a parent, moving, having your house burned down, switching jobs. I don’t think they said it up there because probably it’s not very common at all, but I think right up there with it is the constant stress of healing from trauma and growing and transforming into a bigger, more real, more honest person.
When you transform, you don’t fit into your old life anymore. When I became more real, more honest, more insightful, more mature, I didn’t fit into my family anymore. That’s not to say I didn’t try to fit in. Oh, I sure tried to fit in a lot, and they didn’t like it. They tried to make me mold me into the old way that I was. They liked the little shutdown, lost, voiceless Daniel who I used to be. I didn’t even go by Daniel; I went by Dan back then. They knew me as Dan. Even my name was shortened to Dan. Well, Dan is not who I was. Dan was a fake person. My dad often still calls me Dan. Sends me an email, “Hi, Dan.” And usually, he doesn’t even say anything. Usually, he just writes, starts in on the email. Better, better and safer not to call me a name at all. Make me just sort of an anonymous thing. But if he must call me a name, call me a shortened name, not my real name, Daniel—a full name.
And I think of being a bigger person and how difficult it is. How difficult it is to convert the value I’ve gained in my life into something that can be useful for others. I think there’s just inherent value alone in growing and healing, and even in a small way, rippling out the truth of our new selves—in my case, my new, more healed, more insightful self. But I feel I take a big, big leap in being useful to the world by sharing it publicly through the medium of making videos—making, well, sitting in front of a camera and talking openly. But man, it’s so hard. And I’ve heard people say, “Oh, it shouldn’t be that hard to do. Just be honest about who you are, share it, and make it public.” Well, what I say is the people who say it’s not hard, they’re not really doing it.
Because what I’ve found, and I hope this comforts anyone who’s going through incredible stress about growing and being more real, is that it’s really making each new day a truly new day. Because each day that I grow, I become a really new person—a new person with a newer message, a more powerful message, and a message that actually is a dangerous message to people who don’t want to feel their feelings, don’t want to look at their history, don’t want to know who they really are on the inside, and don’t really have a deep connection with the passion of their true self on the inside. My message is dangerous, and that’s good. It should be dangerous. It should be a threat to the lies and artificiality of the norm.
My family system hates me for being real. The world at large, from what I’ve found, it hates me for being real to the degree that the world is fake. And the world is so fake. The norms and mores and values of the world are about shutting down, being comfortable, being happy now. Forget tomorrow. Forget the future. Forget the children of the future. Forget the future of our species, the future of nature. Just be happy. Be comfortable now. Find ways to be happy and comfortable now. Well, I don’t live that way. I take on a lot of stress now, and what I find is this gives me personally a greater and more expansive future.
And I surely believe, from all that I’ve seen, that if more people did this, if our species focused more on growing and healing the traumas of our species as a whole, myself as an individual representative, if people did what I’m doing and other people who are really healing their traumas, if our species did that writ large, it would be cataclysmically, stratospherically stressful and anxiety-laden for our species now. But it would be the most profound and beautiful investment in our future. And gosh, that is what I wish for.
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