TRANSCRIPT
Someone recently left a comment asking that I make a video on fear of what other people think of you, and I think that’s the most lovely topic. I think part of why I feel I have something to say about it is that I came from a world where I was terrified of what other people thought of me. It was obsessing on my mind a lot, and it’s not something that I’ve totally gotten rid of, but I can say that I’ve gotten rid of a lot of it—probably a good 90% of it. So in a way, I can still relate to having fear of what other people think of me.
I was thinking about it as I was coming to sit down and make this video. My hair was sticking out a little funny, and I was worrying about it. Am I gonna look okay? I had a little fear—maybe I’ll be rejected for it. And that’s minor because in a way, I really don’t care that much. I had a little bit of fear, but it was minor. That’s the 10% that’s left.
But I think about myself when I was younger. Going to get a haircut was a horrifying experience. What if it comes out wrong? What if the haircutter doesn’t do exactly what I was hoping for? Which, by the way, they never did. And people make fun of me. People don’t like me. I was just worried, obsessed about how I dressed, how tall I was, that I didn’t go into puberty early enough, that I was too short, that I looked strange in this way or that way, that I would say the wrong thing, that my voice was too high, that my voice was cracking. The list went on and on and on and on—that I wasn’t smart enough, that I was too smart, that I was too intellectual, that I spoke with the wrong accent, that I had pimples, blotty skin, and those are more just kind of external things.
I think also I had a lot of fear of people seeing my emotional insecurities. People knowing that I had problems, people knowing that I was unhappy inside, that I hated myself inside. Really, when I think about this, the fundamental part of it, the root of it for me, was that my parents didn’t really love me that much. They loved me very conditionally. They liked me sometimes. They liked me when I was behaving right. They liked me when I was making them happy. They liked me when I was making them feel good. They liked me when I was loving them, when I was listening to them, when I was caring about them, when I was fulfilling the ideal they had of making them look good.
I think they were afraid of what people would think of them if I didn’t behave in the right way, if I didn’t do well in sports, do well in school, look the right way, have the right friends. And they really judged me for that. And so what it did is it set in me a very fundamental model of the world not liking me unless I fit a certain mold. And so I extended that. I extended that to other people. I extended that to my teachers. I extended that to my schoolmates. I extended that to my friends.
Thankfully, I had a few friends in childhood who didn’t judge me, who actually really liked me for really the truth of who I was, to the ability that I was able to be true. They didn’t tease me, they didn’t humiliate me, they didn’t bully me. I had a few of those people, and I really am very, very grateful to them. Some of them I’m still actually friends with all these decades later. But they were a very small minority. Most of the people in my life, including in my family system and my greater family system, well, they really didn’t like me that much for who I really was, and I was terrified to show myself for that.
And sometimes I couldn’t hide myself well enough, and I tried. That’s one of the basic ways as a child, even into my young adulthood, that I dealt with my fear of what others thought of me was that I hid myself. I used a mask. I pretended to be somebody that I wasn’t, even to myself. I pretended to be who I wasn’t. I faked my personality. I faked my voice. I faked what I thought about. I even faked a lot of my interests, or I had certain interests that I really couldn’t help but have. I was so passionate about, but I did them privately. I hid them. I didn’t announce them to the world because people didn’t treat me well for it.
Well, now to get into the cure, as it were, for me, the cure for my fear, what happened to me started really in my early 20s as I broke away from my family. I started to—it took a long time. It took a good 15 years to really break away—but I started to break away, started to get out into the greater world, got away from my university system, got away from my university friends. I started hitchhiking, actually. I mean, like this crazy thing—who does that in the modern era? I started in 1992 when I was 20, hitchhiking, and discovered that out in the world, most people liked me a lot more than the people who were my closest friends, my closest family. It’s like these complete strangers treated me with more respect, and I realized I could just be me. I could talk about my interests, I could share my thoughts, and I wasn’t being judged. I wasn’t being rejected. And I realized, oh wait a second, there are people out in the world who are a lot nicer.
So I started to realize I need to get out of this little system that I’ve been raised in—the school system, the family system, the friendship circles. I need to get into a bigger world, and that’s a big part of what helped open the door for me to be more myself in a public way. But it still wasn’t so simple because then I think about what happened when I really started getting away from my family more. I realized a lot of people in the world, even out in the bigger world beyond my family, beyond my university, didn’t really agree with that. Oh, you have to forgive them—they would judge me, and I started becoming afraid to tell about what was really going on in my life. And still, a lot of my insecurities, I was afraid to publicly share about them because it threatened other people.
A big thing that I realized—well, I realize it now in hindsight, but I started realizing it in my 20s, and I realized it really applied to my childhood—is I was afraid of people seeing my insecurities. And the reason was that everybody else had the same damn insecurities. So when I shared mine, it triggered their insecurities. So they would try to shut me down because that’s what they were doing with themselves. So part of it was I needed to get away from people who were more insecure, finding people who were healthier, who loved themselves more. That was part of it. But the big key was I had to figure out how to love myself more, develop a more private relationship with myself.
And that’s one of the big themes of this whole YouTube channel—healing from childhood trauma, finding the ways in which I was not loved in my childhood, finding the ways primarily that I was not loved in my family of origin by my parents, finding the ways in which I was rejected, neglected, abandoned, violated. And it wasn’t so apparent because as a child, I wasn’t allowed to see those, even in myself. It was too painful. I wasn’t in an environment where I could feel my feelings that resulted from all those negative things that happened to me. So I had to get out of that system to really progress a lot on the healing path. And then I had to really work hard at that internal relationship with myself. Basically, I had to become my own family. I had to become my own parent for myself. And that’s, well, what I’ve talked about a lot here—the self-therapy process, if you want to call it self-therapy, the self-loving process, the self-excavation process—all that journaling that I did, all that meditating that I did, not with any fancy way, no gurus, no religion, nothing like that, but looking within, having a conversation with myself, asking real questions.
Questions of myself, listening to the answer, looking at my dreams, trying to figure out what they meant. Looking at my relationships with other people and saying, “Who am I? What am I doing? What are my thoughts? What are my behaviors? What is healthy? What is not healthy?” Assessing myself, putting together the picture of what really happened to me in my childhood, and really looking at my feelings, not running away from my feelings.
As a child, certainly throughout my childhood into my early 20s, my feelings were a dangerous thing. Having my feelings made my life worse. Having my feelings gave me more reason to fear because my environment didn’t like those kind of feelings. Those people didn’t like those feelings in themselves; they certainly didn’t like it in me. I had to start to reclaim my feelings, build a safe environment for myself, a platform from which I could feel those feelings and honor them and respect them, where I could begin to have empathy with myself.
I didn’t have role models who taught me how to have empathy for myself. I had role models who taught me that I had to be afraid of what was going on inside of me. They were afraid of themselves; they were afraid of the true me. Therefore, I was afraid of the true me. Well, I had to turn that dynamic around, really work hard to start to love myself, and it was not easy. It was like it was not my reflex to love myself for my vulnerabilities, for my insecurities, for my feelings that were called negative—my terror, my self-hatred, my sadness, my rage, my anger, my loneliness. I had to work really hard to meet those needs inside of myself.
Also, how to get away from addictions. One of the primary addictions I had was always trying to be in romance. Romance was going to save me, but I wasn’t equipped to really be in any sort of healthy romance. In fact, romance was one of the main areas when I was younger, when I was a teenager into my early 20s, where I was hiding from myself, hiding from my partners. I wanted them to deeply love me for who I was, but at the same time, I couldn’t let them see who I was because I was so insecure.
Also, part of it is I was in no position to really love a partner. I didn’t know how to love these women that I liked. I knew how to try to get them to love me, but I didn’t know how to really love them because I didn’t know how to love myself. I had a lot of internal work to do before I was ready for that. And so what happened to me is I spent years—now it’s been decades—doing that internal work inside of myself, growing stronger and stronger in my love for myself. And that has borne some results.
And in light of the subject of this video, the main result that it has borne in me is that because I love myself more, I don’t give a so much what other people think of me. Yeah, I care a little bit here and there, but really not that much. Because I love myself more, I don’t need their love to feel okay. As long as I was needing their love to feel okay, I was always vulnerable to feelings of rejection by them. And I had good reason to be afraid of them, of what they thought of me, because if they rejected me, then I would hate myself.
Now, if they reject me, yeah, I might have a twinge of going, “Ooh, I don’t feel so good about myself,” but very quickly I come back to myself and I say, “Oh, they rejected me because they’re bad news. I don’t need to be friends with them.” So basically, that idea is if they reject me, it’s a good thing because then they’re out of my life. I don’t have to deal with them.
What I found again and again and again and again is almost pretty much everybody, especially nowadays, the people who reject me are the people who never really liked me anyways. So in that way, I now can feel it in myself, “Oh, why do I want them around me?” I remember being told that as a kid: “Oh, don’t worry about what other people think about you. It’s not your business. If they don’t like you, it doesn’t mean anything.” Well, it was easy to say that intellectually back then because I didn’t love myself, but now it’s like I feel that a lot more.
And so really, to reiterate it, the key is to learn to love oneself again, to really make up for what happened to one as a child, to work out those basic neglects and abandonments in a way, to adopt the little self that’s inside of one, to reclaim the little child that one once was and that’s still buried in each of us, and to hold that child and love that child for exactly who that person is—for their strengths, for their weaknesses, for their vulnerabilities, for their feelings, for whatever it is that they have—to love that little person inside of ourselves, to let that little person grow. For me, that’s been the recipe to much, much less not have to care at all what other people think of me and to not be afraid either.
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