TRANSCRIPT
Over the last couple of days, I’ve been thinking about some strange parallels in my life. Right now, I’m in upstate New York, and I have poison ivy. I don’t have an extreme case of poison ivy, but I’ve got poison ivy. I’ve got some on my hands, and my feet, and my legs, and my arms a little bit, some on my chest. There’s poison ivy all over the place here. It got on me. It’s oil got in me. I rubbed it on myself. Something’s on my head.
I was thinking how, first of all, I hope it doesn’t show up on camera. And then I was thinking there are these three parallels that actually happened to me once before in my life. The first time I ever tried sitting in front of a camera and talking about my point of view, my philosophy, my ideas happened over 23 years ago. It happened in 1997. I was 25 years old, and it was in, of all places, upstate New York, where I grew up. I haven’t spent this much time in upstate New York in, I don’t know, 15, 20 years, something like that.
Well, I was in upstate New York. I was actually in the town where I grew up. I had my family’s childhood movie camera, a big old clunky camera with a VCR pack attached to it, and I had a raging case of poison ivy. I had a long ponytail, but I had poison ivy all over my body. It was horrible. It was the last time I had a terrible case of poison ivy, literally from my head to my toes. It was in my scalp, it was in my face, it was in my nose.
And you have to, for your own sanity, for your own health, for your own perspective, you have to get that perspective. You have to work for it to pull back and say not everything works out like you need right away. But sometimes you don’t even realize what you need. You think you need one thing; in reality, you don’t need it at all.
Here I am, all these years later, back in upstate New York, not in my hometown, not living with my parents. That era is long gone. Different movie camera, much less expensive. And like, technology has become so much less expensive now. I’ve got a very cheap setup that works just fine. But here I am with a case of poison ivy in upstate New York, talking about my philosophy and thinking about memory lane parallels.
How for decades, there’s been a part of my soul that’s been aching to speak, to share my point of view, to share the knowledge that I’ve learned, the insights that I have learned, some of my life experiences, maybe to be useful to people. I mean, I’ve been wanting to do this long before I had any mechanism to share it with anyone. Back then, I didn’t have any way to edit video. I had a computer that there was no way to even digitize this. There was no YouTube. YouTube was still nearly 10 years away. So much simpler now. What an era! How things have changed in 20-something years.
Well, I just think about the parallels in my life, how much has changed since then, and yet how much of my basic essence of me, the basic essence of my character and my motivation and my desire, my purpose is the same. Yeah, it’s sort of like down to me in some ways. It’s like we go so far, and then it doesn’t get what I’m saying. You know, I can’t blame him because he is who he is, but it can sort of be frustrating. Can’t share what you’re saying, what you’re feeling. It’s hard to share it. It doesn’t really connect. They misunderstand.
But what else does change now is I love myself so much more easily. I wake up in such a better mood. I have so much more self-esteem than I did then. I’m a much more respectful person to other people. I have a lot less buried unconscious feelings. I’ve healed a lot of my traumas. I didn’t really know so much about grieving back then. I was so much more intertwined with my parents back then. They weren’t giving me money, but they were still giving me attention in some ways, a lot of feedback. I was still desperately hoping that they would grow and love me and see me.
Whereas now, I’m like, I’ve been through enough to know that that was an illusion, that was a delusion on my part, that was a fantasy, that was something that would never be and could never be. That was running full speed into a wall and banging my head into it, metaphorically speaking, and thinking that the wall was going to break and I was going to go to the other side.
Whereas what happened to me when every time I ran back to my family looking for love is that I smashed my head into the wall of their limits and of their denial. And I just ended up with a bruised and bloody head, knocked myself out, so to speak, made myself feel worse, went back into my regular life, back to the apartment that I had, and felt alone and sad and self-hating, self-loathing, a lot of questioning, thinking that I was the problem, I was the cause of problems in my family. A lot of times believing their narrative.
And yet there was another part of me, in spite of all that, that had been out in the world enough, that had traveled out to other countries, that had worked a lot of different jobs, that had hitchhiked, that knew how to take care of myself in lots of different environments, that knew that I was different from them, knew that I was healthy in some fundamental way, knew that I was well, better than the person that they thought I was, that the person they needed to believe I was, the person that they, as a child, forced me to believe that I was.
I think I had a lot less faith in the core of my healthiness back then, and yet there was still some connection I had with that that wanted me to get in front of a camera, even with a face full of crusted up, you know, poison ivy that had been treated by actual cortisone steroids, toxic stuff. It was like I still was gonna speak in spite of all that.
And then I think of, well, why was I even up in that toxic environment? Not the toxic environment of poison ivy, but the toxic environment of my family’s system. It was because I hadn’t figured out how to manifest as an independent adult. I hadn’t figured out how to have a career yet. I hadn’t figured out what I really wanted to do and how I was going to plug into this world.
I saw my friends going and getting law degrees, and my fellow biology students were getting PhDs and becoming doctors, and people were getting MBAs, and they were starting to make money, and they were having nice apartments and girlfriends and fancy lives. And they were sending their little, you know, snippets of paragraphs about how great they were doing to the college alumni newsletter. And I felt like a loser, and I didn’t know what I was doing.
And it was like there was some part of me that did have faith. I was journaling all the time and saying, “It’s taking time. Your path is a different path from theirs. You’re not running toward money; you’re doing what you love, and the money will follow.” But it wasn’t following, and it wasn’t coming, and I was struggling and stressed out and feeling like really, well, like I wasn’t making it in society.
And looking at all these people around me, my so-called peers, and seeing how well they were doing, and them telling me, “Daniel, go back to grad school. You’re never going to make it with a bachelor’s degree.” I’ve been a camp counselor for that past summer, and it was like I knew I was great. I knew I had some gift to offer, but what? I made like seven hundred dollars in a whole summer. It’s like my friends were making seven thousand dollars a month for some of them. And it was like I just was like, where do I fit in? And I was going to my parents for advice and love. I was asking my dad, “What do you think I should do? Do you have any ideas?” And he loved it when I would ask those questions.
Do this and you can do this. And when I didn’t want to sometimes follow his advice, because sometimes it just, it wasn’t me, it was him. He was projecting on me. Then I saw the old dad that I remembered so long ago. He would rage at me and scream, “You ask for advice and you don’t take it! You know what you are? You’re the loser you always were.” And it was like, I sometimes wonder if my terrible reaction to poison ivy was in part really the poison of my family.
I mean, I’ve been exposed to so much poison ivy now, and I’m not having it head to toe. I wonder, I mean, I don’t want to sound too woo-woo and spiritual, but there’s a part of me that wonders if maybe being around my family killed my immune system and made me have a hyper, hyper response to the poison of the toxins in the world and this poison plant. I don’t know, I’m just totally speculating. Probably not true, but you know, maybe it is.
But I think about these things, and I think about me, and I have a little compassion for myself back then, all those decades ago, trying to sit in front of a camera with a crusted over red face and my long hair that tried to make me feel more unique. And you know, a pair of funky old glasses that were scratched up and probably the wrong prescription because I didn’t have enough money to go and get them fixed. And it was like I was still hoping at some level for the external world to rescue me, to see me, to see my value.
I was writing memoirs, and I was sending them to literary agents and publishers. I was getting rejected all the time. I wanted to be an artist and make it as an artist, and it wasn’t working. And it didn’t look so good, and I think it kind of embarrassed my parents in a way that I was failing. Me, who had done so well in college, who’d always been such a good student, and now I was not quite thriving as an adult. And they didn’t like this, and it reflected badly on them, and it kicked up their own feelings of insecurity, and they both had a lot. And well, they pulled away from me.
I realized it wasn’t going to work. But these are the things that are coming up as I stroll down memory lane with my mild case of poison ivy, with my lovely inexpensive camera, with my few hours free to sit on the edge of the forest in upstate New York and record a video of my thoughts and my philosophy and my, well, my more hopeful vision for a future now more grounded in reality.
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