TRANSCRIPT
I didn’t sleep very well last night. And when I woke up this morning, I thought about my plan from the night before. From yesterday, my plan was to wake up today, get myself ready, come out here to the edge of the forest, and record videos. But I woke up tired, and I thought, “I just don’t know if I’m going to be able to accomplish anything good. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to keep my thoughts straight.” And then I thought, “Well, maybe take a day off, Daniel. Maybe just go take a walk this morning. Go take a walk out in the forest, out in nature. Just get centered and be with yourself and relax and think your own thoughts.”
And then something different popped into my mind. It was just like something from deep within me that’s like, “No, go and record, Daniel. Record now. You’ve got an opportunity. Don’t miss it.” And then I started thinking back about all those times, sometimes months in a row, when I had no opportunity to record videos. I realized over the last probably solid two years, every single morning that I’ve had an opportunity to be with my camera, my tripod, a chair, some level of privacy, and a microphone, I have recorded.
And many of those days are few and far between. Sometimes a week, two weeks goes by where I have my camera, I have my chair, I have my microphone, and I don’t have privacy. I don’t have a space to do recording. Or sometimes I have a lot of privacy and a lot of space, but I’m in another country. I’m on the other side of the world. I don’t have my setup. I can’t record a good video. So I thought, “Daniel, you always try to take the opportunity. Just do it.”
So then I thought, “What could I talk about?” I don’t even know if my mind’s straight enough to talk about any sort of deep psychological theory or about real deep psychological healing. Then I thought, “We’ll talk about missed opportunities.” It’s such an important issue in my life, and that’s part of why I hate missing opportunities. Because for many years, a solid couple of decades in a way, I missed so many opportunities that could have been wonderful. There could have been healing, great relationships, friendships—things that I was closed off to, or I was too hurt and broken and traumatized to be able to engage in.
I think of how my childhood crushed me in so many ways, just stunted me, screwed me up, sent me running down totally incorrect, unhealthy avenues of life—lost in addictions and even things like pornography—or lost in just trying to have one-night stands but not really developing myself so that I could have a real loving friendship with a woman. Things like this—waiting to get drunk on the weekends just so I could feel safe and feel good and feel centered in myself. But it was really like being centered in my false self, further dissociating all my unwanted and painful feelings that were slowly bubbling up so that I could just have a sense of feeling okay and comfortable.
I think of all those years I spent studying and studying and studying to get good grades so I could escape from my family, escape from my town, maybe build a good career for myself, give myself some status so that maybe someday a woman would like me and want to be in a relationship with me and marry me. Maybe I could have enough money so that I could buy the things that could build me a false front that would make me feel important and valid in life.
And all those years of fighting and struggling to build all these things that ended up being kind of like a big house of cards because it was all this externalized stuff that wasn’t really related to who I was on the inside. So many years of missed opportunities. So many years of so much effort put into things that when I look back on it really didn’t mean that much at all or meant nothing or wasted the best years of my life in some ways.
Now I think I’ve talked in other videos about living with the regrets and realizing the fruitlessness of it. In a way, it can end up just wallowing in pity or me living with a sort of victim mentality that I can’t do anything to take care of my life now and just living in the past. And I don’t need to wallow in what wasn’t given to me. Instead, my job has been to learn how to give it to myself. And the more I’ve learned how to give it to myself, the less I’ve wanted to build a false self and be anything other than who I really am.
And what I found so interesting is by becoming who I really am, becoming the real me, the real essence of me that I always was but for so many years was buried and split off and lost. By becoming this person, I find that I have a surplus much more now. And that surplus has a fancy word that I see associated with myself now, and that’s altruism. And that’s a desire to give back, a desire to share—share who I am, share what I’ve learned.
I don’t know if I like the word “teach” because I think of so many of the people who in the past were my teachers were such horrible human beings who didn’t actually teach me things about growing in healthiness. Maybe. And I even don’t like the word “role model” because I think of who were called role models back when I was a kid—people who were awful a lot of times. The people who had the highest status because they were the most fake, the most split off and dissociated, the most grandiose. And sometimes these people who were role models, children and adults underneath the surface, were very nasty, had a real inability to be honestly healthy and intimate. They didn’t have empathy a lot of times, and that was what was held up to be role models.
So if I think of my—some people say, “Oh, you’re a role model, Daniel,” and I’m like, “Well, that word is sort of—it’s been burned for me. It’s something that I don’t like.” But I do like the idea of being myself and sharing myself, and maybe others can get something from it, derive some sort of usefulness from it. And for me now, that’s the opportunity that I have because by giving from the surplus of what I’ve learned to give myself, in some ways, I get a lot back.
I not only feel like I’m being useful, and that gives me self-esteem, but I even get—I just think even of the comments in these YouTube videos, what people write, and I read it all. There’s something about it that’s a reminder: “Yes, you are on the right track.” It’s like I am able to hear from an external source, not just what I’m hearing in my head: “Yes, you’re doing right, Daniel.” But to see other people say it, it’s a good feeling, and it reminds me: “Don’t miss opportunities.”
Not saying that going for a walk is wrong because actually when this is done, I probably will go for a walk and go for a stroll and enjoy this beautiful day. But I know that the time for me to record is in the morning, and the weather is good. Maybe it’ll rain tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow I won’t have this opportunity. So I didn’t want to miss it. And that’s really been a very important thing for a long time in my life—to not miss opportunities.
And then I think of my life between the ages of 22 and 27. I finished college at 22. I started being a therapist at 27. That’s when I went back to grad school and started actually working as a psychotherapist. And in those five years, I did a lot of stuff that was productive. Did a lot of traveling around the world on little or no budget, tons of hitchhiking, learning lots of languages or parts of languages, meeting tons of people, having a lot of experiences, doing a lot of jobs—some jobs that I really didn’t like, some jobs that I liked better than others—but a lot of time feeling like somehow I wasn’t connected with my purpose, feeling very out of joint with society, often feeling very, very lonely and sad, and feeling even ashamed of myself sometimes. Like, “Wait a second, what am I doing with my life? This isn’t my purpose.” And just…
Feeling very unhappy a lot, and when I became a therapist, it was something—because I was thinking about this this morning—when I was thinking about that idea of missed opportunities and sometimes playing catch-up when you do get opportunities.
Well, when I got the opportunity to become a therapist, it was like I went in full tilt at so many levels. It was like making up for so many missed opportunities that I had. I had a chance to grow. I had a chance to think about psychology all the time. I had a chance to win all my free time, devote myself to healing myself, and then in my professional work, in an area where I was learning so much, I could help other people do this.
And there was something about it for me that was so absolutely consuming and gratifying and wonderful. It was like magic had come and touched my life. And it was like, Daniel, all those years of frustration and loneliness and not knowing what to do, and spending my days walking around random cities, maybe hoping I’d find a friend somewhere, maybe even an animal to look at or a dog that would follow me that I could pet and I could feed a little bit and have as a friend—anything.
Homeless people I would sit with just because I wanted to have a desperate conversation with someone, and sometimes they were the only ones who would talk to me.
Well, when I became a therapist, it was like, wow, I have a full-time life, morning to night, every day and the weekends, in my own way, doing it with myself to do everything that I wanted to do. And it was just like years—and this lasted for years—of just like, I am making up for those missed opportunities.
And something has lived of that spirit with me ever since. Just this desperate desire to make the most of every day, to cling to, grab, and to wring every last drop of water and moisture and whatever’s in there out of the opportunities for me. And I have a strange feeling that this may continue for the rest of my life.