TRANSCRIPT
I remember when I was about 13 years old. I first saw this thing called a home video camera. It was this big bulky camera that had a cord attached to it, and it was attached to this big box that had a VCR on it. I wanted one, and I don’t know why I wanted one so bad back then. I wasn’t sure. I just knew that I desperately wanted one, and I begged my dad to buy one for our family. Eventually, he did, and it was magical. I went around recording my life. I spent a lot of time recording my cat and my dog and my family and myself.
When I think back about it, why did I do that so much? When I woke up this morning, why was the first thing that came to my mind, “I want to record myself”? Decades later, 35 years later now, more than 35 years later, why is this so important to me now? I think that I realize that way back when, when I was 13 years old, there was some part of me that just wanted to have proof of what was going on. I didn’t even know what I wanted proof of, but I wanted documentation. I think there was some part of me intuitively, unconsciously then, that knew that someday this would be evidence. This would be the truth of what happened to me back then.
Even if I didn’t know what I was recording, I wasn’t out to get gotcha moments. I wasn’t out to bear my soul to the camera like a journal. It wasn’t that at all. It was just like somehow I needed some clear objective proof that someone was seeing me, and that proof was a video camera. So I got a lot of it. I got a lot of messy stuff, got a lot of sad stuff on that camera, got a lot of personal stuff that I didn’t realize I was even capturing.
This may not be interesting to some people, but this is very important to us. This is the bathroom. That’s a very important place in the house. Hello, my name is Daniel the photographer. Hello, how are you? That’s the bathtub. That’s why we all smell so nice and clean. There’s the towel, there’s the scale, and there’s the sink and the water pick and all that kind of stuff.
Well, back then, I really wasn’t recording for an audience. I wasn’t really sharing it with almost anyone. I was recording for me. I was my main audience. A lot of times, I would just look at the tapes that I recorded over and over again, just watch, observe, watch myself get older. A year later, I’d say, “Oh my God, I look different.”
A year later, hello, this is Daniel Mackler, and I’m going to personally open a coconut. Okay, this is my machete. Now, first, I have to chop the coconut like that. I’ve now chopped the coconut one more time. The coconut is open. There is the meat of the coconut.
Now, I think the big difference between then and now is that I’ve become much more altruistic. A big part of why I’ve become more altruistic is that I’m much more healthy, healed, self-actualized, self-loving. Back then, I had so much self-hatred. There was a part of me that loved myself so desperately back then. It’s been a thread throughout my life of fighting for myself, wanting to survive and thrive and grow.
But something happened, certainly over the last 20 years, where in a way I found that I could plug into myself and feed myself real mirroring, real self-love. I didn’t necessarily need a camera to mirror me. I didn’t need to watch myself with an external device to the same degree because I developed a part of me that could do that at any given moment.
Even when I talk now, there’s a part of me that’s listening to what I’m saying, thinking about what I’m saying, preparing the next line, as it were, that I’m going to say. That’s analyzing what I’m saying. That’s saying, “Is what I’m saying correct or not?” That’s looking within, that watches me from without. It’s like there’s a lot of different parts of me going on.
I know I certainly developed that a lot as a therapist. Even though I was talking with someone who was a client sitting in my office, someone who was paying me to be useful to them, to mirror things back to them, to give insight to them and reflection to them, there was also part—a part of me simultaneously that was watching me, that was listening to me, that was analyzing myself. That was saying, “Are you being fair, Daniel? Are you being honest? Is this how you really feel? What are your motives? Why do you feel mixed up? What is this person really asking you? What is it triggering in you from your past?”
Also watching the whole dynamic, it was like I had a supervisor sitting in session with me who was supervising me and, in a way, doing therapy for me simultaneously while I was doing therapy for someone else.
Well, now that I’m not a therapist anymore, that part of me still lives on, and that part of me is a great ally. That part of me, in a way, is my greater adult self that has been the greatest gift of healing from so many of my traumas. That part of me gets stronger and stronger the more that I heal, the more that I grieve, the less that I’m dissociated, the more that I’m in touch with my true self.
That true self can be converted into an adult who fights for me, who loves me. But I think even more than that, fights for truth, fights for objectivity. Doesn’t like lying in me or in anyone. Doesn’t like lying in my message. Doesn’t like denial in my message. That roots it out. That sometimes says, “Daniel, say that again. That wasn’t quite correct. That wasn’t quite honest. Do it again. Try it again. Do it better. Do it more honest.”
Sometimes, all the while on camera, helps me criticize myself. I’ve been told many times in my life, certainly the first main person who told me this over and over again is, “Daniel, you are so critical. Stop being so critical. You’re rude and critical.” And it’s like, you know, that pained me when my dad told me that again and again and again. It broke me. That was his intention, but it didn’t break me entirely because there was a part of me underneath it that was like, “Daniel, your critical faculties, your ability to be critical is really your ability to analyze, to be analytical, to sort out what is a lie and what is the truth.”
Well, no wonder my dad was terrified of my critical faculties. He was terrified when I was critical and analytical because I was turning it toward him. I was criticizing him. Even if I was criticizing an external person or situation or relationship or dynamic, it applied to him, and he was terrified. My dad was more broken than I was. His true self was much more broken. He had much less perspective. He certainly didn’t have that part of him that was watching himself to nearly the degree that even I had then as a teenager.
Now the coconut is open. I have to get some meat, this white part out of here. This is how I do it. [Music] And I chop it, and sooner or later it will come out, a piece of coconut. Perfecto!
I think unconsciously I was setting myself up to grow, to become healed, to become more enlightened, to become someone who had a camera in my life. I think actually—and I talk about this a lot—my goal as a therapist was to help people learn how to internalize me as a therapist inside of themselves and not internalize me as Daniel, but me as an object who could help them analyze themselves.
Meaning they could learn how to do what I was doing for them without having to use me at all. They could learn how to self-reflect. They could learn how to become the adult or therapist in their own healing process such that they didn’t need to pay me or pay anyone. They could learn how to do that for themselves. They could learn how to be free and independent and wild. They didn’t have to be dependent on a therapist or any part of the mental health system at all. That was my goal, and I shared that with people. Some people, to one degree or other, did that. Some people didn’t do it so well.
But when I think about that early video camera for myself, that was like a therapist for me. And eventually, over time, I learned how to internalize the role of what that camera meant to me. I think by and large, I’ve done pretty well at doing that, being able to internalize that process such now that I feel comfortable turning on a camera and not having to rely on it to help me analyze myself.
Also, to be able to take lots of pictures, not necessarily to analyze myself, but to further my ability, well, to share a message, you know.