TRANSCRIPT
So I’m sitting here at my computer looking at a picture of myself when I was one and a half years old. I think it was on some sort of vacation. We were visiting my grandparents, and I look at my face and I see such a beautiful but sad little boy. A little boy who was so full of passion and life and curiosity, but also shock, terror, sadness, fear, anxiety. A little boy who had seen horror, who had seen ugliness, who had seen betrayal.
That little boy saw his parents fighting in the room in which they lived in New York. Saw them screaming at each other. Saw his father manipulating his mother and using harsh words and anger and rage. A little boy who saw his mother manipulating his father, harming him, lying to him, cheating on him. I think it reads in this picture, this little boy who was just horrified in his eyes. Horrified of the lies, horrified at the hypocrisy, horrified at the knowledge that this love that he was being given could be withdrawn at any moment.
And at some level, deep embedded in his soul, deep, deep down in there, he was saying, “I will not accept this forever. I will change. I will be different from them.” And as he grew older, he started doing that. He started fighting back. At first, he rebelled against them, but then as he became more wise, he began rebelling against the parts of them that were embedded in him because he became like them. And so he had to.
The way that he fought was to self-reflect, and that was dangerous. By being honest, he started overthrowing the fundamental dishonesty of his family system. He started acknowledging how unhappy he was, how sad he was, how traumatized he was, how terrified he was. And by extension, they all picked it up. They all knew it subliminally and sometimes not so subliminally.
When he was speaking about who he was and how he felt and how sad he was and how meaningless his life felt, he was speaking for all of them. He was speaking about all of their meaninglessness. Why did they plaster themselves with drugs and alcohol? Why did they cheat? Why did they do that? Because they were terrified of being honest and taking a really honest true course toward growth, toward being real.
Well, he started to do it, and they didn’t like it. And guess what? Back then, when he was one-and-a-half years old, with that beautiful look on his face, that beautiful look of sadness and fear and hope, a shock of horror yet of potential, he wanted to do it back then. He wanted to be real more than anything else, but he knew by hard painful experience that he couldn’t do it. They would really reject him then, and so he had no choice but to wait.