TRANSCRIPT
I have mixed feelings about being a public figure. On one hand, I love it. I’m so glad that I have a chance to speak my mind, to formulate my thoughts in a way and in a form that I can share them with the world. That some people can find this, can find parts of it or all of it useful in some way that can help people.
Just recently, I came back from kind of taking a break from the internet for about six weeks. I had six weeks of comments on my YouTube channel that I hadn’t looked at, so I went through and I read, I don’t know, one, two thousand comments and just spent a few hours just reading them. It was actually exciting. It was heartwarming. I mean, not all the comments were positive, but a lot of them were. Most of them were. And actually, not all the negative comments were bad. Some of them actually were very useful to me in having an outside perspective on myself, flaws in my arguments, weaknesses in my arguments, lack of nuance that I had shared in some of my videos. And it was like, oh, I can learn from this. It’s a real growth opportunity.
Sometimes the comments can be invalidating of me. Sometimes it can be terrifying and overwhelming and kind of painful. But by and large, it’s like, wow, actually people find what I’m saying useful. And for me, there’s still some part of me that’s that little boy who wasn’t heard very much, who was ignored, who was violated, who was just treated like an object, treated like I was inconsequential, like I didn’t matter. And there’s some part of me that’s like, wow, I really am different. Something changed. I really did grow a lot. I really did heal a lot. In a way, this is some sort of external validation that my life has profoundly changed.
Reading all those comments, realizing that there’s a lot of people who are listening to what I’m saying, it was a surprise at some level. It’s like, at some level, I don’t think of myself that way. And also, I felt grateful. I just felt like, wow, it feels like something that I was meant to do. Like, it’s my destiny just to be able to be me in some sort of public way. And it feels good for me that I am piece-by-piece, slowly but surely, manifesting my destiny because that is what I want to do with my life. And that’s really what I was grateful about. It’s like, yeah, it really feels good.
But at the same time, I do feel mixed about it. It’s actually not entirely easy. It creates a lot of anxiety in me. I don’t sleep as well. I think there’s some parts of me that are still a wounded little child that’s looking for love in the world. And this, in some way, can make me feel like, oh, I’m finally getting loved. And that’s not something that’s good. That’s why I think it’s good for me to not earn my income doing this, but instead to just do it as a public service and to really very consciously not put a lot of effort into trying to expect that I’m gonna win by having a YouTube channel that’s becoming more popular and gets more views.
Because I think sometimes I could see there’s a little part of me, and I think I’ve seen it with other people, it can be even worse where the external validation can make up for the lack of internal validation that I can have inside myself or that the lack of validation that I never got and that I can still be replicating in my life. So basically, I could see the number of views I have on a video or the number of people who read an essay I have on my website or the number of likes I get or the number of subscribers to be some way of quantifying how valuable I am as a human being. And really, it’s not true.
Because another thing is, any day, YouTube could just stop. I don’t know, they could just kill my channel or it could just all end. The internet could go down, my channel could go down, or something could happen and I can lose everybody. And I want, at a deeper level, to be the one inside myself who validates myself. So I don’t want to put too much energy into feeling like my sense of self-worth is coming from popularity. It’s very dangerous. And I think it’s especially hard because I was so wounded as a kid. I was so unseen.
I think, in a way, it’s a similar dynamic to what happens to child stars, movie stars who started being famous when they were kids. And they become so, so popular. And maybe the height of their popularity happens when they’re seven or eight or twelve years old, and they never ever achieve that level of popularity again. And I think what happens is, emotionally, it can be totally devastating to these people because through this external source of validation, they can be getting all the love that deep down they really wanted to get from their parents but they didn’t get from their parents. So they’re getting it from the outside world, and it feels so wonderful. But it’s actually just kind of like a drug.
And what happens is, when it goes away, and inevitably the popularity wears off with almost everybody, sooner or later we hit a place in our life where we’re not so popular anymore, we’re not so loved. Things can change so quickly. When that gets removed, it can be devastating. And I think it’s probably why so many of these child stars, when they’re not so popular, they kind of crash and burn, end up in addictions or horrible relationships or, you know, depression. All sorts of bad things happen. And I want to protect myself from that.
So there’s one other thing that I want to share about being a public figure. That’s the side that I don’t like so much and really I think is, I’d like to spin it in the positive. And that’s the value in not being a public figure. The value I find in not being a public figure is the wonderful value of anonymity, of being anonymous, of being a person who’s able to walk out in the world and have nobody know who you are and just getting to be a regular person who nobody knows you. You just get to be yourself. You get to do what you want. Nobody watches you, nobody looks at you, you know, the things that you say, and nobody’s analyzing you. And it’s like you just get to be you and be hidden.
And that’s part of the reason I like to travel. It’s actually a really nice thing to be out in the world and just meet people. Nobody knows anything about me, and I don’t know anything about anyone else. And we can just start by getting to know each other in a very natural, organic way. Now, the flip side is that actually kind of wonderful when people know certain things about me and they know about my point of view because then I tend to attract people who are more interested in my ideas and my values, and we share a lot of common values. That is something that I really value. But that feeling of anonymity is also great.
The other thing that’s really wonderful about being anonymous is I think it’s actually easier to heal from traumas when we are anonymous, when we can just have our own private healing process. And I think being a public figure can kind of work against that. It can kind of invade one’s privacy. Now for me, I’m not that popular. Not that many people really know me. Not that many people watch my videos, not that many people look at my website or watch movies that I’ve made. And in a way, that’s kind of a relief.
And in a way also, I protect myself by taking time off, stepping back, stepping away from the internet, stepping away from a YouTube channel or writing things on my website and just getting a chance to be me in my own small little private world where I get to do my healing. I get to have my regular life. I get to work jobs that a lot of times aren’t really related to anything that I’m talking about. Just doing simple work that’s kind of, well, uses different skill sets, cleaning even sometimes, or playing music, or just doing basic video editing for stuff that has nothing.
To do with anything, but I’m talking about here, and I really appreciate that. Having a life that’s actually just a regular sort of anonymous private life, so I think that kind of sums up how well I do feel those mixed sides about being a public figure. Probably well for a long time, you.