TRANSCRIPT
My life has not turned out how I expected it to turn out. When I was a kid, I was always striving to be normal. I was trying to fit in. I was trying to wear the right clothes and say the right things and be the kind of kid that was popular in a world where adults were often defining who were the good kids and who were the kids who weren’t so good.
What I found was that I didn’t really fit in. I didn’t have the right friends in school. I wasn’t exactly an outcast, but I certainly wasn’t in the in-crowd. And the in-crowd is something that I really wanted to be part of. I wanted to be liked, and I think deep down what it was, was that I wanted to be loved. I wanted to be acknowledged. I wanted to be seen.
I think that if I had been getting more of that—being loved, being seen, being acknowledged—inside of my family of origin, I wouldn’t have worried so much about trying to be loved in the outside world, from other people, from strangers. But because I really wasn’t getting it so much in my family, I tried to get it elsewhere. I tried to get it a lot by being normal, by wearing the right clothes, by trying to say the right things, by trying to behave in a proper way, trying to be cool. Even once I got to be a little older, the problem is with me, it didn’t really work. I really wasn’t very good at it.
A big part of the reason is something that I can’t really explain why, but for some reason, I was destined just to be myself. As a kid, I remember it. I remember it distinctly in one event that happened, and it was a random moment. I don’t even know exactly how old I was. I think I was about 9 or 10 years old, but I remember I was in the bathroom. I think I was brushing my teeth or something like that, and I looked in the mirror. I saw my reflection, and I looked at myself in the mirror, and I looked in my eyes, and I saw me looking back at myself.
Something clicked in my head, and I realized that I was alive. I realized that I was present. I realized that I was an existing human being. Although this may come across as obvious, because everybody is this, basically, up until that point, it had never really dawned on me that I was here, that I was alive, that I was present. There was something very powerful about that moment.
I leaned in closer to the mirror, and I looked at myself, and suddenly I realized it—that I had a whole new relationship in my life. It was a relationship that, starting from that moment, was more important to me than any other relationship I had with anybody, and that was my relationship with my inner self, my true self. It was something powerful and uplifting. There was something so hopeful about it for me. There was something like, “Oh my God, I’m not alone. Here is somebody who loves me, who really loves me, who’s on my side, who’s fighting for me, who’s honest, who’s not fake.”
So many of the people in my world, in my family, certainly outside of my family—my teachers, the people in school, the people in my neighborhood—so many of them were fake. Some of the worst, most fake people were the parents of my friends. It’s almost like they weren’t even people; like they were just these objects that came in and out and sometimes inhabited some of the same space I did, but they didn’t seem to have feelings. Most people in my life, I couldn’t really identify that they actually had feelings because they didn’t acknowledge them.
What happened to me? I knew I had feelings. I had sadness, I had hope, I had joy, I had pain, I had excitement, I had anger, sometimes I had frustration, I had fear. But I wasn’t getting my feelings acknowledged. So many of my feelings were ignored, but especially by the most important people in my life—by my parents—because so many of my feelings threatened my parents. I think it brought up a lot of my parents’ inadequacies because my parents weren’t really doing a very satisfactory job of providing for my feelings, of helping me to feel secure, of helping me to feel loved and happy and acknowledged. They were really failing me in so many ways.
When I looked in that mirror, here was someone who was looking back at me who knew what my feelings were, who acknowledged them. It was like something clicked in me, and I credit that moment—that moment of looking in the mirror and having the first spark of acknowledgment of a relationship with myself. I credit that moment as the beginning of something, and something that never ended. It was something that I always came back to because I always had me after that.
It’s like, yeah, sometimes I abandoned myself. Sometimes I did what my parents did to me, and I abandoned myself. I had learned very well how to follow their lead, but people who were supposed to love me unconditionally and didn’t love me unconditionally—well, I had learned how to do what they did, and I learned how to love myself very conditionally. Sometimes I really hated myself, but in that moment, the spark—the very beginning of unconditional love of myself—started. Where did it come from, and why? It was a real mystery to me. I never knew why, and I still have never figured it out. I think it may have just been my destiny. That’s what I explained to myself at that moment because it was an unpredictable moment. It wasn’t like I’d done anything to prepare for this; it was just who I was.
It was like maybe I was born to be this way. Maybe something in my brain different, or maybe actually everybody has this, and just so many people have had it crushed out of them, had it squished out of them. They weren’t allowed to develop that relationship with themselves. They weren’t taught through example of how to love themselves. They really weren’t loved that much. They were rejected and abandoned and traumatized in so many other ways that they really didn’t develop that spark. But at that moment, there it was, and it happened. It was something, yeah, I came back to it and came back to it again and again and again.
Well, it took several years before I really developed it into something that I considered to be a real strength and a real skill, where I really developed this much more. The way that I really started developing it into a strength and a skill was by journaling. That was where I—this inner me had a relationship with this inner me. It was almost like there became two of me, where I could speak with myself. I could have a conversation with myself. I could ask myself questions. I could acknowledge my love for myself. I could acknowledge my fears. I could acknowledge my inadequacies. I could acknowledge my problems, and I had a lot of problems.
I wasn’t set forth into this life with a real template for how to become a healthy, self-loving, self-actualized person. I was set forth into this life with someone who had a mix of, yes, certain skills and talents and certain advantages—definitely certain privileges—but also certain disadvantages, certain internalized self-hatred. Yeah, because in a lot of ways, my parents really didn’t love me. In a lot of ways, they actually really hated me. In a lot of ways, yeah, I really threatened them. I brought up stuff from inside them about how they hated themselves. My parents were traumatized. My parents were rejected. My parents were abandoned. My parents had childhoods that, from all I heard, were much worse than mine. I felt lucky in some ways that I had a better shake of the dice, but my shake of the dice was pretty bad in a lot of ways, and it was horrible.
As I grew older, my relationship with myself—that deep conscious acknowledgment of who I was in my relationship with me—it grew, it developed. Now, a strange thing was that I had nobody to share this with. I remember also at nine, ten years old, whenever that first spark of self-acknowledgment came to light, what happened to me is I immediately after that had the realization two other…
People have this kind of relationship with himself, and the only answer I could come up with at that time was, no, they didn’t. I didn’t know anybody who had a self-loving, self-conscious relationship with their own inner self. I had no proof that anybody had this. I hadn’t, not even a suggestion that other people had this. And a big part of why I was pretty sure that nobody I knew had that kind of relationship with their own inner self is it was such a wonderful, powerful, amazing thing to have that I knew if they had this, they would have talked about it with me. They would have said, “Oh my God, did you know? Look, develop this. Have this. I have this. You can have this too.”
And it also scared me because there was a part of me at that moment that realized why I felt so alone, that I had nobody to talk about this with. I had made an incredible discovery, and I realized, wait a second, if I share this with other people, chances are they’re gonna ramp up what they’re already doing to me, which is trying to psychologically kill me and crush me and split me off from my relationship with myself. So I didn’t talk about it. I didn’t talk about it for probably ten years.
Now, the next big profound development leap forward that I had in my relationship with myself came ten years later, more or less ten years, when I was twenty years old, the summer of 1992, when this part of my relationship with myself said, “Daniel, it’s time to take your first major risk in your life.” And I felt ready for it. I felt it was a calculated risk. I felt mature enough, strong enough, intelligent enough, wise enough to do it. And I was already two years through college when I did this.
And what it is, is I started hitchhiking. I took a Greyhound bus from my town in upstate New York, and I rode all the way out to West Yellowstone, Montana. Actually, I started with my bicycle. I brought a bicycle because I was too scared to go without a prop. I needed external things to help me, sort of like something, a safety blanket to hold on to. But after a few days of bicycling in Yellowstone National Park, I ditched the bicycle. I got rid of it. It wasn’t fun. It was lonely. It was boring, and it was such hard work. And it wasn’t a good enough bicycle to be going up and down the major hills in Yellowstone Park.
I rode up to the Continental Divide on that bicycle, and once I rode down the other side of the Continental Divide, I was up at, I can’t remember what it was, like 8,000, 9,000 feet elevation, 3,000 meters, something like that. I said, “No more, too hard.” And I ditched the bicycle, and I started hitchhiking.
And something about being on the side of the road, it thrust forward my relationship with myself. Suddenly, I found being on the side of the road alone, just me and a little backpack, in a sleeping bag, in a tent, and my thumb—my thumb being this wonderful, strong thing that was helping me bond with good people out in the world. It was then that I really started developing an incredibly meditative relationship with myself at a whole new level.
And something about that—I hitchhiked. I don’t remember, it was only probably like two weeks. I hitchhiked around Montana and Wyoming and Idaho, in the mountains and out of the mountains. It was cold at night sometimes; it was warm during the day. Something happened, and when I went back home and then I went back to my third year of college, I was different. There was something about me that had really leapt forward, and it was like I knew that I loved myself.
And I knew now, even though I was still an immature kid in a lot of ways, I was now an adult. And it’s continued to this day. Something that I learned back then, something that I know that it’s precious to me. And also what’s happened is, as the result of this, my life has gone in some very unpredictable directions. I never expected that I was going to become a therapist. It was the farthest thing from my mind. In fact, when I was a kid and I got forced to go to therapy when I was twelve, thirteen, whatever I was, I hated therapy. I thought therapists were evil. They were mean people who forced you to do things and manipulated you and pressured you to do things that you didn’t want to do and used threats and used psychological tricks.
Well, I didn’t like them. I hated them. And then, lo and behold, one day I was like, “I want to become a therapist.” And I wanted to become a different type of therapist. And my life went on a totally different direction than it had been going for a long time.
And I found that one of the things I loved about being a therapist—and it was really one of my huge goals in becoming a therapist—was to help other people develop their own internal relationship with themselves because I had this. And I had this precious thing, this thing that allowed me to step out of myself and to look at my life and to say, “Who are you, Daniel? What are you doing? What are you doing that’s good, and what are you doing that’s not good? In what ways are your behaviors reflections of who you really are on the inside, your true self? And in what ways are your behaviors reflections of the nasty, unpleasant things that were pushed into you through your parents and other troubled people in your life?”
I was able to start to discern who I really was and who I really wasn’t, and I was able to change. I was able to make more conscious, educated risks that took my life in whole new directions. And I realized that as a therapist, I could help other people do this. I could help other people connect with who they really were and disconnect from who they really weren’t and try to disconnect from the people in their lives who were pressuring them to become more of people who they really weren’t.
I was gonna say it amazed me, but it really didn’t amaze me how much people really were disconnected from themselves and how much people were connected to people who didn’t really love them and people who didn’t really encourage them to be who they really were and how much people were connected to people who really weren’t connected to themselves.
And what I realized is the norm, the norm of humanity, no matter which culture, which type of person, gender, sex, race, all this stuff, the norm was so disconnected from itself. And this was normal. And I thought back, and I think back still to when I was a kid and I was striving so hard to become normal. No wonder I failed at it. No wonder I was horrible at it. And no wonder it just made me feel sick and troubled.
And no wonder now, when I look back at all those kids in my life and when I look back at my family from when I was a kid and I look at the direction they went—all these people who didn’t further connect with themselves, people who didn’t develop a self-reflective relationship with their own self—no wonder their lives became predictable and unhappy and they became miserable.
I look back at those people and I thought, “Oh,” and I think now, “I don’t want to become like them.” Now, what I do see, though, is even if they’re unhappy, so many people, so many people who I knew back then, not happy, miserable, disconnected in a way—many people are comfortable with this. I think many members of my family, most of them, are actually comfortable being disconnected, being unhappy, because there can be a real comfort in being part of the norm, in being average.
And for me, once I really connected with me in that conscious way and developed that conscious connection, no, I wasn’t normal anymore. I was different. And it wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t easy. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was not opening up my future toward a comfortable, easy future. I was opening up my future toward a very unpredictable path, a scary path, a path full of risks, a path full of fear. But this, in a way, was something that I loved. I loved the unpredictable nature of it. I loved the unpredictable.
The nature of it now, there’s so many things still that I just can’t predict. I never predicted that I was going to have a YouTube channel, and it’s actually been very enjoyable for me to get up here and talk. But in the same way, it’s very scary. It’s not easy. I always get nervous before I press record on this camera. I did just now, and I probably always will.
It’s scary to be real. It’s scary to acknowledge my real relationship with myself, yeah, in a big way. Because way back when, being real was definitely a way for me to get rejected. And I still do get rejected in some ways for being real. But at the same time, by speaking, by opening my mouth and acknowledging my true relationship with myself, acknowledging what really goes on in my head and inside my heart, I acknowledge my love for myself. I acknowledge truth. I acknowledge my real relationship with me.
And hopefully also, well, maybe I can inspire other people to also be real with themselves.