TRANSCRIPT
It certainly is easier to fit in if you’re average and have the same addictions as everyone else and aren’t criticizing everyone else’s addictions and criticizing their behavior that they don’t even consider addictions. And that actually is an irony. You take the average severe alcoholic who’s getting totally drunk and blacking out and doing crazy things and getting in fights and falling down and smashing themselves up and having terrible hangovers in the morning and having sex with strangers constantly. That severe alcoholic, if you tell them, “You know, you’re a real alcoholic,” their response many, many times—and I’ve experienced this—is absolutely, “No, I’m not. I drink a little bit once in a while, but I can totally control it. How dare you call me an alcoholic?” And they generally don’t want to be friends with me after I say that. They don’t want to be my therapy patient after I say that because you’re breaking their denial.
Well, the irony is that even with very mild addicts, they have the exact same reaction. It’s just it’s a lot easier for a mild addict to write someone off who’s breaking their denial, who’s challenging their denial, because they have all of society behind them. What happens if you tell someone, “You shouldn’t be having children. You’re in a very disturbed relationship,” when that’s not their perspective at all? Their perspective is, “I’m in a really good relationship, and I’m really happy now, and everything is good, and I can’t wait to have kids.” People don’t like to be challenged like that. They’re going to be very resentful.
So a consequence of getting real, the torment of breaking comfort, breaking denial, is a lot of isolation, a lot of social stigma, a lot of social marginalization and alienation, being labeled as a pariah, potentially being labeled as mentally ill. And people have a wonderful way—even professionals have a wonderful way—of taking things that they don’t find comfortable and pathologizing it. For instance, if I went to a therapist and described, “You know, I’m right now going, I just have all these really excited ideas, and I feel this vital passion that I need to share them, and it’s at a great cost to me, and there’s a lot of consequences for this that people respond negatively. Yeah, I have some allies, but mostly it’s just a lot of negative reaction,” they can say, “Oh, he’s bipolar. He’s in a hypomanic episode right now.” And they can give me a coded number, whatever bipolar is, 296.55.
When I did that, the consequence was I was loved much more. I was society’s darling, the family’s darling, and yet it didn’t satisfy my soul. And that’s been my deep motivation for getting real and getting honest because my attitude now is whatever the cost is, it can’t be as bad as the cost of being fake.
The problem was when I was fake and hiding and saying the right thing and playing the game and wearing the right clothes and having the right haircut and spouting the right philosophy—which I was good at. I was good at all those things, and I was given enough of these quote gifts to be able to do that—that I wasn’t happy. At some profound deep level in my soul, I knew there was something very wrong with what I was doing and who I was. I was not a real person, a fake person, and I still feel to some degree I am. And to survive in the world a lot, I have to be to some degree a fake person. I could say part of it’s maybe a good survival tactic.
Now, I’m not, you know, committing suicide by honesty, but at the same time, as I get stronger, I have more of my true self to lean on. I have a center to hold on to that allows me to say what I want and say what I believe with much less anxiety than it would have cost me in my past. In the past, the anxiety would have been so bad that I couldn’t have even considered the possibility of saying this stuff. Now I can say it. It still is very anxiety-producing for me, but I’m also predicting that in the future, as I get stronger and work out more of my traumas and have more of a true connection and a deep and honest connection with the core of my true self, that this will be much easier.
But in the meantime, it’s okay because the purpose of life is not to be comfortable. It’s not to be happy in the short term. It’s to get real and to grow.