TRANSCRIPT
I have a fantasy that I would like to share. I’m very well aware that it’s just a fantasy, but it’s a fantasy that I like and I hold on to. It’s this idea that after we die, that the best part of us becomes all of us, and all the bad parts of us, all the screwed up and traumatized parts, the unhealed parts of us just go away. And all that’s left of us, the core of us, not in body but a sort of soul part of us, is just our true self and is totally honest. It admits all our flaws, all the things that all of us have been hiding our whole lives, just speaks the truth. Why do I call this a fantasy? Well, I don’t really believe in any sort of soul that lives on after death. I believe the way that we live on, and I talked about this in a different video. The way that we live on is the parts of us that we have shared with others, the ways at which we have influenced others, both for positive and for negative. This is the way that we live on after death. This is our legacy. But I want to talk a little bit about this fantasy of mine anyway. I think, for example, of my grandmother, my mother’s mother. She never really stuck up for me. In fact, when there were problems between me and my mother, problems between me and my dad, my grandmother consistently took the side of the traumatizers. She sided against me. My grandmother supposedly had loved me a lot when I was a little boy, and in some ways I loved her a lot. She never really defended me. She never really stepped in when she saw my parents mistreating me. But there was some part of her that was drawn to me, that was drawn to my passion and my life force, and she cared about me and nurtured me in some ways. And so sometimes I imagine now that she’s been dead for what, 15 years or so? I imagine her somewhere out in the world, out in the ether, talking to me and saying, “Daniel, keep fighting. You were right. I was a coward for not sticking up for you. I was too afraid of my daughter rejecting me. I was afraid of my whole family system, our whole family system rejecting me if I took your side. I was afraid to tell the truth. I knew deep down you were right, but I was afraid of the consequences. I was afraid of losing more than I had already lost. I was afraid that if I spoke on your behalf, your mother would look at me and say, ‘Look at all the ways that you traumatized me as my own mother.’ And your mother would have been right. I was too scared to see how I had never stood up for her when my husband, her father, was perverse to her and was abusive to her and to the other kids. I just let him have free reign in the household. I never stuck up for her. I was weak. I was a coward. And even your mother secretly told me that, well, I, as her mother and as your grandmother, was a weak lady. And I was a weak lady. But deep down underneath it, there was a core of me that wanted to speak the truth, and I never could. So in a way now, this is me speaking as Daniel. I get a sort of satisfaction out of my little fantasy that people can finally speak the truth after they die. My mother’s still alive, but sometimes I wonder after she dies. I mean, she’s 80 now. She’ll be 81 soon. Maybe, who knows, she’ll live to be 90 or 100. All things are possible. But I imagine after she dies how she might talk to me, and she might say, “Daniel, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for how I lied, lied, lied when you confronted me, when you confronted me with the truth of what I had done, of how I had harmed you in so many ways and how I’d violated you and been perverse. How I had behaved in a way toward you just like my father had behaved toward me. How I didn’t stick up for you, Daniel, when your father physically attacked you and hated you and put you down. How I just went silent because I knew that if I spoke out, my whole house of cards that was my marriage and my life would all come crumbling down. So I sacrificed you again and again and again. And when you became an adult and I’d built a new life that was a whole new house of cards, I never stuck up for you again. And you were right with what you said. You were right again and again. And all of your tears, I just turned the other way. I turned off emotionally just like I always had, just like I had from the time you were a baby because I was too weak to speak the truth. I was addicted to comfort. I was too traumatized to be open to dealing with my pain at all. And now that I’m a fully manifested self in this fantasy vision of yours, after I’m dead, I have nothing holding me back. I have nothing to lose by speaking the truth. My house of cards has crumbled, and all that’s left is the truth of who I really am at my core. And now I am here to support you. I laugh because this is completely ridiculous. She would never say such things in reality, but deep down in her, I know that she knows all of these things. This is what’s so sad. This is why it’s been so hard to break away from my mother, my father, my grandmother, my grandfather, my whole extended family system. Because deep down underneath all of their lies and trauma and chaos and denial and violations, each one of them has a true self. Everybody has a true self. Everybody, no matter how bad they are. I mean, I was recently watching this horrible YouTube interview with Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer. And underneath all his horrible, horrible stuff, all that awful stuff he did, underneath it there was a little wounded true self, and I could see it. And it was like life had profoundly perverted him, and nobody ever really heard his cries and his anguish when he was a youth. And so he grew up to become an actual monster. But even he had a true self in there, a core that desired to be honest. And actually, he became a lot more honest after they arrested him and put him in jail. Then he had nothing to lose. He’d already been busted. He was more honest than my mother. Jeffrey Dahmer, more honest than my mother. Go figure. And then I think about myself. Something I’ve tried so hard to do in this life, in this in-the-flesh life when I’m actually here, is to live out my fantasy, to become that person that I fantasize others becoming, others in their stuckness. And so I do my best to speak the truth here, but more importantly, to speak the truth first in my relationship with myself and my relationship with my journal, in writing an autobiography, the true history of my life, good and bad. I acknowledge I’m not ready to publish it. I’m not ready to share my journals with the world. I’m not ready for the chaos that will ensue. I don’t want to hurt other people, even in my family system. You might say I’m a hypocrite. Maybe I am to some degree. Maybe everybody is to some degree. But on the other hand, to the degree that I feel safe, and from what I see, this is much, much farther than most people I knew, certainly anybody in my family that I know does. I come and I share the truth. I share it. I try to live. I try to embody the truth that I have found. And it’s really, really not fun a lot of the time. It’s really unpleasant. I wrote a song once, and I want to record the song again with some new lyrics that I’ve added in called “Why is it hell to be honest? Why is it hell to be real? Why is it hell to go solo? Why is it hell to feel?” Well, it is hell, that’s why. All these people I know, the world writ large, to varying degrees, usually a very great degree, holds it all in, hides the true self, won’t even acknowledge the truth.
Themselves. I know my mother, in her private, private world with herself, only acknowledges a tiny little glimmer of truth and of honesty. It’s just too painful. And I look at her, and I look at old pictures of her, and I can see how her face—I mean, I haven’t actually seen her real face in over a decade—but I know what’s happened to her. It’s like the lies are eating her up. The dishonesty is eating her up. Her eyes are lost and hidden. It’s like there’s a film, a glaze of dishonesty over her eyes.
And I see this with people all around in the world. This glaze, like they have reptilian eyes of dishonesty. That’s what happens when people grow older and don’t become real. Their eyes no longer become a window into their soul; their eyes become a window into their artificiality, their fakeness, their denial.
And so I fantasize again and again about this world where that fakeness, that veil, is ripped off and these people can be true. These people can become allies—allies to everyone, allies to me. I don’t have enough allies, real flesh and blood allies in my life on this journey. I have myself. I have my true self. I have my self-reflective relationship with me. That’s my number one ally and has been for decades, my whole life.
I have a few external allies out there who love me and nurture me and can really see me, but I don’t have that many. I don’t have a real community that holds to the values of being real and healing and growing. Our world is still in very early days of healing.
And so I use these little mental techniques sometimes—my fantasy of souls being true and speaking their truth to me—because sometimes, on my painful healing process, I will use whatever it takes to help myself grow and grieve and become more honest in this life.
[Music]
You.