TRANSCRIPT
I remember back when I was in college, in university, a lot of people, professors even, talked about saving the world. It was sort of the ideal for what we as young university students were supposed to be preparing ourselves for. The professors, incidentally, didn’t seem to be doing much saving the world, but that’s what they were talking about. That was the ideal. That was the noble value of our existence: to save the world.
And some part of that concept really did call to me. It didn’t call to everyone. There were a lot of people studying economics and things like that. Their goal was just to make a lot of money and become more comfortable and more powerful. But I remember thinking, yes, I do want to save the world. I’d come from a very painful childhood. I knew what it meant to suffer. I knew what it meant to be hated. I knew what it meant to be abandoned and despised. I knew what it meant to feel all alone and to feel hopeless. I knew what it meant to hate myself. And I didn’t want others to go through this.
And so the idea somehow that I could right some of the iniquities in the world. I also had some friends and certain times in my life too when I was poor. But I saw some of my friends who were more poor than I was and really had very, very little sometimes, economically. And I thought, well, maybe that’s another way I could try to save the world.
So, as I grew up, I went forward with this idea about saving the world. And I’m not saying I’ve entirely given up on it. I say that because sometimes I look at how crazy the world is and I say, save it. And that’s really what I feel now. Basically, it’s like save the world. I don’t think the world is particularly savable.
So then what should my professors have been talking about as the ideal and the goal? And what do I hold as the goal of existence if it is not to save the world? For me, it’s clear: salvage myself, save myself. Now, what do I mean by that?
From the perspective of back when I was in university, back much closer in the middle of my family system, close with my parents, wanting to live up to the ideals of my greater family system—my aunts and uncles, my grandparents, my professors, my teachers—that sounded selfish. Save yourself. Like, put yourself first, you narcissist. That is so grandiose. That’s selfish. And that is not what I mean at all. I don’t mean save yourself at the expense of others. But even in a way, I do.
I think the real basic thing that I mean, and it’s not like save yourself in terms of make a lot of money and have a nice home and a padded existence where you have a huge bank account and you don’t ever have to be stressed by the ups and downs and the insanities of the world and its wars. That’s not what I mean.
What I mean by save yourself, me saving myself, is saving the true self within me. The me that was always there from the beginning that was crushed and hated, threatened by my parents. The core of me that they couldn’t accept and couldn’t see because it threatened them so much. It threatened the true beautiful parts of them that they had long since denied and pushed away and buried. And because that truth in them was hated by their parents going all the way back, catered by their society, but primarily by the primary society of the child—the parents.
And saving myself, my true self, was something that was unconscious in me for a long, long time. Little moments of consciousness as a young child, as a young boy, as a teenager. Moments of this in my late teen years and into my 20s when I started waking up, when I started journaling and realizing that there was a self inside of me, a true self. And I could communicate with this self through writing, a little bit through meditating, but writing was the best way to get the feelings of my true self on paper.
And I could see this self and realize that I was breathing life into myself. In a way, giving myself mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and bringing myself back to life. And the more I did it, the more I had feelings, and the feelings were painful. I had feelings like anger. Anger that had never been allowed to be because it wasn’t allowed in my family. Because I wasn’t allowed to be angry. Because I wasn’t allowed to defend my true self. My true self had to capitulate to my parents, to their insanity, to their hatred of my true self.
And so if I had thought or said as a child, save myself, I didn’t even know what a self was. And my dad was trying to save himself. But it was his false self he was trying to save by making more money and being more fancy and being more grandiose and important, getting the world to love him more. But there was no real self. The self that he thought he had was just a hologram. It was just projected, some projected image of a thing that he wanted to believe that he was. Same thing for my mother. They were two holograms in this hologrammatic relationship with each other that really wasn’t a relationship. It was a world of manipulation and hatred of each other, a chess match against each other to see who was more powerful and who could win, who could dominate. And that’s how it was set up from the beginning.
And both of their parents had relationships like that with each other. Both of my grandparents had these horrible relationships with each other that was manipulation and fighting, fighting for dominance and money and power and cruelty, lies. And my parents held that behavior up as an ideal.
I just remembered something totally random. Let’s see if I could connect it with this subject. But it was something about my dad’s father. My dad thought it was so funny, and he told me this when I was a kid. What a terrible, sad thing to know and to tell your child and to hold it up as a special thing. My dad laughed when he told me this. He said his father, when his father would get a parking ticket from the police—this is going back 50 years—they would put the parking ticket under the windshield of his car for parking illegally. But my grandfather would look around and take the parking ticket and put it under someone else’s windshield, under their windshield wiper.
And my dad said, “Yeah, and sometimes those people would pay for my grandfather’s parking ticket.” And I remember thinking, “Ew.” And then I remember also thinking strategically, “Is that even a good idea?” I said, “Why would they pay for it?” He goes, “Some people just think the parking ticket must be for them, so they pay for it. And if they don’t pay for it, well, they throw it away, and then it’s no harm done. He’ll get a ticket in the mail.” But I’m like, my dad held that up as something funny. Manipulating others, lying, cheating, stealing. I mean, the guy was a crook, a creep, a scumbag. And that was my dad’s father. And he presented this as something good. That’s also who my dad was. And that’s who my dad wanted me to be.
And so when I say save myself, when I present it as an ideal to save ourselves, it means to get away from the lies, to get away from these scumbag people, to be true to us. Now, it’s confusing sometimes because then I’ve met a lot of people in this world—parents who are very moral. They follow often religious guidelines for morality. Do not lie. Do not steal. You will go to hell. You will be punished. God will see what you are doing. Blah blah blah. Don’t do creepy things like my grandfather did. Yet it’s more subtle. Sometimes their cruelties, viciousness, evilness. They hit their children. They abandon their children emotionally. They put their children down. They don’t listen to the true self of their child. They reject their child when their child expresses honest feelings. And they do it all within the rubric of morality and religion and goodness.
So it never crosses their mind that they are anything other than good people and good parents. And if the child complains, they’re not only going against their parents, they’re going…
Against the whole religion, the whole society. And yet still, they’ve lost themselves. The children can lose themselves in these crushing rigid systems. And so I say reject it all. Find the true self in the middle. Find your feelings. Me find my feelings. Find the thread of truth and bring it back into my consciousness. Nurture that consciousness and then suffer the consequences.
There was a certain comfort for me, I admit, as a child, as a young man in not having a true self, being dissociated. I fit into my family. They accepted me. I could come home. They paid for my college. They paid for my food. They paid for my clothes. I went on family vacations with them. I was welcome. My dad said, “I love you unconditionally.” What a joke that unconditionally was from my mother and my father. Unconditionally. The basic unspoken condition being don’t have a true self. If you have a true self, we will despise you.
Or even a little twist on it. When I started really getting my true self, and I’ve talked about this before, my parents said, “Daniel’s gone. Where is Daniel? This is not Daniel. This is not the Daniel we know.” So, they denied that the new me was even me. They thought in a way that I had committed a crime of stealing the me that they knew from them. Like I had robbed them of me because that’s part of what it was in their minds. And I think in truth, in some way, they owned my false self, the hologram that I had become.
They had so pushed down my true self and could control the puppet strings of this being that came into existence as the result of me being lost, that that false me really couldn’t fight back against them. And so when I became me and I started fighting for me and really defending me, they despised the true me. They felt I was a thief. I was stealing their creation. And in a way, I was. And who cares? I had a right to do this. This was my birthright to have me. And that’s what I say now. Save yourself because yes, I lost my family. I was rejected by my parents. They despise me now.
I think they even grieved the thing that they called me. They got, “Oh, Daniel died.” I’ve said this before also. I think my mother, I felt it. If I had committed suicide and killed myself, she would have been happy because then she could have controlled the memory of me, the memory of the false self that she had helped to create through her abuse and neglect and abandonments and rejection. But I didn’t kill myself. All I did was kill my false self and nurtured the true me and saved myself.
And yes, so I’ve been rejected by my family, have no relationship with them anymore, rejected by my past teachers, my university, rejected by their ideals, don’t fit into my society. My society that I don’t like and respect anyway. But I have me. When I go to bed at night, I have me. It’s painful a lot. It’s not easy. It’s confusing. It is never easy to not fit in. It’s always, always uncomfortable.
Yes. Sometimes when I get way away from everything, sometimes when I go way out into nature all alone, hiking in nature, walking along a random beach far, far away from any human beings, camping out in nature, being alone in a jungle at night, sometimes sleeping in my tent, just listening to the sounds of the birds and the wild animals and the insects sometimes. Then just being with my true self is very comfortable.
But I’m in New York City now, in the middle of a beehive of dishonest culture. All these overlapping dishonest cultures. So many people who are so lost and confused and fake, and I have to wind my way between them and watching the things that they do, especially the ones that are raising their children and breaking them. It’s very, very painful and I don’t fit in. But I still say I have done so much saving of me and I’m still doing it. I’m still every day fighting to nurture me. That this is what gives my life value.
This is what I have lived for. The me at 53 years old who talks here, who speaks here, who exists here. This me is the product of my hard work. It’s this me who shares, who hopefully can be useful to others, maybe inspire some others, give a little encouragement to others, give a model of inspiration to others, a little help and encouragement to others.
Is this saving the world? I think of that phrase, old Jewish Hiddic phrase. I believe to redeem one person is to redeem the world. I heard it somewhere along the way. Maybe it’s true. And maybe the redeeming one person, the person I must start with is me. Maybe that’s what everybody must do. I think that’s where we have to start because I think of all those people way back when, 30 something years ago when I was in college. I’m going to save the world and professors teaching us to save the world and become this kind of lawyer and this kind of person who does this kind of organic farming and whatever to save the world.
How can you save the world if you haven’t saved yourself? How can you redeem the world if you haven’t redeemed your true self? So I think this, if there is going to be any grander truer redemption in the world, if there is such a thing as saving the world, it must start with saving the true self. Healing the traumas that we each individually inside of us went through in our childhoods. Going through the horrible tormenting process of grief and all that goes along with it. Grieving the anger, the sadness, the feeling the self-hatred, feeling the self-disgust, feeling the disgust at the people who harmed us, feeling the rage, learning how to manage all these feelings day in, day out.
Learning to deal with the bad dreams, breaking the dissociation and smelling the stink that comes up. Seeing the bad behavior that we have done as a result of having been so traumatized. Bad behavior to others, perhaps definitely to ourselves. The consequences of having sided with our traumatizers, identifying with our aggressors in order to survive. And there’s six systems. Figuring out how to find companions on this true journey of life. Very long and painful process in my case, ongoing.
What I hope is that I can continue it for a long, long time, as long as I live. And how long is a long, long time? Because I know this one day can be very, very long and yet in one day we can do a lot of wonderful things for ourselves, inspiring ourselves and also hopefully inspiring others.