TRANSCRIPT
I recently spent several weeks reading my old journals. Reading 36 years of journaling, starting at the beginning and reading it all the way through. I have read some of it before, bits and pieces. I go back and read a certain date and time. Ooh, let me see what it’s—what was I doing 20 years ago today? How was my life then? But to read it all chronologically, all of it, in its entirety, to read the dreams that I wrote down, to read my dream analysis, to read about my pain. Ooh. It was intense.
So many things came up for me that I thought this would make a good video. I think there are a lot of universals in it. One that I thought of was I have known a few people over the last few decades of my life who have also been big journalers like me, who have told me that they started to go back and read. It was so intense, so painful, sometimes so horrifying that they just said, “No.” And then they destroyed all their journals, shredded them, burned them, threw them away, did something with them to get rid of them. And in a way, I can understand that because it was so painful.
This was a big thing that I got out of it. It was—it, being my life, the day-to-day of my life for so many years, was much more painful than I remembered it having been. It’s funny. This is part of living in a New York City apartment. I don’t know if you can hear it, but there is a baby crying upstairs. I don’t have a lot of places where I can record. I don’t have a lot of time when I can record. So it’s sort of like I have to put up with it. And it’s a strange backdrop to be talking about my journaling while listening to a baby crying. Why is the baby crying? What pain is that baby going through? [clears throat] Ooh, it stopped. The crying stopped. I hope the baby’s okay.
But I think it can be relevant also because I think, like—oh, here it is again. Even myself as an adult remembering back on my adult life 20 years ago, I minimize my pain. And I think it’s just like people with their babyhood, all the crying and sobbing and torment that they went through, they don’t remember it. Oh, my childhood was good. Oh, I had a great early home life. Well, no, it wasn’t. So, so, so often it was terrible and painful.
And I think part of what we humans need to do to survive in this very screwed up, denial-oriented, emotionally split-off, dissociated world, social world, interactive world is we have to split off from our pain, have to bury it, and forget. But it’s in there somewhere. And that’s what I got with reading my journals. Reading that first-person, very blunt, day-to-day account of what I was going through and feeling and experiencing inside myself, with myself, in my interactions, especially with my family of origin, my parents. Ooh. It was really awful.
This is one thing. I was so rooting for myself. I was so saying, “Daniel, I hope you make it. I hope [laughter] you get away from these horrible people.” And slowly I was. Slowly I did. Took a long time. Literally thousands of journal entries, decades of breaking away, going back, wanting to break away from them, hoping that they would change, testing them to see if they changed, listening to them say that they had changed, and then observing their behavior to see that they hadn’t changed again and again.
> [sighs] >> They became more clever in some ways, more deceptive in some ways, lying all over the place. I forgot the degree to which they were liars. And I’m talking about my parents. I mean, I always knew they were liars, but to see it, all these details of how much they lied and then denied that they lied. And I wanted to deny it for a long, long time, would try to move beyond it, move on, get over it. And then it’s like there was no getting over it.
I also realized by reading my journals, my lifetime of journals, that the big theme, not just of my journals, but of my life, was breaking away from my parents. Getting away from these people who couldn’t see me, didn’t want to see me, didn’t know who I was, said that they knew who I was, defined me to me when I was very young. I believed the ways in which they defined me to me. I believed their interpretations of me. But as I got older, I started realizing I’m not who they say I am. They’re not who they say they are. The world isn’t what they say it is.
And if I ever want to have any hope of loving myself, really honoring who I am, I have to get away from these people who don’t honor me, who don’t see me, who actually want to destroy me and call that love. And consider it a betrayal if I love myself and reject this image that they’ve put on me. That’s the theme of my life. And no wonder it was so painful to read this, to sit with it, to see the horror of it.
Also, not just to see how much trauma I went through, but how trauma was ubiquitous in my family system. My parents were deeply traumatized people, didn’t know it, denied it, put it on me, raised me in an environment of trauma, meaning specifically an environment where burying feelings, pushing down feelings, pushing down pain and horror was the norm. That was normal. That was the way to be. That was their way to prepare me to go forth into the world.
> [sighs] >> That’s how they made it in the world. And yet, perhaps even a bigger theme than breaking from my parents in my journals was seeing how I was different from them. How I was different from basically everyone in my life. Different from my whole greater family system, different from my grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles. That there was some part of me that just couldn’t abide by the rules in which they demanded I live.
I couldn’t live by the laws of the family system. I couldn’t live by the norms of the family system. Yes, it was killing me, but it was killing them also. The difference is at some level they were okay with it, all of them. And realizing when I went out into the world and started branching off that pretty much the whole world was okay with being, to a large degree, emotionally dead.
And when I really started breaking from my family in earnest, no surprise, the world at large outside of my family system didn’t support me. They supported my family system. And it was incredibly confusing because nobody explained this to me. Nobody said that this is the way that it is. Instead, they said that I had a problem. There was something wrong with me. There was something deficient in me that I had to learn how to forgive, that I had to learn how to let go, that I had to learn how to move on, I had to learn how to accept.
And part of what made it really confusing was there was something wrong with me. I’d been really screwed up by these people. And here, reading my journal decades later, now in my mid-50s, I can see it. Or at least I can see it so much better, with so much more perspective, have so much more empathy for myself. Coming out of my family system, I was not raised to have empathy for myself. I was actually trained to do the opposite—to have empathy for myself. I was trained to attack myself and hate myself.
And that’s another thing I got out of reading my journals. I knew there were painful incidents coming up at certain points. I’d say, “Oh, I’m coming up on this certain date, let’s say June of 2003. Painful things are coming up.” And I was like scared because how I remembered it was I had behaved so badly at this time in some way. And yet when I came to read this incident, this happened probably 20 or 30 times in my journal. I was surprised that I wasn’t as bad as I remembered. I didn’t behave in as bad a way as I remembered. And they were worse consistently. And that’s what I got—that memories really can be clouded and distorted with time.
My memories. Still holding out some hope that they would change. And they made it confusing because they did what would you call it? False flag actions. Things that they did that seemed very caring, seemed very loving, seemed very nurturing, giving me a gift once in a while, saying some kind words once in a while. But it was manipulation to pull me back in. It was false. It was just a front to get me to believe something that they wanted me to believe, that they had long since implanted in me, some idea that they were loving of me and caring of me.
And yet over the long haul, as I read my journals, I could see they were faking it. They were deluding themselves. That’s something that I got that they really didn’t know themselves. They weren’t journaling like I was. They weren’t on this quest to know themselves. And this is something that came up for me and I still question now. I’ve been done reading my journals for a few weeks.
>> [sighs] >> Really questioning why I was different. Why at 17 years old was I so motivated to journal so deeply and so honestly? Why was I trying so hard at such great risk, writing things down that, you know, my family snooped into my journals? They wanted to discover what was going on in my head. They had no boundaries, and I knew that at some level. And yet I wrote anyways. Desperation. Why was I desperate to be real? Why was I desperate to be true?
I could say at one level some part of me felt that if I wasn’t true, I might have killed myself. And maybe I would have. But why? Why was I so desperate to be real? Why was I different? And it remains kind of a mystery. There were all the also other weird things that happened in my journal. And so many times, like this is the weirdest thing. Sometimes my parents, both of them separately, even after they divorced, they would come to me and want to drop their guard and reveal themselves to me.
They knew there was something special about me. They knew I could understand the deepest truth of them. They knew that unlike everyone else in their lives, I could actually love the truth of them because at some level, although they hated this deep true part of me, they recognized it unconsciously. And they knew that when the hit the fan in their lives and everything was falling apart and they wanted to die, they could be real with me.
And that was very confusing to me, too, because it was my hope that that part of them would catch and click and they would desperately want to be fully real and fully embodied the way that I was striving to be. But it wasn’t so with them. These little moments of them revealing the deepest truth of themselves to me, even acknowledging to me at various random moments over a lunch in a hidden cafe somewhere, my dad telling me, “Yeah,” he said this to me once and I’ve forgotten that he said it. I wrote it in my journal. Thank God I wrote it.
He said, “Yeah, Daniel, probably 99% of the stuff you’ve accused me of, it’s true. I did it.” And yet here he was telling everyone that I was a liar, that I was crazy. And two days later he’s writing me, “You’re a horrible son.” And listen to that. But in that moment, he admitted that it was all true. Spontaneously admitted it like some part of him just needed to get it off his chest. He hated me for being so real. And I saw this in my journals.
Uh, the baby’s crying again. The truth is coming out upstairs, whatever’s going on. Maybe the baby’s hungry or has to go to the bathroom or has gas or maybe it’s being traumatized. What a crazy world we live in. But that again being the >> [sighs and snorts] >> for me as I record this, the musical backdrop.
Well, I’m going to now pull back and finish this video and just say that the person I have become, no contact with my family for the longest, longest time, no contact with my mom for 15, 16 years. Very, very occasional email with my dad over the past 15 years. Not telling him much about my life because he would just try to destroy me. Because ultimately that’s what my parents turned into, people who got stuck, never grew, never wanted to be real. And I did.
I kept this deep anthropological record of my existence over decades. I don’t think I could have done it without journaling. Journaling was the primary form of self-therapy in my life. Even I wrote about therapists that I went to. They came and they went in my journal, sometimes for a couple of years and then they were gone, proving themselves to be actually much more like my parents than they were like me. Much more supportive, sometimes overtly, usually more unconsciously and subliminally supportive of my parents.
But my journaling kept bringing me back to me, honoring me, allowing me to see myself day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month. And now in hindsight, this record that in a totally different self-therapeutic way can allow me to reflect on the broad picture of my existence, my growth process. This giant, humongous tens of thousands of pages of writing that reminds me why for so long I have encouraged people to journal, to give themselves a mirror of themselves.
Something I’m very uncomfortable in doing this. Not easy to do. Very painful. Something that takes a lot of practice and takes a lot of mental muscles to develop the skill to be able to write. I can see that way back when, a long, long time ago in my teens and in my 20s, I was clumsy. I couldn’t write for very long often. Now I can write much longer journal entries. And I still do it. I still journal pretty much every day and still feel that it gives me a mirror which saves my life still.
Still helps me come back to me in this crazy largely non-loving world. And helps me love myself, helps me be myself, helps me keep myself, helps me maintain my equilibrium, helps me keep my focus on what is important. Helps me have a surplus so that I can be useful to others such that I can come here and share this with you.
> [music]