TRANSCRIPT
What is the best way for us to evolve as human beings? Well, recently I have been thinking about an analogy to that, and that is the idea of island biogeography. And why bring this up? I’ve been reading a book about birds and bird intelligence in the evolution of bird intelligence. One of the things they’ve brought up again and again is some of the most intelligent birds, these birds called the New Caledonian crows, evolved in New Caledonia, an island somewhere down in the South Pacific off Australia, I believe, between Australia and New Zealand, where they didn’t have predators. They could evolve in all sorts of novel ways in sometimes inhospitable environments because they had a lot of safety. They were not being attacked. They could evolve in all sorts of unusual ways to use tools. These are birds that can use tools in really complex ways, and they evolved this over how many? Twenty million years or something.
Now, another interesting thing is with island biogeography. On other islands in the world, some really unusual things, birds evolved because there weren’t predators that could harm them. They could evolve in all sorts of unusual, novel ways. I think of the MOA, this huge giant bird that was much, much bigger than an ostrich but sort of looked like an ostrich. It evolved in New Zealand because there was nothing that could attack it and kill it. Not until the Maoris came, whenever that was, five, six hundred, eight hundred years ago, or whenever the Maoris arrived. I think they were the ones who ended up driving the MOA, these giant, huge flightless birds. They drove them to extinction because they were easy to catch. These birds evolved in a place where nothing really was going after them, and so they can really become very unusual and very different and really follow a trajectory that was unlike birds in other parts of the world, except maybe Madagascar, where there was a bird that was even bigger, the elephant bird. Another place in the world, another island, this island of Madagascar off Africa, where there weren’t predators that would kill this bird, so it became a norm. I don’t remember what it was, 900 pounds or something like that, a giant flightless bird that really went wild.
So now I’m going to bring it back to human evolution, human emotional evolution, humans’ psychological evolution, and what are the analogies for me personally? My evolution as a human being, my self-awareness, my self-knowledge, my emotional growth, my healing from trauma happened when I became much more safe in my life. When I got out of my family system, when I learned how to work a job I think that I felt safe in, where I was able to save some money and relax and sometimes not work as hard as I had to work previously, when I wasn’t in school anymore with these aggressive, domineering, sometimes not at all insightful teachers and professors, where I didn’t have to be under the thumb of authoritarians.
When I found jobs where I could freelance, where I didn’t have a boss who was necessarily telling me what to do all the time and sometimes telling me to do stupid things or wrong things, where I had to subjugate my will and my thought process to someone I didn’t respect or didn’t like or even hated, perhaps. So what it was, was what I found safety when I didn’t have to be under the thumb of my parents, when I didn’t have to listen to their version of reality, their version of why I was the way I was, or maybe their complete misconception or mis-telling of the story of who I was, where their narrative about me was no longer dominant. A place where I could explore my own narrative safely, also living in a safe city, maybe living in a safe countryside, a place where I didn’t feel threatened.
As a child, I felt physically threatened a lot. Threatened by other kids, threatened by my parents, threatened by kids at school in my neighborhood. It wasn’t a safe place. So living in a place, in an environment where I felt emotionally safe and physically safe, it really allowed me to go within, to explore myself without so much fear, without so much terror. I can look inside myself with more of eyes of truth, of objectivity, not having to accommodate all these other people who I didn’t like and didn’t respect and who wouldn’t respect my objectivity, wouldn’t respect my exploration, my honest exploration, self-exploration.
And what happened to me as the result of being in an environment of fighting for an environment, of creating an environment for myself that was safe, of having friends around me who loved me, who respected me, who didn’t shoot me down when I spoke about my point of view, when I spoke about my history as I recalled it, who really wanted to know more, who were curious about me, who said, “Daniel, wow, I can’t believe you’re figuring that out. You’re so clear, good for you!” People that motivated me, as opposed to did do the opposite of what had happened to me so often when I was younger, which was shoot me down, criticized me, break me down, disallow me from feeling my feelings.
Well, what happened to me when I created this environment, this new environment, an island of safety for myself, a place with padding around me where people didn’t violate me and attacked me? What happened then is my evolution took off, and I really started to know myself. I really started to have original ideas and creative ideas and ideas that were outside of my family system, beyond my family system, beyond the traumas that I had known, beyond the traumas I had experienced, beyond the history of my family, beyond the limitations of my ancestry. I really started to evolve as a human being, and it was wonderful.
I actually even remember when it really started in earnest. I was 20 years old. I had already finished my second year of college. And by the way, it didn’t happen when I was in college. It happened when I was far away from college. It started when I was 20 years old, and I was hitchhiking. I went out to the side of the road in Wyoming. I took a bus to Wyoming. I was far from everybody I knew. I was in the middle of nature, and I stood on the side of the road in Yellowstone National Park. This is back in 1992. You can’t even hitchhike anymore now in Yellowstone; it’s illegal. I found that out some ten years ago. But then it was legal, and thank God it was because I had the safety of knowing I was breaking no laws. I was in nature. There were animals, there were plants, there was beautiful stuff all around me, and there was me.
And something happened inside of me. Something in this safety and being away from everything, away from society, and not having anybody pick me up for a while, just standing on the side of the road with me and my backpack in silence, I found something inside of myself, some consciousness. And what happened to me is that was the moment where I felt I became an adult. I wasn’t a child anymore in some new way. That was when some key part of evolution happened. That’s like when the island I was living on later was separated from the mainland. That’s when all these birds had a chance to evolve in the new direction. There were no more tigers and lions and wolves going after them and killing them. They really had safety to try something new.
And the thing that happened to me back then, starting when I was 20, which I lost when I went back to college and finished two more years of it, but I knew was inside of me, and I always fought for it again, was I started having original ideas and safety, and it was wonderful. I knew even though I can go back to college, I’m gonna be faking it from now on. I’m gonna fake it with my teachers and fake it with fellow students and figure out how to finish it and get my degree because having my degree was another thing that I wanted. I wanted the power of having that college degree because I knew it would help me in my future, and by God, it did help me.
So even though there was a lot of fakeness and a lot of lying that I had to go through to get that degree, a lot of subjugating myself to people that I didn’t respect, I didn’t respect their ideas.
Didn’t respect who they were as human beings. I got that degree, and that degree allowed me to get certain better jobs along the way and to build my island of safety. And in that private world, that is really where my adulthood, my real self took off. I grew as a human being, and I grew, and I grew, and I grew. I gained more self-knowledge, and then I thought, well maybe I’m ready to go back to my family. I tried going back, only to realize they’re still lions and tigers and wolves. They’ll still rip me up, and they’ll still rip up my ideas because they did not like my ideas. They did not like what I was becoming, and they questioned, “Why are you becoming this way? Something’s gone wrong with you. You’re poisoned.”
Back, actually, I wasn’t poisoned. Actually, what really happened is they poisoned me a long, long time ago, and now I was becoming unpoisoned. Accept back when they poisoned me, they never said, “We’re poisoning you.” They weren’t even conscious of it. They were poisoning me. Being poisoned made them feel safe. I was no longer someone who was calling them out on their horrible, traumatizing stuff that they were doing to me. And as I became unpoisoned, and as I became more real and more honest, I was no longer safe for them, and they hated me.
I realized, ah, they actually hated the real me all along, and that’s why I had to be so shut down. That’s why I wasn’t so safe around them ever when I was a child. That’s why I felt so unsafe in my childhood for so many years. That’s why I had all those horrible nightmares. I was living in an environment that was full of predators that wanted to kill me, and I was their prey.
Well, when I got out, when I started to get free, when I became more free and more free, I became less like a prey item. Instead, I became a self. I became a human being, a human being who was becoming more of a human being and a bigger self, evolving into something new and original and unusual. I was becoming the human version of an elephant bird or a MOA or a New Caledonian crow. I was learning how to use the tools in my life to make new tools and greater tools and better tools to help myself.
I journaled in a way that nobody in my family had ever journaled. I journaled honestly. That was a tool that I had. I had the tool of learning how to make better friends, of having radar to find better people to be attracted to as human beings who could help me on my process. And you know what? I could offer the same thing to them. I could listen, I could love, I could care, I could be respectful, I could not violate. And you know what? I gravitated toward people who had all those qualities, and they became part of my island—people who I let into my personal world, safe people.
And now I take a step back, and I think about so many people who reach out to me on the Internet, in the world, people that I meet in my travels who say, “How do I find this? How do I get out of my family? How do I create an island of safety for myself?” And I don’t always have the answer. I don’t know how. I don’t know. Maybe I was lucky in certain ways, but I say somehow fight for yourself. Use cunning, use smarts, use strategy. Figure out how to get out. Don’t fight them when they have power over you.
I tried fighting my family sometimes when they still had some power over me, and God, again and again, they crushed me. I realized better not to fight them; better to get away from them. Because the other thing is, while I was more in a transitional place where I was part out and part in, I still so much wanted them to love me. And I wasn’t even aware of how much I wanted them to love me. And you know what? Because I had that part of me that still wanted them to love me, that still gave them more and more power over me. They could break me down still.
Me going home for all those years for the holidays, going home for Christmas and Thanksgiving, still wanting them to care about me and love me, and me feeling horrible afterwards and hungover, and still being open to their interpretations about me made me feel sick. Because they were repointing me again and again, and it took days or weeks or years sometimes for me to get that poison out of me and to become unpoisoned.
And again and again, so I’ve learned this process again and again. For me, the value of getting out, of rebuilding my island of safety, of figuring out who do I welcome into this island, and really using discretion, using thought, figuring out how to get better jobs, how to be more empowered by figuring out to save money—not always to live on the edge of almost running out. It was terrifying. I couldn’t live with having no money. I couldn’t live with being in debt. That was disempowerment for me. It was terrifying.
So I strategized. I learned how to live lower budget. I still live an incredibly low-budget lifestyle because for me, that gives me more safety. That gives me more protection. Also, putting effort in my free time to learn how to be a valuable person in terms of my skill set to work, it’s very important to me. Figuring out how to have safe places to live that aren’t so expensive—not always an easy thing. I’m a traveler; I live in lots of different places and figuring out how to have that safety.
But I think a key thing for me is not just that physical island that I live on, but also that inner emotional island. And that for me is about having boundaries, knowing what is okay and what isn’t, knowing how to defend myself if I need to defend myself, knowing how to back away from people that don’t respect my boundaries, to get away from them, to end relationships, to end them gently without causing a big brouhaha and a big fight so that they want to have revenge on me.
Also, how to know how to respect myself more in my own internal life. So part of this island of safety that I’ve built up is about resolving my traumas on the inside. This isn’t about anybody else, but when I have that time of safety to know that who I am, to know who my inner enemy is—all this internalized stuff from my family system, from other traumatizers from my childhood—and to know what of that is within me and has become part of me, and how do I undo it? How do I resolve it? How do I grieve?
And to put in the time every day to fight for myself, to get a good night’s sleep every night, that’s a big part of my safety. So that when I wake up in the morning, my brain is working. And to sleep well without drugs and other things that help me sleep, not always an easy thing in this modern world. I have to fight for my ability to sleep well every night or to try, and it doesn’t always. A lot of times I have terrible nights of sleep, especially as I’m healing from my traumas. Stressful dreams come up, but to fight for my structure, the structure of loving myself, of eating well, of eating healthy, of exercising—trying to exercise every day in gentle and mild ways.
These are ways, these are ways that I create that island of safety so that I can evolve. And I don’t just see it with me because I see it in other people too. The people who really figure out how to fight for those islands of safety—gentle fighting, loving fighting in their own lives, in their relationships, in their relationship with the world—those are people who can evolve more easily. Because I’ve also seen without that, it is very, very hard to evolve. And I want to keep evolving, and I want to keep, keep evolving. I want to learn how to evolve better because I want to become a bigger person. I want to become a healthier person, a more self-loving person, not only for loving myself more but also for being able to be more useful to other people.
Outside world, because I admit I have found such incredible value in that you.