TRANSCRIPT
Someone recently wrote me a message asking if I would make a video for younger people, younger adults, about how to choose a career and a partner. Well, the best answer I have is my own life experience, what I did, and in a way still am doing.
I want to start with career. That was extremely confusing to me when I was younger, and sometimes still can be now. The reason it was so confusing is that I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. So how do I pick something?
I remember taking career tests. One actually was very interesting in high school. It said I should be a trauma medic, meaning I should work with people in emergency situations to help their medical problems when they’re in medical trauma. Very interesting! I didn’t even know what that meant at the time, and I kind of disregarded it because it didn’t sound like that’s what I wanted to do.
Later, I realized actually, in a way, on a psychological level, that is exactly what I wanted to do, ironically. But I took other psychological tests that were supposed to tell me what career I might take and what path I might follow, and none of it I found to be helpful even remotely.
I spent four years of college studying biology, only to realize, ah, the more I learn about the biology field as a profession, the less I like it. It’s stupid. It’s fake. I didn’t feel they were really doing what I wanted to do. My main interest in biology—studying the wonder of life, the beauty of life, the history of the world, the history of evolution—that wasn’t exactly connected to what the biology field was about.
So how did I find my career? Well, for me, it was a lot of struggling. It actually took five years after college before I even realized that I wanted to become a therapist. And then once I figured that out, it was like magic because I was like, “Oh my God, finally I found something that I wanted to do!” And then it only lasted for 10 years, 10 and a half years I was a therapist, and then it was like, uh oh, back to the drawing board. What do I want to do now for a career?
At that point, when I quit being a therapist, I was only 38, and it was like, “Oh, this is kind of scary.” Well, the main answer I have to what I think someone should do to figure out what career might be good for them is to do the most important work of all, and that’s the inner work. The inner work of figuring out who we are, who we really are on the inside. What is our real character? What is our real identity? What are our real needs? What are our unmet needs from childhood? How can we figure out how to meet those unmet needs from childhood so that we can heal, so that we can become a more integrated person?
What I’ve found for myself is the more I’ve healed, the more I’ve grown, the more I’ve become more integrated as a person, the more I become connected with the outside world and actually also more able to give things to the outside world in an unselfish way, in a more generous way, in a more altruistic way. It’s like my perspective has changed such that I’m much more able to be integrated with the outside world. So in that way, the more integrated I become with myself on the inside, the more healthy, the more healed, the more mature, the more I become integrated with the outside world in a way that I can go forth and be useful.
So when I think of choosing a career, especially for a younger person who is confused about what career to pick, I think about what I really did. The career that I chose, without even realizing it, was the career of developing a healthier self, a healthier me. The career of growing, the career of self-knowledge, the career of becoming more, in my case, Daniel. And this allowed me, as I became more sophisticated and more connected with myself, to choose a career and over time different careers that I liked more.
Something that was also very important to me, a little phrase that I heard along the way that really jumped out at me is, “Do what you love, and the money will follow.” I remember watching my friends when I finished college, even a couple of years after college, going after money, going after prestige, going after fame, going after societal acceptance, familial acceptance. And in a way, I so wanted to do that. I wanted my society to be proud of me. I wanted my parents to be proud of me. And yet, more importantly, I wanted to be real. I wanted to be authentic. I didn’t want to fake it.
The problem was, especially in my early 20s, even into my mid-20s, it was like the me that I was at that point just didn’t have a clear path, and it was very, very hard. So what I think also for people that are really, really struggling, really struggling to figure out what to do with their life, that career, that idea that, “Oh, we’re all supposed to know what we’re supposed to do with our lives,” well, I would say to take a step back and to realize, first of all, often people don’t know what to do. They have no clue, especially when they really start looking within and connecting with who they are. It’s very confusing to know how to fit into this very screwed up, confusing, dishonest world, this fake world.
A lot of times, people who are really fake and really shut down know how to fit into this world better because they’re more in sync with this fake world. So really, for me, what I did was I just often worked for many years. I just worked doing things that I didn’t love so much, and that work to make money, to function, to fit into this screwed up world was my secondary path. My primary path was my private path on the inside, my path of grieving, my path of exploring myself, of journaling massively, of trying to learn how to build healthier friendships.
But then this brings me to the second point: how to pick a partner. This is coming from me, who I’ve been single—single, that is, not in a romantic relationship—for most of my adult life. I have had some distinct periods of being in romance, some very painful romances, some very wonderful romances, some very enlightening, profound romances that profoundly, deeply changed my life for the better. Some that, well, didn’t go so well. Some that were very confusing, some that were really wonderful in some ways, some that were very confusing in other ways.
I feel like, in a way, I’m more normal in that I’ve chosen a career that was more successful, more conventionally accepted. I got a lot more kudos and perks on a longer-term basis for my career than for my romances. Perhaps I’m less conventional in that department. And so how do I answer that question without being hypocritical, giving advice about something that maybe I don’t know a lot about in some ways? Or maybe I do, because my answer when it comes to what does one do to develop that external relationship, picking that partner, my answer is the real partner is within.
This is part of the gift of being a human being, this highly evolved being with this thing called consciousness. What consciousness allows us is to have a relationship with our own selves, almost like we’re two people in a way. But we’re not two people; we’re two different parts of the same person. And this consciousness is a super developed part of me. The more that I’ve developed my consciousness, the more I have developed my relationship with me. And in a way, I become my own partner in a strong way, and I become my better half. My conscious, mature self becomes my own role model.
I’ve worked really hard to learn how to love myself better, how to respect myself better, how to honor myself better, care about myself better, take better care of myself, eat better, exercise in a more healthy way, take better care of my body, going to the doctor and the dentist, things like that. But most importantly, developing my relationship with me. And I guess you can see how this really closely ties into me integrating better with the outside world in terms of choosing your career, because the healthier I’ve become on the inside in my relationship with me.
The healthier I’ve been able to connect with the outside world, but interestingly, this has been my primary relationship in my life: my relationship with me. A big part of it is learning how to meet my own unmet needs from childhood and all the different ways that my parents failed me when I was a little child. They failed to meet my needs, profoundly betrayed me, abused me, rejected me, violated me. And often what I found as the outside world—teachers, sometimes even friends, the parents of friends, other relatives—followed suit. They were very similar to my parents in that way. My parents were fairly normal people in their rejection of whole different parts of me, sometimes profoundly all of me. So my job as an adult has been, what I’ve discovered, is to really rebuild that relationship with me. To learn how to love me in ways that actually—I say rebuild, but in many ways, it’s just build it. A lot of this was never even modeled for me, ever. So it’s like I had to become a role model for myself to really learn how to love myself and heal myself and become that stronger, integrated person on the inside. That’s been my primary goal. And how painful and how strange in the eyes of society! When I was younger and saw the world and saw myself much more through the eyes of society, I really thought there was something wrong with me. For a long time, I didn’t find myself able to just so easily be in romantic relationships. I’d lose interest in women a lot. I’d become afraid of them after I became physically or romantically involved with them. I became terrified. A lot of that was just because of the rejections of my childhood. I was playing out ancient historical patterns from my childhood in my relationships with women. Also, I had a mother who wanted me all for herself. She was very, very jealous of me and of anybody who I might develop a stronger relationship with. She didn’t even like my friends a lot of times. Sometimes she would even sabotage my relationship with my friends. But the scariest thing for her was if I got a girlfriend. That was a betrayal of my mother in her eyes. And there was a part of my mother that I took into myself. The psychology world calls it—I introjected that. I identified more with those parts of my mother than I identified with the strong parts of me. So in a lot of ways, I had to break away from my mother to be able to begin to have healthier relationships in a romantic way with women on the outside, even to have healthier relationships with friends. But it wasn’t just break away from my mother on the outside; it was also breaking away from the parts of my mother that I’d taken into myself. I’d, in a way, become my mother in some loud parts of myself. Some of my inner voices were the voice of my mother, her bad qualities, and the bad qualities of my dad too. But my mother was more of a primary person in my life who affected me in this way. And so interestingly, what I’ve found is the healthier I have become, the more I’ve grieved the traumas of my childhood, the more I’ve learned to love myself—the real me, for who I really am—the more I’ve been able to develop that conscious relationship with me. The more I’ve become a real reflexive partner for myself, standing up for myself, fighting for myself, having my own back, believing in my own best interest, and fighting for that in all areas of my life. I’m not perfect at it, but I’ve become a lot, lot, lot better. The more that that has happened, what I’ve seen, quite surprisingly to me, because I never expected it, is that I’ve actually been able to have healthier romantic relationships with women externally. It’s like the more that I healed, the more I was more available to be with partners. And also, this goes right back to that original question: how do we pick a better partner? Well, when I was younger, I picked less healthy people because that looked more okay and normal to me. That was more comfortable to me. I picked people who were actually psychologically more like my family system. That wasn’t so good. As I got older and loved myself more and realized what real love actually was—what real self-respect, real self-nurturance, real self-care was—I picked people who reflected that more. People who honored me more, but more so honored themselves more. So I picked people who had a healthier relationship with their own inner selves. And it still has been hard. Like I said, I’m single, I’m celibate, and that’s been another real part of it—to not be afraid of being single and celibate for me because I’m not alone. I have a relationship with me. Also, I have friendships with me. And also to realize I challenge that basic idea of society that you must be in a romantic relationship, at some level, in a romantic partnership to be a healthy, functioning human being, a healthy, functioning adult in our world. That’s an idea that’s conventionally put out there, and I basically do not agree with that. Because I also see so many people that are in functional long-term relationships, marriages, romantic relationships, and they seem to share a lot of common values, and they’re so wedded to each other, and yet their values are so screwed up. So I challenge that. I don’t want to see that as healthy at all. So I think that’s my answer. Basically, to sum it up really quickly: the goal of life in terms of love and work is first to learn how to love ourselves and be in a healthy relationship with ourselves. And coming out of that, then maybe or maybe not to have an external romantic relationship. And also, coming out of that strong relationship with ourselves, to find some sort of meaningful work out in the world that feeds our soul, somehow pays our bills, and is useful to others.