TRANSCRIPT
Recently, someone left a comment on my YouTube channel asking that I make a video on confidence and social anxiety. This is a subject that, from what I observe, really affects a lot of people. It influences how a lot of people live in the world, who they’re friends with, how they function in the world, in the workplace, in school. And I know it’s been something that really has affected my life dramatically at some points, mostly especially when I was younger. But as I was thinking about making this video, I realized that it even affects me today in all sorts of different ways.
I’m going to give one quick example. Yesterday, I was out taking a hike in the countryside. I happen to be living out in the countryside right now, and I was walking along the edge of a road. I saw a tree stump that had a new mushroom coming out of it, and I was looking at it. Well, I have been lately really getting into collecting wild mushrooms and eating them. Well, this was a new species, and I think I figured out what it was. It’s called a black staining polypore. And the thing that characterizes this mushroom that allows you to really identify it and not get poisoned if it’s the wrong one is when you cut it, it stains black.
Well, when I cut this one, and when you bruise it a little, it’s supposed to stain black. Well, I was cutting this one, and it kind of stained brown. And I was like, well, is that black? Well, later what happened is I looked at my hands, and I realized my fingertips, my fingernails were all stained black. I don’t know if you can actually see it because I’ve been scrubbing my skin to remove it.
Well, the reason that I bring it up is that I thought, how can I record a video? Because I know I wave my hands a lot. I do it without thinking about it. Well, if they’re all stained black and nasty, so scrubbing off my fingers so I could fit in more. This goes right back to my childhood. I think of middle school or high school where I had to look perfect or I would be ridiculed. I would lose all my confidence if I didn’t look perfect. If I had a pimple, or if my hair stuck out a little bit, or my nose was shaped a little wrong, or I wasn’t wearing the exact perfect clothes, I just got insecure. Maybe I didn’t fix my collar right just now. This stuff really can go to the core. It can cut to the core.
And so I was thinking, how can I record a video if I look funky with stained hands? In middle school, I would have been tormented for that. Dirty hands? Why’d you stick your hands in manure? Are you a country kid? Blah blah blah. Don’t you know how to wash your hands? Oh, he wiped his ass with his hand. I mean, that’s the kind of stuff kids would say. I saw kids get tormented like that. Sometimes it happened to me. I became kind of an obsessive perfectionist in a way to try to look the part, which I could never quite pull off. I just wasn’t cool enough. I wasn’t looking at myself that way as a little kid. I just was much more of me allowing myself to be me. I didn’t think about how the world would react. My friends didn’t react that way.
But then something burst really in middle school and certainly into high school where everyone was expected to fit perfectly into this mold of normalcy. I think a big thing that happened as kids started going into puberty, everyone started feeling like their bodies were weird and looked strange, and they didn’t know who they were anymore. And so what they did to defend themselves against their insecurities is they tormented other kids who looked different, who didn’t fit in. Oh, also, you know, that’s one of the ways that bullies gain their sense of self-esteem. Though it’s really not self-esteem, it’s false self-esteem, is by finding someone else to pick on. Ooh, divert the attention away from myself. I’m cool, they’re not.
So how does this all relate to social anxiety? Well, a big part of it is that if you’re not cool in the world—and the world of adults really isn’t that different—if you don’t fit in, if you don’t follow these social norms, which might be very, very distant from anything related to reality, healthiness, maturity, insight, wisdom, intelligence, people don’t like you. People think you’re weird. People don’t want to listen to you. People don’t want to consider what you have to say. People don’t want to be friends with you so often. And in an unhealthier environment, to be a healthy person who has healthy ideas, who’s striving for reality, who wants to speak his or her mind, often that just doesn’t work, and people reject you.
And part of the consequence of really being an individual in a social species is we do, at some level, I believe, just have a desire to fit in. And when the species as a whole is so screwed up, fitting in means losing yourself so often to the degree that society is unhealthy. And I see our society as very unhealthy in general.
Well, what is social anxiety? Social anxiety means you want to be who you are, you want to be how you feel, and yet you know it’s not going to work. You know it’s not going to get you loved, get you accepted, get you listened to, make you friends. And what happens, from what I see, is that this tortures some people. They can’t give up themselves sometimes, and yet they want to be accepted at some level. And yet what people go through is there’s a thing called learned helplessness, where you realize that no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, no matter how hard you try to be yourself or not be yourself, if it still doesn’t work, you realize you can’t do anything to change this. You can’t get people to like you more. You can’t get people to listen to you more.
And as much as I hear people say—many people say—I don’t care what other people think of me. What other people think would be about me is not my business. From what I’ve seen, the people who say that often tend to be people who are more accepted, who are less rejected. In my experience of having been rejected a lot, I still find that what people think about me does affect me. No matter how much I intellectually know it’s not supposed to affect me.
I think about wearing this shirt. Another example of social anxiety. It happens not infrequently, even though I even talked about it in a video at one point. I guess the people who say this haven’t seen that video where I talk about how it doesn’t feel good when people say to me, “Why do you always wear the same shirt?” Well, guess what? I don’t have other shirts. I don’t want to buy a huge wardrobe. I’m a minimalist. I travel all the time. I don’t have room for four shirts to do a constant rotation when I’m making videos. And another thing is I really don’t care on a personal level. Who cares what shirt I’m wearing? Who cares where I’m sitting as long as the sound is good enough so that people can hear my message? To me, that should be good enough.
And yet when people comment, “Why don’t you change your shirt more? It’s boring to see the same shirt. It makes me not want to watch your videos,” it still hurts. It gives me anxiety, and I think about it. I think, well, maybe I should change my shirt, get a new shirt, buy four shirts. And then I’m like, “Daniel, stop.” But I notice I’m still susceptible to it. And then I think, uh oh, I just moved. My hands, are people gonna see the black spot? Oh, and then I have to tune it out.
But I think, what is the cure for social anxiety? How does someone get confidence? Well, I think there’s two basic ways to gain confidence, two basic ways to get rid of social anxiety. One is to lose yourself more and to fit into the social norms, whatever they might be. It’s certainly a lot easier to be confident when no one’s criticizing you, when people like you and accept you and listen to you for what you are presenting to them. Well, what I found for me is that way never worked.
Some people, maybe it works for some people who naturally, spontaneously fit whatever social norms happen to be considered healthy and acceptable at any given time and place. Or it works for people who are able to lose themselves and re-mold themselves as an artificial person who fits into those social norms.
But then I think of the other way. The other way to really gain confidence, I think this is the much harder way, that’s to become our real true self and to be around people who, in that way, are like us and who are their own true selves.
What I see is that people who are their own real true self, their honest connection with who they are on the inside of the deepest levels, well, they accept other people for being true and real. And to me, that goes to the idea of healing our childhood traumas, healing the basic things in childhood that blocked us from being us.
This goes to the fundamental idea of why people lack confidence at all in the first place. It’s because their real true self didn’t fit into their family of origin. Their parents were too screwed up to accept the child for himself or herself. The parents created the ultimate original society where you couldn’t be you. The parents weren’t themselves, and the child had to manipulate himself, shut down himself, block out the truth of herself in order to be accepted by the parents.
That original society of the screwed up family system was way more powerful than middle school and high school, way more powerful than the external world around us that didn’t accept the truth of us. That early childhood system forced children to be something other than who they are and took away their natural spontaneous confidence. That’s what happened to me. That’s what I see has happened to so many people.
And when we really begin to undo that process, break away from our families of origin, break away from the other people who didn’t let us be us, break away from our childhood towns, our childhood societies, break away from our teachers and the lessons that they implanted in us, when we really grieve, grieve the horrible things that happened to us that didn’t let us be us, grieve the disallowance of our basic feelings, our basic reactions to being shut down and traumatized.
When we really become ourselves, when we embody us, we gain a confidence. For me, this is the confidence to speak to the camera. Many years ago, I tried speaking to the camera honestly, and I was so silenced. It was so difficult. Even now, sometimes I say things that come out too honestly, and it sets something going in my mind: you can’t say that, you must censor that, you must edit that out. I still see that in myself, and that shows me how much work I still have in front of me to gain more confidence to be me, to remove my social anxiety about being the true me.
And it also highlights the other part of really having social confidence, losing social anxiety, and that’s being in a world of people who are more like me. From what I see, the world is still so screwed up that I have a lot of reasons to be anxious about being me. The world is still so denigrating, rejecting, rude, and obnoxious, and abandoning for people who are their true selves.
But I try to develop a little bubble of a world, a little social world that loves me more and accepts me more, where in private often I can really be my true self and not be afraid to be me, to laugh and be honest, to be critical of what I see on the outside world of how screwed up it is.
And to the best of my ability, I try to make this YouTube channel a place where I can also be confident and be honest about who I really am and to try to overcome my anxiety, well, maybe to inspire others to do the same.