TRANSCRIPT
I’d like to speak a bit about some occasional painful moments of embarrassment that I still have nowadays. It actually came to my mind a couple of days ago when I was doing a little internet research on some people I knew from my grade school years, from my years in elementary school. I was curious, just sort of a scientific study, as it were, to satisfy my curiosity about what became of them.
So I was doing a little internet research and looking them up, and a few of them I found little bits and pieces of their lives—where they worked, what they were doing, what degrees they had. A couple of times I saw a picture of them. Some of them I couldn’t find anything. It was like nothing to be found about these people. It’s like they just sort of, in terms of the internet, they don’t exist or minimally exist.
And I was thinking, you know, of the people I looked up, how basically how little I found. And the reason I became embarrassed is suddenly, while doing this, it suddenly struck me: what if they did this about me? And then I thought, they probably have done this about me. And then I thought, oh my god, I am so public about my life—like a thousand times more than any of them are. My personal life, my history, my family history, my feelings, my traumas, my painful post-traumatic reactions, my ideas, and all this stuff that’s so out there and so public.
And I thought, I just—I think what happened is I really got into a grade school mindset when I was searching for them and remembering and thinking about my past life. And while I was in that mindset, it was like I lost my self. I lost my more adult, mature self. And I had a perspective on who I’ve become from their perspective, from the perspective of my childhood world, my childhood conventional ideas, the ideas of my teachers, even of my parents from back then, my parents nowadays.
And I felt embarrassed. And that’s such a sad thing. It’s like that’s the world I was raised in—to be honest, to be true, to be real is embarrassing, weird, strange, freaky, stigmatized, alienating, peculiar, bizarre. And I thought that’s probably how they look at me, if they look at me at all. Probably they do. Probably people out there do look at me. And it was like, oh, what a sacrifice. It’s like, oh, do I wish that I’d never been so public? Well, apparently not, because look at me here talking about it right now.
And this is what happened. This is what happened as the result of that embarrassment, because this is going to lead me right to where I am now, at this very moment, sitting here in this chair in front of the camera. What happened to me is, yes, I felt embarrassed, maybe even ashamed a bit—like a little bit like, oh god, sickened to think of those people back then looking at me and thinking I’m crazy or thinking I’m weird or peculiar or bizarre, talking about it with each other probably, because some of them still know each other. Many of them didn’t evolve much out of those early elementary school spheres that they lived in geographically, even a lot of them from what I gathered.
So I thought of them, like talking about me, gossiping about me, and the pain that I would have felt back then if they did that, because I knew what it was like to be—what was that anyway? Who knows? That’s funny. Sometimes the outside world actually reflects—I don’t know if the camera or the microphone caught that noise, but something like something a bird hit the window. I’m so sorry to even consider such a possibility, but it’s like the outside world can manifest or reflect kind of what I’m going through internally.
Yeah, that jolt that I feel on the inside when I consider how it felt back then to be alienated, gossiped about, teased, marginalized, stigmatized—to still feel it now. Well, what happened as a result of that? And it’s just like what I’m doing or about that noise that I just heard is I came back to myself. I migrated back to me. Actually, what I did is I went through a parallel process that I went through in my 20s and 30s and even into my 40s, where I went through the maturity phases. I grew, and it happened quickly a couple of days ago when I went through this process where I returned to healthy, adult, more conscious me.
Where I said, Daniel, if they mock you and tease you and alienate you and stigmatize you, that’s about them. That speaks more about them. This is about how they really feel about themselves on the inside. This isn’t about you. They only alienate you and stigmatize you and maybe even call you crazy or tease you or did that back then because you reflected their smallness, their screwed-upness, their denial. I know that. And certainly in relation to my dad, he hated me. He was ashamed of me. He was embarrassed by me because I was healthy, because I was creative, because I was alive, and he was not those things. He was so dead and shut down and split off that my aliveness kicked up his sense of being alive.
And so he and my mom too, they tried to kill me. They tried to shut me down. They wanted me to be the boy who grew up to become a man who was still emotionally a boy, who fit into this screwed-up world and became one of the people who was like my elementary school classmates, who just became a cog in the wheel of this very screwed-up machine of our modern society, who didn’t do anything to really help others, to be useful to others, to help others grow, to give a role model of something new, to share ideas that were outside of the screwed-up conventions of our world.
And so I came back to me, and I reminded myself of why I’ve gone on this path, why I left all that behind, why I didn’t want to be what they all became, because I saw myself becoming that, and I knew I would be miserable. Something—and it reminded me—something even back then, there was something about me that had a spark of consciousness, a spark of greater health that didn’t like being average back then, because being average was being emotionally dead.
And so I reminded myself, and it happened to me again. I returned to having my consciousness connected with my true self on the inside. And I said, you know, okay, they might think it’s embarrassing, but they are actually the failures in this life. And I’m glad for what I’ve done. And it reminds me, and it reminded me, and it reminds me right now that I want to be here. I want to be sitting in this chair talking to a camera about this, because this is something that I believe can be useful to other people.
Because I don’t see my experience as being only applicable to me. I see this as being much more universal, much more applicable to a lot, a lot, a lot of people. And hopefully in the future, a lot more people, because I’m still hoping, I’m still banking on the idea that our world is going to change, that more people are going to wake up and do things that are against these screwed-up societal norms, these deadening norms that kill the soul, kill the spirit, kill the creativity of the child, keep the child always a child emotionally, even when it has an adult body, even when it’s procreated and created new children that get screwed up by these people who were my elementary school classmates, who are laughing at me or avoiding me like they always did.
But this is my reminder that I actually, deep down, I’m proud of what I did, and I’m proud of what I have become. And I’m proud, even though it’s difficult, I’m proud of what I am still becoming.