TRANSCRIPT
My process starts with an idea, an inspiration, something that I really want to do. And usually, I’m all on it for a while. I do well on it for a while. I think about it for a while. I decide how I want to try to manifest it. What’s the best way for me to manifest it? If I actually have the ability to do it. And then usually what I do is I jump in and I just create, kind of like I’m doing right now.
And by the way, the jumping in process is full of terror. I have anxiety, I have fears. Am I ready to do it? I can actually find myself getting superstitious sometimes, doing things that are a bit repetitive in preparation, doing routines. I also like to be alone. I like to just be with myself, not be too distracted, not think about very many other things at all. I don’t like to do any work. I don’t like to do too much reading. I don’t really want to read too much of the news about all the horrible things going on in the planet. Instead, I want to go in and I want to focus on the inside.
So often my mornings, when I’m preparing to do a creative project like today, is to be meditative. Sometimes I think a lot about the project that I’m going to do, like this project, and sometimes I don’t think about it much at all. So in this situation, actually, I decided more to just wing it and just to see what comes out. Because sometimes I find that if I have a little bit of faith in my inner self, faith that I actually know what I’m talking about, and in this case, who knows better than me about my creative process? Well, if I can just be centered enough that when the camera’s on or when I start writing, if I’m writing an essay or a longer piece, that it’s just going to come out. It’s gonna come out naturally, and that I just have to be centered. That’s my main goal.
So then what I do is I do whatever routine to get myself prepared, get in the situation. So like right now, I have a shirt that I wear regularly when I make videos. I used to have a different shirt, and it was just very comfortable for me. Unfortunately, I lost that shirt when I was traveling in India. I have no idea where it is or where it went. I hope it found a new home and someone who loves it is wearing it because I wore it in a lot of videos. It was the only collared shirt that I had that would nicely hold my microphone. So someone gave me a new one now, so I’m wearing this one and trying it out.
But it’s even that, it’s like, whoo! I like my routine to be pretty strict so then I can just focus on the inside. If my external routine is pretty structured and pretty, pretty consistent, then I don’t have to give it much thought. And I don’t really want to have to think about much of anything except for the creative process of what I’m going to say or what I’m going to write.
So then what I do is I sit down, I take a deep breath, and I start. So in this case, I don’t press start on the camera and watch the little red light flash, and I start talking. And then usually what I do is I screw up or I stutter or I say the wrong thing, and I press stop. And then I go, “Daniel, okay, now that was your trial run. Now be more centered, start again, try again, be more inside of yourself.” And also, I take my glasses off because I find when I take my glasses off, I’m very nearsighted. I can’t really focus on anything. Yes, I can look at the camera, but I don’t really focus that well. That’s why sometimes I squint and stuff like that.
But what I can do with my glasses off, because I can’t really see very well or focus much on the outside, I end up focusing more on the inside. I’m not giving my eyes too much power. More of my power now is coming from my spirit within me and my mind. So then I start usually for a second time. Sometimes I start a third time or a fourth time or a fifth time. I have a bunch of drafts usually that I do on a project, and then eventually I can feel that I’m in the flow. Like right now, I’m in a flow, and I just let it flow. And I talk or I write or whatever it is that I’m doing, and I just go and go and go and go and try to keep my focus and try to keep my mind focused on what is the task at hand, what is the project that I’m doing, now that project being a flowchart of my emotional process.
So then what I do is I say whatever it is that I have to say, whatever it is that I want, all the nuances, all the different layers, all the different points that I want to make. And I finish, or at least I finish a draft. And then in the case of a video, I press stop, or in the case of writing, I end it, and I say, “Yes, I did it!” And often that’s how I end. You don’t see that because that’s after I pressed stop. Yeah, I did it! Oh, it feels great because I feel like I’ve overcome a lot, a lot of my fears.
And where do these fears come from? For me, these fears come from a couple of different places, at least that I can think of. One place that they come from is the little place of being a child, where I really didn’t have a voice of truth, a voice of full honesty, authenticity. I wasn’t allowed to really speak out in my family. It was dangerous, especially if I was speaking about my fears or any sort of criticism of my parents in any way. Not allowed. Anything that I felt that was against them, like if I was angry of things they’d done that hurt me or anything like that, I wasn’t allowed to speak about it.
So as a child, a lot of my mental energy went into censoring myself, censoring what came out of my mouth, putting everything through a sort of filter. And what that ended up doing to me was, uh, it stumbled me. It would literally stumble over my words, or I would just sort of go into a more false self kind of place where I was very inauthentic. The goal being to try to look as authentic as possible, but really I wasn’t very authentic because I wasn’t allowed to be.
So the idea of me doing public speaking, especially about things that were really important to me, things that meant a lot to me, things that especially meant a lot to me emotionally, that was impossible. So now, all these years later, I still have some left over from that. Yes, I’ve done a lot of healing, I’ve done a lot of growing, I’ve worked out a lot of my traumas, I’ve become a lot more independent, my voice has returned. But some part, some little part of those ancient fears, oh my god, you’re not allowed to tell the truth, you can’t be real, you can’t especially critique the family system, things like that, critique authority figures, it lives within me.
And by the way, it wasn’t just my parents because the outside world did the same thing. Especially a big part of my life was school, and school I discovered was a place where I also couldn’t be authentic. My job was to answer teachers’ questions properly at the right time, give correct answers, the answers that they had taught me were correct. And being really creative, being really spontaneous, being really independent, being really free, especially being really outspoken, was not okay. That made my life hell.
I was going to say it would have made my life hell, but actually, I did try often. I tried to be real and be myself. I had this deep urge to just be me, and I got shot down. I got humiliated. There was a lot of humiliation that I experienced in school. The result of that being my natural, spontaneous, organic me, the truth of me, my voice, my intelligence, my freedom, my spirit, all that got very shut down. And all everything had to be put through a lens of what was acceptable.
These years later, being true and being real, there’s a lot of anxiety in it for me. So it’s difficult to create. It’s difficult to do things like this, speak out honestly. But it doesn’t just end when I press stop on the video or when I end doing an essay. Though it feels like such a victory when I’m actually done, because it’s like, wow, I went against everything that I was taught not to do, and I was allowed to be me. I figured out how to allow myself to become independent and free and outspoken, which is what I always wanted to be as a kid. I think everybody wants to do that.
But for me, I feel like sometimes when I’m able to do these creative projects, encapsulate them in a ten-minute video or a five-minute video or a fifteen-minute video or a two thousand word essay or whatever it is, I feel like yes, it’s a victory. It’s a victory against all the people who weren’t letting me be me, and it’s a victory for truth. It’s a victory for my new self, for my real honest me that I always wanted to be.
However, after I’m done, then the anxiety starts creeping in. I’ve made a lot of videos now, and I have learned a lesson that after I record a video in the morning, like right now, what if it’s about 9:30 in the morning, something like that, usually I feel pretty good during the day. I feel happy. I feel like I’ve accomplished something. I’ve lived up to my mission of being me and sharing me as much as I can, sharing the truth as I see it and I’ve learned it.
However, what happens is usually nearer toward the end of the day, that little voice on my shoulder starts to creep in and whisper in my ear, “Why did you say that? You didn’t say that well. You didn’t say that well enough. That wasn’t correct. You’re going against your parents. You’re screwed up. You shouldn’t say that. There are gonna be negative consequences. Bad things are gonna happen to you.” And then I say, “Oh Daniel, that’s just my childhood. That’s just my unresolved childhood traumas.” Because there are still some of them left. I resolved a lot, but not all. But there’s still a part of me that lives on, and that little voice in my head that, you know, that still wants me to be the good perfect little boy that I was raised to be. Perfect meaning being shut down, dissociated, not honest, not true, not real.
So I usually am able to quell that voice and know what it is and see it for what it is. It’s become such a pattern that usually by the time I go to bed, I’m much more relaxed and I feel like I know I did a good job. I’m proud of what I did, and I really feel like this is what I’m meant to be doing. And I’m able to quiet the voice down. Then I go to bed, and then I have an anxious sleep. It all comes back, and then it really comes back in full force. It comes back metaphorically. It comes back in dreams. I’m being chased. I’m being followed. I’m being caught in trouble. I’m being attacked by my parents and being humiliated. I’m being rejected by my family. I’m being rejected by society. Horrible things are gonna happen to me, this and that, and all these negative consequences. Sometimes I’m being chased by wild animals, sometimes strangers that are attacking me. I don’t feel safe. Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. Dreams, dreams, dreams, dreams, dreams.
I wake up sometimes anxious, and my feet are shaking. This is fairly normal, especially after I record a video that really talks about painful stuff that happened to me, and especially that goes against ancient historical authority figures in my life. Especially when I speak about the bad things that my parents did to me, especially when I speak about it honestly and openly and in an unadulterated way. That kicks up my fears, because when I was a child, speaking about what my authority figures, especially my parents, really were doing to me was a recipe for death for me.
Now, you might say death is too strong of a word. You’re alive, you know, they wouldn’t have killed you. Well, what they would have done to me, because they did do it to me, and they showed me that it was well within their capacity in many different ways. My very loving parents, who in some ways were very loving, but in some ways were very unloving. They would abandon me. They would abandon me emotionally. They would reject me. They could even physically attack me, like my dad did several times. Now, abandonment is abandonment. The same as death? Well, when I was very, very little, and I rebelled against them for not being good parents in different ways, when I was a baby, when I was one year old, two years old, abandonment did equal death for me. It was terror that emotional abandonment could have killed me.
And there are psychology studies out there showing how little orphaned babies in Romania, they’re given all the physical, not sorry, they’re given all the food, and they’re given all the cleanliness that babies need. However, they’re not given touch. They’re not given love. They’re not given affection. They’re not given eye contact. And what happened? All sorts of awful things happened to them. Some of them just physically outright died. Some of them became mentally [ __ ] as a result of it. I can only imagine the other emotional problems that so many of them grew up to have, the ones that actually were somehow tough enough to survive not getting held, not getting loved, not getting really cared about, nurtured, having good eye contact, having consistent love in their lives. It was literally a death sentence, physically or emotionally, for so many of these orphaned abandoned babies, even though they were given all the food they need and they were raised in very clean, pristine environments.
So for me, I didn’t have anything that bad, but on the spectrum, I had some of it. I was periodically abandoned emotionally, physically, in different ways, and it really affected me, and it’s still inside me. So when I do a creative process, when I really express myself on paper or on video and then share it with the world or prepare to share it with the world, that ancient terror of abandonment, aka emotional death, comes back, and I do find it terrifying.
Well, what happens is after I’ve had a night of rough sleep, I wake up the next day, and I’m exhausted. I said, “Oh my god, I can’t believe it.” And usually what I say, yeah, I reject my video. I said, you know, I was deluded. It’s not actually that good. It’s not that valuable. It’s not gonna really help that many people. It’s only gonna cause me problems. Or I do something that my parents would say to me or other authority figures would say to me, “You just think it’s good. You know what it is. You’re self-centered. You’re grandiose. You’re full of yourself. You think you’re better than other people.” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And as a kid, I internalized that. I believed, and I thought, “Oh, I must really not be a very good person. I must be something wrong with me. I think I’m special in some way.” Really what it was, was my parents were people, even though I don’t like the word narcissism, they both qualified for that. And what it was, was they thought they were special in ways that they really weren’t. They thought they were more important, more valuable than other people. And when I did things that were actually real and spontaneous and honest, expressions of me, it threatened them. And so what they did is they projected all sorts of their own bad qualities that they weren’t able to acknowledge, that they denied or were dissociated from, let’s say their narcissism, their grandiosity, their inappropriate self-centeredness. They projected that onto me, even though it wasn’t really true about me fundamentally. They projected it onto me, and they rejected me for it.
So I still live with some of those old voices in my head. All those voices in my head, where did they come from? They came from my actual historical experience. Except it comes out now in metaphorical ways, forty years later, creating a video talking about this. It’s almost assured that I’m gonna later in my process go through and go, “This video is crap. It’s not that good.” So then often what I do is I just…
Won’t look at it for two weeks, three weeks, a month. I rarely put up videos immediately after I’ve done them. Why? Because I’m so insecure about them. Because I don’t feel like, especially in the days after I record them, I don’t feel objective anymore. I feel like my historical voices get kicked up. It’s like there’s that saying, it’s in my self-therapy book that I wrote with my friend Fred. There’s a slogan that we have: when you heal, your demons dance.
So for me, part of my healing process is being creative, sharing my creative process, sharing my experience, insights, whatever they might be, with the world. And as the result of doing that, this is part of my healing process. My demons, my historical demons, they dance around and they scream and they scare me.
So part of how I deal with that, again, if I just let myself take a little distance from my project, like this one for instance, maybe I’ll put it up in two weeks or three weeks or a month or three months later. And then what I’ll do is, a while later, when I feel more objective, when I feel also in a centered place, when I feel in a self-loving place, when I feel like I’m in a more objective place ready to honor me, but more importantly to honor truth, I look at it and I go back and I watch it.
And usually, it’s a pretty scary process. I’m the first one to watch my videos, and I can sometimes be very critical. And I notice sometimes if I’m too critical, I’m like, “Daniel, wait, just wait.” Again, sometimes I look and I say, “Oh, there’s a piece of my hair that’s the other way. Oh, I look like such an idiot,” or “the lighting is terrible,” or “my shirt is all crooked,” and “my microphone looks weird.” Or there’s some videos, if you watch them carefully, like I left the button open, and that open button is the open door for me to project all of my historical self-hatred onto the videos. Terrible! I can’t put up a video that has an open button that looks so rotten.
And then I calm down, and then eventually what I do is I just sit and I try to be as objective as possible. I try to listen to myself as if I was listening to someone else, some stranger who maybe I was just neutral about. And I try to just be as neutral and objective as possible at listening to what I was saying, to what my message is. How is my flow? How is my presentation? Did I do a good job? Did it make sense? Did I get my message across?
And then I edit it, and sometimes I take little bits out, sometimes I leave the whole thing. And once in a real while, I’ll have a video that has a complete arc that requires no editing at all, no cuts, no jump cuts. Well, sometimes I cut out certain things I stumble over my words, like at the beginning of this video so far. It actually seems like this video is going surprisingly well. I’m pretty proud of it. It just seems like it’s flowing nicely.
But I think at the beginning I did, I had a stumble over my words, so I did. I’m assuming I’m gonna go out and cut out that little part because I had to say it again. So sometimes I do stutter a little bit. So I do that whole editorial process, and I put in a beginning. I usually put in a title, and then I’ll put in some music that I’ve played, you know, put it at the end and put a little end card in at the end of the video. And maybe I’ll put a couple of pictures in for b-roll to make it a little bit more interesting. Things that, you know, call to mind.
Oh, I’m gonna have to do a little jump cutting out because I have to burp. Now here’s the question: thinking about this as a process video, should I leave it in? I can’t believe I would potentially leave in a burp because the microphone will pick it up. Or should I hold it? At least listen, I’m getting to process-oriented anyway.
So then what I do is I finish the video, I finished recording, and then again I let it sit. And then often, then I have a whole other thing afterwards. Also, it’s a terror and fear and anxiety and insecurity. Oh, really wasn’t as good as I thought it was. I was proud of it, but then I’m ashamed of myself because it’s really not so good. And maybe I am grandiose for thinking it was good, blah blah blah blah blah.
When I sit on it for a little while, then I go back and watch it again. Look at anything I really think of it. Does it need more editing? Is it ready to go? Is it ready to go? Will it be useful to other people? Sometimes I’ll show it to a friend or two and say, “What do you think about? Do you think this is good? Do you think this is objective?” And sometimes they like it. Occasionally they don’t. Sometimes they think, “Well, I don’t know, it’s so good. It’s not as good as some of your other ones,” or “It doesn’t really get to a deeper point,” or “It’s excellent! I love it! Oh, you’ve got to put that up!” And often it’s like, “Oh, thank you, that’s what I think too.” Or if they say they don’t like it, often it rings true to me. I kind of didn’t like it that much either.
Well then it comes to like me uploading it to YouTube, creating that title, putting in some sort of description thing, and then hovering over that. Do I make it public enough? Do I make it public or not? And I get so anxious about that, and I have a lot of process over. And then usually once it’s made it to that stage, eventually I do, and I make it public. And that’s an exhilarating moment, an exciting moment, and also terrifying because like, what will the world think? What will people think? What will people, who knows how many people watch it? What will the life of this video be?
And for me, when I free something like a video or an essay, in a strange way, it immediately takes on a life of its own. Now usually for the first few days after I release a project, it still is me. It’s like as close to me as my hand or my heart or my eyes. It’s like an extension of me, and I can take any criticisms very, very personally. Especially when people are rude. Sometimes even if criticisms are very good and fair and objective, well, you know, I don’t agree with what you said there. Sometimes I can get really upset. I can become like that little child being criticized again, and I can, but I can be kind of irrational about it sometimes. I’ve noticed that about myself.
And like, oh, and I can sometimes want to argue with people, and I’m like, “Restrain myself! Please don’t hold it back! Hold it back, just wait!” And or sometimes what I do is I don’t even look at the comments for a week or two just because it’s too emotional for me. Of course, it makes me feel great when people like it. I’m like, “Yes! That’s what I wanted! I wanted to reach people! I wanted to be useful! I wanted to maybe inspire some other people in some way.” But I’m vulnerable, so it’s better for me to just take a step back, not be too involved, and let this video live on its own. Let it have its own life.
And then sometimes, then I come back and reply a little bit more when I feel less vulnerable. When I feel more objective, I can sometimes watch it again, but often I don’t watch it again. But what I’ve noticed is then eventually, after a couple of weeks, me, myself, Daniel, the self of me on the inside that I’m connected with, and this creation, this video or piece of writing or whatever it is, become separate from me. And I no longer so much identify it with me, and I feel like, well, it’s more of like an historical part of my life, an historical relic of me, the part of old me that I’m now distanced from. And then I feel that’s the end of my cycle, where it has a life of its own. It lives or it dies on its own.
I go on. I don’t identify with it so much anymore. I often don’t think about it so much anymore. And I feel like it’s like a footprint in the sand of life. It’s just something that goes on. It’s my art, and I’m done with it. And I’m on to the next project.
[Music]