TRANSCRIPT
Recently, I was talking with a friend who has a YouTube channel that is not very popular. Or, as of the time I’m making this video, it’s not very popular. Maybe it will be someday, but not very many people are watching her video. And she said to me, she goes, “Oh, I’m making these videos.” She says, “I feel like I’m just putting a message in a bottle and throwing it out into the ocean, and no one’s ever going to find it.” And I thought to myself, and I said to her, “Well, is that such a bad idea?” Because actually, two times in my life—and that’s what I’ve come here to talk about—I’m here to tell a little story. Two times in my life, I have actually found a message in a bottle. Literally, I found a bottle that had a top in it that had a note with a message inside of it. Twice it happened. The first time it happened was in 1994, and the second time it happened was in 1995. I was 22 the first time and 23 the second time. And both times, it was shocking, amazing. I couldn’t believe it! I found a message in a bottle! Oh my God! I was running around showing people, and I would like to share about the experiences of finding these messages in a bottle because somehow it’s metaphorical. It’s like you can do the most improbable thing, and you never know who it’s going to reach. So, in 1995, I was working on a ranch as a waiter in Wyoming, just outside of Yellowstone National Park. And one day, I was in Yellowstone, and I was walking along a creek. And at a little turn in the creek, I found a bottle that had a message in it. I actually pulled the bottle out because I thought it was garbage, and I was going to throw away some trash. And then I looked at it; it was covered in a little bit of algae, and I was like, “Whoa, there’s a message in there!” So I popped it open, and I took out the piece of paper in it. I couldn’t believe it! And I was like, it was a message from a little boy. And he said—it was dated two or three years earlier—he said, “My family is on vacation in Yellowstone. We’re from, I believe it was Texas, and I wanted to just see if anyone would ever find this. Please call me and tell me if you found it. I would be so happy.” He was maybe 10 or something like that. So I did. This is back before we had cell phones or anything like that. I had to actually pay money to call. I had to put money into a machine, and I called. And I told him, “I found your message in a bottle.” He’s like, “Mom! Mom! The phone!” And they said, “Well, if you want, you can come down here if you’re ever in our part of Texas.” I’ve since—I think I wrote all their information down. I’ve since lost it all. But they said, “You can come, you can stay with us. We’d love to meet you. You’re the magical person who has made our son so happy.” And it was magical! It was like, yes, wild things sometimes do happen! Oh, and I also asked, “Where did you throw in this bottle?” And it turned out it was not that far away. It was like he’d thrown it somewhere else in the creek in Yellowstone. It had only gone like three miles—three miles in two or three years. So it wasn’t that exciting. Now, I felt good about it, but it was the less interesting story. The previous one, a year before, was more interesting, more painful too. I was canoeing with a friend in Maryland in a small river. Big—it was a small river. And we’re going along, and then boom! Out of the corner, I saw a bottle. There had a little flash in it, and it was like, “Wow, that’s like—looked like there was a piece of paper in that bottle.” He said, “What bottle?” And I said, “That bottle over there, that was hidden.” He was like, “Oh, come on!” I said, “No, no, I want to look. I think there was something in there.” So we turned the canoe around, paddled over, and I pulled it out. It was like there was a piece of paper in it, and I was like, “There is a message in it!” He goes, “No!” I was like, “Look! Look!” He goes, “Oh my God, you’re right!” And so it was a—I think it was like a plastic bottle. And I unscrewed it, and I pulled the piece of paper out. And this is going back a long time—I’m pushing 30 years now—but this is how it went in my mind, my memory. “Hello, I’m gonna make up a fake name. Hello, my name is Jane, and I am from this small town in West Virginia.” Small town in West Virginia was true. “And I am eight years old. I always wanted to do a message in a bottle, so I wrote this message. Here is my address, and here is my phone number. Please call if you find this message. Please, I would be so happy! From Jane, and I’m in third grade.” I was like, “Wow!” Well, but here’s the crazy thing. It happened in 1994. If my memory holds, it was dated—the note in the bottle was dated 1985. It was nine years earlier! And also, we went back—this is before the internet or anything like that—we went back and we looked on an atlas, and it was like, I don’t know, five, six hundred miles away—700 miles away! This bottle had really traveled! It had traveled down a river and down tributaries and all this and ended up where I found it nine years later. I was like, I said to my friend, “I gotta call her.” He said, “Yeah, yeah.” So we were staying at his parents’ home. I was 22 then, and we called—used his parents’ long-distance calling. They said we could. And I called, and I was like, “I’m doing the math. I’m like, okay, so she’s probably like 17 now.” I called, and this man picked up with a West Virginia accent, which, pardon me, but I’m going to try to imitate how he sounded to me. I’ll do it terribly, but forgive me. He says, “Who is this?” And I said, “Yeah, hi, my name is Daniel so-and-so, and I am in Maryland, and I, uh, near DC actually, and I was canoeing, and I found a bottle with a message in it, and it was written by this girl named Jane XYZ.” I gave the last name, and it was dated 1985, and I found it. He goes, “What are you calling for Jane for?” And he got really aggressive with me. And I said, “Uh, well, actually, uh, it said to call this number, and I have your address.” He goes, “How did you get this address?” I said, “No, no, I found a message in a bottle in Maryland that said to call this number to let Jane know—Jane who was then in third grade—to let Jane know that somebody found it. This is so exciting! And I want you to—how do you know Jane?” I said, “No, no, I don’t know Jane. I’ve never met Jane, but I found her.” Well, he didn’t believe me, and then he said some very choice words to me, and he hung up on me. And I told my friend, “This guy didn’t believe me.” He goes, “Dude, you gotta call him back, explain it to him, get Jane on the phone. She’ll remember! She’ll be so excited!” Well, I took the risk and called back, and the guy picked up again, and he absolutely cursed me out. But I also noticed, and I still remember this, he had pain in his voice. “We’ve chained up! Alone! Leave her alone! Don’t call!” And I thought, Jane, now age 17—not an eight-year-old in third grade anymore. She’s probably a senior in high school, junior, senior in high school. What has happened to her? What painful things? Who has been calling for Jane before me? I’m sure he thought I was just some young guy faking it and probably out to cause Jane harm or misery. He didn’t believe me. So it’s like her message actually did reach a sympathetic ear, and he hung up on me again. And I let it go. I never called back. So who knows?
Probably Jane never figured it out. I never even was able to give my number. Maybe he did tell Jane afterward. Maybe Jane did remember. Maybe he’s like, Jane was like, “Oh my God, a magical savior did find my message in a bottle. My message did get out there, but my dad blocked it.” Maybe Jane was even trying to be saved when she was in third grade and wrote that message. Maybe she was trying to be saved from him. He sounded like a brute, a brutal guy. Was he the most loving father? Who didn’t sound like it to me.
Well, so it’s not the happiest ending. But I think about my life, putting out messages into the ether, into the wild unknown. Back in 2004, I started a website talking about childhood trauma. It seemed so random and arbitrary that anyone would ever hear my messages of hope and healing, that anyone would ever connect with me, connect with my ideas. It was like a message in a bottle.
As it happened, the magic did happen. People did listen. My YouTube channel started from nothing. It seemed sort of random and arbitrary. I remember in 2008 when I started my YouTube channel talking about healing from psychosis without medication. But then when it got really intense for me was the next year, 2009, and into 2010 when I started really putting up videos about healing from childhood trauma, breaking from your parents, breaking from the unhealthy sides of your parents, grieving, knowing who we really are, really taking a good hard look at how society is so dysfunctional and sick and unhealed at a mass level from its childhood trauma.
And I put these videos up onto YouTube. It has seemed like literally like messages in a bottle. Who would ever listen to this? Who would ever care? And I learned that people did find these messages. People did care. So many people cared way more than I had ever expected. I mean, people say, “Oh, your YouTube channel should have millions of subscribers.” Well, it doesn’t have millions, and I don’t know that I want millions of subscribers. I don’t—I don’t want to be famous. It’s hard enough to have whatever I have, tens of thousands of subscribers now. It’s a little overwhelming sometimes, the intensity of the feedback that I get, even the positive feedback.
But what I know is that those little encapsulated messages I made with my old camera, a couple of cameras that go back then, and I’m 14 years ago or more, they did reach people. Those messages in a bottle did reach people. And what I know is that if I had never put those messages in a bottle, spoken into the camera, edited them or did not edit them, just clipped them and stuck them up on YouTube, if I hadn’t taken that action, metaphorically scribbling that note, sticking it in a bottle, and throwing it into a river, littering in that way, no one would have ever found my message. It would have never gotten out there.
And I think of those two kids who threw messages into those bottles with hope. Hope that they would reach someone. Hope that someone would hear their feelings, read their words, get in touch with them, make a connection. Did they believe it would ever happen? Probably not. But it did happen, and they had hoped that it would. And I was the one who found those messages. Now I’m the one who’s making messages and putting them out and saying, “Yeah, you never know. Do your best. Put your YouTube videos in the best river that you can. Make a good title for it. Be as honest as you can. Be as heartfelt as you can. Be as true if you can. Try to be real. Do your best. Be brave. Take the risk, and you never know what will happen.”