TRANSCRIPT
I started writing my autobiography about a year and a half ago, and it’s been a daily process. It’s really put my life journey and the struggles I did, the mistakes I made, and the ways I conquered those struggles. It’s put them into a perspective that has endowed my life with meaning.
I do feel we need to live with purpose. I feel we all have one embedded in us, and the more that we can resolve our childhood issues, we can live out of that purpose. And even with my mistakes, I see that underneath it all, I was trying to live with purpose. It was almost like I was guided by some force that was bigger than me. I look back, and it’s like, wow, there was a pattern. There was a pattern. There was a pattern of healing, of struggle, and really breaking from the limits of my upbringing to be fully me.
Well, the real value of writing an autobiography has been to step outside of my life as an observer. And I really think this is what makes us human, that we can self-reflect. We can observe ourselves and learn from our behavior. It’s like this wonderful mosaic that if you step back, it becomes a picture. So when you step back and observe yourself from a distance and start to evaluate your behavior, start to recognize patterns that repeat, patterns that are destructive, that hurt you, and patterns that are constructive where you overcame, it becomes really a teaching to help you understand why you are on earth and what’s your purpose.
There were moments that I reviewed in my life where I always say the clouds parted and I got it. I got it. I remember I was on Fire Island one day, and it was early in the morning, and I came over the crest to watch the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean. And it just occurred to me that life is a mystery, and I’m part of it. But that was just a magic moment in my existence. You know, which then you get busy with jobs and work and paying bills, and those moments can disappear. But when you write an autobiography, you review those moments that are like stepping stones that you build on to really make your life significant, if to no one else, to you. It really becomes this grand adventure of self-knowing, and I feel when we know ourselves really fully and truly, we really know the meaning of life.
We are part of life. We’re not separate from it. We’re part of nature. We’re part of truth. We’re not separate from these vast ideas and notions. We really are part of this evolving creation called life, and we’re really part—I would call us the crowning jewel of this creation. So why not look at it and learn from it? I just find it so gratifying. So I work on it every morning. One day I will finish, and then that will be a wrap on that part of my evolution, part of my growing. And I can’t write about my death, but I can write about my approach to death, which is to live, to live fully.
Challenges in Writing an Autobiography
So can you share some difficulties or hard times that you’ve had writing an autobiography? Well, I think the hard times are sometimes being honest about some of the mistakes I made. But the thing is, is when I understand that mistakes are really an expression of the wounded child, and if you learn from a mistake, it can really help you understand with compassion how you were hurt as a child.
I know I’ve made some terrible mistakes. I always give the example of how I would get angry at my students. I would teach at a college, and they would act out. And yes, I could correct them, but I would overreact and be angry with them. But I thought, well, I really love these kids. Why am I overreacting? Why is my response amplified? And that is how I learned about how I felt unseen and uncared for and not really respected as a child. I would have never learned that had I not acted out with those students.
And I amend now with my students. If they do something wrong, I say, please don’t do that. You’re disrupting the class. But let’s go forward. Let’s learn. But if I hadn’t acted out that way—and it’s difficult to admit that—I would have never learned how hurt I was as a child, as a boy and a teenager. So those things, like I really present myself both with enlightened parts and wounded in the autobiography. In the autobiography, I present the full circle. It’s like any painting that’s worth its merit has shadow and light that makes it a three-dimensional portrait. So I just had to be honest about those things.
The reason I could be honest, though, was because I looked at them with the eye of compassion, an overview that my mistakes, my negative acting out, were an expression of a very hurt child. And now that child is in my care. I listen to that child. I understand that child, why that child would act out that way.
Why Few People Write Their Autobiographies
Why do you think so few people write their autobiographies? Well, because I think they don’t understand that their negative behavior, that their failures, were really coming out of childhood trauma. I think they feel that somehow they’re bad people if they look at it and if they own it. And that’s not true. They were children that were hurt. And when we act out, like I said before, that’s an expression of that wound, and it needs to be looked at with compassion and learned about.
But I think to look also—I think to write an autobiography, you have to grow up. You have to write it from an adult perspective. Most people don’t want to grow. They want to be rescued, whether it’s by a partner or the government or by lots of forms that can infantilize people. And I think to really write an autobiography, to own the whole thing, you have to be an adult. You have to look at your life from an adult perspective. And so it requires growing up.
Growing up, the other thing with growing up is that you become the parent. Nobody’s coming to rescue you except you and life. Not a bad combination, but that’s who’s coming to rescue. There’s no insurance policy, no bank account, no job, no government, no pie-in-the-sky. It’s really you and truth and nature that’s going to rescue you. Life wants—life doesn’t want to hurt us. Life wants us to grow. But to grow, we have to be an adult, not a child waiting to be rescued.
And what’s interesting, I feel in my autobiography, is that there are arcs within it that I grew, that I grew. And yes, it does culminate into a hole that has sort of an ending that has a climax of a certain enlightenment. But woven within the whole thing is enlightenment. It’s the span of enlightenment, light and dark, the whole thing. It’s almost like a piece, even in my early years, even in my childhood, where I knew I was separate from my family. I knew I didn’t belong to them.
And when I suggest you write your autobiography, or anyone write it, it’s not just for senior citizens or the elderly. So you needn’t wait, because there is a vitality in young people. And some people just really are gifted with the ability to be self-aware, to self-evaluate. And you know, I feel like in your late 20s, you can already start assessing behavior, what works, what doesn’t. Enough data is in to get the picture where you want to go, what really is your guiding light in life.
So it’s not just for people who are seniors. I’ll look back, because so the bulk of seniors don’t want to look back. They want to blur out in comfort. And it’s a good thing to start when you’re young. You can always add another chapter if you have the gift of aging.