TRANSCRIPT
I don’t know if you can tell how tired I am right now. I even went to bed early last night. I was going to sleep well. I was going to get up this morning. I was going to record a video or two. But the problem was yesterday in the afternoon, I had a conversation with someone, and he told me some things about another person we know, a young person, and painful stuff and sad stuff. And it’s the kind of stuff that 30 years ago I would have heard, and it would have been unpleasant to hear, but it wouldn’t have affected me so deeply.
But I’m healthier now. I’m a lot healthier. I’m, I’m, and I’m much more vulnerable because I’m healthier. I’m much more open, and this painful stuff goes into me. It goes deep, deep, deep into me because that’s part of what healing has done for me. To me, it’s opened up a channel in me to my most vulnerable self. And so when I hear stories of others’ vulnerabilities, especially painful vulnerabilities and mistakes and errors and terrible confusions in life and traumas even, oh, it hits me harder.
And so I got in bed early. I’d exercised. I did everything right during the day to get myself ready for a good night of sleep. And I’m lying in bed, and I start thinking about it. And I started thinking about what my friend told me about this poor, sad, kind fellow with his issues. And I realized I was processing it and thinking about it and thinking also how could I possibly be of use to this other person? Maybe I could try to help him in some way and talk with him. And I’ve tried in the past; it hasn’t gone anywhere. He was kind of close to it.
It’s actually ironic that, you know, because of my openness, because of my healing, his painful unhealed life and his closeness to his feelings and his history is affecting me more. It’s affecting him less, at least in terms of his growth process. It’s destroying his life. So here I am thinking about like what can I do to be useful? And that’s part of the problem. I don’t know. I think that’s true a lot of times when I see really painful, awful things going on in people’s lives, in families’ lives, in the world in general. Oh, it hits me hard, and it torments me in a way because I want to solve the problem.
I think it’s because naturally I am a healer. I have been. My first client? Actually, that’s not entirely true because at first I really tried to heal my parents. They were my first failures. Eventually, I turned my healing energy to myself and even found myself resistant and invulnerable for a long time. I mean, I tried, but it was like I had so many defenses up—defenses that I needed in order to survive in my family. Defenses that protected me from their attacks and their pains and their rejections and their violations and even their cruelties to each other, their limits. So yes, I was invulnerable largely for a long time.
As I got more and more away from them, I found little chinks in my armor. I could get in there, and I think of it like in a way like I was water that seeped into the rock and then froze and cracked the rock open. And more and more I opened up, and eventually a really big channel opened up. It saved my life. So I’m not complaining here. I’m not complaining that I didn’t sleep well. I’m not happy for it. I wish I could sleep well every night.
But as much as I sort of am a monk and that I’m kind of removed from certain aspects of life—haven’t been in romance for a long time, things like that—in another way, I’m very connected with the world, and I suffer because of the pain and ugliness of the world and of the denied vulnerability in others. ‘Cause that’s the thing with this fellow who we were talking about, this kind, lost young fellow. He’s incredibly vulnerable, but he just doesn’t acknowledge it.
And that’s the thing for me. As a child, also, I was incredibly vulnerable in my family. Everybody is when they’re a child. I was a vulnerable, very lost little boy at the mercy of very confused, lost people who had no right to have children, couldn’t live up to their responsibilities, did their best like all parents do pretty much. But when people are traumatized, their best is incredibly not good enough.
So, I’m tired now. I’m not at my best. I’m not as perky and not as happy, and you could probably hear it in my voice. Maybe even a little bit of a whine. I think it’s like some pained, desperate part of me right now that still hasn’t been able to process enough in my sleep. I gave a lot of my mental energy to someone else, and to survive in this world, even as much healing as I’ve done, I need a long night of sleep every night to process my existence, to process my daily life, to process the things that I see.
I mean, it’s a rough world. I do wonder what life would be like for me if the world were much more healed, if I didn’t see evidence of trauma and awful trauma and the seal of trauma every day. I walk outside; I see homeless people all over the place. I see traumatized migrants coming in from other countries, desperate for work and not wanted here and not really wanted in their homelands and not really wanted in their families and garbage and mess and no nature and polluted waters. I mean, these are the things I see all the time, and in a way, I’m so used to it, but it still goes in me.
So in a way, I think if I wanted a better night of sleep every night, I could wall myself off from the world and wall myself off from myself, from my inner world, from my history. Live for pleasure, live for comfort, live for not looking around me, not feeling, not empathizing, not thinking about the world, and not being a healer. But what would be the point? This is the value of my life.