TRANSCRIPT
I have been asked a few times over the past few years if I would make a longer term follow-up on my experience of having been mugged in New York City. Well, now it’s been about 3 years and 8 months, and I haven’t gotten around to making the video. Mostly, I think ’cause I didn’t really have that much interesting to say.
Well, today, uh, an hour ago actually, I had an experience that made me think, yes, now is the right time to make this longer term follow-up video. I was walking in my neighborhood in downtown Manhattan, and guess who was walking right toward me on an empty street? One of the guys who mugged me. I saw him. I saw him from a distance. I’m like, that’s one of the guys. I recognized him right away. I recognized his face, and he kind of looked at me and noticed me, but he didn’t recognize me. He didn’t know who I was, which was actually quite nice.
But it was a strange thing. What went through me, what went through my body, you might ask, was I afraid or was I angry? Did I want to hurt him? And it really wasn’t. It wasn’t any of that. What I felt was a desire to confront him, to say, “Hey, you, come here, talk to me now that you’re alone and now that there’s light out on the street and you’re slightly out of your neighborhood. You’re more in my neighborhood. You don’t have a partner who’s going to hurt me if anything bad happens.” And I don’t want anything bad to happen, but I want you to know you’re the guy who robbed me. You’re the guy who really messed with my head and stole a good amount of my money and my phone. You caused me to cry afterwards. You caused me to really be extremely upset and shocked, and you caused real damage in my life.
And that’s just what came through me. It just, it just, I wanted to say it. But he just walked by and just kept going. And I’m looking at his back thinking, not that I’m thinking I should walk up to him, but it was just a sort of an emotional urge to just say, “You, I want to hold you accountable face to face, eye to eye, adult to adult, when our power dynamic is a little bit more equal.” But then I thought, well, I don’t feel like chasing after a guy. I don’t feel like, I don’t know, who knows? Might he hurt me? Might he have a knife? And not that I was so scared that he would, but the real strong feeling I had was I don’t really care about this guy. He’s not that important to me to my healing process.
And that’s part of what I felt for at least a couple of years now, which is a big part of I think why I didn’t make the video. I didn’t, I don’t feel so affected by it anymore, negatively that is. I didn’t feel that sense that confronting him was going to do anything for me. And also, I just, it was weird. It was just like, it wasn’t the strongest urge I had. It was just, it was just an instantaneous burst of wanting to say, “You, you, I know who you are, and you remember me.” And then I thought more.
I was like, back when I got mugged, right afterward, and talked to the detectives and the police and had to go to the police station and all that, and had a therapist for a while. The victim services gave me a once a week telephone therapist, and I believe it was the therapist. She gave me their names, guy’s names, and those names were like burned into my head. And I have a really good memory. I have a good memory for faces. Obviously, I could remember the guy, but I couldn’t remember his name. And I thought, ah, another indication of my healing. I couldn’t remember what his name was. It was like he’s just not that important to me now.
And I felt, it’s weird to say, but I felt a sort of a sense of joy that this guy who had such an effect in my life for a while there has been rendered irrelevant in my life. What a lovely, a lovely feel. And I wanted to find someone. I wanted to, I wanted to tell people, I wanted to go, “That guy, I saw my mugger, and it didn’t affect me.” I didn’t see anyone I knew. I did end up calling a friend, you know, and then now I’m coming here to talk about it, to share it with the bigger world.
I also realized I don’t have any fear to share this in public. I remember, uh, the district attorney, what a jerk that guy was. I’ve forgotten his name too. The guy who was supposed to defend me didn’t, but he was like, “Oh, videos are dangerous, don’t do it,” etc., etc. And I’m like, no, I’m doing it. It’s like this is for the public good is how I feel.
But as I walked, I thought about this guy, this mugger. I think he was about 20 then, and he’s probably 23, 24 now. And he looked depressed. I saw it in his face. He looked like a very lost and unhappy person. I don’t wish that expression and those feelings and that state of mind on anyone except maybe him. There’s part of me that thought, yeah, there’s some justice in this. The things that you did to me and perhaps have done to others, there are consequences for this, and you don’t feel good about yourself doing things like that.
And I even said that to them at the end. This is my memory of right after the two guys mugged me and they walked away. I said, “Don’t do this to anyone else. Don’t do that. You scared me. That was wrong.” Something like that is what I remember. I made that video afterward. I’ll link to all these videos in the description box. You can see if my memory is correct about what I said.
But it was just a feeling like, yeah, there is justice in the world. There’s a strange justice. His actions, if he doesn’t heal from them, if he doesn’t change his life and really own what he did, it will catch up to him. And that’s what I felt. It’s a weird feeling, my wanting to confront him. It was like I wanted to say, I wanted to shame him in a way, but not to harm him. But I wanted him to feel ashamed of what he did because he should feel ashamed. He should feel ashamed of what he did to me.
And I think what I realized afterward when I thought of his face is he may not be conscious of feeling shame about what he did to me, but his expression of depression, it was like the shame is finding him. I don’t have to do anything. It’s like life will take care of him, and hopefully life will wake him up and make him a good person at some point. But right now, it didn’t look that way. It looked like he was a very lost soul, and I don’t feel lost. That’s what’s lovely.
So my follow-up, my big worry right after they traumatized me, after they mugged me, was that I was going to be traumatized long term. I wasn’t so concerned about the money. Yeah, I didn’t like losing a lot of money. It was awful. Didn’t like losing my phone. That wasn’t fun. Didn’t like fearing for my life. That was terrible. But just this feeling like, is my existence going to be squelched? Are they going to make me into a smaller person? And my answer is no, no, no, no, no. I feel bigger than I was then, not necessarily as the result of that experience, but just because I’ve continued to grow.
I think about also how I can walk down the street and not be afraid. I can walk at night out on the street. I’m not afraid. I still don’t like people walking behind me, and I think that’s actually kind of healthy in a way. I’m not like freaked out by people, you know, walking behind me, but I’m more self-protective now. I’m more conscious of the world. I was a little, a little arrogant. Maybe that’s why they got me. I was not taking good care of myself also.
I noticed this now versus then when they mugged me. These two guys, I didn’t want to look over my shoulder, and ’cause I kind of had the feeling intuitively that they were after me. They were onto me and following me, but I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it by looking over my shoulder at them.
Now I look over my shoulder. Looking over my shoulder is an act of self-love. If I feel uncomfortable, I don’t have to answer to anyone. It’s better to just follow my impulses and look over my shoulder and see if, well, someone’s charging up and going to mug me. It hasn’t happened since then. No one has tried to rob me since then. Well, maybe a little bit when I traveled. People have tried to rip me off a number of times, for sure, but no one’s actually physically tried to come in my space. Or maybe they’ve picked up that I’m not so easy to mug because I have more situational awareness now. I feel that’s a good thing to have, better than I used to have.
But I also think about my travels. I’ve done so much hitchhiking in foreign countries, places that people said it’s not so safe to do it, but I felt okay to do it. And I wondered also, is, you know, that mugging going to be the end of my hitchhiking days? End of my traveling to really weird and kind of dangerous places? No, I think I have felt safe in myself, projected a safe aura to the world, and have been safe.
Donald, a lot of things pretty wild, like hitchhiking in Africa, hitchhiking in pretty unusual places in Asia. Since that mugging happened, and went through a year ago in Gabon, a year and a half ago or so, I went through a, well, a revolution in the country when I was there. And there was a coup d’état, and you know, the country got militarized. They closed the airport, shut the internet down in the country, and I was living way out in a village with some folks I met, with some musicians. And it was interesting. It was like, no, it wasn’t scary. That was the funny thing.
I remember asking the villagers I was living with, “Well, what are you going to do if it gets crazy and it turns into like a violent civil war?” Because no one knew it was going to happen. Incidentally, the folks I was living with were of a Pygmy tribe, and they said, “Well, we’ll just leave the village and go back into the jungle.” And I said, “What about me?” And they’re like, “Well, if it gets crazy, we go in the jungle. You’re welcome to come with us.” And I remember thinking, “H, I can do that.” But I don’t remember feeling unsafe.
I mean, I did have a little incident with some military guys at one point when I went into the nearest town to see if I could get some internet connection. I couldn’t, but I got confronted by some military guys who had been drinking alcohol, and they were very aggressive with me. And they came into my personal space and demanded that I give my passport to them. And I was like, I stood up for myself, and I wouldn’t give it. I refused to give it ’cause I kind of had a feeling I might not get it back or I might have to buy it back. And I was like, “No, no.”
I remember I stood up to one guy who was very aggressive to me, almost kind of like a mugging. But what I did, and I did it in French too, I was pretty proud of myself. And what I said is, I asked, you know, all his colleagues kind of told him, I said, “Is this acceptable to you that your colleague is treating me this way?” I was like, “This isn’t the right way to treat someone.” And eventually, they stepped in and pulled him away and even apologized to me. And it was kind of funny.
I remember one of them said to me, he said it in French, he said, “We’re sorry for our colleague. He’s a racist. He did that because you’re white.” I said, “He didn’t do it because I’m white. He did it because he’s drunk.” And I remember everybody started laughing, and they were all clapping. And then they wanted to buy me a glass of wine as a result of me saying that. And actually, I took a glass of wine and I shared a glass of wine with the guys, but they kept away the one who’d been really aggressive with me.
So I thought, no, that’s not the behavior of someone who got, you know, deeply traumatized by a mugging. But yeah, I think what’s happened is my life force is back in line. I’m back on my track, back on my healing track, my growing track. It’s funny that I say back on my track because, well, I don’t know, some months back, I put out a music album, and one of the songs is called “Back on My Track.” And well, maybe that’s a good way to end this video with that song.
I feel like I’m getting back on my track. Feel like I’m getting back on my track. Feel like I’m getting back on my track. Lord, it’s good to be [Music] back. I’m back to the hiking and back to the woods, back to the barefoot and back to the shs. Forget the ones and May and goods. Lord, it’s good to be [Music] back.
I feel like I’m getting back on my track. Feel like I’m getting back on my track. Feel like I’m getting back on my track. Lord, it’s good to be back. [Music]