TRANSCRIPT
So I’ve been on a creative tear these last few days. I have been making a bunch of these new videos. I have no idea if I’m actually gonna put any of them up. I haven’t actually yet gone back and looked at any of them, but I’m gonna go back and look at them and see how I feel.
But I woke up in the middle of the night, and I was thinking, hmm, will I make any new videos today when I wake up in the morning? And I thought, what would I make a video on? And all I thought was anxiety. I’m like, oh my god, I can’t believe I’m revealing so much about my life. And why am I doing this? Well, I’ve talked about this some already, but I guess it doesn’t hurt to talk about it again.
Why? Why am I resistant? Why do I not want to talk about this? Why do I want to hold it in and keep quiet and be anonymous? I think I learned as a child, as a very young child, that it was safer not to talk. It was safer not to express myself authentically. I think, well, I know, I know as a kid that in a lot of ways my authenticity was dangerous.
Now, in some ways, my authenticity brought me a lot of positive things. There were a lot of people who liked me. There were a lot of adults who saw value in what I was doing. But also, I got a lot of negative feedback. I stood out. I got picked on by other kids. I got laughed at a lot. I also got picked on by teachers. I had teachers be super mean to me.
And I think a lot of ways when I was a kid in school set the stage for bullying. It was teachers with their snotty comments and their mean words. They’d give me names. A few times I had teachers actually give me names that were not my name that stuck, that other kids even called me, and they thought it was funny. And it was based on certain qualities of mine, and often it was based on good qualities of mine.
I remember I had a fifth-grade art teacher who made up a mean name for me because I talked in class a lot. Well, why did I talk in class? Because he was so boring, and the class was so boring and stupid, and I would whisper with other kids around me, and it was fun. So he teased me, and other kids would tease me for it.
And I think about, I also think about, but even more profoundly than teachers, it was my parents. I threatened them, my real authenticity, the real things I was thinking, the reactions I had to the negative things that they were doing, the fighting that they had with each other, the cruelty they had toward me, the abandonments, the rudeness, the bullying from my dad. Me speaking authentically about it made it worse for me. It brought me negative things in the world, and I learned that a lot.
I certainly learned that in high school. It was like to speak at middle school, to speak out, to be honest, to really share my opinions was dangerous. It’s like when we had to write our little essays in middle school, in high school, even into college, to really say what I was thinking was not okay. That was not alright.
I learned how to be politically correct. I learned how to figure out what did the teacher want, what did the assignment require that I say. So I had to think about what I was supposed to say, and then I had to figure out some way to regurgitate it, but to make it sound like it was coming from me. So basically, it was how to fake authenticity.
And I think in my family that was even more profound. I had to fake authenticity. I had to sound like I loved my parents, that I cared about my parents, that my parents were the greatest people in the world, that they cared about me so much, that we were a great family—all these family lies and family delusion, family denial. And the best way to fake authenticity is to actually believe it. And in a lot of ways, I did. I really came to believe a lot of false things about my family, about myself.
I remember one of when I was a kid, so many times I heard my mom say that I had social problems, that I wasn’t a very social person, that I didn’t have good friends, that I didn’t know how to make friends, etc., etc., etc. And she was an adult. She seemed like she was socially sophisticated. She worked, she was smart, she had college degrees, she was much better spoken than I was. And so I believed her.
For a lot of time, I was very insecure about a lot of these things, and I think these contributed to a lot of my insecurities. I just became more quiet. I became more shy. I took a step back. I was traumatized by all this. Later, it was like, wait a second, that’s actually not the truth.
And for me, I think the other side of my ambivalence, the side that will speak, that says I must speak anyway, even if it’s like embarrassing and painful and confusing, is that for me, speaking out, learning that I have a voice, connecting with my voice, learning to love my voice, learning to respect what I’m saying, respect the authenticity of what I’m saying—learning that saved my life.
Now, for a long time, my authentic voice was saved for my private relationship with myself. Thousands and thousands and thousands, and probably tens of thousands of pages of journaling where I was having and developing an authentic relationship with myself, getting my memories back, reformulating my concept of who am I, reformulating my concept of who was I as a child, who are my parents, what did they do to me, what is their relationship with me, what is their relationship with each other, who are they in the world, who was I in the world, who were my friends—realizing later actually I had a lot of really nice friends as a kid. I’m still friends with some of them, actually. Why? Because they’re nice people. I don’t want to be around people who are nasty to me. I want to be around people who are nice to me.
And the funny thing is, I look back on it, and my parents didn’t like some of my friends or didn’t think they were such great people, probably because they weren’t from a more educated class, probably because they were from troubled homes, single-parent homes, divorced homes. My friends weren’t in the honors classes. My friends, a lot of them weren’t actually white. My friends weren’t going to college, but my friends were into car mechanics. My friends were into hunting and shooting and being outside all day and riding dirt bikes and playing sports. They were into fighting sometimes, you know, and we had to do that.
A lot of these things, it’s like my parents didn’t understand the social world that I was being raised in, and they didn’t understand the world of boys in the countryside. They didn’t understand like why I would come home with a bloody nose sometimes. They were like, Daniel must be hanging around with losers. They didn’t like my friends. And it’s like, well, actually, I thank God for some of my friends. A lot of my friends were the ones who saved me from being beaten up more. It’s like I had to learn how to have friends who really cared about me, who would defend me. The irony is my parents wouldn’t.
So when I think about this, it’s like I had to hide who I was in a lot of ways. I had to believe their narratives. I had to be silent. And I’ve learned that again and again and again. One of the basic consequences of trauma, of unresolved trauma, is silence—losing one’s voice, losing one’s connection with oneself, losing one’s ability to talk about what actually happened.
And so for me now, for me, for 20 years now, 25 years, my value in my relationship with myself, my developing my friendship with myself, my love relationship with myself has been about being honest, being open, being real. And I think getting older for me is motivating me more and more to share what I’ve learned. Yet it’s terrifying because I still have those old voices in my head. I’m not resolved in all my childhood stuff.
This childhood stuff, film, still very painful. Also, going back to when I was very, very young. How does one resolve some of those very, very early traumas?
Things That Maybe We Don’t Even Remember
That happened to us? Well, I still struggle with that. I do still struggle with that. A lot of it’s listening to my body, the memories, and my feelings. It’s not even necessarily so much my behavior, but my dreams. All sorts of things like this. And writing it down, honest, being open.
But for me, yeah, this whole process of healing from trauma, this journey that I’ve been on, twenty-five years, more, my whole adulthood has been rife with ambivalence, rife with terror, rife with, “Oh my God!” Sharing what I’m learning, sharing my authentic ideas, sharing my feelings, sharing my experiences, sharing my impressions, sharing my opinion. It does win me friends, but it also does earn me people who really don’t like me.
I had that so much. People who don’t want to be friends with me. Girls who didn’t want to date me. Family members who, like, “Why are you talking about this?” Or people who accuse me of being in denial. I’ve been accused of all sorts of things just for being myself. And I realized it doesn’t end when you’re a child.
I just think it’s a lot harder to be honest if you’re a child in an inauthentic family, a child in a family with a lot of problems, a child in a family with a lot of denial. Because it’s almost like the family owns the child. I think it’s a lot easier for me as an adult to be honest because, in a way, nobody owns me. Now I own me. And do I even own me? I think life owns me a lot of times. I think I’m driven by something that’s beyond me, driven to be real.
Also, I think, you know, at different points in my life, hearing these thoughts, hearing somebody talk about this in a real way, I think would have been very helpful to me. And I think it also would have been very helpful to me to know that the person, aka me, who’s sharing these painful, authentic ideas doesn’t find it an easy process, does have a lot of stress.
I can guarantee what’s going to happen to me after making this video. It might not be because I probably will feel good. I feel I’ve expressed myself. I feel pretty good about it. But in three, four, five, six hours later, tonight, middle of the night, I’m gonna start thinking, “Why did I say that? I didn’t say that right. I didn’t express myself well. I revealed too much about myself. There’s no way I can put this up on the internet.” Well, I hope I do.
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