TRANSCRIPT
This is my first time sitting down to make a video in more than eight months. Although over the past many months, I’ve had a lot of videos come out, I think about two a week regularly. I shot them all quite a bit in the past. I shot them all before I was mugged, which was in March of 2021. I was actually just finishing the process of editing them all and getting them ready to start going up when I got mugged. In a way, it was like I got mugged at a good time because if I had been mugged earlier, I don’t think I could have shot any of those videos. I don’t think I could have sat in front of the camera and recorded my thoughts in a logical way. It really kind of screwed me up.
That’s actually not true because I did make two videos after I was mugged. I forgot that. But right at the beginning of March, like right when I was mugged, and just a few days later, a week later, I can’t remember. But after that, I only made a few videos. I made the Dr. Pig videos, which wasn’t really me. That was me sort of being sarcastic and making a point about how horrible psychiatry is. But in terms of me sitting and talking directly with the camera, it’s been a long time, and I’m back now. I feel ready to do it, sort of.
But what I wanted to talk about here is vulnerability. How incredibly difficult it can be to sit in front of a camera and just be vulnerable. I’ve talked about this before, but I really think it bears repeating for a lot of reasons. I actually had two other totally different video ideas that I wanted to do, and I just found myself spinning in my head and thoughts going all over the place and what I was going to say.
And it was, I mean, I don’t want to say hearing voices in my head, but that’s what it was. It was hearing my voice repeating what I wanted to say and criticizing myself and hearing all the voices of people who, well, sometimes can say kind of nasty things in comments on my videos. And it’s like, “Oh, you wear the wrong clothes,” or “You look the wrong way,” or “Why do you keep saying this?” or “Can’t you talk about this?” or “This is stupid,” or blah blah blah, or people just angry at what I said.
And when I sit down to be vulnerable like I am now, just me, a camera, a microphone, my fears, the thoughts in my head, my anxieties, my history, it’s hard.
Why do I share this? I don’t share this so that people will feel bad for me because I don’t feel bad for myself. Actually, I’m proud of myself that I can do this. I also don’t think I share this to say, “Oh, everyone else should go and do this, and you should go through the, you know, the anxiety and the fear and record videos or do whatever you need to do.”
I think when I really center in myself, which is what’s happening as I talk, I think this is a metaphor for growing, living a connected life, that it’s scary, that there’s risk, that there’s inherent anxiety in the process of being real, of being honest. That vulnerability is a part of growing. If you can’t be vulnerable, you cannot grow.
I think I’ve said this before. I’ve certainly written about it. I think I wrote about it in my book, “Toward Truth,” if I’m correct. But I learned this lesson metaphorically as a child when I was always in the countryside in upstate New York, hunting in the local freshwater streams around our house, in my neighborhood, outside of my neighborhood, looking for the little animals and plants and algae that lived there, looking for stones.
And I loved to catch crayfish. Crayfish, little mini lobsters that go around with their pincers. And what I found is sometimes under a rock, I would find a crayfish that had just shed its external skin, its exoskeleton. And when they shed their external skin, they were totally soft. They were like jelly almost. You could, like, if you pressed into their body, it would just leave an indentation. And I was like, “Why are they like this?”
And what I learned when I read about it was that in order to grow, they needed to shed their exoskeleton, their hard external layer that wouldn’t let animals pierce them. And I didn’t realize this as a metaphor at the time, but later I did that on an emotional level, on a personal, on an interpersonal level, we all have an exoskeleton. I have an exoskeleton, a part of me that’s tough and strong that allows me to function and survive in the world, allows me to not die when I get hit by the arrows of the world, the harsh comments, the rude things that people can say, the painful things, the rejections, my failures. This is what allows me to survive.
But I have to shed that exoskeleton. We have to shed that exoskeleton in order to grow, in order to expand. And that’s what happens when those crayfish shed their exoskeleton and they become soft like jelly on the outside. Their skin literally becomes so mushy. They grow during this time, and they expand. And the problem is if they can’t shed their exoskeleton, they can’t grow. Their bodies cannot grow because the exoskeleton holds them in. It doesn’t allow them to expand.
So when I shed my psychological, interpersonal, intrapersonal exoskeleton, I grow. And this is the value. This is the value of me facing all that anxiety, facing that terror, the potential rejection, the potential comments, the criticisms, the judgment, perhaps some of it correct judgment, perhaps some of it incorrect judgment. And what I’m left with when I shed that exoskeleton is me, the real me, the real unfettered me.
And I find when I’m talking like right now, when I’m talking even with insecurities like, “Oh my God, I’ve done this before. I’m having this anxiety. Did I actually press record, or am I just talking to a camera that isn’t recording everything or anything?” So I’m gonna check. Yes, I am recording.
So I get the chance to grow. I get the chance to expand, to really connect with something deep on the inside. And the reason it’s metaphorical, the crayfish is metaphorical, or sitting here vulnerable is metaphorical, is because it’s true what I’ve seen in all of my life, in life in general, that vulnerability is a profoundly important ingredient for growth.
And for those people who cannot be vulnerable, they cannot grow. When I cannot be vulnerable, I cannot grow. Invulnerability, what is it? It’s being real. It’s being honest. It’s dropping the mask, dropping the tough exterior, the strength, the confidence sometimes, and just letting truth flow.
I think of, well, babies. They’re so soft, they’re so pliable, they’re so flexible. And because of that, they can grow. They don’t know. They are naive in a way, and that naivete allows them to really grow in wild and different and creative directions.
Also, it’s like that ancient metaphor from Lao Tzu. I think I’ve talked about it here before. The tree, the big strong old oak tree, that’s the strongest tree in the forest. When the heavy wind comes, its branches break off. Sometimes the whole tree will go down because it’s not flexible, it’s not vulnerable. But the small tree, with so much sap flowing through its trunk and through its branches, it can handle the wind. It can bend in all sorts of different directions, and it can grow.
I think I’ve said about what I want to say here. I think I feel much better that I’ve said it. This was not what I sat down to talk about, but this is what came out. A testament to vulnerability and the hope in vulnerability. The hope for our whole species that we can be more vulnerable, that we can grow, that we can learn.
And yes, from what I’ve seen, there are some people out there who, some whole sections of society, whole groups of people, sadly, that sometimes I think can’t grow, get so stuck in their old ways of doing things that they become rigid and they set themselves up for extinction. But there are some, there are always some who can be vulnerable, who can be more real with themselves and in the world.
They have hard lives. I have a hard life. It’s hard to sit here. It’s not easy. It will not be easy for me.
To edit this video, it will not be easy for me to press the button that says “release this to the public.” But I’m glad that I can do it because, for me, it is part of my process of becoming bigger, better, more real, more true, more honest, and maybe more helpful to others.
[Music]