TRANSCRIPT
This morning, I woke up and I was planning to record a video or two. I looked in the mirror and I saw how I looked, and I thought, “Okay, going to trim off this beard so I can be clean and prepare to do my videos with the look that I usually present.” Then I remembered back to my early 20s when I first started traveling around the world, when I first started hitchhiking and disappearing from home, from my family home for months at a time.
I remember coming home at one point having a big scruffy beard. I had quit wearing contact lenses and I was wearing my glasses, clunky old glasses. My dad called me aside and he had such a look of pain and despair on his face. He said, “Daniel, why don’t you put your contacts on and shave and look nice again? Get a nice haircut.” He said, “You’re such a nice-looking guy. People love you so much when you look nice. You look horrible now. You don’t look nice anymore. It’s not fun to look at you.”
I remember what I said to him because I’ve been thinking about it a lot myself, this very subject. What I said was, “I know, I guess by conventional societal standards I used to be nice-looking when I would wear contacts and when I would shave and have a decent formal haircut. But I said I attracted all the wrong people. They were attracted to me for my surface and not for who I was. I got all focused on my surface and not who I was on the inside.”
And Dad, being this way, having a scruffy unshaven face and a messy haircut and glasses, I said, “I’m focused more on me on the inside now and I love myself more than ever.” And the funny thing is, the world picks that up. I may not be as conventionally good-looking, but I’m attracting better people. I think it was around that time that I had my first girlfriend who I liked so much more than I liked my past girlfriends. She liked me for who I really was, and I was technically kind of ugly at that point.
Also, friends. I was making friends who didn’t care what I looked like. They didn’t care that I looked a certain GQ kind of way. They just liked me because of what I said and how I acted. I think they also liked me that I was so much more relaxed and happy than I had ever been before.
I remember my dad just kind of stopped in his tracks. My dad, I don’t think I ever once saw my father in his life miss a day of shaving. Even when we were out camping, it was like so important to look the part, always look the part, dress the part. Even when there was nobody around, it was like I don’t even think he could look in the mirror and see himself in any other way than sort of presented and perfect.
So I thought this was a good idea to make a video about this and to not trim off my beard, to just come as I am and be me. Now this is how I look a lot of the time. Certainly when I’m out traveling in the world, I shave or trim my beard probably once a week or less. I mean, I found as I get older, sometimes before I go hitchhiking, I do trim my beard or shave just ’cause I want to get picked up. Sometimes if I’m too scruffy looking, cars will just pass me by. People will be scared of me.
And there are other negative consequences. Like I noticed in New York City, if I look like this, or especially if I go a few more days without shaving, I’ll go into a store and they’ll follow me in the grocery store, in the supermarket. They think I’m in a shoplift, and that’s happened many, many, many, many times for a long time. And that’s annoying.
I also do want to say, in fairness, that I think the world can go easier on men who look scruffy and don’t play the good-look part than it is for women. I think the world can be more judgmental of women who don’t fit into conventional, societally acceptable beauty standards. The world can just reject them outright, and I think that’s a reflection of the world itself more than it is a reflection of women in any way.
I think women tend to be looked at by conventional society just more as objects, and their value is based more on their sexual presentation, on their attractiveness. And I think men get more of a pass. But I also just think about myself, how much when I was younger I tormented to try to look the part, especially when I was a teenager. I was before puberty and during puberty. It was like I hated myself for how I looked. I really, really hated myself. I’d look in the mirror and just think ugly thoughts and even say nasty things because I didn’t look how I wanted to look. I looked mostly too young and too skinny, and my legs were too long and my clothes never fit right. I was rejected a lot because of that. I did meet a lot of societal rejection, and it really hurt.
I also think when I look back on it, when I look at the clothes that I wore, it’s like my primary male role model, my dad, he didn’t help me dress. I mean, there’s that old line, “Your mother dresses you funny.” Well, it was true in my case. My mother didn’t have very much taste in clothes, not boy clothes at least, and my dad just wasn’t interested. And this was my dad who was a fancy lawyer. I’m not going to put any photos of him up. I’m still, for whatever reason, protecting his privacy. But it’s like he has all his photos, he’s dressed beautifully, immaculately, with expensive clothes, and he just didn’t care about how I dressed. It wasn’t interesting to him.
I remember I would have to wear a shirt and a tie for band concerts when I played the French horn. It’s like my mom would dress me, and I remember I would go to those concerts and all the other boys would be wearing like suits and nice ties that their mothers or their fathers had tied. I had a clip-on tie and these weird vests, and I always looked strange and didn’t fit in. I was embarrassed, and I was just so glad when it was all done and I could go back to playing with my rough friends who didn’t have any money out in my neighborhood and get muddy and dirty and not have to worry about how I dressed.
I feel like it was like when I became an adult, I went back to by and large being that person who just dresses how I like and wears what I want and practices the number one rule of fashion and style, which is be comfortable. Now, you could say I’m a hypocrite for getting in front of this camera time after time, always trimming up and wearing this, well, by my regular standards, silly collared shirt. But I have a reason. I mean, I wear the silly collared shirt because it holds the microphone quite nicely and it makes it comfortable, and it doesn’t bump against my throat like the other shirts I have make it do.
I trim my beard, I think, to well also kind of present with a uniform. It just is easy. I don’t have to worry about it, and it doesn’t attract strange comments. I’ll probably get some negative comments because of how I look now, but in a way, I really don’t care because what I found, and this is probably the really the key lesson, is the more I have learned to love myself on the inside and made great huge strides at loving myself on the inside, the less I care at all what anyone thinks about how I look. It really doesn’t matter to me.
Whereas when I was a kid, when on the inside I really had serious issues with loving myself because I was so unloved in my family, violated in so many different ways, traumatized and rejected by my parents, shown a million times over that in so many different ways neither of them, my mother nor my father, really cared about me. I had a huge deficit of love for myself. I’d learned not to love myself, and I projected.
A lot of that onto my outer self. I so wanted to change my outer self to make my insides feel better, and it never worked. Never, never worked. And even into my early 20s, when suddenly, magically, I became conventionally nice looking—conventionally, oh, he’s so good looking, etc., etc.—and I grew tall. It was like I stood out in a way. It didn’t help at all. I still didn’t like myself on the inside.
And it was a shock to realize, ah, I got my magic wish. I looked nice, and it still didn’t solve the problem. And I think that really propelled me forward on this inner journey to realize, Daniel, if you’re ever going to love yourself, it’s going to happen from within. It’s going to happen by working out your traumas, figuring out what happened to you, figuring out where your self-hating parts are, your blind spots, and grieving what you lost. Reclaiming yourself, learning how to love yourself, how to treat yourself well. And, well, slowly it happened.
[Music]