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0:12
in 2012 John Green wrote a book called The Fault in Our Stars about a young girl dying of cancer which was based at least in part on the real life of a friend of John's who tragically died young in the foreword he says neither novels nor their readers benefit from any attempts to Devine whether any facts hide inside a story I appreciate your cooperation in this matter tonight's show is not fiction but I very deliberately given no identifying details and like John I hope you'll
0:45
respect that we begin with a very different John jean-paul sartre who was a French philosopher and a bit of a pretentious [ __ ] in 1944 he wrote a play called no exit which has a lot of philosophy in it because he couldn't just write some ideas down or create a work of art he had to try and do both at the same time like a knob and in the play three people two girls and a guy estelle in Eze and Garson are damned to hell for all eternity and as it turns out hell is just a room explicitly
1:17
described as having no mirrors but otherwise it's pretty nice and they eventually discover that they are there to torture each other emotionally forever the play is famous for the line at the end hell is other people and it's really really good it's one of those works of art that like really needs to be in the medium it's in its really suited to the stage because it's only one act it wouldn't really work if it was a film because part of the awful tension is that there's no cuts no edits
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in life theater it's just you're stuck watching this one terrible scene unfold but for me one of the most interesting moments comes about two-thirds of the way in when in Eze has been very cruel to Garson and then suddenly the door to hell opens and Garson has an opportunity to leave only he doesn't so why not if he'll is so awful my toes and Garson just walk out put a pin in that one several hundred years before Sartre another French guy called Rene Descartes
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wrote some actual philosophy in which he tried to doubt everything he thought he knew in order to find something that he couldn't doubt whatever that was it would be certain knowledge and he found that he couldn't doubt that he was thinking and since he must exist if you're thinking hence the famous phrase I think therefore I am but this is only one approach to the philosophy of mind Descartes started as an isolated individual shut away in his chambers with just a dressing-gown and a stack of
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anime DVDs and he concluded that existence as a mind is something that you can become aware of on your own it's an individual achievement contrast that with a philosopher like hegel hegel and a lot of a thinkers who came after him said no your existence as a mind is something you can only become aware of through other people to reflect on yourself and understand that you have a mind is like looking at yourself through the eyes of an audience yes you can shut
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yourself away with a bunch of anime DVDs but sooner or later you're gonna finish attack on titan season 3 and you're gonna look at your own reflection in the laptop screen and think wow I look a lot like my dad so for me one of the most interesting moments of no exit comes about two-thirds of the way through when Garson has an opportunity to leave only he doesn't and Sartre says that he'll has no mirrors so the characters can only see themselves through the eyes of
3:45
the other people there this has made really clear about halfway and when Estelle gets very worried about her makeup but she doesn't have a mirror to check it so she has to ask in Eze to describe how she looks and in Eze really fancies Estelle so Estelle suspects she might be trying to flatter her like oh your makeup is flawless Queen spit in my mouth mommy Estelle can't trust wooden Eze says she looks like meanwhile Garson has been damned to hell for blatantly cheating on
4:16
his wife as well as collaborating with the enemy when his country was invaded he's guilty even if there was a mirror he wouldn't be able to face himself he's worried that he's a coward and Estelle is very willing to dissuade him of that notion by having sex with him she really fancies him she's like you're not a coward you're a big strong desirable man you're worthy of happiness - get over here on the couch and let's do it but in Aires tell us Garson Estelle would have sex with anyone she just
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wants attention from a man and she'll tell you anything you need to hear to get it she doesn't really fancy you she just likes the idea of somebody madly attractive validating her and even though Estelle says that isn't true or even does it matter if it is there's that little niggle plant at the back of garson's mind one of Hegel and Sartre is big themes was recognition wanting to be seen by other people in a certain way and what happens when other people don't see us the way we want them to and
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they're not just talking about other people saying nasty or untrue things about you but what happens when there's nasty untrue things get inside your head and you start telling them to yourself you've probably seen the film Inception where they go into a guy's dreams and plant an idea it's like that somebody puts a thought in your head and it grows so it is kind of you but it also kind of came from outside like a colonization of the mind it's quite appropriate that
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Estelle is worried about makeup in the book perfect me the philosopher Heather widows talks about societal beauty standards and the way they can get inside your head and even if you know on some level that beauty standards are informed by racism and sexism and ableism and transphobia or even just edited photos that aren't realistic they do still pull on you years after Hegel another philosopher called Franz fanon picked up on this idea of mental colonization he was a black guy living
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in France in the 40s and 50s so he experienced a lot of racism and he found that that also got inside his head and he was also worried about literal colonization at the time France had invaded and was occupying Algeria where he lived for a bit and also Martinique where he was from and he saw that at least some black people on some level swallowed that racism they saw themselves as inferior and were trying to be more like the respectable white people who'd invaded and occupied their
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countries rather than embrace their own blackness and the potentially revolutionary ideas that might come with it he wasn't the first person to have these concerns American author w eb Du Bois talked about it too and it's the plot of the film get out like that's a film where white people transplant their into black people in such a way that the victim is aware of what's happening but can't do anything about it mental colonization spoilers by the way it's not necessarily just about race a
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lot of trans people can probably relate to what Fannin was talking about I think some day some black trans persons gonna write something about Frantz Fanon and transphobia it's gonna be really really cool but anyway this theme of somebody else hijacking your thoughts comes up a lot in philosophy and art and makeup tutorials although in all of those cases we know that someone else is getting inside our heads for me one of the most interesting moments if no exit comes
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when the door to hell opens and Garson has a chance to leave only he doesn't a while ago I made a video about a philosopher called Simon Critchley who has this idea called split mind theory the idea is that the human mind is split into two bits the bit that we experience and then the little voice that's always correcting and judging and looking over your shoulder and viewing you like an audience and that can be a good voice it can be the voice of your conscience but
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it can also be colonized and tricked either by a team of inception dream lads or just comments on Instagram calm like I in the video created this character called mister not good enough who was like my internal critic who told me all sorts of nasty things like I was fat and lazy or whatever I've been pretty candid on the show before about my mental health I made a video about a year ago about the force fear of suicide and it was also about my own suicide attempts
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and history of self-harm I created this character called the cosmonaut who was like the personification of my mental health crisis and apparently that video meant a huge amount to a lot of people I still get emails literally every day from people saying that that video saved their lives which is amazing and people drew fanart of a cosmonaut and did songs and poems and regeneration magazine wrote an article about it and NPR in America shouted a while ago all of which was
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amazing and not long after I started that video rush I made it I started therapy and my therapist instead of focusing on the mind asked me to describe how I physically felt in my body when I got suicidal and I said Wow when I get suicide life I feel big but not like big and strong I'm Otto Andrew philic a degenerate pervert who's turned on by the idea of themselves as a sexy man that's not a real thing that's not real that's just a joke from my trans audience but I said when I get suicidal
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I feel big and clumsy oh fish fat I have a recurring fear that when I turn around in a crowded public space I'm gonna bump somebody and hurt them and I told my therapist when I get suicidal it feels like I've been turned into Shrek and she was Australian and she said you know Shrek head friends people liked Shrek which was honestly one of the most uplifting things anybody's ever told me and she also asked had that fear ever come true had I ever actually turned
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around and hurt somebody and I was like oh it never even occurred to me to ask that but no that's never happened and she said so where did this idea come from and I said it came from about about 2/3 of the way through the play and Garson has an opportunity to leave he'll only he doesn't so I guess he'll can't really be that bad he must be exaggerating it in 12 rules for life beloved psychologists and best-selling author Jordan B Peterson says if I stay in an unhealthy
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relationship with you perhaps it's because I'm too weak willed and indecisive to leave but I don't want to know it unless I continue helping you and console myself with my pointless martyrdom it might just be a person trying to look good pretending to solve what appears to be a difficult problem instead of actually being good and addressing something real so I guess on that reading Garson really deserves to be in hell and he really is a coward I talked to my therapist a
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little bit about YouTube because God knows you need therapy or anyone do now as long as I have and I mentioned that around August of last year I changed what I was making if you've been watching my videos for any amount of time you'll have noticed I went from this to this in a relatively short amount of time and I had played with some more theatrical stuff before my video on Hegel was before then and had something I was using costumes and characters on YouTube like way back in 2014 it was
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around about the time I went to drama school to become a professional actor but it all got more basic it was just me in front of a bookshelf partly because I didn't have a whole lot of time on my hands and partly because I mean I had all these big ideas about things I wanted to do but I yeah I guess I don't really have the time but uh around about the end of summer last year the creativity suddenly came roaring back and my therapist said oh that's interesting you so you went from a
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suicide attempt at the start of 2018 to getting your mojo back with a vengeance what was going on in your life when you tried to kill yourself and I said life wasn't going super well when I tried to kill myself obviously I had very few friends which was my fault I mean I alienated them I was just a colleague to most I can't think of a single person who looked forward to seeing me in fact frequently who was the opposite professionally I was replaceable artistically I was invisible
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my YouTube channel was deeply immoral it betrayed a deep character flaw in me and it was the kind of trash that really only somebody without a creative soul can even make if you ran an infrared scanner over me I wouldn't show up dogs ignore me in the street and the reason they do is because I don't have a soul I'm just a horrible fleshy English robot that's gradually breaking my suicide attempt left me living on cheated time I should have died I've done nothing with
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it except to modify it to gain sympathy points from better people and it wasn't even a serious turn turn I wasn't even injured I was in a very real sense unlovable literally incapable of giving love or receiving or even understanding what love is which meant that it was morally wrong for me to pretend to be in love with my girlfriend at the time I was living a selfish vain entirely pointless life sucking up oxygen from better people than quite frankly I deserved to die so it's a good thing
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that it occurred to me to try it and a pity that I didn't have the spine to see it through and she said do you think that's a bit harsh no like yeah probably and she said okay you've got all these negative voices in your mind and I can teach you some techniques to deal with that but things got better you were making one kind of video now you're making stuff you really care about you used to think about stuff all the time now you recognize those are anomalies that can be addressed you're
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here in therapy getting help doing better you're climbing out of this depression and you started that climb before you began therapy so what happened what changed well I was like once nothing really I mean the the only life event that really happens that I broke up with my girlfriend and she moved out of the flat where we were living together and then suddenly I could create again but we just had more time on my hands and we talked a little bit about the relationship and its ups
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and downs and there it was actually this one really funny moment when I'm when I moved out of the flat months after the breakup I had to get rid of this IKEA trysil wardrobe and when she first moved in I spent all day building a thing so she'd have somebody put her stuff and when it came time to get rid of it I I started off with the screwdriver but I the more I work the more I just had to get this wardrobe out of my life I so I when I was my hands I was like smashing
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it and ripping apart the wood and pulling out the screws I I flew it onto the curb I [ __ ] Tsongas sanded that wardrobe I've visitors than dag stopped until there was nothing left but hoe vac it was like beowulf DIY it was really masculine the most masks that IKEA has ever been and I don't know why I did it but god damn did it feel good and my therapist said you know I think this is trauma I think you've been traumatized and I said now if I had trauma I would
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know about it surely and she said you've been in an abusive relationship and I was like no you're not the first person to say that but it wasn't like that I mean it was bad in places but it wasn't abusive I mean yes I did all of the cooking and the cleaning and it was hardly ever appreciated but that's okay I had more spare time that's a feminist thing to do and I enjoy doing this sort of tasks anyway I don't really mind all that much and yeah she was very different when it
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was just the two of us versus when we were with our mutual friends but everybody has two faces and she was very critical of my family and my friends but she's allowed an opinion and yeah when I told her something she done had hurt me she would explain why she was right instead of apologizing but that's just a sign of her intelligence she was really really intelligent and we just had different communication styles and she hated this show and the fact that it put me in touch with people
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who support me and care about my work but that wasn't because it was an aspect of my life that she couldn't control she just wasn't the target audience and she would withdraw affection very suddenly without really explaining why but that's okay you can't be entitled to good vibes and she would sometimes humiliate me in public or ignore me in public or make fun of my insecurities or start fights in restaurants but she she had a lot going on and my concerns were relatively
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trivial and she would sometimes use sex and physical touch as a means of emotional control but I was into it that's that's definitely okay and she was really really angry the night that I tried to kill myself but that's that was okay it wasn't alright for me to do that without thinking about how it might make her feel it was really inconsiderate and I I used to sometimes pretend to be asleep when she came home for fear that she would start a fight if she knew I
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was awake but that that's okay nobody likes arguing with drunk people and yes she hit me once once but it was my fault it was my fault
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you
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oh it's all got a bit serious doesn't it don't worry there's gonna be a happy ending what I learned is that trauma isn't always like a lightning bolt where you know that you've been hit sometimes trauma is like poison that someone slips into your food and little doses and you sit down every night and you eat that poison and you don't realize that it's building up inside you until suddenly you stop functioning they say that people don't know they're in abusive relationships when they're in
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them that you have to be told and in my experience that's true cuz I rationalized it and I rationalized it and I didn't realize where that was costing me because in the end the only rationalization that made sense was that I deserved it we stayed together for six months after the night she hit me and I didn't tell a soul
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Aristotle what is my job Aristotle said that being a good person isn't about doing the right thing or doing it for the right reasons it's about having the right virtues compassion bravery loyalty stuff like that and you've got to have them in the right amounts you know what to be too brave or you'll be reckless you've got to have what he called the golden mean and if you study philosophy 101 one of the objections people often bring to Aristotle is well how can you be too
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compassionate how can you be too loving and the answer is in an abusive relationship your virtues get turned against you don't you want to be patient and forgiving isn't it good to listen don't you want to provide for your girl don't you want to be faithful if you love someone you don't give up on them in an ordinary relationship those virtues will shine with an abuser you will die waiting for them to be reciprocated another risk along similar lines is that you might become what some
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psychologists might call codependent paranoids controversial whether there is actually any such thing scientifically but what I mean is strictly from my own experience I got used to putting somebody else first always helping never saying what I want never asking for anything or doing anything that might inconvenience my partner yeah I can cook and clean and manage your emotional distress and buy gifts for you and take care of everything I have no needs I'm invincible and that
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goes hand in hand with the low self-esteem because I'd been so ground down I thought that what I needed wasn't really worth anything the reason Garson doesn't walk out when the door to hell opens isn't that he's vain in fact has a very low opinion of himself it's because his whole worldview and his view of himself has become dependent on NS which isn't a very healthy place to be in even if your partner isn't abusive there's a recognized phenomenon of sis men in
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particular who are often encouraged to be independent and strong becoming dependent on their female partners because what they really need his friends or a therapist and that's obviously pretty emotionally draining for you girls and pretty emotionally precarious for us guys anyway all of this came as quite a shock to our mutual friends who were like wow we had no idea well to be fair there was other stuff going on and are you sure I'm sure I have done the Descartes thing of
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trying to doubt everything I think I know until I find the one undoubtable thing when I get down to that kernel of truth it's just you're worthless and your needs mean nothing and I can't have that as the foundation of my whole worldview I need a new philosophy and it came as quite a shock to my mum who when it was all over and I told her said it's hard to imagine you being terrified of anyone and that's fair I'm a big strong guy that doesn't matter the actor Terry
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Crews was sexually assaulted and deeply emotionally affected by that and he's like six - and jacked when we get to know somebody very well we take on a little bit of them into ourselves they become like an audience it affects our self perception and a good romantic partner will hopefully build you up and enable you to see yourself the way they see you lovingly the internal critic becomes an eternal advocate you start going well the things I don't like about
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myself when we're together they actually kind of work and if you find somebody like that hold on to them but when somebody starts writing the script for that little voice and putting in some really nasty lines believe me you can live in fear of somebody half your size it's sobering to think of how many opportunities I missed how many great things I didn't do how many excellent videos I didn't make because I'd swallowed that poison how many times did the door to hell open and I missed it
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fortunately I did eventually walk through and I have enough distance from it all now to happily make this little resource though I warn you it does have lasting effects I'll never be able to go to Paris again too many memories which is a joke but it's also true I do have flashbacks and nightmares and I am triggered occasionally and that can mess me up for a whole day although it's getting rarer which is really really nice and sometimes having trauma is hilarious like as a result of going
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through this I have some anxiety about the people I love suddenly withdrawing their affection because that's what I got used to so I got an appointment with a therapist to work through this abandonment anxiety and she didn't turn up which is objectively quite funny I had to be like well just because she didn't contact me doesn't mean that she's gonna come in the flat in two hours and yell at me she's probably just busy like a normal person oh my god that's the lesson I needed to learn 10
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out of 10 best therapy I never had even funnier I got that appointment with that therapist because my anxiety about affections being withdrawn what's getting in the way of me enjoying my relationships and then a week later I suddenly got dumped which again is objectively quite funny I was like well maybe trauma didn't give me anxiety maybe it gave me the power to see into the future although again I had to be like well just because they said that it's over it doesn't mean that they're
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gonna come in the flat in two hours drunk and try and touch me to convince me to take them back like it's normal breakup it's sad but I'm still safe the pain in the ass is recovering from trauma isn't like a movie where the character learns the lesson and then goes on to apply it and save the day it's more like rehearsing a play you have to keep going over it and over it until it becomes unconscious and natural when you have trauma and you don't really feel 100% safe with anybody
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dating becomes quite difficult how many dates do we go on before I tell you I don't want to be defined by it but you need to know is it gonna put you off are you looking for commitment because a time of recording I really don't think I can do that are you not looking for commitment cuz I'm gonna act like I'm prince charming and you're the only one for me cuz I'm scared that if I don't you'll hit me or leave and sometimes they do leave and I hear my abuser saying you're very good at making people
25:23
fall in love with you but you just can't seem to make them happy unlike with the makeup thing I know that's not true it's a conspiracy theory and yet also I wish somebody would unright Fifty Shades of Grey because I feel like I have to go yes I have emotional trauma but this drawer full of BDSM gear honestly has nothing to do with that during the course of writing this video my abuser tried to get in touch several times being like hey hope you're doing alright
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I'm gonna be back in London for a few days do you want to meet up maybe and every time I go through that Descartes process F well maybe that never really happened and maybe it was all just in my head maybe it can all just go away but no I spent a lot of time in therapy not exclusively because of that person but the abuse definitely didn't help and I need to acknowledge that because the progress since then is real - I've changed a lot in the last year in many ways I'm not the man I was
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you can tell looking at my videos that something happened to me at the end of summer 2018 what happened was I came home one day and I said to my abuser I don't love you anymore you need to go incidentally as soon as she moved out all of my rent and bills obviously doubled so I could only afford to leave my abuser in part because I still had this show and thank God I hadn't given her any financial control so if you were supporting me on patreon about a year ago
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thanks I very much doubt that my abuser will ever see this video she's very not online I don't really care if she does though incidentally if you are watching then sincerely thank you for the good times and I would prefer never to hear from you ever again it's not really about that though it's about the journey of discovering that some of the thoughts you have inside your head aren't yours and what you can do about that sometimes we do a bit of philosophy to dislodge an idea and be
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like oh where did I get this how does it work do I want to keep it or not sometimes it sticks in deep so deep you think it's you and it takes therapy and time to slowly grow it out like a splinter I'm sure a lot of people will want to write to me asking whether I think they're in abusive relationships please don't I can't tell you that I'm afraid and I don't think I can take reading it I was quite scared to make this but if all of human knowledge is like a library that we can borrow from
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or add to then when men don't put these kinds of stories on the shelves nobody can borrow them we all miss out on the intellectual resources necessary to understand and take control of these sorts of experiences when they do happen that's why Terry Cruz's work is so important visibly being a man who has been hurt and not heard in the Batman sense of it's my pain it defines Who I am but hurt in the sense that this shouldn't have happened and we can't move on we can only move
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forward with it it's writing what in philosophy we would call an epistemic injustice it is weird I second-guess myself a lot and I don't really know how I should feel but that is why I have a therapist and that is also why I have this this is the complete works of Shakespeare I think it was Judi Dench who once said that this book contains every single human emotion if you can feel it it's in here so I'm gonna read it all of it out loud life on Twitch and if I raise any money
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I'm gonna give it all to a mental health charity awhile ago my friend Harry did something amazing he raised a huge amount of money for a Kids charity by streaming himself playing Donkey Kong 64 for 59 hours straight the absolute legend and he did it in response to a very nasty man doing an awful thing and I don't expect it's gonna be anything like that but I was so proud of him and so inspired by my friend what happened to me should never ever happen to anyone
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but rather than grow bitter and sad I want to make something good come of it I don't want it to be about the pain or the person who caused it I want the legacy of my abusive relationship and my mental health voyages to be something good and if this book contains every human emotion and by the time I'm done reading it I will have felt whatever it is I should be feeling I'll make another video on this channel closer to the time explaining the details of the stream
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when it'll be how you can see it and what charity I'll do it for and if the cosmonaut video or this one meant anything to you then I hope you'll join me and I think that's about everything I've got to say for today except that if you have trauma if you have been abused I've only got one thing to say to you I understand
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[Music]
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[Music] the world's first cosmonaut the first to open the door into the unknown but first that step over the threshold of our
32:00
[Music] you
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the whole planet knew him and loved him yep [Music]
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was it hazardous yes it was the first strides into the unknown we're about to be made [Music] the hero blazed the trail for the star [Music] everyone of us was with Yuri Gagarin as he orbited the earth 190 miles about [Music]
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[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] planned [Music] [Applause] you
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