Every morning I wake up and I tell myself this: It's just one day, one twenty-four-hour period to get yourself through. I don't know when exactly I started giving myself this daily pep talk--or why. It sounds like a twelve-step mantra and I'm not in Anything Anonymous, though to read some of the crap they write about me, you'd think I should be. I have the kind of life a lot of people would probably sell a kidney to just experience a bit of. But still, I find the need to remind myself of the temporariness of a day, to reassure myself that I got through yesterday, I'll get through today.
I remind myself that, though there was a time anxiety might have stopped me, today is not that day. And so, by checking in with myself, minute by minute, I push myself through.
I got through yesterday, I'll get through today.
You live your life day by day and find ways to get through it. You grow up through things that are challenging and you find the joy. You realize there are so many people that have it much worse and remind yourself. I have been very blessed.
My experience is that I find myself having to constantly define myself to others, day-in, day-out. The quote that's helped me the most through that is from Toni Morrison's "Beloved" where she says, "Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined" - so I find myself defining myself for other people lest I be defined by others and stuck into some box where I don't particularly belong.
You need something. Not just to get through the day, but to get through the incarnation. You need to find that power, that perfect unity.
I've just got to remind myself that it's hard to express tone and sarcasm and stuff through text.
Sometimes I remind myself of all the things that make me feel so blessed. And then I remind myself to remind myself more often.
If you have total freedom to design, you won't get anything interesting. So I give myself restraints in order to kind of push myself through, to create something new. It's the torture that I give myself, the pain and the struggle that I go through.
I find too often in the wrestling business, you just wrestle, get to the hotel, make your money. Sometimes I have to stop and remind myself to enjoy my life and not just rush through.
A lot of mantras that I use in my daily life to get through - to move through the world in peace and harmony with myself - find their way into the music that I make. Many of the lines that people seem to be drawn to in my music really come from these mantras that I repeat to myself to try and move through the world in more thoughtful, comfortable way.
I get through difficult situations by looking at how other people have gone through them. I say to myself, 'If they can go through it, then I can.' Or, If they can go through worse, I can go through whatever I'm going through.
A lot of the time, when I find myself critiquing scientific accuracy in movies, I have to remind myself that it had to get close enough to getting it right to get things wrong.
I think it started since I was born, I always had a need to express myself, you know, as a human being, and I found that it felt right when I expressed myself through art, dance, through acting, so it kind of happened naturally.
But I need to wake up somehow. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s best to get through the day half-asleep. Maybe that’s the only way to get through today.
I'm totally a narcissist, so I was doing all this performance and having lots of weird ego time, and learning to set aside my love for the ego and find a deeper love for myself and through that seeing myself as one with all beings. And through loving myself, loving all people in the world, that was my cure for narcissism, the only cure.