Healing from childhood sexual abuse requires commitment. For example: for two months during the height of Daniel’s reckoning with the rapes that scarred his childhood, he lived in his car along the New Jersey turnpike. Deliberately isolating himself from everything, he wrestled with the memories and began the long and painful process of cataloguing, examining, and understanding the meaning of them.

It is that commitment, plus Daniel’s cauterizing honesty, mercurial intelligence, and well of creativity that has enabled him to endure severe post-traumatic symptoms, to relinquish the crutch of alcohol, and to pursue his ambitions. Throughout the decade of his 20’s, Daniel fought against flashbacks, panic attacks, and spells of dissociation as he pursued a career in the arts. He wrote relentlessly and developed his talents in both filmmaking and music. But all the while, he battled internally with the legacies that haunted him.

When the inner turmoil ultimately overwhelmed him and he needed an anchor, he simply worked. Well. He got a job in the world of business and rapidly advanced up the corporate ladder to become a manager and supervisor.

And then he gave it up, because Daniel is committed not only to his healing, but to the creative drive that sustains him. He resigned from his position, moved halfway across the continent, and launched Podcast Meander (www.podcastmeander.com), an audio travelogue that documents “his frantic wanderings across the United States.” In addition to pursuing this creative work, Daniel is determined to contribute his voice and activism to serve fellow survivors and to work toward the transformation of masculine norms so that men can be fully human.