"I was a savage for so many years of my life. There was some seed of determination in me that I was not conscious of. I was mostly consciously getting into trouble and drunk"

The speaker sketches a portrait of a younger self driven by unruly impulses, naming that phase “savage” to capture its rawness and lack of restraint. The word suggests more than mischief; it implies a disconnection from norms, a feral energy coursing through daily life. He owns the behavior, troublemaking and drunkenness, without ornament or excuse, acknowledging a conscious will toward chaos. The admission has a flinty honesty: he wasn’t merely swept along; he chose the edge, sought the heat of transgression, and courted the fallout.

Yet alongside that volatility he identifies a countercurrent, a “seed of determination” he could not then perceive. That hidden seed functions like a buried compass. While the conscious mind flirted with self-sabotage, something deeper was quietly orienting him toward purpose. The contrast is striking: awareness was enlisted in recklessness, while unconscious resolve carried the weight of survival and future growth. The confession hints at a paradox of human development, how discipline can germinate in soil churned by excess, and how the path forward may be incubating beneath a life that outwardly looks like drift.

There’s also an implied narrative of transmutation: the same intensity that once found expression in drink and trouble could be redirected into craft and commitment. The language holds no moral preening; it treats the past as material, not spectacle. In recognizing the seed, he retrofits meaning onto chaos without sentimentalizing it. The arc from “savage” to self-mastery isn’t inevitable, but the line suggests the possibility that ungoverned energy, when finally given a channel, becomes fuel for extraordinary focus. It invites a broader understanding of artistic rigor as the harnessing of dangerous currents, a reminder that what can wreck a life, if encountered honestly and shaped by resolve, can also power a formidable vocation.