Why Steve-O risked his life over, and over, and over again

I've been in pain for a living.

Hey everybody, my name is Steve Glover. I'm also known as Steve-O, and I am an entertainer of all sorts. You know, going back to the beginning, I lacked attention from my parents as a child, like as a baby. You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to imagine that that might have caused me to become an attention seeker.

When I set out to write my first book, which was my memoir called "Professional Idiot," I went through all this stuff that my sister had collected, and among it was a report card from sixth grade. My homeroom teacher wrote on this report card: "Steve desperately wants the praise and approval of his peers, but the way he goes about seeking it brings about the opposite results." And I would try so hard and I would just be overwhelming and do, like, just really aggressive things.

If I could go back and talk to the child version of me, if I could just say, "Man, like chill out." But that kid didn't know how to chill out. There's nothing I could tell him that was gonna change what was going on. It made me very uncomfortable and desperately unhappy a lot of the time.

As I've gotten older, I think there's something inherently compelling to all humans about people being in pain. And that fact is something that I've capitalized on a great deal in my career. I know that pain is compelling, and so I document myself being in pain, and I've become successful as a result.

I've always wanted to please everybody. I'm just such an attention whore, and I need so desperately to be liked—that's been my whole life. When I dropped out of the University of Miami in 1993, I felt that I was a failure in life; destined to fail completely, and to die very young. There just wasn't that much I was passionate about except partying and just being kind of crazy.

So my one plan was to try to become a crazy famous stuntman. I didn't really necessarily expect that it would work. I just wanted to videotape lots and lots of stuff so that when I inevitably died, having failed at life, there would be some evidence that I had existed.

When I got a profile with this "Jackass" franchise, I was recognizable to normal people in the street. When I'm in situations where it's unmanageable because there's so many people, and like, ah, it gets a little bit overwhelming and hectic, it is important for me to remember that that's all I ever wanted.

'What are you most afraid that someone else will find out about you?' With alcoholism, part of the recovery process is to share everything with another person. And that opened up like a bunch of things that I had to share that I wasn't willing to share. I wasn't ready to share.

I opened up my notebook and I wrote at the top of a page the words, "To the grave." These are the things that I was dead set on never, ever sharing, period, no matter what. I was gonna take these secrets to my grave. And as I wrote down these things, I wrote them in code so that heaven forbid, if anybody got ahold of my notebook that they would not have these secrets.

This person who I brought these secrets in code to had told me, "I've been doing this for years. Trust me, you're not gonna tell me anything I haven't heard. Just go for it." And when I read to him my coded secrets, he said, "Ding, ding, ding! That I have not heard!” And we both laughed.

And by speaking up to that one person who I trusted, I was largely freed on that day. But there's no way I'm talking about it here.

'In what aspect of your life do you feel not good enough? When is the first time you remember feeling that way?' My life has been characterized by feeling not good enough. Part of me believes that that's just a trait of alcoholism. You know, I like this sense of incompleteness and restless, irritable discontent.

Like if I felt that I was good enough, then I'd probably be happy. And if I was happy, I'd probably be content. And if I was content, I'd probably be lazy. And I think I can pretty safely say that I don't necessarily wanna feel like I'm good enough because where's the hustle in that? You know, like, I'm not good enough. You know, I got a lot of work to do to get to a place where I'm even gonna be okay. And that's fine.