Avoiding pain causes us to pervert ourselves: we’ll do weird things, say weird things and generally settle in a detached place so that we feel safe. If we’re creative, that detached plain becomes a fantastical place where only our versions of sugary sweet feel goods are allowed in, kinda like the fantastical life that our dear friend, Charlie Sheen, has created. Mark Morford is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.  His article on Charlie Sheen last week pointed out that we created THAT which is now Charlie Sheen because of our expectations. So we created this crazy, lying, monster man? Well, yes. And if you take that as a truth…How do we undo it? (Q)

As I said in the video, by looking hard at ourselves (A)…That is some of the toughest work we’ll do out there. It takes courage to shine a light into your dark stuff. Most of us won’t ever do it. We like to think that we are the exceptions to the problems out there but as Morford says over and over we’re using Sheen as a scapegoat for ourselves merely by watching.  So what I propose? Let’s uncover ourselves: be vulnerable, be scared, let the pain come at you and feel it, also let the delights wash over you too. Here, I’ll show you how I started, with a written confession that not a lot of people have seen:

“I Am a Liar

Tom, my acting coach once said to me, “you are a liar”.  I was dumb struck by this comment.  I thought to myself, “what?  I look for the truth. I am NOT a liar.  Liars are people who don’t tell the truth. Liars make false facts seem true. I can’t ever look at someone in the eye and lie well. I am a bad liar.”

Little did I know that I was a liar and didn’t know it.

It’s occurred to me in the last couple of weeks what a liar is.  I’ve been encountering LOTS of good people who are really good liars.  And it’s not that they are being malicious about it.  It’s that they believe that they have to be a certain way and act a certain way in order to be accepted.  So they may not be going around telling tall tales knowingly, but what makes a person a liar is that they aren’t being truthful to themselves about who they are and thus they are creating a smoke and mirrors game for everyone so that people are distracted from what said person feels insecure about.

I was a liar because I didn’t accept who I was.  I was a liar because I felt one way about myself but didn’t want anyone to know how I really felt about myself. So, I’d play the role of “the actress”, and the girl who had her shit together, and “the heartbreaker”.  So, people thought that I was an actress and that I had my shit together and that love didn’t really matter to me.

But underneath it all,  I didn’t feel like an actress, I didn’t feel like I had my shit together, and my heart was closed off for fear of it cracking beyond repair.

So, technically, I was a liar. I wasn’t really letting many people see who I really was, which IS a scared little kid.  I am a scared kid, learning how to be a functioning truthful human being.”

Who’s next?

–Aurora