Who We Are, Awaits Beyond Our Fear.

Watching the latest interview documentary with Jim Carry on Netflix. This is a man I’ve enjoyed seeing in all movies since I was a kid.

After watching the whole thing I realized how much he and I have in common, as people. The way we’ve always gone after our dreams and passions, how he was feeling the same way I was in regards to, “The Truman Show” and how grateful he is to his family for being together through all their struggles. He talked, originally and at first about the process behind the movie, “Man On the Moon”. Also a great movie.

Later in the interview he started to touch on a lot of what life is, and what he’s come to understand it to truly be. Two things he said stuck out most to me, the first hit me in waves; as most epiphanies do. I’ll do my best but most of it will be paraphrased.

“We all want to escape, to leave behind our life. To be free from ourselves, and that’s what life is isn’t it?… We put on masks, our suits or aprons…our costumes  and try to smoosh ourselves into this small thing we think we have to be. 

“…And it gets to a point where we either stop it from continuing and live to be who we know we are, disregarding fear of what other people think or tell us; or we live out the rest of our lives that way…burying ourselves in our graves, clinging on to that long lost truth of who we are wondering where it all went wrong…” 

The second: “Go after what you want… People don’t think it’s possible to be who they want to be and do what they want to do because they think they’ll fail. Then they go after a safer option out of fear… I’ve found that failing at something you don’t like hurts much worse than failing at something you love…because you’ve convinced yourself that you were safer not going after what you truly wanted. You were safer not being who you truly are. 

“To me there’s no choice. Not doing what you love isn’t an option.”

 

I recommend it, there’s a lot to it. There’s far more to Jim Carry than any of us could’ve imagined, at least in my opinion, in a good way. “Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond”

 

So, I came to a small, still in the works, theory of it all. Not the documentary, but life in this human existence that many live in fear of truly embracing.

We live to escape ourselves; after a while it becomes routinely easy to turn our sights towards anything that doesn’t point to who we truly are. It’s easy to see anything and everything we don’t want to see; until who we are is the only thing left to see. 

As Jim Carry says in the documentary, “We’re all actors… We layer ourselves in false narratives and beliefs to hide the one truth we’re too afraid to face. If they see who I really am, they’ll know I’m worthless. They’ll know this is all a sham and I’m actually nothing special.”

Where’s this notion come from? What’s made us believe this single statement to be true? Most importantly, why’s it that deep down there’s a sigh of relief we breathe when someone else in the world is found to be nothing they pretended to be?

As if internally we say, “Phew, it wasn’t me this time. I did it, I got away with my lie for a little while longer.”

As if we’re waiting to be caught or found out. We’ve grown desperate wanting anyone and everyone around us to believe in an act, that we don’t fully believe in ourselves.

The last six words of the previous statement are especially important: “…we don’t fully believe in ourselves.”

We want to be caught and put out of the misery of having to play pretend. This is where the notion of working to die comes into play. We’ve built life up to be something it isn’t and followed in that same assumption in our ways of living.

It’s time to take it back to basics. To not “make” life into something but simply live life and let it be what it truly is. It’ll take some time, no doubt, but soon after our way of living will begin to change as well.

We can’t be afraid to accept ourselves; we can’t accept being afraid of ourselves.

Who we are, awaits beyond fear.

-Gustavo Lomas