The Babes and the Wolf

How To Do the Human Thing.

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30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS  (13+) WDC's Longest Running Blog Competition - Hiatus #1786069 by Fivesixer

Prompt: Tell us what annoys you most about yourself.

Kill your idols, so you can love them for what they really are.

My Luvey (partner) has been subjecting me to this documentary called Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond and its giving me the feels.

Little things get triggered now and then - things that I just don't think about but they're sitting there in the back of my mind non-existing until something dredges them up again. Like the fact that I once wanted to be a comedian. I used to worship Jim Carey and Robin Williams. I had VHS's and DVD's of SNL's Greatest Hits: Adam Sandler, Dana Carvey, Mike Meyers. But Robin Williams and Jim Carey were my idols. I grew up on The Mask, In Living Color, Ace Venture. I knew the words to When Nature Calls. And Robin Williams was my hero. Mrs. Doubtfire got me through my parent's separation. I would watch his stand up, his movies over and over (except Popeye - he creeps me out). I wanted to be like them. I wanted to make people happy, to join them on their holy mission to bring light and joy into a world full of shit and pain (I grew up in an extremely socially aware and pessimistically oriented household). I even auditioned once for Caroline's Comedy Club. They told me to refine my act and come back for another audition. I never went.


When Robin Williams killed himself I felt nothing. And I think that means I had no idea what to feel. I have a particular knack for emotional denial (<----Understatement). So, what I felt was not a nothing per se, but a void - a something should be here. It was what happens when your feelings get compartmentalized, vacuum sealed, and left in the back of your mental closet because some higher order metal function knows it just doesn't want to fucking deal with that messy shit right now.

My life is a graveyard of dreams.

And certainly not because Robin Williams went and offed himself.

I didn't become a comedian. I gave up acting after four years of formal study, which I love and miss to this day. I used to draw and paint. I even gave up writing - the only thing I have ever felt good at (but don't anymore) - for a really long time because I struggle to see any worth in myself. I didn't know how to believe in myself then. And I still don't. Self-deprecation is extremely useless. I know this. I can know this intellectually all I want. But the actual maintaining self-esteem part is pretty difficult for me. Hard as I try to figure out how. I wax and I wane and I've only recently started to really understand what that means. But the worst thing is I'm not sure that anyone else sees any worth in me either (except my partner and my kids).

Jim Carey goes through crippling depressions. Like Robin Williams did. Like many other comedians, it turns out. I didn't know that until very recently. I watched a documentary on Jim Carey about a year ago. It reminded me how much I used to idolize him. It made me appreciate him more because he could have given up. He could have let himself sink into the floor. But instead his hurt makes him want to make the world lighter for other people.

I mentioned how my partner is "subjecting" me to this documentary (slowly over the course of days). I have no illusions about my ability to compartmentalize and dissociate from my feelings. It took me over a year to watch any of Robin William's movies again after his death. That movie was Hook and my partner subjected me to it as well. After which I balled for the first time since his death and my eyes are tearing up now. But that's what it took to poke a hole in me. And I dissociate from other things too, like pain from my childhood, embarrassments, dreams that have died in my heart. Heroes - especially ones who remind me of how un-special I am. How boring. How negligible. How uninteresting. How unwanted.

How, as one person once informed me: "Mild mannered".

And then my partner subjects me to this film and my psyche says "Fuck. That."

I bitch. I squirm. I groan. And then I can't help but watch. I'm enrapt. I'm transfixed. My partner and I are leaning off of the couch mouthing the words to the clips of his films. I'm brimming with gratitude that my partner has done this again - because he never fails to remind me of little pieces of myself that I've forgotten, or given up , or the ones I thought had died in the dark. And he acts like these things are just everyday parts of what he sees in me. Childish things, pointlessly amusing things I gave up in the course of just surviving, the little lights that keep our hearts young. But I digress...

Pretty soon, as I reflect on them, it occurs to me that part of my reticence to watch this film doesn't stem from the fear of my feelings about myself, but rather the admission that one of my childhood idols is getting old.

Creepy old.

I've lost a bunch of inspirations over the past few years: David Bowie (there was no holding back those tears), Robin Williams, Alan Rickman. Those guys, let's face it, were getting up there. But they weren't creepy old.

Jim Carey is creepy old. And he's not even all that old.

Jim Carey is turning into that weird old guy who, when you comment about the cold weather he starts philosophizing about how perhaps the weather is only cold in our hearts - an embodiment of the winter inside of us. "Open up. Feel the warmth..."

(Or maybe he's just high?)

Among other things I've learned about his life over the past year or so. He's gotten a tad fucking creepy and he's kind of (<----understatement) a dick. Yes, I have to admit that if I'd worked with him on the set of Man on the Moon, I might have punched him in the face. I feel bad for Jerry Lawler. Jim Carey was an asshat. He was going through some delusional shit. And that shit is exceedingly real. He is just so incredibly human. At no point have I ever harbored delusions of perfection or sainthood about any of my idols, but until I brought them down from their pedestals, I was missing the deeper dimensions of it.

I recently found out that Daniel Day Lewis gets so wrapped up in his characters that he goes through separation anxiety at the end of shooting and has trouble re-adjusting back into his own life afterward. I find this awe-inspiring. Terrifying. And touching - all the same. Now every time I see that he's working on a film, my heart chokes back tears of awe. Simultaneously, I find myself gripped with concern and the deepest need to give him a hug and a cup of hot tea.

Ginger tea. Or earl grey. Whatever he wants. The good shit.

Jim Carey went through something similar while filming Man on the Moon.

But Jim Carey is an asshole (in many ways). He's a jerk. A philosopher. A wondering soul. A creepy old man. And a beautiful person - all the same. Because at the end of the day, he's a real person - flaws and all.

And maybe it's okay for me to be, too.