Free This Is How by Augusten Burroughs Page A

not reached the truth of what’s on your mind.
    Thoughts like these are judgments, yes. And they’re also beside the point. Forget whether it’s “negative” thinking or “a tape” in your mind; it’s a fucking daydream. It’s not in the room; it’s in your head.
    Stay in the room. Stay in the instant. Say what you think. But don’t let yourself stray from where you are and what you’re doing.

II
     
    If you’re a stand-up comic and your rent is due so you need the audience to think you’re funny, how do you make them think you’re funny?
    Do you tell them about the seven shows in L.A. that you recently sold out? Maybe read some of the amazing reviews you received?
    Or do you tell them a joke and make them laugh?
    Because if you actually are funny, this would work.
    So if you think the job really suits you, be you .

III
     
    When you say, “I need more confidence,” what you’re really saying is, “I need those people over there to approve of me.”
    That is the desire to control other people and what they think. The first person who figures out how to do this owns the world.

H OW TO S HATTER S HAME
     

I
     
    F EELINGS ARE PRETTY MUCH like everything else in our culture: they go in and out of fashion.
    In 1983, guys wore shirts with Nehru collars and moussed and blow-dried their hair into a kind of manly bouffant; and they did not say, “I guess I’m just feeling really vulnerable right now.”
    Vulnerable was not a fashionable thing to be.
    That’s why everyone wore mirrored shades.
    Today, vulnerability is the very height of emotional fashion. It is not so difficult to conjure an image in your mind of a twenty-year-old dude with layered, shoulder-length brown hair, a smear of stubble across his chin, and the innate ability to play guitar, squinting his eyes as he turns away in profile, folds his arms against his chest, and says, “I guess I’m just feeling really vulnerable right now.”
    Not so easy to imagine is this same guy saying, “I’m really struggling with shame.”
    Shame is the Doris of emotions. It is so out of style that there isn’t even any irony in it.
    Typically, when something has been dismissed from popularity and sits ignored in the dark past, all that has to happen is rediscovery by a celebrity and whatever it was—hair ornament, make of car, baby name, yoga—is suddenly it all over again.
    That has not worked for shame.
    Because every time a famous person uses the word, it’s always in the same sentence: “I have brought shame to my family.”
    Yet another public relations issue is the somewhat religious overtones the word suggests. This may be partly attributed to the fact that the word shame , in one variation or another, appears 235 times in the King James Bible.
    It just doesn’t seem likely that shame will be the next cupcakes . It may be destined to remain terminally uncool, relegated forever to a distant corner of the past we’d rather forget, right there along with clogs.
    I have a hunch that this is one big, fat reason why so many people are so fucked up.
    And end up spending so much money on psychotherapy, self-help books, and motivational training courses all in search of the ever-elusive confidence.
    And I told you what the deal is there.
    There’s just one catch to what I told you: some people find it difficult—or impossible—to focus on what they’re doing instead of the people watching. Some people struggle and cannotseem to let go of other people’s opinions of them, whether real or imagined. That means they’re not able to be themselves. Which means other people won’t see them as confident.
    This is a self-esteem issue.
    The phrase “self-esteem issue” is a cardboard stage prop of a phrase. What does it even mean?
    I guess I have a hard time believing that anything hyphenated could possibly be the deepest truth of the matter.
    A lack of “self-esteem” really suggests a feeling of shame over being one’s self.
    Shame is the landfill