How to Kill Shame and Your Inner Demons

I’ve been asked many times, “How do you do it?”

How do I put my entire story out on the Internet for the world to see? All of my struggles. All of my pain. All of my heartbreak. All the times I got kicked, and then kicked again when I was already on the ground.

I’ve been asked how I’m okay with putting it on display for the world to see.

I get emails every week about it.

I drop hints to girls and they ask about it.

Friends and family ask me too.

“How do you become okay with putting it all out there?”

Easy – I have no shame. Shame on paper is not a bad thing. It’s a social construct designed to protect our fragile egos. But you don’t conquer life on a grand level by worrying about what some keyboard jockey from New Jersey thinks about you.

In fact, if you are ever worried about what other people think of you, you have already lost the battle.

And you’re on your way to losing the war.

Do you think it’s supposed to be easy?

It’s not easy to write about the day that my house burnt to the ground and I stood outside comforting my mother.

It’s not easy to really show I feel about being born an American man; with supposedly all the privilege in the world but none of the happiness that’s supposed to come from it.

I nearly cried when I read this post aloud to a girl the other day.

But fuck, if I’m not bleeding, who am I as a man?

If I’m not vulnerable for the world to see, don’t I just fear the world?

If I fear the world, how can I ever achieve everything I want?

The short answer is that I wouldn’t be able to.

The fear of failure is a real thing.

So is the fear of success.

Many of you, myself included, fear being truly great. Why? Because either or failure or success will be on public display, for the world to see. Think about it.

If you work in a boring cubicle job, chances are that you are invisible to the world, and therefore you are relieved of any and all chances of shame (we’re talking from an emotional sense, not some HR  girl hovering over you and censoring.) You are just a fly on the wall of life.

If you’re CEO of a major company, everything on the line. If you go bankrupt, it’s on the front page. Every minute of your life is a potential for a shameful event to occur.

For the world to laugh at you.

But you’ll never feel more alive than when you’re at your most vulnerable.

To truly capture the emotions of life, to live – you must bleed.

You must be vulnerable.

You must eliminate any and all shame. Once you do this, you realize something…

Life isn’t so scary.

We only get one life and we all end up in the ground.

There’s no shame in admitting that.

Once you’ve conquered a few hurdles, you begin to realize that most people are absolutely terrified of life. 

Women are fragile children who need protection in many cases.

Men used to fight wars without hesitation. Now, your modern man fears uttering the word “faggot”.

Some people think I’m “fearless”.

I’m not.

I had a few family members say, “Wow, you’re just going to back your bags and move to Europe, leave your six figure job – and you don’t even seem nervous.”

I laughed at them.

Are you kidding me?

I was terrified.

When I got on that plane to Poland, I was the most nervous I’d been in God-knows-how-long. An hour before I was due to land, I had this feeling of dread wash over me.

A voice inside my head was shaming me for leaving my life in Los Angeles behind (girlfriend, career, and more).

It was instilling fear in me.

What if I failed?

But you know what, those are the moments where I feel so vulnerable to the world. But so alive. Those are the moments worth living.

Open yourself up to being vulnerable. Accept that shame is what it is. Kill your inner demons about how you aren’t supposed to be afraid of anything. Instead, accept that you are.

And conquer it.

If I can do it, so can you.