I’ve been listening to Abraham-Hicks “Law of Attraction” lectures on youtube for about 3 years now. The abridged version of the philosophy is, If you concentrate on feeling good and changing your negative thoughts to positive, you then naturally attract more positivity and abundance into your life. The entire theory is based on the premise that we are responsible for our own internal dialog. Once this is accepted we can stop blaming other people and circumstances for our unhappiness and really begin to change our lives. I’ve been listening to Abraham for a while now but it’s taken some time to digest the language and internalize ideas that resonate with me. One of those ideas is that your “vibration” (synonymous with, emotional state) attracts you to others experiencing the same or similar situations so that you can learn from them.
I have reached a point where all my suppressed emotions are spilling out, like a zombie leaking entrails everywhere. I don’t want to be around people and get all my gross entrails on them so I suppress all of it when I go out and decompress when I get home. I know I hide it well enough to get by, but I wouldn’t hold up to close scrutiny. When I look in the mirror I see pain or numbness. I actually broke the largest mirror I had in my bathroom in a fit of self loathing. Examining myself was too painful so I did what most people do, I used life as a distraction.
One of my favorite distractions is a hobby I’ve had since long before I contemplated filmmaking as a major. Before I continue I would like to explain that I am NOT a stalker, I just love actors. I love to study their techniques, watch them improve, and I actually root for their careers like some people root for football. My hobby is to pick an actor and study their entire body of work. Or at least what I can get my hands on. I’ve studied Alan Rickman, Gary Oldman, Robert Downey Jr., James Spader, Kenneth Branagh, to name a few, and most recently Jerry Lewis, whom I recommend looking up because it’s also a history lesson and his work is easy to find. I always find something I can learn from, unusual thought provoking pieces that I never would have picked on my own. I choose actors for different reasons, sometimes it’s just because I already like them. Sometimes it’s more subliminal, they had a recent hit movie, they came up in conversation, maybe they or their spouse passed away, they came up on social media, there was a billboard on my way home, a culmination of these things usually.
This time what got my attention was when my brother mentioned he was severely injured during the Mummy franchise, he popped up on social media because of a “me too” statement, I decided to watch the Mummy movies for the eleventy billionth time. Arguably these things are random but I am still grateful that my mind works this way. So I began watching interviews, this is how I try to get a feel for an actors personality and mannerisms in order to gauge weather a role is difficult or not much of a stretch from their true personality. I watched various interviews for about an hour then texted my best friend, “I think Brendan Fraser is me if I were a dude”.
Disclaimer: when we watch other people it’s important to keep in mind the difference between being objective and trying to see a specific emotion which we project. We all do this. I have discovered that the initial viewing of an actor I do this, it’s my knee jerk reaction. Therefore I always come back later and attempt to focus on them objectively the second, third, fourth, time until I’m satisfied that I’m seeing only what’s presented not what I’m projecting. The following are inferences I have drawn from what I perceive Brendan’s situation is or was. Please note that some of it could be complete bullshit because I do not know him or anyone else who knows him. I did not write this to demonstrate how insightful I was trying to be with Brendan, I wrote to explain how it gave me better insight into my own life. I hope that if the right people see it, maybe it will help someone out of a similar situation to mine.
In true ostrich fashion I focused on someone else! I started reading about Brendan, watching him, reading comments on the interviews. He’s had a series of blows from life in the last 20 years, I will list them but first I want to talk about the video I identified with. An interview from December 2016 on youtube entitled “Brendan Fraser Discusses the Showtime Series, The Affair” where he appears far too overcome with emotion to be doing a public interview and the tears are barely being held back. Reading the comments I discover that his mother passed away November 21, 2016. Only 3 weeks before the interview. I’m impressed with how well he did. That’s when I thought, this looks too much like my face in the mirror to be a coincidence. It was too painful for me to look at my own life with this scrutiny. That’s how I got the idea to compare woes, find similarities and think about how I would advise him, then apply that advice to myself. What I got was clarity.
Unprocessed emotion is like the earthquake that won’t be suppressed, it starts the killer wave of unresolved shit growing. Before you know it you have a shit tsunami you may not be able to surmount on your own, and it may ruin your health and your well being to just keep surviving it. You can only tread water for so long. I imagine Brendan’s tsunami most likely begins with grieving after divorce. It’s an old wound now so maybe it’s more like tinnitus, a ringing in your ears that doesn’t go away. There’s more to it, I’m sure working to clear alimony every year probably sucks some of the fun out of living the dream. He has 3 boys, normal daily stress, growing pains and hopefully also a good measure of joyous distraction from that front. There were also injuries, the kind that surgery can only fix in a limited fashion. One was for a ruptured disk in his back, another was a half knee replacement, and there was a vocal chord injury according to Wikipedia. From what I’ve read and seen on the screen, Brendan is very active and I would imagine having these injuries makes being active much harder to enjoy.
Comparatively, in my life I’ve been burying stuff since childhood. The last time I felt like I had a family was age seven. My parent’s divorce was so horrific, I have never been married and I am now 40. My grandmother died, I can’t recall what year because there was no funeral, my family had a warm remembrance of her one Thanksgiving when I wasn’t there. She was our family’s matriarch and aside from her own children I was the closest one to her. My mother has dementia in a nursing home in Ohio where I can’t afford to visit her or move her any closer. Every time I call her she’s a little less herself. My self-esteem is so damaged that I walked out of class one day because I didn’t have anything to contribute to group discussion which triggered a panic attack. I’m almost done with my A.A. degree to transfer to GOD KNOWS WHERE and all of these classes must be passed! Financial aid is in play and it suffices to say I’ve counted more money than I’ve ever made. This is my shit tsunami.
Are these not some impressive giant waves of shit? I realized by comparison of his situation with mine that despite my best efforts I wasn’t able to process my own emotions successfully. Processing emotions is a skill which must be learned and cultivated through the help of a professional counselor or psychiatrist. By processing I mean, dismantling the separate issues, understanding how you feel and why, learning how to work past it, forgiving yourself and others, and moving forward. I have put it off and lied to myself that I was going to power through. It wasn’t until I started looking at someone else’s situation, that I saw the limitations I was imposing on myself by trying to handle everything alone. Now I’m working smarter, not harder.
If by some miracle Mr. Fraser reads this I just want to say that I know it’s presumptuous and I apologize for that. This is my attempt to use the gross public scrutiny of celebrity for something good. I don’t necessarily understand what he has personally been through but I have some idea. Chances are he has already worked this out. I hope so. Not all of us are judging, some of us are identifying. Thanks to Brendan, and all other public figures for that. Love and blessings to everyone with whom this resonates.
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