Imagine that you are an actor and the director calls with a new assignment. It goes something like this: “We’re sending you into a new theatre for the role of a lifetime.” So far, so good. “But be forewarned you are joining a hostile cast and some of the other actors may not be welcoming to you.” No problem, you’ve handled jealous cast mates before.
And the role? “Well, you enter the stage totally nude, utterly dependent on the older actors who have been around awhile, and you have to learn your lines as you go – no script.” Hey, you protest, wait a minute, I didn’t sign up for anything like this….
Shakespeare famously penned that “All the world’s a stage and the men and women merely players.” Yet in the strangest of ironies, after having these characters and roles thrust upon us we proceed to take them far too seriously. We race about madly defending ourselves, announcing to the world that we believe this or that, that we stand for so and so, and never once do we stop to ask, “Whose lines are these, anyway?”
So with a nod to Shakespeare, if we are indeed actors, “What role am I playing?” Looking back at my early years, I can pretty much see that I had nothing to do with any of it. The older cast mates – family, friends, society – more or less fed me my lines and assuming I delivered them in the manner expected I received good reviews. It didn’t matter whether these older actors were just as dysfunctional, just as laden with their own conditioned thinking from their forebears. As a young egoic actor I wanted desperately to please.
But inauthentic role-playing comes at a price. The psychiatric community tells us that the “F” word – “fraud” – is a common anxiety of even the most successful of patients. So many of us are terrified of being discovered as fakes or phonies. And yet, where does that fear originate? How can I be in denial of a self that never really existed? If I’m a fraud, who or what am I betraying? This inner collision is at the heart of endless suffering.
One of the great benefits of suffering is that it makes us more willing to reconsider the role that we’re playing. If the pain gets bad enough we may reach a point where we decide the role simply isn’t worth it, and we either demand a new role (a new “me”) or we want off the stage altogether (suicide). Ultimately, neither option really works.
Marilyn Monroe was handed a role that many of us imagine we would covet: world’s sexiest woman. But like the rest of us, there was a disconnect from the real her and this illusory role. With each objectifying catcall, professional criticism, and new wrinkle in the physical visage she’d come to love/hate, Monroe was haunted by feelings of inadequacy and fraud. In her mind she was a fraud in a role she’d never requested. Ultimately, her inability to change the way the world looked at her – and more important, the way she thought about herself – inclined her to quit the stage for good with a handful of tranquilizers.
But what if Monroe had instead asked the simplest and most profound of questions: “What am I?” What if she’d recognized the role she’d been assigned was just that: A role that had nothing to do with her real nature? What if Monroe had simply stepped off the stage, abandoned her character, and marveled at the production playing out before us all? Can the suffering continue when there is no character there to suffer?
