In her book, Let That Shit Go: Learn to Process Loss and Be Happy, Rose discusses what we may learn from the death of an actor or musician who dies suddenly of a drug overdose, the circumstances that may have influenced them, and the significance of the event in our lives.
The path for individuals who are in the public eye speaks of the sorts of pressure that you don’t realize in your everyday life.
These individuals must often make the sorts of compromises that weigh heavily on them. They are expected to be perfect. They live in others’ imaginations as people who don’t really do much more than act, for example, or they have many followers on Twitter, or they have many persons attending to them in ways that are artificial. This is something that you may not understand, or perhaps you do.
Living for others
The purpose for their lives has reached the point of stagnation because there are too many people who trust them completely with their happiness. They begin to feel they will let others down if they don’t do some things that they don’t feel are right. This is the problem—they begin to live for others rather than themselves—and as a result, the system closes them into a sort of pain cave that is not healthy for them or for anybody. The path for them has closed to such a degree at the end that they continually ask for release from pressure through the use of drugs, mostly. How can this be turned into something of a better way to incorporate happiness?
The person needs to realize they are not responsible for others. This even includes children, to some degree. If a child has enough food on the table, enough in their accounts to live a happy, fulfilling life, the loving support of their parents and other guardians, this is all children need, not huge bank accounts…
Saying “no” sometimes
There are other lessons to be learned from being in the public eye. These include saying “no” sometimes. This is a hard thing to do when you’re a major celebrity with the brand of being nice to others all the time. It is not fun to be constantly interrupted on the street. Celebrity has its own rewards, too, but the problem is, how do they say no to people without incurring hatred? They can’t. But they need to so as to say, “I am human.” This is something of a loss for someone in this state because they are letting go of the need to be perfect people. What better way to let go of something than to say, “I’m human, get over it”? The celebrity life is more about this than anything.
Letting go of the presumed need to please people is perhaps
the most challenging aspect to being human.
The Purpose of Life
So, you have the purpose of life wrapped up here in these few paragraphs about the direct causes of the celebrity’s problems, but these are also very applicable to your own situations.
- You are not responsible for creating anybody’s reality except your own.
- You do not need to be kind all the time, nor live for others’ approval
These two premises are the best way to move into the areas of expression that we will call desires … which point to your true life’s purpose, to enjoy it.