Straight-Faced

the toll of fame

After what happened with Tiffany, I decided that I needed to grow the hell up. Not everyone was going to cover for me if I made a big mistake again because I wasn't a kid anymore. So, I started evaluating the way I acted.

I developed an insane amount of control, the control that I lacked when I blew up at Tiff. I thought words over before I said them, and I identified what I was feeling before displaying the emotions in a healthy and appropriate manner. It didn't mean that my smiles were fake, it just meant that they were precisely calculated. Just because I was genuine, it didn't mean that I wasn't acting.

I lived with the mindset that since there were so many people watching me, I wasn't allowed to mess up. I gained the ability to think incredibly quickly so that it would seem like I still did some things impulsively. My true impulsiveness, however, was gone.

I stopped being able to act freely; that's what my fame did to me. It didn't drive me to insanity, or make me want to shave my head. It destroyed the part of me that most people didn't care about. They didn't even know about it, but they all took it away from me.

Then again, maybe I gave it up too easily.