NSFW – Fatback Media

Before getting into this, I wanted to share an inspirational quote from a book I read some years ago. It’s by one of the rats in Who Moved My Cheese:

“When you move beyond your fear, you feel free.”

Sultry singer Jessica Simpson, who recently broke up with singer John Mayer is waxing poetic about her trials, tribulations and the debilitating fear that comes with being a super rich, entitled country-come-to-town, “singer” who never wonts for anything and always gets her way. I was being ironic there. See? Not like Alanis ironic – which isn’t ironic at all – more at (and this is for the cheap seats), change the debilitating fear to total awesomeness. Here’s what she says on her website:

I just got back from spending some time in Europe, and while I was there I visited many museums, and have been reading about different artists. I have also been writing a lot in my journal recently. I was reading a book about Michelangelo and there were 2 quotes that caught my attention -

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

“Each time we face our fear, we gain strength, courage, and confidence in the doing.”

These quotes inspired me to write the below passage. I hope you can find your own individual meaning in it, as I keep coming back to it and find new strength.

“Sometimes we are all so afraid to be honest with ourselves because we know that honesty will lead us somewhere off the path of the life we’ve mapped out in our minds. Today, I challenge us to ask ourselves this…

What if we allow our fear to provoke us into action?

Can facing our fear be what walks us to somewhere better?

I do not have your answers, but in the quest to find my own, I’ve discovered somewhere worth traveling to…

In my life, I ignore my fears too often, but then I’m left with nothing to challenge the best of me. I just remain cowering from my true identity.

There is no discovery.” (source)

Indeed, bard. Indeed. That’s so inspiring. And original. And totally divined from Michaelangelo’s sculpture; certainly not from the 69 page paperback that you picked up at the airport with an Us Magazine and a box of Sour Patch Kids. I too, have become inspired by this passage and offer this:

“The delicate flower, when from bucolic meadow is unduly plucked, though she sails high seas in vessels gold or in adulation reigns with crown on troubled brow, shall ne’er be so quiescent as in her original sanctum…”

or more rightly,

“You can take the girl out of the trailer park…and if she has DD’s she might just make it. Or she could always work at Hooter’s.”

I think another of our great poet’s put it best:

“Welcome to the jungle baby, you gonna die.”

You. Gonna. Die. Indeed.