We are gathered here today to acknowledge an important death. The death of my past self.

You see, my past life's demise started when I put myself on a stage as a character that I couldn't relate to. I tried way too hard to please the audience, but it was obvious that I despised every minute of the act. How long could I survive with people beating me down for doing such a horrible job playing this character?

What's worse is that the auditorium was empty, so the only person beating me down was myself. As it turns out, my bad acting job was me forcing myself to be someone I'm not, and the stage was life. I hated the part so much that I had to kill off the old me and replace it.

Have you ever forgotten how to love yourself? It's like being in a relationship where you hate everything about the other person, except the other person is you. You detest everything to the point that you can't fix yourself.

Let me tell you that it gets old really fast.You realize that your old self was giving you little messages, but like with any bickering couple, you refused to listen because you were so fed up with their s***. If you said anything useful, it went in one ear and right out the other.

I see this relationship much like the one in Goodby Earl by the Dixie Chicks--bear with me as I make a country song reference. This comedic song starts off as an innocent small-town story, which quickly escalates into murder when two best friends end up killing an abusive significant other named Earl.

For all who are aghast, calm down and just listen for yourself and laugh. Or don't. Whatever. But see, not appreciating yourself is like an abuse that you can't escape because it's within, which is analogous to the abuse in the song. And eventually it's time to kill off the abusiveness and start over as a better person.

Now that I'm back to theatre work, I've learned that there are these games in which the audience can yell, "DIE!" if a player on stage is not following the rules, or if the scene is not progressing. So to my past self, I'm yelling, "DIE!" to acknowledge my failures, rush that failed character off the stage and quickly move forward.

Falling back in love with yourself: now that's something I would do over and over again. All of a sudden you're RedBull AND the person you give wings to. You give yourself power. You stop doing those unnecessary things to please other people. You are actually so busy pleasing yourself that you forget to seek the approval of others. And then you have no limits.

RIP past life, it was nice knowing ya.