Jim Carrey Once Revealed His Biggest Childhood Fear: ‘Things Like That Would Just Shake me to the Core’
Jim Carrey once revealed that he had a huge fear as a child that involved his parents. He addressed how worried he was about them while discussing the message of his 2013 children’s book How Roland Rolls.
Jim Carrey validates kids’ feelings in his children’s book
When discussing his children’s book How Roland Rolls during a 2013 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Carrey explained the inspiration behind the story.
“The idea of expanded consciousness is something I’ve always been interested in, looking for and experiencing in my life,” Carrey explained. “And then, one of the things I’ve always wanted to talk about or deal with is the fact that kids have profound feelings and profound questions that people don’t give them credit for.”
He continued, “They think about life and death and ‘What happens when something happens to Mom? What happens when something happens to me?’”
Carrey explained why he wanted to answer these big questions
Carrey’s book is the story of a wave named Roland who worries his life is over when he hits the beach. “It occurred to me that it was the same thing, how consciousness works,” he explained. “It’s basically doing a dance to entertain itself by making all these different forms, but it’s all the same thing. It’s all one thing that makes everything; one energy that makes everything.”
He continued, “I believe those are questions that need to be answered for kids; all of these questions I really had a lot when I was a child. I was entertaining people in one room and being the clown of the family, and then in my bedroom, I was trying to figure out the universe.”
“My job as a comedian and as an entertainer my whole life, I’ve always looked at it as to free people from concern. I call it the church of FFC: freedom from concern,” he added.
Jim Carrey held on to this fear about his parents when he was a kid
When Carrey was asked what fear the book could help children work through,” he answered, “Fear of loss — whether it’s death or stuff or status, any of that. The fear that you’re just a little tiny thing in a giant universe, when you’re everything.”
He added, “There’s a whole universe. Eckhart Tolle puts it beautifully in one statement — he says, ‘You’re the space in which things happen.’ And when you tap into that feeling, oh my gosh, it’s so uplifting, it’s so freeing. You’re no longer this little fearful thing in the middle of the universe.”
Carrey explained why he worried so much about his parents’ health when he was a kid. “My parents were heavy smokers. I remember locking myself in the bathroom and crying because I thought they were going to die,” he said.
The actor continued, “They banged on the door, telling me to come out. I don’t know if I got over that fear at that time; it was just kind of with me. My mom was not well; she was always sickly, ill, or depressed or whatever. I joke about it, but it was serious.”
“I remember being seven years old and my mother at the dinner table saying things like ‘My brain is deteriorating at an incredible rate!’ or ‘My angina’s acting up; I could go at any time!,'” Carrey recalled. “Things like that would just shake me to the core. It’s terrifying, but that was her way of getting attention and getting love. She was a child of alcoholics and didn’t get what she needed.”
