Bill From “Guess Who?” Wants To Touch Base After His Ayahuasca Retreat
I wish to be defined not by my face, but by my heart.
Namaste, greetings to you on this Family Game Night Sunday. I’m assuming you noticed that my card was missing from the board last week. My apologies, I was on a twelve-day Costa Rican retreat, during which I embarked on a journey of spiritual self-discovery (and ingested an “unsafe” amount of ayahuasca). The good news is that I’m coming back refreshed and enlightened. The bad news is that I can now hear you.
I know you thought all 24 of us Whos were just cardboard rectangles; that these static countenances didn’t have feelings behind them. To be fair, we were designed to be impervious to the outside world. But a week-and-a-half of ayahuasca two-a-days in a 100-degree thatched hut accidentally shattered the barrier between you and me, and, now, I’m sentient. Whoops! But also, hey there!
Since our first meeting at your fifth birthday party in 1992, I’ve been plagued by voices incessantly pointing out my flaws: that I’m bald, that I lack a mustache, that I have a head that looks like an engorged egg. I originally attended Sacred Lotus Healing Retreat to take charge of my low self-esteem. You can imagine my shock when I found out (after chugging pretty damn near a 40 oz of what Shaman Joaquin called “the medicine”) that what I had been hearing were not my own toxic thoughts at all, but rather you, describing my face to your friends and family.
Now that I’ve returned home to the game shelf, I’ve been trying to process nearly thirty years of my memories with you that came to me while I was tripping. You’ve compared me to my peers at every turn. Devalued and discarded me for what I lacked. Singled me out for my unique qualities. And the sheer number of times you asked if I was wearing a hat is mind-boggling. Get over it, dude. Some people don’t wear hats, okay? Joaquin says this is necessary integration work, but it sucks.
It’s not all your fault, I realize this is the nature of the game. I was cast for my distinctive features: my 2000s Christian rock front man goatee, my potentially concerning level of rosacea, my mismatched eyebrows (they’re sisters, not twins). My breathwork guru says that “Excuses are the manifestation of fear,” and I’m not trying to sound defensive, but it’s a little unfair that Hasbro chose the one picture of me where I was demonstrating to the photographer how many pieces of saltwater taffy I could fit in my mouth (23!).
Listen, I’ll never be a certified-ten like Philip, or even a solid-seven in a dimly-lit club like Frans. But do you have to flip me down so violently every time you get an affirmative response when asked if your person is hot?
What the retreat showed me is that beyond this ovate skull, I have a beautiful soul (one that may be teeming with greasy spiders… still processing some of my visions here), and if profusely vomiting on a sheetless cot for close to a fortnight taught me anything, it’s that I have the strength to say my feelings are valid and deserve consideration.
So tonight, if you’re thinking your daughter’s secret character might be ol’ Bill, instead of narrowing in on my pervy pucker, my suspiciously deep philtrum, or my condensed tomato soup colored hair, why don’t you go a little deeper than the surface and ask about the real me?
· Does your person have the heart of a warrior, the soul of a lion and a zeroed-out bank account because good retreats are like $6K a night?
· Does your person not let anything get in their way, be it self-doubt, bad energy, or a group of people repeatedly saying, “That’s way too much ayahuasca; you’re not going to be okay.”?
· Is your person a man — a real man, the kind who provides and loves and cries and now has incredibly graphic nightmares about greased-up spiders and is not sure who to talk to about that?
Am I Bill?
Yes. And I will NEVER wear a hat.
And so it is.
