Demi Moore’s Deepest Fear

Are you insecure? Hate your body? Fear the sheer unknown-ness of your future? Lay awake wondering if you’ll end up alone? Would it help if your father was a famous race-car driver? And if you’d been married to the bassist for one of the biggest bands of the 1980s and were now married to the guitarist for a big indie rock band? What if you turned a career as an actor into a career as a sought-after photographer? And you had three attractive kids. And you were rich and beautiful?
Not enough? Let’s try another route. What if you were not only rich and beautiful, you had been married to two of the most famous actors in Hollywood? What if you had made millions in movies, at one time being one of the highest paid in your field? What if you had homes in resort areas in Idaho, California, and Maine? And what if you also did all kinds of great charity work for some really worthy causes? Would that help?
Apparently not. Amanda de Cadenet (the first person described above) and Demi Moore (no introduction needed) recently announced plans for a TV interview show called The Conversation, to air this spring on Lifetime. The origin of the show? De Cadenet “looked around and saw women in the media who looked like they were doing it all perfectly, and I thought, ‘Well, I’m not doing it perfectly. Where are the women like me? Why isn’t anyone being honest?’”
To promote the show, Demi and Amanda discussed their lives in this month’s Bazaar. Their candid revelations strike a nerve. Talk about honesty!
Here’s one exchange:

DM: All right, so what scares you?
ADC: Infidelity scares me. It scares me when it happens to my friends; it scares me that it’s going to happen to me. And I’m scared of dishonesty. I just really don’t know what to do when people are dishonest. It is alarming to me.
DM: What does it mean to you?
ADC: It’s like an ultimate fear, you know. Of being rejected, of being betrayed. I guess dishonesty and betrayal. Those are the things I’m afraid I wouldn’t recover from.

And here’s a scorchingly self-revelatory response from Demi:

And I think there is no way to reach your fullest potential if you don’t really find the love of yourself. If I were to answer it just kind of bold-faced, I would say what scares me is that I’m going to ultimately find out at the end of my life that I’m really not lovable, that I’m not worthy of being loved. That there’s something fundamentally wrong with me (emphasis added).

So people that have achieved enormous wealth, fame, and power—the cool kids in the high school cafeteria of life—are terrified that they are unloved.
The sentiment itself—the fear of unworthiness—is not uncommon. We’ve heard things like this before. The surprise is that these feelings are coming from people so successful. They’ve attained all the things we relentlessly chase in order to keep our insecurities away. They’ve got the full array of things one needs to justify oneself, to say “I matter!” But the fear only gets worse. The two women go on about their connection to a vague and undefined Spirituality, and how that takes the edge off. But for the most part, they’re still stuck in their fears.
I, for one, need more than Spirituality. I need the One who while I was dead in my trespasses, made me alive (Ephesians 2:5). I need the One who takes away my unworthiness and grounds me in the Unshakable. I need the Friend of Sinners. What was it that he said? Oh, yes. “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Jesus in Matthew 11:28).
That’s a message that never gets old. And I hope Amanda and Demi get to hear it.
(And in a totally non-ironic way, pray for Ms. Moore, who just checked into rehab.)
Mockingbird