realized that I talked a mean game, and I thought a mean game, and I gave a lot of people great talking points and great ideas, but I’d spent too much time thinking about the persona I could craft for myself that I and my family could bear while living in the middle of West Los Angeles, the heart of the beast. For the next four years, that Maher appearance gnawed at me. I had been flirting with acting like myself in public, but I was still afraid. Sometimes in the midst of my sleep pattern I would wake up from nightmares in a cold sweat, one thought running through my mind: what if I went in
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