I lied. And my embarrassment was so great that I changed everything else to make the lie true.

My ignorance was inexcusable, and it made me ashamed.

That has to be the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to me in my whole life.

So I tried to make what amends I could for being what I was...

I was ashamed of myself when I realised life was a costume party and I attended with my real face

I was so ashamed. It made me hard on you, when I was trying to be hard on me. We are blinded by our regrets, Annie. We don’t realize who else we punish while we’re punishing ourselves.

"I felt ashamed."

"But of what? Psyche, they hadn't stripped you naked or anything?"

"No, no, Maia. Ashamed of looking like a mortal — of being a mortal."

"But how could you help that?"

"Don't you think the things people are most ashamed of are things they can't help?"

The thing to do with embarrassment," he told the young American couple who seemed determined to engage him, "is work it all the way to humiliation.

I was wild until I was tamed by shame.

The way they questioned my decisions was absolutely disgraceful.

I was embarrassed by it and racked by middle-class guilt. But when you're on stage, if you're trying to be something you're not, it becomes so much harder. It's better to be honest and take every vulnerability and flaw you have, and mock them and deal with them.

I now see, was the fact that there were so many areas of my emotional life where I was muddled and unresolved and therefore ripe for horrendous embarrassment that I was pointlessly guarded about everything. The lurking fear that I might accidentally give away something I did not want to reveal resulted in blanket self-censorship.

It is the one event in my life of which I am most ashamed and I have long feared would be made public.

I was too embarrassed to leave the house, I even started to avoid my own family because I was scared they would judge me for how bad they’d got.”