The Hollywood Reporter came out saying: “Sneak Peak! The Biggest Deal in Shark Tank History Could Happen This Week.”
Right away, calls started coming in from my friends, family, and associates who had seen the article.
“Oh my God, Melissa, did you get the biggest deal? What happened? This is so exciting. Can’t wait to see the show.”
There was a flood of excitement from the people in my life. I didn’t say a word. I couldn’t. I waited until the show aired. And on October 25, 2013, it did, and that was it—the biggest deal in the history of the show had happened. I got the deal and Mark Cuban, world-famous billionaire, was now my partner.
It was a fairy tale, an entrepreneurial fairy tale.
And it was all real. The shock on my face was real. I truly had no idea it was going to turn out that way.
What nobody saw were the moments before I walked into the tank and the few minutes before that. And with the exception of my therapist, best friend, and mother, these pages are the first time I have detailed it publicly. And even now, I take a deep sigh as I bring my mind back there to tell the story. The critical status of the wounds have subsided, but the scars remain and I am still very careful in my mental hike back to that time.
On that morning in late September, when the show was being taped, I was on the studio lot early to get prepped to film our pitch to the panel of sharks. My creative directors, assistant, and some cast had come with me for the pitch, as we had a scare in store for the sharks. I felt like I had on a pretty good game face. It took everything I had. The buzz about our pitch was very high, and I could see the producers and crew were really excited about it, so I don’t think anyone could tell I was in any kind of emotional fog.
This was the opportunity of a lifetime. We were to be the first pitch into the tank, and that was amazing news for me. A beautiful and elaborate set was put in place for our pitch, complete with gore and horrifying characters. The crew was incredibly nice and helpful with every part of this process. As it got closer, I did notice their excitement increasing. And candidly, I was getting nervous.
Remember, not one person knew how this would turn out, if the outcome of our presentation would be successful or not.
The sharks had no idea I would be standing in front of them in a matter of minutes with a legion of monsters trying to make them pee themselves.
I had gone into a pretty elaborate process of hair and makeup, and now had been politely placed in a green room by myself to wait to be called into the tank.
It was the first moment of silence I’d had that day. As everything around me stopped, I could no longer try to ignore that I was dying. After an almost decade-long relationship, Alyson and I had split about four months prior, and I wasn’t making it. To try to explain the dire straits I was in would be futile, as I don’t think it can be conveyed at all. All I can say is that, truly, I was dying. I was critically suicidal, had started drinking way too much, and was taking prescription drugs. She was my entire world and she was gone.
Sitting in the green room, the realization that I was there without Alyson knocked the wind out of me. Starting what could be the next chapter in Ten Thirty One’s evolution, taking it to a national audience of millions and potentially making the biggest deal we’d ever made, felt empty. Intellectually, I knew that I needed to take the time to really feel this moment because it would be over quickly. But I couldn’t feel anything except sadness. I couldn’t go home and celebrate with her or cry on her shoulder if it turned out badly. I couldn’t call her; I couldn’t see her; I wouldn’t have her ever again.
I lasted about three minutes in the green room before the unrelenting pain of missing her crept back to find me. It never let me get more than a few minutes away from it. As it gave me my usual kick in the stomach, I got dizzy and started to have a hard time breathing. I sat on the floor welling up with tears, as my perfect makeup job poured down my face. I kept telling myself to get my shit together, but I started to worry that I couldn’t pull myself out of this in time, so, as if things couldn’t get worse, I think I started to have a panic attack. All of this from the girl who used to get overly yet quietly annoyed when someone cried in the workplace. I hated that and didn’t feel like there was any room for it in a business environment.
A quiet knock, and a voice came through the door alerting me that we’d be going to the holding room outside the tank in a few short minutes. I got up off the floor and started to wipe my eyes. I was so embarrassed. I had to get up and meet my moment. I don’t think it’s overdramatizing to say that I wasn’t in my right mind, but I know that my passion for business and the opportunity that I had in front of me was one I would regret blowing if I were to survive this breakup. And even if I didn’t survive it, this wasn’t going to be my mic drop.
The production assistant came back to let me know it was time for us to head to the Shark Tank doors. Maybe I’m being oversensitive, but I think he looked at me, like, “oh shit,” and I’m pretty sure it’s true because the makeup person miraculously showed up to fix my face. As the countdown clock hit sixty seconds before the doors were to open and I was to start the walk down that long hallway, the makeup artist frantically brushed here and patted there and, with a second to finish, the doors opened, cameras were rolling, and to the tank I went.
While I was very good at applying my lessons to the professional sector of my life, sadly I was still neglecting the nosedive of the most important relationship I had ever had. I mentioned earlier how communicating effectively can have an enormous impact on essentially every multiperson experience in your life, including relationships and love. Unfortunately, I learned that more quickly in my career than in my personal life. While I was getting a handle on the Ghost Ship nightmare, my relationship with Alyson was being tried daily.
I understand the fear of failing intimately. I was terrified of failing in all aspects of life. Not just my career. I was even more terrified of not having meaning or purpose. I felt like a star when I had been at Clear Channel . . . I knew I was the best. I was confident and exhilarated by the fast-ladder climb of my tenure at Clear Channel. I had no idea how valueless I would feel the day after I resigned.
One day there is a line out your door of people who want you, need you, aspire to be you. The next day, when you don’t have anything they need or want, it’s incredible how quiet your phone gets.
I became my own worst enemy. I had jumped from a very high-paying job with importance to work by myself and “try” to build an empire. And that takes time. I was working every day at home alone, hustling to get people to take meetings with me. When you call from the world’s biggest media company, people take your calls and meetings. Now, I was calling from an unknown new start-up that did not sound very sexy. Even contacts that I had worked with for years at Clear Channel were no longer available to meet with me.
It felt like shit.
What had I done? Talk about feeling like a giant failure, this epitomized my fear of failure. The thing I feared the most was coming true. Nobody cared about me. I was not important anymore.
The first problem was that I internalized my self-worth based on my career status and income. But that’s a reality in our society. We are born, bred, and socialized to align our meaning in this world with our income and job title. It’s not okay, but it’s real and a hard demon to slay.
Alyson would come home from work and I would swear to God she was judging me because I was no longer a powerful corporate executive. My mind was spiraling. She was incredibly diligent about reassuring me, but it didn’t matter because my mind was a storm of chaos. I needed to reassure myself.
She took on the responsibility for the majority of our living expenses so that I could focus on building our new company, and that made me feel like a freeloader. I couldn’t get a handle on my insecurity, could not find my self-worth, and could not believe that the love of my life actually loved me just as much without my fancy, powerful, corporate job.
I failed.
Not at building the company, but in my marriage to Alyson and our decade-long soul-mate love. It took a long time but I really do believe that the initial stress of feeling worthless, and the different but subsequent stress as the company grew and became very successful, started to dent the armor of the relationship.
Our relationship failed for several reasons, but this was, in my opinion, the first crack of something I mistakenly thought was unbreakable. Most of those who knew us would have bet their life savings on us being together forever. Alyson’s best friend once laughed at the notion of the relationship ever ending. I never saw it coming . . . neither did Alyson.
One night in San Francisco a couple years earlier, Alyson and I were having dinner with two of our close friends, Jess and Russ. We, or I should say, they, were having a really intense conversation about loss. As adults, Alyson, Jess, and Russ had all lost a parent, and it shook all of them to their core, as you would expect. They were talking about the coping mechanisms and the ability to keep memories close at hand. It was a pretty long discussion. I was silent through most of it. At one point, Alyson looked at me and gave me a little smile as if she could tell what I was thinking. And she could, because later that night, while we were alone, she said to me that she sometimes worried about me because she knew how close I am to my mother, and I’ve really had no loss in my life to help prepare me for that kind of life event. Sitting at the table that night, I was the only one out of the four who hadn’t experienced death. I feel incredibly blessed for that, but it did provoke a nagging feeling inside that I could really get hit hard one day.
And ironically that day came—the day Alyson and I split up.
This wasn’t a normal or average breakup.
I talk about living boldly as a way of life, not something you can activate when needed and then put in a sock drawer when you don’t. So it makes sense that this breakup would be of epic proportions, because the love was of epic proportions.
We started having problems and didn’t address them effectively or in time. I was mad at her; she was mad at me. I started to push her away until one day she didn’t come back. I took for granted that she’d always be there. I gambled and lost.
Ten Thirty One Productions had a brand-new attraction on deck: the Great Horror Campout. It was slated to launch June 7, 2013, a month after our split. To say I was leveled doesn’t do justice to my feelings at the time. It’s hard for me to write about this time because much of it has escaped me. There was an almost ten-day period when I didn’t get off my floor. I had a giant dog bed in my bedroom at the foot of my bed where I spent the better part of those ten days. I had dropped twenty-two pounds in about two weeks, was drinking two bottles of tequila a day, and wishing for death. My mother was a wreck and had also lost weight because of the situation. I hated seeing what this was doing to her but I couldn’t stop it.
I started going to therapy almost every day. Sometimes for two-hour sessions. After almost a decade together, our lives had merged so I didn’t really have any of my own friends. The friends we did have were in shock that our marriage was over and kept saying “you guys will get back together” or they’d say nothing at all because it was all so weird. I’d hear stories of Alyson showing up with her new interest, and it would send me back to my floor on that dog bed, so I soon decided I had to make new friends that were not connected to my old life. But it took me a long time to get there.
As the launch of Great Horror Campout was approaching, I knew I wasn’t okay. Nothing mattered to me without Alyson. I created the concept; I pulled the trigger on making it our next attempt at a new attraction since the Ghost Ship chronicles concluded; it was my responsibility as the CEO of this company to ensure its success; but I was in hell. Honest to God, I was in hell.
I know I was physically present during the Great Horror Campout because I’ve seen pictures, but I can’t recall any of it. I have an absolutely incredible team and leaned on my creative directors at the time, Justin Meyer and Melissa Meyer, to take the wheel. They did, and it became our second new brand, attracting a giant cult following. It was the brand that Mark Cuban was really interested in expanding. We’ve now done twenty Campouts in eight different cities. I hope that, one day, as the trauma of these past four years gets further away from me, some of these memories will come back.