Treat Yo’ Self ’Cause No One Else Will, Act Like a Lady

Investing in your mental health takes a lot of courage and often gets overlooked, but at the end of the day, it is the best thing you can do for yourself. We’ve regretted outfits, and we’ve regretted most of the dudes we’ve dated, but we’ve never regretted any of the time or money we’ve spent trying to be better human beings. Self-love can be a face mask and a bubble bath, blasting heavy metal in your car, mastering Kundalini yoga, or years and years of intensive therapy.

We all suffer from something, yet everyone is so scared to talk about their head and their heart. Mental breakdowns are not just for the rich and powerful, nor are they only for those with massive trauma. Just like you can pull a muscle after a strenuous workout, you can hurt your brain after a period of prolonged stress or a big life change. You are not alone in your struggle, and there is nothing too small to be worthy of your feelings. You can still suffer from anxiety even if you had a happy childhood, and you can still suffer from depression even if you have “nothing to worry about.” We hereby give you permission to give the finger to anyone who tells you to “smile,” to “get over it,” or who labels you “crazy” for just having feelings. We’ve all got emotions, insecurities, and hormones, and we know how hard it is to balance even the normal stresses of life. You can get all the Botox and a whole collection of expensive shoes, but at the end of the day, that won’t fix you. It really doesn’t matter what you look like on the outside if your insides are all fucked up.

LADY THOUGHTS

Everyone Is a Mess

JV:I think the older I get, the more normal I feel, because I’ve realized how bonkers everyone else is, too.

BT:Ditto.

KK:When you’re young, you’re so self-involved that the whole world is spinning, and it seems like everyone else has it together. It feels like everyone else has it together except me. And the older you get, you realize you’re a mess, she’s a mess, he’s a mess.

JV:Yes! You start to see all of the cracks in everyone else’s “perfect” lives. We’re all just fucking messes.

BT:I had the opposite trajectory.

KK:You did?

BT:Yep, in my twenties, I was carefree and cool as a cucumber. The older I got, the worse my anxiety got. No one is immune to life’s anxieties. You either start off with them, or you get them as you get older. Ain’t life grand?

I wouldn’t have considered myself suicidal, but at the time, I was constantly overbooked and completely drained. I felt like my life was just me running on a treadmill nonstop. All I needed was to get off and catch my breath. I needed a break. The guilt of getting everything I wanted and hating it was isolating. I know I’m not alone in having felt this. There were so many moments during this period where I can fully admit that I wished I would catch mono, or the flu, or some sort of horrible illness where I had to lie in bed for a month. If I got sick, no one could blame me for somehow being weak or being a “quitter.” I needed someone to make me a meal, run me a bath, and tell me it was all going to be okay. I needed to be ten years old again. I needed my mom to make me a cup of tea with a side of warm, buttered toast.

For the first time, I really understand why people went to rehab for “exhaustion.” I had always thought this was silly and such a champagne problem. But it had become real for me. Rehab sounded like a fucking dream.

It all started when I was late to a shoot for my TV reporting job. I was at the end of my rope, hysterical, exhausted, feeling like I just needed it all to stop. I was trying, unsuccessfully, to find a parking spot in a six-story parking structure. My phone was going crazy with calls and “where are you” texts. The time on my dashboard was haunting me with every passing minute that I was not exactly where I was supposed to be. At every corner of the structure, when I would be stuck behind some tourists moving at a snail’s pace, I would slam on the horn. Every time I drove to a new level to park, with growing frustration, I would rev my engine, push the gas pedal to the max, and speed down the corridor, just to slam on the brakes only seconds before hitting the wall at the end. I had near miss after near miss. My car started to smell like burnt rubber, and this act did nothing to calm me down. I was having a full-blown panic attack, meltdown, breakdown, whatever you want to call it. I realize this was insane. It almost seems silly now.

It’s important to note that this all happened in the middle of a very bad year. My work schedule was nutty: I got up at 3:45 a.m. to go to work, and I was working at least twelve to sixteen hours a day, plus weekends. At the same time, my hair started falling out, I was gaining weight, I lost sight in my left eye, and I was randomly covered in hives for no reason. I was constantly irritable and exhausted. If I wasn’t standing up straight in a tight dress, dazzling TV audiences with my bubbly personality, I was alone, in a black room, either asleep or staring at the ceiling without the energy to even turn the lights on.

I had worked so hard to get this fancy dream job that I didn’t want to disappoint anyone or lose my coveted spot. So I said yes to every opportunity. I became the yes woman, and I was rewarded for it. Constantly, I heard things like “You are such a trouper,” “You have such an amazing work ethic,” and “You are so dependable.” This adoration fueled me, but eventually I had nothing left. While I was saying yes to everything work-related, I was saying no to my self-care. For more than three years, I was saying no to resting and eating properly.

What’s crazy is that the act of trying to drive my car into the wall of the parking structure while weeping, screaming, and honking was not my rock bottom. After that moment in the parking garage, I eventually found a parking spot. I dried my tears, put on my lipstick, and went on with my day. No one would have even noticed anything was wrong with me.

Later that week, still teetering on the edge of whatever bout of depression had hit me, I flew to Las Vegas to be a judge at the Miss USA competition. I was in my hotel, in a spiral of tears, when I decided to call my husband, not exactly sure how to describe my continued descent into this dark place. I remember saying to him, “I feel weird and, I dunno, babe, I tried to run my car into a wall.” It came out of my mouth like I was saying, “I took a shower today.” My husband was stunned and immediately sprang into action. Full of concern, he said, “That’s not normal, Keltie.” But this just made my cry more. I got more frustrated by the fact that he was pointing out my flaws instead of just listening to me. I hung up in a fit of fury.

The next thing I knew, my doctor was calling my cell at 9:00 p.m. My husband had called him in a panic. Everyone was worried about me, and I felt like I was in the middle of an intervention. This is when I officially hit rock bottom, because my secret was out. I wasn’t strong. I wasn’t a “trouper.” I was a straight-up mess of a human, and I felt like a stupid child. I was so embarrassed. Just hours away from being seen as a “stand-up and successful human” about to pick the next Miss USA, I was basically on psychiatric hold in the middle of a Las Vegas hotel room.

Later, a doctor would discover that my new job was causing my body to revolt, leaving me with adrenal blowout and, eventually, an autoimmune disease. Apparently, one of the side effects of having thyroid issues can be depression. It all makes sense now, but at the time, I just thought I was “tired.” As a woman, you spend so much of your life rising above the cramps and bleeding of the red tide that just being tired can sometimes seem like a good day. We’re like little machines, nothing stops us.

The shitty thing about rock bottom is that it hurts like hell. The great thing is that when you are down, down, down, and even when you fall down one more notch after that…you can only go up. As a grown-up, you are kind of on your own. I woke up the next day with the same job, the same pressure, the same brain, and it was up to me to look at my life and make the necessary changes. The kicker is that when I am the worst version of myself, I can easily spiral and make laughable decisions. Feeling low? Definitely eat an entire ice cream cake. Wait, what? Now you feel worse? Good, now look for whatever “fix” is next. It’s a vicious cycle. It’s a pathetic feeling when you can’t even trust yourself to be on your own side, right?

Eventually, for me, what helped was an honest conversation with a psychiatrist, monthly professional help, some new boundaries (I still struggle with saying no), a cocktail of medications, and many, many nights of sleeping with a deep conditioner on my head. Though it was not easy, my sight came back, my hair grew back, and, eventually, my smile came back, too.

I’ve hit various versions of rock bottom at different times in my life. We all have. For me, they happened during my first heartbreak, my first big career disappointment, my tenth heartbreak, the first time I attended a funeral for a friend, the first animal I ever had to euthanize, having a car accident, and spending six months having to learn how to write again with my newly useless hand.

Our rock bottoms are our own, and no one has the same story. Our human struggle is deeply personal, and I don’t believe in comparing to find out which one of us has had it worse. Life is hard for all of us. Things that broke me might not break you, and vice versa.

I once had a friend named Rachel. When we were living away from home, Rachel’s mom sent her a flashlight in the mail with a Post-it attached that said, “Use when you find yourself in the dark place.” Whenever one of our friends would be having a hard time, Rachel would pull that flashlight out of her bag and let one of us hold it. It’s been years, but I always think about that flashlight. It’s a great reminder that when life gets hard and dark, we have to find the light. I find the light by sitting where the sun hits my face, taking a walk even though I’m busy (specifically without a phone or other distractions), calling a friend who wants nothing from me and can do nothing for me, making a hot bath and filling it with good-smelling bubbles, organizing my closet or kitchen, and listening to music. Listening to music reminds me of when I was a teenager and thought the world was ending…only it never did.

The catch, of course, is that the only person who can actually find the good days in your life is you. I don’t know how to fix us so that none of us ever suffer. But I do know that it’s okay to be gentle with yourself and to acknowledge that you are low. There is no shame in being a perfectly flawed human who feels things deeply. Depression isn’t something we have to fix. It’s not a broken bone. We all have a part of us that we walk beside every day that has the ability to take us down. I’ve learned to love the rock bottoms of my life. Sometimes I welcome that feeling in. I just listen to Coldplay as I eat fried food, candy, and then cake with some more fried food. Cry. Journal. Complain. Cry. Sulk.

But I’ve learned to see the warning signs that I’m not taking care of myself and that I’m heading in the wrong direction. Mostly, I’ve learned to say hi to that dark part of myself and then kindly give it the middle finger.

I grew up in a household where the only coping mechanism I learned when something shitty happened was to pick myself up, dust myself off, and move on. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not completely knocking this technique. It’s definitely how I am able to repeatedly walk into hundreds of audition rooms and face the dead eyes looking back at me without having my spirit completely crushed when I don’t get the job. I have never been the type to wallow in anything for too long, and up until the age of twenty-seven, I never had anything happen to me that didn’t warrant a good old-fashioned “Tobin shake-off.”

But in July of 2014, while packing for an upcoming vacation that I was going on with my boyfriend of a year and a half, I received a phone call that changed my life forever. My boyfriend, Matt, whom I lived with, whom I had been trying on engagement rings with the week before, had died in a hotel room in Philadelphia on a business trip. He was thirty-one, and he died from a valve detaching from his heart. I was suddenly a girl with a dead boyfriend. Talk about something you can’t shake off. Instead, it shook me to my core and nearly killed me.

Until that summer, I had never understood depression. I was sympathetic to anyone dealing with it, but I couldn’t fully grasp what it meant to be depressed. Needless to say, I was immediately thrust into the crippling depression and anxiety that comes from losing the love of your life. I won’t share the details of that time now, and I’m not sure I ever will, but I want to share how I eventually coped.

Since no one in my family had ever talked to a therapist, the idea seemed very foreign to me, but I knew I needed to talk to someone or I would never be able to remove the dark veil that was covering my entire world. One of my best friends had a therapist she loved, so she asked for a recommendation for a grief counselor. She warned me that this type of counseling had a spiritual element to it, and that it might not be a good fit for me. I had nothing to lose and everything to gain at this point, so I made my appointment.

Before my session, I couldn’t get the “spiritual element” out of my head. Was I going to walk into a smoky, incensed-filled room to find a woman with cult-length hair telling me to wait for the comet? Or even worse, would I have to CHANT? I was the girl who refused to “om” in a yoga class, for fuck’s sake. How had I agreed to see a spiritual grief counselor?! Thank god I was too desperate to let any of those fears stop me.

I was pleasantly surprised when I arrived at the very standard office building in Westlake Village and walked into the suite. My counselor, Amyra, came out to greet me. Much to my delight, Amyra looked pretty normal. She was a middle-aged woman with a short curly bob and very kind eyes. Phew, I thought, I might make it through this session without having to chant or throw chicken bones.

I spent the hour telling Amyra my story. She sat there with a loving look on her face, and she made me feel safe to say and do whatever the fuck I needed. It was liberating. I felt a little lighter after the first session.

God bless my friends and family during this time, but my old habits of not wanting to show vulnerability made it impossible for me to really open up to anyone I knew. I went through the first year or so after Matt died clenching through all these encounters with them, because I refused to show anyone that I wasn’t resilient and strong. I also hated feeling pitied, and so I never wanted to give anyone the opportunity to pity me.

That one hour a week with Amyra was the place I could lose total control and say things without being judged. There was the safety of knowing that I could completely break down in front of this person and not have to worry that she was going to tell our mutual friends the details, or to worry that I would have to be socializing with her later and pretend I didn’t share such intimate thoughts.

Now, I’m sure you’re wondering at what point the spiritual stuff snuck in, so here it is. I have never been a religious person, and I was raised with zero religious education, which were elements that made dealing with death a little more challenging for me. I didn’t have a visual image of a place filled with clouds and rainbows and pearly gates where Matt was dancing around with other friends and family members who had passed. I had the fuzzy memory of a plot of dirt and a casket, and that didn’t exactly comfort me. However, I had always felt that there was more to life than what we were experiencing, and I had faith that things were bigger than us—I just didn’t know how to really practice that, and I had doubts that there even was a practice for it that I would be able to subscribe to. But Amyra helped me harness what that was and focus my energy on the bigger picture, the stuff beyond us. And it seems weird to say, but in the five years of working with her, I have not only felt more comforted when thinking about death, but I have learned to operate from a more empathetic, elevated, and conscientious place.

I have learned that sometimes I need to do things like write people letters I never intend to send in order to release resentment. I have had assignments where, every day for thirty-three days, I have had to look at myself in the mirror and repeat an affirmation that could help me shift a false belief I had about myself. I have had to do adult coloring books to learn to “play” again. I have been assigned countless books to read and have written things called “ideal scenes” in which you essentially manifest your future. I have literally set something on fire in the exact spot in our bedroom where I was standing when I received the news that Matt had died, so that I could release the bad energy and memories from that place. And you know what? It worked. I no longer gasped for air when I found myself standing in that spot. As someone who had the habit of going to worst-case scenarios in my fantasies, Amyra taught me to ask, “Why not win in your own fantasies?” She taught me to give people the benefit of the doubt, and the most valuable thing I’ve learned in five years—and the thing that has forever changed my life for the better—is that “everyone is just doing the best they can with what they’ve got.” As soon as I was able to accept that as truth, I released so much anger. I no longer resented people who weren’t handling life the same way I was. I no longer judged anyone for not doing things exactly the way I thought they should. Most important, I am able to forgive people who have hurt me.

So if you’re a shake-it-off kind of gal who hates vulnerability (we can’t all be Brené Fucking Brown), find yourself a good therapist. You might be pleasantly surprised by how vulnerable you’re capable of being with a stranger who you don’t have to see at brunch every weekend.

A Lady in the Streets, But an Anxious, Insecure Shell of a Human Being in the Sheets

Why am I my own worst enemy? I am a fierce, intelligent, badass bitch, but I constantly find myself fighting a battle inside my own head over the dumbest shit sometimes. When I open up any social media app, I immediately get bombarded with insane bodies, outrageous vacations, and happy couples. Perfection in all facets of life is literally getting shoved down my throat everywhere I look, and the more everyone else is #blessed, the more I feel #stressed.

I’ll go ahead and say it: Social media is fucking toxic. Apps that were originally supposed to connect people have turned into massive sources of anxiety and self-esteem crushers for so many people, including myself. We’re now in a constant downward spiral in the competition for followers, likes, comments, and external praise. We just want more, more, more in an effort to feel validated in our lives. It’s narcissism at its finest, and it’s addicting as hell. What a great cocktail for healthy self-worth, right? Ugh.

I’ll rewind a bit. I was never super confident in my looks growing up, but I never really obsessed about them either. And I hid my typical teenage insecurity under ten pounds of black eyeliner and overly contrasted pictures from the “Myspace angle” (if you know, you know). Sure, as a teen I’d look at Britney Spears on the cover of CosmoGirl and wish I had her abs, but she was an untouchable angel to me. There was this sense of disconnect from the perfection I saw in magazines because I knew the polished bodies and faces were perfected by professional hair and makeup artists, studio lighting, photographers, and artistic airbrushing. Plus, they were celebrities. It was like comparing dollar store apples to Whole Foods oranges.

And then social media came around. It was a gradual process; I followed a few beauty bloggers here and a few fashion influencers there. Slowly but surely, my feed started filling up with only beautiful people living extravagant dreamy lives. And I found myself getting super self-conscious about things I had never even noticed about myself before. Like the size of my nose, or the gobble under my chin, or (and I’m not kidding) the skin on my eyelids. I went from seeing perfection only on billboards to seeing perfection in “normal girls” in every single photo on my social media feeds.

Like any other moderately insecure young adult, I started comparing myself and obsessively picking apart my flaws. I found myself glued to my bathroom mirror, hyper-analyzing my face far more often than I would like to admit. I would spend hours lifting my eyebrows and pursing my lips and squishing my nose to see what I could change that would make me look like all of the pretty girls I saw on my phone. But what I wasn’t taking into consideration was the tens of thousands of dollars spent on rhinoplasties, breast implants, liposuction, lip filler, and lasers it took to get there. Oh, and Photoshop, of course.

I’m self-aware enough to realize that I’m scrolling through avatars and fairy tales of people’s cracked lives, but I’m not self-aware enough to not let it get under my skin. It’s like a head-versus-heart thing. But it’s way too easy to alter a photo, and I felt this subconscious pressure to keep up. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right? So I started altering my pics, too. Nothing huge. Tiny tweaks. I’d make my waist a little smaller or my lips a little bigger. And then I’d get comments complimenting my tiny waist and my pretty lips. People were praising the very things I was altering in my photos! So now, not only was I comparing myself to other people, but I was comparing myself to this enhanced version of myself. What an ugly vicious cycle, dude.

And it wasn’t just my physical appearance. I was fabricating this bogus life of happiness in my relationship at the time on social media, too. From the outside, it looked like I was living the liiiiiiiife. From the outside, I was super in love, traveling the world with a mega hot dude, without a care in the world. From the outside, I was always happy. But on the inside, I was miserable. And ironically, the sadder I was, the more perfect our relationship appeared on my feed. When I was hurting the most, I would overcompensate with a super sappy post to justify staying in my crumbling relationship. But in reality, “the luckiest girl in the world” had just gotten into her fiftieth screaming match over fucking pancakes.

Once I began to realize the disconnect between my real life and my online life, the more I began to realize that everything I was seeing on social media was total bullshit. And it’s not like everyone is just posting their happy days. Everyone is just posting what they want everyone else to see, even if it’s a lie. No one posts about real-life shit like heartbreak, loneliness, financial problems, mental health issues, or insecurity. No one talks about the flawed stuff, because the flawed stuff won’t get you likes.

I’ve always been pretty outspoken about how social media grinds my gears. One day, I was venting about how I unfollowed all of the perfect “Instagram girls” on social media because they made me feel bad about myself. And that’s when Becca hit me over the head with the truth bomb (she’s really good at that, by the way). She said, “Jac, you are that annoying bikini-wearing, globe-trotting Instagram girl to some people, you know.” And I realized that I was so far up my own ass on one end of the spectrum that I didn’t even realize that I was literally part of the problem for others.

From that day on, I made a pact with myself to be a little bit more honest on social media. To show my cellulite sometimes. To post my unattractive outtakes along with my best photos. To refrain from smoothing out a pimple. To be more honest when I’m not feeling my best. To post not only when I’m feeling real pretty, but also when I’m feeling pretty real. It’s ridiculous that it takes courage to post an imperfect photo, but it does. And guess what? The flawed stuff does get you likes. Because our flaws make us human, and in reality, everyone is actually craving a true connection and something to relate to. We’re at a point in society where everyone is sick of seeing the facade of curated bullshit on our feeds—and now it’s actually refreshing to see some vulnerability and reality on social media.

So now, for me, it’s all about balance. I’m still going to post pretty photos in my bikinis on vacation. Because I like to, and because it’s part of my job. But now I realize that posting a shitty fire selfie doesn’t make me feel any happier, and posting a lovey picture with my boyfriend won’t save a failing relationship. The more real I am on social media, the more confidence I am finding in accepting and even embracing my imperfections. I’m finding myself wasting less and less time in front of the mirror. And it’s way more fun being myself than being a fraud. Trust me, you should try it.

Through this I’ve learned that insecurity and self-worth don’t discriminate. Human beings are flawed and envious by nature, no matter what deck of cards you’re dealt in life. Supermodels are still photoshopping their own pictures, and they are supermodels. How fucked up is that?! At the end of the day, everything is relative, and I don’t think it’s fair to judge anyone for their relationship with their own body. But to anyone who wanted to unfollow me because I was “one of those Instagram girls,” I hope my dimply legs can shed some light on the fact that I’m just a normal gal with normal-gal problems.

And listen, I know my rant sounds trivial and unimportant in the grand scheme of our issues on this planet (like, literally—we need to save our planet). But at the very core, self-worth directly affects everything you do. From how well you perform in your job to how long you can hold on to friendships to how deeply you can love another person. It all comes back to your relationship with yourself.

So, if you’re 100 percent secure in the meat suit you live in, I applaud you. My ramblings won’t apply to you, and I’m trying to get there at some point, too. But for any ladies out there who feel lesser-than when they’re mindlessly scrolling through their social media feeds, just remember that the perfect girl you see on your screen is probably just as insecure as you are.