Stumbling Through Ladyhood, Act Like a Lady

If you feel like your life is a disaster and you have no idea what you’re doing, congrats! That is what makes you a lady! Women are complicated, intricate, messy, beautiful creatures, and it’s about time we start embracing our imperfections. There’s no handbook telling us how to be a modern lady, and we’re all just trying our best to figure out this “life” thing as we go. When we think of a lady, we think of her as a perfect Audrey Hepburn, with her dress pressed, a fresh blowout, the doting husband, and everything on point. But even Audrey Hepburn was probably crying in the bathroom over her cheating man. Yes, even Audrey was (allegedly) cheated on.

Every woman wants the same things. We want security. We want to feel appreciated. We want to have a purpose. We want to feel confident. We want to have a full heart. We want to be successful. We want to feel wanted. It’s easy to look around you and feel like every other lady has all these things figured out except you, but the truth is that we are all struggling and crumbling behind our smiling profile pictures. So that’s why it is important to try (even though it’s challenging) and celebrate the little victories without constantly seeing how you measure up to other people. Forgive yourself, and learn from your mistakes. Society makes it really hard to be a woman without feeling bad about ourselves all the time for simply existing. We are constantly being bombarded with so many unsolicited opinions about everything, from our choice of bathing suit to our choice of men, and the best thing we can do is to just be kind to ourselves.

So stop faking it until you make it. It’s totally okay to ask for help. And that help can come in the form of family, friends, professionals, yoga, rom-coms, books, or weed. The truth is that you are the only one who really notices when your nails are chipping. Everyone else’s heads are way too far up their own asses to care about your manicure schedule, we promise. And bikini waxes? Hate ’em. Sometimes we’re gonna have some rogue hairs on our vaginas, and that’s okay! In the same way you can let go of manicures, you can also let go of your inbox, saying yes when you want to say no, and overexerting yourself every damn day. Don’t let the weight of being everything to everyone crush your soul, because ladyhood is a never-ending journey.

There are always going to be more emails. There are always going to be more family events. There’s always going to be another birthday card to send. There’s always going to be another hair to pluck on your body. It’s time to let go of perfection, because something is always going to be falling apart in some aspect of your life. You should always try to be your best self, but being your 80 percent self is great, too.

We get it. As ladies, we’re constantly being pulled in a million different directions, but we have to be selfish every once in a while to be the most capable version of ourselves. Let’s apply the advice about “putting on your own oxygen mask before assisting others” to our lives. If you’re not okay, you won’t be able to attack life coming from a place of calmness and confidence. And then you’re screwed, no matter how many squats you do at the gym or how many Gucci bags you have.

Remember, a lady is defined by her confidence. In a world where everybody is homogenized, you have to embrace the things that make you a unique, bad bitch. When everyone is trying to look the same and dress the same, your quirks are going to make you stand out in a room full of clones. No one notices your stretch marks, so don’t let them stop you from feeling like Beyoncé in your new bikini. Embrace your strengths, but also embrace your flaws, because the combination of all these qualities is what makes you a rare, beautiful lady.

And while you’re feeling confident in your own skin, remember that there is room for all of us at the table, and you don’t have to sabotage the girl next to you to get ahead. True beauty comes from lifting up the women around you. Helping the women around you. Celebrating the women around you. Life is hard enough as it is, so having your own little LadyGang makes it a little bit more bearable.

Last, your gut is your guide. Before every huge mistake we’ve made in our lives, our gut was telling us “DON’T FUCKING DO THIS,” and we did it anyway.

Things Every Woman Needs to Know

How to give yourself an orgasm

To wear SPF every day (your skin will thank you in thirty years)

To wipe front to back

How to properly pay your taxes

How to give yourself a breast exam

To always pee after sex

Your happiest friend on Instagram is your saddest friend in real life

To make sure your face doesn’t show in the nudes you send

To fuck the bad boy and marry the nice guy

Nipple hair is totally normal

Your eyebrows can make or break your face

How to give a hand job

Your wedding day is the most important day to you…and only you

To pack extra tampons

If you’re not doing anything about your mustache, you have one

The difference between a yeast infection and BV

How to nail a job interview

Always tip at least 20 percent

Therapy is always the answer

No one deserves a “birthday month” and a “birthday week” is bullshit

Your ex is your ex for a reason—stop checking his Instagram

To always sleep on your back, because side sleeping gives you wrinkles

The wrong undergarments can ruin an outfit

No one else is noticing your five-pound weight loss or weight gain

How to properly apologize

How to describe your strengths in one sentence

How credit card interest works

To never stand on the end in group photos

No one cares how many likes your last Instagram post got

To stop hating your body—chances are it will only get worse anyway

I Don't Want to Go to Your Birthday Party (How to Say No)

Rule number one: You can’t be everything to everyone. If you think you can, you are gonna burn out fast. When you’re saying yes to someone else, you might actually be saying no to yourself. This is not us telling you it’s okay to be a selfish asshole all the time! There’s a balance between only doing things that make you happy and being a doormat that spends every waking moment making everyone else happy.

You have to find the in-between. It has taken us a lot of trial and error, and what feels like a lifetime, to figure out how to say no with grace, but once we did, it was euphoric. When you get an invitation, it might feel like you need to RSVP immediately and stand by that decision like your life depends on it. But you have to learn to receive the invitation and really take inventory of how important your presence is. What does the day look like for you? Do you have a ton of work to do, and can you afford the hangxiety it may bring? Are there going to be energy vampires there that will suck you emotionally dry? Is your ex going to show up and ruin everyone’s time? Would you rather sit on your couch in your sweatpants and watch reruns of Seinfeld? Take a breather, have a glass of wine, and then make a decision. Think about these important questions, and don’t jump to saying yes just because you’re feeling ambitious and want to please people. If your answer is no, that’s okay. We’re all adults, and most of us don’t have time to go to Natalie’s third birthday party of the month. And by the way, most of the time nobody actually cares if you show up or not. Don’t use that fake pressure and made-up guilt in your own head to make a decision.

Most important, weigh how necessary that event is. Don’t RSVP to your best friend’s wedding and bail the night before because you’re “burnt out” from too many happy hours. Don’t say yes to fifteen birthday parties and then say no to your friend’s mother’s funeral because “Funerals make you uncomfortable.” Guess what? They make everyone uncomfortable, especially the person who died (Becca only agreed to write this book to make this specific point).

Picture this: a warm summer day in August 2014. I was in Atlanta visiting my family and getting some quality time with my nephew, Jack. I was sitting next to my dad on the couch, watching sweet little Jack tinker with his toys. Since watching children “play” bores the fuck out of me, I decided to take a stroll on social media, Twitter to be specific—it was 2014, so Twitter was my lifeline. I clicked on the mentions tab, the place that was usually filled with Glee fans throwing compliments my way and telling me how amazing I am (yes, this is why actors are horribly conceited people). But that day was different. Instead of my usual accolades, a slew of nude photos of myself from many years before started traveling down my feed. My stomach dropped out of my butthole like I had just eaten gas station sushi. I quickly tilted my phone away from my dad, trying to convince myself that it had to have been a glitch in the app. Maybe those photos weren’t sent to me from strangers across the ocean. Maybe my “cloud” (still unsure of how it even works) just happened to open up to my personal device and no one else’s. But as I scrolled and scrolled and saw usernames like “dirtygurlz” and “supersluttychicks” with my nude photos next to their tweets, I quickly realized that a breach in security had definitely happened and that was indeed my bare beaver on the internet superhighway. (To get a little more specific, the photos were Christmas-themed: Santa hat, fur boots, full frontal, ho, ho, ho—you get the picture.)

My phone rang immediately, and it was my manager, Ricky. He informed me that there was a whole group of women in Hollywood who were part of the hacking, one of whom was Jennifer Lawrence. After hearing that I wasn’t the only one, I was comforted—and it’s probably because I knew that Katniss Everdeen was the only nude body anyone would care to see or go searching for. Phew! I got off the phone, took a deep breath, and wondered how long it would be until I heard from J. Law herself. I mean, at that point, wasn’t it like we were both members of the same sorority?!

The next, and possibly biggest hurdle in all of this, would be breaking the news to my amazing, supportive, esteemed attorney father that he raised a daughter who not only decided to do a cheesy Christmas-themed nude photo shoot for her boyfriend five years ago, but also that by some crazy act of Satan, those photos had ended up on a public website called TheFappening. This was no doubt a stark contrast from my older sister Jessica’s picture-perfect life as an attorney with a loving husband and a bouncing baby boy. So, in true Becca Tobin fashion, I decided it was best to just be blunt and rip off the Band-Aid.

I walked back inside the house, looked Tom Tobin in the eye, and said, “Dad, I’m gonna need you to stay off the internet for a while. Someone hacked into my photos, and my naked body is strewn across the internet.” He looked at me calmly and answered, “Okay, no problem. I’m so sorry, sweetie.” (And that’s reason 6,897 why my dad is the greatest human on Earth.)

It was pretty much the same, non-judgmental, empathetic response I received from the rest of my family, and that reaction did something truly extraordinary for me. Since my family didn’t react in a way that made me feel stupid or ashamed or gross or slutty, I decided that I wasn’t going to allow this experience or other people to make me feel that way either. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was still a giant shit sandwich I was having to snack on, but it was going to take a lot more than this to kick my gorgeous Christmas ass.

The hours passed, and the calls came rolling in from friends, family, ex-boyfriends, etc. I realized that I needed to somehow acknowledge this event to the rest of the world (or, like, my five fans who cared). My response? A simple tweet saying “Merry XXXmas!” (Let me remind you that it was August.) And you know something? The tweet was a fucking HIT. I got responses from girls all over the world about how much my ability to make light of a shitty situation inspired them to do the same. I’m not saying we should all just sweep shit under the rug, especially when you’re violated like that, but I am saying that there is a sense of freedom in being able to take back control.

After I was able to get over the initial shock and disgusting feeling of being violated, I took a step back and saw what those photos actually represented: a young woman feeling confident enough to take sexy photos for her boyfriend. Those photos represented something I was and still am fucking proud of: a positive body image and enough confidence to have fun with it. It meant that I was comfortable with my sexuality, and I feel grateful that I was able to express that in a healthy (and, in this case, very festive) way.

As women, we are often told to hide those parts of us, to keep them behind closed doors, and that if we don’t, it somehow makes us slutty. Well, I’m here to tell you that “slutty” wasn’t the worst feeling I could have felt during that time. The worst thing I could have felt was that the disgusting, sick, fucked-up man who hacked into my iCloud had somehow brought me down, defeated me, or made me feel ashamed.

I knew that my public reaction to these photos would impact other people, and I wanted the impression to not be about me somehow feeling sorry or ashamed of my naked photos. I wanted my reaction to be the thing I have carried with me for my entire life: We’re all human. Shit happens; let’s laugh about it so that we don’t cry.

1.Just because people try to make you feel ashamed of something doesn’t mean you have to feel the shame they clearly feel about themselves.

2.Jennifer Lawrence still hasn’t called. It’s fine, I’ve moved on. Have I though?

3.If you’re gonna take nude photos of yourself, make sure you either leave your face out or love them enough to be proud of them if they land on TheFappening.com one day.

As women, we spend what seems like our entire lives trying NOT to get pregnant. I estimated that I’ve experienced more than three hundred periods since I became sexually active. Three hundred weeks where my cravings went crazy, my boobs got sore, and I felt insane…at some point, a day or two before my crimson wave would actually greet me, I would say to a friend, “I better not be pregnant!” And then I would spend the next forty-eight hours worried sick that I was knocked up, and wonder what I was going to do, what the baby would look like, and if I was going to go to hell if I terminated the pregnancy because I was unemployed, living in a bunk bed in a closet (with twelve roommates) on the Upper West Side.

It started simply enough. I experienced a bout of tampnesia and made my way to the gyno. I prepared to see my doctor like I was going to be starring in an HD porn. Wax, shave, exfoliate, lotion, nice underwear…a refreshing wipe in the bathroom right before my appointment, in case any vagina sweat happened to congregate in my pristine vag pre-inspection.

I checked in. The waiting room was filled with baby bumps, and the walls were filled with baby announcements that all had weird-ass spellings for normal names—which people don’t realize is going to totally mess with these children when they can’t find the keychain at Disneyland with CCAYRAH on it, just Sara (take it from a Keltie).

Next, we arrived in the room, where the paper “dress” was waiting for me. At this point, I knew I had an additional fifteen minutes of sitting on the bench, wearing the paper, with my socks on, feeling cold and alone, and looking at the plastic diorama of the uterus. I am in my thirties, and I still have some really big questions about all the body parts and how they work.

The doctor arrived. My legs were lifted up up into the awkward stirrups, and the cold duck machine was inserted inside of me. The doc instructed me to take a deep breath but never made eye contact with me for the next ten minutes…just my nether regions. It was terrible. After I sat up, some vagina juice slipped out and created a wet spot on the paper covering the table. I know that if I ever saw my doctor out in the real world, I would have to run in the other direction if my vagina leaked out onto a piece of office furniture.

What made this particular trip even more awkward is that, even though I had spent a decade using sunscreen, getting Botox, and yearly lasers treatments for “age spots”—even though I worked out, kept up with the trends, and plucked any gray hairs that sprouted from my head—my vagina didn’t lie.

My lack of emotion from the Botox was evident when the lady doc said to me, “Listen, if you want to have kids, you should probably start trying.”

It felt unfair. I still felt twelve inside. People constantly guessed that I was twenty-nine! I even still got carded at bars! Blood tests then confirmed that my eggs were almost gone, the chances of getting pregnant naturally got smaller every single day, and I was at the point in my life where any pregnancy would be referred to as geriatric. Here’s a big fuck-you to whoever came up with this term for pregnancies over thirty-five. I can almost guarantee it was a man. Side note: Since my gyno exam, the phrase “geriatric pregnancy” was changed to “advanced maternal age” because of how upset women were getting about the term.

I felt weird. I felt conflicted. My answer to any of the people who asked me ten to forty-five times a day, “Omg! When are you having kids?” or commented, “Looks like a bun in the oven” after I ate a sandwich was always, “We’re not trying, but we’re not not trying.” I wasn’t on birth control.

But I didn’t want a baby right now. I didn’t know if I wanted a baby ever. I didn’t even like babies. I refused to hold my friends’ babies until they were toddlers because I was so afraid of breaking them. What I did love was that after spending a decade hustling for the dollars, we got our dream home and could lazily spend Saturday afternoons doing renovation projects and strolling the aisles of Home Depot with nowhere else to be. I loved that, after a decade of getting up before 5:00 a.m. to drive to work in the dark, I had been promoted to a job that allowed me (on most days) to drive to work with the rest of the morning commuters when the sun was already up. I loved being an entrepreneur for a buzzy company, and I loved having a little extra money each year to travel, spoil my family, and get a new bag.

On top of that (and I can see everyone judging me for saying this), when you wait until you are geriatric to start thinking about having a family, you have already seen all of your friends’ marriages that have crumbled post-baby. Some of the most solid couple friends I’ve known fell into affairs, bankruptcy, divorce, all-around misery after having their dream baby. You have to admit, the odds are not great. I’ve also been around these friends long enough to see the absolute disaster that is co-parenting with someone you now hate (for everyone except the “consciously uncoupled” Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin). The parents of the world don’t really sell the dream to the non-babied. My thirties Facebook page is one big complaint forum for my mom friends, and my catch-up visits with them always include the words “it’s a lot,” “these fucking kids,” “exhausted,” “overwhelmed,” “no time for myself,” “I have no money now,” and “this kid sucked out my beauty…” They always quickly follow it up with “but it’s the best thing I ever did!” That being said, I have some mommy friends who have relished being a mom, and it’s easy to see that they were born to momma.

I had a Cabbage Patch Kid growing up, but I was never into dolls. I was the kid who played “let’s make my own magazine” and then spent hours cutting up old magazines and writing new copy for my “articles.” I didn’t have babies around me in my family, so the first diaper I changed was at twenty-seven while babysitting a friend’s kid, and I had to watch a YouTube video explaining how to do it. My best friend once described me as someone who is “very hard on her stuff.” I drop phones, and I scuff designer shoes the first day I wear them. As I write this, I have a cut on my nose that I got from trying to open a jar and then basically punching myself in the face. I would need to wrap my baby in bubble wrap 24-7 in order to keep it alive. On top of that, I’m selfish, impulsive, and a neat freak, and all my furniture is white. When (surprise!) my geriatric womb managed to get pregnant, and before I had a chance to even revel in my “Oh shit, this is happening” mind-set, I suffered a miscarriage. I could barely find the time to lose a baby. I was at the doctor’s on a Wednesday afternoon and back to work in my adult diaper, shedding plum-size blood clots, on Thursday morning. A few weeks later I was told that some TV viewers didn’t find me relatable because I’m not a mother. (I swear this is real, womanhood is a nasty beast, y’all!) The women I wanted to be growing up—Oprah, Dolly Parton, Liza Minnelli, Jennifer Aniston—never had children either. Oprah has her girls’ school, and Dolly has her children’s libraries, and even though sometimes these ladies get shit for not using the real estate of their wombs, I appreciate that there are unapologetic women out there who didn’t have children and didn’t get ousted from society.

It’s messed up that vaginas have a past-due date anyway, when sperm works forever. The bottom line is that we all need to stop asking women when they are going to have babies. It’s incredibly painful on every single side. It’s not a cute joke or a conversation starter. It’s a stick of dynamite that blows up our lady worlds every time someone asks. It’s a constant reminder that we are getting older and less fertile every moment, that our bodies are revolting against us by either not getting pregnant or not staying pregnant, that we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to become a human science experiment to no avail, or that we are one of those “cold, hard career” bitches who is too selfish to change her life for another human. It all feels bad, and on a daily basis I have enough to feel bad about already. So please, stop asking me when I’m going to have a baby. When and if it happens, I’ll let you know. Until then, it’s just my lunch.