BEVERLY HILLS BRAT
“Do you know what a Beverly Hills Brat is?” my mother asked, seething.
She had just careened across two lanes of traffic on the hairpin curves of Sunset Boulevard and slammed on the brakes as soon as we reached the safety of a side street. She never took her hands off the steering wheel, yet I felt as though she had grabbed me by the scruff of my neck.
Of course I knew what a Beverly Hills Brat was. They were the boys who actually believed they deserved the privilege they had been born into—without having to prove their self-worth to themselves, their parents, or anyone else who might be watching. The girls, who, without doing anything but be their perfect selves, made me acutely aware of all the ways I felt inferior and unlike them, down to the white-on-white saddle shoes I had to wear because my mother believed I couldn’t stay between the lines polishing the black-and-white ones I wanted.
A Beverly Hills Brat was someone who felt entitled to the gifts they were given, often at the expense of others.
“I will not bring up a Beverly Hills Brat! Do you understand?” She didn’t have to raise her voice to make her intentions crystal clear. “Don’t you ever say or even think anything like that again.”
I nodded mutely.
The reason for my mother’s rage? I’d hoped to get a part in the school play, and I had made the fatal flaw of enthusiastically telling her that I probably would get it “because of dad.”
Those three words came out of my six-year-old mouth without thought. Three words that changed everything. Three words I could never rewind back to the childlike place of innocence and enthusiasm that produced them. Three words I have feared would define me forever. In a sense, they have.
Because of dad.
When I said “Because of dad,” what did I mean? Was it something sweet: Because my dad was an actor, they would think I could act, too? Or something Beverly Hills Bratlike: Because my dad was famous, I expected to get what I wanted?
My mother never asked.
Because she didn’t ask, in my memory I skipped over my own internal narrative of the story and continued on with the plot of what happened next. When our garnet-colored station wagon hurtled across those lanes of traffic, I knew I must have said something really, really wrong to provoke such an unsafe response from my mother, who was usually such a cautious driver that she often drove around a block to avoid making left turns across traffic. Was I scared? A little. But I was used to being a little scared by my mother’s frequent pronouncements of right and wrong in her dualistic, moralistic world.
My mother saw herself as a definite woman given to making definite pronouncements about anything in which she believed strongly. Definite was one of my mother’s favorite words. Definite, in the vocabulary of Mary Grant Price, meant you knew what you believed and you weren’t afraid to do or say it. Mary Grant Price knew Right, she knew Wrong, and she was determined that her daughter would, too.
Definite in my own vocabulary, and that of my friends, equaled strict. Strict meant that what other kids were allowed to do, I usually wasn’t. Strict meant getting no for an answer when my classmates usually heard yes. Strict meant having to stand up straighter, get better grades, turn down invitations to cool stuff, or hear a long lecture about why I shouldn’t behave like the other children.
My best friend Casey had a mom like mine. We talked constantly about how strict our moms were. (Actually, we just talked about everything constantly, which is why I spent so much time in the principal’s office.) Our moms were elegant, well-spoken, beautifully mannered, well-coiffed, powerful, talented, thin, and strikingly attractive women who were married to very famous men. Unsurprisingly, my mother and Mrs. Cole admired one another greatly.
Our mothers ruled our lives. But Casey had one advantage over me. Not only did she have siblings, but she also had her twin sister, Timolin. Like so many twins, the two of them have a deep, unbreakable bond. Many years later, when we were in our early thirties, Casey suddenly said to me over lunch one day, “You know Timmy and I used to wonder how you survived without anyone to talk to. We always had each other, so we could figure out what seemed crazy and what didn’t. You didn’t have anyone but you.”
Until Casey said that, I had never really thought about the way my mother’s definite pronouncements had landed on the childhood me: My mother’s beliefs felt like holy edicts, cardinal rules, perhaps to be questioned, possibly even occasionally disobeyed—but never without knowing I would pay the penalty for my transgressions.
Although my mother spared the rod, she did everything else not to spoil her child. But more than the pronouncements or punishments, what really got to me was her disappointment. Rebel though I might have seemed, all I really wanted to be was good. Don’t all kids want that, deep down? I wanted to do right—but to my mother, that meant doing it my mother’s One Right Way.
By the time the Beverly Hills Brat exchange happened, I was used to my mother’s definite points of view and her impossibly high standards for me. I knew what awaited if I didn’t bow in obeisance to them. So I wasn’t necessarily scared of what my mother might do to me if I acted like a Beverly Hills Brat. But I was definitely scared—because the instant my mother uttered the words “Beverly Hills Brat,” she gave voice to my deepest fear about myself.
What if I really was a Beverly Hills Brat?
I felt ashamed, mortified, that I could ever have thought something so selfish, so wrong, so, well, Beverly Hills Bratlike. Worse, I was afraid that if I could think it, I could be it. I could become one of those girls who made others feel less-than, insecure, unworthy.
It was one thing to feel different, odd, quirky, uncool, unlike the other kids in ways that I couldn’t even articulate to myself. It was another thing to be a jerk.
The net effect of my mother’s admonition has been that I have spent my whole life being nice, humble, and hardworking in order to prove to myself, to the mother who still lives in my head, and even to the larger world that I am not a spoiled Beverly Hills Brat. That hasn’t been a bad thing on the surface. It’s what happened underneath that has had a lasting deleterious effect by fundamentally changing how I thought of myself. My mother’s teaching moment made me afraid that I couldn’t expect good from myself because I actually might not be good. That was the most terrifying thing I could feel. Until that moment, I had thought that good was my fail-safe. That was the moment the asterisk landed on the beautiful blank white page of me.
Once I understood that as an adult, everything came flooding back to me. I knew with utter clarity that when I said “because of Dad,” I didn’t mean “because I’m more special than other people are because my dad is a famous actor.” My class was full of kids of famous people—Clark Gable’s son was in my class, and his dad was probably the most famous actor in the world. I literally meant because of Dad—because I felt, with the purest of childhood joy, that everything I wanted to do was because of Dad! Of course, that would include acting.
In other words, what was really the most innocent and joyful of remarks—said from the pure sweet place of loving my father—was transformed into exactly the opposite, something nefarious. This old story was my foundational joy kill—the original moment when I stopped expecting good from myself and instead embraced the lie of never good enough. That moment seeded in me a lifelong fear of not-goodness, of not-enough-ness.
We all have these kinds of stories. Until we can root them out of our subconscious, we all walk around believing in our not-enough-ness. These are the stories that underlie all of the difficulties we face over and over again throughout our lives. They are our weak spots.
When a dam breaks, the water always bursts through at one place first. Not because the water puts more pressure on that spot, but because that’s where the dam is weakest. That’s what happens with us.
Fear breaks through where we are weakest. Not because we came here with inherently unsound places. Not at all! These are usually the weak, fearful, unworthy places we have unconsciously inherited from those who raised us.
I learned my fear of being not good enough from my mother. My mother’s moralizing messages took root in her own old stories of inadequacy, of not being good enough. Having grown up in the colonial British caste system, aspiring to be something better than her birth status, my mother immigrated to America to forge her own creative path in the world. Which she did! My mother was an extraordinarily creative, strong, interesting, brave, successful, accomplished woman. Her fears, however, inherited from her own parents, immigrated with her.
What were my mother’s fears? The same as her mother’s. Of aspiring to something better, yet not believing they were good enough to achieve it. That was difficult enough . . . and then my mother entered the world of celebrity—where good enough is never, ever, ever good enough. Where being better, thinner, funnier, smarter, more beautiful, more talented is all that matters. Celebrity coupled with a religious and emotionless British upbringing that brooked no whining and in which discipline was king led Mary Grant Price to live by standards that were utterly unachievable on any human plane—and yet which she expected herself to maintain. Her fears of not living up to those standards ruled her life.
Those fears became amplified after she had me. Fear of being judged for her own self-identified flaws cubed by her fears of being judged a permissive mother of a Beverly Hills Brat.
Her anxiety about how she might be seen, because of what I might become, felt palpable within me. Her fears took seed in the fertile soil of that younger me, and there they grew. Throwing out tenacious roots that attached to everything that mattered, wrapping themselves around anything that might be called ambition, strangling the enthusiasm of joy, and eventually becoming that bumper crop that seems to sow itself in spades in so many of us—the epidemic of modern humanhood—shame.
Alongside my mostly self-confident, almost always enthusiastic, generally competent, adventurous, funny, joy-filled true self grew the insidious twin of my false self who began to whisper nasty little nothings in my ear. She urged me to doubt myself, reminding me of all my little failures, stockpiling shame and self-doubt, changing my expectations of myself, of my creativity, and of the world—from self-loving to self-loathing. Eventually I became a workaholic in the unconscious hope that my perpetual busyness might keep the deep unworthiness I felt at bay.
If feeling my mother’s fear sowed the seeds of my shame and self-doubt, and workaholism became the way I sought to stave it off, then perfectionism was self-loathing’s slave master. This was yet another of my mother’s complicated legacies to me: The Absolute Belief in the Possibility of Perfection.
Perfect is just one-third of a very tricky trio: The Three P’s. Even if you’ve never heard of them, you have probably experienced them: perfectionism, procrastination, and paralysis.
Perfectionism means taking on a set of impossibly high, utterly unfulfillable standards and then believing that our task is to accomplish them, which sets ourselves up to fail. That’s when our subconscious comes to the rescue in a very dodgy superhero outfit called procrastination.
Knowing we can never reach the ridiculous heights to which we have been told we should aspire—and fully believing that aspiring to those heights is the only way to live—we procrastinate in order find ways to avoid failing.
Who are we failing? For me, it began as my mother. But at some point, my mother’s impossibly high standards became my own. I expected myself to do, write, dress, act, say, pray, love, eat, feel, be . . . perfect. Faced with my inevitable failure to be a revolutionary off-the-charts genius spiritual creative wunderkind, I procrastinated to the point of eventually giving up.
Eventually the dance of perfectionism and procrastination leads to a near-fatal condition in our personal, creative, and spiritual lives: paralysis. It convinces us to bail out on our dreams—immobilizing ourselves as creative or spiritual or relationship or physical or life failures. When that happens, we spiral into shame. Shame is the secret sauce that takes us from feeling we’re simply a low-grade loser to becoming a full-on self-loather.
When I first heard about Brené Brown, I was immediately struck by the courage it must have taken someone in academia to choose to be a “shame researcher.” Even Brown admits, “When I use the word ‘shame,’ people have one of two responses: I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have anything to do with me, or I know exactly what you’re talking about and I don’t want to discuss it with you.” Brown breaks shame down into the two-headed monster with which I’m pretty sure every single person in the Western world has at least passing acquaintance. Shame, she says, “drives two primary tapes: not good enough, and who do you think you are? Its survival is based on us not talking about it, so it’s done everything it can do to make it unspeakable.”
I am fairly certain I am not the only person who has spent far too much of my life ticking off items on Brown’s terrifying list of shame: “Perfectionism, judgment, exhaustion as a status symbol, productivity as self-worth, cool, what do people think, performing, proving, quest for certainty, fear of creativity.” Been there, done and felt them all!
That’s why letting not good enough in the door is such a big deal. The moment we expect not good enough, shame has found its toehold. Whenever we try to take back our good to shine our lights, shame yells out loud and clear so we and everyone else can hear: Who Do You Think You Are?
Before I began my daily practice of joy, I heard that Who Do You Think You Are? practically every single day of my life. It is only recently that I have begun to take back that question from shame and ask it a different way.
What if “Who do you think you are?” meant this: Who do you think you really are underneath all the messages you’ve been given?
In my heart of hearts, did I really think I was or could ever be a Beverly Hills Brat? No! But once fear convinced me that it could be true, I built up a wall of niceness and false humility that I hoped could help me not to be the Beverly Hills Brat I always fundamentally knew I wasn’t.
This was the birth of my small self, who kept convincing me that I needed to try to be someone I already knew I could never be. In other words, I have lived life as a double negative.
Now my true self is turning shame’s screaming question on its head. Instead of believing there’s some Shame Committee out there made up of all the people we think do life better than we do (the cool kids, the gurus and healers, the ridiculously creative people, everyone we place on a pedestal) who are looking down on us in disapproval, we can all learn to ask ourselves: Who do we think we are?
Posing the question this way—from the inside out—the answer always feels different. When I trust that I am still that me who came onto this planet as a joyful, good, loving little girl, then I am listening to my true self. She lets me answer with my whole heart: I think I am who I was created to be, who I came here being. I came here as joy and good, and I still believe that is who I am. I’m not some sorry person trying to be perfect, because it’s not about human perfection. It’s about being our truest self.
I did not have to be nice to prove I wasn’t a Beverly Hills Brat. I was nice.
I did not have to apologize for not being good enough because I hadn’t lived up to my mother’s expectations of me. I just had to be the good I already was.
I did not have to be ashamed of all the ways I had failed or might fail others. I just had to show up in the Love that was my birthright. That Love just loves.
I was not, nor had I ever been, a Beverly Hills Brat.
I was, am, and will always be, God’s perfect child.
I just had to have the courage to keep exhuming, expunging, and erasing those old stories that never had been mine in the first place in order to find that my truest self had always been waiting for me to return home.
From that beautiful, sweet, true place, I was ready to unlock the mysteries of the other two childhood incidents that kept surfacing.