The Diva Rules Page 11
I strongly suspected that Ru was upset with me for turning the show, and therefore him, down. I’m talking upset at the depth of his soul, upset. After I broke the bad news, I’d tried to call him to talk it through. He never answered my calls. (But . . . to be fair, even if Dolly Parton herself called him, he probably still wouldn’t answer his phone. He just never does. He absolutely hates cell phones and refuses to use one.) Still, hoping beyond hope, I left a message. And another. And another.
If I were a different person, this might be the point where I’d either blow up in anger or meltdown with grief, the latter being the road I usually travel down, but then I quickly reminded myself that this is not how divas do it. We keep it together. We stay positive, even when things get ugly, and we always try to act with grace and compassion. I knew Ru was being this way not because he was angry, but because he was hurt. I let him down. He needed to process that emotion, and everyone knows you don’t kick a queen when she’s down, especially the fiercest queen in the world. So, with that in mind, I took a breath and wrote a simple email saying, “I love you. I’m so happy for your success.” And after what felt like an eternity, but in actuality was only a few days, my best friend forgave me, and Ru and I were able to repair our bruised hearts and our special relationship. There was no way anything was going to keep us apart.
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PEOPLE REMEMBER EVERYTHING. They always remember the bad more than the good, but when you’re really good, they remember that too. So even in your darkest moments, live your life with love. You will be rewarded in more ways than you could ever count.
When you’re having a hard time yourself, or going through a hard time with someone else, always approach the situation with love and gratitude in your heart. That can be ridiculously difficult, especially when you feel rejected, lonely, wronged, or misunderstood, but trust me, girl, it’s the only healthy way to move through this world. And by staying positive, you’ll not only find more peace in your life, but good things will come to you: more friends, more success, more opportunities. Just look at some of these queens who are asked to sashay away on Drag Race. Kelly Mantle, Vivacious, Trinity K. Bonet and Joslyn Fox, all of season six, may not have won the crown, but they won our hearts because of the grace with which they carried themselves. Even when they were eliminated, which I’m sure cut them to the core, they stayed positive, thanked Ru, and walked away with their heads held high.
Now, compare them to Magnolia Crawford, who I do love and adore, but she projected the worst attitude from the start. Mark my words: If you are snarky, mean, and rude, and if you write nasty shit on the mirror of life or even just think it in your heart, you’re never going to make it. You’ll poison yourself with toxic emotion, and you’ll poison every opportunity that may come your way. Blowing up. Melting down. Posting nasty things on Facebook or Twitter. Infighting. All those negative responses are the emotional equivalent of binging on junk food. It might feel good in the moment, but I guarantee you, it will make you feel like total shit later.
rule no. 20:
ACT LIKE A STAR, EVEN IF NO ONE’S WATCHING.
When life takes a turn for the shitty and things stop going your way, it’s really easy to just give up on yourself. One minute, you’re all, “I’m the queeeeen of the world!” And then you get dumped, or fired, or rejected, or shut down, or whatever, and that shady little voice inside of your head, the one that stays silent in good times, starts telling you what’s really what: You’re nothing. No, you’re less than nothing. You never deserved success or love anyway. Everything you’ve done so far? That was luck. Or better yet, a mistake. In fact, you should be embarrassed that you ever even thought for a second that you’d actually earned it. You’re a failure. Worse, you’re a fat failure with—gasp!—no fashion sense and bad hair.
Sound familiar? Yeah, we’ve all been there. Every single one of us engages in negative self-talk from time to time. And surrendering to this nasty chatter is harmful not only to a diva’s career and relationships, but also to our hearts, both physically and emotionally. When you dwell on the negative, run your failures on an endless loop in your mind, it changes who you are. It can turn something only mildly rotten into something horrid, and it can rob you of everything from your confidence to your inner peace to your good health. Trust me, it’s not worth it. You do not want to go there. I did, and it nearly killed me.
Drag Race went on for two grueling years without me, and the show was a raging success. Just to torture myself, I’d watch every single episode from my couch in Wellington, Florida, looking for solace in a bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos and feeling sorry for my total-loser self. I should’ve been there, but I gave up too easily. I let one asshole stand in my way and crush my dreams, and that regret haunted me every single day. I feared my friendship with Ru was over. Maybe I didn’t deserve his love after all? I also feared my career in television was over. Maybe I wasn’t good enough for it anyway? The world was passing me by. My life was passing me by. And before long, I fell into a constant state of anxiety: stressed, depressed, out of control, and full of fear.
Then, one day, I was drawing a bath for my then seven year-old daughter, Lola, and it hit me. It felt like someone had snuck up behind me with a Taser and held it to my head. Zzzzzzapppp! Zzzzzappp! Zzzzzappp! I felt a buzzing sensation that started at the back of my head and then suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. My throat was closing. My heart was racing. I could barely speak or even swallow. Lillie, my then nine-year-old, ran into the bathroom when she heard the commotion. “9-1-1,” I said. “Mommy!” she said. “What’s wrong?” She started freaking the freak out, when she saw my ghastly pale face. “Call 9-1-1!” I said again, this time a little bit louder. Heart attack, I thought.
By the time the ambulance had arrived, so did my husband, who’d raced home from tae kwon do. (Lillie had called him to come home.) He was as white as the martial arts uniform he was wearing. I’ll never forget the look of sheer horror on his face. The paramedics quickly gave me oxygen, strapped me to a gurney, and wheeled me out of the house as concerned neighbors looked on. I was certain that I was close to death and all I could think about was my girls. I couldn’t die. Not yet. I needed to be there for my daughters.
And then, about halfway to the hospital, that crippling pain just—poof!— disappeared. Just like that. I was relieved mostly, though also a little embarrassed for scaring the hell out of everyone for what was apparently not my untimely death. Girl, I know how to make an exit, but that was even a bit much for me. I remember going from thinking about my daughters growing up without a mother to cracking jokes in the back of the ambulance. “Sorry my fat ass gave you boys a hernia when you lifted my gurney up into the ambulance. Put it on my tab.” When I got to the hospital, I saw a cardiologist, who gave me a complete workup. “It’s not your heart,” he said. “It’s your stress. You had an anxiety attack.” In other words, it wasn’t my heart. It was my heart.
If you’ve never experienced an anxiety attack, lucky you. They’re horrible, awful things. Every physical sensation you feel in your body is 100 percent real—the pain, the racing heart, the labored breath. The cause, however, is unknown. In some people they are trigged by certain situations, such as large crowds or television cameras. Those aren’t my triggers, thank God. You know I’m in my element when in front of a camera, surrounded by my girls and gays. No, what triggered mine was acute stress, this feeling that my life was spinning totally out of control, because I wasn’t living it as I’d wanted to. My own life felt out of control. I felt out of control.
That day, as I was lying in my hospital bed, I decided to change my life on the spot. I was sick of sitting at home, doing nothing but eating out of boredom and depression, feeling sorry for myself. I was d-o-n-e, done. I had to be, if not for me, then for my kids. It was time to get my act together. And in the not-so-far back of my mind, I thought, If Ru ever decides to give me another shot to be on his show, I need to be ready. If I was going to be a diva again, I had to start first
calming the f*ck down, and second, believing in myself again. And if I could do those two things, then maybe, just maybe, I’d be ready for bigger opportunities whenever they came to me.
So, that day, I went home and threw away my Cheetos. Step 1, accomplished. Step 2: I hired a trainer, even though I couldn’t really afford one. (I actually worked out a deal with him that if he trained me for a cut rate and it worked, I’d tell everyone about it, proving once again when I put my mind to it, I can always make money with my mouth, especially when a sexy, sweaty man is involved.) I will shout out Marcus Nisbett and his Ncognito Fitness team in Wellington, Florida, for changing my life. Seriously. I looked better when I turned forty than I had when I was twenty. No lie. Step 3: I started to meditate, not well and not for long stretches of time, but for a few measly minutes every morning. And whenever I started getting down on myself, I looked that bitch in the mirror and said, “Oh no, you better don’t.” It’s not as if a month later, I was a skinny zen master (it took me a full year of training six days a week/one hour a day to lose fifty-five pounds), but I summoned every drop of patience I had and waited (and waited and waited) until I could see the results. (I tell you this because we live in such a culture of instant gratification that some people think if they look at a dumbbell and don’t get a bulging bicep immediately, they’ve failed. Not true. Don’t give up on yourself.) And honestly, even if my plan was to make rainbow- colored spaghetti and wear a tutu, the fact that I had a plan at all gave me the thing I was missing most: a sense of control over my life.
It’s easy to say, of course: Stay calm, believe in yourself, don’t panic when success is happening for everyone around you except you. But thanks to having lived through both sides of this, I’ve learned a few trusty techniques for keeping your mental and emotional composure under extreme stress. Use my tricks whenever you’re feeling overwhelmed, overlooked, or just plain lonely, and I swear to you, you’ll feel instantly calmer, more centered, and ready for your big moment.
Find a therapist you love.
Seriously. It doesn’t mean you’re f*cked up. In fact, it means just the opposite, because thanks to therapy, you won’t be. I started going at age sixteen, when my high school principal sent me to one on threat of expulsion, claiming I had an unusual and insatiable need for attention. Now, I hardly think that’s a problem. By the way, neither did my shrink. I loved going to therapy. I loved sorting through any shit that was on my mind, and while I’m seeing a different therapist now from the one I saw in high school, I still look forward to my regular talk sessions. Sometimes just putting words to whatever is bothering you is enough to make it stop bothering you. Something along those lines that is completely free is right at your fingertips: Google. When I would have anxiety attacks or symptoms, I would Google “anxiety symptoms” and just logging on to some of the websites that sell their programs (you don’t have to buy them to look on the sites) and browsing through the list of physical symptoms helps me see that this happens to plenty of other people and for some reason that calms my mind to know that I am not alone in this hell. Now, if you can’t afford therapy, or my Google trick doesn’t help, try my backup: yoga. It quiets the mind in much the same way, and you get to not feel guilty for once about wearing yoga pants all day, too. PS: If you can’t afford yoga class, there are some great DVDs out there that do the job just fine. Light a candle in your living room and down dog until the cows come home. Namaste, girl.
Be present.
A more highfalutin way to say that is “force consciousness.” A more low-falutin’ way to say that is “wake the f*ck up, diva.” You can’t go through your life in a haze, unless said haze is being produced by a strategically placed smoke machine at your feet. We each have so much going on in our lives that it’s easy to stop paying careful attention to what we’re doing and just start going through the motions. That’s how you lose your heart, and a diva without heart is as sad as a gay without glitter. When you find yourself going to a bad place, pull yourself out of the situation and ask yourself these three questions: What am I doing? Why am I doing this? And what is it going to get me? I sometimes even ask these questions of myself out loud, like a crazy person, but I don’t care. It helps. And you know what else? You might as well come to terms with the fact that even if you’re operating with a Buddha-level focus, you’re still going to make shitty decisions sometimes. But if you make good ones, positive ones, conscious ones 80 percent of the time, then you win.
Get some perspective.
Ru and I talk about our place in the world a lot, and whenever we get on the subject of our egos and how they play into our happiness, you could basically time how long it takes before one of us starts quoting (or misquoting) Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now. If you’ve heard us gabbing about our life philosophies on our podcasts—yeah, we usually get real deep right before our conversations turn to lace-front wigs—then you know that we’re sort of obsessed with the idea that the present is all you’ve ever got. When Ru can’t ground himself and my quickly Googled quotes aren’t helping him, he looks at Google Earth. Knowing he’s just a tiny speck in this ginormous universe brings him comfort. Me? Google Earth makes me freak out! What? I’m just a tiny speck?
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DIVAS HAVE THE POWER TO RISE ABOVE all the noise in life that drowns out everyone else’s thoughts and desires, and eventually sinks them. We stay focused when others get frazzled, lively when others get lazy, hopeful when others start to hate, and determined when others get disillusioned. And though we’re constantly and secretly working our amazingly tight little asses off to do just that, we make it look effortless to everyone else. Divas who keep the faith in themselves know that even if the phone is deafeningly silent right now, it could start ringing off the hook at any given moment. Yes, you’re that great. And when other people actually take the time to notice that, then you’ve got to be in top form, mind and body, ready to be in the spotlight immediately. If you’re not ready, you may miss your big moment, and there’ll be no one to blame for it but yourself.
Don’t worry about things you can’t change, and don’t complain about things you can. That’s the diva code. Live by it, and you’ll stay centered, so when it’s time, you’ll be able to take center stage. This quote shall now be your mantra: If you stay ready, you won’t have to get ready. You’re welcome.
Nothing matters? Nooooo! So, instead, when I need a reality check, I like to peek in on my daughters in their beds at night, after they fall asleep. The love I feel for them is what grounds me. It reminds me what really matters in this world. If you’re not sure what grounds you, then start looking for a touchstone. Every diva needs one. It may not look blingy, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a gem.
Meditate.
I’m still a newbie at this, but I’m getting better and feeling better because of it too. The growing body of scientific research on the health benefits of meditation is amazing. Studies show that just sitting quietly for a few minutes a day may help with everything from lowering stress and anxiety to preventing cancer and heart disease. I recommend it, and I hope you’re better at it than me. Basically here’s how my quiet mind looks: Ok, Michelle, clear your head. Ooooo but that nail art I just pinned on Pinterest . . . OMG! I got my blue tick on Twitter! Finally! Yummmm Zac Efron took a shirtless selfie, I am soooo glad he joined Instagram . . . OMMMMM . . . If, like me, your mind goes toward all the things you have to do and shit you have to buy, grab a pen and paper and get it all out before you close your eyes. I am the queen of to-do lists, but I don’t call them that. Too boring. Diva, we call them our ta-da! lists.
Give up the illusion of control.
I used to stress, like really almost break, over every world problem I could think of: war, terrorism, global warming, Ebola, Drag Race going on without me. At some point, you’ve got to come to terms with the fact that you can’t control every damn thing. Some things are just out of your hands, and you’ve got to make peace with that. I’m not going to personally make world peace ha
ppen. I can’t personally control what ISIS does. I can’t clean up after Fukishima with Dove soap and latex gloves. So, my only choice is to sit here and be a bundle of nerves, wracked with worry—or to make like “Adele Dazeem” and “Let It Go.” I’ve chosen to let it go, and I’ve become much calmer since giving it all up to the heavens. (And by that, I don’t mean in some Jesus-y sort of way, though if he’s your savior, hallelujah for you. If My Little Pony is your savior, then I salute, too, your Rainbow Dash. Who or what you believe in [or don’t for that matter] is your choice. Have at it.) I’ve said to the universe, “I’m giving every day to you. You’re in control of the big stuff. I’m in control of everything else.” And once I did that, I felt much less anxiety and a greater sense of calm.
Let go of little things.
Years and years ago, long before my anxiety issues, a friend of mine once told me, “You live with such strength and power that one day, you’re going to f*cking break.” He was right. When I got mad, I’d throw shit. When I’d get happy, I’d bounce across the room. And eventually I discovered that when I got super-stressed, I dropped to my knees in pain and made my daughter call 911. That day, I snapped. I really think it’s a risk factor of being a diva. As you may know, we’re prone to drama. And not just for laughs, but sometimes we really feel the joy, the sorrow, the pain, all of our emotions more deeply than other people. It can be a wonderful quality in happy times and a wretched one in trying times. But in that moment in the hospital bed, I decided to make it my new policy to take a breath and take a moment to turn down my temperature when I get frustrated or sad. There is no reason to throw a cell phone at a wall, or honk your horn in rage when some jerk cuts you off, or have a panic attack because you weren’t available to join your best friend on his TV show for the first two seasons.