MELISA ETHERIDGE reveals what she’s glad she learned to let go
“Fear. And the sense that I am not good enough-not good enough for my partner, my career, my kids. Before, I needed to make everybody else feel good, so nobody would look at me. I’d take on everybody’s problems and make their life happy, so they didn’t see I wasn’t good enough. Now I can go to a photo shoot with 70 zillion people, and I don’t have to make them think I’m the greatest. I can just be myself and trust that I’m okay.” Life
Author: Betty Hoeffner
Tina Fey
TINA FEY
“I was a mean girl. I had a gift for coming up with the meanest possible thing to say in any situation. Well, at my high school — a huge public school in a suburb of Philadelphia — there were a few girls who were kind of “famous.” Everyone knew who they were dating and what parties they went to. They weren’t the prettiest girls or the ones with money. They were just randomly anointed. I was an honor student, and I was in a ton of activities — the newspaper, drama club, the tennis team … My friends and I didn’t really date or go to cool parties, so we made jokes about those who did. To be honest, we felt kind of rejected, and when you don’t feel confident about yourself, you may look for flaws in somebody else to make you feel better. Looking back, I can see the mean-girl thing for what it is: a waste of energy. But that’s not much comfort if you’re the target. The hardest thing is to free yourself from caring what someone says about you. But it brings big freedom if you do it.”
Ben Stiller
BEN STILLER wants you to treat each other kindly
“I was pretty insecure [around girls] because I had bad skin. Not really bad skin, but I had pimples. It affected my sense of who I was. It’s such a silly thing when you look back, but at the time, it drove me crazy. …..[High School] can be brutal because of the cliques and the way kids treat each other. But stick it out — it gets better. Things that seem like they mean the world at the moment, you’ll look back on and realize weren’t that important. It sounds like an after — school special, but it’s true.
Paula Abdul
PAULA ABDUL
“I was like any other teenage girl who wanted to be someone I’m not, and that was defined by what boys liked and what images of beauty the media perpetrated. Plus, when I was 7 years old, my ballet teacher said that I didn’t have a dancer’s body. That rang in my head as “I’m not normal; my body is wrong.” It affected me in profound ways. I’m a strong girl, but I’ve always been a believer that when I can’t manage, I surrender. I get myself to a place where someone can help me. I’m prouder of overcoming bulimia than of anything else I’ve done – more than having a number one record or selling out a concert. Celebrate yourself, embrace your struggle, and don’t walk with shame, because nothing is as bad as you probably think it is. When I got through bulimia, I stopped living as a prisoner. Let your body fall into its natural state. Every minute you stay enthralled with a diet or get caught up in how you think you should look, you lose, because you’re not enjoying life.”
Queen Latifah
QUEEN LATIFAH
“It was a very vulnerable time going from being insecure about my body and who I am to becoming comfortable with me. I had to tune out what the hell everybody else had to say about who I was. When I was able to do that, I felt free.” Parade
“I wish every woman would love themselves and embrace what they were given naturally. I’ve been fortunate to have the career I want without changing what I look like. If [producers] ever demanded I lose so much weight that I’m not even a remnant of who I am, then hell no, I’m not going to do that. Besides, there’d be a lot of girls out there who wouldn’t be inspired had I not been that girl with a little more weight who carried herself with that self-confidence.” In Style
Jason Dooley
JASON DOOLEY
“A girl’s smile is always going to catch my attention. Every girl has a great smile, so if you just show it, I’ll notice it for for sure. But mostly it’s about being yourself. I don’t like it when girls try to be too funny or overly flirty.”
Phylicia Rashad
PHYLICIA RASHAD
“Don’t be preoccupied with looking for approval from other people. You’re never going to be anybody but who you are. And who you are is greater than you imagine. The way that you think creates our reality. It’s very powerful. I would say to a young girl who is feeling insecure about her looks to stop. Who you are is not the way you look; who you are is who you are on the inside. And there is not a mirror in the world that can show you that. It is beautiful, it is amazing, it is awesome.’ Oprah Show
Harvey Keitel
HARVEY KEITEL
“I won’t let anyone tell my son not to cry. I don’t want anything to interfere with his expressing what he’s feeling. As a kid I was told to shush, and as a result it’s taken me a lifetime to be able to speak. I had to hide it – you hammer it down until you can’t think anymore, you can’t speak anymore, and your inner world is in retreat. You can’t function, and you stutter, which I did as a boy. You will stutter not only vocally, but inwardly. You will hesitate, you will fumble, you will futz, and you will deny the truth because the truth is too difficult to handle. It’s hard to select which situations to run away from once you become a runner, so you hide from everything.”
Madonna
MADONNA has fears too:
“Oh sure, I’ve got lots of fears. My job is to conquer my fears. The irony of being a performer is that I have huge insecurities. People are shocked to hear that I think my legs are fat or I don’t like the way I look. We all have insecurities. We’d be lying if we said we didn’t. I’m so not the Material Girl now. There were many years when I thought fame, fortune, and public approval would bring me happiness. But one day you wake up and realize they don’t. Each of us is responsible for everything that happens in our lives. When good things happen — we win an award, meet the love of our lives, or get a promotion – we take ownership of that. But when bad things happen-we get fired or we divorce-we often don’t take responsibility. We call it something that just happened. I now understand that just as we can draw the positive, we can draw the negative.”
When asked what she knew for sure, Madonna said, “That there are no mistakes or accidents. That consciousness is everything and that all things begin with a thought. That we are responsible for our own fate, we reap what we sow, we get what we give, we pull in what we put out.” O Magazine
Uma Thurman
UMA THURMAN
“One of the things that struck me at fashion shows is how great these incredibly thin women look in photographs but how in real life it’s too thin. They would be more attractive if they were a little heavier. And I actually don’t think this desire to be rail thin is as pandemic aesthetically as the fashion world presents it to be. I don’t think men prefer women to look like that.”