Читать книгу Burnt Toast - Teri Hatcher - Страница 6

Imagine this. It’s a sunny Sunday and you’re meeting some friends for a picnic at a lovely spot that’s mere minutes from your home. (Hey, it’s a fantasy – we might as well make it convenient.) You’re in a great mood, and you even brought a yummy gourmet lunch that someone else prepared. (Again: fantasy.) When you arrive at your idyllic, balmy destination, it turns out there’s a lake, with an outcropping of rock jutting out over it to form a natural high-dive. It’s high enough to be scary, but low enough to be safe. There are screams of joy as an endless line of people jump off. Okay, now here’s where I want you to drop the fantasy and consider the situation as if it were real. The question is: Are you the kind of person who climbs right up, takes in the view for a fraction of a second, then plunges off the edge without a second thought? Or do you stand there, trying to get your guts up to jump, and after a few minutes decide it’s too scary and climb back down, admitting defeat? Are you the daredevil, or the wimp? The good news (I hope) is that I’m not here to talk about how brave the first person is, and how the second person is a pluckless chicken who should learn to face the world with guts and determination. No, the way I see it is – if you’re either of these people, you’re lucky. You know what makes you happy, you know your limits, and that’s that. But some of us are stuck in the middle, making life a whole lot more complicated than that. I’m the one who found myself standing frozen at the top of a twenty-five-foot-high rock platform looking down at a placid Sedona lake. I’m the one who stood there, not for ten minutes. Not for half an hour. I stood there for over an hour trying to convince myself to jump. Torturing myself over this pointless, supposedly fun activity. Half terrified. Half hating my own terror. Half wanting to be the kind of person who jumped. Half wanting to climb down and eat some potato salad. That’s right. Four halves. That’s what I’m talking about: a schizophrenic war with myself.

After a good hour and fifteen minutes, I finally jumped off that stupid rock. By then I was so tired of arguing with myself that I was ready to kill myself anyway, so what harm could it possibly do? I did it. I jumped. When I surfaced, there was some biker guy by the edge of the lake clapping for me. He said, “That’s the longest I’ve seen anyone stand up there looking and still jump.” That’s me. I may be scared and conflicted about something, but I go through with it. And for what? Was it fun? Are you kidding me? It was completely anticlimactic. It’s just like sex – too much deliberation kills the mood. It wasn’t even close to fun. All I gained from my jump was the right to tell myself that I hadn’t given up. I’d passed another self-imposed test. Yay me.

You know what they say – you can tell a lot about a person by how they jump off a cliff. Okay, maybe they don’t say that. But it’s not just an isolated afraid-of-heights type of thing. Not for me, anyway. It’s part of my everyday life – that top-of-a-cliff fear, hyper-analysis, internal conflict. That circular contemplation of how I feel, who I am, and who I want to be that keeps me paralyzed on cliff tops for ridiculously long periods of time. I’ve always doubted my abilities and had trouble acknowledging my own success. Take a bet I once made regarding a limousine. If you think I stood on that cliff for a long time…let me tell you, the limo thing went on for years.

It started when I first moved to Los Angeles. I was living in North Hollywood. My next-door neighbor, I’ll call him Ned^*, didn’t have a refrigerator and one day he asked to borrow ice and we became friends. (What kind of girl actually believes a guy who knocks on her door to borrow ice? Me, that’s who. Nineteen years old, fresh off the Silicon Valley chipwagon, and plopped into a city where the women were faster than the cars.) Anyway, along the way Ned and I made a deal. It was after I got my first part, playing a dancing, singing, lounge act mermaid on The Love Boat, and the agreement was that whoever of us became a star first had to rent a limousine. Then we’d spend a whole day driving around in our glamorous stretch limo. Doing what? Doing regular errands: going to McDonald’s, picking up the dry cleaning, buying ice (Ned only – he had to keep up the charade). We’d just cruise around doing nothing out of the ordinary, as if renting a limo were just another ho-hum part of our lives. Nothing was further from the truth. I could barely afford the dry cleaning that we would theoretically go to pick up. Growing up, our family car was an orange Chevy Vega with a black stripe down the middle and Neil Sedaka permanently stuck in the eight track. The only limo I’d ever been in was the one my date and his friends rented for my senior prom, and it was white, which (I now know) is absolutely unacceptable in Hollywood. To me, limo equaled private jet equaled swimming pool filled with Dom Perignon – none of which I’d ever seen, ridden in, or dove into. Extravagant beyond what I ever imagined I could experience.

When push came to shove, I wasn’t good for the limo bet. When I had my TV Guide debut for a short stint on a soap opera, Capitol, Ned said, “You made it! You’re in TV Guide. Looks like you owe me a limo ride.” But I shook my head. No way could I accept that I’d been successful at anything. “Not yet. I haven’t made it yet.” In fact, I kept my waitress job at an Italian joint in the Valley and worked there after filming the soap opera all day. Time passed, and eventually I got my first part in a feature movie, The Big Picture. Well, when Ned heard the news, he said, “Okay. This is the big time. You’re in a movie, and it even has the word ‘big’ in the title. Now where’s our limo?” But still I resisted. It became an ongoing joke between us – when I got my second and third movies, when I got cast in Lois & Clark, I always argued, “I’m a small fish in a big movie!” or found some other reason that it didn’t count – why I still hadn’t “made it.” It may sound like I was an ambitious go-getter, never satisfied, always needing to climb to the next rung. But I was actually just full of doubt. I was too worried that it would all disappear overnight, that the acting police would come pounding on my door at 3 A.M. with documents revealing that my only acting education was a six-week summer program at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, demanding my Screen Actors Guild card back and accusing me of fraudulent claims of talent and attempted mugging (the face kind, not the purse-snatching kind). I couldn’t revel in my success – even when it came. Sort of like finally jumping off the cliff into that lake in Sedona. By the time I managed to get there, I was long past enjoying it.

Self-doubt runs deep. I’ve been this way my whole life. It’s hard to pinpoint why. It’s not like your parents sit down and figure out the best way to screw you up and then embark on an organized execution of the plan. Sometimes I wish that life could be more like golf. I know, I know, if there are two things the world doesn’t need any more of it’s types of wine openers and analogies about golf, but bear with me. Unless you take the game super-seriously (you know, the type who throws his club at the duck that quacked during his tee shot), which I don’t, each shot is a brand-new opportunity, totally disconnected from the shot before and the shot after. Each hole is a new chance to perform and succeed and be a great golfer. Golf is zen like that. But that’s not how life works. Small decisions, occasional traumas, incidental inconsistencies – everything adds up in odd, unpredictable, conflicted ways. Each moment is weighed down by its own set of baggage from the past, and we’re messy bundles of self-protection and reaction to our uneven, un-choreographed experiences.

In early high school, when I was taking geometry, I remember showing my math-genius dad a problem I’d solved correctly. I probably hoped he’d be proud that I was learning a little bit of his field. He looked at the paper and said, “You know, there are three other ways to solve that problem.” I said, “I got it right, didn’t I?” I wasn’t really interested in alternate solutions. I’d managed to do it the way the teacher had taught us and that was enough. He handed the paper back to me and said, “You’re a brick.” He didn’t mean it in the jolly old English use of “brick,” as a dependable chap. Nor was he referring to my abs. He went on, “You should be a sponge, but you’re a brick.” He meant that I wasn’t as open-minded or curious as he wanted me to be. I had shown my dad my correctly done math homework, and he in turn found something wrong with me. Getting the right answer wasn’t enough.

He was also the kind of dad who always beat me at chess and ping-pong. I think he just never found the balance of trying to teach me to be good at something, and realizing that since I was a child it was highly unlikely that I’d ever beat him at anything (he’s changed as a grandfather). I wonder if he thought he was building my character by continually reminding me that I wasn’t good enough to win, or if he thought losing shouldn’t matter to me. But it did. As a kid, if you lose enough times you quit trying. You have to be taught the balance between the effort it takes to improve and a realistic view of your capabilities.

My mother, on the other hand, thought everything I did was perfect. She thought constant praise was the way to show love and build selfesteem. But if you’re perfect in your mother’s eyes, imagine how far you fall when you find out you aren’t perfect in the eyes of the world. And no kid is, not even me, though if you look up “goody-goody” in the dictionary, you’ll find my name. So I had one parent teaching me to lose and the other teaching false confidence. Parents can fall into traps like this. If yours were anything like mine, they didn’t mean to be harmful. I learned to be a loser, to manage failure, to expect that even my best efforts wouldn’t fulfill expectations, and that I would never be good enough at anything. Ironically, I became great at having that attitude.

When I was fourteen or fifteen, I auditioned for the San Francisco Ballet. I went with some of the other girls in my dance class. I knew they were all better than I was, and, not surprisingly, I didn’t get in. I still have the rejection letter. Why save it, you might wonder. Was it that important to me? Was I that heartbroken? Not exactly. But the scrapbook I made while in high school had a section titled “Failures,” and that’s where I kept the letter of rejection, along with a few photos of ex-boyfriends. How’s that for being a good loser? I kept a record of my losses the way others might carefully preserve their ribbons and medals. Like I wanted to have a physical place to affirm the notion that I was not good. (Can you say therapy? Don’t worry, I got there eventually.)

I may have been a brick instead of a sponge, but I still ended up a maths major in college. (Well, junior college. I’d been planning to transfer to Cal Poly, but I never made it. Who wouldn’t sideline calculus for a chance to work for Captain Stubing on Love Boat?) Maybe that’s why I tend to look at my life as if it’s a problem to be solved. I calculate all the possible scenarios – or at least all the bad ones – analyzing, judging, protecting, defending. Like there must be a right answer if only I could find it. But there isn’t and I can’t. Life isn’t two plus two equals four. I wish it were that simple and clear cut.

You only get one life, and it’s supposed to be fun, isn’t it? Of course we all have to work, but isn’t the point of working hard to succeed and to use that success to secure yourself a well-earned, hearty chunk of fun? Having fun is letting go. Letting go of all that analyzing and planning and second-guessing yourself. But it can be really hard to do. In small doses, cautious doubt is healthy – you keep things in perspective and don’t set yourself up for disappointment. But I let it get out of control. And sometimes that doubt creeps into other parts of my life – from my friendships to my social life to exercise to work.

It’s really easy for me to foresee my own failure. If I’m trying out for a part I tell myself, They’ll want someone younger. Or blonde. Or left-handed. Basically, they won’t want me. But I still try as hard as I can. It’s all a silent, internal battle that I try not to let have a visible effect unless, or until, something brings it to the surface. Around the same time I was up for a part in Desperate Housewives, I was also up for a part in another ABC show – a sitcom. A sitcom can be an easier gig than an hour-long show, at least in terms of the work schedule and hours. So I figured that even though I loved the Desperate Housewives script, the sitcom was my top choice since it jibed better with my priorities as a single mom.

I went in to test for the sitcom first, doing a scene in front of some network executives from ABC. I felt comfortable; people laughed; I thought I did great. That night, I waited for the phone to ring and…nothing. Nothing that night. Nothing the next day. I was having a nervous breakdown. When I finally heard back, I hadn’t gotten the part. Okay, that’s happened before – just another memento for the failures page. But what killed me was that word came back that somebody in the room thought I had an attitude. Like I had a chip on my shoulder or thought I was too fancy to audition. Well, that sent me reeling. I couldn’t believe it. It was so untrue. It’s even hard to share this story with you because I worry some of you will believe I did have an attitude – you remember that feeling you had when you were a kid and your parents thought you were lying about something and you weren’t, but there was no way you were going to change their minds?

When I was fifteen I was at my boyfriend’s house. My mom came to pick me up in our Chevy Vega, and before we drove a block, she pulled over and insisted that I’d been smoking pot. Well, I hadn’t and I told her so. Hell, I didn’t even know what pot was. (I wasn’t kidding about that goody-goody thing.) But she kept insisting she could smell it on my breath. What happened to being innocent until proven guilty? I guess that constitutional right went out the Vega window and was replaced with her lack of confidence that I was an honest person whom she could trust to just answer a question directly. No, somehow I’d become a plotting, manipulative bad seed and it was my mother’s obligation to shuck me out. Well, I did prove my innocence by producing a tube of lip gloss. Yes, it turned out to be the dreaded grape-flavored Bonne Bell Lip Smacker. That sweet smell she was associating with pot was just lip balm. Then again, I was guilty of too much kissing.

Not being believed is a real emotional trigger for me. I was more upset about that than about not getting the sitcom job. I really wanted that job, and I’d been excited to audition for it. How had I given off an arrogant vibe? How could I be so disconnected from the people around me? Those questions spiraled into worse thoughts. It was horrifying to be perceived as arrogant or presumptuous. Ugh. I must be an awful person to create that impression and to be so oblivious to it. The thoughts went on and on like that. Blaming myself and only myself. The upshot is that I cried for 18 hours straight. That’s right – it’s not a typo. (Unless it says 180, in which case it is a typo – it should read 18.) Again, I wasn’t crying about not getting the part, but about a lifetime of feeling misunderstood.

Ever cried for eighteen hours straight? I looked like someone had given me an un-facial. My face was pink and puffy. My eyes were so swollen I couldn’t open them. I looked like a joint advertisement for Kleenex and cold medicine. And that’s when the phone rang and I was told to come in that day to test for Desperate Housewives. I said, “I can’t.” How could I audition? I was ready to jump off a bridge, or at least a rock outcropping even higher than the one I’d faced in Sedona. I felt limp and wounded and hideous and far too embarrassed to walk into a room with most of the same ABC executives to go through the humiliation and misunderstanding all over again. So I told them I couldn’t do it unless they postponed the audition. It was a risky move – what if it made them think I had even more of an attitude? – and one that could have easily lost me the part.

Was that the right thing to do, or was it self-destructive? Well, of course it would have been nice to be able to pull myself together, but that sure didn’t feel like an option the moment the phone rang. If I walked into that room I had to be ready. I had to do it without sabotaging myself, without the poisonous cocktail of humiliation and anger that was still in my system like a bad hangover. As it happened, they were able to reschedule the test for a week later, and I took the opportunity to make everything right. Before I went in, I sent cookies to everyone who’d been at the sitcom audition, with a letter saying, “I don’t know what your perception of that meeting was, but I was very grateful for the opportunity to audition, and I wish you good luck with the project.” That made me feel better – a little “heard” and a little more in control, so by the time the Desperate Housewives audition rolled around, I was ready to do it in the right spirit.

As I waited my turn to meet with the producers, I watched the sun set outside the glass windows on the top floor of the ABC building and thought about how life is beautiful and full of opportunities and how, if you try, you can make it have the zen of a golf shot. Last week was horrible, but this week doesn’t have to be connected to it. I had a brand-new shot, and I was going to make it good. I was determined to make sure there were no false impressions. So I went into that meeting, in jeans and a t-shirt, with no makeup on, and let them see who I really was. Not a glamorous Bond girl. Not a back-stabbing villain like the one I played in Spy Kids. Just me, a less-than-perfect woman and a devoted mother, closer to Susan Mayer than any other character I’d ever played.

So that worked. Deep breath. What does this all add up to? More than a jumble, I hope. What I’m trying to say is that life doesn’t move in straight lines. We have lots of chances to start again if we look hard enough. We’re imperfect and conflicted and puffy-eyed. We’re alternately burdened and strengthened by our pasts, but we always have the power to rebound. We have another shot on the golf course. A new job. A fresh morning. A chance to ask forgiveness. Another picnic with another cliff. We may have doubts, but we control the present. We always have the choice to move forward with hope and confidence.

That’s all fine and good. But getting the part didn’t exactly change me. The first episode of Desperate Housewives was very well received. There was lots of press and buzz – everything you want for a new show. I should have been on top of the world. Instead, I found myself standing in front of one of the producers urgently clutching his sleeve. I was thinking, Don’t do this. Turn around. Teri, let go of his sleeve. But the words came tumbling out before I could stop them. “Listen,” I said, “I have to talk to you. I have no idea what I’m doing. I can’t do this.” Not a brilliant move, right? I’m pretty sure that Rule Number One in the book How to Keep Your Job is Don’t Tell Your Boss You’re Incapable of Doing That Job. I definitely didn’t want him to fire me, but I was afraid I would fail. I know I work hard. Lots of thought and preparation goes into what I do. And I pretty much feel like I know what I’m doing (even though it took twenty years and some days I still feel like a fraud). But remember that math problem my dad thought I should rework? The lesson that taught me was that even if I was doing my best, the best that could be expected for my age and experience, it still wasn’t good enough. I would lose. I would always lose. So I prepared myself for people not liking my work. This attitude is self-protective – even if the worst happens, at least I saw it coming.

Have you ever done that – told your guests, “I just threw this dinner together,” or warned a tennis opponent, “I’ve only had a few lessons”? Even announced to your boss or anyone else that you’re going to fail? Or that you’re not going to meet that deadline, or make that spare, or find that secret passageway leading into the pyramid? (Hey, I don’t know what you do for a living.) Well, it’s a preemptive declaration. There. You’ve said it. You’re going to fail. Now everyone has been duly notified. They may think less of you, but not less than you think of yourself. In my case, I guess I’m not the first insecure actress that producer had ever worked with, because he knew exactly what to do. He took me by the shoulders and calmly told me to repeat the following mantra every morning in front of the mirror: “I’m Teri Hatcher. The bad part is over, and only good things are to come.” Great. Even more lines to memorize.

If the mirror mantras work for you, great. By all means chant away. Me, I’m not wild about gazing at myself in the mirror. Still, the producer was right. Something had to be done. I wanted to have a more positive outlook, but it’s tough to uproot part of your personality. Most of us don’t change our personalities on a regular basis, and I’m already at war with myself enough of the time. But every so often life presents you with an opportunity to make a real change, and if you’re open and ready, you seize the day.

My fortieth birthday was a month before the Golden Globe award ceremony. To celebrate, six of my girlfriends and I went on a road trip to Napa Valley, the beautiful wine country outside San Francisco. I’d presented an award at the Emmys the year before, and in my thank-you basket, along with more luxury cosmetics than even an almost-forty-year-old actress could ever need, were a couple of gift certificates. One was for a lunch at BV Vineyard, a winery and vineyard with a tasty grill in a big Craftsman house, and another was for a couple nights at the Calistoga Ranch. And so, like any self-respecting bargain-lover, I built our trip around the coupons.

It was a great weekend, and not just because we had a cake with candles and sang “Happy Birthday” to me with every meal at every restaurant. (By the time it was over I’d run out of wishes – I’d used up world peace and Emerson’s health and happiness and finding true love and was down to things like wishing my dogs would stop shedding in the kitchen.) What truly made the weekend great was the company. My friends are all strong women with distinct personalities and opinions. They’re bossy and outspoken and downright outraged that I don’t have a boyfriend. And they aren’t exactly best friends with each other. I don’t mean that they don’t get along, but as I looked at them all in a group like that, I realized that this wasn’t a gathering of old school chums. The group was unique to me. They were my friends, and each one was here to make my weekend special. I felt a little awkward, being the center like that, but I was moved that they were there for me.

We all had adjoining rooms in the inn, and each room had a terrace and a hot tub. It was pretty decadent. Lucky for me the coupons were like the game show prizes I’d always dreamed of winning as a child. And you only turn forty once. The day of my birthday, we took a long walk up a quiet Napa road dotted with wineries. We talked and laughed and whenever my girlfriends saw a winery with the proprietor’s name on it they threatened to knock on the door and set me up with him. (“How does ‘Teri Hatcher Gallo’ sound?” Ha ha.) Later that night, tired from the sun and the wine, I climbed into my hot tub for a soak. I lounged there, naked, lazy, and middle-aged. (Ugh. Did I just say that word? Please God, say it isn’t so.) If I looked either way I could catch glimpses of my friends – one stepping out to hang a towel on her balcony, another sitting with a book and a glass of wine, a third crawling into her own hot tub. I closed my eyes, sank low in the steamy water, and let myself float. I was so content. I felt happy and complete. It was a great moment.

Then I started thinking. I was forty years old. Landmark birthdays are the perfect time to reflect on where you are and whether you have the life you want. (They’re also a good time to buy people lottery tickets, which I like to give as birthday presents. Big birthdays deserve big hope. So forty lottery tickets stuffed into a fabulous purse or vase or jewelry box can be fun.) Forty is a loud reminder that time is always running out. You’re halfway home. You’re on the way down. Sure, when I’m sixty I’ll say I had no idea what a spring chicken I was at forty. But I remember when my parents turned forty and how old I thought they were. I may not feel old inside, but I’m definitely the twelve-year-old me’s definition of old. I’m biologically more or less halfway to death. It’s true and it’s no fun at all.

So I was thinking all this in the hot tub, and the thought that won out was that I should feel this good more of the time. We all should. We should feel relaxed, happy, and loved most of the time. But a girl can’t bring six close friends to enjoy the benefits of grape-based antioxidant beverages amidst gorgeous, expansive vineyard scenery every weekend of her life. We each have to figure out how to capture that joy in our everyday lives. And that’s when I started thinking about all the time I was spending planning for failure. All that time spent assuming I was going to be the worst housewife on network television. Or thinking I was going to meet a no-good guy. Or telling myself I couldn’t play ping-pong or cliff-jump or bounce off a water trampoline. Turning forty was a time to reassess, and to honestly address what I had to fix. Through the hardest years of my life – a disintegrating marriage, a stalled career, and a mortgage I couldn’t afford – when I felt like I’d pretty much failed at Life 101 – I always prided myself on being a great survivor. But I didn’t want to spend another decade of my life preparing myself for the next disaster. I was missing out on the good stuff because I was spending all my time dwelling on the bad.

It seems like we all do this. We worry and plan and hedge our bets. To some extent this is part of building a life. It makes sense when you’re young, your life isn’t stable, and you’re making decisions that determine your future. But as we get older, we need to start accepting and relishing where we’ve landed. We need to start reaping the benefits of the hard work that got us here (even as that hard work continues to plague us). I’m not talking about getting a built-in Jacuzzi for bliss-on-demand (though that would be nice). If you want to feel this satisfied with your life as it is, you have to shift your perspective. You have to spend less time doubting yourself and spend more time having hope and faith in the life you’ve worked so hard to create. Now is the time, no matter what decade you’re facing. It’s time to be a good winner.

When it comes to changing yourself there are two schools of thought. You can work from the inside, trying to understand the history of all your feelings and how you got to be the way you are. Then, eventually, you can try to use those realizations to change your life. Or you can start from the outside, acting the way you want to be, even if you don’t feel it yet. Eventually it will sink in. I opted for the latter strategy. My mind is stronger than my habits. (Isn’t it? Shouldn’t it be?) I decided to watch for my moments of doubt, and to break the habit by sheer force of will.

Near where I live, there’s a hiking trail that runs through the mountains. It’s a pretty popular place, particularly among the dog-owning set, who park along our street every day. This trail was actually part of the reason I bought my house. I figured I’d have no excuse not to exercise if there was a lovely mountain walk practically in my backyard. So I got on an exercise kick recently and decided to run the trail. It’s three miles long, and it’s very hilly. A few of the hills are extremely long – up to a mile of gradual to steep incline without a break. Some days when I’m running up the trail, I have to stop and walk for a while. And I’ve noticed that whenever I do that, I start telling myself that I’ve failed. The whole time I’m walking, it’s God, you’re so lame. You can’t even make it up this hill. But come on! Shouldn’t I be complimenting myself for not sitting on the couch eating corn chips? Or congratulating myself for making it as far as I did? Or even admiring the view? I could be thinking any number of positive and healthy things, and instead I’m beating myself up. Why would I think I’d be able to walk out the front door and run three miles up big hills? That’s something you have to work up to. I struggled with this, trying not to beat myself up mentally as I challenged myself physically. On the hills, I started telling myself, You’re new to this. You’re not allowed to think bad thoughts. (At the very least, it was better than talking to myself in the mirror like that producer wanted me to do.)

Some people just run up the hill as far as they can and quit when they’re tired. But if you’re a searcher like me, every hill is an opportunity for self-examination. Being a searcher-type is good and bad. The good side is, we examine our behavior. Why did I do that? What does it mean? We judge ourselves, and we judge how we move through the world. We use this self-examination to try to better ourselves. The bad side to being a searcher is losing out on the simple pleasures that the world has to offer, and setting ourselves up for failure by judging all the time. Did I set myself up to fail by picking this hill? Or could I make it an opportunity for learning and watching myself grow? I wanted to be able to enjoy my own limitations and achievements. Lucky for me, another opportunity lay directly ahead.

The Golden Globes were approaching. I’d been nominated, and I found myself getting excited. I wasn’t quite ready to imagine myself winning. But even for a pessimist-in-reform, it was still a big night. I mean, I’d never gotten recognition for my work before. (At least not since being voted Most Likely to Become a Solid Gold Dancer in my high school yearbook.) And possibly even more exciting was the dressing up. Emerson really liked that part, and she helped me embrace the princess aspect of the evening. I mean, whether I came home with the prince or not, at least I was going to the ball, and that was new for me.

If you get caught up in it, there can be a lot of pressure on how you look at those award ceremonies. When you walk across the red carpet, the focus is on you. You’re putting yourself out there to be judged. And even if you’re going to lose, which I was fully prepared to do, when they show that shot of you in the audience clapping and trying to smile graciously for whomever just beat you out, you want to look good. The closest thing I can compare it to is getting married. Not that an award ceremony has the love- and life-changing intensity of a wedding. But getting ready – the hair, the makeup, the dress – is a similarly massive undertaking, threatening to take away from the joy of the event if anything goes wrong. This was a great opportunity to try out my new optimism and to have faith that everything would come out right.

My new stab at optimism didn’t rid me of the cold-feet jitters. (Or, more appropriately, the night-before-the-ceremony nervousness.) I can’t say I had a great night’s sleep. I dreamt I had to save Emerson from bombs (real bombs, not the Hollywood kind). It was the worst kind of dream, but at least I didn’t dream that my lipstick was the wrong color. It’s nice to think that my dream-self wasn’t worrying about superficial disasters or winning or losing. My dream-self seemed to get that this award ceremony wasn’t the be-all and end-all. The only thing as bad as the end of the world is the actual end of the world. Anyway, I woke up relieved to be in a bomb-free zone, and instead of gathering disaster supplies, I prepared a breakfast buffet of bagels, smoked salmon, and fruit, turned on music, and lit some candles. Soon friends started arriving. I was determined to savor the moment.

Later, as my hair and makeup stylist (hereafter referred to as Miss Gorgeous) worked on my hair, he asked me if I’d prepared a speech. Ah, the speech. Hell yeah, it had occurred to me. For the last twenty years. I’d always planned to expound on how I got somewhere from nowhere, thanking the long list of people who’d helped me along the way. It was like imagining who’d weep at your funeral, but way better. Now that I was nominated, however, I couldn’t bring myself to plan for actually winning. These awards are so subjective. It’s not like a horse race, where the fastest horse wins fair and square. To compare different actresses in completely different roles on completely different shows isn’t really meaningful. That’s why the cliché that the real honor is being nominated is actually true. Just being recognized at that level for your work is a huge honor. Winning is sort of icing. But icing tastes good. (Especially when it’s homemade.) Even more tasty is noncaloric guilt-free metaphoric icing. So why couldn’t I enjoy it? Admitting to myself that I actually wanted to win felt embarrassing. I couldn’t wrangle one word into the beginnings of a speech. It made me uncomfortable – I felt ashamed for even coming near the thought. I didn’t want winning to mean that other people lost. Winning felt like snatching the golden-brown, buttered toast for myself and leaving the others to take the sad, blackened end. I felt guilty. I was much more comfortable eating the burnt toast, and in this night’s case, washing it down with the wine they set in the middle of the tables. And there was another part to it, which was that wanting to win would mean wanting to be validated. And admitting that I needed others to tell me I was good was even harder to stomach.

Then I realized that this was another chance (they were coming at me right and left) to change my old patterns of thought. I was forty years old. I was up for a prize and I wasn’t even letting myself hope I might win. I’d spent forty years chickening out from winning and it was time to stop. We absolutely have to take time to reconsider these habits as we age. The defense mechanisms that worked for you as a kid, protecting you from disappointment, can hold you back as you get older. You have to ask yourself: What good is this habit doing me now? What is it protecting me from anyway? If you don’t win a prize, do you feel better just because you never thought you had a shot? I’d just been given an exciting honor – I was a Golden Globe nominee! – but I hadn’t spent a moment feeling proud or hopeful or glad for the attention. I was getting in my own way, using this habit of protecting myself instead of looking for courage and hope. Pessimism gets you nowhere.

As I finished getting ready, Emerson poked her head into the room. “Mommy, I hope you win!” she said. It takes time to end up with issues like mine that can hold you back. Kids just want things or don’t want them. Their desires aren’t loaded with “How dare I feel good about myself?” or “How dare I think I might be able to do something well?” In this case, Emerson just wanted me to win, plain and simple. If I did win, she wanted to know if the award could go on her bookshelf in her bedroom.

Some part of me did feel deserving that day. I certainly didn’t think I was better than anyone else. But I thought at least I deserved a shot at winning. I was tired of being a gracious loser. So I tried it out. I was a little tentative, but as Miss Gorgeous clipped extra chunks of fake hair to my head, I told myself, It sure would be nice to win. I’d like that.

you know what? I did win that Golden Globe, and when I did, it felt great. Actually, it felt shocking. Actually, I have no idea how it felt. I was too busy worrying about tripping, right there in front of Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood and every actor I’ve ever admired my whole life, and thinking what the hell am I doing up on this stage…and then realizing, suddenly, that despite my newfound optimism, I still hadn’t written a speech. You know that recurring dream you have where you discover that you’ve forgotten to write your report just as the teacher calls you up to the front of the class? Well, it felt like that, except that my “class” was fifty million TV viewers and it wasn’t a dream. (At least I had a great dress, which is more than I’m usually wearing in those dreams.) My acceptance of the award and the improvised, miraculously coherent speech that went with it were a blur. I felt completely in the moment, caught in a dizzy, adrenaline-fueled whirlwind. (And if you think that just because I’m in this business it means nothing to stand near Clint Eastwood, you’re dead wrong.) It was a real moment for me – not just because I won, but because I’d let myself hope for it.

And do you know how much that positive attitude had to do with me winning? Absolutely nothing. The votes had already been tallied and the winner’s name placed in an envelope days earlier. But the point is, just shifting my attitude let me enjoy the whole experience more. Even if I hadn’t won, I would have had a better time because I wasn’t undermining my chances at winning in the days and hours before the event. But feeling like a loser can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you tell your boss that you suck enough times, he might actually start to believe you. (That jerk.) If you think you’re going to fail, and it turns out you’re right, well whoop de do. You’re right. Congratulations. You’ve succeeded in becoming the loser you always thought you’d be. Better to behave like a winner, no matter how things turn out.

A few months after the awards I went whale watching in Mexico. My girlfriend and I and our daughters were in a small boat in the middle of the ocean when a humpback whale swam right up to us and started romancing us by swimming around and under the boat. At one point he lifted himself straight out of the water, only four feet away. He held there, a third of his body up in the air, then slowly turned toward us. We were all leaning over the edge toward him, reaching out with our hands in hope of petting him. He looked at us – looked like he was seeing our souls and memorizing them. Then he went back under and continued to swim gently around the boat. Our guide asked if anyone wanted to get in the water. This was my one chance to swim with a humpback whale, and before I could chicken out I quickly said, “Okay, I will.” I put on my mask and hopped in the water with him. My mask instantly filled with water. Suddenly, I was in a massive ocean with a forty-five-foot beast, blind as a bat, and most likely surrounded by hungry, man-eating sharks. I had a panic attack. Hyperventilating, I flailed back to the boat and scrambled out of the water as fast as I could. No sooner had I taken the mask off and caught my breath than the whale swam away. I was crushed. For all my recent talk about being in the moment and believing in myself, I’d wimped out.

Then, lo and behold, the whale came back and swam alongside the boat again. Our guide couldn’t believe I was being offered a second date (and she didn’t even know my lousy track record with dating). But this time I wasn’t as quick to the draw. I was still a little shaken, and I stalled for time. The whale swam away before I even got in the water. As I watched it go I thought to myself, God, Teri, you just blew the chance of a lifetime – twice in a row. The friend I was with didn’t want to get in, so she wasn’t failing herself. But I’d really wanted to be the person who swam with the whale, and I couldn’t do it.

Then, as if in a fairy tale where wishes happen in threes, the whale came back to give me one last chance to conquer my fear. Our guide was now completely awestruck – this had never happened. I knew that if I didn’t make this work I’d never forgive myself. I put on my mask and jumped in the water.

And there I was, floating four feet from a thirty-ton whale. I took a breath and held it as I dove down under water to be with the whale and feel the surge of his body swimming past me. I didn’t touch him – I just watched in awe and fascination. It was even more powerful than I’d hoped. I stayed in the water several minutes with the whale until he swam away, for good this time. After I crawled back onto the boat I was so moved that I couldn’t speak for half an hour. When I finally came out of my daze, I said to the guide, “Am I making too much out of this?” But she told me I wasn’t exaggerating how beautiful the moment was. I couldn’t believe the whale gave me as many chances as I needed. And I saw that with a little practice, and a few bonus opportunities, I really could be the person I wanted to be.

Nothing happens overnight. And you can’t be your ideal self every moment of every day. But if you see something in yourself that isn’t working for you, and it’s keeping you from being as happy as you want to be, you can chip away at it. The results may not be instantaneous, but even changing your intentions is a powerful action. Choosing the positive just feels better.

If I sound bossy, please keep in mind, I’m saying this as much to remind myself as to tell you.

Twining borty vally did have an effect on me – and it wasn’t buying a convertible. (Actually, I do kind of want a convertible. But that doesn’t help my point so well.) I didn’t change overnight. I mean, I still fear I’m never going to find someone to love who loves me back in spite of and because of all my dark, complicated, insecure places. I tell myself that I’m too old, or that anyone who’s good is already taken, or that he won’t be able to deal with me having a child, or that he’ll have too much baggage from an earlier marriage. I still prepared myself to not get nominated for an Emmy even though I did. And as I sat in the Shrine Auditorium watching people receive their Emmys I still had to battle that voice telling me I didn’t belong.

Just a few weeks ago, Emerson and I got take-away California Pizza Kitchen (uh, her choice) for lunch. Our dining room table was covered with scripts and business papers, so we decided to eat in what we call “the white living room.” It’s kind of a fancy room, but I don’t want it to be one of those fancy rooms that people never use. So we sat on the fluffy white rug and ate our pizza over the coffee table. After a while, Emerson looked over at a side table that has my Golden Globe on it. She said, “I love looking at your Golden Globe.” And then she said, “Maybe next year you’ll win the Emmy.” She loves that winged statue – I have to admit, it is pretty. It’s so easy for Emerson to hope for my success. This time I took my cue from her. I didn’t say, “No, I’m not going to win.” I took a beat, then said, “Sure, maybe,” and left it there.

And what about that limo ride that I promised to my friend Ned if I ever made it? Well, now, after all that’s happened with Desperate Housewives, I know for certain that I owe him that swank ride. It’s so long past due, the limo should be upgraded to a Lear jet. We still haven’t done it. I blame it on Ned. He lives across the country now with a wife and two kids and a perfectly decent refrigerator, so it’d be quite a road trip for either of us. But little by little, I convince myself I’d deserve it. Maybe when I’m fifty.