God Bless This Mess(57)
Once again, my heart was broken. But I couldn’t say it out loud.
We stopped doing press, which meant that no one in the public got to hear my side of the story as it was happening.
Chapter 18
Losing Faith
Back in LA, I started to question why I’d gotten engaged at all. Why had I put myself in a position of so much scrutiny? Why had I allowed myself to become the Bachelorette in the first place? And why had everything gotten so messed up?
I blamed myself for caring more about other people’s expectations than my own feelings. My own wants.
It was the same thing I had done in the pageant world—the very same thing that led to me losing.
In relationships, I did the same thing. I went along with things, or let things go too far, because I wanted a boy to love me. I wanted to be accepted. I wanted to prove I was good. I wanted to be admired.
I treated TV the same way. I wanted to be the good Bachelorette. I wanted to be loved not just by the men but by America. So I followed advice and ignored my gut instincts.
I didn’t guard my heart.
I knew I needed help, but I didn’t know how to ask.
Thankfully, sometimes in life you don’t have to. Help finds you.
*
Right after I found out—along with everybody else—about Jed’s girlfriend, which was a few weeks before our engagement aired on TV, I was invited to a women’s conference at Oasis Church in LA. Their lead pastor had spoken at my church in Alabama one time, and I remembered her sermon well, so I decided to go.
Some of the women at church recognized me from the show, and they said things like, “I love your season!”
“Oh, just wait,” I told them. “It’s about to get . . . interesting.”
They decided they wanted to pray for me, and all of a sudden some of my favorite speakers and authors and all of these amazing women were praying over me!
It was exactly what I needed.
I needed reassurance that God still had my back, and I got plenty of it that weekend.
This was right before the overnight dates started airing on the show. So nobody in the public or at church knew about any of that yet.
It was hard watching the show and not being able to tell anyone else. I felt so isolated and alone, watching myself on dates with Peter and Tyler, and seeing how sweet and caring they were, and not being able to tell anybody how that felt now that I was so full of regret.
And on top of it all, I was worried. I had no idea how the show was going to present my blowup with Luke without letting the whole world know who I’d had sex with. But either way, showing a fight about faith and sex on TV was going to get a lot of people talking, I thought. And I wasn’t sure what people’s reaction was going to be.
The studio allowed me to watch the episodes two days before they aired. The idea was to give me time to prepare for my press interviews, so I’d be able to answer questions with authority, while still making sure not to give away any spoilers for the following weeks. What they showed me was always a final cut of the show, with no opportunity to edit it. That meant I had two days’ notice on exactly what was going to be broadcast to the world.
I was still in LA, sitting alone in a borrowed apartment in West Hollywood, when I watched the episode and realized that the show revealed everything.
I sat there, watching me on a TV screen admitting to Luke that I’d had sex in a windmill, and winkingly telling a camera during ITMs that Peter and I had done it twice, and telling Luke that Jesus still loved me—they showed all of it.
I couldn’t believe it. I knew I had signed up for a reality television show. I knew I was putting myself out there. But talking about sex before marriage in the abstract was one thing. Talking specifically about who I’d had sex with, revealing that to the world, and showing the profanity I used in anger toward the end of a long, extended, frustrating fight with Luke, was something different.
As soon as I saw it, I texted the only person I knew who could possibly do something about it: “Just watched the episode. Kinda hard to watch. My problem is with the F in the windmill part. I don’t know if that’s necessary with the ongoing sex-shaming from my fellow Christians.” I’d already been shamed on social media for naked bungee jumping and kissing so many men.
“I’m freaking out,” I continued.
After a long back-and-forth, and a reminder that they couldn’t change the show now even if they wanted to, I was told: “Own it Hannah. You speak for millions of women. Speak.”
I wound up in a fetal position on the floor, bawling my eyes out and shaking. How could this be happening? How can I fix this?
The fact that I might be speaking for other women was great. But what was this going to do to me? I knew that this was going to add fuel to a fire that was already out of my control.
My parents were going to see this. My friends back home. My old boyfriends were watching! My old teachers. Half my town. Half my state was watching. People all over the world were going to see this intensely personal—and private!—moment play out. I was panicked.
People familiar with the show tried to reassure me: “It’s going to be good.” “You come across as the voice of women grappling with their sexuality and beliefs.” They told me I was continuing to be the feminist, the powerful, decisive woman that people reacted to so strongly at the end of my Bachelor run. “Believe in yourself.” “Trust us!” “It’s going to be great!”