God Bless This Mess(70)
I had to get honest with myself: even though I saw the good in him, my relationship with Tyler was not good for me. I realized we were on two different paths, and while I supported him on his, I wasn’t gonna do it at the cost of mine.
No matter how much we talked, and connected, I always felt like his bench girl. Like I was the backup player who never got to play in the game. I was the girl he would confide in. He told me I was the only girl he could talk to for hours and hours on the phone. But my vulnerability and availability seemed to get used only when it was convenient for him, in between me watching him go out with other girls in public. And being in that position left me hurting.
The thing I know now that I wish I’d known then was that if someone really likes you, if they love you, you’ll know. And if they don’t? You’ll feel confused.
A relationship that’s right shouldn’t be so hard. Sure there might be some things to work out, and some tough stuff you deal with. But overall? I deserve to be in a relationship that feels easy. Easy and good. Not hard and dramatic.
Tyler took up way too much space in my head, and lived there rent free for way too long.
I eventually told him I couldn’t really be friends with him anymore. “It just hurts me too much,” I said. “I just need some space. Maybe down the line we can try it again.”
That happened about six months before I sat down to write this page in my book—and I haven’t heard from him since.
His last poetic words to me were, “Well . . . if you rock with me, you rock with me. If you don’t, you don’t.”
I wish I was making that up.
*
I gave up my apartment in LA. I had only signed a short-term lease, and it didn’t make sense to pay for a place when I wasn’t living there full-time, especially when nobody knew how long this pandemic might last.
As a result, the rest of my quarantine time was spent stuck in Alabama, where the only “crew” I had was my family. I realize everyone was cooped up while quarantining. I’m not alone in this. But the pandemic was really messing with people’s heads, and it was definitely messing with mine. I locked myself in my childhood bedroom as my safe place, and I shut off almost all real communication with friends in the outside world.
I also stopped praying. Not for any particular reason. I just stopped.
It wasn’t long before I fell right back into the sad, awful place I was in when I came home from Dancing with the Stars—only this time, I had new scars from Peter and Tyler etched deep into my heart, and the trauma of nearly losing my brother weighing on my soul.
Hollywood shut down. My “career” was suddenly on hold. My stomach churned with worry about what I was going to do next, and where I was going to live. It felt like everything was closing in on me.
I had been in the constant spotlight now for two years, sharing some of my most intimate and personal parts of my life with perfect strangers, and then watching and reading how many “likes” I got and all the comments they left for me.
After Tyler and I stopped streaming and TikToking together, it seemed like the spotlight had turned off—and I wasn’t ready for that. So I turned to Instagram Live.
My spotlight now came in the form of the light from the little flash on my iPhone.
Honestly, I think I started going on Instagram Live in order to fulfill whatever needs for connection (or, more likely, validation) I craved for the day. Social media is nothing if it isn’t a great substitute for actual relationships. I was just so lonely and miserable in Tuscaloosa. But I didn’t want to talk to anyone about what I was feeling. Not even God. So instead I decided to talk to thousands of strangers about nonsense online.
And it really was nonsense.
One time, ten thousand people joined in just to watch me jump rope.
The week of May 11 was always a tough one for me, and for everyone in my family. In case the date doesn’t ring a bell for you, that’s the week when my aunt and cousins were murdered all those years ago. And now it was also the one-year anniversary of me thinking I was changing my life for the better by adding someone to it: Jed, the man I said yes to in front of the whole world—a day that very quickly left me sitting similarly all alone, feeling empty and completely unsure of what might happen to me next.
I needed to get out of the house. I felt like a change of scenery would help make everyone feel better. And when I found out that you could still rent a beach house on the Alabama coast, I quickly decided to book us all a vacation. I rented a house right on the sand, and my family and I drove down there for a little escape.
I’ve never been a big drinker (though I love good wine), but at that point I’d say I was escaping my own nagging thoughts and feelings in the way only a nice bottle of wine can provide. Since breaking up with Jed, I’d been drinking more. Sometimes a lot more. It was another way of avoiding the big problems, I guess.
That week, I quickly formed a habit of drinking one, two, usually three glasses at night. I was at the beach. No one was driving anywhere. I was full of pent-up emotions that I hadn’t allowed myself to fully process, but since I didn’t drink much until the late afternoon, it all felt pretty okay and normal.
Until this one day: May 16, 2020.
I started drinking at 11:00 a.m.—and never really stopped.
While on my Instagram Live that night, I drunkenly read a comment asking me to do a TikTok dance. In the moment, I couldn’t think of any that I knew, except for kinda knowing the dance to “Rockstar.” So I put the music on and tried to remember the dance and the lyrics, all in real time. On IG Live. With thousands and thousands of people watching.