Inside Out(57)

After I completed the program, I reached out repeatedly, offering to meet wherever it would be comfortable—with a therapist, whatever. I was rebuffed or ignored. I couldn’t get my mind around what I’d done that was so terrible that they would cut me off without even a conversation. Eventually, though, I had to let go. If not having a relationship with me was what was best for my girls then I would accept that, even though it was the last thing I wanted. I had to trust that working on myself was the most healing thing I could do for them. It would be three years before we were able to find our way back to one another.

It hurt me, and it made me mad, but that time with just myself was incredibly empowering. It gave me the chance to learn what life is as just me: Not as a mother or a daughter. Not as a wife or a girlfriend. Not as a sex symbol or an actress. It seems like it should be automatic, living as just yourself. But coming from where I came from, being me wasn’t even okay the day I was born.

I sat through not getting a call on Christmas, not getting calls on my fiftieth birthday or Mother’s Day. No email. Nothing. Not one thing. When I had nothing left to lose, I could finally exhale, stop gripping. I don’t think my instinct for caretaking would have allowed me the space to heal if I’d had my family around me. Maybe I needed to be alone to do it, and, without knowing it, they’d given me that opportunity. I had to focus on taking care of myself: getting help for my autoimmune problems, which turned out to be severe; getting treatment for the trauma I had stuffed deep down into my core, where it had started to rot.

One of our collective fears is being alone. Learning that I’m okay with just me was a great gift I was able to give myself. Spending time on my own may not have been exactly what I wanted, but I was okay. I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t need to rush to fill the space. There was an aspect of that time of isolation that was for my healing—which is how I started experimenting with looking at things in general. What if everything hadn’t happened to me but had happened for me? What I learned is that how we hold our experiences is everything.

I’d learned this before. When my mother was dying, I found a way to change the way I held our relationship. I had spent years facing her with anger and longing: Why didn’t you love me enough to be better? I’d managed to move to compassion, and that transition had liberated me. Taking responsibility for your own reaction is the gateway to freedom.

I’d learned this with my mother, sure. But that didn’t mean applying the lesson again would be easy. Some things just seem too painful to reframe. But if I really look at my difficulty with not being able to get pregnant, for instance, whether I could or I couldn’t is irrelevant: it’s the judgment I made against myself that was so damaging. If I’m holding it as I’m a failure as a woman, of course it’s going to destroy me. What if I look at it differently? What if it was for the best, not being tied to Ashton with a child? When I opened my mind to that possibility, I was able to hold it peacefully.

This doesn’t mean that now I’m Saint Demi and I have no pain. It just means I can finally admit that I have weaknesses and needs and that it’s okay to ask for help. I can’t fix everything. I can feel sorrow and self-doubt and pain and know that those are just feelings, and like everything else in this life, they will pass.


WASN’T THERE AN easier way to learn all of this? Couldn’t I have gotten to this place without Ashton walking out, and the kids not speaking to me, and my health deteriorating? Obviously not. Any one of those things would have been enough for most people to stop and say, “I need to take a look at myself,” but for me it took the extreme of losing my husband, our baby, my fertility, my daughters, my friendship with their father, and not having a career to hide in. Thank God it didn’t take losing my home, too.

Things happen in life to get our attention—to make us wake up. What does it say that I had to lose so much before I could break down enough to rebuild? I think it says that the thing that got me here, this incredible toughness, was almost the thing that did me in. I got to a place where I could no longer just muscle through. I could either bend, or break.

I got here because I needed all of this to become who I am now. I had been holding on to so many misconceptions about myself, all my life: that I wasn’t valuable. That I didn’t really deserve to be anywhere good—whether that meant in a loving relationship, on my own terms, or in a great film with actors I respected, who knew what they were doing. The narrative I believed was that I was unworthy and contaminated. And it wasn’t true.

There are two reasons I wanted to tell this story, the story of how I learned to surrender. First, because it’s mine. It doesn’t belong to the tabloids or my mom or the men I’ve married or the people who’ve loved or hated my movies or even my children. My story is mine alone; I’m the only one who was there for all of it, and I decided to claim the power to tell it on my own terms.

The second reason is that even though it’s mine, maybe some part of this story is yours, too. I’ve had extraordinary luck in this life: both bad and good. Putting it all down in writing makes me realize how crazy a lot of it has been, how improbable. But we all suffer, and we all triumph, and we all get to choose how we hold both.





Epilogue


I believe Paulo Coelho was right: the universe conspires to give you everything you want, but not always in the way you expect it.