This Will Only Hurt a Little
Busy Philipps
This book is for my mother.
“When there’s nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.”
YOUR EX-LOVER IS DEAD (STARS)
ALL OF THE LIGHTS
(Kanye West)
Once, a (former) guy friend of mine, who happens to be gorgeous and famous and all of the things, said this to me: “You know, I think people would consider you really beautiful, if only you didn’t talk so much. Your personality is just a lot. Don’t get me wrong, I love you, but I think people get distracted by that.”
My clear reaction should have been, “Ewww. Go fuck yourself.”
But for so long, even with my strong personality, telling a man to fuck off wasn’t easy for me to do. Instead, I would just nod and laugh and agree, “Hahaha. Yeah,” and then swallow whatever insult and seethe later.
During my twenty years working as an actress, there were times I even went along with being mildly bullied on set, not wanting to make a big deal out of something. I was a girl who could work within the incredibly sexist system that was set up, a girl who could take it. Men love a woman who laughs at the joke, especially if the joke is at her expense.
“She’s so cool. She just gets it.”
As outspoken and sure of myself as I’ve always imagined myself to be, it was hard to find my voice in Hollywood. Or it seemed pointless. That no matter what, I was working in a boys’ club and that’s just the way things were. Don’t you want to work?
There was the on-set painter on a show who casually told me he’d found sexy pictures of me online and that they’d really kept him company the night before.
“Hahaha. Okay!”
I’m not gonna get that guy fired, right? Also, this seems insane (or maybe it doesn’t), but there have been more than a few dudes on sets who’ve told me they jacked off to me. Thank you?
Or the actor who loudly proclaimed, “I’m gonna get them to write us a sex scene so I can really get in there and see what it’s like.”
“Hahahaha. Whatever.”
Or the head of casting who told me the only way I was ever going to get movie roles was if I did a Maxim shoot.
So I did. It didn’t help.
Or listening to Harvey Weinstein tell me what model he was currently having a relationship with, obviously not knowing the full extent of his depravity and horribleness. (I have the odd distinction of him not trying anything with me, I think weirdly because he met me and my husband, Marc, together and really liked Marc and thought we were friends or something?! Who fucking knows how a psychopath’s brain works.) As he would casually objectify whatever woman it was, tell me that he fucked her, I would nod and mumble, “Oh. Cool. She’s beautiful.”
And then I would try to lose him as fast as I could.
Here’s the thing: It’s not easy to be a woman in this business. There will always be jokes about your body. There will always be guys who steal your best ideas and pass them off as their own. There will always be actors who push you to the ground. There will always be networks that ask you to lose weight. There will always be jobs you will not get based on your looks.
And the men will continue to support one another and show up for one another and hire one another, but if you want to stick around, girl, you’d better be damn sure you smile when they ask and wear a low-cut top to your network test and lose the fucking weight and let them take credit for your words, because you are expendable.
At some point, I started not to care if I was expendable. It was beginning to wear on me, the things I watched some of my friends go through in order to get where they wanted to be in their careers, the things I’d put up with and witnessed myself. But also life. Life is exhausting and it never gets easier. For anyone.
Two years ago, I was working on a web series for Jenny Mollen. Her friend Tom Lenk was showing me Instagram stories, which had just launched. I had done Snapchat a little, because my friend Kelly Oxford was into it and I liked the filters, but honestly, Instagram stories seemed kind of lame to me.
“I don’t get it. Why would they do this if Snapchat exists? Is anyone even gonna watch this shit?”
“I don’t know,” said Tom. “But look, you have way more followers on Insta than on Snapchat, so probably more people will watch these. You can also just do both?”
“Tom. Who has the fucking time?”
Turns out . . . me. I did. I had the fucking time. I wasn’t really working as an actress. After Vice Principals, I sold a show to HBO with Danny McBride’s Rough House Pictures producing. We were in the middle of developing that, so I was sort of holding off on other TV jobs until we could see where it was going.
Other than that, I was working with some friends, thinking maybe I would finally try to write another movie script. But mostly, I was just hanging out. I was meeting people for lunch. I started working out every day as a way to handle my anxiety. I was doing some surrogate stuff for Hillary Clinton, and also volunteering at one of my favorite charities, working with underserved kids who were struggling with mental illness. And then I was a mom. I am a mom.
At night, after the kids were asleep, I would go downstairs and turn on the TV and wait until Marc came down, so we could watch some show and go to bed. Routine marriage stuff. But then Tom introduced me to this thing. Instagram stories. And there was something appealing about it. I could talk about my day. Or what was going on in my house. Or the episode of Friends that was on. Or my life. Were people watching? I didn’t really care. It was like a diary. Or a confessional on a reality show. Me, starring me.