EP. 187 — Ask Jameela Anything 3

Jameela Intro [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to an episode of I Weigh with Jameela Jamil, a podcast against shame. This is a special Ask Me Anything where I told you on social media that you were allowed to ask me about anything you like, and I just thought that would be a nice way for us to connect with each other. It is a terrible time right now, and everyone’s being fucking awful, and anything that I can do to create more community or connectivity feels like something healthy that you might like. And so a bunch of you sent in loads of wonderful, wonderful questions. Now, some of those questions were very specifically around, uh, mental health conditions or around, uh, psychiatry needs, asking me things about medication, etc. Those questions I’m not going to answer today because I’m on my own and I left school at 16, but I will have an expert coming on to the podcast soon. He’ll be able to answer those questions responsibly. This is more me shooting the shit with you about things that I think and feel based on what I’ve learned on this podcast, or learned from you, or learned in life, or learned from my many, many failures. I want to give a disclaimer, this is not any kind of medical advice, and also we’re not going to be veering too much towards that. I think the most I ever got into it on this podcast is to discuss my own personal experiences with my mental health and EMDR therapy which is eye movement desensitization reprocessing therapy. But again, please don’t ever use me or any celebrity for that matter as a substitute for actual proper mental health care or guidance. So let’s just get into it.

Jameela [00:01:54] So a question I got from loads of people was around what’s happening in the Middle East right now. And it’s not specifically about my stance on the Middle East, that’s all on my Instagram. I can’t talk about it here because it’s so easy for me to be clipped and taken out of context when I’m speaking, so I’ve put it all in like a, in Walls of Words on my social media that you can find that no one can take me out of context because there are so many bad faith assholes on the internet. But a lot of you are talking about the pressure to say something or do something and be effective, and a lot of you were really struggling with, uh, the way in which people are talking to each other. It’s just so vitriolic and violent and awful. And so, first and foremost, I want you to know that the vast majority of questions were about that. And so you’re not alone if you’re feeling really overwhelmed, and if you’re feeling guilty for wanting to take a moment here and there for yourself and for not knowing exactly what to do. There’s a lot of posturing going on online right now with people who suddenly became experts on the Middle East about three weeks ago, who’d never spoken about it before, and using it as a kind of I don’t know like weapon to beat other people over the head with. There’s a lot of posturing for moral superiority and people shaming other people, and there’s a lot of hyper scrutinizing, all of which I think is very unhealthy because it only makes people less likely to use their voice. And we really need people who can handle it to use their voice. Now, the reason I say “can handle it” is because I most controversially feel that some people are fragile right now, and maybe those people don’t have to feel forced to speak out publicly about one of the most, um, upsetting and intense subjects in the history of the world. When it comes to what’s happening in Israel and Palestine, whatever you say will incur some form of vitriol and some form of emotional violence from someone. You can’t please everyone. And so I do worry that people out there don’t have a support system or mental health access, like a mental health expert they can access, uh, or they’re not feeling very stable or well at the moment. Maybe you’re dealing with your own grief, your own loss, your own trauma in your life right now. And there are actual public figures with ginormous platforms who are calling anyone who feels overwhelmed right now weak. And I think that’s really dangerous and irresponsible of them because they’re saying this while they’re sitting outside their massive house by their pool, where they have access to a therapist anytime they want, and they’ve got, I know them, they’ve got big families and, you know, happy relationships, and they’re generally in quite a stable place right now. That is immense privilege. And so those of us who have the privilege to do so, yes, we should do the hard work of speaking out. I am doing that because I have that privilege. But it’s okay if right now you are feeling overwhelmed. I had a lot of people with disabilities and sickness and neurodivergence messaging me saying they can’t handle all the vitriol, and they don’t feel as though they are allowed to find alternative ways to be helpful. It doesn’t mean you have to check out altogether, but you can donate, or you can raise awareness in other ways within your private community. You can educate yourself. You can educate your family members. You can harass your reps to make sure they call for the things that are important to end all of this violence that we’re seeing. You don’t just have to post an infographic publicly. A lot of that doesn’t really make a fucking difference. It’s important as a start, but there’s many things that all of us have to be doing to follow up with that, to actually have actions that take place off our stories and off our grids. So don’t feel like you’re less valuable if you’re someone who would prefer to be helpful privately, that’s okay. An example of one of the messages I got is “how to navigate a chronic pain condition, as well as making a difference in the world. I’m barely paying bills and sleeping, never mind activism, but I want to contribute.” Now that wasn’t specifically about this situation, but it kind of spoke to something else I wanted to discuss with you, which is that the world is fucking unbelievable right now and has been so, it feels like trying to get out of the sea, you know, when you’re trying to climb out the sea and it’s just wave upon wave upon wave upon wave, and we are made to feel as though we are supposed to, like it is normal to be able to handle seeing that much pain and that much hell on the news all over social media, all of the doomscrolling. And we’re supposed to survive a cost of living crisis and our own physical health problems and our own mental health issues, and maybe our own increasing neurodivergence, etc. seamlessly, especially people who have been socialized as female. And it feels very important, especially as I am an advocate who spends a huge part of my life fighting for these causes to again remind you that you are only human and you are allowed to sometimes switch your phone off and take a break. And it’s not just that you’re allowed to, it’s that it’s actually better in the long run for being able to help other people to do so. And I say this as someone who felt for the longest time like, I’m not allowed to look away from anything because as soon as I started speaking out about diet culture, suddenly everyone was like, “Oh, you think you’re an activist? Speak about this, speak about that, speak about my issue in my country that you don’t know the history of. Speak about this cause that I care about.” And I understand why people were doing it. And because I understand, I really empathize, and I didn’t want to let anyone down. And I started to cover everything all of the time. And I was watching the news 24 hours a day, uh, in between takes on set at my job and in between trying to have, you know, time looking after my family or my friends, etc., and I just burnt out and my health absolutely collapsed and my brain melted. And for about a solid six months I’d say in 2020, I couldn’t even think straight. And then I wasn’t really able to be very helpful to anyone at all because I hadn’t paced myself. What’s happening right now in the Middle East is not going to be over for years. What is happening in Sudan, Armenia, Kashmir, in America, in the United Kingdom, in Brazil, in Afghanistan, in Iran, in Pakistan, like all these countries around the world in which people are suffering, it’s not possible for us to fix it all at once and for us to never, ever, ever take breaks. You have to prepare for the marathon that is this shit show. And especially if you are dealing with chronic pain, and especially if you are dealing with, uh, stress and an inability to pay your bills and an inability to sleep, you are no good to anyone if you are dead. You have to protect yourself. And I think it again always comes from the most privileged people who shame others for not doing that. And I know those people. They’re not spending 24 hours doing this shit either. And they’ve got teams of people who are researching and finding and creating infographics and even posting for them. So don’t listen to anyone online. Follow your instincts. Remember, the world has always been a shit show, whatever the media is now saying is the current crisis in the zeitgeist, it doesn’t mean that any moment is more important than another for you to make sure that you survive and not just survive, but dare to live any kind of a stable and happy life. It is something that all of us should want for ourselves, and I don’t want you to feel guilty if you need to do, make certain adjustments to be able to live some sort of a sane existence. I’m sorry if I’ve been rambling, but I just feel so passionately about this, and I speak from experience that the most helpful I ever am is when I look after myself, when I eat properly, when I sleep properly, when I make sure that I take breaks from looking into these fucking screens that are so bad for our brains. It means that I’m able to speak more carefully. When I’m sleep deprived, I’m sloppy, and I say things callously and I make mistakes. I piss people off. Uh, if I haven’t slept properly or eaten properly, I might be less aware of what I’m posting. Maybe I’m going to be more likely to post misinformation. Just as I said about a million times the last five minutes, please pace yourself, and especially if you are struggling with any kind of disability or chronic illness, we need you around and you deserve to look after yourself. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Okay, so on to a very different question, um, someone asked me if I believe in ghosts and I really love your range as an audience that we can go from very, very, uh, very specific types of questions to the completely surreal. The answer to that question is, I really hope that they’re not real, but clearly I must believe in them, seeing as I’m so terrified, like I don’t look in the mirror at night because I’m scared Bloody Mary is going to be there. And yes, I am in my mid-thirties. I, um, am terrified of being in the dark. I’m very afraid of being, uh, on my own in the house. And I mean a clear sign that I must believe in ghosts on some level is that any, uh, hotel or housing I have to stay in when I work on location, the first thing I google is if there have been any reports that that place may be haunted. And one time I was asked to go and film in New Mexico, and, uh, they wanted to put me up in this, like, very fancy hotel. And I looked at pictures and I was like, “There’s something fucking wrong with that place. I can just sense it. I can feel it. It looks creepy. And it might be really, you know, bougie and expensive, but I don’t like the look of it.” And I googled it, and it’s like one of the oldest mental health like psychiatric institutions in America. And as we know that psychiatric institutions now are still sometimes quite brutal places, but nothing like they were hundreds of years ago when we didn’t know anything about mental health, when they used to torture patients. So I was like, if there are ever any ghosts that I don’t want to fuck around with, its ghosts that might be very angry because they were treated very badly. Uh, and there were reports that people’s sheets were being ripped off them in the middle of the night, and there were ghosts in the mirror, and people were hiding their clothes. And I was like, “Absolutely fucking not.” So I do, and I don’t. I clearly do more than I don’t, but, um, I’ve never seen anything. And please, God, may I never see anything? I really don’t want it to be confirmed. My biggest fear is that it will be confirmed. I mean, I took it so far that my boyfriend just played, like a really important gig in his life that was in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery where all the movie stars are buried. And, uh, I didn’t go. All my friends, all of our friends went. And I normally go everywhere to support him. But I was like, “If I see a little Victorian girl standing behind the tree I’m gonna shit myself and jump off a balcony.” So yeah, I don’t feel like I’ve come across very well right now, but that’s something real about me that no one should really have heard. Okay, next up we have “How to get rid of imposter syndrome. We all lack knowledge, expertise and maybe in my case also eloquence,” this person says, although I highly doubt that. But they have a fear of making mistakes and saying inaccurate things, and so they want to know how they can get out of that. I’ve said this before in a few Ask Me Anythings, um, and it’s, I’ve also said it on my social media, I have a very strange relationship with imposter syndrome. I really just don’t see what the big deal is in feeling like an imposter. And I do feel like an imposter a lot of the time, but it’s very hard for me to, you know, in the same way that it’s hard for me to achieve perfect body positivity or perfect self love, it’s very hard for me to go, “Yeah, no, I deserve to be everywhere I am.” Because I do take risks. I do enter into territories where I’m not perfectly skilled because that’s what men do. Men just sort of fail upward sometimes, and I think that that’s something that women should also be allowed to do. So I do sometimes literally put myself in positions where I am an imposter, and my self-esteem has been so crushed by the world that I don’t know if I’ll ever be like, “I totally deserve this.” And so therefore I was like, “If I can’t achieve a perfect mental attitude about myself, then why don’t I just take the importance out of that feeling.” Which again, is very similar to my body image stuff, right? So I can’t, I don’t love my body, but if I could just get out of hating my body, what if I could just be neutral and not really think about my body at all? So when it comes to imposter syndrome, you know what? Maybe I’m an imposter. Maybe I don’t fully deserve to be here. Maybe I’m not the most qualified person who was ever born to do this job, but fuck it, I’m here now. What am I going to do, quit? I’m going to rise to the occasion. I’m going to figure it out. I’m going to learn on the job. I’m going to do my fucking best. And if I do fail, it’s highly unlikely that I’m going to die, dependent on the job, and so therefore the stakes aren’t as high if you don’t put so much value in the bruise of the ego of failure. Failure is something that I consider to just not be that big of a deal. All my best learning has come from failure. All my best stories come from my failures. All of my funniest moments have been my failures. I run towards failure. And I think that’s really noble, because there’s no fun in running at something that you always know you’re going to have guaranteed success. I think it’s really cool when people run towards failure. And so my analogy that I tend to use for imposter syndrome is just that, I look at it as crashing a wedding. It’s like, “Well, I wasn’t invited here. I’m not supposed to be here, but I’m going to try and snog someone and get some free cake before I am thrown out.” And that has been my entire attitude towards this industry. Remember, I never had acting lessons before I became an actor. I’d never, you know, gone to like drama school before I became a TV host. I’d never done radio before I did the radio like I’ve just, I am fucking figuring out in England with all those people, a blagger, maybe the word is that’s closest to that in America is hustler. But it’s been my attitude to life is just, I’ll figure it out. And normally we do. Specifically, people who’ve been socialized as women have been raised with this idea that we are, we have a very small amount of things that we are going to be able to achieve in our lives. And, and it’s very difficult for us to be seen as accomplished. And so therefore, we should be grateful with whatever little we can gather in this life. We’re not encouraged to, uh, keep learning about ourselves. We’re kind of told that by about 25 you know everything about yourself that you’re ever going to know. That’s not true. At 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, people are always learning about new skills and interests that they have. And if you shut yourself off to exploring those, then you might never learn who you really are. There are so many people who’ve been hugely successful who didn’t even find the thing that they were good at until they were middle aged, and I think that’s amazing. I still don’t know what I’m going to do for the rest of my life. I highly doubt it’s going to be me in, you know, in the entertainment industry. I might go back to school. I might train is an EMDR therapist. I have loads of things I want to achieve, and I refuse to let society tell me what I can and can’t accomplish. And so when it comes to my attitude to imposter syndrome, it has really freed me because I have decided that I have no boundaries and barriers in front of me. I’m just going to figure out, make a mess, get some good stories, get some good experience from it, and prove to myself that I’m capable of more than I thought. And so I hope that’s helpful. I hope that’s what you needed to hear today. You do not owe anyone complete perfection, and it is not something that is expected of straight, white, cis men. And so the rest of us are allowed to give ourselves a fucking break, which, by the way, is especially hard if you’re from a ethnic minority, especially if you’re Asian like I am, where your parents put so much pressure on you to be perfect. You have to divorce yourself from that. There is so much fun in the unknown. There is so much fun to be had when you take yourself by surprise. And so treat it like a wedding that you’ve crashed. Just fuck it. Have as much fun as you can. Whoever has the most fun wins. So another question I received is “What is an achievement or other moment in your career that you are proudest of? And it doesn’t just have to be in your career.” Um, I think because I’ve spent most of my time at my career for half of my life, I’m gonna talk about that, and I’d say it’s actually this podcast. This is my favorite thing I’ve ever done. And the thing that I’m proud of is having put myself out there, a bit like with the imposter syndrome stuff I was talking about earlier. Who did I think I was to have a podcast? Who did I think I was to be able to get very esteemed, clever guests on and talk to me? But I did. I just thought, “Fuck it.” I’m gonna try and I’m going to be willing to look silly, and I’m going to have to learn stuff in front of other people, which means daring to show that I didn’t have all the answers. I’m going to improve as a person in real time. You’re going to watch me become more humble and hopefully a bit more informed. And it’s been God like over three and a half years now, and I’m so proud of the community that we have. I love all of you guys. I learn so much from you. I find so many of my great guests via you. Uh, you have expanded my world, and I’m proud of how much I’ve learned on this podcast, and I’m really thankful that so many of you have stuck around from the start. There’s just so many of you who are willing to learn with me, and who don’t make me feel bad for what I don’t already know. I’m proud of creating a safe space that doesn’t make people feel judged. I’m so sick of the fucking shaming and judgment in this world, and I think it’s such a dangerous, toxic way to treat people. No one knows everything about everything. And I think that when our culture started shaming people who were still learning, that was the sort of beginning of the end of civilization, in my opinion, when we started to make people feel embarrassed for not having all of the answers. That’s when I started to kind of divorce myself from a lot of social justice spaces and just start to lean into mental health and being a humanitarian. And I think you can sense that if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a long time, that I’m not into the division that I first came up in in 2018, you know, when I was a more, um, spikey, outspoken person. I’ve changed quite a lot, and I have decided to move away from that judgy, preachy shit that was being clicked and clapped at, you know, post the MeToo Movement. I think that it’s really important to move with the same grace towards others that you would hope to have for yourself, and that’s been a big learning journey after the way that I saw everyone speak to each other during Covid, um, I just didn’t want to be a part of that. And so those are things that I’m proud of, and I love that you asked me that because you’re asking a woman to brag. And I love it when women say a thing that they’re proud of. I think we shouldn’t demonize women, uh, being proud of themselves. I think that we should all encourage more people to, especially women, to say shamelessly something that they feel like they did well. And I urge you to maybe pause this episode for a second and write down something that you’re proud of about yourself. So thank you to the person who asked me that question. This podcast is my proudest achievement. So the next one is quite a personal one, where someone said, “How do you cope with having EDS?” That’s Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which is a condition I have which is caused by a lack of enough collagen in my body. It means that I struggle with my joints because collagen is something that you need in every single cell, so if you have a huge deficiency of it, it makes your life so fucking hard. And I have issues with bleeding, and I have issues with every organ in my body, and nothing works at the pace it’s supposed to, and nothing heals at the pace it’s supposed to. And I’m always falling over and I’m dyspraxic and I have, uh, neurodivergence issues, and all of this is caused by Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and it’s a fucking nightmare. So sometimes, very often, I’d say people, uh, come on to this podcast to ask me about Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. And we actually have an episode in which we talk about Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and chronic health issues that we did a few months ago with Megan O’Rourke. And it’s an amazing listen, and I highly recommend it. She’s so fantastic, and we really get into the personal of that. But anyway, so I just wanted to give context for anyone who doesn’t know what EDS means. So this person says, “How do you cope with having EDS and doing all the cunning stunts and coping with a massive workload? Do you have performance anxiety?” And so this person goes on to tell me about all the things that they do. They are in the entertainment industry, but they also have to cope with EHS, which is ruining their health and therefore ruining their life. And they want to know if I ever worry about my EDS window of opportunity. This is a question I get all the time and loads of you wrote me this question today about how I balance my life with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and I always think it’s really important for me to be very candid and responsible with you about that, which is that I, I can’t do it all. I cannot do it all. And I did try. I really spent a solid part of the beginning of my adulthood being like, “I’m not going to be held back by this. I’m going to prove the doctors wrong. I’m going to be an example for all other people with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.” You know, like some sort of fucking superhero, like I’m going to, I’m going to show them you can achieve all your dreams and sure, maybe you can, but I have chosen not to anymore because it was fucking killing me. And so for the last like four years, I have been and I think a lot of people went through this during the pandemic where they were like, why am I in a rat race? Why am I killing, who am I killing myself for? For capitalism? Why am I not seeing my friends more often? Why am I not having more fun? I could just live a different type of lifestyle. I think that happened in a big way for me, where I was like, “I don’t think I want to push my joints and my body and my kidneys to this level.” Like being in the entertainment industry and thriving in the entertainment industry means waking up at 4 a.m. and going to work, and then coming back from work at like 7 p.m. and then going to the gym, because everyone has to be fucking thin and toned in this industry, and then going to an event and then maybe getting about five hours sleep, which is very bad for your health, and then going back to work in the morning. Now I could do that in little bursts, and I was so grateful to have the opportunity to work in the entertainment industry. However, there is a certain level I can’t get to unless I’m willing to sell my whole soul. Unless I’m willing to give up every hour of my day. Abandon all my friends. Abandon my relationship, abandon my dogs most importantly, and abandon myself. Abandon my health. I would just have to throw everything at it. And, not to, you know, try and get too deep, but, or to sound like Tahani oh my god, this is going to be so Tahani. But I’ve met a lot of the world’s most famous people as Tahani would say, they’re all good friends. Um, and I don’t know any of them who are very happy. And they’ve got as much money as you can imagine, and a massive house that they hang out mostly on their own because they’ve lost touch with all their friends and family, and they’re so famous that they can’t really go anywhere privately, and their love life got splashed all over the world, and people are always trying to use them, invade them for stuff. And I, I just think it’s such a fucked reality. And you can apply this in different ways to industries that aren’t as unrelatable as mine, right? Like thriving and getting to the very top of academia or medicine or business, there’s much sacrifice. And so if that is your life, like if that is like the thing that’s in your DNA that you feel the most alive when you’re doing it, then you should do it. And we need people like you to go and fucking sacrifice it for the journey. I am just personally not that up for the journey anymore. I want to sell my home to get a cheaper home so I can do less work. I want to move to a cheaper area. I would like to work less. I would like to look after my body more. I’m starting to think about old age and as you get into your 30s in particular, you start to really come into a time where how you treat your body in the next like 20 years from between 30 and 50, is really going to be a big determining factor in what your old age is going to look like. And I want it to be happy, I want to rest, and I want to have social time. I don’t want to be someone that strangers admire. I just want to be someone who gets to admire my own friends up close. And so I know that’s not the girlboss mentality that I’m, you know, supposed to say publicly. But I try to show how much I’m at home resting with my dogs on my social media so that people don’t think I’m just constantly girlbossing, uh, but I’m I’m sad if it’s ever made anyone who’s not very well feel like they’re not doing enough. I can’t stress to you enough that I, I really, like, have taken a big chill pill in the last 4 or 5 years and slowed down, and that I, I really want you to evaluate if it’s going to be worth it. If an award in your hand or a certain amount of money, everyone wants to be financially comfortable, I’m not talking about that, but if excess is worth it, is the big house in the fancy area? Or the fancy bags and cars, is the stuff and the awards and the recognition from strangers genuinely going to be worth it for you? If you’re thinking about the entertainment industry, which is such a grueling, such a grueling industry for people with chronic health conditions, and if it is great and more power to you, but if it might not be, then this is your reminder to really consider. You know we’re not, our generation isn’t really, uh, programed to consider the long game, to look at what happens at the end of the rainbow. We’re always, you know, thinking about the journey, but we never think about the destination. And I’ve become kind of obsessed with that destination. I think a lot of people, as I said during during Covid, uh, when people started to lose loved ones or lose their health, they started thinking a lot about like, what are my actual values in life? Like, if I died tomorrow from a pandemic disease, would I have lived my life as happily as possible? Not as impressively as possible, but as happily as possible? And that is a poignant question, and I think that it’s a healthy question to ask yourself. It’s a, it’s a really vital reminder, you know, even though I know it can be a bit stressful to think about our mortality, sometimes there’s a great beauty in it because it forces you to check in with yourself and be like, “Did I live well today? Did I live well yesterday? Is what I’m doing going to be optimal for the most lulls and cuddles and happiness ever?” If that’s what’s important to you, that’s what’s important to me. I’m just not well enough to, uh, go for all of the possible dreams in the world, and that’s okay because my biggest dream is being happy and somewhat well, uh, which is very difficult with a condition like this. And again, I feel like, I feel a tiny bit of shame saying all of this and being honest about it, because I know it’s not the most inspiring answer, but I find it inspiring. I wish when I was younger and sick, I’d heard someone in a powerful position say the same thing, say that they’ve had a peek at the other side and it it’s it’s not going to be good for me. I wish I’d known, and I think I would have had a, um, happier and healthier adulthood up until now. I’m currently the happiest and healthiest I’ve ever been, even though I know I had a bit of health emergency recently, um, that’s just a fluke. But generally, I’ve been really well, and I attribute that to the fact that I’ve decided to get off the treadmill, get off, get out of the rat race, and, um, choose myself above a dream. Hope that’s helpful. Sorry. Someone’s asked me “How to love your body when you have chronic pain. My body doesn’t work like I want it to when I do feel okay.” So this kind of somewhat touches on the same area of my experience with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, but it is a massive struggle. And all of our chat online about body positivity, there’s very little of it that goes beyond accepting, like love handles and stretchmarks. Body positivity, like real body acceptance and liberation is also being able to accept that our bodies are all doing different things, and regardless of what they look like on the outside, it’s really hard to not feel like your body is truly fucking working against you to feel like it’s your worst enemy. But I have decided to really work on that inner voice of mine that’s like, “Come on. Fucking hell. Why are you swollen? Why are you hurting? Why is my kidney not fucking working?” And you know, I had so much rage and jealousy of other people who had good health. Like I used to get so mad when I would see other people drink or take hard drugs, which, you know, I can’t do because if I do, I’ll probably fall over and die. And I’d be like, “Why would you take things that are bad? But why would you smoke? Why are you doing things that are bad for you? You’re so lucky. You have good health. Why are you staying out all night? You know, why are you being reckless? Why are you rock climbing?” I used to get so bitter about everyone, and then I realized that I was becoming quite an ugly person. So I checked myself and just thought, “Right. How would I wish to be spoken to if I was my body? What if I personified my body? What if I called my body Steve?” I don’t know why I chose that name. I just love that name. I don’t know. I have no reason for you. But I was like, “How should I treat Steve?” Steve’s my ride or die. Steve maybe doesn’t function perfectly, but that’s okay. Steve’s doing his fucking best. No one has, no one that I know would ever be willing to go through all the shit I have put it through the way that my body does, like the amount of work my body has done when I made my body do stunts for Marvel. I can’t believe I put my body through that at 30 fucking 5, when no one should start doing stunts for the first time. The amount of late nights out and the dancing and the stupidest heels and all of the terrible, crazy crap decisions I’ve made and the sleep that I didn’t get that I needed. And all the times that I’ve been at death’s door with different illnesses or accidents and I got hit by a car, broke my back, like my body is always somehow just about made it through. And so am I in pain every day? Sure. Am I swollen every night? Sure. Are there many things that I can’t do? Yes. But that is not the fault of my body. My body that I was born with is doing its best, and it loves me so much that when I’m sleeping, all it’s doing is trying to heal whatever it can. When you think about it like that and you start to develop more empathy, you’re like, “Oh God, that is my best friend. That’s the most loyal Robin to my Batman that I’ll ever have.” And so now I look at it more as like something that I want to look after. I want to look after my best friend. It’s made me more thoughtful about what food I put in it, what drink I put in it, how good my sleep routine is, like, am I really, you know, my body does all this shit for me. What am I doing for my body? So much of my anorexia was me just punishing my body and starving it, and over exercising it and talking like shit to it. How awful. I have so much making up to do with this body. It heard everything I said and it watched everything that I did, and it watched me be jealous of other people’s bodies. And I feel very embarrassed by that now, so I know what I’m saying is a bit surreal, but I find personifying things very helpful for my brain. I have a very, uh, literal brain, and so when I do things like that, I’m able to kind of logic my way through it. And I hope that even if you are someone with chronic pain, you can find a bit of this philosophy helpful. Give your body a break and know it’s doing its absolute best for you. Lastly, a question I got again from a lot of people of course because of my work around diet culture and eating disorders was a lot of you asking me about my recovery journey. And I, as I kind of said at the top of this, like, I don’t want this to be your reference for mental health, but I could just tell you about what personally happened to me and then tell you that if you think you might have any issues with orthorexia, which is a kind of fear of food and, and issues with and fixation on food and restrictive eating and diets, or you think you might have an eating disorder or body image issues, I urge you to seek out an expert, uh, some sort of mental health expert or any kind of clinic that deals with eating disorders. And so before I tell you my story, I’m going to quickly offer a trigger warning, which is that I’m going to talk about body image issues and, uh, my anorexia. So I had anorexia for about 20 years from the age of about 11 to 31, and I’ve been in recovery ever since, and I wasn’t starving myself that whole time. But, uh, I kind of would go between starving and bingeing and then starving again and then over exercising, just a constant state of punishment, and this went on for well over a decade. And then the years in which I wasn’t starving myself, I was still engaging in very restrictive eating, and my body dysmorphia was still like at the forefront of my brain, and I was still only thinking about food and only thinking about weight and only hating myself constantly all of the time, and never just freely eating any meal. I knew the calories of literally every single thing I put in my mouth. I knew what the calories of 100g of almost any food on the planet was, and thank God I have started to divorce myself from that knowledge and have kind of forgotten, uh, at large, the calories of anything because also, that is just not a clear science. And that’s not how should we should be working out, uh, what to eat in the day. Um, I, uh, when I got to Los Angeles, realized that I just couldn’t live like this anymore, and I was, you know, I just got on a job as an actress, which I hadn’t planned on. I didn’t really want to be on TV again because I thought it was really bad for my body image and for my mental health, and it made me self-conscious. And women are just treated so appallingly when it comes to our appearance, so I resisted being on television again in my 30s, knowing what it had done to me in my 20s. And so I reluctantly reentered the industry and decided that if I’m going to take this on, I’m going to have to be really, really, really mindful of recovery because this is Hollywood. This is the hub. This is the belly of the beast. This is where so much of the evil that we learned on social media comes from about our bodies, about ageism, about women, and so I was like, “I really need back up.” So I did something called EMDR therapy, Eye Movement Reprocessing and Desensitization Therapy to deal with my feelings around food. And so I used EMDR to, and I want you to Google it and look it up and see if it’s something that you would find interesting, but what it’s really good for is breaking thought patterns. So I was like, one of the first things I can do is break my thought pattern as to how important my body shape is to my happiness, like can I break the pattern of thought that thinness equates value, that thinness equates a happiness, that thinness equates being worthy of being loved. And so I really worked on that with my EMDR therapist. And that was very successful, where I started to get to a point of neutrality, you know, as I was sort of touching on earlier, I don’t really have body positivity, but I have been able to get to a point where I’m just like, it just doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It’s not amazing. It’s not shit. It’s just not important because me and my body Steve are out here doing the fucking best we can. And if it turns out that I’m not thin enough or beautiful enough for this industry, I’ll just leave. I can’t be bothered. I’m not going to suffer for this anymore. I think I’m worthy of love. It doesn’t mean I think I’m the best or the most beautiful, it’s just that I know that the thing that makes me worthy of love is not on the outside of me, it is who I am as a person, and who I am as a person has improved exponentially for no longer being obsessed with food and calories and my weight and my appearance because that all means me, me me me me me me me me. And it made me a boring person. I was a really rubbish lover. I was a shit shack, uh, because I had no energy and was so self-obsessed because it is, it’s a kind of self obsession, which doesn’t mean you should feel ashamed of it, that’s what it’s supposed to be. It’s a, it’s an incredibly pervasive mental illness. But I just didn’t have time to learn anything. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know what was going on in other people’s lives. All I was thinking about was surviving one meal to the next. How can I get out of eating one meal to the next? And so that was really helpful for me. I also dealt with my issues around food because, you know, for me, food was anything but fuel. It was, you know, rebelling against my parents or it was the love of a parent because I had a parent who couldn’t say that they loved me, but they would show me they love me via food, so food was also love. Food was parenting. Food was acceptance, but also food meant being fat and being fat was unacceptable in my family and in the world because I grew up during heroin chic, so it was just a nightmare. Everything I was eating just felt like I was always swallowing a grenade of emotions, rather than just having a fucking sandwich. And again, it didn’t take long with the EMDR to be able to break those thought patterns, to be able to identify the trauma I had around food and just get to a point again, not of positivity, but of neutrality. When I look at chicken, it’s just chicken. When I look at chocolate, it’s just chocolate. And I don’t feel afraid of it. And I haven’t binged in like eight years, which is insane. Or maybe a bit less, but I haven’t over eaten to excess. I haven’t gone,  “Oh, diet starts on Monday.” I haven’t starved myself before a photoshoot in like a decade pretty much. It’s amazing. Just a place of neutrality. I’ve said it a lot on this podcast before, and you know, I talked about it with a few different guests that sometimes the body positivity movement has felt quite oppressive to a lot of us. It’s a very important and amazing movement, and it isn’t for someone like me because I’m, you know, I’m straight sized, I’m slim and privileged, but for a lot of people who even do live in bigger bodies or bodies with disabilities, it’s a lot of pressure to be told in a world that is telling you constantly to hate yourself, you better love yourself and you better be the best at it. And you better think you are the hottest, sexiest thing ever cause then you feel like, “Oh great. Well, now there’s another thing I’m fucking failing at, which is having perfect confidence as well as not having the perfect body I wanted to have.” I really think that capitalism is a massive part of that, of always setting these really unrealistic ideals that we always feel like we’re working towards something. I’m just not about that. I believe in finding ways to be proud incrementally of myself for wherever I’m at. And if I’m always at neutrality around my self-worth as a person, around my achievements at work or around my image, then I will have beyond won as far as I’m concerned. I hope I get to a point of pride. I hope I get to a point of bigging myself up. But when it comes to certain things that I’m poisoned and programed by, by the whole of the fucking media that’s everywhere, including at my fingertips on my phone. If I can just stay at neutrality, that’s fucking great, and so if you can even get to neutrality, you’re smashing it. And I’m so proud of you. But learning that it is a lie, it is a sinful lie that any of our worth or anything that’s important about us is in our exterior or in our perfection. Being able to divorce yourself from that fallacy is true liberation, and it’s something that I work really hard towards. And so EMDR therapy as well as incrementally just, you know, instead of going from starving myself to just eating everything in the world, just kind of incremental progress bit by bit, learning to eat a type of food like bread or something that I’d never eaten before. I just have a little bit and realize that the world doesn’t stop turning and and then, you know, gaining a bit of weight and realizing that, oh, look, all my friends are still friends with me. Oh, look, people still find me attractive. Oh, look, I’m still able to do a job. Oh, look, I feel okay today. I’m still surviving. I’m not manically depressed. I’m able to get out of bed. I kind of actually have a bit more energy. And I had fun last night at dinner instead of dreading it. And so just incremental progress. Everything in life, everything I try to encourage you towards, and this entire podcast is just little bits of incremental progress, incremental progress towards food, incremental progress towards your attitude toward yourself or your attitude towards your body or your attitude towards the way that you look. Be very careful as well that the last thing I did that was I think very important is being very, very mindful of the media that I consume. You know, my algorithm is just a reflection of what I’ve already shown an interest in, so if that’s going to be really skinny models who talk about weight loss all the time and fitness experts, that’s all I’m going to see. And then that’s going to destroy and break my tiny, fragile mind. So about maybe in like 2017, 2016, 2017, I, you know, when I first really got on Instagram properly, I was like, “Okay, this is fucked. I need to change my explore page. I need my explore page to be dogs and funny animal videos,” which is why my social media is mostly funny animal videos that are very much so on purpose so I can help my algorithm as well as help yours be mostly about funny dog videos instead of fucking weight loss shit that we’re all bombarded with. And I started following accounts of, like, old Italian movie stars who were women who had curvier bodies and following people in bigger bodies and, uh, following people who had similar health, you know, conditions to me or, uh, who have similar belief systems or who fought for humanitarian causes or, you know, who loved animals. I just was so, so, so mindful with what my feed looks like, and so I don’t really follow a lot of models and celebrities. And the ones that I do are mostly on mute, not because I have any kind of personal problem with them, I really don’t, but just because I’m honest enough to say, “Ah, looking at you triggers very bad thoughts in my brain about me.” I try to be mindful about what I post on social media so that that doesn’t make anyone else feel any kind of a way, and it doesn’t make me feel bad. I don’t use filters because I don’t want to hold myself up to an insane beauty standard that doesn’t exist and is ruining all of our brains and ruining the world, um, so curating your your feed is something that I refer to as self-defense of the mind. It’s important to learn self-defense of the body, but it is so, almost as important, if not more important, to learn self-defense of your mind. If you’re really, really, really careful with what you’re looking at, you actually might have a fighting chance. Be careful of the magazines you pick up and be careful of the television that you’re watching. Really, really listen for the thoughts in your head when you’re consuming certain types of media. And if you find that anything that’s causing you shame, even if you really like and admire that person or you’re friends to that person at work, but their holiday pictures make you feel like shit, you’re not a petty or small person for wanting to look away. You can still be nice to that person, respectful and friendly, but whatever you’re looking at that makes you feel like shit, stop looking at it, even if it’s just for a while. Stop looking at it. Try to access some kind of therapy that might make you, you know, find it easier to tolerate that sort of material, but please never force yourself to do anything that makes you feel shame and like shit because life is too fucking short. And that kind of brings us back around just as we close out to what I was talking about at the beginning of this episode. I want you to be mindful of the content that you consume. If you are someone who is traumatized by seeing images of people covered in blood and in explosions and dead bodies, you are not weak or bad for choosing not to look at that. It doesn’t mean you don’t have to stay informed. There are plenty of news articles that print the words without the pictures. This shit can really fuck you up, and it can bring back terrible memories of other things that you have experienced. I have friends who’ve survived other wars who are now seeing these images come up without sensitivity warning, who are like having panic attacks and nervous breakdowns over the imagery that’s all over the internet. Maybe get offline for a bit, and maybe just read about it in the newspapers, and then find other ways to be helpful, or be very mindful of the accounts. Maybe mute a few accounts who are posting explicit shit without warning. Again, just think about the long game. Think about what’s good for you in the long term, and know that it means that you will be happier, healthier, and more helpful person at the end. I don’t want you to be doomscrolling all day. I don’t want you to look at the news all day. I don’t want you to look at models and people with unachievable lifestyles all day. I want you to look at things that are just going to bring you some peace and some joy, and be actually helpful to you and to the world. So I hope this has been helpful. These are just some of the thoughts that have been in my brain. Thank you so much for your questions. There are more to get through. I’ll do more episodes like this if you don’t absolutely fucking hate this one, and uh, message me with any thoughts or feelings you have about what I said, and I will see you next week. I love you lots. Please look after yourselves.