It's Not Okay: Turning Heartbreak into Happily Never After (15 page)

Among the plethora of questions I am often asked, the top two have got to be: (1) Why would a lawyer
ever
want to go on a reality television show? and (2) Why haven’t you gone back to your job yet?

I know they say you have to have thick skin to make it in this world, even thicker in the world of television, and though my skin is getting there, these two questions always remind me of just how penetrable I am. I find myself feeling incredibly defensive and insecure when these questions get flung my way. My mother tries to convince me that most people simply ask out of curiosity, and though she’s probably right, I still hear a condescending tone in the questioners’ voices.

What I
really
want to say in response is, “Fuck off. Are you still working at your first job? Oh, you’re not? How dare you make a career change!” But I stop myself as I hear my mother’s voice in my head saying, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” I guess “fuck off” isn’t exactly what you’d call nice. So instead, I reply with a canned answer such as, “Well, I left a great job to go on the show to find love, of course” and “I hope to return to work as soon as everything settles down.”

Truth is, I wonder if anyone really cares about the real answer, or if the blanket bullshit answer I give satisfies their “curiosity.” But nonetheless, here’s what my real answers would be, without saying “fuck off” and trying really, really hard not to be defensive.

QUESTION 1:
Why would a lawyer
ever
want to go on a reality television show?

CANNED BULLSHIT ANSWER:
I loved my job, but I wanted to find the one thing missing in my life: love.

REAL ANSWER:
First off, let me get something off my chest and then I can actually answer the question sensibly. What is so damn bad about a reality television show? We
all
watch them. I watch them, my friends watch them, doctors, scientists, teachers, politicians, housewives all watch them, and I bet if nuns had televisions they’d watch them too. Hell, I’m pretty sure as part of domestic relations, even POTUS watches them. I mean, come on, somewhere in that massive White House there has got to be a television on that just so happens to have a reality show playing in a room that happens to have a love seat with a lady who just so happens to be POTUS’s wife (aka FLOTUS/Head Bitch in Charge), and her eyes just so happen to gaze at the television, right? The fact is, reality television is a huge part of our culture, and we can all try and pretend we don’t watch it, but we do, so let’s just own it. But it seems in the minds of opinionated strangers that my status as an attorney somehow made me superior to a reality show. As if being on television automatically makes you the dull crayon in the box. Let me tell you from experience, there are a shit ton of idiots on reality television, but there are also a shit ton of idiots in the legal profession.

Second, I realize watching is very different from partaking in it. At the risk of sounding cheesy, I actually went on the show thinking I would fall in love. Well, let me clarify. The first time, I didn’t expect to fall in love. How could I? There were twenty-plus other women vying for one man, so the odds weren’t exactly in my favor. But I knew the possibility was there. The second time around, I absolutely expected to fall in love. Now, I say this with a disclaimer because of-fucking-course the travel, clothing, and every other glamorous thing that came with the gig certainly helped to persuade me as well.

Last, the main reason I, “the attorney,” went on the show was that, frankly, I was tired of always being responsible. I wanted to be a little reckless for once in my life. When it came to my career, I had always done the right thing in order to succeed. I graduated high school, then went straight on to college, law school, and right into my job as an attorney. I had always placed this internal pressure on myself to be a self-sufficient career woman, despite the fact that my parents would have been supportive of any career path I chose as long as I followed Dad’s Three Golden Rules: (1) Don’t embarrass him, (2) Don’t embarrass my mother, and (3) Don’t sell my body.

I abided by these rules for most of my life, give or take a few slip-ups in high school. For the most part, I was a decent teenager. Though not a genius like my older sister, I was smart enough to know how much fun I could have and how low my GPA could get and still guarantee me admission to a decent college. I had the same balancing mentality once I got into college, although I tried a little harder. Well, actually, I didn’t try harder in college, I just partied harder, but I was smart enough (again) to find the easy classes. And when I say easy, I mean E-A-S-Y. Put it this way, I had one class where our final assignment was to teach the class a “how-to” of our choice. One kid taught the class “How to Chill a Beer in Less Than Two Minutes,” I shit you not. Unfortunately, I knew those days wouldn’t last forever, so during my junior year I began preparing for my future. I was hit with the panicky realization that at twenty-one years old, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. The economy was in crisis, nobody was getting jobs, and I was terrified of facing the real world or, as my father referred to it, “The Closing of the Daddy Bank,” so I decided, why not try my hand at law school? A year later, I was a college graduate and headed to Wake Forest to become a first-year law student.

I thrived in law school more than in high school and college, which I admit isn’t saying much. It wasn’t due to intelligence but because I worked hard, I actually enjoyed studying (weird, I know) and, most of all, I had found my niche: the trial team. Despite being a communications major in college, I’d rarely done any public speaking. That all changed a month into law school when I, along with the rest of the 150 first-year students, entered the First-Year Trial Competition. After miraculously making it to the semifinals, I was offered a spot on the school’s National Trial Team. My passion for performing in a courtroom led me to accept an internship at the District Attorney’s Office in Atlanta. I loved my job. It gave me a feeling of purpose and challenge. It showed me a world that I never knew existed. I saw more of the world in my time as an attorney in one city than I did in eight countries on the show. My office wasn’t just the courthouse; it was the most dangerous streets of Atlanta, where single mothers tried to support five children in one-bedroom apartments and prayed their sons didn’t go to jail. I saw dead bodies, gangbangers, crackheads, and a broken system I never could have imagined. It was a far cry from the comfy suburban life I had grown up in, filled with tennis moms, Botox, country clubs, and high school student parking lots that looked like luxury car dealerships. Maybe it was the rebel inside me, but something about my new world intrigued me.

Looking back, I think that same rebel inside me was probably the biggest contributing factor to my going on a reality television show. I had gotten a taste of the extreme, and I was hooked!

Now for question number two. Hold on, I need to step off my soapbox, these stilettos are killing me. Okay, I’m back, barefoot.

QUESTION 2:
Why haven’t you gone back to work yet?

CANNED BULLSHIT ANSWER:
I’ve been distracted with press commitments and really want to be 100 percent available before I start back at work.

REAL ANSWER:
Honestly, I haven’t gone back to work yet because although I loved my job, I didn’t love making $57,000 a year working sixty-hour weeks. And as luck would have it, I didn’t
have
to do that yet. I had an opportunity to travel, do fun things, and spend time loving up on my (then) fiancé. Let’s be honest, if
anyone
had the opportunity to make money having fun versus fighting rush-hour traffic just to grind it out at work day after day, they’d choose the former. I don’t care how much you love your job.

It’s ironic that other than my friends and family, the people who never seem to ask me when I’m coming back to work are my former colleagues. I’ve kept in touch with them to this day, and every time I suggest my return, they ask if I’m crazy. See, despite loving their jobs, even my colleagues are smart enough to see the logical choice in this situation is to soak up the opportunity. Besides, even my then fiancé didn’t want me returning to what he deemed a “dangerous” profession, so it wasn’t as if there was a ton of pressure from people whose opinions I value.

Plus, what’s it to anyone? I’m a law-abiding citizen who made a decision to follow a winding road. Yes, I worked hard and spent money on my education, but that was my decision, and as such, it’s my decision how I use that investment. Changes happen in life that make you veer off course. I never predicted any of this would happen. Not the reality show, not the engagement, and certainly not the breakup. But it did. It happened and here I am and I don’t have all the answers right now, but I’m fine with that. There’s something kind of beautiful about not knowing; there’s something freeing about relinquishing control and going along with whatever life brings or throws your way.

What I’m trying to say is that nobody knows anyone else’s secret to happiness. Nobody can dictate what you do with your life except you. Shit happens. Sometimes that shit breaks you, sometimes it makes you into the person you were always meant to be. And sometimes, that same shit makes you feel lost and question everything in life. But sooner or later, something will stick. You just have to keep trying stuff until you find it. Who knows? Maybe next year I’ll become a yoga instructor. Oh, wait, we’ve already established that I suck at that.

But in all seriousness, I’ve realized that success has nothing to do with what people see on the outside. It’s not about what others think you should be doing with your life; it’s about what you want from your life. Success is measured by your own happiness. Because let me say from experience, the times that people probably thought I was the most successful were the times when I was the least happy.

Everyone feels lost at some point in their lives. I don’t know when or how I will find my footing, and I don’t know when you will either. But sooner or later you will. You have to. After all, nobody’s ever died of a broken heart, and I don’t think any of us plan on being the first one to do so.

Lesson learned:
You won’t know unless you try.

T
hanks to yesterday’s yoga session, my body is sore in places I never knew existed. As I lie on the couch, I find myself on my phone doing exactly what I shouldn’t be doing, scrolling through old photos of my past relationship. There’s a nauseating number of them documenting practically every moment of our relationship, from the first night I met Number Twenty-Six, to our first date at a castle in France, to the weekend I met his family, all the way to the day he got down one knee. They’re pictures that luckily producers sent me once the show wrapped, since I wasn’t allowed to have my phone during filming. And now, they’re pictures I wish never existed. Looking at them is like taking a trip down memory lane, only it feels less like a happy stroll and more like I’m walking down my own plank. The worst comes when I see the photos of our first weekend after we got engaged. God, what an amazing weekend that was! I had just gotten my phone back after having gone the entire season without it, and the seventy-plus photos of the two of us together show that I was not only snap-happy, I was just plain happy.

It had been a long eight weeks, to say the least, but I remember the eve of the final day, lying in bed as I realized the journey was finally coming to an end. It was a journey that had taken me from Atlanta, to Los Angeles, to Europe, and now to my final destination of the Dominican Republic. Along the way, I’d gone on dozens of dates, played more tonsil hockey than I care to admit, visited hometowns, met families, dumped twenty-three men, and now there were only two left. Yes, finally two men and by the next day, there’d only be one.

It was a day I had dreamt about for so long, but with it right around the corner, I remember feeling a swirl of emotions. I was ecstatic for the exhausting journey to be over, but strangely saddened that the long days filled with difficult decisions, cameras rolling, and zero privacy were coming to an end. But most of all, I felt relief that without a shadow of a doubt, I was madly in love and wanted to spend the rest of my life with one man and one man only: Number Twenty-Six.

But before I could do that, I had to let go of Number Twenty-Five. It was only a matter of how and when. The first option was to go the normal route on the show, which meant waiting until he got down on one knee to propose or profess his undying love, only to dump him then. Or, I could defy the producers, play by my own rules, and end it before any more damage was done. The thing with Number Twenty-Five was that he was respectful (well, other than telling me he’d rather fuck me than make love to me), he was compassionate, vulnerable, and I liked him. He just wasn’t Twenty-Six. Thus, I knew what I had to do, and allowing him to be humiliated by rejecting his possible proposal wasn’t an option.