Open Book

by Jessica Simpson

That made him angry. “There is one thing in life I want to be, Jessica,” he told me. “A good man. A good father. I can’t help it that I fell in love with someone seven years younger than me. I just can’t.”

Note: wasting that kind of money trying to make someone like you is never really a good idea, but I wanted him to be happy because obviously I wasn’t enough.

I was in the best shape of my life, and I didn’t appreciate it, but also, it just shows the absurdity of how we always find something to criticize about ourselves.

I’d been living with sadness so long that I was used to the feeling. “Please don’t leave me,” he said, and I was back in my body, looking into his eyes. “I love you so much.” “Love is not enough,” I said. “If love was enough, I would stay forever. But it isn’t enough. We have to like each other. We have to be friends.”

How many times are women made to feel responsible for the actions of men?

How do you react when you find out you have apparently hurt someone so deeply that they feel entitled to such actions? I felt manipulated into some revenge fantasy, but I had put myself in this situation.

Nick would always be one of the loves of my life, and he taught me how to love in that way, so I appreciated that. But I had to leave him in the past.

“Dad,” I said. “This is for my freedom, and you can’t put a price on that. Do it.” He relented and agreed to pay him the money just to be done. “I’ll make it back,” I said. “I promise, I’ll make it back.” And then I did. Give or take a billion.

IT WAS TWO MONTHS LATER, LATE NOVEMBER, AND JOHN HAD ALREADY broken up with me again at least once. Honestly, he did it so many times I lost track. Always in an email.

Every time John returned, I thought it was a continuation of a love story, while my friends saw a guy coming back for sex with some foolish girl.

“He was obsessed with you,” she said. “Love and obsession are so different. One is healthy, one is not.”

I remember the moment I realized they were all playing the Madden NFL video game and Tony was playing himself. It was just so bizarre.

Here’s the thing: women are beautiful at any size. I believed that, and still I had dieted for years, taken who knows how many diet pills. I did that because I thought that’s what it took to be a success in the music industry and in Hollywood, but I didn’t want anyone else to hold themselves to that impossible standard. I wish I hadn’t.

The fact that I was that skinny and that I was deemed overweight still frightens me. No way was I going to go out there and turn on my sisters by saying, “Oh, no, you’re mistaken. It was the angle and the fit. I’m actually a size four.” What would that do to my young fans, who may have been a size bigger or twenty sizes bigger?

We refused the requests, unwilling to play into the game of shaming women.

Even as I tried to remain body positive about everybody else, a dysmorphia set in. I no longer trusted the mirror. With every reflection, every single pane of glass I passed, I took myself in quickly to try to catch myself, to see what the world apparently saw.

if you have stretch marks from pregnancy, I hope you can be proud that your body created life.

But I can tell you that plastic surgery does not cure what’s inside. Really, it’s about how you feel emotionally, and I was still just as hard on myself once those stitches were out. I still had work to do.

“Sometimes we are all so afraid to be honest with ourselves because we know that honesty will lead to somewhere.” I wrote this ten years ago. “Can fear walk us to something better?”