Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies: And Other Rituals to Fix Your Life, from Someone Who's Been There - Softcover

Schuster, Tara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0525509909 ISBN 13: 9780525509905

Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

Brutally honest, often hilarious, hard-won lessons in learning to love and care for yourself from a former vice president at Comedy Central who was called “ahead of her time” by Jordan Peele

“You’re going to want Tara Schuster to become your new best friend.”—Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Untamed

“Compelling, persuasive, and useful no matter where you are in your life.”—Chelsea Handler, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Life Will Be the Death of Me

By the time she was in her late twenties, Tara Schuster was a rising TV executive who had worked for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and helped launch Key & Peele to viral superstardom. By all appearances, she had mastered being a grown-up. But beneath that veneer of success, she was a chronically anxious, self-medicating mess. No one knew that her road to adulthood had been paved with depression, anxiety, and shame, owing in large part to her minimally parented upbringing. She realized she’d hit rock bottom when she drunk-dialed her therapist pleading for help.

Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies is the story of Tara’s path to re-parenting herself and becoming a “ninja of self-love.” Through simple, daily rituals, Tara transformed her mind, body, and relationships, and shows how to

• fake gratitude until you actually feel gratitude
• excavate your emotional wounds and heal them with kindness
• identify your self-limiting beliefs, kick them to the curb, and start living a life you choose
• silence your inner frenemy and shield yourself from self-criticism
• carve out time each morning to start your day empowered, inspired, and ready to rule
• create a life you truly, totally f*cking LOVE

This is the book Tara wished someone had given her and it is the book many of us desperately need: a candid, hysterical, addictively readable, practical guide to growing up (no matter where you are in life) and learning to love yourself in a non-throw-up-in-your-mouth-it’s-so-cheesy way.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tara Schuster is the author of Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies, selected by Cosmopolitan, Real Simple, Goop, Publishers Weekly, and many more as one of the year’s best books on mental health and self-care. Previously, Schuster served as vice president of talent and development at Comedy Central, where she was the executive in charge of such critically acclaimed shows as the Emmy and Peabody award-winning Key & Peele. A contributor to InStyle, The New Yorker, and Forbes, among others, Tara Schuster lives in Los Angeles.

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Be the Best at the Worst

Start Where You Are

At Comedy Central, where I have worked for the past ten years, we have an intern lunch during which our group of hardworking, sweet, so-­clueless-­I-­have-­become-­embarrassed-­that-­I-­was-­ever-that-­young interns can ask us executives for advice. The questions are usually the same.

Q: How do you deal with being a woman in Hollywood?

A: Um . . . Do you have ten hours to talk and not in this room full of my dude colleagues?

Q: How do you make a “good” TV show?

A: No idea. All I do is find the most talented people I can, say a prayer, and get out of the way. Anyone who tells you differently, or that they have some secret sauce, is probably an egomaniac.

Q: How did you get your first big break?

A: I was at my own intern lunch at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart when a fellow intern asked that very same question. I had never worked in television before, and I was in awe of the rigor of that show. Jon was there every day, the entire day, overseeing everything. And the people around him were just so smart. They were the adults you wanted to be: single-­minded in their dedication to their work, rushing about in a manner that screamed importance, and totally uninterested in us, the lowly interns. When we finally had our official time to sit with Jon, another intern asked him what his first “big break” was. Jon very quickly, very firmly responded: “There are no big breaks. There are only a series of tiny, little breaks. The key is to work your hardest and do your best at every little break.” Jon Stewart is/was/will forever be my hero, and so I took his words, swallowed them, and tried to make them part of me.

That entire semester at The Daily Show I made it my mission to be the best at the worst of jobs, with the hope that I might find my own little break. When I noticed that a correspondent wanted oatmeal every day but by the time he got into the office it had all been eaten, I saved him packets and put them on his desk with a bowl and a spoon. When I saw that the permanent staff was genuinely annoyed by the interns who constantly did “bits,” trying to out-­funny one another in a misguided attempt to “get discovered,” I decided to be quiet and polite. My greatest contribution, however, was cleaning the capsule coffee machine.

Every afternoon after rehearsal, Jon would make himself an iced coffee in a little kitchen nook outside the studio door. I noticed that the machine was often dirty, out of water, or—­even worse—­broken, and I imagined how annoyed that must make Jon. Here he was trying to get one of the funniest, most important shows on the air, and he couldn’t even get a mediocre capsule coffee? Not on my watch! I saw my first little break.

I treated that machine like a precious object, cleaning it, refilling it, pulling it apart, putting it back together, making sure it was perfect. I read online how to fix the machine and practiced at home by buying a similar model. I spent a good part of my day making sure the thing was in order so there would never be a time when Jon couldn’t have a little coffee. It didn’t occur to me then that I was being pretty intense-­bordering-­on-­psychotic about the machine; instead, I saw this as my way to make a contribution to a show I loved. If I wasn’t going to be a writer on the show, if I was just a lowly intern, at least I could be the lowly intern who could be called upon at any point to fix the single most important item in any creative environment: the coffee machine. I don’t know if it was cleaning the coffee machine or my polite quietness that impressed the producers, but at the end of the semester, they helped me get an entry-­level job at Comedy Central. The rest of my career sprung directly from that decision to be the best at something that seemed like the worst.

Today, I tell young people who ask for professional advice to be the best at the worst. Take whatever weird little opportunity you have and maximize the fuck out of it. In a best-­case scenario, someone cool will notice. In a worst-­case scenario, you will notice and feel pride knowing you are doing a good job, even if the task sucks. Simply put: Start where you are without worrying too much about how far you have to go.

After my twenty-­fifth birthday, on my floral duvet, I decided to start where I was. I knew that when it came to healing my own mind, I would have to apply the same persistence, care, and attention I brought to that coffee machine. I would have to show up, figure out what was wrong with the water tank, and work like hell to fix it. I would have to be vigilant and patient, knowing that for no reason at all, sometimes the machine would have a total meltdown and refuse to work, and I’d be left with an ominous red light staring me in the face. While I didn’t have an owner’s manual to my own mind, I did have a quote from Jay-­Z to guide me: “Only thing to stop me is me, and I’ma stop when the hook start.” I ardently believe in the first part; I don’t totally know what he means about the hook starting.

Start where you are. Wherever you are. Be the best at the worst.

Writing It Down Saved My Life

Connect to Your Innermost Self

By twenty-­five, I knew I was damaged, but I wasn’t totally sure how. Just what exactly was my problem? That shameful drunk-­dial to my therapist was just one of many “not okay,” “are you even being a real fucking person right now?” ways I had acted recently. Many days at work, where I was kicking ass at my entry-­level job, I would find myself uncontrollably weeping in my cubicle. I would be in the middle of logging stand-­up videos when I would feel tears well up from an inexplicable pit of sadness within me. I would look at my snotty, sobbing reflection in the computer monitor and think, What are you doing? The walls of my cubicle insulated me from outsiders just long enough for me to make my way to the personal call room and have a proper cry.

These meltdowns followed me through the office and into the streets of Manhattan, where I often played the role of “girl mysteriously crying on your stoop.” I also played the part of “girl encumbered by too many bags about to burst into tears because the train is slightly delayed/there is a long line to buy a sandwich/any little thing has gone wrong.” I was raw with feelings of extreme unease that manifested into a persistent, slightly dizzy feeling, like I was living outside my body. Was I sick? I seemed to have a permanent headache that throbbed at the base of my cervical spine, then crawled up my neck, wrapped itself around my skull, and finally settled its claws into two painful points above my ears. I had no clue what to do about all of the tears, the sadness, the headaches, the physical and mental pain. I didn’t understand any of it or where it was coming from.

Growing up, fantasizing and creating new stories for myself had been my refuge from the anarchy of my life. From as early as I can remember, I would perform little plays or look for ways to act the part of someone else. When my parents would take me out on their date nights, I would quickly flee our table in order to play the role of “adult friend” to the diners around us. Eight years old and pulsating with tenacity, I would compliment women, telling them, “You are very pretty!” I would ask men, “Are you a sexist, misogynist pig?” I had heard from my mom that this was a very big deal and I wanted to catch any “sexists” and “misogynists” in my midst. The...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0525509909
• ISBN 13: 9780525509905
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar