MasterChef, master stress
In this exclusive extract from Sarah Wilson’s new book, she details how co-hosting MasterChef Australia brought her anxiety to a head.
Ilook back now and can see that every major step forward in my career has been driven by my anxiety.
It leads me. It’s my internal traffic light system that tells me “go” and “stop”.
When I feel the anxious choke at my throat, that urghhhh, I know something is not for me. Stop! it screams at me. In this way my relentless anxiety – and my awareness of it – has helped me make big, important decisions along the way. I think anxiety pushes us. It exists to do so – it helps us friggin’ fire up. Even when it makes us stall with terror, it eventually makes conditions so unbearable that we ricochet off to a new important direction. Eventually.
This is what happened with my gig as co-host of the inaugural MasterChef Australia series in 2009. In this case, my anxiety didn’t so much scream in my ear as explode. Throughout the eight months of filming, my throat was tight with anxious choke. I was compromised by the role, shackled by the confines apportioned to women in Australian TV. I burned with frustration and boredom. It built up and built up, and I’d stopped sleeping. The bags under my eyes, and weight gain from the sugary carbs I took to eating on set, saw me disintegrate in front of the record number of viewers who followed the first season.
One day – the day we filmed the grand finale, aptly enough – I erupted. I was in the shipping container dressing room I shared with my three male co-hosts, being forced, again aptly, into a Jessica Rabbit corseted dress that saw my sugary carbboosted bust billow voluminously.
Did you see the finale? No doubt you watched it on wide-screen. My bust arrived on set. I entered shortly after. Ring bells?
The producers came to the dressing room to announce yet another compromising set of instructions that would see me reduced to a vacuous talking head. I mouthed off at the producers for pushing us – myself and others who felt equally sleep-deprived and confined – too far. “I’m like a broom in a ridiculous dress with a wig. You press play and I mouth off your inane lines.”
Then (I recall watching myself in slow motion) I punched the wall of the metal shipping container. I broke two knuckles. The big bosses were called in to have calm chats with me. I walked off set and went to see my meditation teacher, Tim, feeling deeply ashamed. I’d never behaved like this in my life. Tim laughed. “Perfect,” he said. “You lanced the pimple; you were the volcano that released the pressure valve. Let’s see what comes of it.”
Sure enough, the next day, I felt resolved and clear. I quit, pulling out of future series. And moved to the shed in the forest and created my own business.
Anxiety is also the grist to my mill; the textured, all-weather athlete’s track that provides the perfect surface from which I can make my highest jumps, up and over the rail. My anxiety activates my muscles, my fire, my fight. It also sees me care about everything. If I didn’t care that the food industry was leading us all astray, if I didn’t care that food wastage was killing the planet (and hadn’t researched the bejesus out of such topics), I wouldn’t have had the motivation to work 17 hours a day to meet publishing and business deadlines.
I’m like a broom in a ridiculous dress with a wig.