Learning to Love myself
In a new memoir, the ‘This Is Us’ star gets candid about her harrowing past—and reveals how she finally found happiness in her own skin After my parents divorced we moved into an apartment in what others told you, if you gave them your address, was “the g
She’s a star on TV’S hottest show, but Chrissy Metz has never been one to take herself too seriously. At a photo shoot for WHO’S sister magazine People on March 15, she mugs for the camera, acting as if she’s being swept away by a fan’s breeze while declaring, with a flip of her hair, “I’m not a model— I’m just a girl who pretends to be an actress.”
It’s that humility, authenticity and humour that have endeared her to fans since This Is Us (Network Ten) hit the air in 2016. But “pretends” is more than a joke: It hints at the surprise she still sometimes feels about her success. Growing up in Gainesville, Florida, Metz, now 37, always felt she was “too much of this and not enough of that,” as she puts it—an overweight, insecure girl who loved singing and making her family laugh, but suffered abuse at the hands of her stepfather and never dreamed she’d find her way to fame. As an aspiring actor, she often felt dismissed because of her size. As a star, she still faces fat-shaming and is asked too often for her liking if she’s planning to have weight-loss surgery. (For the record: She’s content in her skin and says, “I don’t focus on numbers—it’s all about how I feel.”)
Her new memoir This Is Me traces her incredible journey from poverty to stardom, and from self-doubt to finally “embracing the idea that people could be inspired by me.” Despite her life’s hardships, Metz says, “I’ve always had this happiness inside. I truly believe that everything that happened to me happened for me.”
In an excerpt from the memoir, she opens up about what did happen, beginning with the year her father, a former Navy officer, left her mother to raise Chrissy, 8, her sister Monica, 15, and brother Philip, 13, on her own. worked as a checkout girl at the Food 4 Less. I was a latchkey kid in second grade.
I didn’t want to be alone, so every day I would go to the grocery store and just walk around. This one was a bit fancier than Food 4 Less. I loved the brightness of the place, and the feeling of being safe. I looked at all the food my family could never afford.
Her mother, Denise, had a baby, Morgana, with a boyfriend, who skipped town. With money tighter than ever, the family moved to a trailer park. After Denise met Trigger, who had a good job at Coca-cola, the family moved in with him and his daughter.
My mom married Trigger at the courthouse. Soon she was pregnant again, with another girl, Abigail. Trigger loved his two biological children, and was even welcoming to Morgana. Me, not so much. My mother was always at work, so she didn’t see how he treated me.
My body seemed to offend him, but he couldn’t help but stare, especially when I was eating. He joked about putting a lock on the refrigerator. We had lived with a lack of food for so long that when it was there, I felt like I had to eat it before it disappeared. Food was my only happiness.
And so I began to hide my eating. I’d get up in the middle of the night and eat. I’d sneak food to eat in the bathroom. Cookies, chips. Things I could eat as fast as possible to avoid detection. Things that would give me the brief bliss of numbness.
My other joy was entertaining my sisters. I had a boom box, and would record interviews with them. We would fall on the floor laughing. I loved entertaining, and the feeling I had when I could make
“I learned to embrace the idea that people could be inspired by me, and that’s what I think a role model is”
them happy. I think I was trying to figure out what joy was.
I don’t remember why Trigger hit me the first time. He never punched my face. Just my body, the thing that offended him so much. He shoved me, slapped me, punched my arm. He would hit me if he thought I looked at him wrong. I remember being on the kitchen floor after he knocked me over, and I was begging to know what I did. He just shoved me hard with his foot. She found escape at friends’ houses and at school, where she joined choir and band. And then came puberty.
I remember looking at my friends’ bodies thinking, How? They were developing curves, and I felt that wasn’t gonna happen for me. I was just round. I never wanted to draw attention to my body and always wore oversized clothing. A lot of collared fake Izod shirts. I had a different crush every hour. I was definitely the girl who was friends with all the guys. I always heard “You’re so cool,” but of course, no boys would want to date me because of how I looked. Before long, boys began making their interest in her clear, but it only went so far. Her first love, Derek, the brother of her friend Mya, refused to acknowledge her in public.
Let me tell you, my first kiss with Derek was—to this day!—one of the most amazing kisses, if not the best of my life. The next time we were all at Mya’s, I waited for him to acknowledge me in a real way, not just through his secret signals. When he didn’t, I decided this was what I needed to settle for—a wink here and there. He couldn’t let anyone know he liked the fat girl. Got it.
If I got too comfortable around him in front of our friends— meaning I said, “Hi, Derek”—he curled that perfect upper lip and looked away, exhaling in disbelief and disgust. The night before, he’d kissed me and told me I was beautiful.
By then I had started my pattern of acting like things simply weren’t happening. I stuffed my feelings with food. I grew to a size 12, the heaviest girl in my grade. And I became one angsty teenager.
When I was 14, Trigger began weighing me. He’d get the scale from the bathroom and clang it hard on the kitchen floor. “Well, get on the damn thing!” Trigger would yell. “This is what you need to know.”
He sat in a chair next to the scale as I got on. “Good God almighty!” he yelled every single time.
The number then was about 140 or 130 [63kg or 58kg]. Most of my friends weighed about 90 pounds [40kg]. “Why are you getting fatter?” he demanded.
I look at pictures of me from that time, and I would be so fine with being that size now. But I thought I was gigantic. By then the beating had escalated. One time he hit me, and I looked right in his face. If I had a gun, I thought, I would shoot you. Afterward, I was so upset with myself. How could I think that about this person I loved so much? Because I really did love him. This man did more for me than my father ever did. He was smart, and I was allowed to quietly join him in watching the Ken Burns Civil War documentaries on television. I clung to [these points of connection] because I needed to figure out why this person could do right by me as a provider, but be unable to love me. She got out as soon as she could, moving to LA to pursue her dream of becoming an actress in 2003. At the recommendation of her then manager, she lost 20kg. But auditions were hard to come by.
It became clear to me that I should either lose more weight or stay the butt of the joke. You were either a size zero or a sight gag. She found work as a talent agent, met a man through a plus-size dating service and married him. She lost 40kg after an anxiety attack landed her in hospital and doctors recommended she lose weight. But the kilos crept back on, and the marriage ended in 2013. Through it all, her dream of entertaining people for a living was never extinguished, and in 2014 she landed a role on American Horror Story. And then the big break: the role of Kate on This Is Us.
[Show creator] Dan Fogelman is solely responsible for changing my life. He wrote
“‘All the boys would flirt and be very kind but never want to date me, because I was the chubby girl’”
a role for someone we’d never seen before.
“It’s always going to be about the weight for me,” Kate says in the second episode. “That’s been my story ever since I was a little girl. And every moment that I’m not thinking about it, I’m thinking about it. Like, will this chair hold me? Will this dress fit me? And if I ever get pregnant, will anyone ever notice? It’s just at the core of who I am ... ”
I remember reading those lines and running to Dan, saying, “These are my fears.” And I love that now, Kate is evolving to a place where that is not her only storyline. Metz has learned to live with the more painful parts of her own storyline and is seeing her life with clearer eyes.
What I have learned is that hurt people hurt people. I have come to terms with my feelings about Trigger. He wrote me a letter when I first moved to LA that I have kept with me. “I just want you to know,” he wrote, “that you do things I never thought I would see you do. You are so much more courageous than I’ve been in my whole life.” He talked about being hard on me, and he said he was sorry. And he said he loved me. That’s all I have ever wanted him to say. About five years ago, I went home to Gainesville for Christmas. I was at the mall when I saw a man with four kids. He was covered with tattoos on his arms and neck. He looked familiar. “’Sup,” Derek said. I had frozen Derek in that summer. Now he had gold teeth and overplucked eyebrows, and he looked worn out. “How are you?” he asked. “Good,” I said. “You?” “Good.” And we kept walking. I turned around to take one last look. I wanted to ask if he was ever in love with me way back then. I wanted to ask what happened to him. Was he happy now?
I thought how much I had loved this man-boy. How I had pinned all of my dreams on him. Maybe he’s not the one that got away, I thought.
Maybe I am.