Failure Throwback: Jameela Jamil

28:01But so many women feel that they have to put on makeup just to go out and buy a loaf of bread. and every time I'm tempted to do that I think of you saying that so I just want to thank you for that and also for the stand that you take against airbrushing well no look I appreciate that and I think where I was coming from was just that I think it's really bad for my self-esteem to have a bunch of makeup artists spend an hour and 45 minutes to work on my face before I can go out on camera or for me to lose an hour of sleep so I can get up extra early to look acceptable for who who am I doing this for I'm not really doing it for me and I think lockdown really proved to a lot of us that we are not doing this for us because when given the opportunity it's been tracksuit city and it's been no makeup and us getting used to our real faces and I think that's glorious and not getting our nails done the idea that we've said sentences like I must get my nails done as if it's a necessity as if no one can see me with nails like this no one cares so I think we've all been quite liberated but for me the idea of caking on layers and layers and layers of makeup and contour, all of that feeds into the way that we feel about ourselves.

29:06So there's a subliminal messaging there that you are not good enough as you are and it's going to take basically you painting a new face onto your face before you can be accepted. The reason I think it made headlines when I said that is that I'd essentially at The Good Place, which is the comedy that I'm on, refused to come in earlier than The Boys. I was like, what is this? Are you doing prosthetics on me? If not, you don't need an hour and 45 minutes to put some eyeliner and lipstick on my face and tong a bit of my hair. I will come in at the same time as the boys otherwise I will not be able to be as funny as the boys as quick as the boys as energetic or be able to remember my lines as well as them this double standard means that we're not sleeping enough we're not eating enough we're thinking about exercise too much we're thinking about our bodies too much this is all time that we could be spending healing or working on therapy or working on happiness or getting orgasms it infuriates me the idea that I'm denied that extra time as if that's normal.

30:00We're going to come on to body issues next, but I just wanted to ask you whether your impulse to share your honest opinion and how you feel about double standards publicly, is that important for your mental health? Because so many people, I think, find it really toxic, often without knowing, not speaking their truth. I think so yes for me but I'm an ongoing experiment so that doesn't mean everyone should necessarily do as I do because clearly I'm a mess but for me personally when I was 26 I think it was I tried to commit suicide and then I I failed so there's a failure I could have used on this podcast failed at death um but thank you for being honest about that that's incredibly brave well I mean it just it is what it is but I guess my decision was that if I was going to stick around in this dumpster fire of a hell earth, then I was going to do everything completely differently.

31:00And up until that point, I'd been quite a repressed person. And I'd found out that my depression was possibly linked to repressed rage. And I think finding that out really just blew my mind of how much that made sense that this numb kind of depression I had, I didn't have sadness. I wasn't comfort eating and crying into an ice cream like I was not in no way to belittle that. It doesn't mean that I'm sounding like I'm trying to diminish that form of sadness or mental health. But that's what I always thought the movie version of depression was, is that I would look sad. But actually, I was this high-functioning, very numb, cold person.

31:33And that's because repressed rage means that you are, there's a dishonesty to it. You're not telling people how angry you are. You're not even really admitting it to yourself. And I think therein lies the gap between yourself and the person you're pretending to be. And that's where the numbness comes in. Now, I have no degree in literally anything. So this is just my theory that I've worked out kind of with the therapist. But that's where I think my kind of moat of empty was between me and who I pretended to be. This hyper-tolerant survivor. Yeah. And, you know, this stoicism that I thought was important to portray and was gallant of me.

32:07Gallant? What's the word? No, never mind. Gallant. Yeah, fine. Gallant and valiant. Together. Gallant. Oh, there we go. Gallant. I do that all the time. Oh, my God. And I'm a malapropism queen. Another failure. But if I could just make a complete 180, if I could completely change everything and just start saying everything that's on my mind all of the time, a kind of practicing of the micro no, it started with just saying, oh, sorry at Starbucks. And this isn't actually what I ordered. Could I have the thing that I ordered, please? And that in itself just felt like such a huge thing to dare to do.

32:40And just slowly but surely, I built up to telling someone who would kiss me in a way that I didn't like, like, oh, I actually prefer kissing like this, not with your tongue in my stomach. And then it kind of moved forward to saying how I really felt in all interviews and then online and then everywhere in all situations. And so if you know me, you really fucking know me. I'm not holding anything back to my detriment sometimes, but it's just something I'm trying to see if I can work my way out of this prison that is being subservient, obedient woman. Practicing the micro no. I feel like I'm getting so many truth bombs.

33:18Motive empty is something that I'll never forget. The fallible woman and practicing the micro no. Thank you. And gallant, the brand new word. Gallant and more scallions. What Oprah Winfrey would call a teachable moment. So your second failure is your failure to be kind to your body. Tell us about that. Yeah, oh, despair. It makes me feel sad even just hearing it. I just spent over 20 years being so mean to and about my body, this body that did so much for me, and I took it completely for granted and just hated it because it wasn't being obedient to kind of very strict white patriarchal standards that hate women.

34:00And so I feel very, very sad now that I look back on how much time I wasted, how much sex I didn't have because I was starving myself, so I had no sex drive, how much less fun I was, how much less fun I had, how much less brain space for innovation and creativity I had. And, you know, what I've done to my organs with all the shit that I've put in my body or haven't put in my body. You know, your body is an engine and you have to nourish it. And I didn't for so long. And the reason I rage so hard against detox and diet products is because I fucking took them all. I took them all. Anything that was advertised by anyone, anywhere.

34:36I bought it. I took it. I spent all my hard-earned pocket money or work money on it and have kidneys that don't work properly. My digestive system doesn't work properly. I don't know if it ever will again. I'm sure I've fucked up my bones. Like I have harmed my fertility. there's so much damage that will last forever because of the early years of disrespecting this body that was just trying to get me from A to B and do so much for me. Do you know that you've harmed your fertility? Yeah yes I do I do and I don't want to go into it because then it becomes another thing that people will talk about on the internet but yes I definitely have and we noticed that early on when my periods stopped when I was about 15 at the height of my anorexia and that was the kind a beginning of issues with that part of my body and with my fertility.

35:25And so it doesn't mean that I definitely can't have children. I've just made it much harder for myself, as many people who've had anorexia for a long time have. And one of the most interesting things was turning 19 and making that decision back then, which is 16 years ago almost, to stop starving myself. And I thought, because I wasn't just existing on like 180 calories a day, that I was no longer anorexic, but I totally was. Anorexia comes in all different shapes and sizes and it can happen at 400 calories a day, 600 calories a day, 800 calories a day. Orthorexia is something that's true, which is a terror of food, which I definitely had.

36:01And it's taken me really until the last four years of my life to get rid of it. Body dysmorphia, all these different things I've struggled with, all without realizing because diet culture is so hyper normalized. Every woman being on a diet, every woman complaining about how much exercise they're going to have to do to work off their dessert or talking about foods as guilty or naughty or a treat you know it was all so normal to me that I didn't even know I had an eating disorder throughout my 20s because every other woman in my industry and even outside of this industry in my life were just starving themselves perpetually because we all wanted to look like I guess Alexa Chung it's not her fault yeah did anyone step in at any point because you described the decision you made at 19 as a person who generated one but did you feel anyone helped or could see what was going on no no and anorexics can tend to more often than not be very good at hiding their anorexia which is how yeah we're able to sustain the i guess it's a disease for such a long time i think katlin moran came on my podcast and told me that something like only 30 percent of people ever fully recover from anorexia which leaves a vast amount of people still in turmoil.

37:09And so no, no one stepped in. People would express concern, which I used to take as a compliment because I was so messed up. And it was the era just post heroin chic. So I really thought it was an achievement if people were concerned for how thin I was. Oh, I despair. I despair. I'm so glad that I didn't die in my early 30s so that I was able to at least have a few years of freedom from that thought toilet that is eating disorder mentality how do you feel about your body now i just sort of don't care i'm not that fussed about it i'm not someone who stands there in the mirror i fucking love lizzo and megan the stallion and all these different amazing women who sit there and really genuinely love i mean megan the stallion also just is i mean they're all goddesses everyone's a goddess but the point is that when there are women who really just fucking love their thighs and they love their asses and they love their bodies i marvel at them but i can't personally get there and to say i could would be disingenuous of me and i would give anything to feel the way about my body that those people do and i'm a relatively slender ish person i'm a size sort of i don't know 10 to 12 uk but i can't stand there in the mirror and look at cellulite and be like, I love it.

38:28I appreciate it because it's a part of me, but I just tend to now as a way of pushing past that to just not really negotiate with my body image. I'm not going to try and love something for me personally that society spends so much time telling me to hate. Instead, I'm just not going to think about it. So I wear most of the time loose clothes or big baggy suits and I don't really look in a full length mirror more often than maybe once every couple of weeks unless I'm getting ready for an event and I don't spend a lot of time getting ready in front of the mirror so I'd have to look at myself too much and so in doing so it has been so fucking liberating to me because there could be a shit an actual shit on my face and I would have no idea all day which sounds like a bad thing but it's also very liberating because why do I need to know why is it any of my business what I look like I don't want to think about it anymore and in doing so I have become so much more successful so much happier my relationship is happier my friendships are better I'm a better person I'm still shit at Twitter so I can't blame that on the eating disorder unfortunately I'm just shit at it but other than that I have such a full and happy life now because even the hours that we spend thinking about trying to love our bodies or actively loving our bodies we're still thinking about them and I just still think that that's what patriarchy wants that's what the diet industry wants.

39:47That's what the beauty industry wants. It just wants us to be thinking about our looks all the time. And so any form of giving into that, I think gives them what they want. And I'm far too rebellious for that. So who knows, maybe one day I'll love it. But for now, I just choose to not engage with it.

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41:24Do compliments help? No. They go down. It's that Georgia O 'Keeffe, you know, compliments and criticisms or insults go down the same drain. None of it helps. It makes me uncomfortable because of years of dysmorphia. I don't want to think about it. and I've become very careful to not compliment other women in particular on if I notice weight loss I used to be like oh you've lost a lot of weight as if that was a good thing and I realized oh my god that was so problematic because also then if that weight comes back on they're now thinking that you're going to be noticing it and judging it so I'm very careful to never comment on that sort of thing I'll comment on a dress or if someone's glowing or on their hair but I'm very very very much more aware of the damage we do with compliments sometimes and just to be clear I think there'll be people listening to this who are nodding their heads with every single word that you say but who also feel like I like to wear leather trousers and put makeup on and go out and and you're not saying that the two are mutually exclusive not at all I fucking love makeup and I I love women in particular in leather trousers, really hot, but I'm never telling anyone how to feel about their bodies.

42:34I'm not even out there preaching to love yourself. I'm just saying for me personally, as someone who's been so fucked up for such a long time, I choose to just not even try. I'm just like, that's for me as an emotional minefield, I'm out. I just want to get on with my day. You do you and whatever you do, just try to do it slowly, safely, and not at the advice of a celebrity. Like if you want to gain weight or lose weight or gain more muscle or have less muscle in your body, do whatever you want, but just do it slowly, safely. No quick fix ever works. It only ever harms you. And it's designed for you to fail so that you'll have to keep using it again and again and again.

43:10Don't ever use laxatives. And please consult a proper nutritionist, someone with certified skills and a health practitioner to guide you through these massive long-term changes in your body. that's the only thing I ever try to subscribe to I'm never telling anyone what to look like what sides to be just to please do everything carefully safely and to never take diet advice from these fucking lying arsehole celebrities here who I see in person they don't fucking look like that and I know how much surgery they have and I know all of the tricks they use I know all their trainers I know how many nutritionists they have I know what goes into I know that they're wearing a weave in their advert selling you hair like growth gummies I see these people I'm on set with some of these people.

43:51I know what really goes into the appearance that they pretend to you comes from a powder. They are hawking to you over the internet that they've never taken once in their life. They're all full of shit, literally. Well, because they haven't taken the laxatives they're selling you. So the shit's still in there. Yeah. Sorry. I should point out that, no, no, no. I should point out that Ai Wei and you have been instrumental in making Facebook and Instagram change their policies around celebrities and influencers promoting diet and detox products to minors. And I often think that those sort of achievements are overlooked.

44:29And I wonder if it ever frustrates you. It does frustrate me, but it doesn't surprise me. Why would we ever choose to big up a woman when we could instead focus on her micro mistake that didn't actually harm anyone? Why would we ever talk about the thing that she did that saved or helped a generation of kids avoid something that was incredibly damaging detrimental that we have statistic proof of being damaging and detrimental why would we ever congratulate a woman for something she did that was helpful when we could instead just make a headline out of a mistake that she either did make or didn't make that we just made up from quote unquote a source so it doesn't surprise me it is annoying but i guess it goes along with my decision to check my ego at the door if i was doing any of this for praise or popularity i would be in the wrong game yeah one of the things i find funny that i noticed when i was researching for this interview is how many grateful no no no it's how many grateful dads you get you get a lot of dads saying to you i'm the father of a 13 year old girl i just want to thank you so much when i email you for advice i feel like you're the guru for dads of teenage girls i'm big with dads i don't know what to tell you i think i've only got 16 % of my followers are men and I swear it's all dads like it's all terrified dads they don't fancy me they just want tips on how to communicate with their daughter I love how many of them listen to my podcast I have like a big dad following on my podcast and so much feedback from them because you know kids aren't educated at school and neither are parents I don't understand why we still haven't stepped up our education program to make kids media savvy to make kids understand what goes behind social media to explain photo editing to them and the dangers of it to explain eating disorder stuff but we should also be making that same manual for kids this is the first generation where we've had kids this far ahead of their parents parents don't even know what the kids are looking at anymore or what they're learning this is a nightmare schools need to stop fucking going on and on about condoms on carrots and igneous rock and all the other nonsense they teach us that we're almost never going to use i don't need to learn about amberlyn i need to learn about consent.

46:34I need to learn about Photoshop. I need to learn about eating disorders. I need to learn about porn. And so do my parents. That's where we need to spend money in the education sector, in my opinion, is actually preparing people for life. And while you're at it, teach children about tax and fertility. That's the other thing that I would add to that excellent Jameela Jamil syllabus. And finances. Finances, which leads us seamlessly onto your final failure, which is that you lost all your money at 30. Tell us that story. Yeah, just so shit with money. So shit with money for so many reasons. One, I think, again, school didn't teach me anything.

47:08How is this possible that we're given debit cards at 16 and we're able to open our own bank accounts? But school literally doesn't mention it. We do not have classes where we learn about interest, about credit cards, about credit, about how to eventually be able to get on, I don't know, if you want to maybe have a mortgage one day or start a business. You learn none of this stuff. So I had no idea about saving. I was totally unprepared. And we don't all come from super educated backgrounds. I sure as shit didn't. So my parents didn't know anything about saving either. And we were really poor. So, you know, money was something that when you got some, you spent it on a nice little treat.

47:43And I guess I took that as the way that I would then go on to, even when I made a lot of money in this industry, I just spent it all of the time. I didn't know how to save. And also as a woman, I think I felt very uncomfortable being successful and having a lot of money. And so I used to just try and spend it and share it as much as possible. And I was incredibly, you know, overly generous, like I'd meet a stranger and they would say they needed a knee operation and they were two years on a waiting list on the NHS. So I'd be like, here's£6 ,000, complete stranger. And that's a nice thing to do.

48:13But also I wasn't planning to protect myself. And I think the third layer of it was also just being quite mentally ill and us not really talking enough about how inner chaos can present itself as external chaos, as financial chaos. I was just spending as if I wasn't going to be here very long. And I think it's because I didn't think I was going to be here very long. So it was just a kind of clusterfuck that led me to making all of this money in this industry and just hemorrhaging it. Also just having an eating disorder, if you're a binge and starve person, really fucking expensive because the binging part is very costly.

48:51yeah you wrote to me that you you spent so much on food and then you lost a clothing contract oh my god well that's because I spent so much on food that I ended up eating so much that I gained so much weight that I lost a clothing contract because I was too big for the samples and I remember just trying to hide from them quite how much I was eating and then getting papped buying like six cakes at eight o 'clock in the morning on my own and then clocking that I've been papped and then instead trying to pick up a healthy pair and hoping this will be the photograph that makes it into the Daily Mail.

49:21But it wasn't, it was the cakes. And so I was sort of busted. But yeah, that's fine. And I'm glad I didn't starve myself for any kind of clothing contract or anything else. But yeah, I literally ate my way out of parts of my career. I'm really, really glad that you chose this failure because I think so few people, and specifically women, talk about money or feel that they can. And as you say, most of us aren't equipped with the knowledge when we come out of school. But after you went through this financially difficult patch, how did you recover from it on a practical level? Like what did you do?

49:59Did you get a financial advisor? Yeah, I got a financial advisor. I was very, very lucky to ever get a job again at 30. You know, moving to America to start a brand new life was a very, very bold thing to do, considering I was going to try my hand at being a writer again, a thing I'd never done. And I didn't want to be on television anymore. But I was able to kind of figure shit out to be able to do work that I knew how to do, which was TV hosting and then eventually accidentally falling into acting. But once I did have money again, this time around, I went and I found two people who I trusted, who guided me through learning really about pensions, about tax, about saving, about planning, about budgeting, all these things I just hadn't learned about.

50:40And another thing that I think is really important, specifically when we're talking about women and finance, is that we are 80 % of the fucking market. We are consumers. We are the main consumers as a gender by far and away we consume the most and we are the ones most targeted by advertising even if it's for cleaning products or for household stuff or for beauty stuff because they think every single part of our bodies needs to be fixed because they've convinced us that it's broken so with women being the most targeted to spend our money we are the ones who should most be taught how to save it and how to budget it and so therefore i kind of find it a little bit convenient that we aren't schooled about that in our magazines or in our schools and we are just left open and vulnerable to being manipulated into that having that must-have bag that it top that must-have makeup like this must-have new color we'd prescribed a brand new body type every decade we're prescribed a new hairstyle that we have to have or a new way of doing our nails men are just not targeted in this way i mean not as much maybe it's growing now because they've run out of inches on our bodies to commodify.

51:43They're now telling us we need our earlobes done and our elbows done and our knees lifted, et cetera, which is real. So I think it's happening more to men. But with women being this much under attack when it comes to consumerism and capitalism, we're the ones who most need to learn how to defend ourselves financially and protect ourselves financially. I'd love to talk to you about LA because I love LA. I feel like it's my spirit place. I've really missed it this year because we haven't been able to travel, obviously. But explain to me why you moved to Los Angeles and what is it about that particular place that has, I don't know whether you feel it's been good for you, whether you feel it's been liberating, but what's the impact that that city's had on you?

52:28Multiple good impacts. First of all, I'd say that you can't blame your problems on LA. And that's been really good for me because I think living in places like London or even spending a lot of time in New York I was able to blame my inner chaos on the very like clear external chaos of living in a city where people are just on top of each other and your money doesn't go very far and your apartment is too small your flat sorry I've already become a bloody yank but your flat is too small and you know you someone farts in your face on the tube in the morning like you know by 9am I was already fucked off by tangible things that had happened during the day like the weather is shit and people are banging into me all the time and so I was able to blame a lot of my problems on that and I think it therefore meant it took me a lot longer in life to work out that oh I am a mentally ill person I didn't realize that for such a long time and coming here it's like oh it's really sunny and there's loads of space and your money goes further and the food's just better quality because there's more sun people are really fucking friendly so no one's banging into each other you know you have so much space as a pedestrian i didn't have anything to really tangibly complain about so i realized that oh this pain that i'm carrying that's on me so for me that was very good because i needed to work out sooner rather than later that i was struggling emotionally and psychologically but also the industry here is way ahead of the UK industry in that women in their 50s and 60s who are African-American or they are brown women or like women from different ethnicities of all kinds of different ages and shapes and sizes have really big jobs over here.

54:09That feeling of you expire at 30 doesn't really exist in America. And I think that that's really cool. And I feel as though they love a multi-hyphenate, which is what I am, which is what most people are. We're all multifaceted and we don't know that. We're not encouraged to find that out. especially when we're women because patriarchy does not want women to know how strong and adaptable and fucking fantastic and special and unique we are and so we're told just to pick one thing that you'll maybe be allowed to do and then just sit down and shut up and be grateful and never complain about that situation and so in america they love multifaceted people it's actually considered strength to be jack of all trades they're not really looking for a master necessarily and I think that's really good for me because I am a master of fucking nothing and I am someone who loves to explore different sides of myself and I've been able to do that here and it's been congratulated rather than criticized which it was in the UK and I urge the UK to grow in diversity and grow in their ability to allow people to be more multifaceted.

55:14Oh I just agree with every single thing you've just said which makes for a very boring interviewer but no i'm sorry i'm also like a caffeinated chatty kathy who's just like not let you put a word in i'm so sorry uh i'm just bursting with opinions can you imagine i tried to condense all of this into tweets can you of course it's a disaster of course i'm a fucking disaster why why jamila why do you do you shout that on my balcony do you love a whatsapp voice note no no i don't no i do i do i do like and need a back and forth especially in chat it's just when i get fired up about something which normally happens on a podcast i just turn into just as roadrunner but no i don't like a whatsapp no no i love a whatsapp chat though especially a group chat i live for that it's how i've just maintained my Englishness and all my knowledge of what's going on in London via my group chats with my mates.

56:19So you went to LA because you wanted to write more. I just wanted to be a writer in comedy. You just wanted to be a writer? Yeah. What's next? Do you think you will end up being a more full-time activist or more full-time writer or will you just continue being the brilliant multi-hyphenate that you are? I think I'm just going to continue not really having a plan if I'm honest like I came here to be a writer that took a really unexpected turn as I said earlier like I love being open to the periphery I think that's where all of the magic in my life has happened in the most unexpected places and so I think I'm just going to carry on trying things and then I will carry on my activism until the day that I die I'm continuing to grow I weigh I love the podcast it's such a fun thing to do so I'll carry on with that.

57:06And we're building out the YouTube channel and we're working on just more and more content to give more and more people a use of my platform. I've got this big old platform and clearly I'm not a fucking expert. So people from the beginning of my career were always like, pass the mic, pass the mic. And I've been like, I don't have the mic. I've got a fucking like dildo that you can pretend it's a mic or you can wait till I get it. And then I can actually pass it on to people. So I feel like now with three and a half, almost million followers and 1.3 million on iWeigh and we have all this engagement and this podcast I now have the mic I have space I can force younger people who are more experienced or interesting or charismatic or funny or intelligent than I am into space just with me and just be like I won't do this unless you allow this person to come with me I'm now able to pull those strings and I don't know throw my weight around in that way and so now it's all about passing the mic over to those who are more you know who are bigger experts than I am so I think that's what I'm doing next and if I don't die I'll just carry on with activism I'll write a book and I'll carry on making documentaries which is something I did when I was younger that now I'm getting back into because I really just love learning and I love learning with other people so that's the main goal forever and how has this interview about failure been for you it has been a success if that's what you are asking me I have I've loved it.

58:30I don't know. I'm sure I shall continue to fail, but I do promise I will keep getting back up and trying something new. You know, I said recently in a podcast with, I think, Angela Scanlon that maybe I'll leave one day and just become a therapist. I have no idea. But I promise to continue to be open and transparent and show my workings out and say sorry when I'm wrong. And just to keep trying to bring everyone along on this transparent journey with me, because it's really the main purpose I serve. There's just no more lies, no more haze, no more bullshit. Let's just be real. Even if we get it wrong, let's at least just be real.

59:06Jameena Jamil, keep failing as gloriously as you do. And thank you so much for the important activism that you do on behalf of the rest of us. And thank you also for coming on How to Fail. Oh, thanks for having me.