ACTRESS TINA MAJORINO TALKS ABOUT SELF-SOOTHING HER ANXIETY

Tina Majorino comes at makeup differently than us non-Hollywood types. With an acting career that started when she was just 2, “I’ve had an extensive journey with makeup,” she says. “It’s one of the pillars of character development.” As important, perhaps, as the research she does to prep for a new role. “Makeup is transformative. Until I can look in the mirror and see [the character] the way I imagined, until I can feel like her, she’s not fully realized,” Majorino explains. “If I can’t convince myself I’m someone else, the audience won’t believe it, either.”

Though she starred in such hits as When a Man Loves a Woman, Waterworld, and Corrina, Corrina as a kid, she wasn’t allowed to wear makeup outside of work until 15—and at that point in her life, it was hardly a love language. “I only used it to hide my acne, which was bad,” she says. “My skin was so inflamed, it really ate away at my self-esteem. I’d cry about it constantly. So for a long while, makeup only reminded me of something painful.”

But once her skin cleared, makeup took on new meaning, and Majorino rhymes a phrase that could easily be a rallying cry for many of us. “The older I get, the bolder I get,” she says, “and the less I care about how anyone else feels about what I look like. With that confidence comes a bravery with my self-expression.” Now, I’m not saying I can beat my own face like Zendaya can, but I know what I like and what I don’t like, and I know how to do the things that make me feel beautiful and confident.”

This, for Majorino—who starred as side-ponytail Deb in the 2004 cult film Napoleon Dynamite—hints at the power of makeup and skincare beyond the creative outlet they provide: They’ve become therapeutic. As someone who’s dealt with anxiety throughout her life, “I use them to self-soothe all the time,” says the actress, also a past regular on Big Love, Grey’s Anatomy, Veronica Mars, and True Blood. “Because we’re living in the age of information, it can feel incredibly overwhelming when everyone everywhere is telling you what to do to feel better or look better. And sometimes that can morph into feeling helpless, because you start thinking, I won’t feel better about myself or snap out of this funk until I do something drastic and huge.

“It’s just not true,” she continues. “For me, the path to finding my own recipe for feeling good was all about simplifying: focusing on the small things I had access to that I knew I could commit to everyday, or already felt pulled to do but maybe judged myself out of doing.”

The Healing Power of Skincare

One such thing? Skincare, which she calls a fail-safe, because “it’s one of the only things I do every day that is only for me. It’s dedicated time, morning and night, without fail,” she explains. “I love how it feels before, during, and after. It feels loving and tender toward myself.”

 

We write back and forth about people who see beauty products as superficial, a waste of money, or even selfish. Majorino’s not havin’ it. “I think for women, in particular, the world really tells us we should hate ourselves, and not take care of ourselves for fear of being or appearing selfish,” she says, and she’s got a point. According to a 2020 study, participants rated women who were wearing makeup, versus those without it, as having “less humanness, less agency, less competence, less warmth.” Less human… Okay then!

Like countless other makeup-lovers—and there are plenty, considering beauty is a $511 billion industry—Majorino isn’t buying it. “This is my one beautiful life and the vessel I was given for my time here. I’m gonna take care of it and treasure it,” she says. “If considering what makes me feel good, learning ways that help me love my face more, adorning it with beautiful colors that lift my mood and make me smile when I look in a mirror makes me ‘selfish’ to factions of society, then so be it, ya know?”

Beyond her OG black M.A.C eyeshadow—Black Tied Velvet, which we, unfortunately, discover has been discontinued—Majorino knows what’s most important to her, a small silver lining that has emerged from the pandemic: “how much I value people, especially the ones that I love. How much we all need each other.” In 2020, during the midst of COVID, she launched a podcast, No Pressure, with her brother, Kevin, where they often discussed the effects of lockdown and the emotional epidemic that followed the viral one.

 

“People’s mental health has really suffered, and seeing as we don’t have a lot of care for such things in this country, the effects of lockdown and the collateral damage of COVID has been really devastating,” she says. “Even though things are going back to ‘normal,’ I don’t really think our definition of that word will ever be the same again. [My brother and I have] both said how we feel so done living through unprecedented events. Everyone is. Between the news, and social media, and our day-to-day responsibilities, our relationships… It can all be so overwhelming. I’ve definitely had to make adjustments to cope.”  

For Majorino, the podcast has itself been cathartic. “Being the super-sentimental one, it’s just such a joy to sit down every week and have amazing conversations with my brother that I can keep forever and listen to anytime,” she explains. “Obviously, we also love connecting with others. It’s so nice that we’ve created our own little corner of the internet where people can come and relax, where we can share our experiences, things we’ve learned, and that people resonate with our chats. Kevin and I are both so invested in making a space for humans to just be, that’s why we called our podcast No Pressure. Thinking of topics we’re both passionate about, talking about mental health and things we’ve learned about how we can better take care of our minds and ourselves… I’m really grateful for it.” 

What, exactly, does it mean to just be in today’s always-on, TikTok’d, if-it-wasn’t-on-Instagram-did-it-really-happen world? Majorino references something her friend, writer Jamie Varon, once wrote: “I’m a human being and too often I forget that the ‘being’ part is essential.” It’s what Majorino hopes people can experience through her podcast. “When I say that it’s a place for people to come and just be, it is very much so because there seems to be so much pressure on all of us, all of the time,” she says. “It’s important to let yourself breathe—relax, check out a little bit, laugh. So come drink coffee with us. Let’s step off the hamster wheel for an hour or two, let’s set our bags down. Let’s chat. Nerd out with us. Take a minute. We don’t need you to be anyone but who you are.”

Finding Connection Amid Chaos

Though Majorino and I met—and bonded over boss-lady and mental-health-y-type stuff—on Instagram, social media is certainly not her ideal platform of connection. “I’ve always preferred in-person hangs, or phone calls, or personal texts and emails. I’ve always valued that personal connection,” she says. “Before getting on Instagram, I was getting my feelings hurt a lot by friends who had it. Because I wasn’t on social, people just stopped taking the time to reach out. There was this attitude of, ‘Well, if you care to know what I’m up to, look at my Instagram.’ Which is absurd to me. Especially now that I’m on it. People see about 4 percent of what I’m actually doing, and how I’m actually feeling.”

How is she feeling? “I’m in a transitional stage, shaking things up and making different decisions, which can feel scary, but it’s also really liberating knowing that when things aren’t working, you can make the decision to burn anything you need to to the ground and start over again.” Her work in therapy—a “game-changer,” as she puts it—has helped her finally understand herself. “I’m a really sensitive lady, and while I spent most of my life being chastised for that, I’m finally in a place and surrounded by people who actually make me understand that that’s a really good thing. It’s my superpower. It’s why we’re here. To experience. To feel. And not just to feel good. To feel everything.”

Majorino then says something I regularly tell my kids, to help them understand my OCD or why they might be feeling or acting some way on any given day: “Everyone has their stuff.” She credits her doctor for learning how to rewrite her own narrative and discover the real meaning of self-love. “I don’t think I ever truly understood what that actually meant. But I feel like I have been able to grasp what that looks and feels like to me,” she says. “It’s hard to be a human. And I’ve struggled a lot. The difference now is that I have a deep knowingness that I’m learning tools that will carry me throughout the rest of my life. Hard times will always come. But I know now I can handle them, whatever they may look like.”

Tell me those tools, you say? They include:

  • Weekly therapy
  • Daily meditation (“I try my hardest to stick to it”)
  • Exercise, preferably outdoors
  • Good boundaries, “not only with other people but with myself”
  • “Unfollowing people on social media whose content doesn’t evoke positive emotions”
  • Saying “no” when she needs or wants to, “and meaning it”
  • “Not being so black and white about everything—learning how to live in the gray”
  • Talking to her friends every day
  • “Letting myself suck at new things”
  • Practicing gratitude

It sounds like a lot, but like an all-you-can-eat buffet of deal-with-it tricks, she picks and chooses as she needs. There is, however, one thing that sits at the heart of these strategies, one takeaway Majorino considers critical for her mental health: acceptance. “Accepting that when I take care of myself, I will at some point inevitably disappoint someone, and that’s okay. That certain decisions I have to make for my well-being will make me a villain in someone else’s story, and that’s okay, too,” she says. “Accepting that I will never be perfect, my life will never be perfect, and what a beautiful relief that is. And the more I can accept my own complexity, the more I accept and embrace everyone else’s—the more compassion I can feel. There’s so much freedom and beauty in the mess. I accept the mess.”

Speaking of mess… back to makeup! The crushes and crumbles and pigments that turn unadorned lids and lips into jewels. “Makeup is so fun. I love that I can embody anything I want to any day of the week, just by adding or subtracting a thing or two here and there,” she says. “And on particularly ‘meh’ kind of days, nothing feels more like self-support than leaning into something I would gladly do for a friend, for myself. Pulling out all the stops: busting out the steamer, putting on a great mask… Really loving on myself.”

Check out Tina Majorino’s podcast, No Pressure, and stream her latest movie I, Challenger on Amazon Prime.

Follow Mental on MSN for more great stories, tips, and advice to make every day a little bit easier

The post Actress Tina Majorino Talks About Self-Soothing Her Anxiety appeared first on Mental.

2022-11-22T12:17:54Z dg43tfdfdgfd