Sorry Not Sorry

by Naya Rivera

  PEOPLE GET FUNNY ABOUT MONEY

  To this day, my mom blames my dad for me squandering all my money, and I’m still trying to reassure her by inviting her over to my house, showing her the pool, and reminding her that I’ll be okay. I don’t blame either of my parents for the mess I got myself into—my mom came over while I was writing this and was shocked and horrified to learn that I’d put empty deposit envelopes in the ATM machine. She certainly did not raise her daughter to do that.

  You have to make your own mistakes, and that’s especially true with money. I’d like to think that the fact I blew through forty-two thousand dollars when I was still a teenager was insurance against going all M. C. Hammer with my money when I got older. It’s good to get your mistakes out of the way early—as long as you learn from them!

  I’ve always believed in enjoying today rather than squirreling away all your $$$ for the future: if you really want that bag, then buy it, because you never know! But now I take the time to make sure I really want it and that it’s not just an impulse buy. If I get sucked into looking at new houses on the Internet, I step back, remind myself that we don’t need to move, and try to be content with just rearranging the dining room—cost-effective, and way easier on my marriage.

  My mom has always said, “People get funny about money”—and she should know. I was a firsthand witness to the toll financial strain took on my parents’ marriage. For this reason, I both hate talking about money and know it’s something that has to be done. My husband, Ryan, and I each have our own bank accounts, which we use for personal and fun purchases, and a joint one that we use for bills and everything related to the house. That way if I go shopping, he knows that I’m not using his money to rip and run through Barneys.

  After growing up with a stay-at-home mom, I knew I wanted to be an equal financial partner in my relationships. It’s a point of pride for me to be making as much, if not more, than my man, but I found myself questioning this resolve when Glee ended. I was already into my second trimester, and entering that phase of pregnancy where you can barely keep your eyes open at 5:00 p.m. I couldn’t imagine rallying the energy to audition and take on a new role. Also, I’d spent the last six years working my ass off—I wanted to enjoy being pregnant, get everything ready for the baby, and have the luxury of naps. Ryan was totally supportive of this (as he damn well should have been—let’s be honest!), and even helped me draw up a postbaby timeline to figure out when I realistically would want to get back to work. In most relationships, the money will ebb and flow, but the important thing is that you’re both on the same page about it and have realistic expectations for yourself and your partner.

  I’ve also learned that while you should definitely talk money with your partner, that’s about the only person you should be talking about it with. Social media makes it especially easy to flaunt what you’ve got, but take a step back—do you really want people to know what you’ve got? No. That’s why I’ll always keep my bank balance close to my chest, but I will flaunt the hell out of my good credit score. Now, that’s something to be proud of.

  SORRY:

  Two words: credit cards.

  Two more words: bank fraud. (They can’t come after me for this now, can they?)

  Spending so much time thinking about what I didn’t have and placing so much importance on material things.

  Buying cars I couldn’t afford. Eff the Mercedes—I should have gotten a Honda.

  Wall-mounting a TV in a rental.

  NOT SORRY:

  That I didn’t grow up rich. Having to work for what I want means I appreciate it that much more.

  Supporting my family. They mean the world to me, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

  Getting my financial disasters out of the way early—before I was married or had a family—so the only credit score I wrecked was my own.

  Facing the facts and doing little things to save money and cut spending (as opposed to just waiting for a windfall).

  Treating myself to luxuries and splurges when I know I can afford it.

  About my current credit score. It’s really good and, damn, did I work for it.

  4

  FROM BROKE TO BIG BREAK

  The Importance of Keeping It Movin’

  WHEN I WAS twelve, my mom asked me if I wanted to be famous, and I yelled, “Bring it on!” I was ready—when I was still in kindergarten I’d had a taste of what it felt like to do what I love, and after that there was no going back. But by the time I was a teenager, no matter how hard I tried, fame wasn’t bringing me a damn thing.

  I hadn’t booked a role in years, though not for lack of trying. My pattern was to get to the final round of auditions, make the casting directors love me, get my hopes up, and then have them dashed when it amounted to nothing. I was almost in the Bratz movie—but didn’t get it and got super upset. Same with The Cheetah Girls.

  I also went on more Disney auditions than I can count. A Disney audition meant that you had to sing and dance, so I’d pick my own music, go in there, nail it—and then the part would go to someone else (*cough* Vanessa Hudgens in High School Musical *cough*). At one audition, I sang my ass off and had all the casting directors smiling and clapping after I’d finished. “You just do so great every time you’re in here!” one of them told me.

  I’d heard it all before, and though I’m sure you can’t imagine me ever saying anything inappropriate (right?), I blurted out, “Oh yeah—then how come you never cast me for anything?” The whole room went silent, and everyone stared at me as if I’d just told Minnie Mouse to go eff herself. You do not talk back at a Disney audition. My mom hustled me out of there as fast as she could.

  Once we were outside, I pointed at the big green building we’d just exited, the one that I’d been to so many times before, and told her, “I don’t care what they are casting in there—I am never coming back.” And so I didn’t.

  At the beginning of the year, I’d convinced my parents to homeschool me for a while, to open up more time for auditions. But by the time the paperwork went through and we’d gotten the go-ahead to proceed, I was over the idea of homeschooling, and I accepted that the acting thing just wasn’t happening. It wasn’t as if I could go stand on the street corner and deliver monologues until someone offered me a role on Ugly Betty—I literally couldn’t do anything unless I had an audition, and those opportunities just weren’t coming. I just wanted—gasp—to be normal for a while.

  October 20, 2002

  I am so upset right now. Because I have to leave school in about a week or so to be homeschooled and I’m really upset. I want to cry. At the beginning of the year, I wanted to be homeschooled because I was having a hard time with my schoolwork, but now I really don’t want to go! I won’t have any friends, I’ll miss out on sooo much! And the worst part is I have to leave because of acting! The one thing that I can’t stand! I want to be normal for a while. I’m not even booking right now. It’s bullshit!

  But my dreams of normalcy didn’t last long. I was still determined to keep it moving, so I shifted my focus to music. I’d always loved to sing. We have a home video of me banging the hell out of a Playskool piano and covering Michael Jackson’s “Leave Me Alone” when I was only two. I couldn’t even say my Ls—so I was really singing “Neave Me Anone”—but I was pouring my heart out in that song. When I was still in elementary school, my dad would bribe a sound engineer friend of his by giving him a hundred dollars to sneak me into the studio on Saturday afternoons so I could work out my vocal cords on something more productive than just screaming on the playground.

  I know what you’re thinking: if I wanted to sing in high school, why didn’t I just join glee club? Well, I frickin’ tried. For one quarter of my freshman year, I was a proud member of the school choir, but all the good solos and parts kept going to my arch-nemesis, Nazanin Mandi. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because she’s an actres
s and singer who dates Miguel, but when we were teenagers, she was two grades ahead of me at Valencia High. She got to sing at every damn pep rally! C’mon, girl—give a freshman a break! Because I was totally insane at that time (and, let’s be honest, probably really hangry), I decided it was a good idea to challenge her to a sing off. “I don’t think she’s really that good,” I told one of her friends, hoping my dis would travel through the grapevine and get back to her. “You tell her I said that, and we’ll sing and see who’s better!” It was my most real-life Glee moment! Sadly—but probably better for both of us—Nazanin never took me up on it.

  Finally, I had enough of playing second soprano and quit. “I don’t need to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at a basketball game,” I told myself. “I’ll just go home and try to get a record deal.”

  My dad was always super into music, and while my mom had managed my acting career thus far, Dad stepped in to do the same with my music career. He played the guitar, had long hair that made him look like a surfer, loved nineties bands like NI and Pearl Jam, and passed on his eclectic taste in music to me.

  I had gotten ahold of Robin Thicke’s first album and listened to it so much that I practically played it out. But I also loved Modest Mouse, Franz Ferdinand, and, of course, Brandy. Most of my friends were listening to punk, but I just couldn’t get into it. While they were dying over Rise Against, I was like, “I’m sorry, but this is the whitest shit ever.”

  Dad and I soon started making the rounds, pulling on the connections he had from his days at Universal Music and a few people I’d met through acting. Opportunities started to pop up here and there—we went to Atlanta to record, met with Darkchild, a.k.a. Rodney Jerkins, and with producers who’d worked with Omarion and Jhené Aiko. I’d do writing sessions where I’d work on my own lyrics alongside professional songwriters who’d coach me through it.

  “Okay, Naya,” they’d say. “What do you want to write a song about?”

  Um . . . boys? Duh.

  And ah, yes, the songs that came out of these sessions—a little part of me is dying of embarrassment just writing about it, and you haven’t even heard them. My mom found a demo tape recently, and when my husband tried to play it in the car, my mom sat in the backseat shouting, “Turn that shit up!” while I tried to rip the CD player out with my bare hands.

  One of the demo gems is about my best friend betraying me and trying to pick up my man (er, boy?) at the mall. It has spoken-word interludes where I’m saying things like, “Girl, how could you?! We were like blood!” over some smooth-as-buttah R&B playing in the background.

  As atrocious as these songs were, they made my dad super proud, and he was convinced we were on the right track. “Writing’s where the money is!” he’d say, practically pumping his fist. “You gotta get in there and get a pub deal!”

  The entertainment industry has a reputation for being kind of sleazy, but in my experience it has nothing on the music business. Even though I was barely old enough to drive, I already considered myself a professional. Being an actor meant you had to show up on time and know your lines, so I learned to take my responsibilities seriously at a very young age. Yet none of the “adults” we were working with did the same. It was like a whole bunch of drug-dealing car salesmen got together and decided to start this thing called the music business.

  “Meeting’s confirmed for 3:00 p.m.,” they’d say. Then on the day of: “Can you do 9:30 instead? At night.” Mind you, I was fourteen, with school the next day.

  People who claimed to know what they were doing always tried to coach me on my “image” whenever I had a meeting with someone from a label. “Wear something hip. This is the music business. Image is everything. You have to walk in that room and look like an artist.”

  Left to pretty much my own devices, I interpreted “looking like an artist” to mean wearing a lot of leather. Specifically, a cropped jacket and bell-bottom jeans with suede ropes that crisscrossed all up and down the sides. I think I wore those jeans to every single meeting.

  The meetings themselves usually just involved me and my dad listening to someone brag about all the amazing projects they’d done, or about how someone else they were working with was about to blow up and make a ton of money. Then, when they finally tired of hearing themselves talk, they’d look at me and say, “Okay, sing something.”

  And I’m sitting there like, “Um, we’re in a Jerry’s deli . . .”

  A few promising meetings did happen here and there. I landed a small role in a B2K video because we thought it could help me get in good with their manager; but other than earning me a few cool points with the black girls at school, it led nowhere. We also signed a production deal with songwriter Dick Rudolph, and while this seemed like a leap forward at the time, it turned out to be one of many deals that pushed me in directions and genres that sometimes just weren’t right and at other times were downright comical. Dick had me do a demo with Al B. Sure!, which had my mom freaking out. “Oh my God, Naya!” she said, fanning herself. “You’re doing a song with Al B. Sure!” That’s a sign right there that this wasn’t going to lead to chart-topping songs—if a singer has the moms swooning, he’s probably not the right pairing for a fourteen-year-old girl.

  Other deals wanted to push me toward the tween market, but I didn’t want my music career to hinge on chewing bubblegum and wearing my hair in pigtails. I wanted to be taken seriously. Couldn’t they tell by my bell-bottom jeans?

  In the end, nothing seemed right, and by the time I was nearing the end of high school my music career had also ground to a halt. I was officially a regular-ass kid, complete with a lack of direction and affinity for bad decisions.

  BEING TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL—AND PAYING THE PRICE

  In my junior year of high school, I had somehow convinced my parents to let me stop going to Valencia High and enroll in this alternative school program called Learning Post. My best friend, Madison, had gone into an alternative program that let her earn community college credit. Mine, however, did nothing of the sort.

  The program I signed up for was basically a one-trailer schoolhouse that boasted three teachers, a bunch of pregnant girls, and various delinquents and degenerates thrown in for good measure. Once a week, we’d show up for “class” and get some workbook packets that we were supposed to take home and bring back the following week. I’d sold this educational opportunity to my parents as something that would give me more time to go on auditions. However, even though I’d cleared my schedule for them, those auditions did not materialize. Instead, I spent my days sleeping as late as possible, watching daytime talk shows, and generally doing a whole lot of nothing.

  Even though I wasn’t expending any effort, I was still getting straight As at good old trailer school, so it became obvious, even to me, that Learning Post didn’t actually involve much learning. After less than a semester, I transferred back to my old school. Surprise, surprise—that 4.0 GPA I’d earned while doing worksheets didn’t amount to much at Valencia High. After I moved over all my credits, I only had a solid C average, but at least I was still eking my way toward graduation—or so I thought. Instead, it turned out that I’d skipped computer applications so often that I’d gone and made myself ineligible to walk with my class. They informed me that if I wanted to leave high school in the dust, I was going to have to take another three months of summer school.

  The thought of summer school horrified me and my mom. Mom was pissed at me, of course, for cutting so many classes, but I’d put her through so much during my four years of high school that she was as excited as I was to say “see ya” to the source of so much teenage drama. With me in tow, she marched into the principal’s office and gave the staff a sob story that blamed all my absences, not on my simple aversion to computer applications, but on my by now long-resolved eating disorder.

  I remember her sitting there in this floral dress and red lipstick and just lying her ass off, tellin
g them that I’d been in the hospital with a feeding tube—which had never happened—and that we hadn’t originally informed the school of the severity of what was going on because the family was embarrassed. With her eyes cast down to the floor and her voice lowered to a whisper, she confided in the principal and said, “We need your help to put this all behind us and move on.”

  That performance right there in the principal’s office convinced me that she really had been on her way to becoming a great actress. Except, the principal wasn’t buying it. As she insisted there was nothing she could do, my fake tears turned into real ones, and soon I was legitimately sobbing at the thought of having to stay in that hellhole for one second longer than I absolutely had to.

  “Come on, Naya,” my mom said, as she grabbed her purse and stood up. “I guess some people are just like that.”

  It seemed like the guilt finally got to the principal, though, and a few days later she called to tell us she’d decided to reconsider, and would let me walk if I could pass a series of tests that proved I had truly learned something after all.

  I still consider the day of my high school graduation to be one of the best of my life. For a few short hours, I seemed to forget that I had actually hated most of my classmates. We bounced beach balls from person to person during the ceremony, and at the after party this kid Nick admitted that he’d had a crush on me since elementary school, and we made out. In a car. Clearly, this was an auspicious beginning to post–high school life. One of my relatives even gave me a copy of that Dr. Seuss book Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

  Alas, I did not go far. As you know, the Naya Rivera solo project did not last long when I realized I couldn’t afford to live on my own and moved back in with my newly divorced dad.