Sorry Not Sorry

by Naya Rivera

  I DON’T FUCK WITH YOU, EITHER

  I’ve only seen Sean once after he released the statement about how we were no longer getting married. With that, he raised the stakes, and now that I’d seen how bad things could get, I was willing to wave the white flag. I called him and asked him to meet me in person, and we sat on Mulholland, in my car, and talked. I was ready for a truce, and my one request was that he not put my name in shit. Do not write songs about me, I begged, because people are already going to assume you’re talking about me, so just downplay it as much as possible. He promised me that he would never do that, and assured me that he was not that kind of person.

  At this point, I’d heard the beginnings of “I Don’t Fuck With You,” which was just a beat and a chorus. I actually thought it had the potential to be one of those awesome LA songs that really defines a summer. I was a fan of it, but I had to bring it up.

  “Please don’t make the lyrics about a relationship.”

  He was aghast that I would even suggest such a thing. “That song’s not even about a relationship,” he said. “There are plenty of things people don’t fuck with. Some people don’t fuck with steak, some people don’t fuck with pot roast . . .”

  What the hell was he talking about? “Are you kidding?” I asked. It can be about how you don’t fuck with kale, just please, please, don’t let it have the words “ex” or “girl” in it.

  He agreed, 100 percent.

  The song dropped a few months later.

  “Bitch I don’t give a fuck about you or anything that you do / I heard you got a new man, I see you takin’ a pic . . .”

  What the hell?

  Once again, the gossip sites were churning out headlines and my mother was calling me and yelling into the phone, “Why does that fool’s name come up every time I google my kids?”

  Dammit—so I was an adult who had dated a child. I learned from that.

  And now I have a rap song about me. That’s almost as good as a star on the Walk of Fame, right?

  THERE IS SUCH A THING AS BAD PR

  If there’s one thing gossip sites love . . . wait, make that two things they love: one, gossip (duh); and two, kicking a lady when she’s down. My newly single self was ripe for both. These sites were reporting that Sean called off the engagement because I was jealous and controlling, and that I had . . . “violent fits of anger”? Let me tell you about the first time I almost had a violent fit of anger: when I read that.

  Another story had me yelling at him and saying, “If you don’t listen to what I say, I’ll ruin your career.” I mean, who says something like that? No one, that’s who. And especially not me.

  You know it’s time to take the BS seriously when your publicist wants to have a conference call. For a couple of days it seemed like I was on the phone nonstop, but in the end I decided not to release a statement of my own. I was already sick of dealing with it, and I hoped that if I stayed quiet and kept it classy (lesson learned, Twitter), the whole thing would soon blow over. Then Sean and I could both keep it movin’ and get on with lives that no longer included each other.

  At the same time, I decided I was going to make the best out of my love life suddenly being in shambles, and focus all that extra energy on my career. Keep it professional. Then that also hit the fan. And the gossip pages.

  It was the end of Glee’s fifth season, and it had been a rough year. Everyone who worked on the show was already stressed. To say that Glee means a lot to me is an understatement, and there are a lot of people who worked on that show who I love dearly. Chris Colfer is one of them. He’s not only a talented performer, but he’s also a bestselling author and just a generally amazing human being. When we were on set, in between takes, he’d be off in a corner, writing novels in longhand in a notebook. I don’t know how he did it, but it’s incredibly inspiring.

  At the producers’ request, Chris had written the second-to-last episode of the season. It was a pretty big deal for him, and for the show. The days we shot were crazy, with even more mayhem than usual. Two of Chris’s favorite things are animals and old people (see? I told you he’s amazing) and he made sure that this episode included plenty of both. There were three-legged dogs running around, and legends like Tim Conway on set.

  However, all this caused one particular Glee star to amp up her bitch factor. She made a huge deal about the dogs and demanded hand sanitizer any time one came near her. While the rest of us were in hysterics over Tim Conway’s constant improvising, it was throwing her off. Instead of just rolling with it, she kept interrupting. “So, like, um . . . are we going to do the scene as it’s written now?”

  Come on—if Tim Conway wants to improvise, you let him improvise! He’d even brought his granddaughter to the set because she was such a Glee fan, and she ended up crying because she couldn’t understand why someone was being such a bitch to her grandpa. Finally, my costar gave up, locked herself in her trailer, and refused to come out.

  Trust me, I would have been fine with her staying in there (like, maybe forever?), but the sad truth was that we couldn’t film without her. People were pulling their hair out and yelling into their walkie-talkies, like, “Can we get her back on set? Can we get her out of her trailer?”

  We were shooting a scene in a diner, and all the producers and crew were in a huddle—no one knew what was going on, and absolutely nothing was happening. Meanwhile, one of the producers was just perched on a stool at the counter, like we were in a real diner and he just stopped by for a milkshake!

  When I started at Glee, the producers told us three things: show up on time, know your lines, and hit your mark. So I listened—I take that kind of stuff seriously, and I know that as much as acting is about performing and having a big personality, it’s also about doing a good job. I never dropped a line in six years of working on the show. So there I was: I’m on time, I know my lines, and I’m on my mark—and I’m the only one.

  I wasn’t trying to be Captain Save-a-Hoe, but, as you’ve probably realized by now, I’m a blunt person. So when things get to a boiling point, like they were that day in the diner full of dogs, I am going to say something. So I walked up to our producer and said, “Are you going to do anything about this?” He looked at me like he had no idea what I was talking about.

  “Where are the other people in this scene?” I asked him, gesturing at all the empty chairs around me. “And,” I added, “you’re on my mark, so if you would kindly get up and handle something—anything—that would be awesome.”

  He lost it, and started screaming at me in front of the crew. “I’ve been running this show for six years!” he yelled.

  Without raising my voice, I responded, “Yes. Poorly.”

  Ooooh, girl, wrong thing to say, cause after that, Nay Nay didn’t get asked back to work.

  By the time I woke up the next morning, every gossip site in Hollywood seemed to be cutting and pasting the headline “Naya Rivera Fired from Glee.” Oh crap. So now, not only did the world know I was dumped, but it also thought I got fired in the same week.

  But I hadn’t actually gotten fired, not even close. The producer just said he needed a break, and during the summer hiatus, we met and he apologized. I accepted and apologized too—I know now that you’re not supposed to tell your boss they’re doing a poor job—but I also let him know I didn’t think my one comment warranted the smear campaign. I told him that, to be quite honest, I felt like I was under attack.

  He insisted they had nothing to do with the rumors, and reading between the lines, it sounded like there was a giant, blinking arrow pointing right at a certain person. So I guess you can throw a bitch fit, lock yourself in your trailer, and stall production, yet still allegedly find the time to leak stories to the press. I nodded. Well, I thought, that person doesn’t write my lines or write my checks, so I don’t give a flying fuck, and we’re moving on.

  The unexpected silver lining to a re
ally horrible time in your life is that it can actually be somewhat empowering. It makes you realize how much control you do have—not over what is happening, but over how you choose to see it. So I could sit there and be depressed and feel like a victim, or I could pick myself up and get on with it. If I have a personal philosophy, it’s “keep it moving,” so that’s exactly what I did.

  FIGURING OUT THE GOD STUFF

  The first thing I did to keep it moving was actually to stop. I needed to be with myself and be quiet, and let the storm pass. One of the weirdest things about being an entertainer is that it’s a constant push and pull between “Look at me! Look at me!” and “No, don’t look at me!” (Picture me passing out on a fainting couch as I wail that last line.) You can get so drunk on fame and all the fanciness of being the center of attention that you forget all the attention doesn’t just vanish as soon as you’re over it. I was going to have to keep my head high and deal with this mess, and the only way to do so was to detach. I had to forget about my ex, forget about the people on the Internet, forget about my costars. I had to just be with myself, and with God.

  For two weeks, I barely left the house. Now, I don’t want this to sound sad, like I was curled up in bed in dirty sweatpants, stuffing my face with Doritos—I still took the time to brush my hair, but I also just took some time to reflect. There’s a difference between keeping it movin’ and just doing things to distract yourself; I knew that running myself ragged wouldn’t help me move in a productive way. It’d just leave me burned out or totally crazy, and I’d just end up looking like Amanda Bynes on a bad day. Physically, she walks around a lot, but she does not keep it movin’. Poor girl. The last thing I wanted to do was party it up and give the tabloids something else to sink their teeth into.

  I also took advantage of this time to start to pray a lot and to go to church. I really think that whoever you are, and whatever you believe in, you need to find something that gets you to a calmer place and makes you feel refreshed. It’s edifying. For some people that thing is yoga, or reading self-help or philosophy books, but for me it’s church. I’m Christian and grew up going to church, and the principles of Christianity have always resonated with me.

  When I was growing up, my mom and dad had very different views on religion, and I respect both of them. My mom became a devout Christian when I was about seven; she started to watch the Trinity Broadcasting Network and refused to let my brother and I listen to secular music. When I would perform at school talent shows, I could only sing Christian songs (which, let’s be honest, didn’t really bring the house down at a public junior high).

  My dad had been raised a Jehovah’s Witness but had no desire to continue down that path as an adult. He had looked into Buddhism for a while, and frequently meditated, but on the whole he wasn’t a fan of organized religion. Whenever he saw my mom loading us into the car on a Sunday morning, he liked to point out to us kids that we didn’t have to just automatically assume we were Christians, and that there were other things out there. So file religion under “Another Thing That Drove a Wedge Between My Parents.”

  I completely understand where my dad was coming from. Religion and spirituality should be about your personal relationship with God. But for me, I didn’t need to look around or search for anything, because Christianity had felt right from the beginning. Going to church felt good, what I learned there made sense, and I felt a real connection to God. Whenever I go to church, or pray, I feel refreshed, and afterward, the whole world seems a lot clearer.

  By the time I was a teenager, my mom had loosened the leash a little bit, and going to church was no longer something she was going to force us to do. But I still always found my way back to it. Whenever I would realize that I wasn’t praying and wasn’t reading the Bible anymore, it felt like I was dropping my relationship with God. I would always notice that when I started to do this, things also stopped working out, or I didn’t feel right in a way that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

  The year 2014 was a wake-up call—for the past two years, everything had moved at the speed of light, and they were going so well that I forgot they could get bad. Whenever there is commotion and noise in my life, I go back to the Bible and my relationship with God, and that steers me where I need to go. I think that’s pretty typical for a lot of people, and it takes something bad to remind us that connecting with our spirituality and our own inner strength is something we should be doing on a consistent, not just as-needed, basis. When I prayed, I made it a point to say, “Thank you for this time, because I know that something good is going to come out of it, and I know that I need to calm down right now.”

  I didn’t want to pray like this: “Things are so bad—get me out of it!” I wanted to be grateful, because taking things for granted is a great way to turn yourself into a lazy bitch. When you get to that point, you stop appreciating the things you do have and quit working for the things you don’t.

  For me, the words “be still in the Lord” ring very true. When I talk to God now, I try to strip away all the problems and anxieties that I want resolved and instead focus on the bigger underlying issues. Like, what decisions did I make that led me to this place? I never ask for God to fix things for me, or to make things go away, only to give me guidance so I can become a better person and fix them myself.

  I do believe that God has a plan for everyone, and that our lives our predetermined. So if I believed that God was steering my ship, why was I always trying to steer everyone else’s? I had to learn how to trust and to mind my own business at the same time. God has a plan, and even if I think that plan is really shitty at first, I have to trust that it will all work out in the end.

  In this case, it did. And even better than I could have imagined.

  I LOVE A GOOD ELOPEMENT

  It was during this time that Ryan came back into my life. He’d seen the headlines and heard the gossip, and sent me an e-mail: “Hey, I heard about all this stuff, and it seems pretty shitty. I was a fan of his music before you guys were together! I just want to make sure you’re okay, so let me know if you want to talk.”

  As with everything that happened with Ryan, the timing was eerily perfect. The day before, my sister had been at my house as I was randomly Insta-stalking him: “He was always so nice! Why don’t you date him again?” So when his e-mail landed in my inbox, I looked up his phone number, called him, and asked if he wanted to meet up. He did, and it was that night that I told him about the abortion. When he slept over, I remember being really nervous, and climbing into bed wearing a hoodie that he zipped up to my neck. I turned my back to him and just went to sleep. I didn’t want us to just hook up and then have that be that. I felt like I’d just crawled through the fire, and getting burned had taught me that I was ready for something real. Ryan was real.

  Shortly after, he left to shoot a movie in Albuquerque. I went out to visit him, and that was when we fell crazy in love. It was one of the best times of my life. I went to the set with him one day, and just sat there and watched him work—it felt so nice to be on the sidelines and watch someone else work—especially someone who is as passionate about what he does as Ryan is.

  Albuquerque, New Mexico, is a lot like Valencia, California—there’s a BJ’s and a Chili’s and a Target and not much else. We went to all those places, shopping for snacks or eating fried artichokes and having a blast. We once spent hours just reading magazines and looking at books in a Barnes & Noble, then bought booze at the local liquor store and just hung out in his hotel room. No one knew who we were, which was a relief.

  I flew back to LA, and before I knew it, I’d planned another trip back to see Ryan. The night I returned to Albuquerque, we sat in BJ’s, our new favorite restaurant, for hours, just talking about serious life stuff: marriage, kids, what we’d seen our parents do and what we’d learned from that. What we wanted for ourselves. Jokingly, I asked, “So, are we getting married?” but he answered me seriously.

 
; “Well,” he said, “I don’t know . . .” Which was not a “no.” We continued to talk about it, and when I was back in Los Angeles, he called me one night. “Let’s do this. We’re getting married.” Hell yes.

  The next day, I had lunch with my mom. “So how was Albuquerque?” she asked.

  “It was good,” I said. “So I think we’re going to have a wedding in Mexico?”

  Now, mind you, my mom at this point had been hearing Ryan’s name for four years but had never actually met him. I half-expected her to reach across the table and slap me.

  Instead, she was thrilled. “Oh my God,” she squealed. “Naya, that’s so perfect!” Like I said before, my mom has had my back through plenty of ups and downs, but she went on to tell me that since Ryan and I had started dating again, I’d seemed calmer and more secure than she’d ever seen me before. He treated me well, and it brought out my best qualities. With him, she thought, I acted my age, not my shoe size. Mom was all for it.

  After that, Ryan and I fast-tracked and met each other’s families. No matter how weirded out they were, they all came. My stepdad told me that he didn’t think it was really going to happen, but that if it did, he would be there. My brother took some convincing, because he thought we were crazy, but in the end he walked me down the sand aisle.

  We got married at Las Ventanas, a beautiful resort in Cabo. After all the press I’d been through with my previous breakup, I worked extra hard to make sure the wedding wasn’t going to be covered by the media until I was good and ready for it. We told the resort that the ceremony was a vow renewal for my mother and her husband, which worked out great—except they write the bride’s and groom’s names in the sand. A representative kept calling and asking, “What’s your mom’s name?” and I’d always find a way to put them off. “Um, I’ll just give you the names when I get there, okay?”