Fake It Till Ya Make It
On celebrity interviews and anxiety. Plus, Padma Lakshmi's best advice, BTS of NYC kitchens and finding some summer chill.
Last week I interviewed Padma Lakshmi on designing her first lingerie collection for Bare Necessities. In the week leading up, I was admittedly nervous. I get starstruck easily, not to mention I’m a longtime fan of Top Chef (for which she was the host, judge and executive producer for 17 years). I’ve done several celebrity interviews and yet I still turn into a hot mess whenever I come face-to-face with a famous person. This time, however, I was especially nervous because my anxiety has been up over the past month.
So much of anxiety is fearing the future: that I won’t be able to handle a situation or I’ll have a panic attack. Anxiety can have no evidence to support the mind’s hypothetical catastrophic outcomes but will persist anyway, until it sabotages the scenario by becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the case of this interview, I actually did have evidence to support the idea that it might be a catastrophe—I interviewed Padma a few years ago and it did not go so well.
This time around, I did what I normally do when I have an upcoming high pressure scenario: prepare as much as I can and then let it go. I memorized and rehearsed my questions until I could repeat them in my sleep, and then distracted myself whenever I felt my mind picturing the upcoming event. But as soon as I arrived at the hotel where I was interviewing her, I felt the old familiar cold sweat return. I watched another journalist nervously interview her before me (with the usual PR peanut gallery watching and listening in too) which made me more nervous. As I heard her ask similar questions to mine, I started to worry that I should improvise new questions on the spot. When my turn came, as I was sitting down to chat, Padma complimented my outfit. Like a true Leo, a compliment immediately put me at ease. We started chatting about the challenge of dressing in NYC without sacrificing comfort and the rest of the conversation flowed.
The interview couldn’t have gone better. I got everything I needed without going over time (typically the publicist has to intervene in an interview with a “time to wrap up” warning), I improvised questions based on her responses and made it feel conversational. I didn’t trip over my words or panic or go blank as I anticipated I would. The whole experience proved my anxiety wrong, re-instilling that I’m the one in control here, not my anxiety.
Out of desperation to resolve this recent flare-up of anxiety, I’ve been problem-solving—maybe if I can unpack what anxiety really is, I can figure out a solution. In addition to realizing anxiety is a fear of not being able to control or handle a future scenario, I’ve also come to the conclusion that anxiety is a lack of confidence. What anxiety needs to calm down is confidence that the worst case scenario won’t happen. How does one build that confidence? By doing the things that make us anxious and proving to ourselves they’re not so hard afterall. The problem is anxiety typically holds us back from doing the very things that scare us.
When I was back home in Toronto last month, I found out a family member of my friend was going through their own intense bout of anxiety. It had gotten so bad they went to the E.R. in a panic. After hearing about the months, even years, that led them to this particularly difficult moment, what I gleaned was that this person’s anxiety has made them largely non-functioning. They feel incapable of doing any task. It’s not that they’re incapable of doing it, they are, it’s just their anxiety has convinced them they can’t handle any situation. The more they avoid trying, the scarier the task becomes, and the more convinced they become that their anxiety is right.
What a person with anxiety or low self-esteem needs is evidence that they are capable; that everything will be okay even when it feels like it won’t be. A year-and-a-half ago I was nervous to interview another Top Chef judge, chef Tom Colicchio, at Kohler Food & Wine. I remember my brain assuming the worst: that I would forget my questions, or fumble over my words. But I didn’t. It wasn’t the best interview I’ve ever had but it went well. A couple days later, I was seated across from the chef at dinner and managed to have a casual conversation about living in Brooklyn. In just the span of a couple days, I’d built some confidence.
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A few months ago, I ran into chef Colicchio again, this time at a press dinner held in a penthouse loft in Williamsburg. I was too nervous to go up to him during the dinner—I couldn’t face the awkward reaction or fake friendliness in the case that he wouldn’t remember me. But as I was leaving the dinner, I ran into him waiting for his ride in the lobby. I took advantage of him being alone without an armour of publicists to ask some candid, off-the-record questions. We ended up having a lengthy conversation about ghost kitchens and the future of food tech. I felt like a completely different person from the nervous journalist who interviewed him just over a year prior.
Reflecting on the two conversations I’ve had with both Top Chef judges, I see progress. Both with chef Colicchio and Lakshmi, my second encounters with the celebrity chefs went remarkably smoothly. Even when the first encounter didn’t go according to plan, I didn’t let my anxiety use that as evidence that I wouldn’t be able to handle the scenario again and thus turn down the opportunity to meet them again. Instead, I said yes to a second interview, and went into it with an open-mind that anything could happen, imagining myself with a blank slate. And I’m glad I did, because now my anxiety has evidence that I can handle difficult scenarios; evidence that I can use whenever I need proof that my catastrophizing is baseless.
Best,
Anna
Published 📝
Forbes - Padma Lakshmi On Cultivating Confidence And Designing Lingerie
The ultimate goal in an interview is to make it feel like you’re just two friends chatting. Once I got over the initial challenge of developing interesting questions that dig deep and then memorizing said questions, I realized the hardest part of an interview is making it flow. As much as I’m nervous going into an interview, the subject is usually nervous too, and it’s very easy to exacerbate their nerves by firing questions at them without responding to each of their responses.
The key to a good interview, I’ve learned, is to listen. This is especially hard to do when it’s a celebrity and you tend to get starstruck like me. So I’m proud of myself for really listening to each of Padma Lakshmi’s responses in this interview. The result was that it felt like we were just having a casual conversation. Here’s an excerpt, with the question that incited the most passionate response from Lakshmi.
Haines: What advice would you give women who might feel insecure about their bodies changing?
Lakshmi: It’s something I’ve dealt with every year because of my yoyo-ing weight and eating all the time with filming. It’s really tough. What I would say is give yourself some grace. Step outside your body and talk to yourself like you would talk to a girlfriend. Give yourself the empathy you would show your best girlfriend.
I knew this launch was coming up, I really wanted to be in shape for it. I’m somebody who goes to the gym five out of seven days. I haven’t been to the gym in three to four weeks, because I’ve been shooting my cookbook photos and I was required all day from 8am to 8pm. When I got dressed today, I was like ‘oh do I still wear that mesh dress.’ I’ve never worn this dress before, it’s been burning a hole in a closet for several years now. And I thought, ‘if not now, then when!?’ I was feeling the same way, my body’s changing, things are going south instead of north [laughs]. And I just told myself, ‘yeah, ok, maybe your bum isn’t as high as it should be, but on the other hand, you’ve have this whole body of work.’ I’d rather have this body with my accomplishments, then have the beautiful body I did in my twenties without any accomplishments. I wouldn’t go back to my twenties for all the money in the world. I think people need to hear that.
I’m 53 and I feel more in my body, more comfortable in my skin, more sexy and sensual than I’ve ever felt. The things I used to worry about when I was twenty; the things I used to obsess about—I wish that younger me had given herself a break. I’m sure that the 75-year-old is going to tell the 50-year-old the same thing. That is my biggest piece of advice: show yourself some grace. Show yourself the same grace you would afford to somebody you really love.
Haines: I think we get so hung up on an image of ourselves and looking a certain way, we can cling onto that, it can be very limiting in the long run instead of just embracing where you’re at. With celebrities especially there’s this tug-of-war of do I cater to what society wants, especially with all the options now like Ozempic, people can very easily fit the mould or they can just embrace their own body. When you’re in such a position of influence, it’s really great that you do embrace your own body because people need to see that it is human to change, the very nature of life is change.
Lakshmi: Yeah, and I personally love women with curves.
Haines: And wrinkles! I committed to myself when I turned 30 no work done, no botox, no fillers. Because we’re gonna get used to seeing a fake face, not a natural face. That’s why I love the culinary industry, because people tend to be real. You meet female chefs in their 50s, 60s, and they’ve never had work done, they don’t care.
Lakshmi: They look like themselves! I think it was George Orwell who said, “everyone deserves the face they get at 50.” Everyone earns the face they have.
Haines: Look at everything I’ve been through right, why would you try to hide that.
Reading 📖
🫠 Welcome to the millennial midlife crisis.
💻 Normcore was a misunderstood fantasy.
🍸 The rise of NYC’s members-only clubs.
💉 So was body positivity all a big lie?
“It’s a slippery slope between taking care of our health and aligning our sense of health with the size of our bodies. If we are to actually shift from a society that discriminates against fat people to one that accommodates all bodies, then we must see fat people as more than just fat people but as people with the same needs, desires, wants, and concerns as thin-bodied people. And that includes making choices about my body freely and without fear that others in our community will see it as a pointed betrayal. Body positivity fails if we use it as an excuse for conjuring up more tools to judge ourselves and hold each other to another set of untenable standards. And we fail body positivity if we don’t reckon with this new context it sits in.” - Samhita Mukhopadhyay
🛁 Am I a wellness asshole now? (Wish I saw this ahead to last week’s essay on cold plunges).
📸 How to become a celebrity in 2024.
🍝 On the leisurely joy of an Italian lunch.
🎸 We need to talk about your Nirvana shirt.
Watching 📺
Living in a major city, I always wonder what the daily lives of all the vastly different people I pass on the street look like. So naturally I adore this NYT series On The Job about people whose jobs often go unseen—from the man who makes over 3000 bagels a day by-hand to the bodega shopkeeper that makes Tik-Tok famous breakfast sandwiches.
‘A Day With a Dishwasher at a Top Restaurant’ might not sound like the most interesting, but it’s my favorite yet. The episode hones in on dishwasher Drevon Alston at one of the oldest restaurants in Brooklyn, Gage & Tollner. Drevon, who goes by Dre, used to be a subway performer, now he puts in insanely long hours washing dishes (as well as carrying them up and down flights of stairs over and over again). What makes the episode so good is his charisma, but also the production—who knew you could make a dishwashing scene captivating with classical music you’d expect to hear on Chef’s Table.
Listening 🎧
Turning to music for your mental health is tricky. A sad song can easily prompt a depressive spiral, a tempo too-fast or frenetic can make you anxious, and songs tied to difficult memories or times in your life can get you stuck ruminating on the past. But the right music can help tremendously. When anxious, I find myself searching for playlists with the keywords “cozy,” “comfy” and “feels like a blanket.” Rarely do my Spotify searches garner success, because they still tend to recommend songs that I already listen to, and thus have associations with. So when I first heard Adrienne Lenker as the soothing soundtrack to my ex’s best friend’s slideshow of film photos on Instagram, I immediately looked her up.
Hailing from Minnesota and a band I used to listen to—Big Thief—her quiet folksy sound reminds me of Paper Kites and Angus & Julia Stone. It’s the kind of music I want to listen to this summer in a mountain forest or the shores of a lake up in Canada at dusk surrounded by fireflies and people I love.
Snacking 🍌
I tend to find mantras cheesy and the commercialization of self-care cringe, but there is one tool I find actually works—my mindfulness bracelet. Started by two sisters, Lindsay and Emily, who have OCD and anxiety, each bracelet has a positive affirmation that borrows from cognitive behavioral therapy to help people manage their own mental health symptoms. The phrase I chose for my first bracelet was ‘brave the uncomfortable,’ and I’ve found whenever I’m facing a situation that makes me nervous, I look to the bracelet for some encouragement. Over a year of wearing it, I started to find the days I wore the bracelet I was more mindful than the days I didn’t—it was like putting it on each day was an act of intention-setting for myself. I’ve since fallen in love with the concept so I ordered another one that is more helpful for dealing with my anxiety with the phrase, ‘I am separate from my mind.’ For my friend who experiences ruminating depression, I got a bracelet that says ‘My thoughts are passing clouds’ last Christmas. Like therapy, you’ll only get out of the bracelet what you put into it, but I find having the gentle reminder right on my wrist incredibly helpful.
As for anxiety snacks? You can probably guess my recommendation: bananas. Funny enough, I never considered how my favorite fruit could help with anxiety until someone sent me this article thinking I’d wrote it. Writer Sarah Lempa carries a banana in her purse to function kind of like Ativan—just knowing she has it helps relieve her anxiety. But in consulting a dietician for the story, she discovered some real biochemical backing to the fruit’s anxiety-relieving effect—bananas are high in potassium which can help lower blood pressure, block adrenaline and keep your heart beat steady. Bananas are also high in tryptophan, an essential amino acid and serotonin precursor which may help ease stress. So maybe this is why I’m so addicted to the fruit—it’s one of the few foods that relieve my anxiety.
Other remedies I’ve been consuming this week to calm me down: this adrenal optimizer, these fast-acting stress mints, and Martha Stewart’s chill CBD gummies.