Christy Carlson Romano on the Dark Side of Child Acting and Addiction

You're listening to I Choose Me with Jenny Garland. Welcome to I Choose Me. You know Christy Carlson Romano as the iconic Wren Stevens from Even Stevens and as the voice of the incomparable Kim Possible. You may have seen her as Belle on Broadway in Beauty and the Beast. She is an actress. She's a singer. She's a mama.

and now the author of Once Upon a Trainwreck. Please welcome Christy Carlson Romano.

Hello.

Hi there. You look so beautiful. Well, thank you.

So do you.

Oh my gosh, you're all grown up.

Yeah, it happened.

You're like, finally.

Exactly. With the book, kind of, that is a part of it for sure.

Oh, yes. So yes, your memoir is called Once Upon a Trainwreck. The fall and rise of a child star. Why train wreck?

Well, I think that there's many stops in this track of life. And I think that for me, I definitely hit a low at some point in my 20s before I met my husband. And so it kind of, it documents exactly that. where I was at the height of my career as a young performer and then sort of how I got to that place really like earnestly and genuinely and really doesn't hold back. No.

Okay, good. Because that's people, we both know that people come to our, you know, teen star memoirs for behind the scenes stuff and the juicy details of all of it. Yeah, there is some of that in Trainwreck, but there's also more. What do you hope people really get from your book?

You know, one of the bits of feedback I've gotten from people reading it is that it's relatable. And you would think from a tell-all memoir type book that that wouldn't be the case. But, you know, I think we're, specifically for a lot of the fans that grew up with me, they're in this millennial existential crisis where they've gone through a lot of different life experiences that were quote unquote unprecedented. And I should say Gen X too, where we've all lived in this society that's been just reaching out for one another and social media for better and for worse has tried to help that. And it's helped me in the end, but I think for a long time, a lot of us have felt alone. So I hope that people can see themselves in the humanity

of my journey and feel a little less alone.

Oh, I'm sure they will because just the way you write it, when someone feels like they're reading something from a friend of theirs, it really does make a difference.

Good. I'm hoping that's the case.

And I think we're really in a culture now where people can smell inauthenticity like a mile away. And with this book, it was just, okay, this is my time to tell my story. So Yeah, didn't hold back, which is a bit terrifying, actually, now that it's this close to it coming out and everything.

It's a little scary.

Yeah, I know the feeling.

Yeah, I was thinking you would. I was hoping you would.

Yeah, it is an intense time. I had at least one mental break while on my press tour of just being so afraid to be so vulnerable. So I really understand how you're feeling right now.

Good. I'm glad I don't feel alone today.

No, never. You write about spending becoming almost a form of self-harm for you at one point. When did you realize that your relationship with money was connected to something much deeper emotionally?

I feel like when I lost it was when I had to really reevaluate my relationship to it, right? I think with anything that one person can be addicted to, it's when you stop the drinking or when you stop the spending and being addicted to people, places, things, that sort of thing. And I think that I had had a lot of really bad relationships that I tried to fix with money. You know, I write about renting one of my exes a Ferrari for his birthday and trying to sort of make him love me by, you know, either buying a psychic stone and, and, and things like that, where I threw money at problems that had answers within myself.

And I couldn't, I couldn't see that clearly.

No, I've been there too.

Yeah.

For my first marriage, which was very young, I bought him a Harley, a vintage T-bird. Like I spent so much money trying to earn his love or prove why he should love me. And I just look back on that time and I think, well, he should have been buying me stuff. Like why?

Yeah. Or yeah, if it was equal, that would have been half as bad, you know?

Right.

You do, you learn things the hard way sometimes in life.

After every chapter, there's letters to my daughters and it's a big part of the book. the connective tissue to it.

Yeah.

And I think that this book is reaching through time and space to kind of leave a legacy book for them to kind of read and know that, you know, mom has been through it too. And there's probably nothing that they'll go through that I can't relate to on some level. And like you said, we've learned the hard way with just the lifestyle that we've lived and Um, I would love it if they felt a lot more kindred to me in their struggles over the years.

And I hope the book does that, you know, I know that's so special.

I haven't gotten to read your entire book yet. I'm really looking forward to it, but I'm, this is very exciting to be able to kind of hear from you what you wanted out of the book and the most meaningful parts. And that sounds like a really meaningful thing in the book that I'm going to really listen into along with helping your daughter, um, you could help an I Choose Me listener today. I have a listener calling in.

Her name is Sophie and she's struggling with spending right now. And she could probably use some help from those that have been through it. So can we take a second and talk to Sophie?

I would love that.

Hi, my name is Sophie and I have a really great job.

I love it.

I work really hard and And I'm on track for promotion. The problem is I have not gotten that promotion. And because I work so hard, I feel like I deserve these things by myself. I tend to overshop and I justify that I need these things because I work hard and I deserve them. But the other issue is, you know, while I'm starting to enjoy these nice things, Everyone around me, all my friends and a lot of my colleagues, they just make more money than me. And I feel like I have to keep up and buy these nice things.

So I'm kind of in a tough situation and I'd love to know what advice you might have.

Thank you. Okay. Sophie, thank you for calling in. And yeah, this is a tough spot. I know a lot of people can relate to this. Absolutely. Because finances are stressful.

They are so stressful.

They are what motivate us to get up and get out of bed some days.

Which is sad.

Time to make the bacon.

Yep.

Yeah. My father always used to say, baby needs shoes.

Well, you know what, Sophie, there's always going to be somebody out there that has the bigger house, the nicer car, the designer handbags and shoes. And The problem with comparing your life to someone else's is that I know, and I've said this before, compare only creates despair within you. And the people oftentimes that are, you know, look really wealthy on the outside and who are flaunting all their things are probably the ones drowning in debt, honestly, living far beyond their means just to maintain an image of What do you think you would tell Sophie?

Think of your future.

I think that spending is a really immediate impulse that we all absolutely fall victim to. And it's so easy to have this lifestyle creep where we do see our friends having these beautiful things. And we say, well, if I'm evaluating my role in this tribe, because we're very tribal people.

You know, people. We haven't evolved that much. Then we try to fit within our tribe.

But the truth is, is it's actually a really great opportunity to evaluate a couple things.

One would be your friendships, I would say.

And if you did scale back, what does that bring up in you where you don't feel like you're enough in order to be in their presence and to have their friendships? And I would say that's maybe a deeper conversation to have with yourself. Separately, I think when you're thinking of your future, financial literacy in women, unfortunately, we become a little bit of a train wreck at times in our lives, whether it's you know, not even being considered for the promotion.

So that's fantastic. Congratulations on that. Right.

Let's hope it comes through. I'm on people.

I'm praying for you. But there's the on-ramps and the off-ramps where.

If you end up having a baby or your life changes, then you just don't get as many opportunities. So what you do have is really important to save so that when you are older, you can see the compounding of everything that you've saved. And time, they say, especially with motherhood, they say that the days are long, but the years are short. And I think that extends to anyone, truly, because before you know it, you blink and you're 60, 70 years old. And so you want to make sure that you're being really smart about your future because you don't want to look back and say, well, that time has passed and so has that opportunity to invest.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I mean, I think also what you said kind of more on a bigger level, true... confidence doesn't come from having all the shiny things that everyone else has. It comes from you having the courage to walk your own path and make your own decisions about what is important to you. So if I could help you by giving you a little tip, I would say that every time you feel the urge to compare your life to someone else's, not just their life, but maybe their highlight reel, because they're only showing you all the good stuff. They're not showing you the struggle, the real things that are happening inside their home. I would just encourage you to say, just pause and tell yourself, you know what? I choose me right now. And let that align you with your

true identity and what's the most important thing to you in your life. And really get clear on what those things are. And then when other people's things, possessions, material items come into your view, it's easier for you to discern, well, you know what? That's not really that important to me. What is important to me is that I am creating a nest egg so that I have financial stability. Should I not be working at some point in my life or should I want to leave and have a baby or go traveling? You've got to set yourself up for success and that's way more important than having the Gucci bag or the I, for one, never, ever spent my money on a fancy bag or like fancy, you know, shoes, like really expensive things because I had kids really early

in my life and I had my priorities in order and I knew how hard it was to make money, not just for myself, but for my family too. And it really put everything into perspective. So just, yeah, take a step back and decide what actually feels aligned for you, what brings you joy. And rather than chasing around some projected version of success, just project the true you and take your own, take your path. You've got one.

Yeah.

I think what's great about it is that she already knows she has a problem. Yes.

They say that's the first step is recognizing the problem.

Yeah.

I also have a woman that I would recommend you reading her books. Her name is Nicole Lappin, and she writes really easy to understand books on money and finances and I think you would get a lot out of reading them. So maybe check her out. But gosh, thank you, Sophie, for sharing your story and being so vulnerable and telling us where you are right now. And I know, like I said before, so many people are going to be able to relate to that. I can relate to that.

And we are all rooting for you. You got this. Christy, you talk about how complicated it can be to separate your true identity from the characters that you've played or the people that, you know, people have watched you grow up. Do you have any examples of that sort of conflict meeting you right in the face? Absolutely. Where they think you're something, but you're just not that?

Yeah. I mean, I find that with my current situation. You know, the more that I share.

about my past to promote my book or in times in the past when I've thrown it out there with a darkly humorous stroke or even just made a YouTube video about it. I get a lot of criticism from folks that grew up with me.

Some are very supportive.

I would say I have an overwhelming amount of support and I'm so grateful for that. But with the folks that have sort of a you know, a very fixed version of nostalgia for themselves. I think they have a very hard time. Yes. Seeing the complexities of a person that they saw, which I'm sure you can relate to as like the perfect girl.

And you, you, we are all very three-dimensional people.

So when, when you start having an opinion as a woman, I am finding that it makes people very uncomfortable.

Yeah. I'm curious, when did you start to figure out who Christy was outside of being these big infamous Ren Stevens and Kim Possible characters that people grew up with?

I have to say it was motherhood.

Yeah.

You know, I think it baptized me into a whole new, a whole new self.

And I truly just shed the identity of being this other, you know, child performer. And I became a mother and I, it gave me so much cathartic growth all at once where right when I became pregnant, I realized I had a problem with alcohol. So I already made that big leap right then and there. And from there, I think it was just all the way up, you know, just one day at a time, making good decisions, growing a life within me and feeling truly autonomous, which I would say is a theme in the book that I have a really hard time finding myself and, um, you know, knowing my worth and my power inside myself. So I think when we become mothers as women, we feel so powerful, you know, most of the time when you're, when you're

in those, in the, in that era of your life, you.

Know, it's powerful, but like your focus goes onto something so much more important than you.

Not you, you're not thinking about you. And I actually used to call it a narcissistic purgatory because you have to keep thinking.

About you and the industry. Otherwise, you won't succeed.

But then, you know, you want nothing more than to think about something else.

Right.

So I would say that, yeah, motherhood definitely, definitely fixed that for me.

You recently wrote a piece that I read on Elle online. And it was after Hayden Panettiere's death. You felt compelled to reflect on really the failure of our industry to sort of protect young actors. I thought that was really brave and interesting. And one of the things that you said that really stuck with me by the end of the article was like you said, about your own daughter, quote, how badly I want her to grow up in a world where children are not asked to become consumable before they become whole. That kind of shook me.

Yeah, I think with social media, our children are at risk for this, even if they're not, you know, with an agent and a manager and going out on auditions.

And what scares me the most about that is that anyone can be famous now. So it's quite scary to see I can only protect my daughters so much that they're on YouTube. They're watching these things casually on any given device, and you can really only protect them so much. So I'm going to be relying a lot on my experience to help imbue them with some perspective over time.

Hopefully they listen.

But I think even just in the introduction of all of the ways that our society prizes youth as a means for so much gain.

It's very predatory.

It is.

It's very predatory. And as a parent, you start to look at it through a whole other lens.

It is.

It's so tricky, too, because it's not always predatory. It can quickly and easily become that even when it wasn't intended to be that. But also we need representation of young people in programming. Like, you know, I know when Beverly Hills 90210 came out, yes, it was about teenagers, but that's still very young. And there had been never a conversation like we were having on 90210 out there for other teens to hear and to like associate with.

That's true.

So even going younger, like when you were– you started– We need that perspective. We need that point of view. We need that voice out there. And we also love young people. Like they entertain us. So it's not always predatory. That's the hard part, you know?

Right.

I agree with you.

I think that there's a way forward here that I think is an uncomfortable conversation for the industry that's already having so many difficulties with staying afloat. And it's been a long time coming to have this conversation. What I think discourages me sometimes is just how little effort there's been to have more data that if you were to say, okay, on the whole, if you were to take someone who's entering as a minor versus someone who's exiting as just having come of age, like, What mental health struggles did they have? Where can we find modes of intervention and the times that we.

Can actually provide that as a union?

I think this holds true to where the union can actually help.

Support.

Yeah, absolutely. Because there's no better information than once someone has lived it for them to share their story. And then once you hear that same story repeated by a lot of people in the industry, those struggles of mental health and just feeling the way we end up feeling, I think, as a commodity. I always said like a pawn in someone else's chess game.

Yeah, and that's where the struggle for autonomy exists, especially when you're known as a particular character. where you say to yourself, well, how do I, you know, and that's why we've seen time and time again, so many actresses go the, you know, the sexy route. Miley Cyrus comes to mind, who I think was an expert at being the architect of her own, like completely new chapter.

And it ruffled a lot of feathers.

I was recently talking to her mother about this and I was like, did she know what she was doing? Or was this what people perceived as some sort of mental break? And she was like, she knew exactly what she was doing. And it took that amount of sacrifice to kind of burn the old you to then gain. But in my opinion, that comes with a struggle. So there's got to be a way to sort of help kids bridge, you know, to have some more grace for them to go from point A to point B as an adult. I'm just not exactly sure what that would look like.

I mean, point given with, you know, the loss of another extremely talented, wonderful actress and, you know, heartbreaking reminder of how addiction can take part in all of this. And even when somebody seems to have it all together, you've been really brave in speaking publicly about your own relationship with alcohol. And how it nearly costs you everything.

If you're open to share it, could you tell us what made that pull so powerful when you were struggling and what ultimately helped you choose yourself and your sobriety?

Yeah.

I mean, I struggled with alcohol, I would say, from the time I was... probably around 18 when I started to go out and go to nightclubs.

Go clubbing. Yep. Clubbing, going to the clubs.

I went, I went even earlier, but didn't really have a fondness for alcohol.

And what it could really afford me.

And then when times were tough is when I think alcohol presented itself as a, as a trusted friend.

It was always there.

And I wouldn't wake up and drink, but I would, you know, make sure I was on an empty stomach and go out and, drink six to nine vodka OJs just to have a good time and think I was networking in the industry. But really, it was just sort of fostering a slow drip of an addiction to alcohol. So alcohol in my life was a problem for a long time. I think that it was one of the many things that sort.

Of contributed to this, this train wreck that I speak of in the book. And I didn't, it's, it's, it's in the book.

It's, it's sort of a current, uh, throughout it, but we don't really understand it until I'm sitting in therapist's office with my husband and we're talking about being pregnant. And I have to admit that I'm powerless over alcohol because it's the first time that I would stop drinking and since I was 18. So, you know, if you can't remember the last time you've been sober for as long as you, you know, a couple of days, then I think that you start to have to really evaluate your.

Relationship to it.

Yeah, definitely. I think there comes a time for all of us because it's so easy to have access to alcohol. underage or overage.

It's everywhere.

It's at every dinner. It's at every company party. It's just so encouraged in our society to consume alcohol.

Yeah, especially back then.

I feel like the nightlife culture was at a very high point, especially in Los Angeles and New York. And There was just such a I mean, every song that you heard was about shots and drinking and it was just really everywhere, which is why I find it really lovely that there's a mocktail culture now.

There's a there's a big, sober, curious population now where.

Kids are not drinking as much.

And, you know, and I love that.

My girls are on that same one of my girls doesn't drink at all. And I just find that so refreshing and so great for her. Like I'm, you know, just like, wow, I wish I could have gone through my teens and early adulthood like that. Cause maybe things, maybe a lot of things would be different in my life.

I'm sure.

Right.

It's having alcohol in your life clouds your judgment.

And I think that because I kept going back to it, a lot of my judgment calls were just really off.

And I wasn't able to focus.

What do you think that girl who was clubbing and out there being social, what do you think she lost out on the most?

A career. I think that my career suffered because of alcohol.

I think that, you know, I never came to set drunk, but I definitely went to auditions two hours late, you know, and couldn't find my way and just was very irresponsible. And I, I feel like I had a very delayed maturity in a lot of ways, but then I was overly mature in others.

I can layer. Yep.

I've, I've always thought like, what's wrong with me? Why am I 10 years behind my real peers? You know, they all seem to have their shit together and I'm over here just still struggling. I don't get it. But yeah, I kind of realized, uh, I didn't get to develop, uh, the way a regular person does who's not in the industry. Yeah.

You need that socialization. You know, you need that.

You were really like, you were huge in the 2000s.

Yes. Right?

I had the 90s.

Yes.

You had the 2000s, but it's the same story.

Yes, absolutely. It is.

It's the same story that the industry probably hasn't even changed that much today, you know, which is why it can be a little daunting to speak on this stuff because even though we have more social media presences for people who are on TV now where they're able to kind of use their platforms to create their own brands.

You know, they have so much more ability to navigate their own image and likeness and even make money off of it versus having to wait for the next opportunity and the phone to call and all of that. But still, I'm sure that there's still The Hollywood parties and the pressures and just the confusion of, you know, where do I end and my career begin?

It's so true. And it's hard to find yourself in all that noise. It's really hard to find your true north.

It is.

You have to step away.

You have to step away, you know, and I mean, that's why there are so many people that step away from Hollywood for me. stepping away meant moving away. And so we moved to Austin, Texas in 2020.

And we've been, I can't say, I can't say it enough.

It was just the most amazing choice for my family to, to really just get away and show myself that I could still function and work within the industry in different ways, whether it's on social media or podcasts or now the occasional Hallmark movie, which is coming out. But it's all just one big.

Journey, I find.

I mean, your life, you describe it as a train wreck. I guess that's the fall, right?

That's the fall, yeah. The fall from fame.

And then the rise was you making this intentional choice to redirect your life, not just for yourself, but for your family. And you already had your two girls at that time?

When I moved to... Austin, yes.

Yeah.

I admire that a lot because oftentimes I thought that when my girls were little, but I really stayed because I thought if I leave, how am I going to pay the bills? This is what I do. I have to be here. And things have changed so much now that You know, people like you are taking these wonderful opportunities and getting the hell out of town. I'm so happy for you.

Thank you very much. And I miss it.

You know, I miss being closer to, you know, the ability to collaborate more and be in person with people.

But we make it work. And I think Austin's a great city. Have you been here?

Oh, yes. Many times. I have a close tribe of friends there. So I visit a lot.

Oh, good.

I love it too.

Yeah.

The only thing is I just always eat way too much queso when I'm there and I don't eat cheese. So you can see the problem that might.

The queso, the queso. You can't refuse the queso.

If you do, they kick you out of Texas.

It's so funny. Well, thank you. This has been so lovely. You are so wonderful.

Oh gosh, thank you. Once Upon a Trainwreck is Christy's new memoir. It's available now. There's so much more to talk about. Part two is coming soon.

Christy Carlson Romano on the Dark Side of Child Acting and Addiction

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