Never Too Late (9 page)

It started out slow, but we would end up losing ourselves in the money and that weird kind of fame we had landed in. Leah’s dad wound up becoming someone who was far, far away from the person he used to be in my memory. But I got away from myself, too, in my own way, with the pills.

Still, I’ll say this until I die, and you can ask any honest person. I have never cheated on that man in my life, and he knows it. No matter what life I was living, I never cheated on him. I was always loyal to our relationship. I wish he could say the same.

P
eople always ask me how exciting it was when I realized
16 & Pregnant
was making me famous. Well, let me just remind everybody what kind of “famous” that was. I wish I could quote one of the stories directly, but you’ll just have to trust me when I go over some of the things the tabloid writers said about us. Or you can see for yourself. It’s all over the Internet. The gossip reporters called us schlubby and fat, made vicious fun of our lifestyle and how much money we had, and mocked our relationship relentlessly. It got meaner and meaner as time went on, to where it really just felt like bullying. I’m not even talking about the many times we were criticized in the media for our behavior or our mistakes. I’m talking about the many stories that served absolutely no other purpose than to call us fat or ugly or stupid.

That side of fame wasn’t fun for either of us. It was pointless and cruel, and it took a toll.

It didn’t happen all at once, but the first signs of what was to come were bad ones. I instantly knew the reality TV thing was out of control the moment I saw myself on
The Soup.
That was a truly shocking moment for me. Like I said, we never thought
16 & Pregnant
was going to turn us into household names. We just thought it was a funny thing that happened one time, and after we cashed that check we were totally ready to fade off into the MTV archives or whatever. We weren’t prepared to reach late-night joke status.

It just so happened that
The Soup
was one of my favorite shows at the time. So one night I was sitting around watching Joel McHale cracking jokes when all of a sudden, boom! I popped up on the screen. I didn’t even have time to think about whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. It was obviously a bad thing. They went right into it, showing clips of me eating all of this food and making fun of me.

It was the first time I experienced that kind of negative media attention, and all I can say is it made me feel like shit. Straight up shit.

Back then I didn’t know what assholes the media were. Maybe it was all that time I spent without a TV growing up, but I just didn’t understand how mean people could be. I didn’t understand what reason there was for it.

I’d never felt good about food or my weight, and to see myself on one of my favorite shows being bullied for the way I was eating was absolutely devastating for me. I was sensitive, and those remarks cut deep.

That was the experience that kicked off the fame roller-coaster. There was never anything about it that I can say was fun or positive. You can call me ungrateful, but that’s the truth. It wasn’t like I was walking out on the red carpet with people cheering for me and throwing me flowers. I was getting splashed on tabloids and shows like
The Soup,
and people were not on my side. They’d made their own opinions based on what they saw on the show, and I guess they felt like they knew the whole story and were right to say whatever they wanted about me. They were always picking on my weight and my looks. It was just the hardest way to learn firsthand how vicious the press can be.

So with all that going on, we weren’t really excited by the attention so much as we were shocked. Even when people were coming up to us on the street, it was so unexpected and new for us we didn’t even know how to deal with it. We were like, “You want a picture with us? What the fuck?” You have to remember we were just two kids in Indiana who’d grown up poor and sad. To get from where we were coming from to having people follow us around with cameras, asking us to pose with them, it was just beyond our comprehension.

I’m not saying I was never excited, but there really was more shock than anything else. I didn’t even know how to deal with it or process it, because of course I’d never had that experience before. I remember doing my very first magazine,
People
, with the rest of the girls. They asked us how it felt to be an overnight celebrity. I remember saying, “I don’t feel like a celebrity. What are you talking about? That’s crazy.” It felt more like I was a target for bullying than anything else. After the way it all started out, with all the mean comments about my looks and my weight, I felt completely self-conscious and miserable. I was just buried in that feeling. It really sucked. There was so much of it happening that pretty soon I kind of just wanted to crawl into a damn hole.

I’d always struggled with anxiety, and that shit didn’t help. It’s all on record how bad I was starting to feel at that time. The stress just starting eating everything up. He and I were both feeling the strain of things. We just didn’t know how to handle how fast and how much our lives had changed. All the messages from girls online were still building up in the background, and our relationship was getting really tense. Along with the cruel comments in the media, it just wasn’t a good situation.

It came to a point, which people got to see on the show, by the way, where I ended up going to the doctor and getting a prescription for anxiety medication.

That was where the next phase started. I hadn’t messed with pills since I found out I was pregnant with Leah. And for six months after she was born, I stayed sober. But I was already reaching the limit with my unhappiness and stress, and I was almost begging for something to come along and offer me a way to escape. A Klonopin prescription was the obvious step for somebody suffering that much anxiety. But almost right away, I started eating them all up, and that was the beginning of me becoming an addict.

Before
16 & Pregnant
had even wound down, they were talking about doing another season. Leah’s dad and I were completely sure we weren’t gonna get picked. We were still in the mindset that the show was a one-time thing, and we didn’t think we were exciting enough to get picked for the spin-off over anybody else who was on the original show.

I’d just gotten that Klonopin prescription when one of the producers came by to see me and let me know we were going to be doing
Teen Mom.
When she walked in and said “You got picked!” I was so blissed out on my new pills I had to think kind of carefully about how to say “Yayyyy . . . woohoo!”

I can’t tell you when people started to catch on to those pills being a problem to me. Nobody ever said anything. I don’t now if it was because they were afraid of the confrontation or what. At the time, I just thought I was really slick and really good at getting away with stuff.

The thing about going back for another round of reality TV was that even with all the media backlash, we really were excited for the behind the scenes filming experience. We loved the people we were working with, and we got close to everybody right away. All those crew members and people I freaked out with my hillbilly impression in the beginning, we all ended up becoming really close. On their breaks we’d go out to eat together, just Leah’s dad and me and the whole crew at the Olive Garden sitting at a big ass table, eating and laughing and cracking up. That’s not really normal on the set of a reality show—when the crew is on break, they usually don’t want to see your face. But we were all so chill together we hung out all the time. After we were done filming, the girls would stay for an hour after everybody left just to hang out and talk and laugh about shit.

That’s the reason why I have the relationships I have with the people from MTV. It’s all based on those moments. We built up a really strong dynamic. There was one time during
Teen Mom
when we were sitting and filming and my cousin Krystal was on her way over. When she came to the door, she was all mad as hell and telling me I needed to get my neighbors away from her. “The hell?” I thought, and went outside. To my surprise I saw my neighbor from straight across the street cussing and yelling at me. She’d started up with Krystal over where she parked, like the street had designated parking or something (it didn’t). But this woman obviously wanted trouble. It was seriously just some fifty-year-old lady freaking and calling me a whore, walking out into the road like she was about to do something. I don’t even know. Of course all I said back was “Shut your damn mouth up. I’m not messing with you. You’re like fifty.”

Well, right at that moment, this huge blond girl started wandering up the street, and she was yelling and cussing at me, too! “That’s my mom! That’s my mom!” I was like, damn, is the whole freaking family here? Welcome to Anderson. So there I was standing on the porch in a black miniskirt with a camera crew, going back and forth with this mom and daughter tag team while they closed in on me, screaming I was a whore and acting like they were about to turn it up. They barged straight onto my property, on a rampage and the daughter started getting in my face. So, you know, I got right back in hers. I remember her trying to talk shit to me, saying, “You think you’re fucking cute, don’t you?” Well, obviously she was an idiot, because that’s a really dumb question to ask a smartass. I was like, “Yeah, I am.” Duh.

But the crew all came out and they were telling me to walk away from that whole hot mess, so I went back up onto the porch and went inside.

It’s a pretty obvious statement, but not everybody in reality TV has that much support from the crew. When everything’s all about the ratings and getting the craziest clips possible, it’s definitely not automatic that the people behind the wheel are going to have your best interest in mind all the time. And if you don’t respect those people you work with every day, if you treat them bad and don’t work on building a good relationship with them, you definitely can’t expect them to put their asses on the line to have your back when things get out of control. I was crazy back then. If somebody wanted to fight, I was always ready to fight back. It’s only because I was lucky enough to have such good people around me that I didn’t get into worse shit than I did. Nobody was egging me on or trying to get the most drama for their buck. I really felt they were concerned for me and tried to keep my interests in mind.

It helps a lot to have that support behind the scenes when on the other side, everybody has decided you’re a piece of shit. The media was so awful at that time, and so was the public. It wasn’t just the mean stories on TMZ and
E! News
or whatever. There were horrible comments on those stories, and messages I was getting, and cruel things on Twitter . . . just all over the Internet. Let me tell you, Farrah and I might have our differences, but it sucks to see her taking on my old role. I know how that girl feels and then some. It’s not right. It’s really not. Once people decide to hate on somebody, they are relentless.

It used to hurt me so bad when people said things. Back in the day when I got up to around 175 pounds, every time someone said something about my body it cut me straight to the bone. Anytime someone called me fat or ugly, I really believed it. I got so depressed over it, and then I started losing a lot of weight. It probably went a bit too far. I remember going shopping with Leah’s dad and trying on some jeans, because the ones I was wearing weren’t fitting right. The next thing I knew I was in the dressing room zipping up a pair of size zero pants. I remember him looking at me like, “What the hell?”

I’d never been that skinny before in my life. It brought some of my confidence back, but there was still a whole lot of mess going on underneath that new look. Obviously fitting into a pair of size zeroes doesn’t mean a lot when your family’s a mess, you’ve got a kid at home, and you’re slowly jacking up your addiction to pills.

Things weren’t right on Leah’s father’s end, either. It’s hard for me to look back and speak for what he was going through at the time. I know how the experience affected me, and I know the kind of feelings I had and how I started slipping out of control. But with him, it’s hard for me to say. The best I can explain it is that having all that money and all that attention from girls for the first time in his life just did something to change him. He went from being this beautiful person I’d started a life with to being a guy I didn’t recognize anymore. The way he talked to me and treated me was completely different. He was doing these mean little things, saying things to pick at me and start fights when there was no reason to be fighting. And the whole time he was getting all these messages from girls and he was sending them back.

It was actually Valentine’s Day when things between me and Leah’s father took a turn for the worse. Sounds shitty, huh? Yeah. Just wait.

He said he hadn’t had a chance to pick me up anything for Valentine’s Day, so he took off to go to the mall and get it together a little late. That was about an hour’s drive away, so I didn’t think much of it when he didn’t come back right away. It took about four hours before I started really wondering, and I called him up to check in and see where he was.

He answered the phone. But when we were talking, I heard the sound of girls laughing in the background. That put me on guard. I asked him what the hell was up.

“I was at the mall,” he said. “These two girls recognized me and we got to talking, so I was giving them a ride home.”

There was so much that was weird about that, to me, I couldn’t even think of what to say except, “Really?” I mean,
really?
The man left me alone at home on Valentine’s Day saying he was going to go get me something nice, and the next thing I know he’s off hanging out with other girls while I wonder where he is? Who would be okay with that? We started getting into a fight on the phone, and it was a really bad fight. But right then, when I was so upset, he started laughing at me. He was laughing at how mad I was, and that wasn’t even the worst thing.