I Was the Good Girl for Fifty-Five Years, Then I Sat Down With Jamie Lynn Sigler

I have been a good girl for as long as I can remember.

I do not mean that in the polished, well-mannered, thank-you-note-writing sense, although that is part of it. I mean that I was raised, the way most women I know were raised, to believe that my value was measured by how easy I was to be around. How little I asked for. How much I could carry without anyone having to notice I was carrying it.

I was the woman who said yes when she meant no. The one who apologized when someone bumped into her on the sidewalk. The one who downplayed her own pain because she did not want to make anyone uncomfortable, and who hid the parts of her life that did not fit the version of herself that everyone seemed to need.

I had an eating disorder I did not talk about for years, because talking about it would have made me a problem.

I stayed in a first marriage to a narcissist for longer than I should have, because leaving would have made me a problem.

I built a thirty-year career in news on the back of being unflappable, agreeable, professional, never the story, and certainly never the woman in tears in the green room, because being any of those things would have made me a problem.

This week on The Tamsen Show, I sat down with Jamie Lynn Sigler.

Jamie was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at twenty years old, in the middle of filming one of the most iconic shows in television history, and she hid that diagnosis from almost everyone in her life for fifteen years. She told me on tape that the reason she hid it, the reason she could not bring herself to share even the most basic truth about her own body, was that she had been conditioned to be the good girl. She did not want to be the problem.

I sat across from her and I felt every word.

Because here is the thing about good girl conditioning that nobody tells you when you are young. It works. It does, in the short term, get you praised and promoted and chosen. The cost does not show up right away. The cost shows up in your forties and fifties, when you look around at the life you have built and you realize that almost no one in it actually knows you. That you have spent decades performing a version of yourself you thought was lovable, and now you are tired, and you do not even know who you are underneath the performance anymore.

Jamie told me something in our conversation that I have been turning over in my mind ever since.

She said the first step in any of this, the first thing she had to do before any real healing could begin, was forgive herself. Not the people who hurt her. Not the moments she would have done differently. Herself. The young woman who was just doing the best she could and did not know any better, and was trying, with the only tools she had, to survive.

I have not done that yet.

I have forgiven a lot of people in my life. The first husband. The producers who underestimated me. The version of the world that taught a generation of girls that being good was the same thing as being safe. But I have not forgiven the woman who lived inside that conditioning for fifty-five years, who hid the hard parts, who said yes when she meant no, who carried the weight in silence and called it strength.

I am working on it.

If you are reading this and you recognize yourself in any of this, in the apologizing, the performing, the hiding, the version of yourself you have been quietly carrying around for years, I want to tell you what Jamie told me.

It is not too late to rewrite the story. It starts with forgiving the woman who was just trying to survive. Your story is not over yet.

The full conversation, Jamie Lynn Sigler: How to Forgive Yourself and Rewrite Your Story, is out now. Listen here or watch here.