Note to Self: 30 Women on Hardship, Humiliation, Heartbreak, and Overcoming It All

When Your Pride's in Jeopardy Camryn Manheim Camryn Manheim is an Emmy Award-winning actress, most notably for her roles as Ellenor Frutt onThe Practiceand Delia Banks onGhost Whisperer. She wrote her first book,Wake Up, I'm Fat!in 1999. She lives in Los Angeles with her amazing son, Milo. Her running charade skills are unmatched.Most of my humiliating and humbling experiences have come not from the moments in which the horrifying incidents occurred but long after, when I put the pieces of the puzzle together and the whole picture became painfully clear. Like the time I wore a pearl jeweled brooch in my hair to a Golden Globes ceremony. At the time I thought I looked so chic and confident, but in retrospect it was truly a fashion faux pas. Lucky for me, the picture only showed up on several thousand websites and hundreds of publications...until Tara Reid's boob fell out of her dress on a red carpet and stole my limelight. I should send her a thank-you note.I'm no stranger to humiliation. Most of the time, though, I'm able to take the punch, put it in its proper place, and find the amusement in the retelling of it. However, there is one moment that lives on in my memory, in my bones. The humiliation can still be felt when I turn the channel to ABC at 7:00 p.m. on any given night. It's humiliating times ten million, because that's about how many people watched me fail, and I failed big.As the daughter of two Jewish educators who sent their only son to Harvard, there was an underlying pressure that I, too, would follow in their academic footsteps. At the age of ten, when I decided I wanted to be an actor, my parents thought the passing phase was cute. But as ten turned to eighteen, and I decided to seriously pursue being an actress, my parents found it no longer cute but -- how shall I say it? -- terrifying.My whole family is a bunch of smarty-pants. And while I think of myself as smart, I guess my strengths would be better described as "differently" smart. For example, I can't spell my way out of a paper bag, but I like to think of myself as a good writer. When my son was born, I began a journal for him. This is an excerpt from my very first entry.Dear Little One, There are a few things you should know about me before we go on this journey. First, you're going to see a few pictures around the house of me on a motorcycle. This does not mean you will ever be able to ride one. Secondly, I'm a terrible speller. I think I'll have you covered through second grade, but when you get into the five-letter words, you're on your own, kid.While other new moms were reading first-time parenting manuals, I was leafing through theOxford English Dictionarytrying to figure out how to spellpacifier. The truth is, I was never able to retain the simple facts you learn in school. Geography? A blur. Social studies? If only itweresocial. Spanish? I was so bad at it, I couldn't even remember the swear words. Oddly enough, I could kick ass at charades and poker, but the decade when Trivial Pursuit was the number one parlor game was slightly traumatic for me. Truth be told, I would rather have a root canal than collect all the plastic wedges required to win that tedious game.My parents used to quiz us in the car when we would go on long family vacations. How many senators are there for every state? What is the capital of Ethiopia? What kind of number is the square root of eight? Ad nauseam. It always felt like when the genes were passed out among the siblings, they were not equally dispersed. My brother got most of the "fact retention" genes, my sister got all of the "visual art" genes, and I got the "social" genes. I could make friends with a lamppost. That came from my mom. Since my dad was a professor of mathematics, you didn't get the car keys in my household without caBuchanan, Andrea J. is the author of 'Note to Self: 30 Women on Hardship, Humiliation, Heartbreak, and Overcoming It All', published 2009 under ISBN 9781416948766 and ISBN 1416948767.