My Reality (7 page)

One day I was over at Stefani’s house, and she finally snapped.

“I don’t want to hear about it anymore,” she said. “I’m your best friend, and I’m here for you, but if you’re going to keep doing this to yourself, you can’t keep running to me when he breaks your heart again. Because we do this every week.”

I couldn’t blame her for reacting that way. I understood why she and Reagan were tired of listening to me whine and moan. Heck,
I
was tired of whining and moaning. Despite Stefani’s words, I knew that she’d still be there to pick up my pieces and listen to me cry when I needed her to, because that’s what great friends do. But the whole situation had become almost as emotionally draining for her as it was for me.

And then, I got frustrated, too. It dawned on me that, sometime during the breakup, I had not only lost my motivation to meet someone else, I had also lost my motivation in pretty much every other area of my life. I didn’t know if it was because I wasn’t challenged by my job, and I didn’t have any extracurricular activities I was passionate about, or whether it was because my personal life was a complete mess. I just knew that I felt completely paralyzed.

I was at a crossroads emotionally, and my life was at a standstill.
I constantly thought about how empty and hollow I felt. All I did, all day, every day, was sit and think about my failed relationship, and how—IN ONE DAY—my cube had gone from having happy pictures of Tye and me all over it, to having no decorations at all. It was like a metaphor for my life. I was stuck in this dark, empty space, and I didn’t know how to get out.

I had that empty pit in my gut, and I just wanted it to go away, and Tye was just ONE factor that contributed to that pit (albeit, a big factor). I was not happy with where my career was. I was not happy having a home I didn’t like going home to (because it reminded me of Tye). I was not happy that I didn’t have the Cowboys to keep me occupied, and most of my friends were still on the squad. And I was not happy being alone. Even though I was with my friends all of the time at this point, ironically, I felt more alone than I ever had. So I just wanted a change from everything. Not limited to—but definitely including—Tye.

I needed a BIG change: a change of scenery, a change of perspective, a change of direction in my life. I was itching to get out of Dodge. I didn’t want to be in Dallas anymore. I was thinking about relocating to Austin, and I visited there several times while contemplating whether or not the move would make me happy. I was thinking about going for my teacher’s certificate and becoming a teacher, and I still believe I will be a teacher someday. But I couldn’t bring myself to do anything.

And then, one day that summer, I checked my mail, and there was an application for the television dating show,
The Bachelor.
I was totally dumfounded. The opening letter read: “Thank you for applying to be a candidate on
The Bachelor
. . .”

What?? I never applied to be on anything. I wouldn’t even know how to go about doing that if I wanted to. What the heck?

Now, over the past six months, several of my girlfriends had joked that I should be on that popular television dating show
The Bachelorette.
They always told me that I had a lot of things going for me, and that I would absolutely get picked for the show. But I thought it was just my friends trying to cheer me up and make me feel better about myself. I certainly hadn’t taken them seriously. And I certainly hadn’t applied to be on any show.

I couldn’t figure out how the application came to me, but I also knew that it couldn’t have been completely random. It wasn’t like they just handed them out to people at the supermarket. The materials revealed no clues. They thanked me for my interest in becoming a contestant, and included instructions that asked me to complete the entire questionnaire as honestly as possible and mail it back by a certain deadline.

Hmmm . . .

I took the application to work the next day, sat with one of my colleagues who was also a good friend, and got my cell phone out. One by one, I called each of my friends and asked them if they had somehow nominated me to be on
The Bachelor.
Finally, I got one of my girlfriends from the Cowboys, Kristen, on the phone, and her response wasn’t quite like anyone else’s.

“You know, I might have,” she said. “I don’t remember.”

Seriously?! You don’t remember if you signed me up to be a contestant on a national television show? Yeah, right. Someone’s busted. I found my culprit!

After that mystery was solved, I decided to delve further into the “application.” As I’ve probably established by this point, I would have done pretty much anything to make my workday go by quicker. As I started flipping through the application materials, I noticed there were twenty-four pages of questions, all targeted at me.

Wow. They could write a biography on someone with all of the information they wanted.

I figured it wouldn’t hurt to fill it out, since I wasn’t exactly doing anything with my life just then. Surely I wouldn’t make it. I’d just see how far I could go, just for fun. It gave me something new to focus on—a distraction—which I desperately needed in my life at that time. It certainly wasn’t anything I had a burning desire to do. To be totally honest, I had barely even seen the show. And I had always thought it was a little staged.

Falling in love on TV? Really? With all those cameras?

I just didn’t buy it.

Anyhow, I filled out the questionnaire. The questions were pretty basic:

Where are you from?

Who are your friends?

What do you like to do?

And, of course, they wanted to know all about my romantic life. When I got to the questions about my love life and past relationships, I decided to leave out Tye. I suppose it was probably just another form of denial.

If I leave it off the application, no one will ever know what really happened . . .

I filled it all out and sent everything back in, along with a couple of photos, which were required. I wasn’t sure how long the whole process would take, since there wasn’t a time line included in the packet. So after I mailed the application, I kind of forgot all about it and continued on with my life.

A few weeks later, I received another envelope in the mail from
The Bachelor.
I’d made it to the next round. How, I have absolutely no idea. Next up was to submit a video of myself answering a whole slew of new questions.

I almost stopped right there. It was too much work. I didn’t have a video camera. And I didn’t really care enough to deal with all of this. Kristen and I were about to leave on a big, fun trip we had planned to Mexico with a couple of friends, even though I was completely broke at the time—emotionally and financially.

I had filled Kristen in on what was happening throughout the audition process and had kept her updated on each new round that I had made it through. I told her about the video, and how I didn’t really want to do it. I was a little embarrassed and not really sure I was 100 percent interested. She somehow convinced me to just do it.

We literally shot the video the morning we left for Mexico. And we had to go to my parents’ house to use their video camera. I laugh today when I see clips of that video on YouTube, because it’s so clear that I was already dressed for a Mexican vacation! It’s a terrible interview, really, because we were in such a rush, and I wasn’t that invested in the whole process. The only thing I remember saying was in answer to a question about how my relationships tended to end.

That was easy.

“I’m always the dumpee,” I said. “And I don’t understand why. I believe in love. I’ve got a tattoo on my back that says True Love, because I’m a firm believer. I just haven’t found it.”

I shipped off the video, left for Mexico, and didn’t think twice about it. Surely they wouldn’t be interested in the quick, sloppy interview I’d submitted. It was fun to play the “what if?” game,
but I was still planning to move on with my life, as if there was no possibility that anything would happen with the show.

Until, that is, the producers contacted me to say that they wanted to meet me in person.

What?!? How did I actually make it to the next round?

Again, I couldn’t understand how, or why, they still wanted to meet with me. Looking back, maybe they saw how cracked and fragile I was at the time—even though I’d tried my best to mask my heartbreak. I suppose I’ll never know for sure.

It was now Labor Day weekend. I was vacationing with my family on an island off the coast of Florida. It was a Rycroft family tradition; we’d gone there every summer for the past twenty-four years. I remember this trip being particularly uncomfortable for me. My younger brother, Christopher, had brought along his girlfriend, which was great, except that there I was, single and auditioning for a TV dating show, which my parents had made clear they really didn’t want me to do. Not exactly the impression I wanted to make as an older sibling.

There were only two days I could choose to fly to Los Angeles for the audition, and so I had to leave vacation a few days early to meet with the producers.

I wasn’t nervous or anxious at all. I never thought I would make it, and so the whole experience just seemed beyond belief. Once I got to LA, there was a car waiting to take me to the hotel where we were meeting. Once we arrived there, a producer was outside waiting to greet me. She seemed nice enough.

Maybe this won’t be so bad after all.

She showed me to my room to drop off my bag, then escorted me immediately to where all the producers were set up.

First I did a one-on-one interview with a producer. She asked
me a few generic questions that I’m sure everyone’s been asked at one time or another, and I simply answered them the best I could.

So I answered, smiled, and had fun with the process. I didn’t answer anything too seriously—I wanted to be funny and show that I had a sense of humor.

After the one-on-one interview, I was led into a room where—without any warning—I was suddenly face-to-face with a slew of producers, who were all sitting around a table staring at me. They made me sit up front and face them all.

Intimidate much?!

The strange thing was that I still wasn’t the least bit nervous. While I was sitting there, I had this thought that made me feel totally calm:
They can’t ask me a question I don’t know the answer to because it’s all about me.

I also thought of it as a charade to see if I could cover up how I was really feeling, which was still about as heartbroken as I’d ever been. I never cried on camera. I never said anything directly about my relationship with Tye. I was acting like this really strong, independent woman. And it worked. (Well, I think it did. But, then, for all I know, they might have been on to me the whole time.) Even though I was still a mess inside, there was something about pretending to be put together that started to make me feel like I
was
that powerful woman I wanted to be, and that made it all easier.

It helped, too, that, somehow, I immediately had a good sense of my boundaries. They knew that I had been a professional cheerleader, and one of the producers tried very hard to get me to do a cheer.

I can’t be THAT girl. If I dance and cheer now, they’ll expect me to dance and cheer on the TV show . . . and that’s just not me.

I smiled to make sure I didn’t seem rude.

“I don’t really cheer,” I said. “I mean, the cheerleaders are dancers anyhow. They’re not cheerleaders.”

“Well, then, do a dance,” the producer said. “We want to see a dance.”

I could tell that they wanted to see how far I’d go on TV.

“No,” I said firmly. “I’d rather not. I’m not really comfortable doing that. And I’m not dressed appropriately.”

There was their answer to how far I would go: not far at all.

When I left, I figured I had totally blown it, because I didn’t do what they wanted me to do. They probably wanted me to be that girl who would be THE DANCER on the show. But I didn’t care. I was glad that I hadn’t compromised myself. (How ironic that it actually took me doing a television show that I didn’t really care about to inspire me to stand up for myself, and launch a change in my life that played a big role in my destiny.)

About a week later, I got another package from
The Bachelor
in the mail.

No way! . . . This has got to be a rejection letter or something . . . It can’t be ANOTHER round of auditions.

I opened the package, and what do you know? It was a formal acceptance letter to be on the show! They wanted me to be a cast member! All I had to do was sign the enclosed contract by a certain date, and it would be official.

At first, I still couldn’t believe I’d made it, even after this whole, long process I’d been through. Then, the reality of it all set in, and I realized that there was one huge obstacle I had to face before I could go on the show:

Tye.

Of course, I received the packet containing the contract just as
Tye and I were starting to talk again, and it felt like things were good between us. Naturally, it was hard not to get my hopes up. But, by now, I knew better. I gave myself a good talking to: “Melissa, remember the pattern. Remember that this happens for a week or two, and then he always goes away.”

I
didn’t know what to say to Tye about
The Bachelor
, and so I chose not to tell him anything and just pretend like it wasn’t happening. Part of me wanted to get out of Dallas, to go have an adventure, and leave my heartbreak and emptiness behind. But the other part wanted to stay and be with Tye, and not do anything that might upset our reunion. I couldn’t muster up the courage to discuss it with him, and so I held on to the contract for as long as possible while weighing my options.