Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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In this episode, my guest is Paulina Porizkova. Paulina is a Czechoslovakian-born writer, and she’s one of the featured presenters in a series Sounds True produced in partnership with Maria Shriver. It’s called Radically Reframing Aging. Paulina is a former supermodel, and in 1988, became one of the highest-paid models in the world as the face of Estée Lauder.
As an actress, she’s starred in 16 movies and numerous TV shows. And Paulina Porizkova has written a new book. It’s part of Maria Shriver’s book imprint with Penguin called The Open Field. The new book is called No Filter: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful. It is now Paulina’s time to be heard and not just seen, and she has a lot to share about aging beautifully. Here’s my conversation with Paulina Porizkova.
Paulina, welcome.
Paulina Porizkova: Hello, and thank you.
Tami Simon: Your original dream as a person was to be a writer, and it’s so wonderful now that you’ve released your new book, No Filter. Tell me about that original dream and how it lived in you as a young person.
Paulina Porizkova: Oh, thank you so much for asking me that. You’re the first person to have asked me that, and I feel like it’s fairly significant. You know what? My primary love my whole life has been reading. Just books. I was a bibliophile since I learned to read.
And I remember reading this book, which is actually an American book called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. And I read it in translation in Czech when I was maybe about nine years old. And it starts off with a little girl, Francie, reading in a tree. And I was a little girl reading in a tree as I was reading the book, and so I had formed this instant bond with Francie. And I remember there was a segment in the book where she goes to the library, and she decides to read every book in the library starting with the letter A.
And I thought, “That’s brilliant. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.” So I set to try to do that. I didn’t get very far because, at the age of nine, I got moved to Sweden and then, obviously, had to learn a whole different language and culture and pick up new books.
But I think my inkling or my dream that I one day wanted to write really happened once I learned Swedish. And I was probably around 10 or 11, in middle school, and I started writing these plays for Friday afternoons. On Friday afternoons, kids would have free time to be creative, to do whatever they wanted. And I would write these plays and then direct them and, of course, star in them as well.
And that was the first time that I realized the power of actually writing something that then could make other people do something I had written down, the power of words to actually move objects, to move humans, literally and not so literally. And I think I enjoyed that kind of control, actually, to be able to somehow move those that I was connected to.
Tami Simon: And your new book, No Filter, beautiful storytelling throughout the whole book. So I think you’re achieving this original dream that lived inside you, impacting people, moving people. Now, help us understand, as a young person, the winding path that brought you to modeling.
Paulina Porizkova: You know, that path was actually much less winding than everything else in my life. That one seemed to be kind of a straight shot, honestly. I had three girlfriends when I was in Sweden, and we were sort of the outcasts. One of us had acne, one of us was too heavy, one of us actually was kind of normal but preferred to stick with the weirdos. And I was the Communist kid. I was the immigrant.
And one of the girls was very fond of fashion and fashion magazines, and she was really into makeup, like, I guess, a lot of teen girls are. But she was very good at it. She was very talented. And she would use me as her palette, as her canvas. And then she would take little Kodak Instamatic photos of me, and then she’d develop them, and they would come back, and she’d look at them and go, “Whoa, you know, you look really good on pictures.” That’s a comment I’ve gotten a few times, especially when people meet me in real life. And then they go, “Oh, you look really good on pictures.”
And she sent her pictures in to some lady that was a modeling scout in our little town to ask her about how to become a makeup artist, how to enter the fashion business. And the lady responded with, “Yes, yes, yes. Who’s the girl? How old is she? And how tall is she?” And so my girlfriend set up a meeting for me with this older lady, and the older lady set up a meeting for me with John Casablancas, who was the owner of Elite Model at that time.
But it all happened really quickly. Within six weeks, I went from being the picked-on, bullied kid in school to flying to Paris to become a model, because I was apparently beautiful. So there you have it.
Tami Simon: Now, I know one of the things that sometimes people say to you now, in addition to this comment you made, how good you look in pictures, is, “Paulina, you still look good.” And it’s this comment that carries a lot with it. And I wonder if you can share a little bit when you hear that comment, what it brings up for you.
Paulina Porizkova: Oh, I understand that it’s meant as a compliment. It used to provoke quite a strong reaction to me, because my immediate hearing of the word “still” is the assumption that I shouldn’t be. “Oh, you can still sit straight up? Oh, you can still walk?” Why are you assuming that I couldn’t?
So, “You are still beautiful.” The assumption is, “You shouldn’t be.” Because why? Because I’ve aged. And so, I find it offensive because of that, but I do realize that people don’t mean it like that. I understand that they mean well when they give you this compliment. But I sort of kindly, mostly, try to tell people that the connotations of the word “still,” that there’s an element of surprise with the word “still,” and that it’s not quite as flattering as you would think it is.
Tami Simon: One of the things in reading No Filter and in reflecting on this conversation about women, beauty, and aging that I’ve really been thinking about, and I really want to hear your view on this, is why, as a culture, do we have this incredible strong bias that women are at their most beautiful when we’re young? So I have a couple of thoughts about this, but I’m curious what your thoughts are.
Paulina Porizkova: And I want to hear your thoughts too, because I find this a really obviously interesting discussion, because I spent a lot of time thinking about this. I have a couple of theories. Theories is all they are, obviously. I have no proof.
One of them is that it’s biological to a certain extent, that as long as we can procreate, we are supposed to be attractive to men. Men are supposed to be attracted to women who can actually carry their seed and grow it and pop it out.
Another thing is, to me, that I think youth is flexible, youth is naive, and it’s much easier to control somebody that’s young than somebody who has grown into their full selves. And I do find that there’s a lot of men, especially, who, in order to feel really masculine, they need that kind of control over a woman. And then it makes them feel younger in extension that they are able to bag a hot babe that’s much younger. It’s, I guess, distancing themselves from death, right? “I’m not there yet. I’m not there yet. Look, I’m sleeping with a woman 20 years my junior.” So that’s a few, a few—
Tami Simon: And interestingly, in all of your hypotheses, which merge well with mine, it’s all through the eyes of men.
Paulina Porizkova: Of course.
Tami Simon: Beauty is defined through the eyes of men. And, you know, I’ve been a lesbian my whole life and have refused that lens on me. So for me to age and have my naturally silver hair and to not wear makeup, it’s all natural for me, in a way, because I’m not trying to appeal—
Paulina Porizkova: Right.
Tami Simon: —to men. That’s not what I’m trying to do. And yet, I understand the tremendous pressure, and I see it, that so many women feel under, which is to match a definition of beauty defined by men. And I’m curious to know, for you—here you are, aging, part of the Radically Reframing Aging series with Maria—how do you think women can reclaim a view of beauty, can own a view of beauty that’s not defined by men?
Paulina Porizkova: I am not sure how easy that would be for a younger woman who technically is in the marketplace of being chosen. Also, culturally, it is the men who choose the women, and the women get to accept or decline.
Now, in a culture like Sweden, where I grew up, or in my sexually formative years, it wasn’t like that. We girls, we were brought up to believe that our bodies were our own, we could do with as we pleased. Sex was a good thing. Sex was something that you ought to do because it was good for you, sort of like playing tennis. And they gave you all the—in school, you could go and get condoms, no questions asked. There was a lot of education on safe sex.
And I went to a school that wasn’t a particularly—that had a lot of children of the more underprivileged part. Not that Sweden was ever that underprivileged. But, you know, the kids who didn’t have wealthy parents. And I don’t know a single one that got pregnant. And they were all having sex. By the time we were 14 and 15 pretty much, I seemed to have been the only old maid left.
So that taught me, too, that because we had control of our own bodies, and so we weren’t—we didn’t feel like victims. We didn’t feel like objects that were out in the marketplace being selected. We did the selections ourselves. And this is so funny because I’ve never encountered it since. In school dances, the boys were the ones that would line the walls, and the women would be the ones that walked around and picked their dance partner. And then the boys would be like, “Huh. OK. Great. Thanks.” Because the boys rarely turn you down. And that gives you a whole different sense of power and understanding of yourself as a woman.
And then you bring that to the rest of the world, and it doesn’t work like that anywhere else. That was a bit of a shock to me, that that was such an enclosed space, and that that didn’t exist in France, it didn’t exist in the United States, it didn’t exist anywhere else. But I grew up this way, so I sort of internalized that and always felt like that. That just because I’m a woman, I’m not the weaker sex. In fact, I’m the stronger sex, because I can do anything a man can and I can bear children. So take that. And that was kind of an empowering way of growing up. And I’m sorry, because now I completely lost the beginning of your question.
Tami Simon: This is an important conversation, Paulina, because you mentioned how younger women, if what they’re trying to do is appeal to men, then younger women will have to fit with the gaze. But what I’m looking at is the kind of cultural transformation that I think is important and that you’re even pointing out was part of your youth in Sweden, where women feel more in charge of their own beauty. And I’m wondering, throughout the whole life span, and I’m wondering what your recommendations are such that, in a sense, we’re everyday cultural workers doing this work by how we live our lives and how you see that.
Paulina Porizkova: Right. By leading by example. Now I’m at the point where I think that there’s not a whole lot that—look, we can build it a little brick at the time, but to change the minds of the young ones is pretty difficult, especially as, when you’re young, you don’t love to take the advice of older people. You think you know much better. You think your mother’s or her friend’s ideas are outdated, and, “You don’t know what’s going on today.”
But I think it’s for us older women to carry ourselves with an attitude and putting ourselves out there in the world, in whatever way we are comfortable with and that makes us happy, to proudly bear our age, to admit to how old we are, first of all.
I also think letting yourself age physically when you have the opportunity not to is a terrific thing, because it’s bringing attention to—there’s no shame in having wrinkles. There’s no shame in having saggy skin or gray hair. It’s just a change. It’s just a different kind of beauty, and it’s changing to something else, and it’s actually something that’s far more powerful. So can we make that look cool? Can we make it cool by inhabiting it with joy and by celebrating ourselves the way we are without trying to make ourselves look younger?
Tami Simon: One of the things I was reflecting on is how much I love old trees. And, of course, lots of people love old trees. “Oh my God, I was sitting with a 2,000-year-old redwood.” That kind of thing. And yet, when it comes to our appearance, aging is considered something that we’re supposed to cover up. And I thought, “Huh, what if we viewed women more like we view trees?” So I’m curious what your perspective is.
Paulina Porizkova: Well, I have that exact passage in my book where I’m saying, “This is where you best understand how objectified we are as women, because we are nature, and like nature, we change. Yet we are supposed to stay the same, like objects.” And that’s a cultural thing. It’s thousands of years old.
But that’s what we celebrate. We celebrate the ones that somehow manage to not seem to join the advance of time, the ones that stay the same, however it is that they do it, and act especially youthful. That’s aging gracefully these days. And I would really like to turn that on its head and go, “No, aging gracefully is by actually embracing who you are and living proudly and loudly with, ‘This is who I am, and these are my changes.’ And, ‘Put up with it. This is what it is now.’”
Tami Simon: Now, you write about, in No Filter, a conversation you had with your agent at a certain point, who basically broke the news to you that you were too old now to be successful any longer as a model. And I thought about that, and I thought, “Why? Why don’t we want—women who are older are still buying clothes. They’re still using makeup. They’re still buying products. Why do we say, ‘No, your career’s over’?” And maybe it’s changing in the modeling agency, I’m not sure, but I’m curious what your views are on this.
Paulina Porizkova: It’s changing a little bit, but it’s not changing a whole lot, to be honest with you. And I think it’s in part because, and I was just talking about this yesterday on Instagram, because of—look, what decides this? What decides the beauty standards, to a certain extent, is money. Corporations that push products on women to sell you things. Of course, they will make you feel inadequate so that you have to buy this cream, or you can buy this hair color, you can buy this lipstick, whatever it is that you need to be sold.
And the real problem here is that although us women in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, we’re the ones that apparently hold the most wealth. We are actually the deciders. We’re the ones that spend the most, yet we are being offered products with the faces of much younger women on them, because that’s what we buy.
We don’t buy products from women our age, because we don’t want to look like women our age. We want to look 20 years younger. When you buy an anti-wrinkle cream, an anti-aging product, what are you trying to do? You’re trying to wind back time a little bit. And you’re not going to buy that from somebody like me who’s got obvious wrinkles. You’re going to want to buy it from somebody who looks like it may have worked on them.
And so we’re kind of self-defeating because, yes—and I hear this quite a lot. “Yes, more representation of older women. Please, more representation of older women.” Yet as long as you put your money into buying younger, then younger is all you’re going to be offered.
Tami Simon: If you were to model products that are products you use at this point in your life, what would they be?
Paulina Porizkova: Oh, I am a product whore. Excuse the language. I love products. As much as I know that they are not actually working and that—well, I mean, they’re not going to give me an instant facelift, for example. They’re not miracles. I somehow stupidly keep hoping that I will find that one that will do that. So I’m perennially out there buying things that I already know are false. So that’s how—this is my inner conflict with aging. I have a hard time of it too. I try to put a really good face on it, and it works some days, and then some days it doesn’t work so well. But yes, I love beauty products. I love my little—
Tami Simon: Well, I’ll share this with you just for a moment. Here, I’m just going to be a confessional. With my silver hair, I use this purple extract because it keeps my hair being more bright and shiny and not yellow and dingy. Great. So this would be a product that has a non hair dye. I’m not dyeing my hair for the next however many decades, and yet it’s something that needs to be sold in the marketplace that some silver-haired woman could model. I’m not looking for a product sponsorship now. I’m just sharing the kind of reinvention of marketing and selling that’s possible, I think, that could work.
Paulina Porizkova: Yes. But even though—and by the way, I use the purple stuff too, because I love the ashy tone, because I have grays, and I have whites, but they’re still a little—they’re not as even as I’d like them. I love gray hair. I think it’s fabulous. Wait, what was I going to say? Oh, so that silver shampoo, that purple stuff—
Tami Simon: Yes.
Paulina Porizkova: Yes. It’s really only good for white or graying hair to give it that cast. So it is obviously for a very specific kind of audience. So you know you’re not going to use a 20-year-old brunette to advertise it. But it’s still a very small movement that, “Go with the grays. Go with the whites. Let it do its own thing.” Most women still dye their hair.
And on my Instagram, you have no idea how many comments I get all the time about, “You looked so much better with brown hair. Why don’t you dye your hair?” And I think, “Well, I looked much better in brown hair because I was 20 years younger, so that’s why you think I looked so fabulous. Now, if I dyed my hair brown, it would look like a wig.” Because nature does what it’s supposed to do. It softens the hair around your face as your face softens. It all works together.
But women—look, when you start looking your age, somewhere in your late 40s or 50s, I think, you are starting to get that cloak of invisibility, and you get dismissed from the main table outside in the world. And not just from the men’s table, also, unfortunately, from the women’s table.
And so I think the easiest thing to do is to go to a dermatologist and have some of that age erased, dye your hair, and get a little Botox, get a little filler. You look five years younger, 10 years younger, and then bingo, you get to hold on for another little while.
Self-acceptance, coming to terms with who you are and what you look like, and celebrating that, I always thought was the rewards of aging. But now I think because we have a choice not to age, it just seems to be an easier way to acquire that confidence. You can buy that confidence instead of having to work on it internally.
Tami Simon: And what’s your view of that? Are you saying, “Sure, just go that route” or “That’s something that we need to challenge”?
Paulina Porizkova: I would never judge any woman for doing what she needs to do to make herself feel confident and good about herself. I think that is individual. I have not done it. Sometimes I struggle with it, because, in my world, this is an old-looking face. This is a lot of wrinkles, which I get reminded about on a daily basis by Internet trolls, that I’m “old and haggard,” and I should retire and, “You’re way too wrinkled for your age.” And I think, “Really? I’m way too wrinkled for 58? Well, what are you supposed to look like at 58?”
Well, if you are in the public eye as a woman, nobody knows what you look like at 58, because everybody has had little tweaks exactly for that reason, because you get shamed if you are starting to look your age. I don’t think anybody even knows what 58 looks like anymore. I don’t think anybody knows what 60 looks like.
That’s why I have my little hashtag, #BetweenJLoAndBettyWhite. There’s this hole, because JLo is slightly younger than I, but she looks 39. And then you have the adorable little old lady who is just so funny, and she gets to be delightful and adorable. But in between there, that’s like—are there any women alive in between those two? Not any that get any attention. Sorry, I keep spinning off into my own universe on this.
Tami Simon: What you’re saying is important, Paulina, and I think… Here I am. I’m 60—
Paulina Porizkova: Yes. Literally. Look at you.
Tami Simon: —and this is all natural. And I’m right there in the middle of those two extremes that you said in your hashtag.
Paulina Porizkova: You’re in that “between JLo and Betty White.”
Tami Simon: So if you want to know what it looks like, here you go.
Paulina Porizkova: Thank you.
Tami Simon: Healthy and untampered. You know, I think when you talk about older women, whether it’s the products that we want to buy or our voice in the world being quote, unquote, “irrelevant,” something in me rises and says, “No to that.” Because it’s so important that the hard-wrought feminine wisdom we have is in the conversation today. So that kind of irrelevancy, no.
And I think that’s part of what Maria Shriver’s doing with her Radically Reframing Aging summit. And to me, talking to you, you know so much from your life experience, and I want to honor that, not, “Oh, your modeling career’s over. Goodbye,” but this is the time where we get to not just look at you but hear you and learn from you.
So I just want to emphasize that, and I’d love to know, if you were to re-create the modeling business—let’s just pretend. We’re going to give you a wand, and it has fairy dust coming out the end of it, and you get to re-create modeling in our world, and you can put whatever kinds of righteous, women-loving people at the top of the organizations. What would it look like?
Paulina Porizkova: Well, the people that I would put in charge would be ones with good taste in fashion and the understanding that every woman is beautiful. And I’d have to say, I’m sorry, it would have to come down to percentages. We need equal percentages of representation for every type of a woman: women of color, women of different colors, women of different sizes, physical sizes, and then, of course, women of different ages and then even fluid gender.
Let’s represent everybody. Let’s not leave—let’s not pick only one kind of beauty and highlight only one kind of beauty, which, by the way, is not even the same kind of beauty that… The beauty that is highlighted today is not the same kind of beauty that was celebrated even in the ’50s or the ’40s or the ’20s or 1890. Our ideas, our social constructs of what beauty is, changes with times all the time.
It’s not written in stone that there is one prototype of a woman that is beautiful, because that has changed through times and cultures. So why do we just have to fixate on one example? Let’s just say the Kardashians. They took the world by storm in the ’90s or whatever, and then that became the prescribed, “This is what a woman is supposed to look like now.” And women are running to get butt implants, and they’re running to get their eyes pulled. They’re doing surgery in order to accomplish a body goal that was seen as not that attractive only 10 years earlier. I mean, this is fads. This comes and goes.
So I think if we just shed a much, much wider light on beauty, on the variations of beauty, then women wouldn’t have to feel so bad about themselves all the time. So that’s what I would do.
Tami Simon: Now, you mentioned the people in charge, they’re going to have a good sense of fashion, and I appreciate that. If they’re looking for beauty, different shapes, different sizes, different ages, and let’s just pretend this is through your eyes, how would you see beauty? For example, is there a connection between the inner light of a person and their outer radiance, in your view? How do you see that? How do you say, “Oh, that person, I want them. I want them on my roster, because they have the kind of beauty I’m looking for.”
Paulina Porizkova: You know what? Don’t forget, when it comes to pictures, it is a one-dimensional surface, and so certain things don’t translate to that, unfortunately. And this is also, I think, in part, why models have a bad name for maybe not being very smart or whatever the reputation is. It’s because you have to have a certain set of—and I always say it. I refer to it as a certain set of mathematical features that look good on camera. And it really does come down to mathematics and, like, milli-millimeters.
So that’s what looks good on camera. And amazing character and intellect and kindness and generosity and all of that, you can’t really see that on camera. I know people imagine that you should be able to, but you actually don’t. You can see it on film, but you can’t see it on flat paper. And so, unfortunately, that limits actual fashion models to a certain extent, because it is true, I think, that their personality becomes less important than their physical attributes.
In my real life, I find what we think of conventional beauty as, or perfection, utterly boring. And I’m almost prejudiced against it, which is not fair of me either. I’m kind of doing exactly what I accuse other people doing against me, dismissing me because I look a certain way. And I’ve done it to people my whole life too. “Oh, he’s really gorgeous, so he’s not interesting. He’s not going to be funny, and he’s not going to be smart.” So I understand how that works.
And you are only asking me about remaking the fashion world, remaking modeling, not the world.
Tami Simon: Yes.
Paulina Porizkova: I don’t get to be God, but I get to be, I guess, Anna Wintour and just redo the world of fashion. And so I am very well aware that there are mathematics of the face and the body that photograph better than others, and you are a little bit tied to that.
Tami Simon: OK. Fair enough. What it brings up for me is one of the powerful stories that you tell in No Filter is when you and your former husband, Ric Ocasek, the lead singer of the Cars… You were together for almost 30 years—
Paulina Porizkova: 35.
Tami Simon: You write about—35 it was? OK. Thank you. Sorry. 35 years. And you write about an article that came out in a magazine called “The Beauty and the Beast,” and you talk about how you were drawn to Ric’s beauty, more like a Modigliani painting than some other kind of classic view.
And I thought, “Huh, that’s interesting.” What is now Paulina’s view of beauty, not for the fashion business you’re running, but just inside of you? You found him so beautiful. What was it in him? And tell us that story of finding that magazine story.
Paulina Porizkova: Oh, well, I’ll tell you that first. Actually, it was only one of the many articles titled “The Beauty and the Beast.” That might have been the first one, but certainly people jumped on that. And then that sort of became how people described us, which always made me a little bit sad and angry, because, yes, I did find my husband very beautiful.
We were standing in a supermarket, and I pulled up a magazine and just was flitting through it. And I saw a picture of us with a great bold caption above it saying “Beauty and the Beast.” And I was mortified. I closed the magazine. But my husband had seen me looking at something, and so he grabbed it from me, opened it up to the same page, saw the type, sort of closed it.
And I felt so guilty, like I had written it myself or something. It was the oddest feeling, like I was somehow responsible for the negativity pointed at my husband. But he just turned around and looked at me, and he said, “It’s OK, honey. I don’t think you’re a beast.” And that’s, in part, why I fell in love with this man.
Now, I have to say, look, I find talent terribly, terribly sexy. So if a man is talented, if I love somebody’s books or somebody’s songs or somebody’s paintings or somebody’s views on politics, I can fall in love with just that. And when I actually see them physically, the way I feel about what they’re able to do will make them look amazing to me, whatever way they look.
I have, at this point, dated many men and some women, and I have really gone the gamut on looks. The physical outside becomes beautiful to me the moment I find that person interesting. And it doesn’t matter—the variations, the physical, mathematical variations of a face and body, have zero importance. I will find exactly that assemblage the perfect one when I like that person.
Tami Simon: Well, let me just ask a little bit more about that, because I get being attracted to someone’s brilliance or talent or creativity, but then do you also see their body as beautiful? Even if it’s, I don’t know, not classically so. You actually see their physical form as beautiful as a result of the talent and brilliance?
Paulina Porizkova: Well, then they also have to be great kissers, and then I have to connect with them. But yes, once I connect with them, it doesn’t matter if they’re thin and tall or short and pudgy. Literally, there is no—I have no preference. That outer shell will become the one that I love the best when I’m in love.
Tami Simon: I wonder if there’s a learning in that for people who find their bodies shaped differently, short and pudgy, whatever it might be, that’s not part of our conventional beauty, that that doesn’t have to feel like it’s some limitation. I wonder what your thoughts are about that.
Paulina Porizkova: I’m continuously surprised and shocked that people don’t see it the same way as I do. I think I’m maybe a little narcissistic in that way, that I’m like, “What do you mean? You don’t feel the same as me? You don’t think that this man is beautiful or that this woman is beautiful? What’s wrong with you? Can’t you see their brilliance and their talent?” And sometimes, it’s just kindness.
I think spotting beauty—and I’m talking about physical beauty. I’m not talking about internal beauty. Internal beauty, of course, is what makes you fall in love with somebody. But then I’m talking about the physical beauty, the arrangement of your physical self on the outside. If you have that inside beauty, then everybody is beautiful on the outside.
And I understand it sounds like sort of a cliché or one of those glib proclamations, “Everybody’s beautiful,” but if you take the time to look—what it requires is patience. It requires a patience to actually look at that person. You can’t just skim by them and make a judgment. You have to sit with them. You have to say a few words to them, and then, little by little, their beauty will become apparent to you, whatever their beauty is. We’re all, like I say, beautiful in different ways.
But it requires time, and our culture is giving us less and less time, and it’s quicker and quicker to label and box people. So I think we just don’t take the time. We’re overwhelmed with information at all times, and so we don’t have the time to find actual beauty.
Tami Simon: How does patience and slowing down allow us to do that?
Paulina Porizkova: Well, it’s by hearing, not just seeing. It’s the combination of being seen and being heard. It’s being understood as a human being, not just a name. “Oh, I heard about you from such and such, work colleague or whatever.” It allows us to peek into each other’s souls a little bit.
And that’s why I think vulnerability, which has been celebrated quite a great deal now with Brené Brown and all the work she’s doing on it, I find it so incredibly important, because you open yourself up a little bit to somebody, somebody new, and instantly you’re able to make a little connection with them, a special little connection, a valuable little connection, that is not going to happen if you saunter in, and you’re perfect, and you have your armor on. And that all takes time. Sometimes it just means you need to give something five more minutes than you usually would.
I’ve found so many of my Uber drivers beautiful. I had a taxi driver in England. He was driving me to the airport very early in the morning, an older man, maybe in his 70s. And it was a beautiful sunny day in London, which is unusual. And we were driving to the airport, and we started talking, and I told him that my husband had died. And because I told him, I opened up to him, he then opened up to me and told me that his wife had just passed six months earlier, and then he broke down in tears.
And we ended up having the most beautiful, deep, sad, heart-crushing, and gorgeous conversation that I’ve had in a long time, just pouring our hearts out to each other. And all it took was my willingness to open up a little bit and then giving it time. The world is so full of beauty on every level if you stop to look for it.
Tami Simon: Now, Paulina, one of the things I wanted to get your current reflections on, and you write about this in No Filter, is what happened with you and Ric upon his death and how after being married and, as you say, being together for 35 years, you were actually written out of his will, and then you went through a lawsuit. This was all written up in several magazines, got lots of attention.
And you also write about the inner journey that you went through to try to understand and to see the situation clearly. And I’m curious now, upon reflection, these years gone by, how you see it and what your insights have been.
Paulina Porizkova: Well, I think when I read the—when I read—when I wrote my book, it was about two years after my husband’s death. And, look, we have two children together. We did such a good job raising them, and that’s me and him. That’s not just me. That’s 50/50. He was a wonderful dad to them. And they adore their father, and they miss him every day.
And for my children’s sake, I had to sort of go back to the love I had for my husband. It was for their sake. It was so that we could include him back in the family and mourn him together, for him to be precious to all of us, not so my boys needed to take their grief into a separate room because Mom was pissed off about that. I didn’t want that to happen.
So I had to work really, really hard on gratitude, on being grateful for all the incredible years that we had together, which, by the way, 25 years of a happy marriage ain’t bad. That’s pretty damn lucky. He was my soulmate for a long time. He was exactly the man I needed for a long time.
And so the will stuff—you know what? The biggest betrayal for me on that was—and I’m going to well up with tears, because I still can’t say it without getting emotional—that he said that I abandoned him. Because, having read my book, I think you can probably surmise that I have some serious abandonment triggers.
Without trying to be pitying about myself—it sounds pathetic, but I’m going to say it anyway. Every person I have ever loved has abandoned me. So this is a very big deal to me, abandonment. It’s the thing that scares me the most, just being walked away from, having no idea, not having any warning, just people that I love, that I rely on, that I thought love me, just stand up and walk away from me, and they have no more interest in me for forever. That’s something that I’m still really struggling with.
And so for him to say that blatant lie, since we were still living together and I was taking care of him—and it was the word, too, that was so incredibly painful. Although, in retrospect, I know it was a legal term. It was just a legal term that his lawyers had put to it so that they could disinherit me, even though it was a lie. It was a stab wound. And in my book, I say, “I’m choosing to look at it as a crime of passion, that he still cared enough to want to be vindictive.” So I’m just going with that, because it makes me feel better than “He didn’t care.”
Tami Simon: I’m curious how you relate to the notion of quote, unquote, “forgiveness” for him, for you, for the whole situation. How do you relate to that idea?
Paulina Porizkova: Forgiveness. Forgiveness is incredibly important for the person that needs to forgive, right? I’m sorry, my light is moving in my living room. I’m getting funny sunspots. Hang on. Forgiveness is incredibly important. Everybody talks about forgiveness and compassion.
What I have found, though, is that I don’t think everything needs to be forgiven. I don’t know that I need to forgive my father. I don’t think I need to forgive certain actions of people who have hurt me. I believe in accepting things, just accepting them for what they are. This is what it is. Accept it and move on.
If you haven’t forgiven, and it causes you a great amount of pain, and you’re still angry, and it makes you want to smash something every time it pops into your mind, then yes, you need to do some work on that. But for me, there are certain things in my life that have happened that are unforgivable, and I’m OK with that. It’s all right.
Tami Simon: One thing I might suggest, though, and see if you think this is true, is that with acceptance, with seeing things clearly as they are, there does come a kind of release of hostile energy. Have you found that? There’s a kind of energetic release and a kind of freedom—
Paulina Porizkova: Oh, absolutely.
Tami Simon: —so freedom in that acceptance.
Paulina Porizkova: Acceptance is my favorite thing in the world. I think to accept and to celebrate and to feel grateful, that’s it. That’s your best life right there.
Tami Simon: Paulina, we started our conversation, and I asked you about this early inspiration you had to be a writer, something you’re now doing with the release of your first [nonfiction] book, No Filter. And you talked about the impact that words can have, that stories can have, that books can have. What’s the impact that you’re hoping your writing work will have on readers?
Paulina Porizkova: Honestly, when I wrote the book, I didn’t dare to even hope for any sort of an impact. First of all, the book was written so quickly that it was sort of just an outpouring of everything that I had been thinking about and everything that had happened to me. So I wasn’t thinking about the—I wasn’t writing it for the reader at that point. I was writing it for me.
But the impact that—actually, just two days ago, I went to a little book event here in New York, which was the first time it was a book event where people were invited. It was like a book club, where people were invited that had already read my book to come with a book and have a conversation. And again, I well up inside when I think about it, how incredible this moment was.
When it’s time to ask questions, this woman who stands up and reads me back a passage that I had written and is in tears and tells me that this is what she recites to her[self] every day to make herself feel better. I mean, is there anything better in life than that? Than to have had that sort of a positive impact on even just one person? It breaks my heart, and it remakes it just as quickly with just happiness.
Tami Simon: And Paulina, this program is called Insights at the Edge. And finally, here, I’m always curious to know what someone’s edge is. And what I mean by that, sort of your own personal growth edge, where you currently are that you’re passing through, coming into what’s new and next for you.
Paulina Porizkova: It’s a big, deep question. In my life, I feel like—if you believe in reincarnation, then obviously I chose this way. But whatever the belief system is, my life has been a strange conspiracy to allow me to sample a certain segment of experiences and then blow it all up and then make me start from zero. And this keeps happening in my life. It’s happened many times at this point.
And so I am back at—well, I was back at zero when I was writing my book. I was at zero. I had lost the entire world as I knew it, my entire belief system, my belief in what love was and of what I had learned about trusting people, which was no longer valuable information. More importantly than what I lost physically was what I lost emotionally. I felt like everything I had learned up to that point was a lie.
And so, rebuilding from that—and this is where you’re finding me now, this is my edge now, is I have rebuilt to a certain extent. I have crawled out of that muddy trough. I’m standing on the embankment, and I’m ready to fly. And I’m ready to fly armed with the experience and the wisdom of my age, so I know better than to assume it’s all going to be great, and yet I believe because I’m armed with my age, that the best is still yet to come. Convinced of it.
Tami Simon: I’ve been speaking with Paulina Porizkova. She’s the author of the book No Filter: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful. Paulina, so great to be with you. And I see you and feel you soaring.
Paulina Porizkova: Thank you.
Tami Simon: Thank you, Paulina.
Paulina Porizkova: You beautiful lady, you.
Tami Simon: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in after-the-show Q&A conversations with featured presenters and have the chance to ask your questions, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community that features premium shows, live classes, and community events. Let’s learn and grow together. Come join us at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
