The story just kept going. The New York Post gave me a new nickname, “Jumbo Jessica,” and the media declared that I was a cautionary tale about “mom jeans.” There were fashion pages about how to avoid looking like me. Page Six, the gossip column everybody in media read, ran a cartoon of me with my features ballooned to represent every cruel stereotype of a person of size. It showed me dumping Tony to be with my true love, Ronald McDonald.
That caricature became how I saw myself. Even as I tried to remain body positive about everybody else, a dysmorphia set in. I no longer trusted the mirror. With every reflection, every single pane of glass I passed, I took myself in quickly to try to catch myself, to see what the world apparently saw. The worst part was that I had to get up in front of thousands of people in Charlottesville four days later for another tour stop. My confidence was gone, and Stephanie and I rethought my entire wardrobe. What could invite people to make fun of me? I instinctively added a black vest, just like my days of performing at church camps as a kid, when my body was continually scrutinized for the potential incitement of sin. The rest of the tour, instead of enjoying the sold-out audiences, I was conscious of people taking pictures. Reporters eyeing me, taking notes. What were they seeing that I didn’t? It made me shrink onstage.
My mother worried about me, knowing my self-confidence had been taken away. She saw me withdrawing, not fully present. I was the same girl who had refused to go to school because the cheerleaders were cruel to her. Now, instead of graffitiing our house, it was people commenting on every image of me.
“Ninety percent of women go through this, I promise you,” she told me. “You just have it on a whole different level.”
“Why are people so cruel?” I asked. I may as well have been in my old bedroom in Richardson, refusing to get dressed for school.
She didn’t have an answer, so she went to the go-to every mom uses with her daughter at one time or another: “They’re just jealous.”
I couldn’t do anything about the media focusing on me, but I hated that I was so focused on me and my body. I had grown so much since I was that girl who’d pinched herself black and blue in 1999 because I had the smallest jiggle. I no longer needed to draw on abs with eyeliner. And here I was, still looking for the flaws. Old enough to know better, but unable to stop myself. Still, I had enough sense not to go on some crash diet, or worse, stop eating in order to fit the media’s view of what was beautiful.
In those months, I can probably count on one hand the public moments when I forgot how much everybody was looking at my body, judging me. I was in the line at TSA flying out to L.A. to do some work on the Collection. I set off something when I went through the metal detector, and I got flustered. A female agent did a pat-down of my body. When it was over, she smiled at me, so I smiled back.
“You’re really not that big,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said. Jess, I thought as I walked on, that’s not a compliment.
I turned back. “I’d be fine if I was, though.”
It took me a while to not just say those words, but to believe them. Like a lot of life lessons, I was able to incorporate some aspects of what I learned right away. Some took longer. It certainly informed how I expanded my clothing line. The Collection needed to stay inclusive as we branched into jeanswear and dresses, and our showroom always had to have fit models who reflected the full range of the customers I loved. I always wanted to dress the everyday woman, because I am an everyday woman. I want to wear the same things that everybody else wants to wear, and I wanted to be able to provide those things for people. To be the friend you go shopping with who gives you a thumbs-up when you come out of the dressing room because she genuinely wants you to look and feel good. The silver lining of the mom jeans debacle was that I felt women trusted me more, because now they saw what I was going through.
When my time on the Rascal Flatts tour was over in March, I found that my feelings of insecurity stayed with me, even when I wasn’t onstage. Mom and I scheduled an appearance to promote the Jessica Simpson Collection at a Dillard’s in Scottsdale, Arizona. When I arrived at my hotel room, I had some quiet time while everybody got settled in their rooms. But I resisted, because downtime at that point usually meant picking myself apart. I grabbed a remote and flipped the channel, only to see a photo of me in those high-waisted mom jeans next to a more recent picture of me onstage. They said I’d gone on a crash diet and lost twenty pounds. I switched off the TV.
“Why won’t people leave me alone?” I asked the empty room.
This little tiny whisper of intuition answered. A voice from within spoke up. “It’s okay to not be left alone,” it said. “The moment people leave you alone, it will be because you stopped standing up for yourself.”
I got chillbumps. The truest voice is always that one inside you. I wouldn’t give in.
There was a long line of people at that appearance, and I always watch my team fade ever so slightly from standing around at these types of events. I don’t help things by taking too much time chatting with each person as I sign a photo or the heel of a shoe. But I love those moments of connection. A woman who’d waited at least an hour finally got to my table and started to rush-talk at me as if she’d rehearsed what she had to say the whole time and had to get it out.
“Ijusthavetotellyouthatyoureallysavedoneofmystudents . . .”
“Who?” I asked.
She slowed down and said her name. “She’s a great girl, but she was really getting . . .” she paused. “Bullied.” She said it like it was her failure as a teacher. “It was about her weight. It’s eighth grade, so kids can be . . . you know. I could stop it in my classroom, but not outside. She was just so sad.”
I could feel my whole team leaning forward, listening as she continued. “Her mom told her about you, and she feels something akin to you. I asked her about it, and she said that because of you she knows she can get through it.”
Soon we were all tearing up. I stood up and said, “If I give you a hug, will you give it to her for me?”
This was why people wouldn’t stop their judgments and leave me alone. It was so I could stand up to them, and for that girl. When the world was trying to knock me down, to challenge who I was as a woman and the ownership I had over myself and my body, I could choose to get back up and be right in their faces. To say what I would want that girl and my daughters and all women, to say: “No, actually, I am beautiful because I believe in myself and everything God has given me.”
I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s sometimes a daily struggle. But you gotta get up. You can’t leave me up here all on my lonesome.
I COULD TELL TONY WAS RELIEVED WHEN THE FLATTS TOUR WAS OVER. HE was a traditional guy who believed in old-fashioned gender roles. He wanted me to be a Dallas Cowboys housewife, even without the ring. I spent more time at the home, which he encouraged me to think of as my own, but it was still as much of a frat house as ever. In interviews, when people got through the required questions about my weight, they turned to asking about my next project. I said I was still deciding, not letting on that my boyfriend didn’t want me on a movie set. I think he was fine with me doing the Jessica Simpson Collection—it certainly made me financially independent from him—but maybe he also saw that as women’s work. A more official version of a girlfriend who has a hobby making dresses for her friends.