Burnt Toast. Teri Hatcher

up the hill as far as they can and quit when they’re tired. But if you’re a searcher like me, every hill is an opportunity for self-examination. Being a searcher-type is good and bad. The good side is, we examine our behavior. Why did I do that? What does it mean? We judge ourselves, and we judge how we move through the world. We use this self-examination to try to better ourselves. The bad side to being a searcher is losing out on the simple pleasures that the world has to offer, and setting ourselves up for failure by judging all the time. Did I set myself up to fail by picking this hill? Or could I make it an opportunity for learning and watching myself grow? I wanted to be able to enjoy my own limitations and achievements. Lucky for me, another opportunity lay directly ahead.

      The Golden Globes were approaching. I’d been nominated, and I found myself getting excited. I wasn’t quite ready to imagine myself winning. But even for a pessimist-in-reform, it was still a big night. I mean, I’d never gotten recognition for my work before. (At least not since being voted Most Likely to Become a Solid Gold Dancer in my high school yearbook.) And possibly even more exciting was the dressing up. Emerson really liked that part, and she helped me embrace the princess aspect of the evening. I mean, whether I came home with the prince or not, at least I was going to the ball, and that was new for me.

      If you get caught up in it, there can be a lot of pressure on how you look at those award ceremonies. When you walk across the red carpet, the focus is on you. You’re putting yourself out there to be judged. And even if you’re going to lose, which I was fully prepared to do, when they show that shot of you in the audience clapping and trying to smile graciously for whomever just beat you out, you want to look good. The closest thing I can compare it to is getting married. Not that an award ceremony has the love- and life-changing intensity of a wedding. But getting ready – the hair, the makeup, the dress – is a similarly massive undertaking, threatening to take away from the joy of the event if anything goes wrong. This was a great opportunity to try out my new optimism and to have faith that everything would come out right.

      My new stab at optimism didn’t rid me of the cold-feet jitters. (Or, more appropriately, the night-before-the-ceremony nervousness.) I can’t say I had a great night’s sleep. I dreamt I had to save Emerson from bombs (real bombs, not the Hollywood kind). It was the worst kind of dream, but at least I didn’t dream that my lipstick was the wrong color. It’s nice to think that my dream-self wasn’t worrying about superficial disasters or winning or losing. My dream-self seemed to get that this award ceremony wasn’t the be-all and end-all. The only thing as bad as the end of the world is the actual end of the world. Anyway, I woke up relieved to be in a bomb-free zone, and instead of gathering disaster supplies, I prepared a breakfast buffet of bagels, smoked salmon, and fruit, turned on music, and lit some candles. Soon friends started arriving. I was determined to savor the moment.

      Later, as my hair and makeup stylist (hereafter referred to as Miss Gorgeous) worked on my hair, he asked me if I’d prepared a speech. Ah, the speech. Hell yeah, it had occurred to me. For the last twenty years. I’d always planned to expound on how I got somewhere from nowhere, thanking the long list of people who’d helped me along the way. It was like imagining who’d weep at your funeral, but way better. Now that I was nominated, however, I couldn’t bring myself to plan for actually winning. These awards are so subjective. It’s not like a horse race, where the fastest horse wins fair and square. To compare different actresses in completely different roles on completely different shows isn’t really meaningful. That’s why the cliché that the real honor is being nominated is actually true. Just being recognized at that level for your work is a huge honor. Winning is sort of icing. But icing tastes good. (Especially when it’s homemade.) Even more tasty is noncaloric guilt-free metaphoric icing. So why couldn’t I enjoy it? Admitting to myself that I actually wanted to win felt embarrassing. I couldn’t wrangle one word into the beginnings of a speech. It made me uncomfortable – I felt ashamed for even coming near the thought. I didn’t want winning to mean that other people lost. Winning felt like snatching the golden-brown, buttered toast for myself and leaving the others to take the sad, blackened end. I felt guilty. I was much more comfortable eating the burnt toast, and in this night’s case, washing it down with the wine they set in the middle of the tables. And there was another part to it, which was that wanting to win would mean wanting to be validated. And admitting that I needed others to tell me I was good was even harder to stomach.

      Then I realized that this was another chance (they were coming at me right and left) to change my old patterns of thought. I was forty years old. I was up for a prize and I wasn’t even letting myself hope I might win. I’d spent forty years chickening out from winning and it was time to stop. We absolutely have to take time to reconsider these habits as we age. The defense mechanisms that worked for you as a kid, protecting you from disappointment, can hold you back as you get older. You have to ask yourself: What good is this habit doing me now? What is it protecting me from anyway? If you don’t win a prize, do you feel better just because you never thought you had a shot? I’d just been given an exciting honor – I was a Golden Globe nominee! – but I hadn’t spent a moment feeling proud or hopeful or glad for the attention. I was getting in my own way, using this habit of protecting myself instead of looking for courage and hope. Pessimism gets you nowhere.

      As I finished getting ready, Emerson poked her head into the room. “Mommy, I hope you win!” she said. It takes time to end up with issues like mine that can hold you back. Kids just want things or don’t want them. Their desires aren’t loaded with “How dare I feel good about myself?” or “How dare I think I might be able to do something well?” In this case, Emerson just wanted me to win, plain and simple. If I did win, she wanted to know if the award could go on her bookshelf in her bedroom.

      Some part of me did feel deserving that day. I certainly didn’t think I was better than anyone else. But I thought at least I deserved a shot at winning. I was tired of being a gracious loser. So I tried it out. I was a little tentative, but as Miss Gorgeous clipped extra chunks of fake hair to my head, I told myself, It sure would be nice to win. I’d like that.

      you know what? I did win that Golden Globe, and when I did, it felt great. Actually, it felt shocking. Actually, I have no idea how it felt. I was too busy worrying about tripping, right there in front of Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood and every actor I’ve ever admired my whole life, and thinking what the hell am I doing up on this stage…and then realizing, suddenly, that despite my newfound optimism, I still hadn’t written a speech. You know that recurring dream you have where you discover that you’ve forgotten to write your report just as the teacher calls you up to the front of the class? Well, it felt like that, except that my “class” was fifty million TV viewers and it wasn’t a dream. (At least I had a great dress, which is more than I’m usually wearing in those dreams.) My acceptance of the award and the improvised, miraculously coherent speech that went with it were a blur. I felt completely in the moment, caught in a dizzy, adrenaline-fueled whirlwind. (And if you think that just because I’m in this business it means nothing to stand near Clint Eastwood, you’re dead wrong.) It was a real moment for me – not just because I won, but because I’d let myself hope for it.

      And do you know how much that positive attitude had to do with me winning? Absolutely nothing. The votes had already been tallied and the winner’s name placed in an envelope days earlier. But the point is, just shifting my attitude let me enjoy the whole experience more. Even if I hadn’t won, I would have had a better time because I wasn’t undermining my chances at winning in the days and hours before the event. But feeling like a loser can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you tell your boss that you suck enough times, he might actually start to believe you. (That jerk.) If you think you’re going to fail, and it turns out you’re right, well whoop de do. You’re right. Congratulations. You’ve succeeded in becoming the loser you always thought you’d be. Better to behave like a winner, no matter how things turn out.

      A few months after the awards I went whale watching in Mexico. My girlfriend and I and our daughters were in a small boat in the middle of the ocean when a humpback whale swam right up to us and started romancing us by swimming around and under the boat. At one point he lifted himself straight out of the water, only four feet away. He held there, a third of his body up in the air, then slowly turned toward us. We were all leaning over the edge toward him,