Joanna 'JoJo' Levesque

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172 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard Nov 2024

Joanna 'JoJo' Levesque’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Barely Famous · Falling in Love with the Process with Joanna “JoJo” Levesque · 22 Nov 2024 podcast

Yeah. I thought about age so much. And I talk about that in the book because I was so much younger than everybody else when I came out. And that made me feel really isolated too. It made me feel so stupid and embarrassed. And I wanted everybody to think I was older than I was because it wasn't cool. Like the people that were –

The next range were like Lindsay Lohan and she was maybe 18 or 20 when I was 13 and Sierra, who was just coming out at the same time, she was like 18 or 19. And I was just like, you know, a middle schooler. So I thought about age a lot because people were always like, oh, my God, how amazing is it how young you are? And I'm like, stop talking about how young I am.

And now it's so interesting to not – to by far not be the youngest person in the room. And all I want is for young people to just not rush growing up and to enjoy the lack of responsibilities and the lack of pressure, like to just have more fun because I never wanted to be a kid.

I mean, the dynamic of my family was, you know, my mom and dad weren't together, and they both had their separate challenges, as everyone does. And how did that change? I mean, I became... the financial provider for my mom and I. She was managing me. She had been cleaning houses for a living before that. We come from a working class background. And, you know, my uncle was a painter.

And then we do have some family in real estate and stuff like that. My dad was fully disabled at a certain point. He was like a headhunter. And then he His boss asked him to like jump in a trash can to like get the trash down like a big size. And then he like injured himself. And so neither – I mean my mom worked her butt off to make sure that we never wanted for anything.

And the way it changed the dynamic was that we were making money.

I think I was used to being in high –

cortisol environments where like my nervous system was conditioned to do well under pressure to assume responsibility to I think I felt innately that my mom I knew my mom was stressed about money all the time I knew that people were telling me that I had this gift from a very young age and people were like you're gonna be rich and famous one day and I think I was like maybe I will um

And then I was like, maybe I can get us out of this, of sharing a bed, you know, and of us being poor and of the paint chips falling into my cereal. Like, maybe this is the ticket. I think there was something that was like, you know, and I didn't have stage parents, but my mom was very supportive. Both my parents were very supportive of me being the eccentric little individual that I was.

Yeah. So firstly, it is a nod to... the foundation of addiction that I come from. So my parents met in AA and they were both seeking sobriety and maintain sobriety for various periods of time in their life. And I did get my mom's blessing to talk about this, obviously, because one of the main things about Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous is the anonymity.

So I was like, is this okay to talk about? But It's a part of my journey, too. I have the serenity prayer tattooed around my wrist, and it's the most meaningful prayer to me. It's God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. And that's really how I have tried to live my life. I always go back to that.

So it's about how I felt self-righteously like I would never be like my parents when they fell off the wagon and disappointed me and were human and all these things. And I was like, I'll never be like that. And then I had my own experiences with addiction in various ways, whether it was substances or relationships, love, sex.

validation and I found myself under the influence for most of my 20s and just being so confused and lost and really held by this feeling of being out of control and also what it means is just unsubscribing from old ways of what I thought I needed to be of society or

executives or managers or handlers or an industry influencing the way that I live my life, influencing who I date, where I live, what I eat, anything. I was so... I was so confused about what my values were because so many people had told me what I should – what should be important to me from a young age. And I think that this book is kind of a statement of that's in the past.

Anything from this point forward, can't blame anybody else for. At a certain point, we're the grownups.

I was definitely stunted, particularly in relationships. And that's a big theme of this book is relationships. There's a lot of talk about romantic relationships in this book. It's one of my favorite things to talk about. If we were... girlfriends and we were at lunch, I would just be like, tell me everything about your relationship life. I want to know. I just am so into all of it.

I think it's so fascinating. It's so revealing. And I realized in writing the book that I had patterns that kept showing up and that I didn't, couldn't see as clearly until I had some, until I had a bird's eye view of it and I had it in black and white. And I'm like, whoa, my bad behavior in relationships was allowed for a long time. By who?

By different people that I chose to be with, I think that they enabled my bad behavior because I was either financially providing or it made them look good to be with me so they just wanted to keep me around or something like that. And I think that when you become famous from a young age, you're coddled and people don't really tell you the truth.

And then I think I chose – I was attracted to partners that would continue to coddle me and not challenge me. And so I'm also over that shit, too. Yeah. Yeah. It's just not it doesn't feel good to not know what people really think or feel or and to not be a safe place for yourself or for someone else.

So that's a part of it, too.

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