Those who’ve watched Christy Carlson Romano on the Disney Channel know her as the epitome of a put together teen.
Off screen, however, the actress was nothing like her straight-laced Even Stevens character: she was self-destructive, depressed, and oftentimes drunk.
The 35-year-old got candid about the pitfalls of early fame and the lonely road of her Disney Channel success in an op-ed for Teen Vogue, in which she admitted that her life was so “broken,” she once paid a psychic $40,000 for a crystal because she thought it would fix everything — a very anti-Ren Stevens thing to do.
She notes while most people witnessed her costar Shia LaBeouf struggle publicly, she has “largely suffered in silence.” She’s not a victim, but her early adult life had been plagued with depression and self-medication because her non-traditional (read: showbiz) upbringing caused her to be “delayed in some developmental milestones that one often has in their preteen years that adequately inform their early adulthood and help them make the right decisions during hard times.”
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Romano started acting at six years old and spent most of her adolescence learning to be a “triple threat,” going on auditions in New York City, and traveling the country with “musical road shows.” She landed her first main role on Even Stevens at age 14 — by which point she was already “that precocious theater kid, a confusing mix of sheltered and overexposed to the public.”
While she was already on TV as a young teen, Christy was falling behind in other areas of her life — and cognitive development. She explained:
“I only learned to ride a bike at 12 years old because I had a callback for a cereal commercial. I had very few friends my own age and lacked the ability to communicate my emotions effectively due to my insecurities with being different. Needing to be liked was my full-time job and constant concern of mine.”
Starring on Even Stevens only made Christy feel more different than the “normal” kids she grew insanely jealous of. She wrote:
“Nothing could have prepared me for fame and the responsibilities that came with being on television screens everywhere. I was somewhat protected (or stultified) by staying on my set and making friends with whoever showed up to be cast as my best friend that week. I worked full days and would go home and be tutored in a different subject every night. The idea of one day having a college life became my greatest fantasy. I would watch teen movies and become intensely jealous of ‘normal’ kids, feeling, at my moodiest, like a misfit.”
This separation from the “normal” world eventually triggered an intense insecurity complex for the actress, as she explained:
“A tape inside my head softly began to play, telling me I wasn’t good enough in either the normal or entertainment world. Despite all my public successes, inside I was insecure. I had a swinging confidence in my abilities which pushed me to get on camera, perform, and make money. My personal value was irrelevant until validated by my most recent accomplishment. I had no idea how much money I had in the bank or had made since starting a grueling workload, and I was told that leaving Hollywood right after Even Stevens would ruin my career. In retrospect, it probably did. But in my heart, I was running away from the responsibility of fame and toward a glamorized fantasy of adolescence.”
Christy ended Even Stevens months before heading off to an Ivy League school. Unfortunately, she still felt like a “misfit” there, and that debilitating “tape” that had played negative thoughts in her head “now started to play louder, faster, and angrier.”
The then-19-year-old dropped out of school and dove “back into the arms of the New York theater community,” where she became “a bit harder-edged, binge-drank more at loud nightclubs, and started to accept the transient natures of love, sex, and friendship.”
She was surrounded by people, but Romano couldn’t have been lonelier. She explained:
“Growing up, I entertained thousands of families only to feel completely lonely. People were as replaceable as they had deemed me to be. Imposter syndrome had stiff competition against my self-hatred at that point.”
That’s when she began to “flirt with other methods of self-destruction”:
“I tried to scratch my skin with my fingernail because I was too scared to use a knife. I chickened out and honestly felt like I had failed some important race to win the trophy for ‘most tragic, beautiful girl.’ One night, a psychic approached me at the stage door and offered me a reading and her card. She said I needed guidance and that I wasn’t on the right path. I couldn’t help but feel immediately attracted to someone with answers. While on the outside everyone thought I knew what I was doing with my life, I was willing to go to desperate lengths to try to have someone else tell me what my truths were.”
Christy ended up paying the psychic thousands for a “life-changing” crystal — only to realize, days later, that she had been conned. She recalled:
“I felt marked, used, and violated so I started to blame myself for everything instead of learning from my past mistakes and growing as a person.”
Eventually, Christy forged her own path and went back to school where she re-centered herself. There, she ended up meeting her husband in a screenwriting class and “found in him a companionship that would take a mallet to the tape that had been screaming in my head all those years.” The two got married and now have two daughters together.
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The future for Christy is bright, thanks to the state of the entertainment industry today. She’s set to launch her own YouTube series Christy’s Kitchen Throwback on June 27, where fans get to see her “geeking out over kitchenware and cooking themed dishes with everyone from fellow stars of the ‘90s and aughts to some of today’s biggest YouTube personalities.”
It took a long journey to get there, but the momma of two is finally fulfilled. Looking back on her days as a child actor, the actress admits that she, like many other child actors out there, had no idea who she really was underneath it all. She remembered:
“I have two friends from my earlier Disney Channel days who died by suicide. You can search their names, I am sure, to try and find some sense in their deaths, but you can never understand what was going on behind closed doors. And though I might not know their exact struggles, I do believe I have an idea of how being in the spotlight can warp your sense of reality.”
Many child actors have suffered greatly because of early onset fame, so we’re glad the star came out on the other side of that tunnel.
She concluded her op-ed with a message to those seeking a career in the entertainment industry:
“[K]now this: having a clear understanding of your personal value helps to positively shape everything you do. If you don’t, if you aren’t careful, you just might end up getting what everyone else wishes for but wondering what you want yourself.”
Great advice!
Click HERE to read Christy’s full op-ed!
[Image via WENN]
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