We know her as Sporty Spice. But Melanie Chisholm, aka “Mel C”, has a side of herself she wants to reveal to the world — she has always been an extreme people pleaser.
“I wanted, needed, for people to like me,” she writes in her new memoir, Who I Am.
Opening up about her parents’ divorce when she was a young child, Chisholm wrote:
“I do believe the turbulence of those formative years is a big part of who I am, what made me want to succeed. It gave me hunger for acceptance and attention.”
The 48-year old appeared on the podcast How To Fail, speaking to host Elizabeth Day about the catharsis of writing this book, which took her over a year to complete.
“There are only five people who know what it’s like to be a Spice Girl, but at the heart of it, we are ordinary people, with ordinary issues, things to overcome. The hardships that I face are so common,” she told Day.
Chisholm spoke about the various difficulties of navigating fame as a young person, admitting that “being successful very young, being wealth very young…sometimes people don’t grow up in the way they’re supposed to – there are certainly some aspects of me emotionally where I’m a little bit behind.”
She spoke about sexism in the music industry, her friendships with her former bandmates, and opened up about the sexual assault she suffered on the eve of their first ever performance in Istanbul in 1997, when she was 23.
“I didn’t want to make a fuss, but also I didn’t have time to deal with it,” she said. “Everything was leading towards the pinnacle of everything I’d ever wanted to do.”
“What happened to me, I kind of buried immediately, because there was other things to focus on.”
She felt “vulnerable”, “violated” and “embarrassed.”
“I think it’s really important to me to say it and to finally deal with it and process it,” she added, telling Day that she had not planned on writing about the trauma in her book.
Her memoir covers her life in the spotlight, detailing her struggles with clinical depression, anorexia, binge-eating disorder, and severe anxiety.
In an interview with British columnist Jan Moir, Chisholm said she would “binge until I was unconscious” and “eat cereal and bread to the point of sedation.”
“So many of my issues were driven by control or lack of control,” she explained. “I was binge drinking. I was binge eating. I was embarrassed and ashamed of it. I had to keep it a secret because even though you’re in denial about it, there’s still that tiny little voice going: “This isn’t right, you can’t continue like this.”
“But I didn’t want to face it. I didn’t want to face it until the time when I personally felt like I didn’t have an option. I was afraid of what the alternative was.”
In both interviews with Moir and Day, Chisholm said she is positive about her future and loves being surrounded by other mothers.
“All around me I see women overcoming and achieving incredible things,” she said. “I just feel like we don’t give ourselves enough credit.”
“We are fucking warriors, you know? Sometimes when I think of what I have done and what I now deal with every day; with work, with being a mum, with family stuff. And I’m like, fucking, I’m still standing.”
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