EASY DOES IT

Right: The cast and crew spent two weeks filming on the South Island of New Zealand. “I couldn’t keep up with Mindy and Reese there,” says Oprah. “They told me, ‘First, we’re going to a yoga place. And then we’re taking a helicopter. And then we’re hiking. And then we’re going on a boat ride.’ They squeezed all the juice out of that orange!”

MY BEST LIFE Storm Reid

The ascendant adolescent on the importance of Oreos and embracing your power.

Above: Oprah greets the crew while shooting a scene on the planet Orion—home to a seer known as the Happy Medium (played by Zach Galifianakis), who lives in a cave. The cast had to walk on massive scaffolding (like the crosslike structure behind Oprah), hence the wire rig attached to her costume for balance.

Left: Oprah’s ensemble for the planet Camazotz. “I saw Mrs. Which as a kind of energy,” says Delgado. “She’s a star in the sky. I wanted her costumes to play with ideas of metal and light.” BEST “PINCH ME” MOMENT Booking the role

of Meg Murry! After an audition process that took about a month, my agent finally told my mom to expect one more phone call. We didn’t know what was going on— until Ava DuVernay called from an unknown number to say I’d gotten the part. Mind blown.

BEST ADVICE Don’t waste energy on things you can’t change. Oprah told me that one day when we were having a conversation about my weird fear of being tall—I’m already 5'4"! Instead of putting negative energy out into the universe about something that’s set in stone, like my height, she said I should turn that energy into something positive and use it to make my dreams come true. So if I end up being seven feet, then I’ll be seven feet.

BEST ON-SET SNACK I’m a cookie girl. They were in my trailer, at the catering table— everywhere! My favorite are mint Oreos, which nobody in my family likes—so I get to keep them all for myself.

BEST REASON TO JOURNEY THROUGH TIME To

meet my ancestors. My mom just got a DNA kit, and now my sister and I want one, too, so we can learn more about where we come from. It’s kind of like time traveling. —AS TOLD TO JOSEPH ZAMBRANO

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO Gayle

TUNE IN

More than a year after its season 1 finale, FX’s acclaimed comedy Atlanta, about a down-on-his-luck musician trying to find his way, finally returns March 1. My first reaction: Yay! My second: Why the wait? According to Donald Glover (the show’s Emmy-winning writer and star), it’s because he was busy fulfilling a dream: acting in an upcoming Star Wars film. I can’t be annoyed with him for that—but please, no delays before season 3!

GO

It doesn’t take a mean girl to turn Mean Girls into a Broadway musical. Tina Fey wrote the 2004 film’s memorable screenplay, and now she’s brought her comedic writing chops to the highly anticipated stage adaptation (previews begin March 12). Tina recently told me fans can expect to see the film’s DNA infused with dancing and plenty of high notes. Even Regina George would agree that sounds pretty fetch. Meet Dominika Egorova, a Russian ballerina turned “sparrow,” a.k.a. government spy. When an accident derails her career, Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence) transforms her mind and body into a weapon—and the line between loyal comrade and dangerous renegade starts to blur. While watching Red Sparrow, I kept wondering whose side she was really on. I bet that on March 2, film audiences everywhere will be doing the same.

SHOP

I still cringe when I think about my first pair of glasses: turquoise cat-eye frames my mom bought without consulting me first. If only Pair Eyewear had been around when I was in the fourth grade. The children’s eyewear company wants glasses to give kids confidence and has come up with a fun twist. The frames have a magnetized front, so you can attach different colors and patterns. Hey, if they’re cool enough for Anna (left), my modeling partner and O managing editor Abby Greene’s 10-yearold daughter, they’re cool enough for me! (From $115; paireyewear.com)

WATCH

CONNECTIONS

FATHER KNEW BEST

Battling a puzzling, precipitous illness, Jane Ratcliffe reached out and grabbed a lifeline.

SHORTLY AFTER I was born, my mother was hospitalized and received daily doses of shock treatment. She had what would now be diagnosed as postpartum depression, but in the early ’60s, much of female psychological distress was still called hysteria.

My father is a kind and intelligent man, so the doctors must have presented a convincing case to get him to agree to have my mother’s brain lightning-bolted with electricity. Because agree he did. And from this improper care, a family legend was born: My mother was crazy. I not only bought into this myth, but also harbored a fear that I was destined to become crazy, too. So part of me wasn’t surprised when, in January 2008, the prophecy began to bear fruit.

It was after midnight when I called my father. My heart had been racing for several days. I was tired, yet my nervous system was locked in go, go, go. My skin had turned yellow, the whites of my eyes appeared gray, and my normally pink nail beds were colorless. Though not usually one to shed tears, I couldn’t stop crying. The room was flipping over. My short-term memory had all but disappeared; when I took my daily walk, I was unable to find my way home, even from a block away.

Also the pain was back. Since the late ’90s, when a tabletop in a furniture showroom fell on my head, I’d experienced bouts of debilitating physical agony. Now it felt like my head was locked in an evertightening vice.

My 80-year-old father was not unaccustomed to my calling and asking him to bail me out. In high school, I’d sneaked out many times to clubs and parties from which he often had to collect me. At 20, when I dropped out of college and moved to New York City without a job or a contact, he was my financial and emotional support system. So though it had been a while, he knew to take a midnight phone call from me in stride. But on this night, something in my voice concerned him enough that he lurched out of bed, leaving my 79-year-old mother, who’d been healthy and self-sufficient for decades, and drove an hour to my house in his pajamas. He ended up staying three months.

“It’s connected to the head injury,” I’d say, as red-hot adrenaline shot up my arms. “Yes. And we’re going to fix it,” he would say in his charcoal London baritone.

I wasn’t sure either of us was right. I’d never told anyone about my mother’s hospitalization, in part out of respect for her privacy and in part because I feared they would start to see me as I saw myself—teetering on the brink. I’d gone to therapy diligently for years, working to stay sane. Now I worried it had all been for naught.

Every day, every hour, I would ask my father, “Am I going crazy?” By which I meant: Am I fulfilling my role in our lineage? Each time, he would

Top of the pops: The author and her father on a 2017 European cruise (above) and lakeside in Michigan, 1962.

reply, “Absolutely not.” By which he meant: I won’t let that happen again.

After he arrived, every week involved a visit to some sort of doctor. I told each one about the head injury. I explained that I’d lived through crushing headaches before, and though I’d never experienced symptoms this severe or wideranging, I knew the old injury was to blame. Doctor after doctor dismissed my self-diagnosis with a hastily scrawled prescription for a psychotropic drug. A few suggested I try not to think so much.

But my father stood by me. Every morning he made me oatmeal; lunch was always a cheddar and avocado sandwich lovingly cut into fours. On Sundays, he’d drive to his house to pick up enough of my mother’s home-cooked dinners to get us through the week. When the adrenaline rushes were particularly bad, he ran with me around the kitchen table and up and down the stairs until the surges dissipated. At night he sat in the rocking chair beside my bed and read to me from Winnie-the-Pooh. More complicated plot lines confused me.

On gray, slushy afternoons, my father would tell literal war stories—

A family legend was born: My mother was crazy. I not only bought into this myth, but also harbored a fear that I was destined to become crazy, too.

how, as a child, he’d been evacuated from London and separated from his family. And for the first time, he told me that when he and my mother arrived in America in 1954, the job he’d been promised didn’t exist. So he’d trudged up and down the streets of Detroit in a woolen English suit during a muggy August, making inquiries at autoengineering firms. “I was disconsolate,” he told me. We all suffer, he seemed to be saying. You haven’t been singled out.

He also encouraged me to think positively and have patience. Thanks to his profession, he had a cache of car analogies about bringing the “vehicle” into balance. He repeated them so often that I could soon speak with some authority about carburetors, pistons, and cracked aprons.

Above my kitchen sink, he posted three dots and a dash: Morse code for the letter V, echoing Winston Churchill’s World War II–era V-for-victory sign. His daughter, too, would rise again.

On my worst nights, I rushed to my father in tears, wondering whether I should, at last, go to the emergency room. He’d gaze thoughtfully at me and say no. Then he would tell me a story. The evenness of his voice, coupled with his very presence, helped me feel as good as I was able to. But the next day, the cycle would begin again: “It’s the head injury,” I’d say. “Yes.” “Am I going crazy?” “No.” I didn’t want to let him down.

At times I would imagine my mother in a hospital robe, being led by a sternfaced nurse down a narrow green hall to a room where she would be instructed to lie on a bed, her heart racing. There, they’d strap down her wrists and ankles, preparing her head for the electrodes. Then the image would change; it was me being led down that hall.

One day my father took me to see yet another physician. We drove an hour to Dr. Denton’s office in my dad’s Crown Victoria. Along the side of the road, daffodils were in bloom. The doctor, a small, straight-backed man of few words, actually believed me. In his office, my father and I finally saw an X-ray of my head and neck. It turned out my original injury hadn’t healed properly, and my head was on crooked, reducing the oxygen supply to my brain.

“Worst case I’ve seen in 28 years,” Dr. Denton said, indicating the precarious angle at which my skull was perched on my spine. (How had I not noticed this in a mirror? How had friends and family missed it? Why hadn’t the previous doctors known that symptoms of anxiety are uncannily similar to those of insufficient oxygen to the brain?) “You must have a strong will,” Dr. Denton told me. “Otherwise I don’t know how you’ve been functioning.” I glanced at my father, who gave me a nod of camaraderie. I wasn’t crazy after all.

As my body slowly healed—with the help of Dr. Denton, chiropractors, and craniosacral therapy (no surgery or braces, yet)—I often wondered why my dad had been so keen to keep me away from the emergency room. Did he worry that if the ER workers—trained to view the world as, well, an emergency—had seen me in that state, there was a good chance I’d have been whisked away like my mother?

On the ride home from Dr. Denton’s office, I gazed out the window at the passing flowers, so bright on that rare day of Michigan sun. “Thank you,” I said, turning to my dad. By which I meant: for believing me. He looked surprised. “You’re welcome,” he said. By which he meant: I knew better this time.

We’re all marked by stories—bad decisions, missed opportunities, mistakes made in distress. But sometimes, with luck and love, our histories can be transformed into the medicine that makes us whole.

MAG INSIDER

PRODUCTS • PROMOTIONS • EVENTS

ADVENTURE OF YOUR LIFE CRUISES

Holland America Line and O, The Oprah Magazine have partnered on an exciting initiative to pair the wonder of travel with the inspiring content found in every issue of the magazine. The August 11, 2018, O, The Oprah Magazine Adventure of Your Life Cruise will feature special appearances by Oprah Magazine editors, authors and thought leaders, as well as O-inspired activities that will make your upcoming 7-day Alaskan cruise even more memorable. O’s Reading Room Join us at O’s Reading Room to discuss our favorite titles and authors.

Just Breathe Greet the morning with meaningful meditation and movement, inspired by O’s dedication to wellness. Love That! Travel-friendly style trends and more curated by O, The Oprah Magazine’s Emmy Award-winning Creative Director, Adam Glassman.

Let’s Eat Give your diet a healthy boost by adding key foods and ingredients that rev up metabolism, help improve memory, and much more!

Visit HollandAmerica.com/OprahMag to book today!

3PART 3 OF4 •PAR T 3 OF4•PART3 OF 4 •

EASY

DOES IT

Dixie Laite has set some ambitious goals, but she’ s still dogged by her lack of discipline. Fortunately, O life coach Martha Beck knows a few motivational tricks.

Dixie seeks creative input from Dr. Waffles.

WHEN FREELANCE WRITER and brand consultant Dixie Laite needed to climb out of the doldrums and find her destiny, she asked O life coach Martha Beck to be her guide. Martha began by advising her new client to get in touch with her gut—literally—by breathing deeply and focusing on physical sensations. “If you pay attention to your body, you will feel physically pulled toward what’s right for you,” she said. “What would make you feel joyful and relaxed?” Dixie confessed her passion for glossy magazines and street-fashion blogs that feature “women of a certain age who dress the way I do.” Aha! Following small pleasures is the way to find your grand purpose, said our coach, who proceeded to give the 55-year-old New Yorker a homework assignment: Do only what delights you. Has Dixie been following her bliss? Let’s find out.

Martha Beck: So tell me what’s been going on in your life since we talked! Dixie Laite: Okay, I’ve taken some concrete steps. I got someone to help me develop a website and blog. I want to call it Dametown and write about old-fashioned dame heroes— from the movies or real life—and also my own experiences. MB: That’s huge! DL: But here’s where my discipline problem comes in. I’ll say “I’m gonna learn French!” Then instead of signing up for a class, all I do is buy a bunch of T-shirts with French words on them. MB: You’re stuck in a common pattern, and the cure is so hard for people to grasp. I call it “having the courage to do the small.” This means taking tiny, incremental turtle steps. DL: Let’s talk about that. I already put the cover of O on my bathroom mirror to remind me to work on the blog for just, like, an hour a day. MB: Oh, honey. An hour? DL: That may be too long. MB: How much have you been doing? DL: Zero. MB: Here’s the reason: Your steps are too big. You’re an animal, and your motivational system works the way an animal’s system works. But you’re trying to apply an analytical approach. You put out a lofty goal and think you’ll just keep striving, and the only motivation you need is this vague idea that one day you’ll be fantastic. But to train an animal, you give high levels of reinforcement for very small moves. To train a killer whale to jump out of the water, you start by rewarding it just for coming to the surface. If it won’t come all the way to the surface, you reward it for advancing four or five feet. DL: When I tell myself I have to write for only 20 minutes, I usually get going and find it impossible to stop. But I have this platonic ideal of what the blog should be, and now that it’s time to really work on it, I worry it’s just gonna be...lame. MB: I’m speaking to you from experience: Every time you sit down and actually write a paragraph, it’s a piece of crap compared to your fantasy. That’s why it takes courage to do small things. Human beings would rather commit to 12 huge things and then never follow through.