Last week I received an e-mail from Ben Purvis, the Weekly's art director. It read: "Sonja! Have you heard? Las Vegas Weekly's readers voted you "Sexiest Las Vegan"! (Tied with Chef Kerry Simon.) Isn't that something? I'd like to get you in the studio for some shots for inside the magazine. Can you make it?"
I had to read it over and over again for it to sink in. I wrote back and asked him if he were sure it was me and not some kind of mistake. I mean hell, I could see me being voted most likely to screw up a new relationship, or least likely to make it past the standard 90-day dating period, but sexiest Las Vegan? There had to be some kind of mix-up, right?
After I spoke with Ben and realized that the information was accurate ... I cried. Hard. I was flabbergasted, overwhelmed, surprised and most of all flattered beyond belief. Here's a woman who only seven years ago was hospitalized by the state of Nevada for severe depression and anxiety. I had about as much self-confidence as a tick. I was in so much internal pain that in one brief moment—one unbelievably selfish and pathtic moment, a moment that could have wrecked the lives of the most important people in my world—I ingested 54 Xanax and half a bottle of tequila.
In my very sick mind, it was the only way I could stop the pain and anguish of trying so hard to be someone I wasn't. Afraid every day of my life that someone would find out where I'd come from, the childhood I'd suffered through and, most of all, afraid that at some point the world around me would see me the way I saw myself: a disgusting, damaged, emotionally crippled, scared little girl. But before anyone could find out that I was a fraud, that I'd created this laughing-on-the-outside-crying-on-the-inside-crazy-nutty-funny-fearless persona, I decided to leave them before they could leave me. And I was almost successful.
If I live to be 101, I will never, ever know the pain and worry I caused my then-husband. The heartache and helplessness he must have been feeling as he held me in his arms, watching the life nearly drain out of me while he waited for the paramedics. To say that I am sorry seems so lame, because what I did that night—to him, to me and potentially to my children and my friends—goes way beyond the realm of just "sorry." I remember him every night in my prayers and hope that he has found it in his heart to forgive me as I have finally come to forgive myself.
Later, my husband put me in therapy. And as the memories that I'd stuffed so deep inside my soul came flooding back, memories of my father, loving me "in that special way" that was "our little secret" and feelings that my very intelligent and intuitive mother somehow knew but did nothing to help me, my ex-husband never left my side. He never judged me, just held me tight and promised that no one would ever hurt me again. I could see it in his eyes, that if my father hadn't been shot and killed in front of me when I was 14, he would have killed him himself. For that, I will love my ex-husband all the days of my life.
To know me back then was to think that I'd never had a bad day. That I'd had the most normal and loving childhood imaginable. That I didn't have a mother who found so much happiness in saying things like, "The first thing my cousin Roy said when he laid eyes on you was that you looked just like Jimmy Durante with that giant nose of yours." And when I was 12, she told me that I wasn't a pretty girl, but I was a funny girl and that if I were good in bed that maybe I'd be lucky enough to get a man and keep him. When I was 16, I kissed her good-bye in front of my date, Brad, and she said loud enough for him to hear, "You smell like a cheap whore." I tried not to cry as Brad walked me to the car with his arm protectively around my shoulders. In my early 20s, she told me that maybe her marriage to my father would have worked if I hadn't been "givin' him a little on the side." In my late 20s, she told me that I had stretch marks that looked like lightning bolts all over and that I should consider never wearing a two-piece bathing suit again. In my 30s, she told me that I had a big, fat ass and that I was starting to look like LaToya Jackson with all the work I'd had done on my face.
At 37, I no longer have a relationship with my mother. I know that she would say, "You only remember the bad stuff, why can't you ever talk about the good stuff?" And she is right. There was some good stuff in the mix. It's the reason I've been able to become the woman I am today. For the "good stuff" I am grateful to her and will always love her, even though I no longer like her.
It has taken me most of my adult life to repair the damage that she and my father caused. Damage that has cost thousands of dollars in therapy and plastic surgery to try to reverse. You see, by the time I was 30, I was like a quilt, I had had so many stitches. Externally and internally. Internally, as I kept on stitching back together my little broken heart. And externally, as I kept going to the plastic surgeon hoping that if he could just transform my outsides, that somehow, miraculously, my insides would change to match. I mistakenly thought that if I were pretty, I'd be happy. Pretty people are always happy, aren't they? No. They aren't.
What I've come to find out on this long journey is that beauty, confidence, sex appeal—all of it shines from the inside out, not the outside in. We are all products of our environment, we cannot change where we came from or the pain we suffered along the way. But we can grow to learn that the past does not have to dictate who we become. We control our own destiny.
So, to those of you who thought enough of me to vote for me as "Sexiest Las Vegan," I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I thank you for seeing in me what I have only recently been able to see in myself: that sharing from the heart, caring about the world around me and the people in it, giving without expecting anything in return, being real and never giving up hope can indeed take a scared, sad little girl and help transform her into one sexy bitch!