Gunn's Golden Rules

When You Need Help, Get It

I’M CRAZY ABOUT MARTHA Stewart. We’ve done a lot of things together, and I’ve always loved watching her show. But sometimes her domesticity gets a little out of control.

One day I was watching her cooking show. While roasting a pan of nuts, she said something I have never forgotten: “Life has few disappointments greater than a room-temperature nut.”

After Martha had been through the ordeal of her trial and jail time at what was referred to as Camp Cupcake, I asked her if she still stood by that quote.

“I said that?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “I think about it all the time.”

“Well,” she said, “I wouldn’t say it now!”

FOR A 2009 SEGMENT for The Dr. Oz Show,I went to D.C. and met an extraordinary testimony to courage. My assignment was to help a veteran shop for clothes. Sgt. Reinita Gray is an amazing woman: a mother of five who did four tours of duty and lost her leg to a missile while on a noncombat mission in Iraq, earning her a Purple Heart.

She hadn’t been out of the hospital since the loss of her leg, so we brought a special wheelchair van and I wheeled her in and out of it and through Bloomingdale’s.

We had my usual fight about size.

“It’s too small!” she insisted.

“It’s not too small!” I said. “Look at the sleeves and the shoulders. It fits!”

We talked about all the outfits we thought were a hot mess. We teased each other. It was all such fun—and very moving. She’s just learning to get around on her prosthetic leg, and one time she walked out of the Bloomingdale’s dressing room unassisted.

But where it became even more inspiring was back at the hospital. The bigger picture of inspiration and emotion for me was being at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. While waiting in the lobby for our contact there, we saw people go by who were badly burned, completely bandaged. That was the visual. But when we went to the amputee center, the big wing at Walter Reed, we spent an hour or so in the physical therapy area, and would you believe I didn’t see one person who looked miserable?

The spirit in that room was so uplifting. The room was full of people who had lost a limb or two or even more, and I expected to be met with individuals full of anger and self-pity and depressed by their situation, but instead they seemed so full of life. What they go through is incredibly tough. Sometimes it takes two years for these patients to build up the strength in their stumps so that the prosthetics will work. I felt almost joyous about the spirit of the human will. There was no self-pity in that room. The refrain was: I’m so happy still to be alive. Again and again, people said that to me, and they smiled.

That experience put so much in perspective for me. I tried to remember how many people seemed that happy and grateful the last time I was at a fashion event full of well-off, successful, gorgeously dressed guests eating wonderful canapés and drinking champagne. In high society, you have people walking around complaining that they haven’t had their nails done in two weeks. Well, I want to say to them now, “At least you have nails to do! At least you have a hand!”

Maybe it’s the gift of having become successful late in life, but I feel so incredibly lucky to have the life I do. I am blessed to work in a field I love, to do projects I care about, and to be appreciated for what I bring to the table. When someone hands me a glass of champagne, I sure don’t check the label to see whether it’s worthy of my consumption.

Back to Walter Reed. I thought these soldiers would be furious and sad. I spent a long time with Sergeant Gray, and we spoke very frankly, so I know she has moments of despair, but she pulls herself out of them. She is committed to moving forward. And that’s a quality I saw in all of these soldiers: a total commitment to working hard and figuring out how to make the most of whatever they have.

“How do you rationalize this tragic accident to yourself?” I asked Reinita.

“I don’t even try to,” she said. “Things happen, and this happened. I’d like to think things happen for a reason. We never know why, but this has given me such a sense of who I am, independent of this leg I’ve lost. I’ve focused on my family in a way I hadn’t before.”

I have so much respect for her, and for everyone at that hospital, and for all our veterans. Each day I think about them and the other people I’ve met in the course of my travels who are enthusiastic about their lives, and I try to remember them when I encounter someone who has everything—money, fame, and legs—and yet complains constantly about how hard they have it.

That’s something the staff at Walter Reed has no patience for: whining. They give tough love. They are not coddling those patients with whom they spend so much time. When Reinita was struggling to get up from the mat on which she was doing her physical therapy, I bent down to get her crutches. The physical therapist shot me a look.

“I shouldn’t do that?” I asked her.

She shook her head. And together we watched Reinita learn to stand up on her own.

I am so grateful to Dr. Oz for giving me the chance to go to Walter Reed, let alone to be a part of his core team. I always love appearing on his show, because I genuinely believe he’s having a hugely positive impact on his viewers.

When the producers approached me about being a regular guest, I thought it might be fun. I had seen Dr. Oz on Oprahand liked his bedside manner. But it’s been even more fulfilling than I anticipated. He has genuine warmth and a very clear and articulate way of communicating. He doesn’t dumb things down, but the way he speaks is accessible (his producers have suggested that I with my fancy vocabulary don’t always manage this …). He’s not an alarmist, which is so refreshing.

I love the part of his show that teaches the audience about what is and isn’t normal when it comes to their bodies. The audience has placards with normal written on one side and not normal on the other, and they vote on topics before he explains the truth behind them. I learned that snoring was not normal, for example. There’s a lot of content packed into his show. And I’m not surprised that he has one of the top daytime TV talk shows in America.

Dr. Oz was the one who wanted us to go to Walter Reed to take a look at the place and see what we could do, and it really did change my life. I am tempted to rent a bus and drive a bunch of self-involved New Yorkers down to D.C. to see the physical therapy wing. “We’re going to take a little trip, people! Come with me, all you mopers!”

Can’t you see Martha Stewart standing there in the middle of Walter Reed? She’d kill me for saying this, but I like to imagine the pre-Camp Cupcake Martha surveying the scene and then saying, “This is nothing compared to the disappointment of a room-temperature nut.”

NOW I WANT TO talk seriously about people who aren’t just depressed about their nails, but who are truly depressed or who are going through hard times without a staff of military doctors on hand. I have been there, and I want to reassure you that I know how impossible it feels. I promise you that things will get better if you are committed to climbing out of whatever hole you find yourself in.

First of all, there is no shame in undergoing therapy. I know there’s still a stigma in much of the country, and I think that’s too bad. Here in New York, the questions you hear most often are, “Where’s your apartment?” and “Who’s your therapist?”

I don’t think everyone needs to go all the time (nor can everyone afford to), but I do think everyone at some point or other can benefit from a little chat with a psychologist, whether it’s when the kids leave for college or when you’ve lost your job or when you’ve had a painful breakup or when someone close to you has died or when you’ve for no discernible reason lost the joy in life.

I think people are afraid to admit to problems, because once they admit to them, then those problems become real. But everybody has problems. If you think you don’t have any, then you do have a problem. Being in denial or feeling you can’t talk about things is so dangerous. You have to do somethingabout whatever your struggles are. It’s what gives us resources to move forward. It’s what life is.

People get very defensive if they think you’re saying what they’re doing isn’t normal. I don’t think it’s about normal. It’s about acceptable. When we talk about a situation that we need to change, it’s better not to think about whether or not it’s normal, but instead about whether or not it’s acceptable. Some things are contextual: People blow their noses on the street in India with no tissues. If you’re over there, you can do that. But if you’re on an American main street, you’d best break out the tissues.

Other things are never okay. It’s not acceptable to be abusive to a family member, or for a child to behave destructively, or for a job to make you miserable. You need to figure out what to do about those things, and there’s no shame in admitting you need a shrink, or your pastor, or your family, to help you out. It can make all the difference in the world just to have someone impartial to talk to once a week.

I say ever so glibly, “Go get some therapy,” but the value depends on the quality of the therapist. There’s a huge difference between a good one and a bad one. When I was young, my parents sent me to a lot of doctors, and some of them were far crazier than I was.

You have to shop around for someone who suits you. I think a therapist of the same gender sometimes helps with empathy, but you know when you’ve found someone you click with.

After trying a bunch of duds, eventually I wound up seeing a truly wonderful therapist five days a week—Dr. Phillip Goldblatt in New Haven, Connecticut. His sense of caring was palpable. He didn’t have to say anything; I could just sense his goodness and concern. I had the maturity of a gnat and a lot of issues. He made me deal with them. It took a long time. He would keep returning to things that came up. He absolutely gave me my life back.

Why, you may be thinking, did I have to go to therapy five times a week? Well, it wasn’t my idea, I’ll tell you that. It was an intervention that was thrust upon me. I’ll come clean: When I was seventeen, I made a serious suicide attempt. I was at yet another boarding school—I must have cycled through a dozen schools in as many semesters—and was ever more miserable. I had a debilitating stutter. I had no friends. I was incredibly lonely and depressed. I just wanted to end it all.

In my dorm room at Milford Academy I took far too many pills, then lay down to die with a sense of peaceful resignation.

Then, much to my frustration, I woke up the next morning. This wasn’t supposed to happenwas my first thought when I opened my eyes on a new day.

I hear that people who survive jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge report thinking on the way down that they want to live after all. When they survive, they feel so grateful. But I didn’t have that feeling. I was disappointed that I’d failed.

Now, of course, I’m glad the pills didn’t work.

I learned how to cope. I matured so much. When I got beyond my stutter at the age of nineteen, it reminded me of how I felt about the world when I was given glasses at the age of twelve. Everything changed. I hadn’t known that you could see individual leaves on trees, or that you could read road signs from a car window. Similarly, when I could speak clearly, my world opened up. I could actually be comfortable talking to people. It was like being more fully whole. I realized I had been living only a partial existence.

Going through all that helped me be a better person and a better teacher. I feel so much compassion for what young people go through. It is very hard to grow up, especially when you’re sensitive. You’re so vulnerable at that age. I worry about my friends’ children, and I try to be a good uncle.

The Megan Meier case, in which a teenager hanged herself after being tormented online by her friend’s mother posing as a teenage boy, is an example of the worst kind of inhumanity. That case made me want to unplug the Internet.

Of course, you can’t do that. You have to let young people live their lives. But you also have to do everything you can to show them that their teenage years are going to end and that there’s a world of possibility out there. We all need to do anything we can do to help children realize that they have value and gifts to give the world.

Sometimes people ask me when I figured out that I was gay. Well, for a very long time, I didn’t know whatI was. I knew what I wasn’t: I wasn’t interested in boys, but I reallywasn’t interested in girls. A lot of it was denial, but it was also that I didn’t feel unsatisfied. I’ve always loved working and have made that my priority. For many years, I described myself as asexual, and that’s probably still closest to the truth.

I do believe in a spectrum of sexuality. Some people are completely straight and some are completely gay, and plenty of people are somewhere in between. I think it’s crazy how hung up Americans, especially American men, are on this subject. I identify as gay, but there are women to whom I’m attracted. It’s not like I want to go to bed with them—but I can appreciate when someone’s radiating sexiness.

Things have changed so much in the past thirty years; it’s almost hard for young people today to imagine what it was like to be gay back then. Let me tell you: It was the opposite of fun. You used to feel so alone with it all. If you were even thinking about homosexuality, you assumed it was only a matter of time before someone put you in a straitjacket. In my parents’ home, the term wasn’t even in our vocabulary. I used to think if I shared any of my thoughts, they would lock me up. If I tried to talk about anything even remotely related, my parents would say, “We’ve never heard of this!” But I think they knew that “this” was what I was, and that that’s part of why they sent me to shrinks constantly.

To this day, my mother has never acknowledged that I’m gay. I’m outin public. I mean, I’ve been on the cover of The Advocate. But it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that she finally stopped talking about women she wants to set me up with. When she met the man I was with for a decade, I introduced him as a dear friend I wanted her to meet. She didn’t ask any questions then, and she never asked me what happened to him when he dropped off the face of the earth. I always half expect her to say, “Gay? I just thought you were happy!”

In fact, if there were ever a moment when my mother and I would have talked about my being gay, it would have been one night when we went out to dinner in the Village. It was the second and last time she visited me. In twenty-six years, she’s been here only twice. I think my move to New York from Washington, D.C., was always hard for her. She found New York intimidating and always joked that she needed to lose a dress size and get a new wardrobe before she could visit.

I took her to Chez Ma Tante on West Tenth Street. We were sitting there waiting to order. She looked me right in the eyes and said, “Why would you take me to a restaurant where there are only men? Are they all homosexual?”

This stopped me cold.

“You don’t know that everyone in here is gay,” I said, trying to psych myself up for the conversation. “And furthermore, it’s New York, in the Village, at the end of the twentieth century. For men to be together is normal and acceptable …”

There was a tense moment, and I thought I saw an awareness dawning on her. Then two women walked through the door, and my mother said, “Oh, never mind, there are some women!” And she went back to looking at the menu as if nothing were amiss. Denial is not just a river in Egypt.

Today’s young people have Adam Lambert and Lady Gaga and the Internet, where they can find a support system.

That doesn’t mean being a teenager (much less a gay teenager) is ever easy. The physical changes are enough to traumatize a person. I feel such sympathy for teenage boys who have that wisp of a mustache. They’re too young to shave, but they’re starting to look werewolf-y. If you’re gay on top of it, it can be very scary if you live in a place that isn’t supportive.

The Harvey Milk High School in New York City serves gay teenagers who don’t feel safe at other schools. When I moved from the West Village to the Upper West Side, I gave the school my grand piano, which had been a gift from my grandmother. I thought, Those kids need it more than I do.When you don’t fit in, something like a piano, or a flair for design—whatever tools or talents you discover at that age—can show you a whole new world. One truly nice person or one thing that you learn to do well can save your life.

Back when I was a suicidal, seventeen-year-old, misfit boarding-school student, I never thought I would be where I am now. I never imagined that I’d have a beautiful apartment, or a job I loved, or witty friends. I think about that when fans on the street call out, “We love you, Tim!”

I want to respond, “I love you, too!” I mean it. I am so grateful for my wonderful fans’ support. I hope in my honor they will think about the children in their lives who may be struggling and share that love with them.