So after all of this happened, you don't tell your mother.
Your friend, who's waiting at the hotel,
you don't tell her where you've been for two days.
I don't say anything to anybody.
And did she ask you?
I mean, no, she didn't.
We were at that age, we just got on the train.
We have to go, there was no conversation.
I said we just, we need to go now.
And we're at that age,
we just don't have tough conversations.
You step over things.
Now, our friendship imploded,
and as a result of it.
That was that.
When my mom then asks me later,
well what happened when you called?
I was so afraid.
It was the middle of the night.
Oh, nothing, nothing.
I just stepped over it.
I went on to become a model
and here I was, I went to Japan.
I became a real reckless.
I would have a book that would kinda
keep me separate from people.
Not that they ever wanted to talk to me.
But when I wasn't shooting,
I hung out at my agent's office.
And her grandparents were there
because in Japan, they revere their elders.
And they're always there in case
they want advice of any kind.
And I was sitting in the conference room one day,
running my fingers over this strange wooden table that
had the eyes of the wood left in.
And it was narrow at one end and wide in the other.
I'd never seen something like this.
But the grandmother said, oh Wabi Sabi.
And that's when they took turns telling me about
the most important of Japanese principles,
the grandfather said.
Which says that the beauty of anything,
any object lies in its flaws.
It's not the polished up parts
that make something beautiful.
It's what is damaged, what is ruined.
And something can only rise to beauty
if it has a correlate degree of damages and imperfections.
It was blowing my mind, I'd never heard anything like that.
I had to leave.
It was so overwhelming.
Where did you go?
I went out on the street
and just started to walk as fast as I could,
started to jog, started to clear my mind.
Finally, I realized I hadn't eaten all day
and I stopped at a little cafe.
I don't like the Japanese McDonald's.
Got my lunch at the counter, came and sat down.
I was sitting at a table, there was a blank one,
you know, an empty one in front of me.
And then at the third table facing me
was what was probably a bag woman.
And I'm just kind of reading my book,
doin' my thing, like always
and she starts shouting.
At you?
Well it sure seemed so.
People are looking at her and looking at me
and looking at her and looking at me.
I didn't like to be looked at it.
It wasn't like when I was a model
where I'm just like a meat suit.
They were looking at me.
And the man at the table next to me leaned in and says,
she asks why you make war on Japan.
And I'm looking at her and she's crying
and snot it frothing up.
She's crazy.
And I'm saying to these people,
can't you see she's crazy.
Look at her eyes and d I locked eyes with her.
I was overcome with compassion because she wasn't crazy.
She was just traumatized and had no idea
how to make sense of what occurred to her.
And I didn't see a crazy woman, I saw myself.
And I bowed to her and she stopped and fell silent.
And I said the only two words
that made any sense, Wabi Sabi.
And I gathered everything and bowed to the people
and they all bowed back.
I used to think oh, I'm gonna have
to live in Japan for Wabi Sabi to translate.
I'm gonna have to spend the rest of my life there.
I prayed that the notion of Wabi Sabi would translate,
but I realized it does.
It's not the things that are perfect
about us that make us magnificent.
It's all the other things that we thought
were wrong about us.
Did that help you embrace
what you been living with at that point?
It very much did.
It made me realize, I didn't know how to go on living.
I was trapped in a hell of my own mind.
And I thought if I told anybody what had occurred,
they would know that I was damaged and ruined and filthy.
And that somehow some way,
what made me bad or wrong could actually
be what was right about me, I just had to figure out how.