Leslie F*cking Jones

You are with yourself every day, all day, all night—might as well like yourself.

The world’s not going to stop for that shit. This doesn’t define who you are. Don’t make this the focus of your life. There’s always going to be hurt before you get to the right place.

Some of the stories about my childhood is vague, because a bitch is 55 and I've smoked a lot of weed.

At the [SNL] party I went up to Justin Timberlake at some point and said, 'Yo, dude. I kind of got beef with you. You don't know me, but I am the person that you've been stealing your moves from. I really don't appreciate that shit!' And then I did some sweet Timberlake dance moves. 'That's my shit,' I said. 'My! Shit!' And I kept on doing his dance moves right in his face. (I was sure after that he'd want to put me in one of his videos.)

And you got to be willing to walk away from something that is not for you, no matter how big it is. I don’t stay anywhere I’m not wanted. I don’t let people misuse me anymore—I don’t have to. My talent can take me anywhere I want to go. I’m not conceited or cocky. I’m just convinced.

I remember hearing Diana Ross once say, “Know who you are because if you don’t, they will make you what they want.

Every race goes through something - Black, white, Spanish, Asian....No one is free of f**ked-upedness, We've all got baggage. But if we could just have some compassion for each other's baggage, everything could be solved so much differently.

In the end, what I learned in the pandemic, and since, is what so many of us learned: life is life. It’s not supposed to be easy all the time, and it’s never as easy as we want it to be. But live through your trauma, stop running from yourself—you are your best friend. Think about it—would you let someone hurt your best friend? No. Do the same for yourself. You will get the biggest reward: happiness, even in a storm. Grant yourself some grace because life can be short, but it can be long as fuck, too. You wake up every day and you hope you make it back to your bed safely. You hope you get good sleep, and you hope you wake the fuck up. That’s it.

I didn’t discover that I was special at SNL—I was always that. I just had not fully owned it. And that’s the frustration with this industry—you have to fight for that freedom, and when you do, sometimes it’s a problem, especially if they want to take your magic and use it the way they want you to use it. Or they just try to own your magic, or wring the fuck out of it, or try to copy it. Or they will try to make you think they discovered your magic.

(I’ll never forget Prince being on SNL; at one point he saw me to the side of the stage and because the room was dark, he thought I was Chris Rock. I know that because he called me Chris Rock.)

That day, I remember sitting on the couch thinking, If I was twenty-seven, this shit would be fucking me up right now. But when it happened, I was forty-eight and a soldier. Did they think that they were going to computer-scare me? I’m not going to lie—it hurt for a second, because it was absolute evil. We have evil people in the world, and this is a sure sign of it, and it’s terrifying that people can behave this way. But I know I haven’t done anything wrong. Yes, I will have to explain to my aunt why my vagina is all over the internet, but these photographs are my personal property, as is my vagina.

Partly I had that attitude because I was the oldest on the cast, and partly it was because of what I’d been through. After my brother died, I just abused myself. I dated terrible guys, did all kinds of stupid shit. I thought, The world has killed everybody anyway… In a way, SNL kind of saved me a little bit (as did a really great new therapist in New York)—I had work to do, so I just did it.

I got SNL! I got SNL!” I screamed over and over and over again. He looked at me puzzled. “What the fuck is SNL?” he said. This is the hood. He didn’t know Saturday Night Live—he probably thought SNL was slang for some kind of strange venereal disease. But from then on, he would know what SNL was. Leslie Fucking Jones had just gotten the job of a lifetime, and nothing would ever be the same again.

Death had given me the courage. Death helped me not be scared to say my truth. There was no fucking around anymore. No one was going to tell me what to do. Everyone had died; I figured I would die, too. If they don’t want no more Joneses in the world, I might as well go for it! Death gave me a new perspective. Death gave me everything.

I was more afraid to not try comedy than to try it. This shit right here is calling me, I thought.

To this day, if someone swims in my pool, they have to sign a waiver that they won’t pee in it. If they pee in my pool, they’re peeing in my life, and I won’t have that.)

It took until I was his age then to realize what my dad was going through. His wife just had a stroke and left him with these two kids. He had not been involved in the day-to-day as much as my mom had. My mom wasn’t my friend; she was my mom. She loved me, and we had fun together, but she was my mother. She knew what I was going through because she paid more attention to that stuff—being tall, getting bullied, not fitting in—and she was more involved because she was more connected to the school stuff. She was so good with me, and I knew that I could sometimes take advantage of that. She was just happy if I was happy. I often feel guilty about how I treated her. I know how much she worried about me.

If you’re reading this now, and you’re eighteen, or younger, get your ass up and go hug your parents and thank them. You don’t have to mean it; just say it. And if you’re older than that, call them and say, “I get it, Ma. I get it, Daddy.” It’s a cold world without your parents, the two people who unconditionally love you.

A lot of stuff needs to be fixed between generations. Every generation thinks they have a new set of issues to deal with, when actually it's just a different scene, different clothes, different mechanisms, but the same damage getting passed down....Every race goes through something...We've all got baggage. But if we could just have some compassion for each other's baggage, everything could be solved so much differently.

We have to take care of ourselves and realize the wonderfulness in all of us, because once we start doing that, once we start with respecting ourselves, really getting into the business of actually liking yourself, we realize that each of us is a unique person with God-given gifts that we have to use to benefit everyone around us.

And that is the f*cking great thing. There is no one like you. You're the only you. And you're busy trying to pretend to be somebody else. Who pretending to be you?

My talent can take me anywhere I want to go. I’m not conceited or cocky. I’m just convinced. Trust me, you have to fight to get to that point. I would continue to get tested. It happens all the time. Take the live tweeting of the Olympics as a perfect example. I’m just sitting and watching TV and tweeting my love for those incredible athletes for y’all, and for free. No one helps me with that. I do everything myself. But then NBC started to give me a hard time about rights to the clips I was referencing. Again, it’s people thinking my talent is a fluke, or it’s impossible for me to be that funny or they think that they can copy what I do, but what they don’t understand is what they’re seeing is real passion. I am incredibly passionate about the skills of Olympians—those athletes are incredible, and it brings me so much joy to watch them and that’s what comes across when I tweet. You can’t fake that, or own it! It means so much to me still because it’s something that me and my dad used to share—we’d watch every single minute of every Olympics together. (How many of y’all watched the Olympics with your loved ones?) But OK, you think you can get other people to do the same thing I do? No, you can’t, because when I do it, I come from an innocent, passionate place that goes all the way back to my childhood.

Worst of all, of course, was that one of the lead characters was a Black woman. For some men this was the final straw.

Ghostbusters came out July 11, 2016, but before it had even hit the movie theaters it had been the subject of intense online abuse—and no surprise that I was the one who got most of the hate.

I even attended a Christian singles night lecture kind of thing—I was single, it was free, and it was Church. Honestly, that night should be an episode of American Horror Story. The woman leading it was telling us how God had cured her herpes (I didn’t like to mention that herpes just goes into remission)

He’s a grown-ass man. If you don’t watch out, you’re both gonna die—you’re both gonna sink in that same boat.

If anything, you’re taking advantage of me. Because for one, you thought you were going to fuck me and that didn’t happen, and then you thought I was going to babysit your kid—

I knew I wasn’t going to have children as far back as when as I was twelve. I am not a pain person. You’re telling me you’re going to pull a whole human out of my pussy? (For a start, I’m going to need more than six weeks off.) We saw a film in health class called something like The Beauty of Childbirth—but all I saw was hideous shit. What’s beautiful about snatching a baby out of a woman’s ass? The fuck? My cousin Rhonda even delivered a baby in our house, and I remember that there was so much blood… None of this was going to happen to me.