Jodie Sweetin admittedly never tried to flex her child star status in the midst of her Full House fame.
“After the show ended and in high school, there was this strange feeling that I had because everyone assumed I was ‘A TV star,’” Sweetin, 44, recalled on a recent episode of the “Inside of You” podcast. “The rumor before [I] even started school was, ‘She’s a stuck-up bitch.’”
Sweetin famously starred as Stephanie Tanner on Full House from 1987 to 1995, starting when she was just 5 years old. After the sitcom’s eventual finale, Sweetin returned to public high school without any special treatment.
“I wanted to prove them wrong, so in order to make myself palatable and make other people feel like I wasn’t trying to be better than them, I would try to be worse than them,” the actress explained. “Like, ‘I don’t think I’m better than you, I’ll get more f***ed up [and] I’ll do more drugs.’ [I didn’t want my classmates to] think, ‘She’s goody-two-shoes,’ and then you keep going, and that becomes who you are.”
Sweetin, who has been open about her battle with substance abuse, further noted that she “spent most of [her] life” questioning whether she was loved and accepted for who she was and not what she had made on TV.
“I had no idea [who I was]. I had to make a mess of relationships, I had to cheat, I had to lie,” she alleged. “I had to get involved with really severely toxic, scary people, but I had to get through all that. … It really has, sort of, rocketed me all of that into this place where around my mid-30s, I was just like, ‘Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I think I’ve been doing this all wrong.’”
After getting sober and navigating multiple divorces, Sweetin entered therapy and “dug in” to uncover moments from her past that shaped her life.
“I went through it, but I had to be like, ‘What did I choose? What did I bring to this and why?’” she said. “I realized I just, sort of, let everyone else make choices for me, and I never really even asked myself, ‘What do you want?’”
Now that she is on the other side of her substance abuse struggles, Sweetin said that she “found the gratitude in going through a lot of the worst stuff.”
“I’m glad that I was able to look at it, reflect on it and really dig into it and be willing to be like, ‘All right, back to therapy we go,’” she said. “Then you’re like, ‘Oh, wait. This actually turns out this actually feels way better, like, I actually don’t hate myself and I don’t feel like I’m trying to be anybody other than me.’”
If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
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