New York native Melina Bellows now lives in the Palisades neighborhood of Washington, D.C., where she applies her considerable experience as a journalist at Ladies’ Home Journal, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan and as the former longtime publisher of National Geographic Kids to her own Fun Factory Press, a local firm specializing in children’s nonfiction. Bellows, 58, lives by words of wisdom delivered to her in her 20s by two people you might have heard of.
I was going through a bad breakup with a boyfriend, and there I was in Chicago interviewing Oprah [Winfrey] for Ladies’ Home Journal. And because it’s Oprah, you have a real conversation, you know? And she told me that when anything bad happens to you, it’s actually a gift if you ask the situation what it has to teach you.
That really did a couple of things for me. First of all, it stopped the pity party. And instead of saying, ‘Oh, I didn’t get that job’ or ‘I made a fool of myself for doing that,’ it puts you in the power seat to say, ‘What can I take from this? What can I learn from it?’ It has you thinking about the future instead of thinking about the past. That was really powerful to me. If something bad happens to you, it’s not necessarily bad: It has something to teach you.
When Oprah gave me that advice, it made me think about the way I spoke to myself, and it made me aware that I had a really negative voice running in my head. I was suddenly aware of that and I could turn it off, or at least ignore it. ‘Don’t believe everything you think,’ right?
I have since learned that Oprah got that advice from someone who mentored her: Dr. Maya Angelou. Oprah said she was whining or crying about something, and Dr. Angelou said, ‘You stop that crying right now. This is a gift.’ So Dr. Angelou gave her tough love, and Oprah passed it on to me and I continue to pay it forward to my young interns.
A second story: I interviewed my all-time idol, [author and filmmaker] Nora Ephron, who took me under her wing a little bit. In my 20s, I was looking for love and going about it in all the wrong ways, and Nora taught me—like Oprah did—when something bad happens to you, it’s actually great, because you can make a great story out of it later. She taught me to take the bad stuff that happens to you and use it.
She also said the worse the thing is, the more people want to hear about it. She said people love hearing about terrible things that happen to other people, and she should know: She wrote Heartburn, which was about the demise of her marriage to [journalist] Carl Bernstein. And it became an incredible movie starring Meryl Streep.
This story appears in the May/June edition of Bethesda Magazine.