We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Gloria De Leon. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Gloria below.
Gloria, we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?
Getting to a place of healthy self-esteem and confidence has been a journey and it’s an ongoing process. When I was a teenager my self-esteem was non-existent, which lead to suicidal levels of depression. Despite my lack of self-esteem, I’ve always been an overachiever. I always try my best at everything I do and it got me into UCLA where I then auditioned for a spot, and got into, the theater department. That was a huge win for me, but it came with it’s own challenges, and in my senior year of college I walked into the UCLA Student Health Center and asked for help with my ongoing depression issues. There, I was lucky enough to meet an awesome therapist who helped me develop some tools that I use to this day to help me manage my mental health issues.
One of the things I learned was to focus on my strengths. Like I said, I’m an overachiever and I like accomplishing things which means that I HATE wasting time. Based on that self-analysis I concluded that judging myself, hating myself, spending all this energy on trying to “fix” myself, was a HUGE waste of time. This was time I could spend writing, creating, rehearsing, volunteering, helping others, etc, doing something productive. That was step one.
The next major step towards confidence was understanding that I must CREATE the world in which I want to live . That means that if I want to live in a kinder world, I must be kinder to myself. It means that if I want a world where fat, brown, queer girls are loved and accepted, I need to love and accept myself. It means that if I want to see people like me on TV, on stage, and in film, I need to not be afraid to get myself, as I am, on TV, on stage and on film. If I want to stop the erasure of BIPOC identities and bodies, I need to stop trying to erase my own identity and body. I started consuming fat-positive, proud-brown-girl, women-who-love-science, boss-women content that celebrate the pieces of me that I’d formerly been taught to be ashamed of. I learned to surround myself by people that I admire and that build me up. All of these steps have had a significant impact on my sense of self.
My confidence and self-esteem are doing great now! However, that doesn’t mean that I wake up feeling great every day. I don’t always love and accept my body. I have to work towards confidence at times when I’m feeling down. I watch inspiring videos, I write something I’m proud of, I listen to motivating podcasts. I do what I need to do to give myself the grace to be both flawed and still incredibly proud of the person I am. And then I remind myself how lucky I am to be alive.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I’m a storyteller. I’ve always loved performing and from the time little, tiny, baby me could watch telenovelas, I knew I wanted to be an actress. I’d watch novelas with my mom and then make up side stories with the characters, so I guess I always wanted to be a writer as well.
I went to college for acting and surprisingly my UCLA professors did not include telenovelas anywhere in the curriculum. Like, what? After college I continued to take classes and workshops, I signed up for improv classes, and voice over workout groups. I did anything I could financially afford to do to keep growing as a performer. But ultimately, what most helped me find my voice was connecting to performers who are also activists. It’s so powerful to find people who used their artistic talents to uplift others and to address social issues that need attention.
When I found out that there was a sketch comedy team that was looking for fat comics to create fat-positive content, I jumped at the chance. I was an honor to be cast and to be one of the founding members of FATCH, the Fat Sketch Comedy Show. For the first time, I got to play on the same stage as other hilarious, fat, talented actresses, which would never have been allowed to happen due to the “You only get one” rule. YOGO is the Hollywood standard that allows only one member of any particular underrepresented group to be on stage, or on camera, for a significant amount of time, so as to suggest inclusion, but actually excludes everyone else of that group since, “we already have one of you”. This amazing opportunity was such a blast! It connected me to fat positive community, it spoke to my personal mission to unlearn fat-phobia, and it taught me to better educate others on how to create a more inclusive world.
While writing as a fat activist, I also returned to my beloved novelas and that’s how Noveleando Podcast was born. Noveleando Podcast is a podcast all about Spanish-language telenovelas. The podcast is in English, however, we don’t cover American soaps, because frankly I don’t care about them. This has been my passion project for the last four years and it’s my favorite thing to do in the world! Each episode focuses on a different novela, with some novelas expanding into multiple episodes depending on how wild they are. I get to be a storyteller, and share all my favorite stories! We discuss the bananas plot lines, plus important topics brought up by the novela that are often not talked about accurately or enough in our latine culture. I’ll be honest, novelas are fun, but they are also problematic af, so we talk about things like colorism, body bias, chauvinism, mental health, and all the things that need to be discussed openly.
Watching novelas keeps me in touch with my native language, Spanish, and with my Mexican roots, but it also allows me a glimpse into other cultures, as the stories always reflect the values of their setting. Noveleando has also allowed me to be part of novela culture, which is so much fun! I am so grateful for the community of novela lovers out there who have supported this endeavour. And for new listeners, please find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or all the other podcast listening thingies, or you can find the episodes in our link in bio on Instagram @noveleandopodcast.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Curiosity. I always wanna know more. I’m a naturally curious person so I always wanna know more about things that interest me and in the age of the internet, the possibilities are endless! Time is my biggest enemy in this because sometimes I don’t sleep while researching something new. When I decided I wanted to be an actress, I didn’t just want to do it, I wanted to know acting inside and out. I want to know how the lights work, how the set moves, how the stage manager schedules rehearsals. This curiosity has taught me so much, and it allows me to step into a production fully confident that I can tell the story we’re sharing with the audience.
Speaking Spanish. Nothing has opened more doors in my career than being fluently bilingual. My first voice-over job was a dubbing job, my first professional theatre role was with the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts here in Los Angeles, where they perform shows alternating between Spanish and English on different nights. My first internship on a film set was as a translator. It has helped me professionally in many ways, but on a personal level, I also just love speaking Spanish. I’m bi-cultural and I when I spend too much time in non-Spanish-speaking spaces, I miss it, and it sometimes feels like I’m losing a piece of myself. I love being able to communicate with other Spanish-speakers and I wish I knew more languages so I could get to learn more about more people.
Self-reflection. I want to be the best version of myself and sometimes that means questioning my own motives for my choices. I have big feelings, most artists do, and it’s important for me to analyze why I feel the way I do about things. I don’t judge myself for having feelings, but I do hold myself responsible for how my feelings turn into actions that affect others. I’m not perfect, but if I get that ucky feeling in the pit of my stomach that says I didn’t act right with someone, then I need to figure out what I did so I don’t do it again.
As far as advice goes:
I can’t force anyone to be curious so the note to take from that section is that my curiosity leads me to feel confident in my work. So if you can figure out how to be confident that you’re serving the story, using your own skills then cool, you’re good.
Speaking Spanish is a skill I was lucky to have developed with no effort as a child, but keeping it up does sometimes require some attention to make sure I don’t lose it. If you speak another language, don’t be shy to use it. If you don’t, find your own unique skill that people are looking for and keep developing it.
Self-reflection means checking in with yourself. You’re not gonna be right in every argument, and you’re allowed to change your mind. Always ask “Why?”, “Why did I do that?”, “Why do I feel that?”, “Why did I react that way?”. And if you find that the answer is “I need therapy”, go get therapy. If you can’t afford therapy, check to see if there are free therapy support groups in your area. Look for all possible resources. Sometimes we need help and that’s ok.
Alright so to wrap up, who deserves credit for helping you overcome challenges or build some of the essential skills you’ve needed?
My friends, they are the best people in the world! Whenever I meet people that inspire me, I make them my friends. I’ve been so incredibly lucky to have met some of the most amazing, talented, motivating, hard-working human beings in Los Angeles. Depending on what types of challenges I’m facing, I will often reach out to a friend who has faced similar challenges to see if they have any words of advice for me. Many of my friends have been kind enough to share their experience and knowledge with me and sometimes I can identify how to better myself by adopting qualities of theirs that I admire. They’ve even often taught me skills, and shared tools and resources with me. But friendship is a two way street, and I also love being there for them and I’m always happy to share my own skillsets with them if they need it. I surround myself with people with whom I want to build a better world, and we help each other do that.
Contact Info:
- Website: gloriatheactress.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/gloriatheactress?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gloriadeleonofficial?mibextid=LQQJ4d
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gloriatheactress
- Other: https://linktr.ee/gloriatheactress
