Trixie Mattel is Taking a Break From Everything
Drag icon Trixie Mattel announced that she will take three months off from all her work projects to take better care of herself.
Trixie Mattel, the YouTube personality, musician, and drag influencer who gained international recognition from her stint on the celebrated RuPaul’s Drag Race reality TV show, announced in a video that she is going on a three-month sabbatical to take better care of herself.
The winner of Season 3 of RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars explained her decision-making in a nearly 17-minute-long YouTube video entitled “I’m Taking A Break! Here’s Why.” In it, Mattel called her current situation “unsustainable.”
Mattel appears out of drag in the video and said that the last 12 months were “the most difficult time of my entire life.”
The 34-year-old Wisconsin native said she felt “weird” complaining about her problems, in part because her success and fame enabled her to live out some of her dreams. But as her career opportunities took off, she felt she was neglecting her social life, her emotional well-being, and her personal relationships with family and friends.
“You know those straight guys who are all muscly at the top and have those twig little legs at the gym? That was my work-life balance,” Mattel says in the video. “It was all work and money-making and creative stuff, and then my social life, my family life, my personal life… twigs. Frail twigs. And the bigger the work things got, the smaller my real-life things got. My support system, all of that started to shrivel on the vine.”
She emphasized the importance of self-care and caring for one’s mental health.
“It is not so fierce to work yourself to death. It is not so fierce to work yourself into an autoimmune disorder,” Mattel said, referencing her struggles with arthritis and a condition called temporomandibular joint disorder, which affects the movement of the jaw.
“It is not so fierce to like…do so much drag as Trixie, that at a certain point, I literally started to feel like a Trixie impersonator,” she continued. “I was putting on the blond wig and the winged eyeliner and the ’60s dress, and being like, ‘Let’s just get through the day.’ … And then to be so lucky to do what I do, and not be appreciating it, it’s horrible.
“Being a hard worker is fierce. Being a hard worker at the expense of your real life and health, is not fierce.”
In addition to her stints on Drag Race, Mattel has hosted The Pit Stop, an online program reviewing episodes from the most recent seasons of Drag Race, as well as a podcast called The Bald and the Beautiful. She has starred in the drag reality singing competition Queen of the Universe and started her own makeup company, Trixie Cosmetics. And appeared in the hit fixer-upper TV series Trixie Motel.
Mattel did tell her fans that her YouTube channel would not be abandoned during her absence, promising that “very famous, very iconic, very celebrated drag artists, makeup artists, performers” would substitute for her while she was away. The channel will also release some pre-recorded videos created prior to her announcement.
She said that her sabbatical would last about three months, teasing that she’d return sometime in October.
Watch Mattel’s announcement below:
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