“I Always Try to Better Myself” – An Interview with Survivor: Fiji’s Stacy

There have been many questions raised about Stacy and her behavior during Survivor: Fiji. I had a chance to ask many of them, and I could tell that Stacy has been waiting to talk about them. So without further ado, read on!

RealityNewsOnline: Hello, Stacy, and thanks for talking to RealityNewsOnline today. How are you doing?

Stacy: Good, thanks.

RNO: What did you do to prepare for being on Survivor?

Stacy: I hired a personal trainer about three weeks before I left, and besides that I worked in a really crazy ad agency that was very intense. So I really only needed the physical part.

RNO: Did you vote people out of the ad agency?

Stacy: (Laughing) No, I was not responsible for that, just getting stuff done, taking care of business.

RNO: What was your strategy going into the game?

Stacy: My strategy was not too complex, it was just kind of figure out who the players were, how they were playing, and stay as true to myself as possible. I think I tend to not hold my tongue and I speak my mind, and if I don’t agree with something I’ll speak up. If you do well, you get kudos and if you don’t, you’ll know too. I know a lot of people can be fake in this game and I wanted to walk away happy with how I played it and not as somebody I’m not.

RNO: Several contestants I’ve previously interviewed have said you were only looking from one vote to the next, rather than planning far ahead. How do you respond to that?

Stacy: I think that in the beginning, there was a solid alliance and I wanted that to carry through the game. As we went through the twists and turns, that wasn’t the case. Once you lose trust in the people around you, it does come down to shortsightedness, especially when you’re getting all sorts of information from all the players – it’s difficult to trust people. I was using my intuition and if I didn’t feel something was right, I wasn’t down with it.

RNO: Leading from that, why did you decide to turn on Alex and Edgardo after they were your allies early on and then saved you at the Tribal Council when Michelle was voted off?

Stacy: At some point during the game, I had a conversation with Yau-Man and he kind of gave me the intel that Alex was trying to vote me off. I think up until that point, Alex and his boy alliance made it pretty clear that it was Alex and Mookie and Edgardo and possibly Dreamz. It was clear they were the boys club, and I wasn’t sure how I was fitting into that plan, but I felt like I was just a vote until they wanted to get rid of me, and I didn’t want to be in that position.

RNO: And why did you say things like suggesting the tribe shouldn’t even feed your old allies?

Stacy: I think that because Mookie was begging to go home and Alex was getting really crazy, they were the next to go and our food supply was dwindling. We collectively had another conversation on the side and said we could hide the food from them and save it for us, the people who are still in the game and need the food. I think I often tend to say things and they be well thought through and may not be, but that’s how I’m feeling. It’s not like I’d go to a Thanksgiving dinner and not feed my mother. We’re playing a game and it’s funny that people took it so seriously. I would never seriously starve somebody. It’s a game and food is power.

RNO: How did you feel after the reward challenge when you were mentioned in so many negative categories?

Stacy: I felt bad. I think I internalized a lot of it. I didn’t go around and talk about my feelings about it openly in a negative way. I took it as something I could learn about myself. I confided in Earl and Yau-Man and Cassandra. They helped bring me to a better place and understand the importance of always putting your best foot forward to give that first impression. In my line of work, you deal with the people you deal with and the others are just background. I treated the game as the same thing, which I don’t think was the best approach. I learned later on I was kind of squandering the opportunity to really get to know some fantastic people. From that point forward, I was with them.

When I would talk with Alex about it, he was more concerned about how he felt like everybody thought he was entitled to win because he went to Harvard. But that was one question and I was on like 20. I tried to talk to him because we were friends at one time, but he just shut off. So I thought at this point I want to be cool with people who are cool with me. I realized something midway through and my outlook changed on myself and the game. I turned what could have been a very negative thing into a very positive thing that I could learn from.

When I was feeling really bad, I was able to turn to Earl, Yau-Man, and Cassandra, and they helped me understand things I didn’t understand about myself, and I took it as an opportunity to grow as opposed to something negative. I was looking for some compassion from people who I thought were in my camp, like Alex and Edgardo, and they were every man for themselves and kind of cold about it. I was like okay, I’ll just move on. And I know it wasn’t shown, but I did cry in one of my confessionals. I wanted to know why and how I could make myself better. Instead of beating myself up, I wanted to show everybody that it brought me to a stronger point within myself, which it did.

I’ve been waiting to talk about it because they didn’t show it and I looked stoic. But I did care about it and I always try to better myself. I’m all for self-improvement, that’s the only way you learn about yourself.

RNO: Following up on what we didn’t see, you seemed to have received less airtime than the other players at this point – what did we miss?

Stacy: You missed the part where I didn’t really get along with Dreamz and Cassandra at the beginning because they were complaining they were invisible, but it seemed they were alienating themselves. Rather than coming to me or the others, they aired their dirty laundry at Tribal Council. I thought that was cowardice on their part. That put a bad taste in my mouth.

But as the game progressed, Cassandra and I got closer and I apologized to her and said maybe I misinterpreted and I hope moving forward we can be pleasant with each other. And also with Dreamz too. I sat down with him and said I think you’re playing this game and you’ve had a rough life and there are all these things that are interesting about you, and I don’t want you to think I don’t like you; I think we can be cool, and I think we were.

Also, there were a lot of times when Alex would sit down and talk about how he wanted to better children’s lives and people would roll their eyes because he was kind of a hypocrite. I thought if he’s teaching a class on children’s ethics, children beware. A lot of my interactions with him were souring as days went on, because he was a hypocrite. When Mookie and he went thru Yau-Man’s bag, he washed his hands of it. He was always trying to walk away with clean hands and I think that bothered a lot of people.