MAYIM BIALIK, Ph.D.
NEUROSCIENTIST, AUTHOR, ACTRESS, “JEOPARDY!” HOST
Mayim Hoya Bialik is best known for her lead role as Blossom Russo in the 1990s NBC sitcom “Blossom,” as well as for playing Amy Farrah Fowler on the CBS comedy, “The Big Bang Theory,” for which she garnered two Critics’ Choice Awards, a SAG nomination, and four Emmy nominations. Bialik and her company, Sad Clown Productions, produced the FOX show “Call Me Kat,” in which she starred for three seasons. She has been hosting “Jeopardy!” since 2021, winning the Critics’ Choice Award for ‘Best Game Show’ in 2023.
Along with her partner, Jonathan Cohen, Bialik hosts a successful podcast, “Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown,” breaking down myths about mental health; the podcast has 20 million downloads and counting. Bialik’s screenwriting and directorial debut, “As They Made Us,” starring Dustin Hoffman, Candice Bergen, Simon Helberg, and Dianna Agron, came out in 2022.
She is a #1 New York Times Best-Selling author for Girling Up and Boying Up, and holds a BS and Ph.D. in Neuroscience from UCLA. Bialik lives in Los Angeles with her teenage sons and three cats.
Was, Is, and Will Be
MAYIM BIALIK
My kids say I’m cheating. That I don’t have a “real” God. They say I am faking it and that I’m not really a religious person. They tell me, “You may be an award-winning actress, but you can’t act your way out of this one.”
Here’s what it is: I believe that God exists the same way I believe that gravity exists. I believe that if I throw a tennis ball from a very tall building, it’s going to fall at a rate of -9.8 m/s. Always and forever. I believe that God exists the same way I believe that the sun is going to come up tomorrow. I believe that the waves in the ocean will keep doing their wave thing no matter what I pray for, think about, or try to manipulate.
That’s God. God is what I trust to be true when nothing else can – or should - be trusted. God is all of the Forces of Nature in God’s Universe. I don’t have to “make” gravity or centripetal force; they just are. I don’t even have to justify their existence. These things existed before there was anything else, before there was anyone to observe them, or measure them, or write equations to describe them. Always was, always is, and always will be.
I am aware that there are many things in the Universe that we do not yet know how to explain. You can look them all up and insert them right here. Black holes and quantum issues; wondrous things! There are equations and explanations and theorems and hypotheses and refutations and abstracts and chapters and books and even courses we teach on those things.
But I don’t lose sleep over them. I don’t have a sense of dismay or dread about what we will or won’t find. Those things we cannot explain are not a source of confusion or perturbation for me.
Neither should my spirit be confused or perturbed. Neither should my soul be. Because when I open my eyes every morning, I know for certain that I am spinning very fast on a ball of dirt through the cosmos and I’m not going to fall off. I am spinning fast, yet I feel as if I am stable. When I swing these legs around the side of my bed, I know that they will touch the floor and I will stand up and walk.
I also know that there will come a day when I will not stand up and I will not walk anymore. And on that day, I will know all of the mysteries of the Universe because I will be returned to my Creator. And until that day, when I awaken, I will praise the God of my understanding for the faith and trust I have that everything is ok. It always was. And it always will be.