Put on Your Crown

by Queen Latifah

  My talk show wasn’t a raving success, either. If it was, I’d still be doing it. Things got really heavy with my guests and the studio audience. Every day I felt like a doctor going into the ER, and you lose patients sometimes. It’s exhausting, because after that you have to go home, process what happened, dust yourself off, and come into work the next day ready to save lives again. Again, I tried my best. But you can’t beat Oprah at her game.

  Be on Time to the Spot, Get the Look, Nail the Shot

  The movies I made weren’t always huge box office or critical successes. Sure, I want them to earn millions at the box office on opening weekend, but it doesn’t always work out that way. I show up on time, prepared and ready to go. I remember my lines, hit my marks, and deliver my performance to the best of my ability, with all the heart, authenticity, and emotion that the role requires. I work well with my co-workers, shoot the stills, go on the press junkets, and do everything I can to promote the movie in every possible way. I can’t say what the studio does or what the director, producer, or some other actor does, but I sleep at night knowing I did my best. If a particular movie doesn’t go so well, I can’t say anything about the audience. Maybe ours was released in eight hundred theaters and another one was released on the same day in two thousand theaters. But two years later, if people find it on cable and decide it’s their favorite movie from me, I’ll know it’s because I did my best. It’s going to show.

  It might not be when or how you want it to happen, but you don’t have to feel bad about it. Try your best, then you can let that thing go and try something else. Just be sure to finish what you start. See it all the way through, and don’t give up so easily. It’s human nature to want immediate satisfaction, but sometimes these things work out best on God’s schedule, not your own. And sometimes His plan is a lot more interesting than anything we can come up with ourselves. It’s hard to see it at the time, but maybe losing a job is a blessing, because it frees you up to pursue something that you find more fulfilling. Maybe you wouldn’t have done it if your back hadn’t been against the wall.

  Renaissance Woman

  You don’t have to love just one thing or have only one career. Don’t be like my scared ass friends when we were on tour in Europe. Don’t take the McDonald’s approach to your life’s work. Sure, the familiar is comforting, but it’s also boring. You’ll miss out on so much flavor in life. Order up a few tapas dishes. Taste something new on the menu!

  You can love many things. Give them all the energy, time, love, faith, and strength that you have. Frederick Douglass said that without struggle, there can be no progress. No one ever got ahead by going through the motions. You have to be constantly improving yourself. Make your life the masterpiece you want it to be.

  You are multifaceted. As human beings, we have so many sides to us. Use all of your ability and talent and the knowledge you gained along the way that you didn’t even know you had. Do your homework and step out on the faith and conviction that you can do it, and while you’re at it, send up a few prayers. Ask that your path be guided and directed, and it can happen if you can step out of your own way.

  Learn what you are capable of, and evolve. Knowing who you are doesn’t mean you have to put yourself in a box. A healthy identity has to be given room to breathe and grow.

  I’m not done yet. I will be a work in progress until the day I die. There’s a lot more to this party called life, and I am going to extract all I can until the party’s over. I want to do something great every year and see it through to completion, whether it’s expanding on my acting roles, producing more movies, learning more things, or doing something for others in a way that has a huge impact. I want to learn to fly a plane. I want to write more songs. And many other things besides.

  I’m going to stay on this path of self-discovery, even when it’s a steep uphill climb, just like that mountain that seemed so high, I never thought I’d make it to the top. But I did it, and I did it the way I do everything else—step by step, moment by moment. That’s all you can do. Face each challenge as it comes. Don’t look up and let yourself be defeated before you even start. Just focus on the journey, and before you know it, you’ll get there. And when you finally do make it to the top, you’ll feel so proud and so energized, you’ll be ready to conquer that next mountain. You’ll know that it was worth every stumble and scrape along the way. You’ll also discover that, yes, you are stronger, swifter, and smarter than you think.

  CHAPTER 2

  Beauty

  In diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

  —MAYA ANGELOU

  I was loving the camera, and the camera was loving me. Hot music was thumping on the sound system, scented candles filled the room with a delicious aroma, and the lighting was as clear as the early morning sun. The energy at that photo shoot was electric. People were dancing. But everyone on that set, from the ad executive in charge of the campaign to the assistant in charge of keeping my glass filled with water, was focused on one thing: making my first CoverGirl moment perfect.

  And it was. Earlier that day, I’d spent more than three hours in hair and makeup. The clothes were beautiful. My hair was long, smooth, and glossy. My complexion looked flawless. The makeup artist knew every trick to bring out the brown and golden tones of my skin. He sculpted my cheekbones, perfected my pout, elongated every single one of my lashes, and made my eyes smolder with shadows and liner. I’d done photo shoots with hair and makeup people before, but never like this. The so-called glamour part of my life was always kind of rushed—something I had to squeeze into a jam-packed schedule. But for this picture, they were going to take their time and do it up right. All the attention and primping truly did make me feel like royalty.

  But the best part of the day was seeing those first proofs for the ad. They were gorgeous. It was a whole new look for me—pretty, feminine, almost angelic. I wish every woman could have a moment like that. The photographer brought out all the beauty I thought I always had and then some. He shot me gazing away from the camera, an angle I tend to prefer. There’s something sort of dreamy about those shots that say your mind’s in a different place. You almost want to travel there. It was so gorgeous, and I felt really proud—of CoverGirl for understanding the fact that there are different types of beauty out there besides size zero blond models, and of the example it was going to set for girls who are not the typical ideal of beauty. They were going to look at this ad in some magazine. I could just hear them saying, “Wow, she’s a cover girl; I can be a cover girl! She can sing and act and be a beautiful woman in a magazine, and I can be all those things!”

  It wasn’t so much that this moment was pivotal to my self-esteem. I always felt beautiful in my own way. My CoverGirl moment had an impact in the sense that it boosted my confidence by a few degrees. But I believed it would completely change the lives of millions of girls, and that gave me a thrill. I knew CoverGirl was going to spend a shitload of money on this campaign. This ad was going to be everywhere. It was going to expand the idea of beauty in a way that was long overdue. Young black, Latina, Indian, and Asian girls would see it. The image would be in their faces on a daily basis. Some kid would look at it, have her own life-stopping moment, and say, “Okay, beauty is me.”

  More Shapes, Colors, and Sizes, Please

  When I was coming up, there were no women who looked like me in the media. As a kid, I’d flip through magazines like Essence, Ebony, and Jet, staples in any African-American household, and for the most part the models were light-skinned and skinny. My mom would sometimes bring home Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, where black models were practically nonexistent. I’d flip through these big, thick books, fascinated by all the wonderful products and gorgeous, cutting-edge fashion and accessories. But they were practically devoid of people who looked like me, or my mother, or my aunts—beautiful women in their own right. Maybe there were one or two models who looked like my friends’ Spanish cousins, but that was about it. It kinda hurt that what was suppose
d to be the epitome of all that was desirable and edgy and fashionable had no relevance to me. Nothing was tailored to black women, especially not me and my curvy, darker-skinned sisters. It was as if Madison Avenue was telling us, “This isn’t for you.”

  There are a few more black models today. There are even one or two curvier girls on the magazine covers. But diversity in the fashion industry is all too rare. You still hear stories about photo editors digitizing images beyond recognition. A little airbrushing in the industry is normal and acceptable to some extent. Sometimes you might have a pimple or the lighting has cast a shadow or a piece of clothing has fallen the wrong way. But when they start lightening up the skin of gorgeous black women like Beyoncé or Jordin Sparks, and when they start chopping off the curves and body parts of perfectly normal women to make them look gaunt and sickly, like they did in that Ralph Lauren ad, it’s time to draw the line.

  Every day, girls are being exposed to standards of beauty that aren’t even real. They’re just images manipulated by a photographer. I know, because I see these women—actresses, models, and singers—in the flesh, and they are much more beautiful in their flawed individuality than their cookie-cutter images in a magazine spread. Nor do they look like those distorted paparazzi shots the tabloids like to print. You can make anyone look bad when you shoot them at an unflattering angle. But to say beautiful, healthy women like Tyra Banks or Jennifer Love Hewitt are fat is just sick.

  Hollywood is this unrealistic bubble that doesn’t represent the rest of the country, but its influence has spread far and wide. You see all these actresses starving themselves to look amazing on the red carpet, and the young girls across America who try to emulate that starved physique end up slowly killing themselves. A lot of people in the entertainment business have eating disorders. They get pressured by their agents, producers, and studio executives to lose weight. At all these award dinners and luncheons I get to go to, you almost never see young actresses touch their food. Many have way too much plastic surgery. I don’t knock the profession; it has its place. But people get addicted. So many women, and men, are chasing an ideal of beauty that’s just not cute. What is it that these ladies see in the mirror that would make them think it’s a good idea to blow up their lips with some filler to the point where they look like two hotdogs on their face?

  When you strive for that kind of perfection in your appearance, you end up not looking human. Women lose their individuality, and they look like sisters from the same planet. Girls are taking drugs, diuretics, and laxatives to get thinner and thinner. They’re doing all sorts of things to themselves short of mutilation in their quest to look like Angelina Jolie, and the people behind the magazines and blogs are perpetuating this madness as they sit and judge every little hair that’s out of place. It sets a terrible precedent for the rest of women and girls. When you give way to this kind of obsession with your looks, you miss out on what true beauty is.

  Perfectly Imperfect

  To me, real beauty has nothing to do with perfection. It’s those little flaws we have in our faces that make us memorable. It’s like a great jazz performance, when a horn or saxophone cracks a bit in one spot. Or one of those rare times Aretha Franklin hits a note that’s ever so slightly off. Those are my favorite parts. It isn’t perfect, and that’s okay. It’s all part of the charm. The way it is, flaws and all, is special, and that’s better than perfect. Not only do these tiny imperfections highlight how brilliant the rest of the performance is, they remind me that the artist is human, and that makes their music even more beautiful to my ears.

  Leave It Alone!

  The most beautiful picture of Mary J. Blige I ever saw was the one on the cover of her album Mary. It’s a black-and-white shot of her in profile, and it shows the scar she has running down from her left eye to the top of her cheekbone. Usually that little mark gets airbrushed out, but the fact that they left it alone is what makes this image so unforgettable.

  For the most part, I’ve been fortunate that photographers have not gone crazy and digitized my image beyond recognition. But I have had issues with the scar on my forehead. Sometimes I have to fight to make sure they leave it alone. I got that scar when I was three years old playing tag with my brother. I tripped and fell, hitting my forehead on the corner of the bathroom door frame on the way down. Not long after that, I was running into my aunt’s house when I tripped and landed face-first on the stairs, in the exact same spot where I’d injured myself before. I had to have three stitches. But that scar reminds me of my childhood and the fun times I had with my brother. It’s part of who I am. I love that scar!

  I wish every woman would learn to love herself and embrace what she was given naturally, even her small imperfections. The point is to be healthy, feel good in your own skin, and play up your best assets. Whether you’re short or tall, thick or thin, the beauty comes from how you carry yourself, how you care for your appearance, and the inner glow that confidence brings. A girl can be born plain, but if she believes herself to be gorgeous, she can be the sexiest woman in the room.

  When your self-confidence is low, it’s all too easy to internalize what you see or don’t see in the media. I was fortunate enough to have a foundation of self-love instilled by parents who constantly told me how beautiful and special I was. As a little girl, I never wondered whether I was beautiful or not. I knew I wasn’t pretty in the conventional sense, and all the Dark and Lovely in the world wasn’t going to get my hair straight, but I liked myself plenty.

  I was athletic and big-boned. All limbs. I was always running around, getting scraped up, ripping up my dresses, and losing my hair clips, but inside I felt every inch a girl. When my cousin Sharonda showed me her father’s book of Muslim names and I came across “Latifah,” I decided that had to be my new name, because it meant “delicate, sensitive, and kind.” That was exactly how I felt inside.

  Who You Callin’ a Tomboy?

  But at every stage in life, people come along who test your self-esteem. There’s always going to be someone who’s going to try to tear you down. Self-love is something we have to work hard at every day. As filled as I was with love at home, outside in the world of schoolyards and Newark streets it was a different story. In fourth grade I changed schools, and I was very much the new kid trying to join in at recess. Instead of playing hopscotch or drawing on the concrete like the other girls, I was drawn to whatever sports the boys were playing, whether it was football, softball, or basketball. I’d always played these sports with my dad and my big brother, and I was good at all of them. But that didn’t seem to matter to my new classmates. They’d all been together since kindergarten, and they were determined to let me know my place. There was a kid named Andrew, a typical alpha male, and he put himself in charge of all the sports teams. When it came time to pick the players, he’d always choose me last, if at all. Boys are under their own pressures from their peers. They don’t want some girl showing them up and getting a basket or a hit on them, and I guess the fact that I was so competitive in sports made me a threat.

  Pretty soon, the boys in school started calling me a tomboy, and they didn’t mean it in a gentle, teasing kind of way. They were saying straight out that I somehow wanted to be a boy and that I wasn’t pretty or cute the way a regular girl should be. I hated that word, and I couldn’t fathom why they were saying it to me. It especially hurt when Wink called me that. (It soon stopped when he realized how much it upset me.) One day I felt so bad, I came home to my mother, crying, “Ma, why are they calling me a tomboy?”

  My mother said, “Dana honey, you’re not a tomboy. You’re just athletically inclined.”

  Now, try telling that to a bunch of schoolkids on a blacktop in New Jersey. But the next time the taunts came, I did just that. I told Andrew, “I’m not a tomboy, I’m athletically inclined!” Of course, it didn’t go over too well. But I said it with all the backbone I could muster. At first, he looked dumbfounded. Then he laughed, and the whole schoolyard joined in. But this was what I
had to do. It was more an idea for me to have in my own mind. With all my nine-year-old wisdom, I decided I was not going to feed into what people said about who I was. I was not going to let other kids define me. I chose instead to define myself, even if it was in a completely ridiculous way. And guess what? Pretty soon after that, other kids started picking me first to play on their teams.

  Self-esteem starts early in life. We begin with a clean slate, but it gets junked up fast. As children, we are so vulnerable to the stereotypes people want to heap on us. It seems like everyone has an idea of how we’re supposed to be from the time we can crawl. This is especially true for girls. All too often, our self-esteem is tied up in our looks. Our bodies get scrutinized and criticized from the minute we start developing. And when we’re a little thicker than the feminine ideal dictates, it’s even worse. That’s why we need to be strong and love ourselves for the fact that we are about so much more than our looks.

  Love Yourself

  Gabby Sidibe, the star of Precious, plays a character who’s tortured by the people around her for the way she looks, but in real life she’s bubbly and happy, nothing like the character she plays. I love what she has to say about this: “I sleep with myself every night and I wake up with myself every morning, and if I don’t like myself, there’s no reason to even live the life. I love the way I look. I’m fine with it. And if my body changes, I’ll be fine with that.”

  The more people like her express that message, the more girls who come after us will believe it, and at an earlier age. This is wisdom that could change the world if we live it every day.

  But even when we’re blessed with Gabby’s hard-won self-confidence, there will be moments when we fall prey to low self-esteem. Anyone who says she’s confident 100 percent of the time is either fronting or delusional. It’s okay to have some ups and downs. I do.