And I don’t feel bad about it. I can’t. Even if I had that money to give, I don’t think it would have been a good thing for this guy. Sometimes you enable people when you give to them. I have a cousin who is on drugs. A lot of people face this in their families, whether they choose to admit it or not. It’s either drugs, or it’s alcohol, or both. When they ask you for money, it’s almost easier to give it to them. In your mind, you think you’re actually helping this person out. But deep down in your heart, you know that $20 is going toward buying drugs, and what you are actually doing is hurting that person. They need to hit rock bottom so they can stand back up on their own. But if you’re floating them, you’re not helping them get to that point. They’re just cruising along on your dime. If anything, you’re helping to prolong the problem. You need to give them some tough love. It’s the same for anyone in your life who’s using your money to avoid facing their own responsibilities, even if it’s just a taker friend who expects other people to help sponsor his lifestyle. If you keep subsidizing them, they’ll never grow up.
My friend went on to do very well for himself, and I’m happy for him. We never talk about what happened, but we’re fine now. There are always going to be different kinds of friends in your life. You have your intimate friends, your work friends, the people you know you’re going to party and laugh with but you don’t completely trust, and that’s okay. But you have to guard your heart. You have to know who to keep at arm’s length and when to protect yourself, even if that means losing a friend or two. If all they want is what they can get out of you, maybe they weren’t such good friends after all.
This is just as true with female friends as it is with male friends. Not everyone’s a sista. Women excel at tearing each other down. Men aren’t nearly as complicated. If they like you, they’ll hang out with you, and if they don’t, they won’t. But girls can be so competitive with each other. It stems from basic insecurity. If two attractive women can come together as friends without an agenda, it’s because they already have high self-esteem. They’ll party and flirt with men together and go home at the end of the night as buddies. But lots of friendships aren’t as supportive and easygoing as you might think. There are girls who have to have that fat funny friend who entertains them and makes them look good when they’re out together. They don’t want the competition of someone who is much prettier than they are. Or they have the sidekick who’s less successful or smart. Or they use you to cry about a bad relationship, then dump you the minute things get better with their man. Girlfriends have all these subtle little ways of using each other to prop themselves up. That’s okay up to a point, but you have to know when to walk away.
People Are Gonna Let You Down
That’s harder to do when you’re younger and the line between social acceptance and self-acceptance gets blurred. My mom has seen so many examples of girls who get talked into some incredibly destructive behavior by their peer groups. Whatever one girl is into, she’ll talk her friends into doing the same because she doesn’t want to go it alone. The more people she drags along on her hellride, the better she feels about herself and what she’s doing. There’s the usual stuff, like doing drugs, getting drunk, and having sex before you’re ready. Somehow girls have decided among themselves that sex is the new goodnight kiss. But there are other disturbing trends going on around the country—junior high and high school girls recruiting each other to perform sex acts for money or drugs. I mean, fourteen-year-old girls are pretending to be friends with other girls and trading them off to their dealers like pieces of junk. In return, these pimps or dealers give them dope or money for sex. And this is all happening in middle-class neighborhoods, among girls from good homes with nice families. Ladies, please! What’s happening in a girl’s life that could lead her down this path?
I know it’s hard to let go of friendships. When you’re out with your crew, that’s your world. It doesn’t seem like anything else is out there. But you have to shed those toxic friends for the sake of your soul. The older you get, the more you’ll realize that friends come and go. The true ones who really have your back will stick around for life, and that’s all you need.
I used to be more tolerant of the friends who aren’t really friends, but now I don’t have time for it. I prefer the company of those who keep it real. I know what signs to look for: “Money problems and mood swings / Situations where certain people will do things.” We don’t need that. Life is complicated enough without the treachery of fake friends. Sure, we need people in our lives, and we need to keep our hearts open. But there has to be give and take, loyalty and sincerity, love and support. They have to pass a few litmus tests.
I’ve seen enough takers to spot them a mile off. There was someone in my circle who had a history of borrowing money off his friends, including me, and he was perfectly comfortable with not paying it back. I could never do that. The thought of owing somebody something would weird me out. I could never talk to that person without thinking, “Oh, he’s thinking about the money I owe him and he wants it back.” But some people are okay with being takers. This guy borrowed several thousand dollars from a girlfriend of mine. Meanwhile, I helped him get a job, and he started making lots of money. She’d see him around town, driving a fancy new car, owing all these people money, including her. Of course he never paid her back.
I don’t mind helping people out or treating them when we’re all out having a good ol’ time. If I want to bring a bunch of friends along, and not everyone can afford it, it benefits me to pay for everyone, because I’m also having fun and enjoying the company. That’s fair enough. My level of fun isn’t always in everyone’s budget. But after a while, you do start to notice the people who never reach for their wallets. You buy bottles of tequila for everyone, and there are certain people who are always the ones drinking the most, but they don’t even offer to stand you one drink. These are moochers, and you should be wary of them. It’s like in that episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Christian Slater is at a party eating all the caviar. Larry David tells him he has no caviar etiquette. He’s just tearing into this dish like it’s his own private stash, and it’s probably worth hundreds of dollars. You just don’t do that!
You Live and You Learn
The takers come in all forms, and it’s not just about money. If you let them, people will take advantage of your time, your connections, your love, your body, and your soul. I wrote a song about this on my album Persona, called “People.” It talks about the pitfalls of fame and the people who want to use you to get ahead: “Some they got they hands out even after you feed ’em / But they never around when you need ’em.” But they’re still just people. There’s good and bad in all of us. It’s up to you to expect nothing from others. Be aware of their motives, and move past it when they disappoint. It’s also up to you to keep your radar up and be strong.
You almost have to step outside yourself and look at you as if you were someone else you really care about and really want to protect. Would you let someone take advantage of that person? Would you let someone use that person you really care about? Or would you speak up for them? If it was someone else you care about, you’d say something. I know you would. Okay, now put yourself back in that body. That person is you. Stand up and tell ’em, “Enough!”
Of course, I have to learn to take my own advice. It’s hard enough for women in general to set boundaries. We’re trained to give. We watch our mothers putting everyone first and themselves last. No wonder we have a tough time with the “no” word. Then there are the girls who’ve been sexually abused or molested. This problem is chronic. One out of four girls in America. That’s a stunning statistic. Imagine, you pass by four girls walking down the street, laughing and giggling in their jeans and sneakers, and one of them has been inappropriately touched and emotionally scarred by some man—a stranger, a friend of the family, a relative, her father. She can’t say no. She doesn’t have a choice. Or maybe she’s been told she doesn’t have a choice, because this is
a person in a position of authority. He tells her she’ll be in trouble, or no one will believe her if she says anything. I have a friend who was molested by a relative for years. She tried telling people, but no one did believe her. People see what they want to see. Too much knowledge makes them uncomfortable. We don’t create an environment where these girls feel safe about coming forward to a teacher or a parent or the police. They’re ashamed and afraid they’ll get shot down, so they suffer in silence for years.
I was one of those girls. When I was five years old, I was molested by the fifteen-year-old boy who was babysitting me at the time. He was not my regular babysitter. He was a shy kid from the neighborhood my dad trusted and sort of took under his wing. It went on for about a week, maybe two. But that was more than long enough to scar me for the rest of my life. That episode, and another incident a couple of years later, when I was out playing and a pervert touched me inappropriately, did some damage. I kept it locked up inside me for the next twenty years. After my brother died, I just couldn’t carry it all, so I finally told my parents. My mother was devastated. She was a country girl, so at the time it happened she just wasn’t up to how slick people could be. When I told my dad, he said nothing. He didn’t respond. He was so furious at the person who would do that to his baby girl, his face went stone cold. It rocked his world that this was someone he put faith in. He was a cop, and very much a man of action, so I wasn’t sure what he was going to do about it. It was scary.
I don’t know why I didn’t tell them at the time it happened. They were always very open with me. They made it easy for me to come to them about a lot of things, and no subjects were off-limits. They always did their best to be honest with me. But I just buried it as deeply as I could. There are a bunch of feelings that come with something like that: confusion, guilt, shame, grief, fear. You think somehow it was your fault. It really messes you up.
A few years ago, I finally started talking to a therapist about it. Black people tend to shy away from therapy. They believe you just suck it up and deal with it. But sometimes you need to talk to someone who’ll listen and care, with no agenda. I first started seeing someone to help process the grief over my brother’s death. I was having trouble tapping into some feelings for a really tough role in a movie, so my friend Jada Pinkett Smith recommended someone, and this woman really helped me. Now I have a guy who’s guided me through a lot of difficult periods of my life. He’s the one who finally helped me get a handle on the abuse, how it’s affected me, and how I have to forgive myself.
He said: “Imagine yourself as an adult and think about what an adult can do to you. Can they beat you? Can they defeat you? No. Now, imagine yourself as that child.” That really helped me get a perspective on what happened to me. I was just a baby. I had no power or control over the situation. I wish I’d said something sooner, because I always wondered, “Did he do that to someone else?” But at the time it happened, it was all way beyond my comprehension. When I was old enough to understand, the time for action had passed.
I stopped blaming myself, because I realized that I was totally being taken advantage of. My guilt came from the fact that I didn’t scream or run right back to my parents and tell them. They explained my body parts to me, they told me not to talk to strangers. They communicated to me as much as they possibly could. But I still had the mind of a child. And this was a babysitter, not a stranger. He was someone with authority over me, someone who had been entrusted with my care. To a five-year-old, that’s a confusing situation. You think you are smart enough and you are doing the right thing, but you are being taken advantage of by someone bigger, stronger, and depraved enough to manipulate and violate a child.
I don’t know how this affects other women. I can’t speak for everyone. But I would imagine, if there’s a repeat pattern of abuse, a lot of girls end up gravitating toward abusive relationships, because it’s what they know. They get locked in a cycle of victimhood, and their boundaries get broken over and over again.
Fight Back
In my case, it was the opposite. The older I got, and the more I was able to protect myself, the more I did protect myself. When I was about ten years old and we first moved into our house on Littleton Avenue from the projects, my mother sent me to the corner to buy some milk, and on my way home some man on the street tried to grab my behind. Now, I was big for my age, and I started developing early, but I was still clearly a child. And I was heated. I’d been violated once before, and no way, nohow, was it gonna happen again. I mustered all the strength I could and slapped him in the face so hard, I left a nice red mark on his cheek. He swung right back at me, and I went running home with a black eye, but I was proud of myself. I fought back.
When my mom saw my face, she was horrified, but then I told her what happened. She was proud of the way I fought back. The fact that her little girl had the courage to stand up when lines were crossed gave her comfort. She told a neighbor, whose son was known and respected among the different crews in the area, and he went with me and my mother around the streets of our community, stepping on corners and knocking on doors to tell certain people, “You see this girl? She’s off-limits! Don’t touch, or you answer to me!”
By the time I hit my teens, I was very aware of personal boundaries. I went through a promiscuous phase. I was sexually curious at an early age, which tends to happen when you get introduced to things you shouldn’t even know about when you’re a child. But when I did experiment, I was in control, or at least I thought I was. Emotionally, I kept everyone at a distance.
That hurt me in my dating life. I had boyfriends, but between the sexual abuse and my parents separating and eventually divorcing, I didn’t have much faith in relationships. I definitely didn’t trust guys. Sure, there were great men in my life, like my father and my brother and a lot of platonic male friends and even a few boyfriends; but after what happened to me, I was convinced that romantically, things just weren’t meant to work out. I had a certain confusion in my relationships and major commitment issues. I could have been married a long time ago had I not been so self-protective. In my personal life, I didn’t just have boundaries, I had ten-foot walls!
I’m getting better at it, but dating has always been my Achilles’ heel. I was able to excel at other stuff much more easily. I had a clearer understanding of what to do in order to make things happen. But when it came to my personal life, in my mind I made it much more complicated than it needed to be. And it didn’t help that I would watch men with a certain eye, especially when they were around kids. I know plenty of guys who are great with kids, and wonderful parents, but I still take an extra look at people. If I see a little girl on a man’s lap, and I think she’s been there a little too long, I get suspicious, especially if he’s not the father. I just don’t trust it. I’ve been through it, and I know how subtle and sneaky sexual deviance can be. These guys always have this in the backs of their minds, and they’re always looking for opportunities to act out those ideas on some kid. Most people don’t think that way, but once you know, you know, and in a lot of ways I wish I didn’t have that knowledge.
As a result of all that happened to me early in life, my personal boundaries are a little too strong at times, yet I allow my business boundaries to get broken all the time. (I tend to go in extremes.) I’m better about saying no, but it’s a constant balancing act, and when things get out of whack, it can really mess me up.
About six years ago, after Chicago, my career was going gangbusters, and Shakim and I were saying yes to just about every opportunity that came our way. I worked three times harder than I ever had in my life, and I’d always worked pretty hard to begin with. I was doing two or three movies a year, plus my music career, and multiple endorsement deals, including my CoverGirl partnership. For three years, I did not take a vacation. The most I could get was a Sunday off, but even then my phone was always ringing. It got to the point where I was constantly exhausted. But I still had to get up, put on a happy face, do the interviews, make th
e appearances, turn up at the award shows. I had all these things to do, and there was no way I could get out of doing them if I really wanted to make these different branches of my career a success. If you want certain things in life, you have to show up, no matter how you are feeling that day.
To deal with the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to take a break in the middle of all this, I started to drink. I began to have a few drinks at night just to unwind. But the amount I was drinking increased over time. This can happen to a lot of people who do what I do. When you’re on a set fourteen hours a day for three to six months straight, there’s no time to unwind. You come home late at night, then go back out to the set early the next morning. In between, alcohol becomes a way to unwind. Add to that the fact that acting wasn’t my only job. On weekends, I had my business to run and a music career to maintain. It didn’t stop. Because I was working so hard, I felt entitled to party hard. But it was getting out of control, and I was losing Dana Owens under all of that.
Finally, Shakim said something: “Dana, are you okay?” He’d noticed my drinking, and he was getting worried. “You know there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. I just want to make sure you’re all right.”
“You know what, Sha, I don’t think I am okay. As a matter of fact, I think I may be drowning over here.”
That conversation gave us the opportunity to check in with each other. We had a real heart-to-heart, and I expressed everything I was feeling about my life and how I felt that it wasn’t even my life anymore, because I was living on everyone else’s schedule. He shared a few of the things that he was going through, and we came together as friends. We decided we would make some changes. One major change was that I was going to start taking vacations. I was going to do what the Italians do and take off the entire month of August. They’ve got it right. They take breaks in the middle of the day, eat good food, and enjoy a nice glass of wine. They take time off to decompress and enjoy life.
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