by Terrence J
“My life is over,” she moaned. “It’s like—that whole vision I had, of the three of us raising a family together and me studying fashion and Sean stepping up and being the dad? Wow. I was so stupid.”
“You weren’t stupid, just optimistic. At least you had a vision.”
“Same thing.” Her voice on the other end of the line was high-pitched and screechy.
I suddenly had a vision of what it was like to be the parent of a teenage girl: very frustrating. “Come on, now. Visions aren’t stupid. Anyway—you and Sean always seemed to want different things. Maybe it’s good that you are going to be able to pursue some new directions on your own.”
“Pursue new directions? Why bother pursuing anything? Oh, and listen to this—my grandma wants me and Tyler to move out. Says a one-bedroom is just too small for all three of us. So now I’m jobless, loveless, and about to be homeless. I give up.”
Who was this girl? “You can’t give up. Remember—your personal legend?”
“I’ve got nothing. Nothing.”
“You’ve got Tyler. And you’ve got yourself. That’s not nothing.”
“Easy for you to say.”
Though I could understand why she felt this way, I knew this whiny attitude wasn’t going to get her very far. It was frightening to listen to Tiffany talk like this—all these months, despite her very real moments of setback and frustration, she’d always had an upbeat attitude. Now that was gone, replaced by a sense of defeat. But I had to confess that the tone in her voice sounded familiar to me. It sounded suspiciously like how I had sounded when I had a rough time in my midtwenties. And I realized that what she needed was context.
My mom always taught me that putting others first helps you get yourself where you want to go in life—that sometimes, instead of complaining about how bad you have it, you need to look around and remember how much worse it could be. This advice had helped lift me up at a time when I needed it the most. Maybe it was a lesson that could help Tiffany now, too.
ON TUESDAY, JANUARY 12, 2010, a massive earthquake struck Haiti. In less than a minute, the island as we know it was utterly destroyed. A quarter of a million homes were obliterated. Thirty thousand more buildings collapsed, including the Presidential Palace, the National Assembly, and the local United Nations headquarters. The earthquake left 3 million people suffering, 1.5 million homeless (17 percent of the population!)—and more than 316,000 dead.
On the day of the earthquake, I was sitting in my dressing room on the set of 106 & Park, at the all-time low of my adult life. It had not been a good winter for me.
On the personal front, I was going through a miserable breakup. There’s always one breakup in a man’s life that really tears him down. This one was completely my fault due to cheating, and it really had an effect on me. And on the work front, 106 & Park was going through some turmoil. Rocsi and I had replaced two iconic hosts, AJ and Free, and a lot of people hated us just because we weren’t them. Living up to the expectations of a number one show was really hard. Bloggers destroyed us, commenters said they hated us, rumors floated about the fate of the show. Ratings dipped, and there were rumors that the show would be canceled.
In addition to all this, I had created one of my biggest problems myself. My finances were a mess. When I first came to 106 & Park, I thought I’d made it to the top of the food chain, hanging out with celebrities every day. I was doing well for myself—a nice six-figure salary, enough to pay my bills and college loans—but after taxes took their bite, it went fast. And I was hanging around multimillionaires, some barely even out of their teens.
I got sucked into the typical “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality of the entertainment industry. I’d go to a nightclub on a Tuesday, and blow $1,200 on bottle service, just so I could be one of those guys with the sparklers going off and the girls at their table. I went and bought myself chains, an Escalade, an apartment. I treated friends and strangers to fancy dinners.
I couldn’t afford any of it. I had great friends and advisers who warned me that I needed to live within my means—mentors like Mike Kyser (president of Atlantic Records) and Chaka Zulu (head of DTP Records). “Pace yourself,” Mike Kyser would tell me. “Don’t try to show off.” Chaka would say, “Save your money, let your money grow.” But I didn’t listen: I wanted to be living the life, like the guys I encountered every day.
In my first year, I even went to meet with Diddy, one of the first people to take me under his wing, He told me that “work ethic comes first. I live the way I live because of the work I put into my business.”
Still, the message didn’t resonate. Not yet. I thought that I got the things first, and that those things would perpetuate the success, instead of the other way around.
To make matters even worse, I had no clue how to do my own taxes as an independent contractor. I had no financial manager; I didn’t understand fundamental economics. And thanks to the market crash and housing downturn, the condo I’d bought was turning out to be a bad investment. I even had to turn my car in. I knew what it was like to not have anything, but it’s even more embarrassing when you have something and then you squander it away.
And that’s when I got audited. I owed massive back taxes. By the time the IRS collected what I neglected to pay, I was totally broke. I had absolutely nothing to show for all the money I’d earned. And if girls were at the root of my motivation, all the reckless spending never led to anything good. If anything, the best women I’d dated, the most loyal, had dated me because I was being myself, not trying to be someone I wasn’t.
As a result, I’d spent most of that winter feeling sorry for myself, wanting to give up on everything. And yet I still wasn’t changing my ways; I was still trying to live the life. Everything that I was going through really affected me in a negative way. I was aggressive and angry; I would show up late for work. I was always on edge. At this point I was operating purely off of credit cards, just to keep up the appearance that everything was okay. One night I went to a nightclub and bought a bottle, only to have my card declined. Embarrassed and frustrated, I snapped. As I walked out of the club, I punched the first parked car I saw, hitting it so hard that I shattered a window and messed up my hand. I sat on the ground and looked down at my bleeding fist, and I didn’t know the man I was becoming.
This all led to an incredible amount of stress, which only further complicated my problems. One day, while getting prepared to go onset, my barber, Marshall, noticed a small patch of light skin on my cheek. Unique, our makeup artist, looked at it and recommended that I check it out with a dermatologist. I ignored her suggestion and carried on as usual, figuring the light patch would just go away. Instead, it started to grow. Another blotch appeared on my hand. And then another on my neck. And then around my eyes. Frustrated and concerned, I finally went to get it checked out. My dermatologist diagnosed me with vitiligo.
Vitiligo is a condition that causes depigmentation of sections of skin. My doctor told me that the cause is unknown, but research suggests that vitiligo can be triggered by stress or bodily deficiencies. It’s particularly noticeable in African American skin, and more noticeable whenever you spend any time in the sun. It’s the same condition Michael Jackson was diagnosed with.
More light patches, varying in size and shape, started popping up on my arms, back, and midsection. As the patches appeared, I grew more and more stressed out and depressed. Would they consume me and hinder—or destroy—my career on camera? I literally felt myself falling apart, physically, mentally, and financially.
One morning in early January, my mom called me to check in, and I broke down. She listened in her caring, empathetic way as I laid all my problems out for her.
To this day, I can still remember her words to me at this time: “Whenever you think life is at its worst, you need to take a step back and look at the rest of the world; because someone, somewhere, is going through something a lot worse. If you really stop to take a look at other people’s problems, you’re goin
g to want your own problems back,” she said. “You are so blessed, so talented. There are people all over the world who have so much less than you. Instead of looking at the things you don’t have, you need to focus on the things that you do have.”
She continued: “What you need to do is take time away from your own life to help other people. The more you give, and the more God sees you giving, the more He will bestow upon you. Take your immediate focus off yourself—when it’s not me me me anymore, but others others others, greater things will happen in your life.”
My mom was speaking from experience. She was always thinking about others instead of herself, and had ever since I could remember. It was just in her nature: She would give until she couldn’t give anymore.
On the other end of the line, Tiffany sniffed. “I don’t have anything to give away,” she said. “I have no money. I can’t even pay my own bills.”
“It isn’t necessarily about money,” I responded. “There are lots of ways to help others that aren’t about money.”
My mother was always donating to local charities—like the Salvation Army, Goodwill, and the local libraries. She helped out with church drives and holiday car washes. But even more inspiring was the way she was constantly helping out the people in our community. If a neighbor’s lawn mower was broken—a big deal when you live on an acre of grass and it’s the middle of a hot North Carolina summer—my mom would simply drive her own mower across the street and take care of it herself. When a friend landed in financial trouble and was worried about paying for groceries, my mom helped her find a meal delivery program. If kids were selling Girl Scout cookies, my mom would buy three boxes. When a friend’s kid headed off to college, she would give them $50 to buy books. If a lonely old lady stopped her in the grocery store, just wanting someone to talk to, my mom would sit and chat with her as if she had all the time in the world to spend talking to a needy stranger.
As my mom puts it, “That’s what the world is about—trying to help people out the best you can.”
It is the little things that count, sometimes. I remember in high school, a friend of mine desperately wanted her driver’s license. But she lived with her grandmother, who didn’t have a car; so she had no way of learning. My mom volunteered to teach her how to drive using her own car. She took my friend down to a local mall and spent hours letting her practice her parallel parking and left-hand turns in the parking lot.
Even animals were the recipients of her largesse. Her philosophy was that food should never be wasted; so the leftovers we didn’t or couldn’t eat were given to the local animals. She left stale bread and leftover stew by the back door so often that our house was a regular parade of cats, squirrels, possums, rabbits, and deer.
“We are stewards. It’s our responsibility to take care of anything we have the ability to take care of.” I can’t remember the number of times she said these words when I was growing up. And I took lessons from her example.
At the radio stations where I’d worked, I had my first exposure to the idea of community giving. Radio stations are constantly doing all kinds of drives: turkey drives, coat drives, raising money for AIDS research. In high school and college, through my work with the radio stations, I was constantly involved with community fund-raising. After I saw what an impact the Unity March that I participated in had on our college community, I began volunteering to go out to talk to high school students about the need to end violence among young people.
And then, when I joined Omega Psi Phi, I was introduced to an amazing organization: the Boys & Girls Club. Our fraternity was heavily involved with the local chapter, and we raised money for PlayStations for their game room. Soon, I found myself mentoring kids and speaking at Boys & Girls Club events. It was the beginning of a relationship that I value to this day.
In New York City, working for BET, I was still volunteering occasionally with the Boys & Girls Club. But by January of 2010, when my mom laid her lecture on me, I was spending a lot more time worrying about my own life than worrying about anyone else’s. I’d watched Rocsi do charity work in her hometown of New Orleans, and told myself that I was also doing my part to help others, but honestly, any charity work I was doing now was done out of a sense of obligation or for an event. I hadn’t taken it upon myself to get actively engaged in a community on my own.
I heard what my mom said that day, but I didn’t really absorb it. Instead, I went on feeling sorry for myself, completely distracted by the issues of my life. Instead of trying to figure out a better way to give back, I spent my time and money on buying expensive sneakers and ordering bottle service at nightclubs.
And then the earthquake happened.
On the day of the Haiti earthquake, the entire staff of BET immediately jumped into action, including us over at 106 & Park. My job that day was to go on television and spread the word about what was taking place in the Caribbean, off the coast of Cuba. Many of our viewers had relatives in Haiti, and much of what I was doing consisted of delivering messages for people in Haiti who wanted their families in America to know they were safe. The phones may have been down, but certain messages were getting to media outlets; at BET, we spent all day collecting names and news and then going on live TV to share what we’d learned.
“The Joseph family in Port-au-Prince is alive—they have no power and no lights, but they are alive,” I would read. “The Duval family wants everyone in New York City to know they are doing okay.”
As I delivered these messages, giving our viewers these precious bits of information, I grew more and more engulfed in the story. The news kept pouring in, along with the first images of the devastated country. My contributions to the crisis in Haiti began to feel negligible at best—sure, I was helping disseminate the news, passing on critical messages, but couldn’t I be doing more? Millions of people were dead, homeless, helpless. Every message on the television was from organizations like the Red Cross asking people to donate time, donate money, donate resources, donate help.
As I watched the news reports live from Haiti, I felt like the newscasters were talking to me. My mom’s words earlier that month began to resonate. “Whenever you think life is at its worst, you need to take a step back and look at the rest of the world; because someone, somewhere, is going through something a lot worse.” Well, it couldn’t get much worse than what they had going on in Haiti. My own problems were laughable in comparison.
“I remember seeing that, on TV,” Tiffany said. She suddenly sounded chastened. “It looked awful.”
“In person it was even worse than you could have imagined, but I’ll get to that.”
This was the opportunity my mom was talking about. It was time to step out of my comfort zone, time to put aside the bullshit that was in my life. It was time—as my mom had put it—to make my life about “others others others.” But there was so much to be done in Haiti—what exactly could I offer?
The answer didn’t come to me immediately. It took a few months for me to realize what I wanted to do. Finally, I marched into my boss’s office and asked for a leave of absence. I was going to go to Haiti.
Over the course of the next three months, Fred and I organized a trip to Haiti with three of our best friends—an old friend named Jamel, a coworker named Deirdre, and my cameraman pal Dave. We bought plane tickets, using our own money. At the time, there were so many organizations with shady reps working out of Haiti that it was difficult to know who to align ourselves with. So we decided to wing it instead—we would have a direct, personal response with whatever Haitians we encountered. We would offer some actual help on the ground, and—using Dave’s camera—document our experience in order to inspire people back home to help out, too.
Before leaving, we raised $10,000 in donations to use to help the people we encountered. And then, we jumped on an airplane to Haiti.
The experience I had there would completely change my perspective on my life, and on the world.
Even before the plane landed, I was already feel
ing inspired. Sitting next to me on the plane was a woman from California named Nicole, who was on her way to teach the people of Haiti how to build their own houses. Her husband was a contractor, and they had collected several hundred thousands of dollars in donated building supplies: wood, hammers, nails, anything you might need to actually build a house. It was the classic concept of “give a man a fish and he’ll eat for one night, but teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for life.” If the people knew how to build their own houses, they wouldn’t be so reliant on the authorities to help them. She impressed me, and I was already excited about the way we might be able to help, too. We decided to team up.
Immediately upon landing, we could see that the environment was way worse than we could have imagined. Flying in, you could see the devastation stretching out into the horizon, no matter in which direction you looked. The cities were rubble, for miles and miles. The tent camps where the people were living looked like giant trash heaps.
After disembarking from the plane, we drove to a tent city on a plot of land three hours outside of Port-au-Prince, where Nicole planned to build two model homes. But when we arrived at the shipping dock at customs where her building materials were being held, we were confronted by a group of Haitian renegades carrying machine guns. Waving the guns in our faces, they said that if we wanted to collect our supplies, it was going to cost $50,000.
As Nicole wept with frustration, we tried to reason with them. It turns out there’s no reasoning with someone with a gun. Their response was “Give us the money or get the fuck out.” (We would later learn that many of the supplies that had been sent to help the people of Haiti were being held in customs, essentially for ransom. In a terrible situation, corruption was making everything worse. Nicole would end up going back to the United States to try to get the government involved, but her supplies were never released.)