Priceless Inspirations

by Antonia Carter

  I couldn’t love and trust anyone until I learned to love and trust myself more. I needed to believe in my own choices. I needed to believe that I could pick the right kind of man for the next part of my life. I needed to become more sure that I could make the right decisions for myself and my daughter before I brought a man who might become her stepfather into our lives.

  I didn’t have a plan for doing this, but, looking back, I see how it happened. Maybe this story can give you some clues for finding a deeper love and trust in yourself, too.

  Learning to Trust Me

  I think I first started to learn to trust myself by accident. It started when Dream and I were married and the relationship wasn’t working. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I had swallowed down so much anger, and I had put up with so much that I just couldn’t take it anymore. Something in me just exploded. I was pissed off about so many things--my relationship, the way people were talking about me, and the lack of support I felt from family and friends. It was all pressing down on me like a heavy weight. It wasn’t so much that I thought to myself, “I’m just gonna trust my feelings on this one.” It was more like, “I’m sick of this crap and I just can’t take anymore.”

  I felt like whatever I did or said next, things couldn’t get any worse. Dream and I were over and I hated living in his shadow. If one more person introduced me as “Dream’s wife” or “Dream’s baby mama” , I was afraid I’d punch them out and end up in jail for assault. I couldn’t live in New Orleans anymore where everyone knew me for that one relationship. I felt like no one cared about me for me, Toya. I finally decided, “To hell with what anybody else thinks. I have to get out of here!”

  It was almost like desperation, or self-preservation. I felt like I had to get out or I would go crazy. I felt like I had to get out or I might die.

  Making that single, desperate decision was when things started to change for me. Like I said, I wasn’t thinking “Gee, Toya, you need to trust yourself more.” It wasn’t like that. What I felt was raw. It came not from my mind, but from a place deep in my heart. When I started thinking and feeling that way, that I would just go crazy if I didn’t do something different, was when I started making decisions just for me. It was when I finally stopped worrying about other people and doing what I felt like I needed to do, and trusting that whatever happened, it would be okay. Making that shift was when I started to feel better about myself, my life and my place in the world.

  Sometimes, after you’ve been through a lot of mess, it’s easier to take the kinds of chances that can change your life. At least that was true for me. All the drama I had been through made me feel like I had to do something, anything, to bring a change. If you’re in a similar situation, use your feelings of being pissed off or fed up to take you to your next destination, whether that destination is a new job, or a new school or, like me, a new city.

  I try to remember that feeling that I had in my heart when I have to make decisions now. I try to find that feeling because it brought me in touch with me, with the real Toya and what I really wanted. Your heart always speaks to you and if you can turn off what other people are saying and listen to it, you’re on the way to trusting yourself.

  Too many of us don’t trust ourselves at all. We’re always going to other people to help us make our choices. We’ve got to call sixteen friends just to decide if we want to go out to dinner or how to spend our own money. I know you know some girls who talk over every single thing with their friends. Everything. You might even be that girl. Or maybe you’re not quite that bad, but when it comes to the big decisions in your life, you find yourself calling other people and looking for guidance. I know I used to be a lot more like that than I am now. I felt like I didn’t know enough to trust my own feelings. As I got older, I realized that, while there are plenty of things I don’t know (and there isn’t anything wrong with asking people who are more knowledgeable for information), the decisions are still mine. I still might reach out for help or even advice from people who have had more experience. At this point in my life though, I know that the opinions of others don’t have to rule my life. If what others say doesn’t feel right or if I don’t have peace about it, I don’t do it.

  Sometimes, this makes people mad, and while I don’t like hurting people’s feelings, there are times when it can’t be helped.

  When Tiny and I first started thinking about doing a TV show, we lost a friend, but the decision wasn’t about intentionally hurting anyone. It was about trusting what we both felt in our hearts.

  Originally, we wanted to do a talk show. I still think that would be fun. There are lots of interesting topics out there, and I think we could do something that everyone could learn from. Me, Tiny and another friend put something together and approached James DuBose of DuBose Entertainment about it. Our idea was that we could do something like The View with the three of us discussing various topics and having on guests, too.

  The folks at DuBose Entertainment had a different idea, a reality show for BET. I thought it was interesting, but I wasn’t ready to decide. BET was just one of the networks we were talking to and while it was an interesting idea, we wanted to see if maybe another network might buy our talk show idea. We went from meeting to meeting with our talk show idea, but most of the other networks weren’t interested at all. When we were done making our pitch, the only other interest came from MTV, but they didn’t like the talk show idea either. Instead, they wanted to do a reality show, too. Their idea was something that focused more the men the three of us had been involved with, particularly on Tiny’s man, who had a movie coming out, and with us ladies as simply background.

  Well, you know for me that was a “no.” By then I’d come to the point where I knew that whatever I did, it had to be as me, Toya. Not as the ex-anything of anybody. I was done with that.

  We hoped that having MTV put something on the table would give us some leverage with DuBose Entertainment and BET to try to do our original talk show idea. It didn’t work the way we planned. They still wanted to do a reality show or no show at all.

  Well, Tiny and I were like, “Okay.” We thought we might shop our idea around a little bit more later and see if things had changed. While we had own ideas about it, we weren’t really pressed or stressed about it. I guess we both had a feeling down deep that it would work out the way it was meant to. We had trust in ourselves, trust in our idea, and trust in God. We were cool with BET having a different idea, but we were just going to think about it a while longer.

  It wasn’t a big deal.

  My other friend freaked out. She went all crazy on the guy, calling him out of his name and throwing her finger in his face. It was not pretty, not at all. When we left out of that meeting, I felt like a bridge had been burned forever.

  Still, I was okay with it. I was disappointed that the talk show idea hadn’t found a home and embarrassed that someone I was so closely associated with had showed her butt so badly, but something inside me trusted that it would all work out.

  Sometime later, DuBose Entertainment and BET called again to say that they wanted to move forward with a reality show concept built around Tiny and me, and without the other girl. I had a moment when I was like “what about my friend” but it only lasted a moment. There was a time when I might have passed up that opportunity if my girl wasn’t included, but I felt inside me that this time taking the show was the right thing to do for me. I didn’t think the girl who was cut out of the cast would be mad about it. I mean, what did she think was going to happen after she went in there and cussed and screamed and carried on? That everyone would just forgive and forget?

  Forgive, maybe, but forget? Would you forget someone coming into your office and disrespecting you? Would that be someone you wanted to work with in the future?

  If I had done that, the only person I would have had to be mad at would have been myself, for real. This girl was mad at everybody. She then proceeded to go on the Internet and try to bash everybody.

&
nbsp; One of the things that experience taught me, though, is that sometimes when you just let go and trust that everything is going to work out, everything does. I had one clear boundary for the whole thing--that whatever we did was about us girls and not about the men we had been involved with. Other than that, I was cool with whatever ended up working out. Sometimes, when you stop trying so hard to “make something happen” and just have some faith, God will do better by you than anything you could have dreamed up on your own. I know that’s been true for me.

  The Mistake I Made That You Shouldn’t

  I spent a lot of years worrying about what other people thought. I was afraid to trust myself until I finally just got fed up. When I finally just said, “enough!” my situation got better. I finally started doing what I wanted to do, without worrying about what anyone else thought about it. I finally started to focus on just me. I started to look for that real, raw feeling down in my heart and using it as my guide. That was the beginning of learning to trust myself, and I wish I’d done it sooner.

  No matter what you do, someone’s always going to be mad about it, so it’s important to realize that in the end, you have to trust yourself enough to do what’s right for you.

  Don’t wait until you’re about to explode before you trust yourself. Don’t make my mistake.

  Toya’s Priceless Gem: Learning to trust yourself means doing what you feel is right for you, even when what’s right for you may make others mad.

  Loving Me

  Everyone always says the greatest love is learning to love yourself. Actually it’s the hardest thing in the world to do, especially when everything seems to be going wrong and people are leaving you right and left. It sometimes seemed to me that I had done so many things wrong that there wasn’t much about me that anyone could love. It also seemed like so many people had walked away from me at one point or the other that there must be something unlovable about me.

  Probably every one reading these words has felt this way--unloved and unlovable. The truth is, when you’re feeling like this, people can talk about “loving yourself” all they want to, but it doesn’t change much. When you’re feeling bad about yourself, it’s not always easy to find anything about yourself that’s worth loving.

  At my lowest points, when I was so in love in Dream and he wasn’t in love with me anymore, or when there were so many haters talking bad about me and it was hard to find true friends, or when Aunt Edwina died and I realized how alone I was in the world, I didn’t love myself. I didn’t even like myself. Since I didn’t like myself, I sometimes made decisions that ended up hurting me.

  It wasn’t until I left New Orleans and moved to Atlanta that I really started to try and figure myself out. Who was I really? If I wasn’t Dream’s girl, or my mother’s daughter, who was I? What did I want to do? What did I have to offer the world, other than being a rapper’s ex?

  For a while, those were really hard questions. I knew what I liked to do—fashion, hair, and helping other people achieve a look that made them feel beautiful and confident, but I didn’t have the confidence to believe that anyone would seek me out for that help. I didn’t even know how to go about putting myself out there as someone with those skills. I could hear people laughing at me: “Toya thinks she’s a stylist, now? She must be tripping!”

  Actually, I was tripping. I was tripping because I didn’t think I was good at anything. I had failed at everything from my high school exit exam to my marriage. How could I think I could succeed in such a competitve industry as fashion styling?

  The only real thing I was absolutely sure I was good at was being a mother.

  I am proud to say that I’m a good mother.

  I’ve made some mistakes, but for the most part, I’ve done pretty good. I can tell by the relationship Reginae and I have. She knows she can talk to me about everything and anything, and she does. She knows I love her, and I tell her every single day. She knows I’m proud of her. She knows there are limits and that while she’s still a child, I will do everything I can, and give everything I have, to protect her and keep her safe. She knows about the serious mistakes I made and that, even though I’ve been able to make lemonade out of the lemons, it wouldn’t be the smartest choice for her to follow in my footsteps.

  I knew I liked fashion and I knew I was a good mother, and as I became more comfortable in Atlanta and started meeting more and more people, I began to realize another thing that I was good at--I’m a good and loyal friend.

  It’s true. I started meeting people and making friends. Sometimes I met them at events that I was invited to, and sometimes it was just doing errands, or at the hair salon. People seemed comfortable with me, and they told me their stories. I shared with them some of the things I’d been through.

  I began to see myself as family-oriented and realized that I had really tried to help my relatives. Sometimes that got me into trouble. I tried too hard to please people who didn’t have my best interests at heart, but the spirit of it was a good thing.

  I began to see myself as a good person. I was a person who had made some mistakes, and I was a person who had weaknesses and faults, but I was a good person, a person I liked, and a person who tried hard and was honest, loyal and real.

  Two years ago, I had the words “I love me” tattooed on my finger. It was my reminder to myself to treat myself like I was as priceless as my name. It was my reminder that I was a gem, and that the time for making decisions for my life that were wrapped up in what other people thought or wanted was over.

  I had finally decided to make my life about me.

  It hasn’t been easy, but little by little, I’ve started to recognize more and more of my good qualities. I’ve started to feel better about myself. Feeling better about myself has helped me to reach for new opportunities. Reaching for new opportunities has helped me to see that I was capable of so much more than I thought I was when I was sitting in my house in New Orleans, wondering why Dream didn’t love me anymore. I started to make friends who saw all my good qualities. They’ve praised them in me. It’s been like a snowball--the more confident I felt, the more new things I tried. The more new things I tried, the more new people I met. The more new people I met, the more new things I learned. The more new things I learned, the more I liked myself. The more I liked myself, the more confident I felt. The more confident I felt, the more new things I was willing to try.

  I made new goals for myself. One of them was to try to do more fashion styling and to hold fashion shows. Another was to open a boutique. I got the opportunity to try styling on Tiny and Toya, and I know I’m going to be doing more of it. I’ll be hosting more fashion shows in the community at my boutique, The Garb.

  I’m really, really proud of the store because it’s something I’ve wanted to do for the longest time, and it’s something I’m doing 100% on my own. For years, I tried to open the store, but I thought I needed either the financial backing or assistance from my ex. One thing and then another seem to keep it from ever happening.

  Finally, The Garb is open on Magazine Street in New Orleans, and I did it all myself. In addition to offering high-style at recession prices, it even has a section that includes a little bit from my own wardrobe called “Toya’s Closet” where you can buy dresses I wore on the red carpet or outfits that I’ve been photographed in.

  I’m proud of it, and I’m proud of me.

  The other really big goal that I set for myself was to write this book, and as you can see, I’ve done that, too. I’m proud of it, and I’m proud of me. Not in a conceited way, but because I set a goal for myself and I accomplished it.

  Finally, I really started to see myself as loving and lovable, and once I started to see myself as loving and lovable, love came to me.

  The Mistake I Made That You Shouldn’t

  For a long time I believed that I was only lovable when someone was in love with me, or when I felt the love coming to me from others. I wish I’d realized sooner that being in a relationship isn’t what makes
you lovable. Instead, it’s what you have in your heart, what you give to other people and how you use all the qualities and abilities that you have that are gifts from God.

  I was lovable even when no one loved me, and now I know that. By exploring new things and new places, I’ve discovered things about myself that I like and strengths I didn’t know I had. I’ve learned to love myself for who I am, and Ioving myself has made it easier for me to love others.

  Toya’s Priceless Gem: Starting to love yourself means looking at the things you’re good at, at the qualities you’re proud of and the good you do for other people in the world. Every time you find things you like about yourself, you come closer to realizing that you are a priceless gem, and to learning to love yourself for exactly who you are!

  Loving and Trusting Others

  I’ve been hurt enough times in relationships to be real suspicious about men. When I meet a new guy, I hesitate. Lots of things run through my mind: What’s his motive? Is he a player? Is he looking to get famous or to use me? Is he dangerous? My life has given me reason to be suspicious.

  I’ve had plenty of dealings with people whose motives with me weren’t good. I’ve had my share of bad experiences with men who just wanted to be with all the girls and who weren’t interested in building anything serious with just me.

  I’ve met plenty of guys who, as soon as they found out a little about me, wanted to use me to get famous. They wanted me to hook them up with the people I’m associated with, but after that, they weren’t really interested in getting to know me.

  After being followed by a stalker fan, I have learned to be cautious about the people I meet casually in public. I couldn’t take the chance that someone who saw me on TV and claimed to “love me” might get too close to me or my daughter.