Life Is Not a Fairy Tale (10 page)

The record deal at J Records seemed like some kind of dream that I would be livin’ in. Clive Davis is the man who discovered some of the most unique and unforgettable voices in music: Whitney Houston, Toni Braxton, Alicia Keys, Carlos Santana, and Bruce Springsteen. Was he the one person that God wanted to hear me?

The fact that Clive Davis heard me, met me, and wanted to work with me was beyond belief. I had met Mr. Davis once before in the Top 3 competition. He had been one of the guest judges for this round. He came backstage before the performance and met the three final contestants. He shook hands with Diana DeGarmo and Jasmine Trias and then he came over to me. I expected him to shake my hand as he did the others. Instead, he looked at me and said, “I want you to go out there and sing like you ain’t never sang before.” I said, startled, “Yes, sir.” He left me in shock. I went out and did what he asked me to do, and he had the biggest smile on his face the whole time I was singing. I felt so comfortable and confident that I went right to where the judges were sitting and started singing to him. Clive Davis was singin’ with me and dancin’. He was feelin’ it.

After I won the following week, I was called to a meeting with Mr. Davis in his J Records office in New York. Mr. Davis’s assistant had called and said that he wanted me to come in. I was very nervous. What do you say to an awesome music man? What was I gonna say to someone who is so powerful, mysterious, and invincible? I worried. I decided to just be cool and be
me.
I wouldn’t even have known how to pretend to be a different way.

Clive Davis was sitting in a huge brown leather chair. He seemed slumped down, because the chair was so tall. Mr. Davis was twiddling his fingers. When I walked into his beautiful office, he stood up, walked away from the chair, and gave me a kiss. I could smell his cologne and that reminded me of my daddy. Mr. Davis was a groomed man. He walked me around his office, pointing to all the photographs of people he had worked with: Aretha, Whitney, Alicia. I had a smile on my face. He motioned for me to sit down across from him. He had returned to the too-big-for-him chair. He started the conversation by saying, “I want you to tell me, what kind of music do you want to do?” I said, “I am down for doin’ anything, but I just want it to be real. I want to make ugly faces when I’m singin’ my songs. I just want to be me.”

Mr. Davis started playing me some beats, and I was impressed with how
hot
the beats were. Clive is
on it,
I thought to myself. He asked me, “How do you like those beats?” I said jokingly, “You are gangsta!” The whole room became quiet, no one knowing how Mr. Davis would receive such a remark from someone like me. It was dead quiet. Then Mr. Davis started laughing and said to everyone in the room, “Did you hear that, she called me gangsta!” He thought it was really funny. I was slightly embarrassed that I said it like that, but that was what was going through my mind and it was the realest thought that I had at that moment.

The meeting was a success, and all of my nervousness was a thing of the past. I came away from that meeting thinkin’,
“Clive Davis knows what he’s talking about. He has put a lot of people on the map. I respect him. He’s a wise man.”

When I went on
American Idol,
I wasn’t tryin’ to win. Besides, it’s a pop show and I’m a
soul
singer. My dream was that one day I would perform in front of thousands of people and I did that. I used to say that all I wanted from
Idol
was to get one person to hear me and hook me up. It’s all happening because of God’s grace. That’s the only way to explain it.

“Y
ou aren’t ugly,
Fantasia” is what I tried to tell myself and what I felt God was saying to me deep down in my heart. But I had a hard time listenin’ to Him. Again, I wasn’t lettin’ Him in, which is the reason why I was walking around with my head hung down.

When I was younger, I didn’t listen to my inner voice. I just felt so bad about myself that I couldn’t really hear anything that wasn’t negative, so God’s message of encouragement and love were not getting through. I spent most of my life believin’ I was ugly. I would look in the mirror and see my big ole’ lips, my dark skin, and how skinny I was and that made me miserable most of the time.

To be honest, I have always had low self-esteem. I would look at my flat chest and compare myself to all the other girls and I would kick my clothes across the floor out of my frustration. The frustration inside me felt like something that was going to rupture and make me bust my gut or somethin’. It was a feeling that just wouldn’t go away. I was able to fight this nagging sensation that felt like a pit at the bottom of my stomach when I was with my family or watching TV or singing a song to Zion. Whenever I was with Zion, I always felt like it was all OK. That was the rare time that I was able to keep my head up. Being with Zion let me forget all of my worries and problems. The fact that I never felt like I had enough to give her disappeared when I could see that being with her was what she needed the most. When you are a mother you have an unusual sense of lifelong love that no other relationship can ever beat. Zion looks at me with child’s love, which never ever changes. It is the same way I look at her with mommy’s love. Zion is always a beautiful sight for my tired eyes. She never looks bad to me. When she is crying or sick or swollen or poutin’, she is always beautiful. I feel her looking at me with that same admiration and life-or-death love. Every child thinks that their mommy is beautiful, even if their mommy is
me.

I remember those moments when Zion was asleep and I was alone with myself with nothin’ to do. I remember how bad it felt to have this face and these lips and know that they weren’t going anywhere and that I was stuck with them for the rest of my life. These are the times that I hated myself. I didn’t know how I was going to get through this life lookin’ the way I did. When I was in eighth grade, I used to sit in class watching all the pretty girls and not listening to one word that the teacher was saying. I envied those girls because they always got whatever they wanted, or so it seemed. I envied those that light skin and long wavy hair were requirements for happiness and success. There were other pretty girls who didn’t have long hair or light skin in my class, but they had light brown skin like the color of dark coffee with just a little bit of milk thrown in. These girls had pretty perfect white smiles and the brown eyes of angels with long eyelashes. They were pretty girls too, and they
still
didn’t look anything like me. I watched the way they moved and the way they picked up their books from their desks and the way they held their books in their arms. I watched the way they picked up their sandwiches and the way they took a bite without getting mayonnaise all over their lips. I memorized the sight of those girls, hoping to become one of them.

What was so frustrating about all of this was that I couldn’t understand why I looked the way that I did. I looked at Mama with child’s love. My mama was beautiful to me. And you
know,
I loved my daddy and thought he was the most handsome man in the world. How could Mama and Daddy have made such an ugly girl like me? I wondered. The confusion would bring tears to my eyes. Sometimes my teacher would catch me in my daydream and ask, “Fantasia, why are you crying?” And I would say, “No reason, ma’am, I’m just thinkin’ about some things.” And the teacher would say, “You should be thinkin’ about the test tomorrow.” Then she would say, “Fantasia, open your book to page forty-two, please. We are on the third paragraph.” This embarrassment of being behind in class would give ’em something more to tease me about. It was yet another misunderstanding. I was thinking about something that was important to me and everyone else just thought I was dumb.

My mind wandered right back to the pretty girls who always had boyfriends. The pretty girls always got what they wanted from their parents. The pretty girls were smarter and richer and got better grades. With this face and these lips, I thought, I was just always going to be on the outside, lookin’ in.

There was a lot of drama at my house when I was twelve years old. Truth is, I had a lot to learn. My mother used to suffer through those nights when I went to her cryin’ and screamin’ about my looks. I told her that I hated myself. “I got big lips, I’m too skinny, and it makes it hard for me! I can’t take it!” I used to say. I was giving her an awful time. Mama didn’t know what to do with me. I could hear her praying for me at night when she thought I was asleep. She would come into my room and pray over my sleeping head.

My mother would always tell me that I was as pretty as any other girl. When I would complain, she would say, “Fantasia, don’t worry about it.” I would say, “But I’m skinny!” And she would say, “Don’t worry about it! God made you skinny so you could move through life easier.” I would say, “I hate my lips!” And she would say, “Don’t worry about it! God gave you those lips so that you could sing better.” I would say, “I have no chest!” She would say, “Don’t worry about it, God gave you a little chest, but he gave you big lungs and a big gift. He couldn’t give you everything so he gave you what you could use.”

As difficult as those moments were with my mother, what she was tellin’ me started to sink in. I realized that there were things that I couldn’t change about myself and there were things that I could do something about. My mother told me to take the qualities that I had and work with them. She used to always quote this famous prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

I decided I was going to stop complainin’ about the things I couldn’t change and just “work it,” like Mama used to say. So, when I was about twelve or thirteen I became a girl who was into fashion and hair. I wore all kinds of crazy outfits and my mother let me do it. Blue fingernail polish, food coloring in my hair, ripped T-shirts. Anything that said I was “in da house.” I did all kinds of things to my hair: it was slicked down, standing on end, braided on the sides—anything just to stand out and let people know that ’Tasia was as good as those pretty girls.

I looked at magazines all the time. The magazines were filled with models and pretty girls, and I looked at them every time I could get my hands on one. I would get them from the garbage or if they were left on a seat at the doctor’s office or, once in a while, Mama would even buy me one. I never was able to read the articles, but I was only interested in how everyone
looked.
I would stand in the mirror and pose like them and try to smile like them and hold my head the way they did. I somehow thought that if I read those magazines enough, somehow I would start looking like some of them.

My mother tells a story about the day I was in the eighth grade and went to school in one of my self-made outfits. It was a denim shirt tied up around my belly button with rips torn into the sleeves and back. I also had a denim miniskirt that I had redesigned by cutting the bottom off the skirt and then taking what little was left and cutting the fabric on a diagonal so it ended right below my panty line. When I came into our yellow kitchen on Montlieu Avenue that morning in my outfit, my mother was shocked. Her mouth just hung open. She couldn’t get any words out. She knew how sensitive I was about my appearance, so she didn’t say what she wanted to say and let me go to school like that. Mama knew what would happen. So I went to school in my “hot to trot” denim outfit, fishnet stockings, and stack-heeled shoes. When I returned home that afternoon a little earlier than usual, my mother saw that I had tied someone else’s jacket around my waist, covering all that needed to be hidden. My mother laughed to herself and asked, “Fantasia, why are you wearing that shirt around your waist?” Humbly, I said, “All the kids at school laughed at me and told me to cover up!” My mother had known, but she wanted me to learn for myself when being “too cute” wasn’t “cute.”

That evening after dinner, Mama came into my room to talk to me about what happened at school that day. I cried to her, telling her that I thought my outfit was like the clothes that I saw in the magazines. I told her that it hurt me that the girls and guys were laughing about my ripped T-shirt and my skirt that was too short and the hem was crooked. I pleaded with Mama to tell me what had gone wrong, because I didn’t understand. Everyone knew that I was different and liked looking unusual like the models.

Mama explained to me that that my outfit was trying too hard to be something that I wasn’t. She said that what everyone could see in that outfit was fakeness. She said, “Everyone knows you ’Tasia. They all grew up with you. They know you are not like them clothes. They know you are not those rips and tears. They know that you are a girl who loves the Lord and who is anointed. They know that the Holy Spirit is in you. That is why they were laughing, because you were being something that you are not. You were being a
fake.
”

I asked Mama, “How can I fix it?” And she said, “Fantasia, the thing that my mama always told me was to keep my head up.” I asked Mama what that meant, and she said, “It means to be proud of who you are and what you are. If you are a child of God, don’t act like you are a child of Satan. Keep your head up and be proud of who you are and what you came from, no matter if it is good or bad.” I listened to what Mama was saying and needed to think about it more. I did remember Grandma Addie saying that sometimes when I was leaving her house. She would kiss me on my forehead and say in my ear, “Keep your head up.”

Self-esteem is something that I have struggled with. Just being happy with the way I looked was impossible for me when all the pretty girls looked better than me. That is why I tried so hard to make myself look different with different clothes and wild nail colors and wild shoes. There were no similarities between those pretty girls and me, no matter how hard I tried to look like them. It’s taken a long time for my self-esteem to grow stronger. The way that I improved it happened shortly after that talk with Mama. I could feel myself finally growing tired of all the hate inside my heart that was slowly eating away at me. I was looking in the mirror one day, putting on my blue shimmery eye shadow and my red, red lipstick. My hand slipped, and the lipstick went off my lips and smeared above my lip. Instead of wiping it right away, I stood there and looked at my face for five solid minutes. I looked like a clown. My stomach was churning and tears were running down my face. I felt sick to my stomach because what was at the pit of my stomach was self-hate. I remember thinking to myself that I had to change my insides because putting all this stuff all over my face was not making me prettier. It was making me a clown. I wanted finally to lift my head.

I thought to myself, What if I loved myself instead of hating myself? I realized that I needed to have a real relationship with myself first and not worry so much about my relationships with my girlfriends and B. and the other boys. Instead of the kids at school making me feel ugly with their mean nicknames and constant teasing, I needed to come up with some names for myself that were better than their names. Instead of B. making me feel ugly with his disrespect and neglect, I learned that I had to drown out his voice and make my own voice the loudest. Instead of the girls calling me “Big Lips” and “Snaggle Tooth” I told myself that I was “Beautiful Lips” and “Pretty Smile.” I started talkin’ to myself. Instead of the teachers making me feel dumb, I had to tell myself that I was smart. I decided that the “I am so ugly” song had to go. It didn’t really matter to the outside world what song I sang to
myself,
so I decided to change my song from “I am ugly” to “I am beautiful.” Instead of walking around with my head hung down low, I decided to stand up straight, lift my head, and have some pride in myself. Although it was hard at first, because I wasn’t really convinced, I started looking in the mirror more instead of avoiding it. I started going over my face one feature at a time and saying to myself, “My eyebrows look good.” “My nose is good.” Like Mama said, “My lips are good because they are better to sing with.” “My crooked teeth can be fixed.” I looked at my short hair and imagined it in red or blond. I imagined it in a ponytail or in braids. I said, “I can make it anything I want. I can control this.” Since that day, eight years ago, I am still always prancin’ around and my head is always up, and I finally look like I own
myself.
I look in the mirror and I say, “This is me, and I am the bomb!”

I know, you think ’Tasia’s trippin’ again, but I’m really not. It is just that this is the only way for me to see myself. And the only way for you to see yourself, too. I don’t want to go “Hollywood.” I don’t want to change myself. I don’t want to change God’s perfect plan. I don’t want to think that change comes with money. I wanted to change my look with a new attitude and that’s all I needed. If I didn’t change my own view of myself, no one else could.

Feeling better about yourself also means changing your actions. I finally got sick of hearin’ the negative things about my skinniness. The boys used to call me S&B, which was short for “Skin and Bones.” The first part of changing from a weakling to a strong woman was
to stop bein’ and actin’ weak.
I had to stop letting people tell me who I was when I knew me best. I had to stop being so
sensitive.

Just like everyone else, I want to keep my body in shape. Whenever I’m on the road, I go to the hotel’s gym and do the treadmill for as long as I can. It’s not easy, though, because I don’t have a set work schedule, so it’s hard to have a set exercise schedule. When I get off the road and go back home to North Carolina, Mama always makes sure that I can eat some of my favorite foods, like fried chicken, sweet potatoes, Mama’s beef stew, and chicken Alfredo with broccoli, because she feels like I deserve it after months on the road and eating restaurant food. My favorite foods are not the healthiest foods in the world, but they sure taste good! When I struggle with the guilt of eating the foods that I love and that I miss so much, I realize that Fantasia is not her imperfections. I love myself, even if I’m not skinny or perfect. I am happy—finally. With God in my life, I always see that I am beautiful—even when others don’t.