Put on Your Crown (4 page)

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.

In diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

—M
AYA
A
NGELOU

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.”

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 supposed 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.

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.

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.

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.