You Deserve It!

I grew up in Los Angeles. You know, the city of beautiful people? La-La Land. Hollywood. While my upbringing was less than glamorous, I was certainly close enough to the action to allow some of the “shine” to rub off on me. In my mother’s more prosperous years, she started taking me to the beauty shop to get my hair done when I was just four years old. I was too little to reach the dryer hood so I used to sit on stacks of Yellow Pages until my hair was dry. A common theme I would hear while the perm was burning my scalp was, “You gotta suffer to be beautiful!” Little did I know that those subtle influences about how I viewed beauty, fashion and even myself would govern my thoughts and actions to this day. Little did I know that even though I kept up appearances, I had a distorted image of myself in my mind that told me that I had to look a certain way in order to be accepted.

Now I love to see a sistah when she has it ‘goin’ on’. Her hair is fly, make-up is tight and, of course, her clothes are banging. I used to put a lot of stock in how a person looks and think that was the sum total of who they were. But I have learned that everything that glitters ain’t gold! That sistah could be steep in debt trying to maintain her ‘flyness’. And as I’ve had an opportunity to meet lots of women in my profession, I’ve learned some things about women, in general. I’ve learned that underneath all of the Gucci and the Prada is usually just a regular sistah who wants to be loved and accepted. And sometimes we want this to our detriment. Sometimes we compromise our values, morals and core beliefs just for that acceptance. Sometimes we settle for Ain’t-Had-No-Job-In-Two-Years-Laying-Up-On-My-Unpaid-For-Couch-Leroy just for the comfort of a warm body in our beds. Sometimes we settle for letting the Undereducated-Low-Skilled-Sister-of-the-Boss get a promotion ahead of us. Sometimes we settle for letting Nina, our girl from college, use our credit card once again to get her hair done.

I believe at the heart of why we settle for less than the best and over-extend ourselves to be accepted is because we don’t believe we deserve better. If you ask us, however, we would say that we are “confident, secure, and our way to the top”, but our actions belie us. What is it going to take for us to realize that we are fierce all by ourselves even if we don’t have the latest Coach Bag or the flyest ‘do’? Clothes, purses and make-up don’t validate you as a person; being a woman of substance and character does. So take some time to think about all the ways that you settled or compromised to gain acceptance and start making steps toward re-defining how you view yourself. ‘Cause, guess what? You deserve it!