(ThySistas.com) Ask any room of Black women who they look up to, and her name comes up fast. Michelle Obama earned that. But a whole lot of us stopped admiring her a while back and started competing with her instead, mostly in our own heads, and losing every single time.
I love that woman. Let me say it plain and clear before anybody twists my meaning. When the former First Lady walks into a room, something in me stands a little taller. The way she carries her shoulders. How she looks folks dead in the eye and still smiles like your favorite auntie. The steel it took to raise those girls under a spotlight hot enough to melt most of us. Watched her speeches more than once, cried at a few. So this is not one of those pieces where one of us tears down another to prop herself up. We do too much of that already.
But there is something I have needed to say to my sisters for a long time, so I am just going to come right out with it.
We set the bar for ourselves up in the clouds and then wonder why we keep falling short of it. Degrees from schools that turn most people away. A husband who stays, and looks good staying. Your figure holding firm past forty and two babies. Work that lands your name in the history books. And through every bit of it, never letting a soul see you crack. Nobody handed us that list on paper. We breathe it in anyway, and most nights it leaves us lying awake, certain we flunked a test we never agreed to take.
I want to gently call that what it is. A lie.
You do not have to become somebody else’s masterpiece to matter. Your life was already stitched together on purpose. Nobody made you by mistake and then left you to fix yourself by copying another sister’s blueprint.
Let me tell you about my cousin Renita. She never finished college. Got pregnant her sophomore year, came home, and everybody had an opinion about what her future looked like now. Renita raised three children on a nursing assistant’s pay. Worked doubles. Sang in the choir on Sunday morning even when her feet were screaming inside her shoes. Not one of her babies went hungry. All three grew up knowing they were loved down to the marrow. Two of them own homes now. The youngest is finishing the degree his mama never got to finish. Tell me that woman is not exceptional. I dare you.
The world will hand you one narrow picture of a successful Black woman and try to convince you it is the only frame that counts. Polished. Poised. Perfectly spoken. Powerful in a way that shows up on magazine covers. There is nothing wrong with any of that. But it is not the whole story of who we are, and it never was.
Plenty of us are quiet. Others stammer the second nerves hit and never did learn to face a crowd without their hands shaking. There is the sister who is single at forty five and worn thin from folks asking when she plans to settle down, like a ring is what finishes a woman. One of us buried a marriage she fought like everything to save. Another went wide and soft in the middle after carrying life, and no amount of arm exercises is bringing back what the years took, and honey, that is fine. Some clean other people’s houses. Some teach. And a whole lot of us are still figuring it out at fifty, with no shame in that at all.
The women I was raised around did not rank each other by résumés. My grandmother would have laughed at the idea. To her, a person’s worth showed up in how they treated the folks who could do nothing for them. Whether you gave up your seat, fed a stranger who could not pay you back, kept your word when there was nobody around to hold you to it. That is a different arithmetic than the one the world runs, and I have come to trust it more than any headline.
So why do we keep grading ourselves on the world’s report card?
Part of it is love, honestly. We are so proud of the sisters who broke through. After generations of being told we were less than, watching one of us stand in the highest house in the land in her own skin, unbought and unbroken, felt like vindication for all of us. That pride is a good thing. Hold on to it. But somewhere it curdled into pressure. We took a sister meant to inspire us and turned her into a ruler to beat ourselves with. That was never her intention. She has said as much in her own way, speaking openly about self-doubt, fear, anxiety, and the difficult days that come even for someone the world sees as strong.
Even the ones we admire are not made of what we imagine.
Here is what I have come to believe after enough years and enough hard seasons to know a thing or two. Your value was settled before you did a single impressive thing. No diploma adds to it, and no divorce takes anything away. Neither a promotion nor a layoff moves that truth an inch. You were worth loving on the day you drew your first breath, and any voice telling you otherwise, even your own, is lying to you.
Comparison will rob you blind if you let it. It will have you scrolling past somebody else’s highlight reel and feeling like a failure by breakfast. It will have you looking at your own real and beautiful and hard won life and seeing only the places it does not match a picture you were never meant to copy. That kind of thinking steals the joy right out of the ordinary blessings sitting in your own two hands. The children who call you. A friend who shows up when nobody asked her to. Rent that somehow got paid. Stillness on an afternoon that owes nothing to anybody. Those things are not small. They are the substance of a life well lived.
I am not telling you to stop reaching. Reach. Go back to school if that is your dream. Build the business. Run for the office. Write the book that has been stirring in you for years. Ambition is a gift when it grows out of who you truly are and not out of a desperate need to prove you deserve to take up space. That space is already yours. It was yours the day you got here.
But if you never do one headline worthy thing, hear me. If you live and die known only to a handful of people who loved you, you were still a whole and precious somebody. A mother rocking a colicky baby at three in the morning is doing holy work. So is the daughter caring for her aging parents while the world spins on without noticing. So is the one holding down a job she does not love so her family can eat.
I watched my own mother do that kind of quiet labor for thirty years. Never gave a speech in her life, never owned a designer thing. Raised five of us on a checkbook that had no business stretching as far as it did, and to this day I cannot tell you how she made a way out of no way so many times over. Her name will not show up in any history book. But she is the strongest person I have ever known, and if greatness counts for anything, she had it in a form the cameras were simply too dull to catch.
That is the thing nobody tells you. Our culture only celebrates the version of us it can photograph, the dressed up, spoken up, lit up one. Meanwhile the real work of holding families and neighborhoods and whole communities together happens in kitchens and hospital waiting rooms and church basements, done by women whose names will never trend. Those lives are not the runners up to the story. They are the story.
So stop waiting to become somebody else before you accept that you are already enough.
You do not have to be her. You never had to. What you get to be is rarer than that, the specific woman the world has never seen before and will never see again, and that, my sisters, has always been more than enough.
Staff Writer; Raven Jones
Raven writes about music, relationships, and the everyday ups and downs of Black women… She keeps it honest, encourages other sistas, and can be reached at RavenJ@ThySistas.com.