(ThySistas.com) Most of us picked up a rule about ambition without anybody ever handing it to us directly. Pick one thing. Get good at it. Let that be the whole of who you are. Nobody says it to be cruel. It tends to come from people who love you and don’t want to watch you wear yourself thin chasing too much at once. I took that for wisdom longer than I care to admit. Then I spent some real time with one woman’s life, the way she kept stepping over every fence somebody built around her, and I started seeing her whole run for what it actually is. A quiet case against the notion that a gift is supposed to live in one room.
Oprah Winfrey got her start in broadcasting at a Nashville radio station while still in high school. Television news followed, first in Nashville, then Baltimore. On paper that was the arrangement, and it was supposed to hold. A young woman with a strong voice lands a seat, and the seat is a desk, a camera, and words some producer handed her. She didn’t fit it. Talk television came next, and she took an ordinary afternoon slot and made it a place where people finally said out loud the things they had been carrying alone. Their weight. Marriages coming apart at the seams. The shame around money. Grief they had never once named to another soul. After that she acted, and the film work brought her serious recognition. Producing came next, her name and her money thrown behind stories the studios were too nervous to touch. A book club followed, with the power to lift an unknown writer out of nowhere and change that person’s whole life inside a week. A magazine came after that. There was a school she built for girls in South Africa, and fortunes she gave away without making noise about it. A network carried her name. When the culture moved toward podcasts and streaming, she moved right along with it.
Look at that trajectory and tell me where the lane was. There wasn’t one. She kept driving over the lines because the lines were never real to begin with. They were suggestions dressed up as rules, and she treated them exactly the way suggestions deserve to be treated.
I want us to sit with something uncomfortable, because I think a lot of us need to hear it. The boundaries around our talent are usually not enforced by strangers. They get enforced by the people closest to us, and they get enforced by us. A job tells you what you are. You are the reliable one at the office, the person who handles the crisis, the manager everybody leans on. That identity feels good because it comes with praise and a paycheck. So you pour yourself into it, and slowly the version of you that writes, or paints, or wants to open a business, or dreams of running for office, that version gets folded up and put in a drawer. Not killed. Just stored somewhere you stop visiting.
Family runs the same play, and here is the hard part. They usually mean well, so you can’t even be clean angry about it. You’re the mama, the daughter who always answers the phone, the auntie whose door never closes. Everybody in the house has already decided who you are to them, and they need you to stay her, because your being dependable is part of what holds them all upright. Reach for something larger and you feel it fast. That tug in the chest. The voice asking who you think you are, wanting more, when there are folks right here counting on you. I know that tug well. I have stood in my own kitchen past midnight, wondering whether wanting a bigger life made me a selfish woman.
And then there are friends. This one stings because we do not expect it. Sometimes the people who have known you the longest are the most invested in you staying the same. Not out of cruelty. Out of comfort. If you grow, the friendship has to grow too, and not everybody is ready for that work. So they laugh a little when you mention the new plan. They remind you of who you used to be. They call it keeping you humble. What it really does is keep you small, and small is easier for everyone except you.
Oprah could have listened to all of those voices, and she had plenty of them. She was told she was too emotional for news, too invested, too much herself on air. That so called flaw became the foundation of everything she built. The thing they wanted her to shrink was the thing the whole world was starving for. That should stop every one of us in our tracks. What if the part of you that people keep asking you to tone down is the exact gift you are here to give.
There is a specific load on us as Black women, and I won’t sit here acting like there isn’t. Be strong, they tell us, and hush about what the strength takes out of you. Be thankful you got a seat at all. Somewhere in there the thankfulness hardens into a chain, and next thing you know you’re apologizing for reaching toward the thing you want. Stay in your place. Do not ask for more. You already got further than most. That messaging is everywhere, and it is designed to keep us performing one function instead of living as full human beings with layered gifts and wide curiosity. A woman can be an engineer who also sings. She might run a hospital ward and still write poetry that cracks a reader wide open. Raising children, building wealth, mentoring, traveling, starting fresh at fifty and again at sixty, all of it can sit inside one life.
The refusal to stay put is not arrogance. I need us to understand that clearly. It is honesty. When you accept that you contain more than one calling, you are simply telling the truth about your own design. The arrogance, if we want to locate it, belongs to the idea that a person should be flattened into a single useful shape for the convenience of everybody around them.
Here is what I have watched happen when a woman finally decides to stop asking permission. The first thing that goes is the apology. She quits explaining why she wants what she wants. The shrinking falls away too, that old habit of making her ambition small and easy to swallow so nobody at the table feels threatened. That shift alone changes her face, changes how she walks into rooms. The second thing is that she starts losing the audience that only ever clapped for her smallness, and gaining the audience that was waiting for her to rise. That trade feels frightening before it happens and feels like oxygen afterward.
Oprah gave us a map, whether she meant to or not. It does not say become a billionaire. Most of us will not, and that was never the point. What it says instead is that the number of things you’re allowed to become is not fixed by your first job, your family’s expectations, or the imagination of the block you came up on. You get to keep expanding. You get to be a beginner again at an age when everyone expects you to be settled. You get to disappoint people who preferred the old you, and survive their disappointment, and find that the world did not end.
So I am asking the women reading this to do a hard and holy thing. Go find the part of yourself you folded up and put away. Take it out. Look at it honestly. Maybe it is a business idea you have carried for a decade. Maybe it is a return to school. Maybe it is a whole second act that has nothing to do with who anybody thinks you are. Then ask yourself who told you that you could not, and whether that person had any real authority over your one and only life.
They did not. They never did. The lines on the road were painted by people who were scared to cross them, and you are under no obligation to honor their fear. Drive.
Staff Writer: Brenda Poole
BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…
Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.