Victoria Monét Shows Black Women Why Delayed Success Is Still Success.

So let me point you toward somebody who learned young that going slow and going nowhere are not the same thing at all.

Back in 2009, a Sacramento raised young woman named Victoria Monét loaded up a church choir voice and a notebook crammed with lyrics, drove out to Los Angeles, and went chasing a sound nobody else could hear yet. The business barely cracked the door. That pen, though. Everybody wanted a piece of that pen. Ariana Grande built records off it. Fifth Harmony came calling. Chloe x Halle, Blackpink, and a list longer than my arm lined up behind them. One hit after another carried her name in the songwriting credits, even while the spotlight stayed fixed on somebody else, and being unseen like that will eat at a person who lets it.

“I was sometimes only relevant to people according to my proximity to another artist,” is how the singer once described the ache of it. Read that twice. Imagine pouring your gift into rooms where your own name never made it onto the marquee.

Here is the part the fairy tales skip. While the credits piled up, life kept moving. In 2021 came a daughter, Hazel, and with motherhood came the kind of recalibration that rearranges your whole sense of what a career is even for. Plenty of people assumed that was the exit. Baby on the hip, dreams on the shelf, right? Wrong. The Sacramento raised artist used that season to get sharper about who she was and bolder about what she wanted the mic to say.

Then 2023 arrived, and so did Jaguar II, her debut studio album years in the making. “On My Mama” became the anthem of that summer, the sort of song that makes strangers roll their windows down. Suddenly the songwriter the business had parked backstage was standing out front, and the credit that took its own sweet time came pouring in all at once.

Look at what happened next. For the 2024 Grammys, seven nominations landed. Best New Artist went to a woman who had been grinding for fifteen years, which is its own beautiful joke on the word new. The R&B Album prize came home too, with an engineering trophy stacked right on top. This next part still gets me. At two years old, Hazel became the youngest Grammy nominee in history, all off a few babbling sounds stitched into a song called “Hollywood.” A mama and a baby girl, names sitting on the very same ballot. Go ahead and try reading that without grinning.

Now sit with the word everybody kept reaching for that night. New. The powers that be handed a seasoned professional a trophy for freshness, when the truth is plainer and far prouder. What the cameras finally caught was a long obedience in one direction, the fruit of somebody who refused to quit on herself back when quitting would have been the reasonable move.

That is the whole lesson, and it belongs to Black women in particular, because Black women know this waiting room better than anybody. We get told to be twice as good, then asked to stand in line behind people who have not done half the homework. Ideas that started with us go strolling out the door wearing somebody else’s badge while we smile politely. So when one of ours walks up to the front after all that deferral and claims the entire prize, baby, that is not luck. That is harvest.

No wonder this current year feels like a victory lap, the kind you only earn the long way. This past summer, the California girl was all over Europe, splitting stadium bills with Bruno Mars on his Romantic Tour and singing to full houses in Paris, Berlin, Madrid, and London. Stop and picture it. Somebody the charts once filed under other people’s songs was now the reason fans an ocean away reached for their wallets. Let that irony sit a minute.

And the music keeps flowing. “Let Me” opened the year back in February and rode all the way to number one on the Adult R&B Airplay chart. “Reach Out” followed in the warm months. “Juicy,” which dropped in September with a writing credit from the legendary Babyface, slinks and struts like it fell out of a record crate from 1983. All of it pointed toward Frequency Of Love, the new project that arrived just days ago on October 2nd, the follow up a lot of us had circled on the calendar for ages.

So what is our girl up to right this minute? Getting ready to come home, essentially. On October 27th, the Frequency Of Love Tour launches in Raleigh, North Carolina, then rolls over to Charlotte the very next night before winding across the continent and closing out in San Francisco this December. For those of us in the Carolinas, there is a quiet pride in watching a Grammy winner three times over kick off a run that hits twenty seven cities right in our own backyard. Beyond the lights, a new venture called the Frequency Of Love Foundation now carries the mission further, pouring into young people through lessons centered on food, agriculture, culinary knowledge, wellness, and healthier futures.

Think about the full arc for a second. Side door to center stage. Songwriter behind the scenes to headliner. The woman too many people overlooked to the name printed across the ticket. It did not happen on anybody’s preferred timetable, and it did not land because some gatekeeper finally granted permission. Monét decided her clock kept its own time, and she had the nerve to trust it when trusting looked foolish.

Let that settle on whoever needs to hear it. A delay is not a denial. The timeline this world drew up for you was always a suggestion, never a sentence. Hold onto that pen, stay stubborn in the faith, and when your moment comes, walk up there like you expected it all along. Because you have.