(ThySistas.com) Plenty of us walk around with a shame we never say out loud. You quit school before the diploma. Money ran short, a baby showed up ahead of schedule, nobody was ready, pick your reason. Point is it calcified into a thing you repeated about yourself so long that one day you stopped pushing back on it.
If I just put words to some piece of your life, stay with me here. I keep circling back to Fantasia Barrino, and it has nothing to do with the road being smooth. It was a mess. That mess is exactly what makes her story one for us.
Picture High Point, North Carolina. Fantasia grew up there with little money and no easy road ahead. After being sexually assaulted by a classmate and facing harassment at school, she left before earning her diploma. By seventeen, she was a mother. Reading was another struggle, one she carried quietly until she found the courage to discuss it publicly. By every yardstick the world uses to divide folks into winners and the left behind, that teenager looked like somebody who had already lost the race before the starting gun.
Then 2004 arrived.
At nineteen, that young mama walked onto the American Idol stage and sang like an open wound had finally found a melody. The country voted. Barrino took the crown in season three. What a television competition could never fully capture was the hardship and determination behind that remarkable voice. Offstage, she had diapers to change, school years left unfinished, and that coat of shame society so often throws over a girl who becomes a mother too young.
Here is the part worth underlining for every Sista taking this in right now. Winning did not wipe out the rough beginning. Nothing ever does. What the victory exposed was that the beginning had never been the full truth about that girl at all. A difficult start is one chapter. Far too many of us got tricked into treating it as the final page, closing the book on ourselves before the good parts could unfold.
Think about the reading alone. Grown and already famous, this Sista went on national television in 2005 and admitted to struggling with reading and writing. Do you understand the courage in that? Plenty of people would rather carry a secret to the grave than let the world spot the gap. Fantasia sought help, worked with tutors, and eventually earned her GED. Years later, in 2023, she enrolled at Central State University to study business. The same young woman who once left school without a diploma was now pursuing a college education after becoming a household name. That kind of determination preaches a whole sermon about Black women and the lie of “too late.”
Broadway came knocking in 2007. The role was Celie in The Color Purple, and anybody who knows that character knows Celie got stitched together out of everything a person can survive. For somebody who had lived close to that, the part never felt like pretend. Then 2023 rolled around and Hollywood released a new film adaptation of the musical, and guess who showed up as Celie one more time. Critics praised her performance, and the work earned her a Golden Globe nomination. The young woman who once struggled to read was now bringing one of literature’s most unforgettable characters to life on the big screen.
None of it came smooth. Money troubles made headlines. Darkness came too, including a painful mental health crisis that Fantasia later discussed openly. It was a frightening chapter in a life already carrying more than its share of hardship. The point of this witness is not that pain skipped the door. What matters is that pain never got the last word.
Look at where things stand all these years later. Her son Dallas Xavier arrived in 2011. Marriage to Kendall Taylor followed in 2015, and Fantasia has spoken warmly about the love, encouragement, and personal growth she has experienced in that relationship. Their daughter Keziah arrived in 2021, early and tiny, a baby who spent time in the NICU before finally making it home. Add up what has stacked up since the American Idol win in 2004. Albums kept coming across the years, Free Yourself and Sketchbook among them. A Grammy Award came in 2011 for her song “Bittersweet.” Movie screens came calling. That tour bus has yet to park for good.
So no, that rough start did not become a permanent address.
I need you to hear why this lands so hard for us specifically. Black women get handed a particular kind of pressure. Let somebody stumble and everybody leans in to watch. Watch that same person win and you can almost hear the shrug. Teenage pregnancy, leaving school early, a work history full of holes, folks will line it all up like proof in a case you never signed up to stand trial for. Worse, when enough people hand down that verdict, you catch yourself saying it back in your own voice before anybody else can.
That right there is the trap. Not the setback itself, but the story we keep building on top of it.
A teenager could have let seventeen define the rest of her life. Zion, the daughter born during that very stretch the world might have written off, grew up watching a mama refuse the script others laid out for her. Imagine the lesson stitched into that household. Every setback is information, never a sentence.
Here is what I want my Sistas to take from all of this. Your transcript is not your testimony. The year things fell off track is not the year your worth got decided. Every closed door in the past is sitting back there in the past, which happens to be the one place that cannot reach forward and snatch the pen out of your hand unless you allow it.
Some of you went back to school at thirty-five with children watching every move. Some of you buried a dream back at nineteen and decided the door shut behind it. It did not. Doors like that swing back open for the ones stubborn enough to keep rattling the handle. You can still finish the degree. The business you keep putting off can still get built. Nobody is going to throw you a parade for starting over. It happens quietly, on some regular Tuesday, and counts just the same.
Fantasia did not become remarkable because the opening was pretty. That opening was brutal. She became remarkable because she refused to let the brutal part become the whole story. The woman who struggled through school became a Grammy-winning singer, an accomplished actress, a college student, and a mother who could show her children what it looks like to keep reaching for something better.
You get the same decision to make. Not next year, not once every condition lines up perfectly, but today, right where you sit.
Your past already happened. The future has not been written yet. And the beautiful, terrifying truth of it is that the pen rests in your hand.
Pick it up, Sistas. Somebody down the line is going to need your chapter on getting back up.
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.