The monster - African American women and self-doubt - Sisterspeak - Column

Ebony, Oct, 1997 by Laura B. Randolph

This is a story about ghosts and goblins and ghouls and monsters. Not the harmless kind that live in your neighborhood and will knock on your door on Halloween and chant one innocuous mantra throughout the night: Trick or Treat, Trick or Treat, Trick or Treat....

This is about the amorphous kind that live in your head and will knock down you dreams by chanting one insidious mantra throughout your life: You can't, you can't, you can't....

All of us have met The Monster. It is clever and crafty and very, very cunning. It can appear at any time (when you're in the depths of despair or when you're on a roll) and in any form (friends, family, cohorts, colleagues).

And The Monster is an equal-opportunity demon. Being beautiful and smart and talented does not exempt you from its power. Trust me on this. I know dozens of beautiful, smart and talented people It has visited many times.

The Monster appears in different forms to each of us. As anyone who has met The Monster knows, it is a master of disguise. To Anita Baker, The Monster arrived in the fast-talking personas of record label executives who told her not to quit her day job because she couldn't sing.

To Daughters of the Dust writer/director Julie Dash, The Monster arrived in the haughty, Hollywood personas of rich White producers who told her a movie about Black women at the turn of the century had no audience.

To Natalie Cole and Oprah Winfrey, The Monster arrive in its most effective (read: most crippling) form: Insecurity, Self-hatred. Self-doubt.

"I know it appears I have everything," Oprah recently confided to me, "and people think because you're on TV you have the world by a string. But I have struggled with my own self-value for many, many years."

So did Natilie Cole, Her struggle with The Monster was so savage and so twisted it very nearly killed her. In the early '80s, she was so desperate to slay it, she tried to drown out its voice with anesthetizing quantities of drink and drugs.

"It started with something I couldn't control," she explained to me, recalling how the internal doubts metastasized into self-hatred. "And that was the family I was brought up in -- never really knowing if people liked you for yourself or because of who your father was."

I myself have met The Monster many times. As a matter of fact, during my first year in law school, we were virtually inseparable. "You're never going to make it," It would whisper in study groups, classes, exams. When I graduated, it simply sang a new tune: "Lucky break, but you're never going to pass the Bar Exam."

In recent years, The Monster appeared to me in one of its more persuasive personas -- well-meaning friends. "You're 30 years old, you've never worked for a magazine in your life, and you're going to quit your government job, give up your pension on the hope that it might work out? Don't do it, girl. This is thee real world, not Mayberry," they warned.

But here's the thing about The Monster -- in whatever form It appears, you can always recognize It if you just remember this: It never, ever deviates from Its M.O. -- determine your worst fears and increase them. Detect your deepest insecurities and exploit them.

That's the one benefit of having seen The Monster as many times as I have. You finally figure out its dirty little secret. As scary as It can be, It isn't real. Not if you don't listen to It. Not if you refuse to give It any power.

Remember waking you late at night when you were a kid and seeing shadows dancing on the closet door and knowing there were monsters inside? Remember lying in your bed frozen with fear until you convinced yourself that if you were (a) very, very careful and (b) very, very fast you could sprint past the monster-infested closet and make it to your parents' room before it caught you?

And remember what your parents did? How they explained how shadows are formed and what they really are -- just figures cast on the closet by the trees outside your window that were intercepting the light of the moon. And how sometimes things that look scary aren't really scary at all when you understand what they are and where they come from.

Remember what happened when they took you back to your room and opened the closet? You looked inside and The Monster wasn't in there at all, only harmless shadows dancing in the moonlight.

Well, you can slay The Monster the same way now. Only now, instead of looking into your closet, look right into your fears. Instead of talking with your parents, talk to yourself. About how you have the power to create your own reality. About how, by refusing to listen to negative people and negative thoughts, you can do anything you believe you can. About what fear really is: False Evidence Appearing Real. Faith turned inside out. Shadows.

And then reflect on all the real monsters your ancestors -- especially your ansisters -- had to face. Slave ships and slave master. Jim Eastland and Jim Crow. White men in white sheets.

Stand in front of the mirror and say their names out loud: Harriet Tubman. Sojourner Truth. Mary McLeod Bethune. And then close your eyes and remember that you carry the genes of all your ansisters -- Sister Harriet, Sister Sojourner, Sister Mary, your mother and your grandmother and your great-grandmother -- all the way back to when we were African queens. Close your eyes and know that the blood that run through their veins now runs through yours.