Valuing Your Own Thing!

The other day I came across a riddle, jesting about women wearing hair weaves. It struck a chord.

I don’t wear hair weaves or extensions, or fake nails, or put collegians in my lips, or wear panty butt lifters, or invest in breast augmenters… or buy into many other artificial rooters that might improve my looks. Heck, I’ve been singing for years about not paying content editors to erase my writing voice.

BUT!!! I do pluck my brows, or at least I try to. Occasionally I’ll throw on a coat of lipstick and mascara my lashes. I also manicure and paint my nails, but I must gingerly select what I add to my original package. Ask anyone who really knows me. Let me be sitting in a formal meeting and get hot. I’d forget all about I was wearing extra hair and pull it right off and sit it on a table. Or let me get bored, and I’d get to playing with my contacts and pull them out and sit on the table too.

Still, in other ways I also work on my image. Back on track and the point being, it doesn’t matter what it is that a person wishes to enhance. Be it to influence someone, or to impress him or her own-self, I respect your thing…however you choose to enhance it, like I value my thing.

I remember when the Afro was in, and thick lips and large behinds not so much. Today copycats have switched this swagger around. Almost everybody is trying to toot them lips and behinds, and wearing hair as straight and as long as the floor.

The real irony about valuing our own thing, is when we don’t, someone else will. It bemuses me to hear someone scoff about how a native work was copied, or stolen, and credit given to the copycats. This happens when we sit idly by these precious creations, not using our own voices…and the mediums we have access to, for whatever our motives are...waiting for a larger voice to appraise it. Welp, when they do, they copy it and run off with it.

And not that I have it all worked out, but I do my best not to wait on cues to talk up and celebrate the noble works and lives of others, both known and unknown. This open celebration is not based on skin color or whether or not I like the artist or author. My admiration and respect is solely based on whether the work really moved me; the same way I value my own thing too.

Looking forward to observing Black History Month.