Be Your Damn Self!

A.K.A Be really silly with a twig in the snow!

I have struggled with the concept of being myself a lot, I still do. I think it's not noticeable from the outside, maybe it is.

I'm self conscious about the way I talk, always have been. I'm loud, I couldn't hide the fact that I'm from South London if I tried. Slang flows off my tongue so easily, it's like speaking my native language and getting the accent juuust right. Madison gets called "Bruh" at least twice a day (Don't judge me, dude's really trying my patience with this climbing malarkey. Can he walk though?? Jesus be a landing mat!) Even my "work voice" has the south London twang and I have a few select words and phrases that I permit myself to use. I mean, if I get annoyed, they all think there's a shank in my pumping bag, but oh well.

I guess from the outside, I look really confident in who I am and how I sound. The thing is, I'm very aware of how the black people I aspire to be like sound. They don't sound like me. Most have managed to balance en pointe sounding like a BBC broadcaster, but allowing a hint of their postcode to show through. Others I wouldn't recognize if I were to hear their voice over the radio.

Now we could talk, colonialism, assimilation and all the rest, but most likely you're black and know this shit already. The reason I want to talk about it is because it's been another reason I've used to lie to myself, I've told myself "Rose, if you want to do this, you gotta fix the way you talk. No one will listen to you if you sound like a roadman" I've recorded whole YouTube videos and scrapped them because I've watched them back and told myself "You sound too ghetto" or "You swear too much"

Bold face LIEEE! I know it's a lie, a lie from the pit of hell! But my trusty friend, comparison is really good at making me believe nonsense. Well I saw a comparison about 20 minutes ago that made me feel a whole lot better and I wanted to bring it to OUR attention, because I know for sure that I'm not the only one dealing with this. I don't know if you know of a woman on Instagram called Raynell Stewart a.k.a @Supa_Cent founder and CEO of The Crayon Case. She is a lot of what I aspire to be like. Unapologetically black, her new Orleans accent is thick-k-k. She doesn't front for the gram and have perfect pretty insta pictures all day long. She is 100% her authentic self and her fans love her for it. She may not be your cup of tea, but I recommend visiting her page and taking a big whiff of what her brand of genuine smells like, it's delicious! By being herself, she's now a boss that can make a million dollars in 1 hour! What an achievement, she's inspiring women and men all over the world to be their best authentic selves and that's what is flying off her shelves like hotcakes.

I've told myself from this year onwards, I'm not second guessing myself in this area anymore. My word for 2019 is "Fearless" and I can't own that word if I won't even allow myself to speak freely. I have spoken this way for 30 something years and by now y'all are gonna like it or not, but to get to where I want to go I'm going to have to be a lot more confident than I am now, and with much thicker skin. Seems like a good starting point right?

Rose
xx