Priceless Inspirations (20 page)

I knew I liked fashion and I knew I was a good mother, and as I became more comfortable in Atlanta and started meeting more and more people, I began to realize another thing that I was good at--I’m a good and loyal friend.

It’s true. I started meeting people and making friends. Sometimes I met them at events that I was invited to, and sometimes it was just doing errands, or at the hair salon. People seemed comfortable with me, and they told me their stories. I shared with them some of the things I’d been through.

I began to see myself as family-oriented and realized that I had really tried to help my relatives. Sometimes that got me into trouble. I tried too hard to please people who didn’t have my best interests at heart, but the spirit of it was a good thing.

I began to see myself as a good person. I was a person who had made some mistakes, and I was a person who had weaknesses and faults, but I was a good person, a person I liked, and a person who tried hard and was honest, loyal and real.

Two years ago, I had the words “I love me” tattooed on my finger. It was my reminder to myself to treat myself like I was as priceless as my name. It was my reminder that I was a gem, and that the time for making decisions for my life that were wrapped up in what other people thought or wanted was over.

I had finally decided to make my life about
me
.

It hasn’t been easy, but little by little, I’ve started to recognize more and more of my good qualities. I’ve started to feel better about myself. Feeling better about myself has helped me to reach for new opportunities. Reaching for new opportunities has helped me to see that I was capable of so much more than I thought I was when I was sitting in my house in New Orleans, wondering why Dream didn’t love me anymore. I started to make friends who saw all my good qualities. They’ve praised them in me. It’s been like a snowball--the more confident I felt, the more new things I tried. The more new things I tried, the more new people I met. The more new people I met, the more new things I learned. The more new things I learned, the more I liked myself. The more I liked myself, the more confident I felt. The more confident I felt, the more new things I was willing to try.

I made new goals for myself. One of them was to try to do more fashion styling and to hold fashion shows. Another was to open a boutique. I got the opportunity to try styling on
Tiny and Toya
, and I know I’m going to be doing more of it. I’ll be hosting more fashion shows in the community at my boutique, The Garb.

I’m really, really proud of the store because it’s something I’ve wanted to do for the longest time, and it’s something I’m doing 100% on my own. For years, I tried to open the store, but I thought I needed either the financial backing or assistance from my ex. One thing and then another seem to keep it from ever happening.

Finally, The Garb is open on Magazine Street in New Orleans, and I did it all myself. In addition to offering high-style at recession prices, it even has a section that includes a little bit from my own wardrobe called “Toya’s Closet” where you can buy dresses I wore on the red carpet or outfits that I’ve been photographed in.

I’m proud of it, and I’m proud of me.

The other really big goal that I set for myself was to write this book, and as you can see, I’ve done that, too. I’m proud of it, and I’m proud of me. Not in a conceited way, but because I set a goal for myself and I accomplished it.

Finally, I really started to see myself as loving and lovable, and once I started to see myself as loving and lovable, love came to me.

The Mistake I Made That You Shouldn’t

For a long time I believed that I was only lovable when someone was in love with me, or when I felt the love coming to me from others. I wish I’d realized sooner that being in a relationship isn’t what makes you lovable. Instead, it’s what you have in your heart, what you give to other people and how you use all the qualities and abilities that you have that are gifts from God.

I was lovable even when no one loved me, and now I know that. By exploring new things and new places, I’ve discovered things about myself that I like and strengths I didn’t know I had. I’ve learned to love myself for who I am, and Ioving myself has made it easier for me to love others.

Toya’s Priceless Gem: Starting to love yourself means looking at the things you’re good at, at the qualities you’re proud of and the good you do for other people in the world. Every time you find things you like about yourself, you come closer to realizing that you are a priceless gem, and to learning to love yourself for exactly who you are!

Loving and Trusting Others

I’ve been hurt enough times in relationships to be real suspicious about men. When I meet a new guy, I hesitate. Lots of things run through my mind: What’s his motive? Is he a player? Is he looking to get famous or to use me? Is he dangerous? My life has given me reason to be suspicious.

I’ve had plenty of dealings with people whose motives with me weren’t good. I’ve had my share of bad experiences with men who just wanted to be with all the girls and who weren’t interested in building anything serious with just me.

I’ve met plenty of guys who, as soon as they found out a little about me, wanted to use me to get famous. They wanted me to hook them up with the people I’m associated with, but after that, they weren’t really interested in getting to know me.

After being followed by a stalker fan, I have learned to be cautious about the people I meet casually in public. I couldn’t take the chance that someone who saw me on TV and claimed to “love me” might get too close to me or my daughter.

Even before the show, I sometimes met guys who weren’t quite right, you know what I’m saying? Sometimes you can tell when you first meet them, but sometimes, it takes a minute for you to realize it. That’s how it was when I met a guy I’ll call “Sam” when I first moved to Atlanta.

At first everything was great. I liked Sam and he seemed nice. Pretty quickly I could tell he was more into me than I was into him. He really liked me, and after only a couple months of pretty casual hanging out together, he started talking about getting married. We’d be driving around the city together, and he’d be pointing at houses.

“You like that one, Toya?” he’d ask. “I’m gonna buy it for you.”

I thought that was a little strange. I hadn’t known him long enough to even start thinking about a serious relationship, and he was already talking about settling down?

It got worse.

I don’t know if you would call it stalking, but he kept popping up on me everywhere I went. If I went to visit a friend, he’d be driving in the neighborhood, or even stop by her house. If I went to the grocery store or to run some errands, there he was. It made me really uncomfortable. I felt like he was checking up on me or something, trying to make sure I was where I said I was. That’s bad, even if you are married to each other, because if you don’t have trust, then you don’t have a relationship. We didn’t have it like that. We weren’t married. We weren’t even boyfriend and girlfriend. We’d just been on a few dates, and that was it.

This went on for a couple of weeks before I got sick of it. I broke it off with Sam and I told him why. I let him know that I just didn’t like the possessive vibe he was sending out. He went crazy. Somehow he got his hands on some pictures my friends had taken of me and he put them all over the Internet along with my phone number. “She’s a freak!” he wrote on this website, detailing all kinds of nasty stuff I would do to them if they’d call the number. It was really sick.

Sam also caused me problems at home, too. My little brother was living with me then, and Sam convinced him that they were friends. So my brother was telling him where I was and taking his side in my house! I had a serious talk about loyalty with my brother, which he really didn’t like. He got mad and left me to go back to other relatives in New Orleans. It took a while to sort all that out and for my brother to understand how Sam had been using him to try to force me to continue dating him.

At the lowest moments of my experience with Sam, I was afraid to stay in my own home. I don’t know what would have happened if he hadn’t decided to go back to New Orleans (he was from there, too).

He went back, and ended up getting killed. I guess he ran into some trouble down there. I really don’t know the story, but I heard that someone shot him. By then, I had already decided--no more dating for me. None. I went on a loooong break from men.

It wasn’t just the experience with Sam. My dear friend Shawnte’s murder a little while later really put the lock on it for me. Some of the things she went through were things I had avoided just by luck with Sam. I felt like I had every reason to worry about violent and abusive men. The way she died shook me up so badly that for a long time I didn’t take any chances with anyone. In every man’s face I saw the potential for harm hiding just beneath his smile. I wouldn’t let my guard down to any of them because of this for a long time after her death. I was just too scared. I didn’t want her fate to become my own.

Little by little, I started to realize that my fears were cutting me off from adding the possibility of a happy relationship to my life. I knew I had to be cautious or I’d make the same mistakes I had in the past, and get swept up in a relationship with someone who could never really be serious about me. I knew I had to be cautious or I might become a victim of someone who claimed to love me, but was actually unstable. While I’ll never forget the lessons of Shawnte’s death, I don’t want to live my life being so suspicious that love can’t find me. Some men are abusive, but not all of them are. I had to trust that I’d learned something from Shawnte’s experience and at the first sign of something “off” , back out of the relationship and move on.

I wanted a man in my life, but I wasn’t feeling desperate about it. I’m not one of these women who loudly proclaim they “don’t need a man.” It’s true, I don’t
need
a man, but I do
want
someone to share my life with me, and that’s just the truth.

I met my guy, Memphitz, a couple of years ago at T-Pain’s BET Awards after-party. I usually don’t date guys I meet in a club because when you meet a guy in a club, you know something really important about him—that he clubs. Guys that go to clubs to hang tend to be boys, still playing. They haven’t grown up. They haven’t become men who are interested in something
real
.

The after-party had a club feeling to it, but because it was at a beautiful private home in Los Angeles, I made an exception to my usual rule about men I meet in that atmosphere. We talked. It was nice. He was a different kind of guy than the guys I usually meet. I found him interesting, and at the end of the evening, I broke my other rule and gave him my number.

We hung out when we could. We were both busy and had a lot going on in our lives, so it wasn’t like dating or any big love affair at first. He had a house in Atlanta, but spent a good deal of his time in New York. When he was in Atlanta, he’d call and we’d chill around the city, getting to know each other.

We started out more as friends than anything else. He had a situation and I had a situation and neither of us was free, so it really couldn’t have been much more than friendship. I was involved with a player from the Buffalo Bills, and he had a girlfriend. We talked about those relationships. We tried to give each other advice. It was like having a good friend from the opposite sex to help give you another point of view.

I invited Memphitz to my birthday party and he brought me a present--a pink gun.

I was still dating the player, but things hadn’t been good in a bit and I was starting to feel that he wasn’t the right guy for me. In one of our many conversations, I’d told Memphitz that I wanted a little gun. I wanted to learn to shoot for protection. After the incident with the fan who tried to follow me home, I was rattled. I was a woman alone with a young daughter. I don’t have security, and I don’t have guards. I wanted a gun--a pink one. (Hey, I’m a girl!) I’m not trigger happy and I’d hope to never, ever use it, but I knew it would ease my mind to have it.

Here was Memphitz with a pink gun in a pretty little box for my birthday.

I was really touched. It was sweet that he’d remembered, and it made me see him in a different light. He was really paying attention to what I was saying, and he really wanted to see me happy. Most of the guys I’d hung out with only paid attention to what made them happy. They rarely gave the women in their lives much thought at all.

It was a real light-bulb moment for me.

Memphitz had proved to me he was different from most other guys. We were still just friends, but the thoughtfulness of his present kept coming to my mind again and again.

Of course, the player didn’t like Memphitz or his present. He felt disrespected because someone else had shown more thoughtfulness toward me than he had. I didn’t care. I was ready to break up anyway. I wasn’t going to let someone who wasn’t really feeling me tell me to cut off a friend who genuinely cared for me.