Is You Okay? (2 page)

Then finally, I was invited to speak at the MAKERS Conference taking place in early 2016. MAKERS is a leadership group that tells the stories of the groundbreaking women of today in order to create the groundbreaking women of tomorrow. The people in this group are leaders, crusaders, fighters, storytellers, revolutionaries.
What did they want with me?
My biggest video of the year was the Kylie Jenner Challenge, where I sucked on a vacuum cleaner hose to make my lips bigger (it works, in case you were wondering). Was I the entertainment, or was MAKERS saying they considered me one of them? I wasn't sure.

Then I saw the theme for the 2016 conference—#TheTimeIsNow—and it all made sense.

By the time 2015 was over, I'd made 120 videos, generating hundreds of millions of views, and I had more than four
million subscribers to my YouTube channel. I had met people and been on TV shows that had been important to me throughout my life, been through some very high highs and some very low lows, and come out the other side with an invitation to speak to a group of amazing women to start the new year.

Yes, I was one of them. But I was also different, and I think what made me different was that I don't need to be reminded that the time is now. I have been living that idea, whether I knew it or not, my whole life. And never so much as the three months that followed my accident. Everything that has ever happened to me has helped me to understand that you only have today. There are no excuses. Great friends are important, but knowing yourself is more important. You can do, or be, anything you want if you have faith, if you work hard, learn from your mistakes, and try to stand out.

I realized quickly that the MAKERS Conference was not the only group I was different from. I was (and still am) also different from the six hundred video tastemakers I was supposed to share the night with after I came sliding down that fireman's pole at the Streamys. They were mostly young; I was in my early forties. They grew up with smartphones; I grew up with pay phones. I had been married twice; they were
so
inexperienced. (I don't mean that in a negative way, I just mean in terms of time on this earth.) Some of them were
born when I was in college; others were in middle school when I first started posting videos on YouTube. I had an extra generation of life experience on nearly all my friends.

The MAKERS conference took place the first week of February 2016 at a beautiful oceanside resort in Palos Verdes, California, called Terranea. The only thing more beautiful than the hotel were the women inside attending the conference: Gloria Steinem, Abby Wambach, Katie Couric, Caitlyn Jenner, America Ferrera, Bethany Mota (my girl!), Annie Leibovitz, and so many others—all true legends of their craft.

At the opening ceremony, the organizers played an amazing welcome video that featured all these legendary women. The video talked about empowerment and vision and showed the face of every woman scheduled to speak at the conference. All these trailblazing women in the world whom I have looked up to, all in one room—it was unbelievable. Then my face came up on the screen! It was completely surreal. I was one of those people I looked up to! (LOL.)

When I truly considered that some young people looked up to me the way I looked up to Carol Burnett and all the women at this conference, I realized that it didn't make much sense for
me to write the kind of book you might expect from a typical YouTuber. Instead, I figured why not take advantage of all these
bonus years
(I'm being kind to myself now) to answer many of the questions—some serious, some silly—that young people often ask me. Why not offer them some hard-earned wisdom and hard-learned advice so they can avoid all the same crazy ups and downs that I had to survive?

So that's what I did.

This book is about all the big lessons in creativity, identity, and adversity that I was fortunately not too stubborn to learn, as well as an account of the moments from my life that led to learning those lessons. These stories are the experiences that made me who I am today, helped me find my home on YouTube, and, most important, taught me that the answer to the question “Is you okay?” can always be YES.

     
Q:
  Is “GloZell” your real name?

     
A:
  Yes. When I was younger I used to tell people my name was French, because that sounded more refined and elegant. But really, it is a combination of my parents' names: Gloria and Ozell. Get it?
GLO
-ria and O-
ZELL
. It's actually a pretty common practice in the black community, and I've grown to really love it.

           
My sister's name is DeOnzell. She's named after the amazing singer Dionne Warwick (my mom changed the spelling a little), and my father. It's pretty fitting that she was named after an awesome diva, because she's an opera singer now. Takes one to know one, I guess.

I have always been different.

As long as I can remember, even as a little girl growing up in Orlando, Florida—especially then, actually—I felt different. For a start, I never wanted to be what other kids wanted to be when they grew up. Boys wanted to be firefighters or astronauts or football players; girls wanted to be princesses or veterinarians.

I wanted to be the tooth fairy.

I'm deadly serious—I actually went around telling people I wanted to replace the tooth fairy when she retired. I thought that would be the greatest job in the world—and you know what, I still think that, kind of. You get to travel all over the world, you can FLY (
hello?
), you get to go into people's houses and look at all their stuff and you don't get in trouble. Plus you get to leave them some money. You're like a guardian angel with a bank account. That's why everyone loves the tooth fairy. Who wouldn't want that?

When I asked my mother, Gloria, how I could apply to be the next tooth fairy once she got tired of flying all those miles, my mom laughed and dismissed it, but not in the way parents do when they think you're just being a silly kid who doesn't know any better. She did it like she already knew what I was going to be when I grew up, and it didn't involve a pair of wings or dental work.

“Oh no, GloZell, you're going to be a corporate lawyer.”

Corporate lawyer? I had no idea what that meant—I was five years old. That didn't matter to my mom, because she was a teacher, and as a teacher, success for her kids meant doing things that involved a lot of school. Doctor, lawyer, engineer, scientist. Why corporate lawyer? I have no idea. Maybe it was because “corporate” means business and business means lots of money? Who knows—when you're young, all that really registers when you hear the words
corporate lawyer
is “not tooth fairy.” I thought,
I will never get to fly, and I will never see what toys the neighbor kids have that I don't
. It was a dark day.

Of course, I'm much closer to being a tooth fairy now, as an adult, than I ever was to being a corporate lawyer. It's why I like to wear a green tutu at my public appearances.

Is the green tutu a bit weird for a grown woman? Maybe. If it is, I blame it on my mom—the weirdness, I mean. (The tutu was my choice.) That woman is diff-UH-rent. She's one of my best friends now, but growing up she confused me more than just about anyone else in my life. She could have spoken to my little sister, DeOnzell, and me entirely in Japanese and we would have been less confused.

My mom is one of those people who have a lot of strange ideas about things that often leave you shaking your head.
The stranger the idea, the more right she feels about it. And the more right she feels, of course, the less right she tends to be. What's worse, though—at least when it comes to arguing with her—is that there's always a little kernel of genius inside each of her cray-cray ideas.

A couple years ago, for GloZell Fest she made a bunch of church hats (we call them “church crowns”) out of household items—a KFC bucket, a trashcan, a lampshade, a pot and a frying pan, stuff like that. Her plan was to have my YouTube friends model them in an impromptu fashion show. Now I can see my mom's logic with the KFC bucket: to church folks back home, where GloZell Fest was happening to church folks back home in Florida, fried chicken is like the Holy Bird. We eat it so much at church events that
of course
making a formal hat from a KFC bucket would make perfect sense to her. The rest of it, I have no idea, but the KFC bucket? At least I could see the kernel in the Colonel. (And here's the thing: the hats were good. Colleen was one of the models in the fashion show, and I think she actually really liked hers. My YouTube friends
still
ask about those hats. . . .)

See, it's not that my mom is a crazy person; she's very smart, actually, but in unconventional ways. She's like a mash-up of Martha Stewart and Bear Grylls. The thing is,
something happens
between the time a little kernel of genius plants itself in her brain and when it grows into a fully formed
idea. That “something” makes the moment of genius blossom into “something that makes no sense,” which in turn makes arguing about it with her impossible.

Like I will never forget the time in sixth grade when one of her brilliant ideas left a family friend named Dr. Almont looking like a hockey player. Dr. Almont was a pharmacist like my dad. My dad loved his pharmacy and he cared a lot about his customers, so if he ever had to be away, he would only trust someone he knew well—like Dr. Almont—to take over in his absence. And since Dr. Almont didn't have his own pharmacy anymore (he was older than my dad), he would happily fill in from time to time.

So on the occasion in question, my dad had a week of pharmacy training and certifications to do some place far enough out of town that he called in Dr. Almont.

Nothing really changed at the pharmacy when Dr. Almont filled in for my dad. My mom worked the cash register (when she wasn't giving piano lessons, that is); Dr. Almont filled prescriptions all day, and after school, if DeOnzell and I didn't have choir practice or piano lessons ourselves, we'd come hang out, pretending to do our homework while we watched the TV that sat on the floor behind the counter. If there were a lot of customers, we could watch cartoons or reruns of
Laverne & Shirley
. If it was slow, Dr. Almont and
my mom would join us and then they got to choose what we watched since they were the adults.

This particular afternoon we all got to watching
Jeopardy!
Dr. Almont sat in a little chair against the wall, my mom stood leaning against the counter in case any customers walked in, and they went back and forth trying to beat each other to the answer. It seemed like they didn't care if they were right, they just wanted to be first. Dr. Almont would start in before Alex Trebek even finished reading the clue:

Alex: “This sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer—

Dr. Almont: “Who is . . .”

And then his answer would trail off because he had no idea, and he had to reread the clue on the screen that he'd just talked over. This would always give my mom the time she needed to give her answer—which was wrong, like, oh, I don't know, 75 percent of the time?

At one point there was a clue about the royal family and Dr. Almont was silent. No half guesses, no jumping the gun, nothing. The royal wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana had taken place only a couple years earlier—everyone had been obsessed with it—so how could he not have at least one name on the tip of his tongue to be wrong about? I looked over, expecting to see him thinking hard—instead, I found
him with his eyes rolled back in his head and his whole body shaking to one side. He was foaming at the mouth, his jaw was clenched, and his arms were bowed out in front of him. Imagine Frankenstein trying to hug a tree, and you'll get the picture.

“Mom, Mom, Dr. Almont is having a fit!” I yelled. Back in the day where I come from we called what was happening “having fits.” The correct term I learned when I got older was “seizure.” Dr. Almont, it turns out, had epilepsy, and sure enough was having an epileptic seizure right there behind the counter of the pharmacy.

My mom started shouting, “It's okay! I know what to do! I know what to do!” Even by sixth grade I knew whenever my mom said, “I know what to do,” what she really meant was that she had no idea what to do.

“Don't worry, I know what to do! I know what to do!” she shouted again. “We gotta lay him flat on the ground and put something hard in his mouth so he doesn't bite off his tongue!” She seemed so sure of herself, that's what we did. My sister and I got Dr. Almont flat onto the floor and just stared at him while my mom ran to the back of the store to find something to put in his mouth. Let me tell you, it's very weird to hear the countdown theme music to Final Jeopardy in the
background while an old man you've known your whole life shakes on the ground like he's possessed by demons.

I'll take “Please Make This Stop” for $1000, Alex.

My mom ran back after what felt like forever holding a large metal spoon—the kind you see in the pan of scrambled eggs on a breakfast buffet. Now I have no idea why there was a large serving spoon in the back of a pharmacy, but whatever—she got down on the ground holding that thing like it was the Jaws of Life, pinned Dr. Almont's arms down with her knees, and then spent the next two minutes trying to jam the spoon through his clenched teeth. My mom is not the physically strongest lady in the world, but she's no quitter. That spoon was getting in there one way or another.

Dr. Almont came to three or four minutes later. We were all freaked out, but he had been living with epilepsy all these years so he was calmer than us—right up to the point where he ran his tongue over his teeth and looked in the mirror behind the counter. In my mom's panic to get something into his mouth so he wouldn't bite off his tongue, she'd broken off his top two front teeth. He looked like a jack-o'-lantern! Dr. Almont was completely confused, and I'm sure he wanted to be mad, but how could he be? My mom was just trying to do the right thing.

And that was the thing with my mom: she was always kind of right . . . sort of. You are supposed to get someone suffering an epileptic seizure onto their side, and you are supposed to make sure you move any harmful objects away from them. But it's a myth that people having seizures can bite off and swallow their tongue, so you're
not
supposed to put anything in their mouth. Even if they could, you shouldn't use something stronger than teeth to prevent it, let alone try to jam it in there like you're chipping ice off a windshield. In the Old West, when they had to amputate a limb or remove a bullet, they'd give the guy some whiskey and then have him bite down on a leather strap or maybe a broomstick. Not a piece of metal, and certainly not a huge spoon!

But that's my mom. The kernel of the idea is right, and the execution is all sorts of diff-UH-rent.

My mom's tendency toward being different doesn't stop at emergency triage medicine; it includes far less critical things like, oh I don't know,
where she sent my sister and me to school!

The
idea
was to give us the best education and the most opportunities to succeed. The
execution
involved putting us in a place called the Calvary Presbyterian School. I
absolutely loved where I went to school—I'm not trying to hate—I'm just saying that if you've never been to any place with “Presbyterian” in the name, it's usually about as white as the screen or the paper you're reading this on. From kindergarten through eighth grade at Calvary Presbyterian, DeOnzell and I weren't just the only
black
girls, we were the only ones with a
tan
.

Growing up in a big family—my dad was one of eight kids, my mom was one of six—you spend most of your time in the same houses, in the same neighborhoods, going to the same churches, and you don't realize how different things can be (or how different you are) until you're taken out of those familiar places and forced to spend most of your day some place new. I didn't even realize I was black, for instance, until my first day of kindergarten and all the other parents dropped off their children—my new classmates. I was the first one to arrive, which by itself was a miracle since my parents were not prompt people. They always managed to get me to school on time, so I'll give them that, but they never picked me up on time. (It's why I'm so crazy about being on time as an adult.)