Some chapters prove you can survive. Others remind you that survival was never supposed to be the whole story. I love Eve's music. Let me get th
Some chapters prove you can survive. Others remind you that survival was never supposed to be the whole story.
I love Eve’s music.
Let me get that out of the way because, obviously. Tambourine. Love Is Blind. Let Me Blow Ya Mind. Ruff Ryders. The short blonde hair. The paw-print tattoos. Eve came into hip-hop looking and sounding like nobody needed to explain to her who she was.
But acting is where I became a real Eve fan.
I loved her in Barbershop. And when Eve came to television, I was there. I genuinely grieved when that sitcom ended. Eve was funny. She had timing. She could carry a scene. I wanted to see where that part of her career was going.
Years later, Eve wrote a memoir, Who’s That Girl?, with Kathy Iandoli.
And once I started looking more closely at what Eve has shared about the woman behind all those different versions we saw, I realized something.
There are some survival lessons in this woman’s life.
These are lessons about what happens when life doesn’t unfold neatly, when the strong woman isn’t feeling particularly strong, when one version of your life ends, and when you have to figure out who you are after everybody has gotten accustomed to who you used to be.
1. Being underestimated is not the same as being accurately assessed.
Imagine walking into a room as a writer and having people assume somebody else must be doing the writing.
Eve has talked about encountering exactly that kind of doubt early in her career. People could see the young woman standing in front of them. What they could not necessarily see was everything she had brought into the room with her.
People assess us with incomplete information all the time.
They see our age. Our job title. Our mistakes. Our education. Our lack of education. Our neighborhood. Our accent. Our appearance.
The current season we’re struggling through.
Then they build an entire conclusion out of a handful of facts.
You do not have to spend your whole life running behind people correcting their assessment. You can keep developing what is yours.
Sometimes the answer to being underestimated isn’t a better explanation. It’s time.
2. One closed door does not get jurisdiction over the rest of your life.
Music Eve became acting Eve. Acting Eve became television Eve.
There was fashion. Hosting. Marriage. Motherhood. A memoir.
That doesn’t mean every door she wanted opened. Some didn’t.
Her hilarious sitcom ended after three seasons. The music industry changed. Life changed. Eve changed.
This is where motivational language can become dishonest. We sometimes tell people that a closed door means an even better door is waiting.
We don’t know that. Some doors do close and nothing equivalent ever replaces them. BUT, one closed door still doesn’t get to declare the entire building condemned. There may be another amazing room in your life that you haven’t even discovered yet.
3. Looking strong and feeling strong are two different things.
Eve has spoken about experiencing panic attacks during the height of her early success.
From the outside, here was a woman winning.
From the inside, her body was sounding an alarm.
There are people walking around right now doing their jobs, raising children, paying bills, cracking jokes, making everybody else comfortable and looking perfectly capable while privately thinking:
I don’t know how much longer I can keep doing this.
Looking functional does not mean everything is functioning well.
You are allowed to pay attention when your body, mind and spirit tell you something needs care. Strength includes listening.
4. Sometimes the woman making everybody laugh is carrying something nobody knows about.
This got to me. Because I loved this show and had no clue.
While filming Eve, Eve experienced an ectopic pregnancy. She later revealed that she told people she had appendicitis.
She was working. Performing. Making television. Making people laugh.
And carrying an enormous private experience that viewers knew nothing about.
Later came endometriosis, fibroids, fertility struggles and IVF.
How many women have we watched perform through pain without realizing it?
Not just entertainers. The coworker. The teacher. The cashier. The woman at church. The friend who remembered everybody’s birthday.
The woman who answered, “I’m fine,” because explaining the truth would require energy she didn’t have.
Sometimes survival looks remarkably ordinary from the outside.
That should make us gentler about assuming we know what another woman is carrying.
And it should make us gentler with ourselves when keeping up appearances has become exhausting.
*Note: Eve takes accountability for her own contribution to the show ending, and that is admirable, but I personally choose to give her grace. It sounds like she was experiencing the highs and joys of the show and the lows and loss of good health and a pregnancy. Could not have been easy.
Women, We Are Not Asking for Special Treatment. We Are Asking to Be Treated. – WE Survive Abuse
5. You are allowed to stop performing toughness.
You are not required to remain the woman you became when survival was your full-time job
There was a time when “pit bull in a skirt” fit Eve beautifully. But nobody should have to remain the same woman forever simply because that woman knew how to survive. There are seasons when armor is useful. There are seasons when you begin wondering why you’re still sleeping in it.
Growing softer in some places does not erase the woman who had to be hard.
Wanting quiet does not make your younger fire embarrassing. Wanting family doesn’t cancel ambition. Rest doesn’t invalidate hustle.
Peace isn’t proof that you have lost your edge. Sometimes peace is what all that fighting was trying to get you to.
6. You don’t have to insult your former self to celebrate the woman you have become.
I love this one especially for women.
We are encouraged to tell our lives as before-and-after stories.
Old me: foolish.
New me: wise.
Old me: broken.
New me: healed.
Old me: lost.
New me: found.
Human beings are more interesting than that.
The young Eve belonged. Rapper Eve belongs. Actress Eve belongs. The woman who struggled belongs. The woman who made choices she might make differently today belongs.
Wife belongs. Mother belongs. Author belongs.
Every version does not have to agree with every other version to belong to the same life.
You can grow without standing over your younger self calling her stupid.
She knew what she knew. She survived what she survived. She got you here.
Teach her something. Forgive her something. Laugh with her about something.
But don’t throw her away.
7. Your life is allowed to have more than one act.
Maybe this is what Eve’s story leaves me thinking about most.
We become accustomed to measuring people’s lives by their most visible season.
Especially women.
There was her moment.
There was her beauty.
There was her career.
There was her chance.
Past tense starts creeping into conversations about women surprisingly early.
But a human life isn’t supposed to peak once and spend the remaining decades explaining what happened. (It is why I despise the trending word, “irrelevant.” The word, as people casually use it, is a lie.)
You can have an extraordinary season at 22 and another meaningful one at 44.
You can leave something.
Return to something.
Become a beginner again.
You can discover that the thing you thought would define your whole life was only one part of it.
And you can grieve something that ended without deciding everything good ended with it.
I still wish Eve had lasted longer. I felt cheated out of more seasons with all of the characters and their storyline.
There. I said it.
But perhaps that’s part of the lesson too.
I can wish one chapter had continued and still appreciate all the pages that came afterward.
Eve’s life did not follow one clean upward line. Neither will most of ours.
There will be interruptions. Detours. Losses. Surprises. Years when very little seems to move. Things we wanted that never happen exactly as imagined.
No promised rose garden.
Just this:
As long as you are here, there may still be something worth tending.
Something worth learning.
Something worth trying.
Something worth enjoying.
And perhaps another part of yourself you haven’t met yet.
Your life is allowed to have more than one act.
There is no age when a woman becomes finished. There are only seasons when she has not yet met who she is becoming.
