The ego tries so hard to make itself the most important thing in our life, because it’s afraid of not existing. So it tries to control your life with personalizations and attachments in order to feel comfortable. A change in any of our attachments here—people, places, or things—gives the opportunity for our ego to create negative thoughts in our heads that aren’t real, just like the ego isn’t real.

GUILTING OUT

My parents didn’t place guilt and responsibility on me, and they didn’t have to. I placed guilt and responsibility on myself. The bad angel took the lead on my shoulder and in my mind, and it was telling me all sorts of things that weren’t true. It was feeding me those devilish lies:

“You’ve let your family down, Keke.”

“Do you even know what you’re doing?”

“Where can your career even go from here?”

“Stay inside, it’s too difficult for you to decide.”

“You’re an idiot. Look at how emotional you are. All you do is let me down! How can you trust yourself?”

“Talk to your mom.”

“No I can’t.”

“Call her, you need her.”

“No, she probably doesn’t love me anymore.”

“Why would anyone?”

“Once all my money is gone no one will think about me.”

“ ’Cause no one really sees me anyway.”

My ego defined itself by being the breadwinner. None of this was true. My family loved me, but my ego was insecure and it blinded me from the reality and drove me away from people who loved me. This very irrational voice in my head had me believing every negative word and put me in a very dark place. When you allow yourself to feed into the negative voices in your head, they drown out everything and everyone else. See, that’s the ego trying to be in “control” again.

GIRL ON THE MOVE

At eighteen years old I ran away to live with my boyfriend, and when I did it was like I put my life, and my dreams and my passions, in a freezer like some human embryos. Reality soon set in that my man couldn’t save me because that wasn’t his duty. #DUHKEKE.

I shouldn’t have expected him to save me, and he shouldn’t have agreed to. We were both really young and we thought the emotion of being “in love” itself was enough to sustain a relationship. #LOVEISANACTIONNOTASENTIMENT.

Never mind the fact that he hadn’t had time to come into his own as an adult, and neither had I. Guys kind of mature late, so even though he was twenty-two when we moved in together, he didn’t know any more than I did. Neither of us had really gotten comfortable with who we were as individuals, let alone as a couple.

We didn’t grasp the importance of knowing ourselves or what we wanted from each other. That level of maturity is very important when starting a relationship, especially when a couple is moving in and starting a LIFE together.

We quickly began crossing boundaries that we never knew to set for our relationship. Almost immediately we became the perfect example of a codependent relationship. My fantasy that a relationship could save me popped.

My guy couldn’t help “me find me.” I had to love MYSELF and face everything that I had buried underneath my mask of humanity if I ever wanted to accomplish ANYTHING in life.

I’d lost my identity with the loss of my job and it took a lot of work and honest reflection and self-assessment to get back to the real me. Digging into my journals was a big help in doing that. I had to be comfortable with who I was before I could be comfortable in a relationship. I needed to step back from it. This is what I mean when I talk about how you can change your story. If an identity isn’t working for you (aka Keke the child star on True Jackson, VP, Keke the breadwinner, Keke the perfect humble kid who I thought my parents wanted me to be), then you can create a new one.

Or even if it ditches you, take it as the opportunity to expand into something more! But I wasn’t allowing myself to do that. I was trying to hold on tightly to an old identity and an outdated story line. I was spending all my time mourning my old identity, when the reality was that it was time for Keke to move on.

It was time for Keke to expand into something more. And that’s when the idea of Just Keke started to develop in my head. I knew I had so much to say about life and that my feelings and experiences were probably not so different from other young people. The only difference was that I had gotten resources very early on that allowed me to intellectualize my feelings as a young person.

I felt I could be a conduit to relay the message to younger people that it ain’t that deep, and that we were going to be all right. Before, there had always been older talk show hosts, and we didn’t feel like they could relate to us. My idea was that because I was young, the time was now (I am a millennial ). It wasn’t that I was smarter than them—I just grew up in a different world and I could create a platform to help young people tell their stories. I just couldn’t leave them hanging. That’s where my new dream was birthed. I also wanted to help them see that their stories are their testimonies! I figured out how to see myself as a hero in my life. I realized the power of perspective and I wanted to share that power with them!

GROWING BEYOND EXPECTATIONS

I had loved True Jackson, VP, and I missed the comfort of that scenario, but even before it was canceled I’d begun to feel ready for a larger role. People had started referring to me as “the girl from Nickelodeon.” That annoyed the ^*%$ out of me. I’m like, Oh really? Y’all forgot about The Wool Cap? Y’all forgot about Akeelah and Barbershop? Y’all forgot about my foundation?

I was still having trouble establishing an identity outside of my career and outside the perception of others. Their labels bothered me so much simply because I knew there was more to me than that. Yet, at the same time, it reminded me that the public perceptions of “Keke” that were focused on those specific accolades or accomplishments had moved to the forefront.

I resented not being able to surprise people when they met me. I started to become pissed that everywhere I went, there was already a perception formed of who I was. I thought that public perception was too narrow. My frustration with it was also a symptom of me being aggravated by my own confusion of who I was. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so pissed if I’d been more secure in my sense of self.

When you grow as a person, you’re always trying to reestablish your own identity. I was growing and changing on the inside daily, but I allowed my circumstances to put me in a mental space that restricted my efforts to grow. I didn’t realize that this was a blessing. Now that I was no longer working on a television series, I had the freedom and the motivation to move forward. That’s how it is when you lose something. It creates a space where there wasn’t space before, so something new can come in.

I also realized that for others to respect my boundaries, I had to make my boundaries clear. That realization came when my boyfriend and I broke up.

Boundaries aren’t just for boyfriends either. They are for anyone who is a regular part of your life. Creating boundaries up front can solve a lot of issues long term.

CREATING BOUNDARIES

You can create boundaries in any area of your life in order to develop and follow your own voice. If you don’t like your sister wearing your clothes, you can tell her that if she puts on your shirt, she’s crossed a boundary. It works with parents too. I eventually had to tell my mother I wasn’t going to accept her not being conscious of my privacy and not respecting my freedom of choice.

My mother has been my manager all my life and she was very comfortable micromanaging everything! But there comes a point where you’re ready to be the driver of your own car. And it took a lot of concentration for us both to accept that it was time for me to take the leading role instead of a supporting one.

In the transition, she’d often cross those boundaries. Thinking she was helping but really only stepping on my toes. I could understand why she did it. She was my mother and my manager, and sometimes it was tough to distinguish between those two roles. I wanted my manager to work for me and with me on all major decisions, but I didn’t want my mom acting like my mom in front of the people we worked with. I wanted the people who we worked with to respect me, and for her to respect me too, outside of being her daughter.

Letting her know how I felt allowed my mom to make the needed changes for our relationship to thrive. She heard me, and our relationship began to change for the better. I started to feel like I could say what I really wanted. I finally wasn’t a kid anymore, so I guess I could be seen and heard. #LUCKYME. #BLACKFAMILYPROBS.

At every turn after True Jackson, VP, I was learning more and more about what I could handle and how resourceful I could be during difficult times. When things begin to change, you really have no choice other than to look for the real you. Your setbacks give you the opportunity (and space!) to figure out what truly makes you happy, who adds to your happiness, and how to find the next part of your story—the one that’s going to make it really interesting!

Think of all the things you’d do if you knew that failure couldn’t hurt you, and focus on the experiences that have been beneficial, useful, desirable, and constructive in establishing your core values. Once you begin to determine the values that truly matter to you, the real you and your real voice can’t be far behind, and that’s real!