Being Whitney… By Whitney Farmer – Un Pop Culture

February 15, 2012 Whitney Farmer 7 Comments

Whitney runs a rock music venue on the beach in L.A.. She has an M.B.A, and very few scars.

The party where she had been scheduled to perform started in the same hotel where her body still lay in death. As the party went on, so did her ex-husband.  He hit the stage in Mississippi right on time and threw kisses to heaven while he made some money.

They had met at the height of her career as his had begun to decline. They got married and had a baby together 8 months later. The baby, a daughter, was her first and his fourth. Later, he would introduce his wife to drugs and might have helped her rid herself of any thoughts of being special.  She had been born with gifts and had been raised surrounded by people who gave her gifts respect. Now, she was with a man who persuaded her to have their miserable life together filmed as a reality show. When their marriage finally ended, he sued her for spousal support.

Maybe if she had looked back on her life, she would have thought that she made mostly good decisions, except for a few. And maybe she would have had few regrets. Or one.

This has been a difficult one. None of her bravado worked. She asked Diane Sawyer once to imagine being onstage and hearing the sound of disappointment in 10,000 people. She wasn’t Black enough to not be jeered at the Soul Train Music Awards, White enough to be featured in the posters of her first movie, bad enough to be left alone, or holy enough to be safe from darkness. The thin part of the layer of her gifts of beauty and voice had begun to be frayed, but the deep and permanent layers remained untouched. As her body was brought home for burial in New Jersey, her latest record sales surpassed a million. She held the first three spots on Apple’s ITunes and her various albums held first, second, fourth, and fifth sales positions on Amazon.  Her daughter – hospitalized twice since Whitney’s death, inconsolable in her loss –  is the heir to her rapidly growing estate.

The common tagline in times like these is that it was no one’s fault, or if there was blame, she was solely responsible. This is a lie. What seems to be a rhetorical question of “Am I my brother’s keeper..?” was an answer given by Cain after becoming the first murderer. Even though the blood of his brother Abel cried out against him, he viewed himself as being blameless. But the question can also be answered in the uncomfortable and truthful opposite. While each person is responsible for their choices and will reap the consequences, we can affect each other as well by the choices that we make.

In human conflicts and crises, it is popular to say that “It takes two.” It’s not true. We have broken up fights at the club where one person was solely responsible. In these cases, a handshake at the top of the stairs isn’t enough to make it right. They are out and done because they have proven that they can’t be trusted. It would be easy if life above ground and outside our walls was this simple.

Sometimes a divorce is because one person was betrayed. Sometimes a murder is because someone was a victim. Sometimes someone loses the promise of gifts and life because the wrong people were let in. It’s rare that a person willingly opens the door to destruction. If they do, it can be an indication that they have been damaged sometime before. Sometimes people are fooled into believing that someone or something is good for them. Isn’t this line the opening come-on for addiction? Isn’t compassion called for when a person makes mistakes because of deception?

What was your head like after you found yourself trapped in the middle of a nightmare? When I got divorced, I had lived my life before as a good girl. It hadn’t insulated me.  When it all hit, I decided to abandon everything that I thought I believed about reaping and sowing and divine math and sin and throw myself off a cliff.  I was only able to manage one true prayer from my heart, that God would keep me alive long enough to change my mind. He did, and my life intact was all I was left with. Thankfully, that was all I needed.

Let the record show: If you introduce someone to drugs and they become an addict, you are responsible. If you marry someone and betray them, you are responsible. If you beat someone and they bruise, you are responsible. If you steal from someone – their gold or their gifts – you are responsible. There is one way out of this, and it has nothing to do with hiring a publicist. Own it. Be broken by it. Pray to God. Do what you can to fix it. The best word to describe it isn’t popular: Repent.

Victims will reap the consequences of their own actions after your assault. But don’t start lying to yourself and deny that they won’t be trying to run their race with a broken leg.

If Whitney felt that she had to marry because she had gotten pregnant, or that she was a good girl who could rescue a bad boy, or that she felt a conflict inside of darkness against light that all of us fight but she assumed was her personal hopeless secret…it’s all done now. Her race is finished and she crossed the finish line. In honesty, she did better than many.

—-

Quote of the Blog, from Whitney Houston in her 2002 interview with Diane Sawyer: “I have a few temptations, but it’s not about drugs, it’s about kicking ass…”