"Look what I have done in this lifetime"

I had a whole post ready for you all, but then I shut down the computer and opened up social media for a second and learned that Tina was gone.

It’s weird when you feel a connection with someone famous. You know nothing about them and you’re an observer and audience, knowing only snippets of their life that get splashed on screens or online.

But Tina curated a lot of the information we knew about her. She was deeply involved in both the film and the musical about her life. She wanted to tell her own story as she saw it, in her own words. She framed it, engaged with and coached the actors, promoted it. She wrote her memoir and sang her truth.

“Look what I have done in this lifetime with this body. I’m a girl from a cotton field that pulled myself above what was not taught to me.” (Tina documentary, HBO, 2021)

That’s the thing I connected with. The thing I saw in Tina that I sometimes see in others, and that I feel within myself at times…the thing that keeps urging us forward, saying, You are not your trauma, this is not you. You are light: SHINE.

Tina put her trauma out there, unashamed, because her trauma was not her. Like so many of us who have silently suffered abuse and violence at the hands of those closest to us, she developed inner workings of steel.

She shared her story and was an inspiration to other women who left coercive and abusive partners or had to reinvent themselves later in life. She was Tina, created by her own hand, in her own imagination. She took only her name because it was enough. She was enough.

The “girl from a cotton field” who sang in church, the young woman who sang on stage with her husband, the woman who left an abusive marriage with nothing but her name, the forty-something who made a huge comeback, the mother who lost both sons. Whatever low expectations might’ve been set for her by family, partners, executives, and society at large were trampled on stage in stilettos.

Throughout it all, she sang, she loved, made music, lived the fullness of life, and sought peace. May you continue weaving your magic in the heavens, queen, icon, legend, fierce creatrix…ancestor.

I’ll leave you all with one of my more recent favorites: