» The crazy-enablers, from BET Honors to Ole Miss

This is a story about The BET Honors (the televised awards-show honoring the accomplishments of five, prominent African Americans) and my four, white friends who graduated from Ole Miss (four caucasian friends of mine who attended the University of Mississippi). I promise that this will start off making absolutely no sense but leave you with a warm, cushy feeling like that Kleenex commercial where the people sit down on the couch and within 30 second, end up crying. Stick with it.

This weekend I attended the BET Honors in Washington, D.C. because a skincare brand I work with was a sponsor of the event. The BET Honors are essentially the Kennedy Center honors of the African American community – a chance for the Black Entertainment Network to recognize leaders in entertainment, social change, education, business, media, and music. This year’s honorees were Whitney Houston (I know!!!!), Sean “Diddy” Combs, Queen Latifah, world-renowned neuro-surgeon Dr. Keith Black, and Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University. Yeah, it was pretty major. Whitney wore head-to-toe, painted on gold sequins and stood in the aisle doing her sway-dance (twitch?) to Jennifer Hudson honoring her with a rendition of “I Will Always Love You” that made my co-worker Brendan cry, “cartoon tears, like we’re talking projectile waterfalls.”

Naturally each of the honorees gave a speech of thanks to the people who helped them get where they’ve gotten – places of extreme and unparalleled success (despite some crack in the road. Intended). Each of their stories was of overcoming the odds; not one started with a trust fund, a star-search win at 8-years-old, a scholarship to a premiere university. Not one rose all the way up without stalling, falling, or questioning whether they wanted to keep climbing at all.

Again and again they spoke of the community of friends that stood by them throughout their darkest and most challenging days. They spoke about starting with nothing but believing in themselves because they were surrounded by the love of a select few people who believed just as much. They talked about never doubting that they could be the success they are because that group held them up and told them not to doubt. For the honorees much of that community was and remains the African American entertainment family, a group of professionals that recognized their talent and held their hands all the way to the top, but my point isn’t a racial one – it’s that when these success stories reflect back on where they were at 18 and 25 and 30 they can point directly to a family of people – blood-related or otherwise – and say, those people had my back every step of the way, and in some instances, pushed it so I went further, faster.

I think it was Queen Latifah who said that you’ve got to be crazy to really, truly go for it – whatever your it may be – but more importantly, you’ve got to have some just-as-crazy in your corner of the ring reminding you that you’re not alone – a group of crazy-enablers, if you will.

I thought a lot about that idea of support and community and understanding on my Acela back to New York. I thought about people in my life who are that got-your-back for me, and there are many. And then I thought about examples of groups of people in my life that I look at and think – that is the kind of friend group that breeds success because all its members won’t settled for anything less for any one of them.

Enter my four friends from Ole Miss. Jenny the photographer, Zac the writer and burgeoning filmmaker, Meg the writer and world’s greatest Lady Gaga impersonator, and Brittany the actress slash muse are that example for me. I’ve known supportive friends. I have incredibly supportive friends, but I’ve never met a set of 20-somethings riding this wild ride together quite like these four.

They are each here because of one of the others – literally a chain reaction of New York implants who arrived with two bags, X-hundred bucks, and little to no jobs. They share a common bond of leaving everything they had in pursuit of their own successes. They struggle. They’re struggling now. But from where I stand – watching and learning from them – not one of them doesn’t believe that all of them will make it where they belong. They are each other’s crazy-enablers – each other’s constant reminder that it isn’t insane to believe, it’s imperative. They make it okay for one another. They make the dreaming and the pushing and the sometimes screaming and crying that goes along with it the expectation, not the lonely path it can be for so many people who go through it alone.

The famed Uptown Record exec who introduced Diddy referenced a story about one of his first days interning at the label. He’d sent Diddy on an errand 10 blocks away then stood shocked when the 20-some-year-old showed up back at the office less than ten minutes later. When the exec asked him how he did that so fast Diddy responded, “I don’t stop, I can’t stop, I won’t stop.”

When Diddy accepted his BET Honor he thanked his versions of my Ole Miss friends – the people in his life who met that insane lines from his 20-year-old brain with, “I can’t seem to stop either, so how ’bout I won’t if you don’t.”

Get some crazy in your corner. It’ll make the trip up faster and a whole hell of a lot more fun, right guys?