Fix My Life - by Kaitlyn Greenidge
It was when I saw Iyanla Vanzant tie a head wrap on her head in a vaguely regal configuration, don a white robe, and sit down in front of LisaRaye’s family to declare herself and them queens that I decided the tv show was not that bad.
I remember Iyanla from when she used to show up on Oprah’s show, when I watched it in high school. She has the round, plummy voice of a Black actress and something about her smile, about the way she enunciated her words as if calling to the farthest seats in the theater, that made me distrust her. On Oprah’s show, back then, there was none of the theatrics that she has become famous for. There was only her voice and her story , “my story”, she said, over and over again. “My story.”
Her actual story is very fascinating. Seriously, for some good reading, I suggest you check out her Wikipedia page. It is an entire satirical novel of uplift and trauma. Although, writing this to you, I just went and checked and it looks like the best, most interesting details (she was an ordained Quaker minister for a while; she was also a part of a vaguely mlm company) have all been scrubbed.
On “Iyanla Fix My Life” there is no trauma too great that can’t be fixed with some heavy prop comedy. She has made grown men who have shared their stories of sexual abuse dig holes and get inside them. She has made grown children who have talked about their pain of abandonment pour mud and dirt into a cup of tea and mime drinking it. Memorably, she made a grown woman who had the audacity, in Iyanla’s eyes, to sing a song about twerking, look into the eyes of Harriet Tubman and apologize for even suggesting anyone might enjoy “popping my butt”.
I watched her show at first for the camp. There’s a certain point, when you have lived through enough awfulness and you take account of each one and line them up, that all those traumas become deeply, cosmically, comical. The cruelty of the show, of course, is that she forces this camp on those who may not have gotten to that point yet in their sense of self. It is easy to laugh at her show, but harder when you see the lost look in the eyes of a man forced to ticky-tack pieces of garbage on to a piece of board because Iyanla tells him that this symbolizes something.
One of the things about living through trauma is the number of people who don’t believe you. Who actively gaslight that you experienced it. “Really?” “I’m sure it couldn’t have happened that way.” “I don’t believe it.” I learned very early to turn that skepticism back on the wider world, which means, in my darkest hearts, that when I hear someone tell me their own personal hell a part of me is whispering “It can’t be true.” That’s how I feel when I hear Iyanla, in those plummy tones, tell her story “My story” over and over again to her guests. The fact that she deploys her story, “My story,” she says, as a cudgel and a caress and a coaxing makes it even more suspect. But the fact that she is a master manipulator doesn’t mean her story isn’t true.
That’s been a harder thing to learn. Manipulative people can have lived through horrific things. And horrific early life does not excuse later abuse. In the episode where Iyanla declares LisaRaye (or the former wife of the PM of Turks and Caicos, as I know her from my early 2000s love of gossip) a queen, she does so because, she says, it is impossible for women to understand to relate to each other without knowing their roles and responsibilities in a family group. And when she says it, I cry a bit. And I think, “Maybe she is right.” And even though I know I’m being manipulated and so is poor LisaRaye and her lost and wary kin, I think the manipulation isn’t so bad. Maybe it’s a price for getting better.
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