In Flow with Susan Taylor

For more than three decades at Essence magazine, Susan L. Taylor’s visionary contributions largely birthed and nurtured our collective - and now common place - shift toward living an authentic life.  After all, at Essence, Taylor not only served as chief editor, but also authored the magazine's most popular column, In the Spirit - where she courageously offered up painful lessons and blessings from her personal life that unearthed hope, love and a passion for the divine in all of us.  

 

The column not only satisfied my young mind’s relentless thirst for stories of triumph, but the woman who pinned that transformative writing - Susan Taylor - became for me a living monument of womanhood, creativity, humanity and the certified badass I aspired to be.

 

It is for this reason alone that I accepted the assignment from my editor to interview Ms. Taylor, who this January is being celebrated for both her 70th turn around the sun and to highlight the National CARES $7 million fundraising campaign - an organization dedicated to mentorship that she founded in 2005 as Essence CARES.  

 

With less than a day’s notice to prepare, I recognized this wasn’t work.  It was a divine appointment to rendezvous with Susan’s wisdom in real time and offer that brilliance to you.   After a 40-minute unscripted convo full of laughter, aha’s and amens to the choir, Susan had indeed served up all kinds of piercing insights on becoming a better you, self-love, life, change and of course spirit.  An abridged version follows.

 

H&S:

Having inspired millions of women for decades, at this juncture in your life, what would you deem to be the most important instruction for those who are dreaming of a new life, but are deeply afraid to make any radical changes?

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Ms. Taylor:

Life is going to give us repeated opportunities to change, and sometimes it forces change. I think our challenge is to pause and, in the quiet, ask this critical question: "What have you come to teach me?"  Be with that and allow life to unfold.  Life does require us to have unbreakable trust.  I call it walk-on-water faith.  To know that no matter what is coming my way, it's for my good.

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H&S:

How does one develop and sustain faith in the face of life’s day to day uncertainties and disappointments?

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Ms. Taylor:

Faith is built all the time.  If not for the breakups and the shake-ups and things falling apart in my life, I would not know the Holy Spirit. I would not know that life is truly on our side, all the time.

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When my first marriage fell apart, I was thrown on my own with a baby, no man, no money, had lost my business, everything.  When I look back on that, I thank God all those things happened. I was reminded to count my blessings.  We have to trust and look for the divine hand in everything.  It’s always there.

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H&S:

Would you say that you actually had such optimism in real time while you were navigating those changes back then?

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Ms. Taylor:

There was no optimism.  It took an anxiety attack, and for me to be truly on the ledge.  Looking back, I see that if I didn't have that anxiety attack, I wouldn't have been in the hospital that day thinking I was having a heart attack.  If I had money that day, I would not have attempted to walk home from Manhattan to the Bronx.  I've told the story many times - how on that walk I was led to a church where I heard a sermon that changed my life. Things that I thought were disruptive, were actually gifts - they were the changes that I probably needed to make, but may not have had the courage to initiate without being pushed.

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H&S:

Viktor Frankl, author of Man's Search For Meaning, wrote, "When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves." Have you ever faced a situation that you felt powerless to change and as a result were forced to change yourself?  

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Ms. Taylor:

Probably the most challenging moments in my life had to do with not having the resources that I needed to pay my rent, feed my daughter, and keep a roof over our heads.  Not being able to take care of ourselves, more than anything, created depression and fear.  

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I had to look within myself and get quiet.  Once I did that, I  had an idea that I should make a phone call to this modeling school.   I asked them if they had any interest in having a beauty editor come and teach some courses there for the young women training to become models.  They hadn't heard of me, but they had just heard of Essence and said, "Oh, we'd love that!"  With one phone call, my salary increased by forty percent.  That school was there for thirty years before I ever made the call.

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What I know now is that there's always an answer.  There's always a way to resolve a situation. The resolution may not be the things that we want, but it's the right resolution for our lives and for that moment. 

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Only because I paused, and thought critically about what I might do did the idea emerge.  That phone call changed my life. 

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H&S:

While you were editor-in-chief at Essence, I think many of us were in awe of and moved by your willingness to be so radically transparent with the personal stories you offered to us in your In the Spirit column. Given the times, what influenced you to make such a revolutionary choice?

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Ms. Taylor:

The reality of it is I hadn't yet gone to college.  While I would just love to say I had the complete confidence to do the work, I didn’t.  It’s so very important to have cheerleaders in your life.  Get rid of the judges and naysayers.  I had a man in my life who was a lawyer, had an MBA and said to me, “you have exactly the background they need.”  Because he believed in me, it made me believe in me and I stepped into the position of editor-in-chief.  

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Doing so after Marsha Gillespie - this brilliant writer, phenomenal mind, and my boss for years - I asked myself, "What am I going to write?"  I decided I’d write about spirituality because that’s what I cared about and was longing to know about.  That's why I began writing In the Spirit - to chronicle my own experiences. 

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Then I had a breakthrough when I found the courage to really write about early childhood sexual experiences that I was very ashamed of as a kid.  I was able to name that shame finally because of the women I started working with who had drug addictions, etc;  they would look at me all sly like, “what are you going to tell me?  I’d say, “I come from the same circumstances. Here's my story.”  That is what gave me courage.  I think we really have to give people an opportunity to reveal themselves.  There’s nothing to fear.  It's easier to say than it is to live.  I had fear, but I still moved forward. 

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H&S:

Inspired by the “trail you blazed” decades ago, so many women now pursue careers in self-empowerment. What would you advise a woman to do in order to find her authentic voice, rather than trying to be the next Susan, Iyanla, or Oprah?

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Ms. Taylor:

What you just said is the most important work of our lives, to find our authentic voice. That really takes an understanding that each of is a divine original, unique, sent here on purpose, with a purpose.  

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The only person we can really be well is ourselves.  That's the challenge - to believe that we are enough as we are. 

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Being a writer or an inspirational speaker or starting your own business, no matter what it is, really takes building the architecture. If you have a strong desire to influence women's lives and help people, and it’s your calling - which it has to be - and you do the work to prepare yourself, then I'd say step out there because it's what the world so needs.

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H&S:

Do you believe your purpose or calling has changed over the years?

 

Ms. Taylor:

That's such an interesting question because I was just thinking about this the other day.   Even when I was the beauty editor at Essence all the way to the editorial director, and even now as the leader of the National CARES Mentoring Movement, my goals have been the same - to help us understand our value, that we really are powerful, beautiful, and capable of being healthy, strong and resilient in the world.

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H&S:

How do we really love ourselves? 

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Ms. Taylor:

That is our every day work. We have to learn how to give ourselves to ourselves, before we give ourselves away to  anybody else.  

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We love ourselves by nourishing ourselves with the right self-talk.  I am valuable.  I am whole.  I am loved.  I am God's child.  

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My generation is the first generation to have any conversation around self-love and self-care.  It is not selfish.  As Audre Lorde said, "it is self-preservation, an act of political warfare.”

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When we don't get what we need, we don't love one another well.  We don't love our children well. We don't lead well. We don't live our lives well. 

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You're not going to treat anybody better than you treat yourself.   We have to shut down the negative voices that tell us that we are not enough, or haven’t done enough five years ago, five minutes ago.  

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We have to ensure that we are giving ourselves the affirmations that we need to love ourselves better.  These are things we have to do every day.  Every single day.   

 

To listen to the entire interview, click here.