Lessons learned about love and joy from a Princess and a Diva

The lives of  Princess Diana and Diva Whitney Houston should strike a cord with all women, no matter if your life has been embittered by abuse or you wear a mask to hide pain from low self-esteem. When we're broken so deeply there is no strength to live, love or laugh.


The Princess and the Diva were raised differently; Diana coming from a home marred by divorce, Whitney born into a secure family setting and raised in faith. However, both women wed men who betrayed them through adultry, abused them verbally and left their souls shattered with a woundedness they could not rise above.
Whitney attempted a strong come back in 2009, with what could have been (should have been) her signature song and oath for living: 'I didn't know my own strength.'

With an amazing Whitney-style conviction, she sang-
"Survived my darket hour, my faith kept me alive
I pick myself back up, hold my head up high
I was not built to break
I didn't know my own strength"

When we're wounded, and feel inner strength drawn from us, that pain prevails to the point of becoming broken in spirit.  We try to look strong on the outside, but in truth, we're struggling on the inside.  We become silent suffers, but live lifestyles that try to override the hurt within.

When our spirits our traumatized it effects how we shape our beliefs, our thoughts and emotions. Turmoil is something that takes over, and our coping skills weakenm and we decend into a lifetime living with negative emotinos that impact our choices and our relationships. On the outside we mightg appear self-centerened, egotistical, but we're just trying to survive.

'Hope deferred makes the heart sick.'  When we have a hurting heart, it effects our spirits; it can cause sickness, life becomes hard to bear and our relm of meaning crashes as we don't know how to shape our destinies and we live an injurious lifestyle by associating with people who don't have our best interests at heart. . .and use us for their own gain.  We have hope to find true love, rise above poor choices or lifestyles, but we allow others to make our choices, or do things to fit in so we feel accepted, or accept the ideologies of others; following destructive ideologies that further defer our hope to seek another way of living that will provide internal healing of our souls and spirits.  We can become hardened so we no longer feel that internal pain, we turn to self-medicating to live a numbed existance. . .and we give up hope.

Perhaps you grew up with messages that 'you won't amount to anything, you're to fat, you're too thin, why can't you be like him or her. Why don't you listen, what's wrong with you,' and other negative messages that causes you to question if there's a loving, accepting and gracious Creator.

We become comfortable in chaos if we're raised in an environment that's not nuturing and witness unhealthy lifestyles and coping skills.  We accept messages from the ones we love as adults if we lack a positive self-image.  And we can become very good at wearing a mask in public to hide the hurt within, but soon that's a burden we just can't bear. . .like Diana. . .like Whitney.

You were born with a purpose, and feeling a heartsick soul is a sign to reach out to to overcome the pain.  M. Scott Peck wrote 'The Road Less Traveled,' and although that sounds like a lonely sojourn, creating our pathway on the road less traveled will ensure we find our strength as we face our woundedness, and can learn and share with others how to rise above and change our lack of self-esteem to finding internal strength. . .and hope.

“How strange that we should ordinarily feel compelled to hide our wounds when we are all wounded! Community requires the ability to expose our wounds and weaknesses to our fellow creatures. It also requires the ability to be affected by the wounds of others... But even more important is the love that arises among us when we share, both ways, our woundedness.”
― M. Scott Peck


We mourn two great women, Diana and Whitney, they gave so much to others. . .and how much more they could have done, if they only revealed the depth of their inner sorrows and removed their masks as we knew they weren't perfect. . .none of us are.  We can't expect others to heal us or make us feel worthy. . .that is what we find when we remove the mask and travel the road less traveled.

We were the Mask
by Paul Lawrence Dunbar

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To three from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but o the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherise,
We wear the mask