Is You Okay? Read Free

phones. I had been married twice; they were so inexperienced. (I don’t mean that in a negative way, I just mean in terms of time on this earth.) Some of them wereborn when I was in college; others were in middle school when I first started posting videos on YouTube. I had an extra generation of life experience on nearly all my friends.

    The MAKERS conference took place the first week of February 2016 at a beautiful oceanside resort in Palos Verdes, California, called Terranea. The only thing more beautiful than the hotel were the women inside attending the conference: Gloria Steinem, Abby Wambach, Katie Couric, Caitlyn Jenner, America Ferrera, Bethany Mota (my girl!), Annie Leibovitz, and so many others—all true legends of their craft.
    At the opening ceremony, the organizers played an amazing welcome video that featured all these legendary women. The video talked about empowerment and vision and showed the face of every woman scheduled to speak at the conference. All these trailblazing women in the world whom I have looked up to, all in one room—it was unbelievable. Then my face came up on the screen! It was completely surreal. I was one of those people I looked up to! (LOL.)
    When I truly considered that some young people looked up to me the way I looked up to Carol Burnett and all the women at this conference, I realized that it didn’t make much sense forme to write the kind of book you might expect from a typical YouTuber. Instead, I figured why not take advantage of all these bonus years (I’m being kind to myself now) to answer many of the questions—some serious, some silly—that young people often ask me. Why not offer them some hard-earned wisdom and hard-learned advice so they can avoid all the same crazy ups and downs that I had to survive?
    So that’s what I did.
    This book is about all the big lessons in creativity, identity, and adversity that I was fortunately not too stubborn to learn, as well as an account of the moments from my life that led to learning those lessons. These stories are the experiences that made me who I am today, helped me find my home on YouTube, and, most important, taught me that the answer to the question “Is you okay?” can always be YES.

CHAPTER 1
EVERYONE’S A LITTLE DIFF-UH-RENT
    Â Â Â Â Â  Q:   Is “GloZell” your real name?
    Â Â Â Â Â  A:   Yes. When I was younger I used to tell people my name was French, because that sounded more refined and elegant. But really, it is a combination of my parents’ names: Gloria and Ozell. Get it? GLO -ria and O- ZELL . It’s actually a pretty common practice in the black community, and I’ve grown to really love it.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  My sister’s name is DeOnzell. She’s named after the amazing singer Dionne Warwick (my mom changed the spelling a little), and my father. It’s pretty fitting that she was named after an awesome diva, because she’s an opera singer now. Takes one to know one, I guess.

    I have always been different.
    As long as I can remember, even as a little girl growing up in Orlando, Florida—especially then, actually—I felt different. For a start, I never wanted to be what other kids wanted to be when they grew up. Boys wanted to be firefighters or astronauts or football players; girls wanted to be princesses or veterinarians.
    I wanted to be the tooth fairy.
    I’m deadly serious—I actually went around telling people I wanted to replace the tooth fairy when she retired. I thought that would be the greatest job in the world—and you know what, I still think that, kind of. You get to travel all over the world, you can FLY ( hello? ), you get to go into people’s houses and look at all their stuff and you don’t get in trouble. Plus you get to leave them some money. You’re like a guardian angel with a bank account. That’s why everyone loves the