Life Is Not a Fairy Tale by Fantasia (books for students to read .TXT) 📗

he was sixteen and doing it so well. When you really heard him, you could hear that he had a beautiful voice and it was a little sexy. The older ladies loved him.

Camille is someone I became very close with during myAmerican Idol experience. She reminded me of me a little bit and I had that bond with her of going through struggles and overcoming some obstacles. We both fight for what we believe and know that nothing is impossible. We are still close to this day.

All the Idols stood out for me and made me realize that I wished I played the keyboards, so I could do more with my songs and be able to play them as soon as they come to my mind. That just goes back to me thinkin’ about how much I have, but how much I lost when I was younger and not going to school. I should know how to read music as much as I love it. It made me sad when I saw George up there, playin’ and singin’ and writin’ his own songs right when they came to his head. What power that would be. If you love music and you’re studying music, you’ll have the power to create whatever comes into your mind and your spirit. It just reminds me that while I have had this extraordinary change in my life, there is still so much that I have missed that I want to catch up on.

When the tour was over, everyone was tired and eager to get back home. I was the only crybaby, of course. I cried and cried. Those nine other singers had become my family. I learned something from every one of them. Every night, no matter what had happened earlier that day, we all got on the stage and would “work it out!” I can’t say enough about how awesome everyone was.

As you can see, I am not competitive anymore, not like I was with the girls when I was in school. Now, I just get inspired bytalent. Those years of envying other girls really taught me that using that negative energy doesn’t work and it doesn’t make you grow. The only person that I compete with is ’Tasia. I’m very hard on myself. I love to sing with good singers because of all they can do with their voices. It feels wonderful to hear my voice against theirs or blend with their voices. I’m always taking notes in my head about my performances and about what I have to do better the next time.

I have come a long way from that envious “ugly” little girl that I used to be. But I’m not talking about my looks. What was probably the ugliest thing about me was that I wanted what other people had. To this day, I don’t know what happened to all those pretty little girls with boyfriends who I used to envy. I don’t know if their baby daddies did the same things that Zion’s daddy did to me. I don’t know if they have children they are raisin’ on their own. Or if they are happily married. I don’t know if they are successful or not. Who knows?People are people. And everybody has their highs and lows in life. What I do know is that when I cleansed my heart of being envious and jealous and focused on my life and my music and God, the blessings just started pourin’ in. Probably the most important thing that I have learned after all I have been through is the simplest thing: Give props where props are due!

The experience that I had with the Idols taught me a lot about the difference between beingfriends andbeing friendly. What I have learned is that friends are deeper than the people you are friendly with. With friends there are no barriers. With people you are friendly with, although they are friendly to you, that doesn’t mean that they sometimes don’t have their own interests at heart and their own barriers. The thing about true friends is that they help you to grow and be better people and you do the same for them. Real friends feel like family even though there is no blood relation.

My first real friendswere family, my cousins, Kima and Kadijah, Aunt Rayda’s daughters. Back in those days, we were like the Three Musketeers. We all had other friends, but we werefamily, and we were always in church together because we were always with our mothers. Kima and Kadijah were like my sisters, and our mothers treated us like triplets. We sometimes wore the same clothes, and once we all got the same baby dolls at Christmastime. We were all happy to get our matching baby dolls. One Christmas, mine was the white version of the doll while Kima and Kadijah had the black version. My mom didn’t say anything about it, hoping that I hadn’t noticed that my baby doll was white. It really hadn’t mattered to me, but Aunt Rayda asked my mama over Christmas dinner, “Why didn’t you get Fantasia the black doll?” Embarrassed, my mother said, “Because they ran out of the black ones and the white ones were all they had left.” In my neighborhood, the white ones were only a last resort. Kima and Kadijah just used to say that my baby was mixed. In my room, there were all types of odd dolls based on when my mother had enough money to get what they had left on the shelf. I had dolls with one leg shorter than the other and dolls with two different shoes. That was when ’Dijah was four, I was five, and Kima was seven. We played house with those babies until they fell apart. I remember those broken-off arms and legs strewn all over my room, reminding me of all those hours of play with my two favorite cousins. It still makes me smile.

Today, Kima, who is twenty-two, has three