Maybe your version of happiness looks like a very well decorated prison cell to someone else. The acquisition of corporate wealth, along with a spacious condo that has a killer view, an investment portfolio, and an electric Audi in the garage may be totally unappealing to a free-spirited person. Is it conceivable that all a woman may need to find joy in life is a used car, a gym membership to take showers, and a few dollars in her pocket to buy food? For that is the life of 90s R&B singer Dawn Robinson from the hit groups En Vogue and Lucy Pearl. 

She recently put out a YouTube video in which the stated that due to a series of unfortunate events or “life was lifein” as they say, she has been living out of her car for the past three years. The tabloids and blogs picked up the story immediately and used disparaging headlines that spoke about her like she was a charity case. Headlines such as “Dawn Robinson has been living out of her car for three years” and “Dawn Robinson offered job by her ex-husband amid homelessness” are everywhere. First off, who the hell wants to work for their ex-partner? But I digress. What struck me more than anything else is that none of these articles suggest that Dawn is actually happy. After watching her video, however, one can easily conclude that she is. 

She divulged that she didn’t want to be a burden on her co-manager who had put her in a hotel room for eight months. She no longer wanted to live with her mother who she said had become angry and hostile toward her. So she took to the road, inspired by van life videos and the lives of legendary soul singers such as Marvin Gaye who had once lived out of their vehicles as well. She made a joke about being able to keep up with her hygiene by taking showers at her gym. “Just because I’m a funky diva” she said alluding to the title of En Vogue’s first album, doesn’t mean I’m funky. Her face looked unburdened, vibrant, and full of optimism. She made this video while on a very necessary spiritual journey in her life. She’s trying to determine what’s real and what isn’t. She’s totally doing away with the idea that people’s perception of her should mold her existence. She no longer cares what people think about her, and I believe that this is exactly why so many people will crucify her for her social sins. For if the mob of social reinforcement cannot bully people, and especially women, into conforming then that totally disrupts the natural order of things. 

We need to be able to tell people how to dress, how to think, how to live. We need to be able to enforce our ideas of success, what dreams are appropriate to have, and how celebrities should present themselves. Dawn must always move in a way that inspires awe in her fans. She must wear makeup, be fashionable, and look like she achieved the dream that almost every single American is in pursuit of—and that is to be famous. She can’t be sleeping on the side of a road in the Mojave Desert no matter how beautiful the scenery may be. She isn’t allowed to take a hot shower at Planet Fitness, on the contrary, she’s only relegated to the bathroom in her condo in the greater Los Angeles area, or New York, or Atlanta. Because we don’t like the optics of our celebrities looking like normal struggling people—even if they are. We don’t like it because it presents the notion that heaven may not actually be heaven. Perhaps it’s just like Earth but with a much longer stay or, even worse, perhaps it doesn’t exist. 

But if heaven doesn’t exist then why are we intentionally falling downstairs for likes and views? Why are we taking pictures as we tote pistols and show off the jewelry that we got in a high-profile robbery that we committed two days ago? And why are we posting these incriminating photos online? Why are we taking vacations for the sole purpose of gathering content to upload on our social apps? Why do we try to sneak into the shot when we see that Channel 5 News is doing a story in our neighborhood? Why did that man release his first rap album on sound cloud at the age of 41? Why does that teenage girl want to be an influencer when she grows up? We are literally willing to die to be famous, and we actually do! There are dozens of selfie deaths every single year. 

When a person is famous then they can’t be still trying to figure it out. They can’t experience the same hardships as us folk down here at the bottom. We have no empathy for people like Dawn Robinson who has the audacity to move about the world as if she is a normal human instead of being a fixed object in the sky like the star that she is. We only have sympathy for her, because having your celebrity status die while you’re still alive must be the worst thing a human-being could possibly go through. There is no satisfaction in being an average everyday person. There can’t be. This can’t be as good as life gets. In America our celebrities are like Gods in human flesh. We must always worship them. Needless to say, Dawn has rendered herself impossible to worship. And what a terrible sin.