Oprah
Living Her Best Life

Text: Dana Lee
Images: © Alex Wong/Getty Images/Touchline Photo

She is the first African American billionaire. She is on the Forbes’ Richest list and possibly the most famous and well-recognised woman alive today. She has befriended presidents, princesses and paupers. Her show has won innumerable awards, as has she personally. An appearance on her show guarantees instant success and fame, even if sometimes short lived. Her weight and marital status are speculated on ad nauseum in the popular press.

Everything she touches seems to turn to gold: from talking to producing, acting and publishing. No matter how you look at it, there can be no question that Oprah Winfrey is a celebrity, a star and very, very wealthy. Yet none of these things define her, and none of these things explain her enormous and continued popularity with fans in 109 countries across the world.

Turn on the television for The Oprah Winfrey Show and you will not see a so-called celebrity, building fame on the back of eccentricities and scandals dug up from other people’s lives. You will get not one iota of sensationalism. “I taped a show,” says Oprah, “for a guy who was a mass murderer. He killed eight people. I did the whole interview, and I had the families of some of the people he killed. In the middle of it, flash, I thought, ‘I shouldn’t be doing this, this is not going to help anybody’.” The show was never aired.

And it is this very characteristic that was her downfall early on in her career, then as a television news journalist. She remembers: “I used to go on assignment and be so open that I would say to people at fires – and they’ve lost their children – ‘That’s okay. You don’t have to talk to me’. Well, then you go back to the newsroom, and the news director says, ‘What do you mean they didn’t have to talk to you?’ I’d say, ‘But she just lost her child, and you know I just felt so bad.’ So, I didn’t do very well. I was too involved.”

Whatever you fear most has no power – it is your fear that has the power.

It is that very involvement that is part of her phenomenal success now. What you see when you tune into her show, is an ordinary, well preserved woman, talking with great honesty and integrity to other ordinary people about their hopes and dreams, their fears and sorrows, and sharing of herself in the process. Her eyes sparkle with amusement at the funny bits and amazement at the unusual bits. She asks the questions all of us would want to ask, given the chance; voices the opinions we all hold. And she does so with dignity and respect for other people, regardless of their station in life or any other superficially defining characteristic.

Oprah has remained warm, accessible and open. There is no television persona. “My ability to get people to open up is only attributed, I think, to the fact that there is a common bond in the human spirit. We all want the same things. And I know that. I really do know that I am no different than anybody else,” she says.

Every day brings a chance for you to draw in a breath, kick off your shoes, and dance.

She is comfortable in her own skin. She doesn’t mind making mistakes on air, scraping off the veneer of the bright lights and showing the very real woman underneath. “There is no such thing to me as an embarrassing moment. If I tripped and fell, if my bra strap showed, if my slip fell off, if I fell flat on my face... I know that there is nothing I could possibly experience on the air that someone hasn’t already experienced. I was on TV the other day, and somebody said, ‘Oh, Oprah, you have a run.’ Have you not seen a run before in your life? Well, I get them too. Let me tell you. So I can’t be embarrassed,” she laughs.

One possible reason for her ease in front of audiences and cameras might be that Oprah has been in training since she was three years old. “I was taught to read at an early age. By the time I was three, I was reciting speeches in the church. They’d put me up on the program, and say, ‘Little Mistress Winfrey will render a recitation,’ and I would do ‘Jesus rose on Easter Day, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, all the angels did proclaim,’” she remembers. By her teens she was touring the churches of Nashville, reciting the sermons of James Weldon Johnson. It is thus no wonder that when she got a break onto the local radio station at the age of seventeen she was a comfortable and fluent newsreader, not in the least intimidated by microphones.

Molested and sexually abused as a young child, Oprah went through a very rebellious and promiscuous phase until she was sent to live with her very strict father. Unyielding in his expectations of his daughter, he provided her with the necessary structure to start believing in herself. But even as an adult Oprah struggled with her ‘disease to please’ – desperate for the continued approval of others, she found it impossible to say ‘no’. Only in her thirties did the realisation dawn that she had both the right to say ‘no’ as well as the right to change her mind.

With every experience, you alone are painting your own canvas, thought by thought, choice by choice.

Therein lies a further clue to her success: Oprah has continued to grow as a person, and through sharing a little bit of her own journey towards wholeness with her fans, she inspires all of us to be the best we can be. “It is very difficult for me to see myself as other people see me,” she explains. “I don’t know what being Oprah Winfrey means to other people, from the outside. Because I still feel the same. I feel the same as I did when I was twenty-two and struggling. Because the struggle has taken on a different form for me. The struggle is more of an inner self-struggle, trying to find the truth for myself, than it is trying to get enough money to pay my light bill. Actually, it was easier trying to find enough money to pay my light bill than discovering what the truth of your life is all about!”

Oprah Winfrey also understands the universal principle of giving back. In September 1997, She launched Oprah’s Angel Network. This is a campaign to encourage people to open their hearts to those in need. To date, Oprah’s Angel Network has raised over $12 million. Through the Network, 150 young people have been granted scholarships, over 200 houses have been built for homeless families, and 34 schools have been built in 10 countries. In April 2000, Oprah’s Angel Network established the Use Your Life Award and has since awarded it to individuals who, through their charitable organizations, are making a difference in the lives of others. This award helps recipients to expand their programs and do even more for those in need.

I know for sure that what we dwell on is who we become.

A busy lady indeed, Oprah regards a twelve-hour day as a short one. The only reason why she is able to maintain such a hectic and demanding schedule is that she truly enjoys what she does. “What I know is that if you do work that you love, and work that fulfils you, the rest will come. You know you are on the road to success if you would do your job, and not be paid for it. And I would do this job, and take on a second job to make ends meet, if nobody paid me. Just for the opportunity to do it. That’s how you know you are doing the right thing.”