After being sexually assaulted at 4, Angelia Robinson grew up with an identity crisis so acute that she didn't even know how to properly spell her name until she was 12. Her autobiography WHO R U? describes a middle-class broken little girl from Maryland who is transformed over the course of 48 years and nearly 200 pages into a fearless woman who would be used to help transform the world.
A devout belief in God helped her to realize she had a higher purpose to fulfill. But beyond being a wife and mother, Robinson couldn't envision what that destiny might be. She had always, throughout her life, been pushed into a position of standing out, of shining, of leadership, because people gravitated toward her. She understood that she was one of God's messengers (which is the literal meaning of her first name). She had also been a recording artist and a damned good one. Yet there she was at age 42, just coming out of an unhappy 16-year marriage, recently evicted from her home, living paycheck to paycheck working at a call center doing telemarketing, with a newborn - and miserable.
This wasn't how her story was supposed to go. It was time for her to turn around the narrative.
Bubbly and gregarious despite absorbing one punch after another from life, she took the advice of an old friend and started selling bedroom accessories and other enhancement products at in-home parties, like Tupperware but for couples. Within a few years, she became a superstar in direct sales, earning more money than she'd ever seen in her life and standing out as someone her fellow saleswomen looked up to. Suddenly, a woman who had numerous brushes with death and could never find her path and passion was a senior executive director and a professional everyone held up as an example of the right way to do things.
Angelia Robinson survived until the miracle happened. Now she lives her life in a state of bliss. The rejection and betrayal that she experienced time and time again could have made her heart turn cold. Instead, it left her determined to bring her existence greater meaning and purpose. She believes that she suffered so that readers of her autobiography WHO R U? won't have to. They can look at their own life and, through the power of her example, understand that it's never too late to be who or what you might have been.
