Tyler Perry
speaker
187 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Tyler Perry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
My life comes in my life in a category of a tree. Some people are leaves. They come in your life. They're there for a moment. They're there for a minute. They're just there. They're going to give you a little shade, do whatever they need to. But when the seasons change or the winds blow too hard, they can't handle it. So they're out. You can't be mad at leaf people. Leaf people are who they are.
Let them be leaf people. Don't be mad at them because they're a leaf. Then there are people who are branches who are a little bit stronger. You can rely on them to be there through seasons. But if you step out on them too far, they may break and leave you high and dry. So you don't know how much you can trust the branch until they've grown with you for a while.
But then there are roots at the bottom of the tree. And if you find people who are like the roots, they're not trying to be seen. They don't need anybody to know they're there. They're just trying to give you what you need to hold you up. And a tree can have way many more leaves and branches than it have roots. So if you have a few roots in your life, you've done really well.
And I've been very, very fortunate. God has blessed me with a good handful of roots to hold me up, to hold me accountable, to keep my feet to the fire and to pray for me.
A little bit of both.
For me, it was the opposite. I wanted to be smaller. I would always slouch and didn't want to be seen. You want to be invisible.
No, because the strong men for me in my life weren't good men. So I wanted to be the opposite. And being tall and being big, I was always at the end of the line and always don't hit him back. And this is my cousin who was smaller than me and he would bully me. And his mother would say, you can't hit him back. You're too big to hit him back. Just don't hit him back. Just you're too big.
You just got to take it. Yeah, just got to take it. And then one day I lost it and hung him on the clothesline in the backyard.
Yeah. And ran home, told my mother, I was like, I couldn't take it anymore. She said, what'd you do? So she goes and get the kid down and she's laughing all the way. But yeah, I want it to be smaller. They were kind of right to tell you to not hit back because look what happened when you did. Yeah, exactly right. But that's my thing.
I am the most gentle guy in the world until I'm pushed way too far. Then there's a whole nother side.
Did you stand out like that? Oh, for sure. I was the tallest and the biggest and the smartest. And it was a lot. And this is in New Orleans.
Growing up, my mother was a woman who completely gave a lot. So it was all about giving and helping each other all the time. And because we didn't have much, but we had more than others in the neighborhood, we were always the place to come if you were in need. And my mother was really, really great at that.
I would wake up in the morning, sometimes Saturday morning, step out of the bed and I would step on somebody on the floor like, who is this person? And my mom would be like, they needed a place to stay. Be quiet. Don't embarrass them. Oh, really? There was a lot of that for sure. And was she finding these people at church or all over? We lived in New Orleans, which was the big city.
And most of her family and the man that raised me, his family were from the small country towns outside. And when the two of them got married and moved to New Orleans, it was family members that took them in. So it was always your door had to be open for somebody else. Right. And siblings? A brother and two sisters. Older or younger?
Younger brother by 10 years and two sisters by five and six years. So do you feel included at all, or do you have little brother complex? My brother's 10 years younger than me, so we never were close. But with the sisters? With the sisters, no. There was always something that was off for me in the family. Like, I didn't feel like I belonged.
So I was never able to be extremely close to any of them. It was really, really strange.
Chantel, you told me this was light and happy. Where are we going? OK. All right.
All right. OK, Monica. OK. All right. I'm with you. Well, you told them light and happy. Light and happy. But no, no, no. I'm light and happy while talking about my trauma.
We're going to need the weed. Yeah, to walk down the side of the house and see that crawlspace little cubby house where I would hide from the abuse. And it was painted robin egg blue. I remember the blue paint that I found somewhere in a rusted can and painted. It was such a beautiful light blue.
I now realize that what that blue was for is that people would paint their ceilings or their porches blue so that wasps and other things wouldn't build nests because they thought it was the sky. Wow. Oh, really? Yes. Southern thing. Oh, wow. Now realizing that robin egg blue was to represent the sky. It was a pretty painful and rough time. It was hard.
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