Felisha Lord parties her way into ‘singlehood’

Some people mark the end of a relationship with a bottle of rum or a huge tub of ice cream, as they try to either drown their sorrow or eat away the memories. Well, not Felisha Lord. The actress, radio and television host decided that that milestone deserved a proper punctuation mark, celebrating with a huge party dubbed I’m Single for the First Time in My Life.

In July, Lord hosted her virtual party which saw more than 700 people logged in and laughing as they danced, enjoyed the music, and later listened as she built a vibe and went into a stimulating storytelling session. When The Gleaner reached out to Lord to find out the significance of the party, she said that she wanted to show that being single was a choice that she is happily exploring for the first time.

“I’ve been in relationship after relationship after relationship. Now that I’ve been through therapy, I know why that is. It basically stems from my abandonment issues, as my mother left Jamaica when I was 11 and I didn’t enjoy my own company,” Lord said.

Everything she does, she added, has at least five layers underneath. “I’ve been proposed to and engaged three times; been married twice.”

Her most recent relationship lasted nine years and ended because they were going in two different directions “Fi the next year, I would like to literally spend time with just me. I want to know what it feels like to be lonely. I want the feeling of my own identity in the presence of my home.”

Her reasoning behind the party and a lot of her decisions is that she is that individual who is brave enough to say the things many admit to thinking but are too afraid to say out loud.

“I am bipolar and medication-free at this time in my life, so the level of courage that I have is not something that you will find in a typical human. The filter that a lot of people employ and naturally lead with, I don’t necessarily have that filter or always choose to use. I’ve been through six years of therapy, I now know coping skills that I can use that I didn’t have before. So, now I’m able to get the best of both worlds: my creative spark, but be able to manage my bipolar episodes at the same time.”

Lord, who started greying at age 23, has also become an advocate for women who wish to embrace their gray hair and body rolls while challenging societal beauty standards that may make women feel as if they are not enough the way God created them.

“I had a little patch in the middle of my head and went to my hairdresser to cane row my hair for me to put on my wig and, when they done cane row, me noticed two little white hairs and me tell her draw dem out.

“I think I was doing Claro Cash Cab, so me start colour me hair and wear honey blonde hair etc, because I’m like in my 20s. I got pregnant and was about to have a baby, so me nah think about hair, so the whole of the front just start white out and me a try dye it, but the new growth happened so often that it looked very untidy. One day me just say who me a hide the gray hair from? Why me nuh just wear me hair and done. So me eventually allow the dye to grow out,” shared Lord, whose current project is Felisha’s Inner Circle, because she realised a lot of people on her page want to know the things that she knows.

“As someone who has been in the theatre, media and entertainment industry for over 25 years, a lot of people see my confidence and don’t realise is that that took time, effort and training and so I created the ‘Confidence on Camera’ course where I teach entrepreneurs how to market themselves online,” she explained.

That course, she said, is doing “very well”.

nicola.cunningham@gleanerjm.com