Recognized throughout campus for her “Weather by LaNia” Snapchat segments that have garnered over 5,500 daily views on the Syracuse Campus Story, freshman painting major LaNia Roberts comes off as an example of positivity.

But it wasn’t always that way.

In seventh grade, an 11-year-old Roberts looked at herself in the mirror and asked, “Why do I have to be so ugly?”

Her question was sparked by a group of boys sitting on the bus ride back home. They were talking about her, once again. This was what really broke her, she said.

At this point, she said she couldn’t look at herself in the mirror, call herself beautiful and believe it. But on Tuesday night, Roberts stood onstage in Grant Auditorium to deliver her first motivational speech titled “Loving Yourself Unconditionally.”

When the talk began, Roberts jumped onstage and began to dance to the song “I” by Kendrick Lamar. The crowd, which filled most of the auditorium, cheered her on.

“It takes a sense of fearlessness to come up here and speak to you all today, because there was fear in this, you guys,” Roberts said. “I’m putting my flaws out there and letting them be known.”

On Jan. 1, 2012, Roberts looked in the mirror of the bathroom and asked herself, “What do I want my New Year’s resolution to be?”

Little did she know her resolution would lead her on a “road” to self-love.

She said she resolved to lose weight, because if she lost weight she could be like the popular girls. Her second resolution was to start loving herself more. So, she joined the track team and lost 50 pounds.

That year, Roberts met both of her resolutions. She lost weight and she could stand in front of the mirror, call herself beautiful and believe it.

“Little did I know that love was so conditional,” Roberts said. “It was like accepting the terms and conditions that you check when you’re making a new Facebook or something.”

It was the summer before her junior year of high school that Roberts gained the weight back.

“Every pound that I gained, I lost a pound of love,” she said. “So you can do the math of how much love I lost for myself. I would look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘Oh my gosh.’”

Instead of focusing on herself physically, Roberts decided to focus on herself as an artist. She applied for a program at The Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts and was accepted to a class of 222 out of over 1000 applicants.

It was here that she started taking risks, and her first risk was telling a man, who she joked was her husband, that he was “the most beautiful man on this damn earth.”

“Then he said ‘LaNia, you can’t be telling me this. I’m an RA.’ So I said, ‘Shoot, honey I just did — what’re you going to do about it?’” Roberts said. “Suddenly this confident girl took over and I was like, ‘Shoot, you keep doing your thing, honey.’”

The real change, though, came in college. On Jan. 1, 2015, Roberts said she stood in her bedroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She was getting ready to go out with her family when she realized her jeans weren’t fitting her quite how they should.

She said she had an epiphany at that moment.

“My love-handles was poking out a little bit, so I looked in the mirror and said ‘Oh, that doesn’t look too good,’” Roberts said. “’But somebody’s going to love them someday.’”

Roberts calls herself an independent woman, but she was depending on someone to validate that for herself, she said. Then, she decided it was time to love herself unconditionally.

She ended her talk by saying she understands what it is like to be bullied, to not feel good enough and to feel “damn right sad.” But she also knows what it’s like to be the exact opposite.

Said Roberts: “Love yourself unconditionally, people, because you are the only thing that you are promised your entire life.”

Published on April 22, 2015 at 12:26 am

Contact: kasotelo@syr.edu