*Tracee Ellis Ross is redefining what it means to live as a single, childless woman in her 50s through her new Roku series, “Solo Traveling with Tracee Ellis Ross.”
“So much of what traveling is about, is for me, not waiting for something in order to walk towards my life, in order to be in my life, in order to experience my life,” she said, BuzzFeed reports.
In the series, Ross addressed comments from Oprah Winfrey, who in a 2020 “Your Life in Focus” interview called her “an example of what being an unmarried woman could and should look like.” Ross pushed back, stating, “She said that I’m the poster child for singledom. I don’t want to be that.” Instead, she aspires to be “the poster child for being an inhabitant in your own skin.”
Ross, 52, sees her single status as a source of freedom, not a limitation. “Yes, I am a single Black woman who does not have children, but not having a relationship — long, long relationships — not having children has allowed me to explore things of my own humanity,” she shared, describing a life filled with “joy, loneliness, grief, exuberance, delight, like, literally all of it.”
Challenging societal expectations, Ross reflected on past dreams shaped by tradition. “I, like many of us, was taught to grow up dreaming of my wedding, not of my life,” she told Oprah.
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The Emmy-winning actor added, “I’m the chooser. And I can choose to get married if I want to, but in the meantime, I am choicefully single, happily, gloriously single.”
Tracee’s series celebrates living authentically, a message she reiterated in a 2021 interview with Harper’s Bazaar. “People are like, ‘You’re the poster child for being single.’ And I was like, ‘Great.’ But what I would prefer is that I’m the poster child for living my life on my terms. And that there’s a version of that for everyone. I don’t live my life for other people. I just totally live it for me.”
“Solo Traveling with Tracee Ellis Ross” is streaming now on Roku.
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