Manhattan, Take 1 – What I’ve Learned in a New York Year
April 20, 2013 § 2 Comments
If you pinned parts of me to cork board like a dissected art class beetle, you’d find the stories of a race I’m not a part of.
I can still smell pine needles and oak sap around the open spaced sanctuary where I was raised in California. I’m 10 again, just like that – sitting on a green fabric chair in a blue, carpeted room. God didn’t choose my European ancestors to follow him through the Red Sea, but I was taught, nevertheless, that faith is a thing you stumble upon when you discover your shoes don’t wear out, and cracker bread falls from the sky.
Its been a lot of years since then. I don’t have a word for it anymore – not “Christian,” not “Buddhist.” I’m pro gay, pro abortion, pro sexual freedom, pro follow your dreams and stick it to the man – and I’m pro doing right by everyone around you, including the folks that try and tell you that you’re hell-bound, together with all that feminist freedom and your neatly rolled spliffs and birth control.
I ignore them, on the subway, yelling about hell. But I resonate with loving my neighbor, and I still like to imagine one particular story of the Israelites gathering stones to carry as remembrance of a river crossing – a big to-do. They’d made it a long way since Egypt, god said. They should stop and take note.
I’m following suit, this weekend – picking up fortune cookie sayings and saving champagne bottle tops to mark a year, now, that I’ve been on the road to my own promised land – earmarking moments to remind me that just when I thought the current might carry me away, it didn’t.
It also won’t.
Here’s what I’ve learned in a New York City year – the lessons I carry, like my own bag of remembrance stones from the foggy Hudson river.
Begin
I wasn’t ready, you know. I arrived on April 20th, all blustery weather and trains running along a system of numbers and letters I didn’t understand. I didn’t know anyone to speak of. I only had $137.50 in my checking account.
When you jump into something like that, it’s all mouthfuls of water and salt in your eyes. Full throttle, uncomfortable emotion. You don’t get to dip your toes in. There will be no wading. Your money, your reputation, your heart and your relationships are all in a neat row, set up together like targets, waiting for someone to punch them in the gut.
I guess I’d caught wind that was the only way to ever do it, really. Some lives you can live apart from some professions. But my life and my job are like water – pulling them apart like breaking down a river current for parts. I knew I had to go all in on myself, as an entrepreneur – balls out, all calculated risk and determination.
Stay
All that salt in my eyes and the water I choked down taught me a lot. But I had to start going through the motions of doing it before it made any sense. Like a dog paddling toddler in the water – “look! I’m swimming I’m swimming I’m swimming!”
I was drowning, half the time.
Doesn’t matter. I stayed in the water. And eventually, I started to swim.
Go
Entrepreneurship is a life you walk into the day you quit saying yes to everything else. I’ve learned that’s the only way you get going, or keep at it, for that matter.
The trouble is, it doesn’t feel natural. People mostly congregate in groups – religious groups, ideological groups, groups depending on where they grew up. Posse like. Follow the leader.
Don’t.
Make a home
Barbara Kingsolver writes that home is where you answer the question: “what life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?”
New York is the place where I’ve ever felt “home,” by her definition. They say that once you can make it here you can make it anywhere. I don’t believe them. I’m not sure that homes aren’t like best friends. You get only one real one, in your life – two or three if you’re extra lucky.
Decide
New York asks you who you are over and over and over again. This kind of work isn’t just what you “do” – it’s an ear mark on all your life pages – your friends, your bars, your groups, your places, your beliefs and commitments.
She’s a regular class bully. After you answer, New York will push you around a bit, and ask if you’re sure.
You have to be.
Show up
The night I met my flatmate, I’d shown up at a fundraiser I didn’t want to be at, and paid for an unlimited drink wrist band I couldn’t afford that week. But it was for the Congo, and then there she was, busting balls and wearing bright red lipstick. A month later, we were hiring brokers. Six months later, I wake up every morning and blink twice, just to make sure this big, beautiful apartment is for real, and my home life is really this full of peace.
It’s hard
Somebody, somewhere presented the idea that entrepreneurship was all excitement and heady feeling.
I’d like to kick them in the balls.
“I do wonder…whether some people opt for the entrepreneurship ‘experience’ over the lonely, exhausting, and terrifying real thing,” Eric Schurenberg writes in April’s Inc issue. “Companies get built in the spaces between you, your customers, your investors, your vendors and your team, where things get gritty and complicated and rarely go according to plan. They don’t get built, unfortunately, on a pitch-contest stage.”
Schurenberg nails it. Some days I’m terrified. That’s the worst of it. Others its just that I don’t feel useful, or smart or inspired. I don’t have a great answer for that – except that I keep trying anyway.
I think that’s the best anybody can do.
It’s only temporary
I’d paid my staff, my taxes, the business phone bill, my internet bill and bought chutney and red curry and had (very few) dollars to spare (I thought) for the week when a sneaky dollar fifty put me over the edge, clutching a coffee mug and wailing over my financial instability.
My father told me that it was a morning, not my life.
“Its the people inside your business that define it – the kind of work you do,” he said. “Not your bank account at 9 am on a Tuesday. This is called start up life, and this particular struggle will go away. But the people will stay, and so will the ideals you have built on.”
He told me there’s a wide road running between failure and frustration.
This too, would pass. And it did.
You’re going to need some help with that
The first time I moved in New York city, I did it on the subway, with big red rolling suitcases I had to drag up flights and flights of stairs. I had just about collapsed on my last transfer, when I felt my bag get lighter and realized the gentleman behind me was holding it up with his hands.
“You’re going to need some help with that,” he said.
God, have I. I wouldn’t know who to start with, if I listed out people to give credit to for every inch of this business.
I’ve learned that you can neither build nor enjoy a story by yourself.
It’ll come back around
I’ve learned that life is cyclical. On your team, even. She’ll pitch at you until you catch.
I try to live a lot, in the meantime, so I’m ready when she does.
Fall in love
I forget to love my life, sometimes – all caught up in bills and business deals, quality control problems and waiting to “make it.”
But I can and should and do fall in love with a million things around me every single day – the Albanian man who tells me that I have steel blue eyes, the flower stand I always pass on 84th and Columbus – the band playing Motown at Essex street on a Saturday morning, that one waiter in East Village, two weekends ago, who kept my coffee warm and my champagne filled just so — the sudden rain that one night I felt everything was ending until it soaked me through to my skin, running for my train.
I remember stopping in between 7th and 6th and crying, letting myself get all wet, getting it all out, alone on 23rd and feeling acutely aware that it really was going to be okay.
That was ten months ago.
Now, I catch myself falling in love with conversations and restaurants, brands of whiskey and certain Saturday morning traditions, coffee blends, champagne labels and familiar smells…people.
Most of all, I catch myself falling in love with what I have.
If that isn’t worth remembering, I’m not sure what is.
(photo by Sandi Elle).
Picking Me for Me: On the Decision to Be my Boss at 21
April 7, 2013 § 1 Comment
I loved Tory Johnson‘s recent tweet on picking her career as a female entrepreneur. It was both gut level honest and powerful – a combo I’ve come to expect from successful female entrepreneurs.
She said that she couldn’t have felt confident in her career if she didn’t work as her own boss.
As in,
“The only way I’d ever feel confident and comfortable in my career is to be my own boss.”
I was sending out late night invites for an event, killing a bottle of pinot, making dinner after 10 PM and feeling particularly excited about a new designer I have lined up for 2014.
Johnson made me pause. She was blowing something wide open that I hadn’t really admitted to myself yet.
I picked me for me.
I’ve been hung up on it ever since: trying, for a few days now, to figure out why I did that, at 21 – hungover on tequila shots outside of Long Beach with a new business license, more than my fair share of ignorance and a cancelled ticket to Washington DC.
After careful consideration, I’m convinced that I picked me, partly, because I had no idea what the fuck was up. I was idealistic, a little cocky and definitely felt that a few trips through Dubai made me the shit. I probably also picked me because I had no damn clue that I was picking up arms for John Mayer might aptly describe as the, “war of my life” – a battle to explain me for me to everyone I knew, including myself. I had no idea how lonely that would feel, or how insecure I could get without a boss.
I had to shake my head at myself a little, the more I thought about it. If Shanley 1.5 had been any less cocky, idealistically emotional and/or blissfully ignorant she may not have picked me.
But I’m sure as hell glad she did.
A little over two years later, I’ve learned that you don’t pick yourself once. I had to pick me all over again at 22, when I almost walked out on me for a journalism job. Me and me went at it again at 23, when I almost quit on me to go back to business school. At 24, my secret fantasy is joining a hidden hippie commune somewhere in Nevada City, CA where nobody can give me any responsibility (or force me to wear pants) again in my life.
Yes, that’s still a thing.
I’ve learned, in these times, that I picked me for me at 21 because I knew I wouldn’t let me quit.
I knew I’d push until I cried, and hurt, felt totally out on a limb insecure and wanted to walk away because I was in over my head. Then, I’d push me just a little further. I picked me because I knew I’d demand that I would fix my mistakes, answer my phone on weekends, get up early and stay up late, do the work and show up, over and over and over again before I’d ever get paid. I picked me because I knew I would push myself to learn and do things that no one else would hire me for just yet.
At 22, I picked me again because I knew I was too deep in to quit – that I was learning things I couldn’t learn as quickly any other way. And, I had some crazy sense that I was born to be in charge. I would learn leadership because I was choosing to lead. I’d get the business education I was lacking because I was jumping into business. I would meet and network with incredible people that would help me because, well, I’ve worked with me before. And I know that networking is one of my strengths.
23 was the year I picked me because I needed a win, and I knew I was the only person that could get one for me. I picked me that year because I knew that if I didn’t, nobody else would. I called on my own raised hand, packed my own bags, got myself out of my own rut and pushed past my own self doubt.
At 24, I picked me for me because I loved my work too much not to.
At the end of a long day, when the new line comes together, the event space is full, the quality control problems are fixed or the impossible hurdle is finally knocked down, I’m aware that what I knew, when I picked me for me, was that I needed to know that I was good enough for myself.
Like Johnson, I knew, at 21, that that was the only way I’d be confident – was the only way I’d be comfortable. And, when I say comfortable, I mean in a deep (sometimes dark and barely reachable) place in my soul and my psyche. Because my job is the most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever done.
I picked me because I had no idea how excruciatingly difficult it would be to pick me. I didn’t know I’d pay in 60 hour weeks and part time jobs, weeks with beans and rice and tight, tight budgets and mornings wrestling with self doubt.
But, I’d pick me again, without blinking. I know, now, that all that difficulty is part of building a story.
Any entrepreneur worth her shit will tell you that, after she’s picked her for her for a while.
Now, let’s be honest, I have to admit, at long last, that I picked me because I was all I had.
I picked me because I thought I could.
But I pick me again when I wake up each day because I’ve proved I can.
GIVEAWAY: @HTC and @nakateproject go #MobileEmpowered for #Internationalwomensday
March 8, 2013 § 21 Comments
HTC had been after me for two weeks when I dropped my iPhone in December.
Hot off the dance floor – 2:08 AM, in fur and flats and running to catch a cab.
Slip. Slam. I heard a crack.
I stopped. I covered my eyes. I waited for D to pick it up.
“Just tell me what it looks like,” I said. “I can’t. I can’t even look.”
“Awwww, girl,” I heard him say. “Just hang on. Hang tight.”
I felt him beside me, bending over.
“Well. It’s working…
(pause)
Only kind of shattered.”
He was trying to sound cheerful.
Monday night’s happy hour consensus said I should go to one of “those little shops” on 6th.
“They fix that for $29.99, you know. Gotta know where to go.”
“Where?”
“Just gotta know. Gotta get the right vibe. Know it’s a good place.”
I insisted I was fine. Then I dropped it again. This time, on it’s face.
I gave in the next morning, after I pulled the tiniest glass shard out of my cheek after a 5 AM Skype with Uganda – a baby of a glass shard I pulled out in the mirror, and stared, while I watch a trickle of blood collect.
It was time.
HTC sent me a phone to try on January 14th, the day before my 24th birthday. I shut down my iPhone, opened my HTC EVO 4G LTE. And, I cried.
To be clear, that was the pathetic I’m-a-control-freak-and-can’t-handle-a-new-phone-I-don’t-understand-yet kind of crying. As in, harder than my last breakup.
See, if you give girls like me the right phone, we can work anywhere, any time. That’s how we live – putting in ten minutes here, five minutes there. We’re running multiple social media accounts and turning in pieces on deadline, we’re going, going, going at our part time jobs managing interns while we bootstrap. We’re starting companies in our twenties, and, under the intense pressure of budgets and deadlines and meetings and contracts, we want a phone that can. Fill in the blank. Whatever it is, I want it on my phone.
I thought that’s what my iPhone was – a can do phone.
And then I switched to HTC.
It started a week after the crying fest.
“My phone doesn’t do that,” a founder friend said over my shoulder.
“What?”
“Open up spreadsheets like that.”
I shrugged. “I thought I just didn’t know how to do it on my iPhone.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think it does that. It definitely doesn’t do that.”
A week later, a recruiter I was gchatting with told me to, “keep going” while he ran into a meeting.
“I’ll go mobile,” he said.
Already mobile, I sent him a three paragraph schpeel from my EVO (yes, a schpeel is a thing) that he never got.
My phone buzzed a half an hour later.
“Testing. I don’t think it’s working. I’ll get it back at my laptop.”
The next time I saw him, he slipped my phone in his pocked, and smiled.
“Yeah, that fits,” he said.
I raised an eyebrow.
“We’ve all been brainwashed by Apple,” he said. “Right? You like this, don’t you?”
He handed it back.
“I’ve been watching you work with it. I like it. I want one.”
I smiled – half for myself, and half for a community manager that knew just, exactly, what she was doing, sending a phone to a girl like me.
I thought back to an interview on African women in tech that I had last fall with Anne, a gender and trade specialist at DAI, an employee-owned, international development firm.
“Women are natural innovators,” Anne had said to me.
According to Ann, it was all about getting the right mobile phones in the hands of the right girls – improving access to markets and information, providing them with the ability to work from wherever they are, with up to date information and technology.
The more I discovered I could do on my EVO, the more I felt like she had to be right.
At Nakate, my LA based stylist and I partner with female artisans on the ground in East Africa to bring their work to high fashion and lifestyle markets across the world. We have stockists in Australia and in Canada, Ireland and the UK, not to mention contacts in South Africa, West Africa, and a manger on the ground eight hours ahead of EST that I need to be in almost constant communication with. Someone that we’re working with is always awake – and we’re still a very small operation.
- Switching to HTC has improved my access to google applications, and spreadsheets, which I can share, edit and interface with on the go.
- It’s increased my communication with my manager on the ground in Uganda, and contacts across Africa through easy access to gchat and google talk and hangouts.
- I didn’t have to pay $2.99 for tweetbot like I did on my iPhone, because the twitter app that comes with my HTC phone already blind tweets, and switches between accounts seamlessly.
- My phone immediately integrated to dropbox, where I share not only photos with dozens of shop owners, but editors, and go over shoots with stylist in LA in seconds.
- I’ve also found that applications like Paypal, Freshbooks and Square are easier to interface with – saving me time when I’m doing sales on the go.
- Thanks to HTC, I’ve close accounts while I’m walking up 6th, grabbing the J train and billed in a manner of quick minutes from my part time job. We’ve enjoyed better quality mobile cameras and the ability to edit and upload straight from our phones.
This International Women’s Day, HTC has partnered with my social enterprise Nakate Project to celebrate the mobile evolution of female entrepreneurs across the world through giving away one of the following phones:
· HTC One X+ (on AT&T or for global winners)
· EVO 4G LTE (Sprint)
· HTC One S (T-Mobile)
· DROID DNA (Verizon)
I’m the founder, see. I’m the CEO. That means I approve and reject, approve and reject, approve and reject – photos, deals, samples, accounts. If I can log on and approve and reject in thirty seconds while I pee during a restaurant meeting in midtown, projects move forward. If I don’t, they don’t.
That’s my bottom line.
1. Comment on this post to let us know how mobile has changed the way you work.
Then,
2. Follow @nakateproject and @HTC. You must follow both accounts to qualify.
3. Tell us how you’re working on the go with the hashtag #MobileEmpowered. To qualify, format your tweet in the following manner:
I’m #MobileEmpowered because _________.
Tell us how you how you have been #MobileEmpowered in your work, mentioning BOTH @nakateproject and @HTC, and include a link to this post. Only 3 entries per day. No purchase necessary to enter. Contest ends and winner will be chosen at random on Friday, March 15th at 12 PM.
(Some examples: I’m #MobileEmpowered because _________ http://bit.ly/15BGTOu (@nakateproject @HTC), or I’m #MobileEmpowered with @nakateproject and @HTC because ________ http://bit.ly/15BGTOu).
What is Woman? On the Sierra Nevadas, Anias Nin and Growing up as the Peter Pan Girl
June 8, 2012 § 3 Comments
I know a woman who is an art teacher and a botanist. On Monday, she is a painter. Tuesday afternoon she is a gardener. She crafts meals like art on the weekends – lemons and sage and garlic and California steaks, all laid in candles and bold red and blue and yellow dishes on big, wooden tables that have intrinsically bound food and beauty, for me. She cooked this way when I was six, and she called me in from the orchard with her sons to eat dinner. I’m 23, now, and we’re using the same dishes. But we’re both women. She spanked me once when I was five and wouldn’t stop screaming. Now, she is my friend.
My friend has children that live in worlds of their own – dancers and artists and wild, mountain men, this woman has raised. They come in and out of her home like hurricanes – bringing life and laughter and talk and booze and they go again, after the dishes have been piled high and washed – again and again – and all the meat and the sage and garlic has been heated and reheated long into Sunday night, when everyone climbs into their cars and drive home to their homes tucked in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.
On Monday morning, I know my friend wakes up and makes coffee in her kitchen as a painter. On Tuesday, as a master of the garden – peonies be warned! On Wednesday afternoons, perhaps she makes coffee as a writer. She told me she might begin to write.
Last week my friend called me from the desk she sits at on the days that she is an art teacher who needs to file paperwork. She talked to me about children, but not as a mother.
She didn’t say, “as a mother.”
She said, “as an artist, let me tell you something…”
She said, “as a woman, let me tell you something…”
I’m working as a nanny two days a week – on the days I’m not a woman running a business, or a writer or a woman reading in Bryant Park. I was asking her for advice with the 20 month old. We talked the need for children to have autonomy. It was a segue.
Isn’t everything?
Children need autonomy. And, so do women. So do people.
To give a child autonomy, you must have your own autonomy first.
She told me I would always be a woman first – that I would always be a writer, a business woman, a lover, a yogi and an artistic being. I would always be multi-dimensional, she said to me. Everyone is, you know.
“Should you ever, by whatever circumstance that comes your way, end up bearing children out of your body,” she said, “you will need to remember that the children you bear are not the axis on which your life turns. They do not define you. You do not define them.”
She told me I would never be a mother by definition.
“You will simply be a woman who, for a period of time, is carrying a child on her hip.”
Fluid. Continuing forward. Generous living. Conscious living. A woman.
But what is woman?
When I was a kid, the women around me defined womanhood as servitude. Woman is not for herself, and a woman must not live for herself. They talked about woman being made for man. Woman was words like: under, below, submissive.
They didn’t mean those words like Anias Nin did when she wrote them. Nin said, “I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness.”
We might mistake her for a submission junkie herself if she didn’t, in the same breath, note: “I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
So Nin wants a strength that moves her to strength. She’s about the Yin and the Yang, XX and XY, carpels and stamens. The caryatid and the telamon.
I didn’t get my hands on Nin until I was in college because I was raised in the Sierra Nevadas, with all these women in jumpers and flats talking about serving my husband by keeping my virginity. That’s sex ed, in the conservative church. Your sexuality is something you can lose. If you give it away it the wrong moment, it’s gone like a rip tide, and inside you, in its place, a knot forms – a big, ugly knot of guilt and cosmic anger.
When I was little, I imagined my virginity as the shadow that runs from Peter Pan in the Disney cartoon I watched with my brothers. I spent hours trying to figure out how to attach it to me in a way where it would never get away. I made plans to stomp out my desires, to be good – to live in terror of consequence in order to save myself until the marriage bed.
It’s not monogamy I’m picking on. It’s the utilization of fear, shame and control in sexuality and femininity. I am dear, dear friends with a beautiful, homosexual man who hailed monogamy on the phone as I walked to the Path train last night. I resonate with him. I resonate deeply with commitment.
Christa Wells – “You’re in love with the truth about me/all the scars that no one else sees/and the creases that tell of the stories we’ve written together.”
Commitment is logical to me.
What isn’t logical to me anymore is belonging most deeply to everyone except myself.
The women in jumpers taught me that God started in crushing woman’s independent spirit after the Garden of Eden. The serpent will bite her heel, and she will give and give and give pieces of herself to the men she’s created for until she turns to dust. The way I was taught it, a woman belongs to four generations and an institution – her parents, her husband, her children and her children’s children. After her family, a woman belongs to the church.
I was told I’d find joy in serving. But they weren’t talking about serving my fellow man.
They were talking about giving away chunks of myself until my whole life was caught up in servitude. They were talking about serving the lust and the evil out of me. That’s how you combat losing your footing, your good standing, your virginity.
Why do they call it that – “losing” – like something you were meant to keep slipped away? Why don’t they say that your body opens up, shifts, that the earth gives way? Why don’t they tell you that time stops?
I grew up terrified of losing something in my body that I’d never get back.
My own humanity began to blossom when I began to have acceptance of myself inside my body.
It sprouted legs and lifeblood and real, fucking skin on my body – I was Pinocchio that time.
Hey! I’m a real girl!
I hadn’t felt much but terror, until then. Everything a shadow – everything Peter Pan. I was raised on the expectation of domination and submission, like BDSM for the soul and the spirit – but with prettier words. When I was in high school, my family moved to New York, and a woman with tight curls and 80′s eye shadow told me about myself and my role as a woman. She had sausage fingers and white skin with freckles. She buckled her shorts high up over her protruding stomach, and she was always asking me if I thought I was appropriate.
Sausage finger lady made me afraid of losing my virginity and my reputation and my slot in heaven because I couldn’t be appropriate enough.
Her question about me being appropriate was always rhetorical. It was always over lunch. She’d take big gulps of sweet tea she sucked while staring out at me from under her green and blue eye liner and she’d begin to talk about ways I could serve the bad things out of me.
While I was getting my navel pierced, I imagined what she’d come up for me to do as recompence. The big, surgical needle went diving through my skin and ripped out the other end, and I felt deep, horrible powerlessness when I imagined all the sunday school classes she’d have me teach to get the early blooming sexuality and expression of rebellion in my ripped navel out of my body.
I didn’t have the words or the ideology or the understanding to break free from the lines she was setting for me. She was defining sexuality and womanhood and my role in the world through her sausage fingered lens, and I didn’t know how to stop it.
That’s what happens when your whole god damn life is a reaction – a submission, a role of help-mate – to the church, to a man – to a woman with sausage fingers and 80s eye shadow when she defines both.
Getting away took a separation of self – an unlearning and a relearning, a ripping out of ideas that defined everything for me. But, years later, unmarried and unafraid of losing something I’ll never get back – I live in a world where the earth shifts, and time stops. I give to my fellow man out of love, instead of fear.
Years later, I’ve learned that this concept of finding a man that who has the courage to treat me like a woman is necessary. I’ve learned that buying underwear I love is changes the way I feel when I walk down the street. I’ve learned that being in touch with my body, instead of afraid of what it could do to me, is integral for my mental health. I’ve learned that I like time to myself the same way I like to be in a room of people. I’ve learned to say no when I’m spent. I’ve learned to say yes when I’m not.
I’ve learned that I want men around me who listen to my ideas, and tell me their ideas. I’ve learned that the demands I want set on me have to do with my work, my capacity to have my own life, my ability to be patient with the lives of others and to be generous – as a partner. I’ve learned never to give myself up, but to give often of myself to others.
I’d like to find 80′s woman, and a room full of jumpers, and I’d like to ask them all where they came off being the way they were – making me afraid of losing something I could never get back, dominating me into fear and panic and lost identity. I’ve like to shake my finger in their faces and tell them to stop scaring little girls into submission and dominance, loss of identity and fear of their bodies.
Then again, I know that I can’t define sexuality and womanhood and their role in the world through my hot pop pink nail polish and my turquoise rings any more than they could do for me through their sausage fingers and jumpered vaginas.
Beyond that, I don’t need to define it for them, anyways.
There’s already enough people doing that – their churches, their children, their husbands, their grandchildren – their parents.
They’ve got four generations and a congregation to belong to.
And me?
I’ve got the world.
I went to my garden, dear friend, best lover! breathed the sweet fragrance.
I ate the fruit and honey,
I drank the nectar and wine.Celebrate with me, friends!
Raise your glasses—”To life! To love!”- Song of Solomon 5
Che GueVagina, The Evangelical Backlash and What Anna Taught me About Myself
May 20, 2012 § 1 Comment
The woman at my nail salon calls me “California.” She shakes my hand, “thank you, California.” When I go, she yells – “Bye California! Bye!”
Anna is from South Korea. She’s lived here for 23 years – 11 of them working 6:30 am to 8:00 pm at her salon on 1st street. She was quick to tell me how hard she works, ringing out her long hours like a gong of her success over the heavy smell of polish remover.
It took me half a schlack manicure to get that all the yelling and slapping and pointing and smiling and shaking her head at me was about communication. She didn’t have the words she needed.
This morning, someone called “intersectionality” the “pivotal point where reproductive justice starts.” I’m sitting at my desk typing and sipping my overly strong french pressed Trader Joes dark brew and then someone tells me about intersectionality and my world just got wider. Can I use this word for that perfect place when a black and tan is made just right? Can I use it for the way I feel when there’s a perfect storm between my past and my future and my present is a wildfire?
That’s the thing about the intersectionality between the right words you need and the writing you’re doing about your life. They expand your ability to call out what’s going on in and around and above and behind and inside you.
Last night it was all going on around me in a spot I was planning on leaving once I peed. But then I was dancing – four, five, six people around me all spilling my beer and laughing and welcoming me to the wild, raging city – and I stayed, and I danced and I danced and I danced, because Forbes said this week that the new charisma is chutzpah, and I have plenty of that.
I was hyped up on being called “Some of the best feminist writing I’ve ever read,” an “honest manifesto of the righteously pissed off modern woman.” Che GueVagina! I was stoked on this comment on twitter that someone hadn’t, “read anything that fundamentally revolutionary since the ’70s.” The intersectionality of that, and the words on the grapevine from people that are close to my heart, was killing me inside. And I had to go, go, go. This city was blazing into the night without me, and I was a righteously pissed off modern women.
There are corners in this city where people are finding the meaning of things while the dark brews are flowing. I wanted that corner. I found it at 10th and Willow. It was 10:30 – still early, on drinking time. I pulled up a seat in the quiet backroom of the bar.
The bar tender was blonde, and she was talking about her son. Her name is Pam. There was a man in a blue shirt, sitting in the far corner. He was the only one in the room, and they were talking the way old friends do. I needed that kind of humanity in my life.
If our bodies are a reflection of God, the transcendence that one friend’s soul has with another’s – the genderless, bodiless, comfortable, meeting in the middle – has to be another side of divine nature that we’re just barely on the cusp of.
I pulled up a chair and talked Zodiacs with Pam and her friend, which led to the way the Capricorn in me came out on the internet this week. I told them my angst over revealing my struggle was the reason I left a bottle of wine sitting on my kitchen counter, and came to catch the spirit of the city instead. The judgement had started coming in, and I just didn’t want to be alone.
I emoted about the backlash. My name’s hot on the grapevine.
I was drinking Blue Moon. Pam’s friend was drinking Coors.
“All these people from all over the world are telling me how they relate to me,” I told them. “And, these aren’t people who are anti-religion. These are people dying to explore the religion they grew up with in an arena that’s free of judgment and shaming. They want the freedom to get it right – for them.”
The old friend beside me was nodding. He looked at me and said, “I don’t know you very well, but I’m much older than you. So, here’s a piece of wisdom from someone who’s down the road a bit. I want to tell you that you’re on it. You’re right on it. Keep going.”
Pam nodded at me and quietly said, “drink’s on me baby girl.”
He put one finger down on the counter, and pressed down and said, “this” – meaning my life right now, my life signified in that one bit of black counter he had his pointer finger on. “This is going to take courage,” he said. “And it’s going to hurt.”
I nodded. “I’m here because it hurts, man.”
What hurts is the fear that honesty about your process is punishable. What hurts is the panic that everything could be taken from you if you were to get real – not just with god – but with the people that have always defined God for you.
My heart dives with that panic. My heart dives when my name’s on the grapevine. Then it rises like a bat out of hell to my throat and I get teary because humanity in all its goodwill came at me like a fire hydrant, this week. I could check off a list of men and women I can call now – people from my background, editors I’ve written for, women in international development – women in East Africa, in New York, in Northern California, in Egypt and from India and Europe and Los Angeles and the Middle East, all telling me that they felt it too. But that wasn’t all. There were men calling and tweeting and writing – men working in development in Haiti with fundamentalist backgrounds and men I knew as boys when I was little. There were Ugandan journalists and gay men who experienced sexism living in Malawi and scholars and pastors and doctors and writers. Perhaps one of the most tender responses came from a friend I haven’t spoken to in months. He called laughing last night, telling me I had balls and I was setting our background on fire.
“You fucking okay you crazy feminist bitch? How are ya?” He chuckled. “I just want you to know I love you, and when they start railing on you, you call me. I’m here.”
I’ll say it again. It wasn’t the freedom to “come out against” something I was expressing. No, that would be against the whole point.
I was expressing my desire for wide open space as I search for authentic truth – for love of mankind instead of his religious systems. I have been sitting at my desk for many hours now, trying to find the words for the difficulty in searching for solidarity and integrity in the midst of acute judgment.
“Did I tell you about the year I studied Buddhism?” my friend asked me.
“No!”
“Yeah, well, I had to keep it quiet.”
Had to. I hate those words more and more.
Had to.
Can’t.
Have to.
They won’t let me.
These phrases are pouring into my inbox and they’re about families and friends – the closest people in all these peoples lives – the women who raised them, the men who taught them how to ride bikes, the people who helped them wash their hands in the church foyer bathroom when they were four. There’s a stark terror present in the face of consequence for being honest about their struggle. Shaming. Blaming. Getting after! Punishment.
I wanted solidarity bad. I had to, because I know there’s a loss that comes in breaking out – admitting you don’t have it together. Have you read C.S. Lewis? He talks about Eustace the dragon having his skin torn off deep so he could be human again. He talks about how the salt water he entered into as a new, baby skinned human hurt him like hell.
Maybe I’m a new human, too, and the dragon skin has just barely gone. Perhaps that’s why it hurts. I sat on a stairway near Washington Square last night and I stared at all the people. I let the struggle sit inside me. I let it breathe. I gave some girls directions to a liquor store. I told two old, overweight men that the bar beneath us was worth checking out. I’d had good nights there.
Within the struggle, I’ve found there’s a need for new words, new terms, new ways of coming at this beast in our communication with our background. Someone told me that guilt can be redefined as powerlesness. She told me that my image of God had to get bigger.
“My God is swirly and in nature. My God doesn’t have a lot of words, because I have a hard time with that. Oh, and my God lives in music,” she said. “God doesn’t want to be quantified and made to be so narrow – no, I don’t think God wants that at all.”
She told me her God was light, airy, cheerful. She gave me the phrase “gender abuse.”
Re-identification – new language. New ways of seeing. If religion is sushi, I’m taking great big bites of sliced ginger. I need a new palette. I need it bad.
There’s a theme ringing out like Anna’s voice does at the salon. It’s coming from Pam’s friend at the bar, and several old friends who have called to cheer me on. I think it’s key to this disidentification, re-identification, healing, crazy, wild process I just started. I think it’s the key to a new kind of communication, and finding better words.
“To get room, you have to give room,” they say to me. They’re using words like gracious, loving, kind, understanding. They’re telling me to to create a barrier of understanding with people. They told me to have love that gives freedom.
Kahlil Gibran said something about that too. He said,
Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
Just as my schlack manicure was drying under the uv-rays this week, a girl came in asking for a pamphlet – a card, telling her pricing. A price list? We were all trying to help think of new phrases to help Anna understand she needed something in her hands that told her how much her pedi would cost.
When she left, frustrated, Anna pointed towards my vagina and said – “wax?”
Where did she get THAT idea? If this woman is hurting my arms, I can’t even imagine what my poor v-jay would look like. Scorched earth wouldn’t begin to describe it. I was horrified. I crossed my legs.
“WHAT? No! No. I don’t want you to wax me.”
She shook her head and pointed at the door where her potential customer had just stood. She said, “she want Brazilian wax?”
God, I laughed and I laughed and I laughed. I couldn’t even respond. I laughed and finally I said, “No. Anna. She didn’t want that. But I love this color on my fingers.”
Anna smiled then, and she laughed with me – big, loud laughter – laughter as loud as the commands she barked. We had a moment of honest human exchange both of us understood. Then she slapped her file against the counter, and started haggling about pricing with me.
I thought of Anna last night, when I got a letter from someone I used to know that hurt me deeply. I felt the guilt coming in like a hooded spirit, taking over my heart and beating me down. That’s how I’ve always responded.
I called a friend. And, he laughed. He laughed and he laughed at the idea of my old friend’s accusations being true. And, so, in the quietness of my own bedroom, I started laughing with him.
Mid cackle – I thought of Anna, price lists and Brazilian waxes. And, in that moment, I remembered that it was powerlessness I was feeling, not guilt.
That made all the difference.
Church Deacons, Blue Bras and the Revolution We’re Writing
May 17, 2012 § 25 Comments
I’m having this struggle. Burning, churning, making my gut wrench struggle. I walk down 1st street with my heart on fire. The separation of church and state – it’s going on between my temples in the worst way. No, it’s not that. It’s bigger than that. I’m a woman, now. I buy my own things. I feed myself. I put a roof over my head. I go out when I want. I come in when I want. I cuss when I want to. And, when I know I shouldn’t – not because I believe there’s any kind of negativity in the words themselves – but because I’ll lose my audience, I try not to. I’m a woman working in the field of woman’s development. I get on planes by myself. I started a company. Along with it, I’m learning to ask for what I want out of a relationship.
That’s something they tell you you can’t do, at a Christian University. I went to one. They told me I needed to wait for men to want me. They told me I couldn’t want them first. They told me to wait to be wanted.
But there’s this revolution, see. It’s hit the streets of New York and it’s calling us out in throngs – into bars and coffee shops and down the nuts and snacks aisle in Trader Joe’s on Sunday afternoons. It’s not generational, and it’s not counter-religious. It’s cultural. It’s spread across the board of age and occupation. It’s called authenticity. Twitter started it for us. Twitter, because twitter taught us to stopped following those girls that bitch about their breakups and to start paying attention to the women that were “fucking angry” the week of the Egyptian woman in the blue bra. We gave up inappropriate drama – the kind you want to unfriend on facebook because it won’t stop updating how it feels about it’s ugly ex – for the kind you’re dying to watch like a firework pealing across the skyline. These girls showing up in our feeds? They were authorities. They were brilliant. They were starting something – the girls who couldn’t stop e-cussing because they were so god damn pissed off about what was happening in the world of women’s rights about them. They didn’t have time for you if you were complaining about their language. They were in the middle of a revolution – a revolution women were being kicked around the street for. There’s language for that. The phrase, I think is fucking brutal. Those bastards. Kicking women in their bras around the street. Being kicked on the ground is fucking brutal. And Mona Eltahawy wasn’t afraid to tell us so – the systematic degradation of Egyptian women needed language.
Instant information has changed everything. Now, we watch this stuff on youtube – and the people you-tubing it with their phones? They’re typing expletives and feelings and developments as they go, and they’re coming right to your phone – live. So, you’re more engaged than ever before with the world around you.
Don’t you get it? It’s about what they’re saying. Don’t get so caught up in the presentation that you can’t see it. It doesn’t matter anymore if girl is cussing while she tells you about it. She’s telling you about it. Look around. No one else is experiencing the way she is.
Lean in.
Listen up.
Pick up your pace. Catch up. We’re professional women. We’re professional woman comfortable with our bodies and our revolutions and our alcohol on Monday nights – and we’re talking about it. We’re saying what we want. We’ve got chutzpah in our veins.
Can you feel it?
We’re the ones changing your world. We’re the women starting our own businesses and clothing lines and starting revolutions in Egypt – the women who say what we think. I’m the bottom of the totem pole. I’m a freshman, a new beginner – the pond scum the big kids push around. I hardly know what I’m doing, except that there’s this raging, pounding, churning revolution around me and it’s telling me to get it out – and to say it how I want to. Censorship is dead. The age of typos and cussing and talking about my sex life being the bane of every company’s existence is over. Now, the lack of authenticity, the stuffiness, the lack of personality – it’s leaving you behind. And me? People are calling me up to come speak because I say what I think. And, that’s what’s next. That’s the future. It’s got me giddy inside. I’m doing a dance in my room.
Honesty. The way I feel it. The way I want to tell it.
Therein lies the gut wrench. The dance stops. The music fades. My glass gets nailed back down to the counter because you’re telling me to stop. You’re telling me to wait again, to listen again, to censor again.
Be appropriate!
I’m writing things you don’t want to read. They’re coming out of me like big, weekend explosions. Word vomit. They’re not about the revolution in Egypt because I’m not there. I’m here. I wasn’t in Uganda for the women that ripped their shirts off for freedom of expression and got their boobs grabbed by police while they were shoved into taxis but I sure as hell was in Sunday school when they told me I couldn’t buy tank tops because the boys might be distracted. I sure as hell was in Sunday school when they told me “sexy” was sinful, when they told me to keep my legs shut and my mouth closed and to look for a husband to direct the rest of my life – for a man to submit to, lay my life down for. I sure as hell was awake when the damning text messages came in the first time it came out I was supporting a man, instead of being supported by him.
I’ve spent hours on the phone defending my right to choose – to choose my words, my wardrobe, my relationships. I’ve been kicked around in the worst way in a world where autonomy doesn’t make any sense – a world where the women I know stay sexless and quiet until marriage and sometimes afterward. And god damn I tried so hard to be one of them. I tried so hard. I tried not liking boys. I tried not liking beer. I tried hating cigarettes. I tried giving all three up for lent.
I hate lent.
I was a contortionist, changing and shifting and moving to try and fit in this little box someone created for me. And I don’t want it anymore. I like my tank top straps the way they are, my tattoo where it goes – and I like my beer to flow freely.
I shouldn’t even have to be talking about these inalienable rights.
But in the world I grew up in – you do. You’ve got to fight your ass off for an ounce of respect after you sleep with a man outside of marriage, let alone a woman. You’ve got to pound your damn head against the wall to get anyone to hear you when you say you’ve found a balance in your relationship with god almighty and vodka crans on Friday. Nobody believes you. They don’t think that balance is possible. They think it looks one way, it goes one way. And they read about your honest writing and your tweets and your coming out of the closet – no matter what sex your partner happens to be – and they label you as one of the sad ones, the ones gone astray.
You’ve left the fold.
They make you choose. They make you decide. Religious. Not religious. Like you can check it off in a box the way they expect you to check off your orientation, your drinking, your marijuana use.
And, it’s not really about whether they think you should or shouldn’t. It’s about your right to express it. Your right to process. It’s about they way they’ll string you up for the word you chose to use, the partner you chose to have. Was everyone listening when that brief for conservative fundamentalists got sent out last week?
“As people who promote personal responsibility, family values, commitment and stability and emphasize freedom and limited government we have to recognize that freedom means freedom for everyone.”
I’ve got my inalienable rights. What I’d like is the respect I need to explore them without a label.
Well, what if I smoke a cigarette every two weeks? What if I’m not a smoker, but I smoke when I’m drinking jack? What if I had sixteen drinks last week, and three this one? What if I’m a really healthy individual – I drink my carrot juice, I eat my apples, and I like two beers every night. Damn, that means 14 drinks a week, checking a box in the doctor’s office. That’s high on the doctor’s scale. He’s giving me funny looks now. He’s checking my heart. Do your math, doc! It’s not a big deal.
We’ve been cringing. Or, I’ve been cringing. You know, I tried to talk about my experience with a deacon who chased me around my parent’s church with a figurative Bible held over his head writing letters about me and taking surveys on my modesty. I was 19. He took me down fighting, and he ruined my reputation for wearing bikinis on the weekend. When I tried to blog about it, the phone-calls shut me down. All these well meaning busy bodies calling to help me deal with my situation in humility and submission.
Inalienable rights. I needed to blog. Does the church understand? That would have been healing. That would have brought me back.
I need healing. So, years later, in New York city with the clothes I love and the shoes I can finally afford – sitting with a great big sigh coming out of me for the autonomy I’ve never had – I’m starting to write about all the things I’ve been told not to.
And I’m walking down first with my heart pounding because of the disappointment I feel when I think that maybe I don’t get to be honest. I don’t get to let it out. I don’t get to be real – not me. All those girls that grew up and rejected their faith – they do. Those people that came out of the closet and said they didn’t want faith anymore – it was clean for them. My friend Caleb calls it a burden I’ve got to figure out if I’ll shake or not, this “faith thing.” He tells me it’s still inside me, tying me to a background I disagree with on a fundamental level.
I had a roommate that told me she liked to live in the pink and blue and green and grey shades of life.
“I like it all,” she smiled at me. “It all teaches me something.”
Then she told me she loved Jesus. And Hillary Clinton.
That was the week Obama got elected. I pasted a poster of his beautiful red, white and blue face above my desk where I could look and see the sun go down behind the capitol building every night.
I didn’t tell my family. Obama didn’t fit in the box – I was un-contorting secretly.
But is that freedom at all, the kind where you uncross your legs and get your head out from under your armpit where no one can see?
I live in pink and grey and green and blue – but can I write about it? Can I talk about it? Man, that’s the kind of writing I ride google for. I’m all over this laptop trying to find people pouring all the ugly, beautiful, horrific things out of their souls so I can find myself in it – get a piece to rip out of it and scribble into my journal.
So, if I talk about the real stuff – the desires and events and people and places that are boiling up inside me and asking for words – the kinds of things I’m starting to tell my editor I need an alias before he publishes – will they make me choose? Do I have to check the box? Faith, not faith. You don’t get to be complicated here. It’s black and it’s white.
I need a god damn sharpie to scribble all over this chart.
That’s what my heart looks like.
I moaned about all this to a friend turned mentor over breakfast a few years ago on the corner of First and Adams today.
He told me he understood my dilemma. He said it was difficult. Then, he said that his one consolation was, “they can’t take it from you. That – your religious freedom – your freedom of expression and choice within it – is the one thing they can never take.”
He told me it would be difficult – that it would rip me up inside the way I expect for it to. My life would be excruciatingly painful for a bit – a lot like coming out, but less clean, when I came out and told everyone that I loved God a certain way, but it didn’t look like they wanted it to.
Then he told me authenticity was the most important thing – he told me to choose wholeness, whatever that looked like. And, it certainly didn’t look like climbing into an evangelical box or judging myself on a faith meter a sexually frustrated deacon with a pot belly told me I should live out of.
When it comes down to it, I guess that’s the whole point. It looks messy. It looks a little discombobulated. But it certainly doesn’t look like beers on Monday nights and black bras under my white tank tops or the way my navel ring clicks against my high waisted red shorts when I walk.
No. If you can see it – it’s running much deeper that. And, you’re missing the point if you’re going to gasp about where I slept over two weeks ago, or that pack of cigarettes I split with someone in East Village because I was having a particularly stressful day. The fucking point – if you can see it – is that I’m finding my place, as a woman. I’m throwing off all the things they told me – about being defined by a man who knows his direction, and gives me mine, about losing my sexuality in modesty, about losing my soul in obedience and the reality of what I want in the willingness to let go to the wishes of those running this big machine. I’m losing the things that made me never want to darken the door of a church again.
In my soul, my heart, my throbbing head – it’s the getting rid of the old that’s bringing in the new. It’s a re-appropriation, a disidentification. A friend who came out at 20 wrote to me that, “It will be crucial that you continue this ground breaking work inside of you for the full act of disidentity to be successful.” He talked about extracting power from stigmas, challenging preconceived notions and ultimately tearing down walls of oppression.
“No more of this ‘women in bras being kicked around and felt up’ or waiting in humility, covering and denying your steaming natural sexuality bullshit for the sake of a man’s desire for control of your/their body and your/their mind,” he wrote to me. “I love how you’re still writing about balance – between your life and your faith. Because, I can tell, you are and then again you’re not ‘losing your religion.’”
Someone asked me this week what I’d teach my children – if I’d have them go to church, if I’d push them in a certain direction, tell them how to believe. “Will your family be religious?” they asked me.
God. I just sat on their couch and stared and didn’t have an answer. I don’t. I really don’t have an answer. See, I’m discovering truth organically – truth you can’t discover with someone breathing down your neck. And that’s new for me. The hairs on my neck are still raised. I barely got out. But I did get out. And here, where I can breathe, I’m finding that “The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it!” And I have to believe that, “All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
I’m finding that the whole “settle our relationships with each other” bit is a wildfire.
A friend I parted ways with badly last year is getting on a plane to my city soon because, like James Taylor tells it, he
Got a letter from a dear friend of mine, the story of a spiritual awakening.
She spoke of her love returning in kind, she let me know that she’d be waiting.
And I should be on my way by now.
Walking across the floor, reaching for the door, on my way by now.
That letter was all full of purple and grey and green with sharpie scribbles – spiritual awakening gone rogue, coming out my insides.
I don’t remember when I sent it. But I have a feeling it was right about the time I began to understand that there was something sacred about trading in my secret love of foul language for an open love of people, and my fear of my family’s opinions for reconciliation with the people I had gone head to head with in college. It was the month I lost all recollection of how it felt to be told my sexuality was evil, and found a man to discover – and discuss – it with, instead.
Love of mankind instead of his religious systems. I’m on the front lines – can you feel it? Maybe you don’t like the way it sounds. Maybe you don’t like the way it looks. Maybe you don’t like the way it’s presented – but it’s the real deal. It’s a revolution, no matter how you present it.
Lean in.
Listen up.
#dignity2012 – On the way Agnes Changed my View of East Africa and, with it, the World
April 14, 2012 § 5 Comments
I took Agnes to the pacific last week. We’ve been business partners for over a year now – her running the Ugandan side of our business, myself working stateside. We’ve worked together in East Africa. But, now it was her turn to enter my world.
We spent time in Beverly Hills, Hollywood and Santa Monica, introducing Agnes to shop owners and re-stocking locations with our new spring line. We found out she loves mango smoothies the way I love matooke. She loves coffee the way…I love coffee. She loves sandwiches the way I love chapati. In my world, we talked about my childhood the way we’d talked about hers during my last visit. We discussed my breakups the way we’d talked about her relationship with Patrick after she’d met him in grade school. We talked about the way I was born in San Diego and grew up in the Sierra Nevadas the way she’d talked about growing up in Kampala. And, after she met the head of the journalism department at my alma mater, we discussed our degrees – mine in journalism, hers in business.
She laughed through my dating stories. She told me she’d waited to get married on purpose to finish her education. We discussed Patrick’s views on women – his support of her. I nodded. I’d seen it – him waving goodbye from the veranda, watching their three children while we worked on our company. We traded stories about our cultures on the way into boutiques – the way Ugandans say Americans make love in the streets, the way Americans claim Uganda – and all of Africa, at that – is full of people defecating in the streets.
At the stop light on Broadway, we laughed so hard it hurt.
It was 3:30 pm when we were done – prime traffic time in LA, and I warned her we’d be late home. But Agnes had been smelling the ocean air for just about as long as she could stand without being properly introduced, and I caught the desperation in her eye.
“I’ve never seen it!” she pleaded.
I thought of myself asking to visit the Nile, and nodded, putting the truck in drive.
I’ve never introduced anyone to the pacific for the first time – let alone the ocean itself. The practice felt sacred to me, taking off our shoes on the edge of the boulevard and walking across the sand in our bare feet. I pointed out ships and surfers as we walked.
Agnes hesitated at the edge of the water, the way I’d hesitated when I’d first shared a pathway with a herd of Ankole cattle on my way through Wobulenzi. I laughed at her hesitancy the way the cattle herder had laughed at me, crouched at the edge of a herd of long horn cattle. I waved my arms – “come on!”
She did.
I watched Agnes and the ocean feeling each other out for the first time, and I thought about how many things this woman has introduced me to.
I met her when I was 21. It was my first day in Kakooge. Agnes greeted me with a loud voice and open arms. She gave me a hug and three kisses – left, right, left. She waved her arms around – “welcome to our home! You are so welcome.” By “home,” I soon learned Agnes was referring to the entire village – not just her half acre plot in the midst of it.
Skirt wrapped around her waist and an arm of bracelets, Agnes walked me through every part of town, little blonde NGO reporter that I was. We went to the outskirts of Kakooge, to the main street of Kakooge, to the village’s only indoor restaurant, to the east, where most of the children gather to play and, finally, to the bars, where drunken men recognized Agnes, and exclaimed over the Mzungu. I watched them, sitting on a wooden bench offered to the white girl, and I thought about the woman I’d just met.
She spoke about Jesus and women’s rights in the same sentence – often in church. With a booming voice and an out-streched arm, she regularly preached alongside her husband to a local congregation on wooden benches. And yet, here she was, a public figure in her village and a respected woman in her culture, laughing with the men in the bars and, later, I’d learn, with the prostitutes. Turns out, Agnes is not only progressive, she’s a bit controversial.
By controversial, I mean Agnes swims against the ancient wave carrying respected society away from anyone engaged in less than admirable activity, and pulling the religious and dignified away from issues like birth control, safe sex, AIDS, family planning and a woman’s right to express herself freely in every room in her home. Jesus doesn’t talk about condoms, does he?
Agnes seems to think he does.
After my 22nd birthday, she threw in her livelihood with me, and hired 40 women she handpicked to partner with us after meeting me once. That same year, she began to change my view of Uganda. She brought me into East Africa as a part of the woodwork, insisting that I wasn’t a visitor anymore. I had a place carved out in her home along the Kampala to Gulu highway, where the trucks run through to the West of my bedroom wall in the night, and the roosters crow on the half hour just before dawn.
Agnes must have known that any person transitioning into a culture needs to be taken in with their background, and taught new ways, instead of expected to know them, because she told me she saw me the third time I returned to Uganda. I was deep in a half eaten plate of matooke when she said it. I was struggling with a culture that I didn’t fit into – checking my iphone in between meetings running an hour behind schedule, and lying awake trying to teach myself to slow down. I was embarrassed by my white legs, and the way I kept cutting myself shaving in my bucket shower.
I stopped eating and stared. “Yes,” she nodded. “I see you. I see your heart. I get you. And, I believe in you.”
Her words, in the midst of a sea of misunderstanding, became my lifeline.
Later that week, it was Agnes, again, that gave me permission to have a large vision for my work in East Africa. She walked into a room she’d transitioned into mine for the two weeks I stayed with her. “I want you to open your heart,” she told me. “We’re going to be big. Big beyond Uganda. I have plans for Kenya, Rwanda, and the Congo. So, you let me know when you’re ready, and we’ll go.”
During that visit, I discovered that Agnes’ willingness to be controversial – to speak up, to speak out, and to go places where other women were not willing to go – had taken me to those places with her. She’d silently understood my desire for integration into her village, my desire to do business directly with the women in at, and with it – quietly been creating a place for me in Uganda – in the way she spoke about me, the way she helped me understand her culture and, now, the way she brought the two together.
She’d created a profile of my work, and my character. She’d been prepping the women working for me to meet me again. The woman she once went to visit in the bad parts of time were coming to greet her – and to greet me. Women that we’d gone to take pictures of in huts were walking across town to kiss me three times – left, right, left – and talk about our work. The prostitutes that had once pursed their lips at me were greeting me in English.
Six months later, at the age of 23, it was Agnes that gave me the grace to allow our plan take longer than expected, and for funds to come through more slowly than I wanted them to. After sales tax stripped our January bank account, I got an email from her quoting a scripture passage from the book of Zechariah. “Don’t despise the day of small beginnings,” it said.
More than matoke or Ankole cows, Agnes has taught me about the way a relationship with a person can change everything, as she’s staked her reputation on my ability to come through for her and the women she’s hired to work for us – taking months to explain cultural customs, work out our accounting on the ground, gather items and, now, to come and learn my culture so she could better integrate the needs of our customer base into hers.
As we walked on the wet sand, I pointed out kelp and washed up shells and explained crustaceans. I picked up different size shells. I pointed out the way the tide moves. But Agnes wasn’t interested in that. She was interested in the way children interacted the way with the water, and kept pulling on my arm to laugh and point them out.
I’d never seen the ocean that way – through children. One ran away from the ocean – terrified – and made a muscle, smiling at us, once he’d safely escaped the surf. Another was rolling himself in the sand and grinning underneath his gritty, gray hair. A third ran into the surf squealing with delight over waves that were too cold for me.
“I love the way they love it,” Agnes said. And, it was in that moment, watching a little girl dance the sand out of her polka dotted suit, that I realized Agnes had done it again – she’d changed my perspective on the world and, with it, the way I view the people around me, and my place in it, alongside them.
International Women’s Day: What Powerful Women in Kakooge Did This Year
March 8, 2012 § 1 Comment
Today, I’m simply re-blogging a post from Nakate‘s blog.
The longer I work with artisans in Uganda, the more I find that the women I know from central Uganda are some of the strongest, most intense, most driven, powerful people I know.
Not to mention, my dear friends.
Today, I’m celebrating them -
- Agnes Kabugo is the project manager for Nakate. She not only helps women across her native country, she manages the local school and, often, will step in for her husband and preach at the local church.
- Grave Kavuna, a pastress in Kakooge, sent 10 of her children to school through her own salary.
- Florence stopped defining herself as the poorest woman in the village.
- Grace, an uneducated woman, was able to send all 10 of her children to school to be educated.
- For the first time in her life, Grace was able to take her children to the hospital whenever they fall sick.
- Grace made a statement in the church that she runs – men don’t believe that women should have their own money but she preaches from the pulpit that, through Nakate, she has her own bank account.
- Nakato stopped believing that a bank account is only for rich women, and opened her own. After that, she was able to pay for her own medical bills, and bring herself back to health after falling really sick for a period of time because of her HIV status.
- Margaret Namayego paid off a Habitat for Humanity house loan.
- Margaret bought two cows and a pig.
- Grace Nsambu bought a bicycle, a cow and grew her small roadside shop.
- Grace became an equal breadwinner for her family.
- Harriet opened a bank account, bought a pig and started a breakfast and lunch roadside stand.
- Harriet’s granddaughter Anet saw her grandmother purchase a pig through Nakate, and began to work with us herself, in the hopes that she could save enough money to open her own restaurant. When her grandmother saw her initiative, she gave her some of her own Nakate salary to get her started on her business while she’s waiting for her’s.
- Dorothy Nambooze paid for all her grandchildren to go to school.
- Justine stopped digging a hole in her back yard and stuffing money in it. Instead, she opened a bank account.
- Jane turned her mud hut into a cement house, and was able to afford taking care of her sick mother.
- Nakato was able to get herself out of bed and on her feet through continuing to work with Nakate while sick with HIV, and paying for her own hospital bills.
- Betty was able to afford rent, and school fees for her children.
- Florence Nakacwa bought herself a piglet.
- After Juliet Nabukenya’s husband left her for another woman, she was able to send all of her children back to school with her own salary.
- Lydia went from sitting at home without work to do, or digging for a small salary in other people’s fields, to having a job that paid for her pay her bills, and save some money.
- After being deserted by the Muslim community and her family, Saudah bought poultry for herself through her salary and says she eats whenever and however she wants to, now.
- Margaret Nakamya finished building her house, and bought a bicycle, pigs and a cow.
- Justine feels “settled” inside and stopped worrying incessantly – for the first time in her life.
- At 50, Florence received her first paycheck, and was able to begin buying animals to supplement her income with Nakate, and started successfully taking care of her 10 grandchildren.
- Kisakye bought bricks to buy herself a permanent home. She felt empowered to take care of her children herself, instead of depending on a husband she says was a drunkard.
- Caroline began a charcoal business shipping charcoal to Kampala on trucks that come through Kakooge on their way to town. She identified land she wants to buy in Kakooge, and plans to purchase it as soon as she saves enough of her salary. She was able to pay for her sick mother’s health care.
- Margaret Nakibuka bought iron sheets for roofing her home.
- Scovia, a Rwandan first generation Ugandan, paid off her loan on a house in Kakooge. She started a business selling milk at the local market.
- Margaret stopped sitting at home crying thinking she’d die from AIDS and leave her children. Instead, she said she has hope.
- Over 120 children were able to attend a private, well run school founded by Align Ministries in Kakooge through their mothers paying their salaries.
- Together with her job as a teacher, Rebecca was able to single handedly provide for her four children, two of her siblings and her mother.
- Fatuma agreed to leave her work as a prostitute and begin making jewelry instead.
- Jane Katushabe opened a bank account, and began saving money to buy a permanent house, instead of renting.
- At least five women in Kakooge hired people to dig roots for them, instead of digging themselves.
- 8-year-old Maurine was able to provide for her own school fees, and help provide for her grandmother to feed herself and her older siblings.
- Health care was paid for for in over 20 people’s families through their own salaries, rather than outside funding.
- Saudah bought herself a brand new outfit for the first time in her life.Read the original post.
Lacy Underwear, Couture dresses and Finding New Direction
March 1, 2012 § 4 Comments
Anna Winters was spot on when she said that, “What I often see is that people are scared of fashion – because they’re frightened or insecure, so they put it down.”
I lived comfortably as one of these people, and planned on continuing do to so until Africa knocked me over, and, deserving or no, I was thrown into the mix of what Winters describes as, “something…that can make people very nervous.”
Nervous, in particular, if you’re a girl who lived in your brother’s cast of soccer shorts and rainbow flip flops for most of college.
But, here I am – whether by design, or by accident, I’m still discovering. And, regardless, I’ll be damned if I’m not making the most of what I’ve fallen into.
In effort to give it my best shot, I bought my first four pairs of lacy underwear at Who What Wear‘s styled by party at the Grove. A man with a bow tie and silver tray bought me lemon drops, and I pretended not to have at least every season ever invented of H&M sport thongs sitting in my drawer at home while he handed me a little white napkin.
(this game got much easier after my second lemon drop).
Two nights later, I tried to fit into couture for the first time. 10 pm, watching “the Artist” with three friends – I gasped when Nakate’s wardrobe director walked in with a black backless wonder that I just had to try.
“Can I wear it!?” I squealed.
“Get your pants off girl,” he laughed. “You want to wear some couture?”
Oh, god. Did I…
I took my yoga pants off, and the work began. Halfway up my thighs, and, standing in my new black lacy underwear in front of a panel of my favorite gays, I was primed to take my top off and replace it with an editorial kind of risque when my size 28 inch waist got in the way of my best couture wearing aspirations.
“No! Hell no!” I whined.
Breath held, waiting, I closed my eyes and clenched every ounce of extra weight I could while he laughed and said, “This isn’t gonna happen.”
I stuck out my lip.
“Girl, it’s such a small dress, don’t worry about it,” he said. Then he got a twinkle in his eye and threw in a quick, “It’s a problem with the model, not the dress!” for the appreciative audience on the couch.
I pushed him, but his eye kept the twinkle – “Let’s try something else!”
We did – and for the next hour, at least, Christina Milian and I were connected by three degrees of separation – a rack of designers, a stylist who wanted to see them ahead of time, and my size four thighs. “Walk of shame girl, walk of shame!” I was sent out again and again to get a thumbs up or down from a man in face mask on the couch, and his newly introduced boyfriend beside him.
“That is gorg,” in response to a feathered editorial piece with a white bowtie. “Should I be seeing that much nipple?” to a second mesh top, and a quick judgment from the green facemask: “Yes! It’s editorial.”
We played dress up for most the night, and I thought about my body, and myself. Here I was, in my underwear, holding out my arms and admitting my terrible luck with zippers.
Let’s correct that statement.
*Here I was, on my first day wearing the first pair of underwear I’ve ever purchased that doesn’t look like I bought it for a sport’s marathon, getting a zipper stuck on a dress a designer’s name I can’t remember sent in for Christina Milian’s next breakfast event.
Zipper fixed, still slightly overly conscious of my lacy underwear, I continued my trip up and down the hallway – in star studded heels, a pair of boots that wouldn’t zip up over my calves, a little striped leather number that made my size 28 waist look fantastic, and, after that, the “chikita banana” dress – a long line of multicolored sequins with a train and, with it, laughter so long our stomachs hurt.
At least ten outfits later, there was a Sherri Hill I got to keep if it fit me right because, ”this piece won’t work with anyone’s body.”
100% polyester, barbie pink, one shouldered, and perfect on boobs that have always been a few sizes too small – not to mention, thighs that couture had so recently rejected – it was mine.
“Take it home girl,” the voice behind me said. The face mask from the couch yelled “favorite! Stunning!” and the boyfriend nodded, and smiled.
I smiled too, at my B34 breasts and size 4 thighs, perfect – for the first time in my life.
Back in my sweats and a cosco tank top my mother bought me when I visited home after college, I thought about transition – as a woman. Sometimes life forces you into a second chance – your husband loses his job and you’re having to go back to work after 25 years spend raising children, your husband’s past affair raises it’s dirty head for the first time, and you’re faced with an affair long buried, but suddenly relevant. Or, perhaps, your boyfriance (yes, this is a thing) leaves you on a dime, and you’ve got to find a blow up mattress to sleep on, finish out a nannying job, and find a way to get home.
I’ve found that disaster breeds new life, if we let it. Perhaps the dress didn’t fit me, the city was wrong, or the relationship fell apart right when I was giving it my best shot.
I’ve always thought these situations were dead ends – big, glaring red lights on a trip to an unknown destination. Now, I know that they’re simply a sign of two things:
1. There has to be a way forward, if one is to keep living and 2. This isn’t it.
Perhaps it’s simply time for a right turn.
This weekend, a discussion in my mother’s best friend’s kitchen turned from failed marriages, failed moves to Portland and religious paradigms gone awry to the art of pinterest, opportunities in New York City, publishing deals and positions at art schools in San Francisco.
Walking out, I had to wonder if things could possibly have turned out this well if they hadn’t gone awry.
Over tea, last night, in a beautiful apartment in the bay owned by a friend who was kicked out of his home for coming out at 20, I brought up the idea of opportunities. Specifically – ones that come around for the second time. Opportunities for living as who we are, at our most honest. Opportunities to move to the cities we wanted before we met the men we thought we wanted, the jobs we dreamed about before we got married or, perhaps, the one shoulder Sherri Hill piece we get handed when the couture doesn’t fit quite right.
I thought this was a terrible place to be. But, twirling in my Barbie pink dress last Friday, I had to wonder –
what’s to say that a plan B can’t, in it’s own right, take on a life all it’s own?
…particularly when it turns out to be a better fit, to boot.
(PS: thanks to Antonio, Nakate made another cover this week!)
The Power of Words – and the Way Olivia and I Lost our Footing
February 27, 2012 § 2 Comments
I wish growth came instantly, like a thunderclap. I wish it came right when when we see our faults – the crashing moment when a person (me) realizes that we said too much, acted to quickly, left dignity and/or graciousness at the door and, as an ex of mine used to say, “word vomited” all over a situation that needed careful thought, instead of speech. But growth is a process – one riddled with failure. Moment after moment – Damn! I did it again.
And again.
I’ve got to get better at mulling a thing over.
It’s a combination of things, this quickness to go at a situation and needle it with my words, to talk about another woman – another person’s life – or their interaction with mine. Did it help anything? I don’t think so. A quick release of emotion, a feeling that I’ve “gotten it out” – but then, do we ever “have it out?” Words are like guppies. You start with two. And, before you know it, you’ve got to get a bigger tank – or, in my case, a bigger town.
Maya Angelou says that words get in the walls and the upholstery. She says that they are objects. She says that they are more powerful than we think. And, I’ve been slinging. There’s no better word. Slinging. Like mud. Where will the next one go? There’s a Winslow Homer to the left of my kitchen table. Perhaps we could sling some harm there.
It’s a cry for help. I lost my footing. And so, like any villain in a single story – I pointed at everyone else – “Look at her! She’s floundering too!”
But, when does that help? When has it ever helped?
Me? I keep going at it far too long. And, by the end of it, I have an overpowering image of Olivia the pig – a cartoon character I used to read about that, “even exhausts herself.” Oh, god. Here I am again – polka dotted with my pink snout, lying dizzy in the middle of the carpet. Did I need to turn so terribly fast?
Perhaps the realization most humbling is the truth that there are others who speak about me, and, in the midst of it, the kind, kind words of those who never would – the kind touch and loving words of a man in my life who says “come to San Francisco for the week” and will buy Trader Joe’s groceries and roll European cigarettes for the days when they just aren’t fighting fair, are they?
“Mean girls,” he says over breakfast. And then, “They didn’t realize that you are powerful.”
Powerful, that is, until I stooped – until I spoke as they spoke, jabbed as they jabbed, and made a show of my frustration. Oh, darling Olivia – when will we learn?
I’ve come to see that any woman who expects to speak well of other women must be a woman who learns to love herself. It starts on the inside, the definition of who I am, and how I go forward based on the cornerstone of my being. Am I beautiful? Am I smart? Am I capable?
It starts when we’re small.
I’m six, and I tell my father I want to be a country singer. He tells me I can be whatever I choose. At nine, I want to play the pipe organ, and he says we should find me a teacher. At sixteen, I’ve lost all interest in music and I want to write. He tells me I wield words like a sword – that if I can be so powerful in argument, surely I can be powerful on paper. I’m 23, with a transnational business to run, and a town I’d like to get out of – and he tells me, “I think you’re on the edge of something big.” On the heels of his words come a friend’s – “If you can keep from being jaded, keep perspective, and give grace to those who don’t know themselves as you do, your work will know no bounds. But, get bitter? And you’ve lost it. You’ve lost direction. You’ve missed the point.”
Where does bitterness begin? I think it begins when a person’s words stick in the upholstery – the walls – the floor. And, with their words, we begin to change the way we believe about ourselves. I was successful. I was pretty. I was capable. I could have been a country singer! But, after interaction with another woman – I’m not so sure. With lost footing comes the first signs of bitterness. If I can’t be pretty, capable – smart. Then, what can I be?
I can be critical. Here is a perfect example of how we subtly do it (thanks, Gina!).
I missed the point this week – stopped seeing myself, stopped seeing proper perspective – got bitter. And, perhaps, the only way to get up from this dizzying position is to sit down, have a good cry, and recognize that, like so many that have gone before, I must come back to believing in myself and valuing my own work, my relationships, my life. Without it, I’ve set the room to spinning, and, quite possibly, managed to do nothing much more than sling words to the walls – and exhaust myself.
Perhaps the only way to move forward is create boundaries in my mind – a wall in the gray matter that stops word slinging before it bores holes into my perception of myself.
I had a long conversation with this man about it this weekend.
“You’re going to laugh,” I said. “But I’ve finally hit a light bulb kind of realization. I’ve finally realized I don’t need everyone to like me. I mean, I guess I spent years trying to get everyone to think I was fantastic.”
He didn’t laugh. He choked.
I supposed I should have warned him.
“Are you okay!?”
“You just ruined a perfectly good drink!” he coughed.
Then he laughed – big, loud, heaving laughter, and I laughed with him. We laughed and cackled and made fun of the years and years I’ve thought that I needed every woman around me to love and adore me in order to believe in myself.
“Oh, Shan,” he said. “I know you did. I know you tried to get them all to love you. But they just won’t. They won’t all like you. And you won’t like all of them. And, I’m so glad you finally get it.”
We talked for another half hour or so – because he likes me. So does the friend that wrote me this morning and said, ” You will always disappoint someone. But there are always, always people in YOUR life whom you can not disappoint. I am one of them.” And, on top of it, the friend coming to get my tonight to whisk me away for a few days to an apartment overlooking the bay where I can work in a town of women who don’t know my name.
This morning, I settled on the knowledge that there are many woman around me who will never “like” me the way I wish they would.
And, with it, the knowledge that life begins when I like me the way I wish they would.
That way, I can stop criticizing either of us.
Photo via Squidoo.com.
