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).
In Your Twenties, Building a Business is Building a Life
January 24, 2013 § 4 Comments
Two hours ago, my friend A called life “really fun.”
Fun, she said, even when its hard – and too fun, she pointed out, to choose not to enjoy yourself when it happens to be.
Here’s what I learned in 2012: entrepreneurship in your twenties has everything to do with building a life. A life is made up of people. The experience you have living it can be good or bad. It depends on who you know.
Here’s how I usually learn: hindsight. Here’s how I learned in 2012: showing up. That’s how I made real friends. Good ones. The make you laugh so hard you snort and then not get embarrassed by your snorting noises kind of friends. The have your back real quick kind of friends.
Here’s what changed: everything.
I learned that while building your first business is difficult, building a life doesn’t have to be. See, a social enterprise, like a life, is built on belief. Belief is kept alive through experience. Experience comes from people.
There’s a perception going around that us entrepreneurs are all grit and determination, living in basements with laptops in dark rooms and skipped paychecks. And, the truth is that nobody can keep that up for too long. We had to figure out how to do it differently. We had to start lives. Now, we’re in the light, laughing with people who know the difference between broke and poor and put cash down for our beers when we’re tight that week. We’re learning from passionate conversations. We’re finding ways to make things beautiful. We’re going all in on our passions. And, dammit, we’re figuring out health insurance and internet bills and signing leases just like the rest of you.
It’s just not all couches and credit cards anymore. Not when we’re building lives.
Here’s what I learned: all this has everything to do with a focused, disciplined life, and nothing to do with skipping out on living. Not skipping out on living has everything to do with relationships: with your mom, your friends, your grandfather…all the people that come together, and make sure your ducks are lining up like you need them to.
That’s how S and I landed a place to launch out in together. I met her at a party, all red lipstick and intense focus, drinking whiskey on the rocks and making a point to the men across from her. Three of them, all leaning in and listening. I wanted to listen too, so I asked her for her number. S is making a life while she works to create sustainable clean water solutions. We had a lot to talk about. Talking turned into eating turned into laughing turned into drinking turned back into laughing and eating again…turned into finding a place to build lives around what we do.
It was only after putting our heads together to find the perfect fit for our not so normal lives that I realized how much we were doing right, creating a physical and metaphysical atmosphere to live out of.
Two months later, we signed a lease on a place with an office, where we’ll hang four foot photographs of her work in Cameroon, and build a long desk to share on the days when we’re home. Our friends will come over this weekend to help us build beds and desks and a sofa. Somewhere along the way, I’ll hang up my Samoan tapa and that silly set of masks I bought the first time I set foot in East Africa.
As we walked through the apartment and designated the “office,” let potential roommates know how much we work from home and planned a rent budget for me quitting my part time job, I realized that I’d bought in. Hook line and sinker, my whole life – I’ve become an entrepreneur.
We finished signing our lease in the afternoon. My friends invited me out that night, to get on train to West Village to laugh and live with them while I take a break from my work – like any girl with a big, happy life – a fun life – would do at the end of a long work day.
This is what buying in and moving to New York for my social entrepreneurship gave me: a life.
Good Jazz, Shenlok and Music in the Unresolved
December 20, 2012 § 1 Comment
I didn’t hear the long, slow jazz note coming from our right last Wednesday, but E did. He stopped, leaned in and disappeared into a dark doorway, dragging me behind him.
He reached out for my hand and motioned for me to be quiet. In an almost empty room, a jazz trio was playing under a blue and green glow.
I wanted to stand there forever, even though I didn’t like the music. I got this warmed up feeling inside me, and I forgot how hungry I was.
E pulled me back outside into the cold, and in a second we were back dodging pedestrians on Houston and he was asking what I wanted to eat.
We talked about jazz on the way.
“Those are the kind of folks that are killing real jazz,” E said. “Did you hear that fucked up shit?”
What’s good jazz? I don’t know enough to know – except that good jazz rests comfortably on an unresolved note. Bad jazz seems to wrestle with it, like it wants to turn into something different. But good jazz? It just sits there unresolved and it grins at you.
There was a baby girl on the train today. She had Velcro shoes and chubby hands. When the woman with her picked her up, baby girl stretched her fingers and thumb out in an “L” shape towards the center of the train and bounced. The woman started to sing and she sang and she sang to her on the C train from 59th all the way to West 4th where I caught the M home to Myrtle Ave. The baby danced and she yelled and she held her chubby baby hands up to the center of the train and prattled and she stared at me.
There was that warmed up feeling, again. I wanted to stay on the train and watch her dance.
I’m told that you make a hell of a lot of mistakes, as an entrepreneur – that that’s ok. Par for the course. A Wall Street friend I go to for advice sometimes told me the important thing wasn’t that I didn’t make mistakes, but instead that I kept afloat through them – kept my chutzpah. He called it grit. He said if I could stay in the game for long enough and grow my capacity to change, I could make it work.
Willingness to accept change was, he said, the most important thing – to wake up each morning with the mindset – “Fuck it. Today will bring some crazy change and I’m going to embrace and go with it.”
I nodded, and I bit my lip, because I’ve been so dependent on all these things – like immediate results, dependable outcomes – paychecks. Things you don’t get when you start your own thing. And, giving all that up has been like the aftermath of a bad binge. Not the least bit comfortable. Not the least bit natural. Really bad headache. Nausea.
I decided to take all that seriously. “Fix your shit,” that’s what my Wall street friend said. So, I’ve been working on healing from my past perceptions of what my life would look like. And, I’m finding a home in the midst of this Buddhist recovery group on Sunday afternoons – sitting on this big blue cushion in between former heroine addicts and alcoholics and purgers and over eaters, and learning to meditate.
I’m letting go of control, and so are they, so I don’t see much difference in any of us. We’re all a little fucked up and a little too addicted to something and sometimes I don’t like getting out of bed any more than they do. So, while everyone’s spilling out their fantasies about stuffing their mouth so full they barf and how they got hot sweats during a date that weekend and what kind of anti anxiety pills they just switched to, I sit and I cry in the middle of all the recovery and I laugh with them until my sides hurt – and I don’t feel so alone in this crazy city I’ve adopted.
My group leader likes to draw distinctions. There’s power in naming things, she says. Sad and depressed aren’t the same thing. But they both can be healed by staying grounded in the moment. She talks about change – that we can’t control when things work, or how they work, but we sure can control the way we respond to them, and the way we respond to our uncomfortable feelings about them.
We read this bit on the definition of dysfunctional – that a person is never just one thing. A label – like dysfunctional, like depressed, like co-dependent, rests not only on the naming of things but on ensuring that they don’t take up more space than they ought to.
So, you may often find yourself depressed, but that doesn’t mean you’re depressed every moment. Perhaps you could even be defined as “depressed” this afternoon, but tonight you’re gleeful, or angry, or loud or drunk or expectant. And, that’s valid. That’s who you are, the same as sad or depressed or addicted or (fill in your blank here).
Things crashed last month, but my solution was successful Tuesday. We made a mistake on Wednesday morning, but on Wednesday afternoon I was brilliant. And, all of that matters equally. All of that defines me.
It’s the prattling of babies and the quick laughter of people I didn’t expect that makes my life light up, in the midst of learning to be comfortable with unexpected change. Like the videos my nine year old cousin, Sam, sends me from an old generation iPad my aunt lets him use. Ill be out walking in Brooklyn and suddenly there’s a blonde boy in my inbox, making silly faces and telling me to have a good night. And I want to kiss my aunt for kicking him that little piece of technology because I couldn’t be connected this closely to Sam any other way.
I sent him a video from the 81st street Central Park West train station tonight. Every few weeks this beautiful black man pops up by the South entrance and he sings out “Because He Lives” in a voice so rich and deep and full that I take my headphones out and I soak up every word – as if Jesus himself were on 81st street, smiling and saying that he’ll help me face tomorrow.
The 81st street singer makes me feel the same way I do when the videos from Sam come through on my iPhone. Full. Slowed. Grounded. So I pulled my phone out and I took a video for Sam, and kept it recording until the train showed up, because even if he doesn’t appreciate my train serenade, I know he’ll like watching the B roll through like that.
I’ve begun to surround myself with experiences like this – the ones that give me that full, slow, grounded feeling. I’m actively cultivating it. I find it in children, and I find it when I decide to look out, as my J train runs over the Williamsburg bridge. I get it around people who believe in goodness and in light, in having deep friendships, telling the truth and paying attention to the people around them when they talk. I get it when I really take the time to read. I get it with every small success in Uganda, and when I insist that I won’t let struggle take over…and I breathe, instead, and open the curtains by my desk and make a fresh French press full of coffee.
I get it when I recognize that I’d like to tell the universe to fuck herself, let her know that love is supposed to look certain ways and come out like this or that, and that, as a woman, what I need is XY and Z from my job or my life or my family – but I don’t. I stop wanting to, because I’m laughing so hard I hurt with this kid on the crosstown, or feeling the slow buzz of a dark Belgian ale out with a new friend of mine, and I know, instead, that have absolutely everything I need.
My friends on the blue cushions are teaching me that life comes in insistence that whatever is in front of you matters more immensely than anything else. Shenlok - it doesn’t matter so much that you’ve got everything resolved, but that you’re able to hold your seat comfortably while it’s not.
That’s when your make your own kind of music.
Everything after that is just part of the song.
Death, Cultural Customs and the Interaction between a Mourning Period and Social Entrepreneurship
December 10, 2012 § 1 Comment
In 1997, a Makerere University study reported that for a widow to be socially integrated into local support systems, she needs four factors in her favor. The first factor is the composition and culture of her society. Second is her community, and how it can help her overcome her sadness. Third the widow’s recovery from her problems depends on the support she gets from the family of her late husband. Fourth is a favorable neighborhood and working environment.
I was in Uganda three days after the World Cup bombings. An explosive ripped through a city restaurant and sports club in Kampala. 74 people were dead. Yoweri Museveni declared a one week mourning period.
There are ways to be born, there are ways to celebrate love between two people, and there are ways to die. Our cultures and our families collectively dictate the way we do these things, and I believe we can learn more than we often realize from the way someone else does any one of them.
I remember sitting on a stoop in a compound, listening to seven women talk about their favorable conditions after their husband died. He left a long, U shaped building, with single apartments each owned by a single wife.
“Thank God he provided for us,” one told me. “He was a good man.”
I never thought more about the legacy a person leaves behind than I did in Uganda, that year. It showed itself in the material provision that individuals left behind, in the way communities mourned and in the manner in which the deceased’s family treated any relatives joined to them through marriage. We have elements of this in my culture too. But the societal expectation behind customs of mourning in Uganda seemed to put color and honor to death.
Here, you know, we “need to start moving again.” We know that, “life goes on.” The emotional expectation is that grieving will change the way we perceive our lives, but we laud pushing through as normally as possible. Society does not provide a widow or grieving mother protection from work, from the ripping feeling of time moving forward, from responsibilities. But, in Uganda, they demand that it all come to a grinding halt.
Ugandan surgeon and politician Speciosa Kazibwe wrote in 2008 that, “Most of us spend [more of] our time doing burials than any other thing, especially because of HIV/AIDS and malaria which is very prevalent in Uganda.”
Doing business in a culture takes customs from the classroom to life, so to speak. And, I believe that one of the benefits of “trade versus aid” is that business forces you to engage customs, while aid often provides an excuse for dismissing them as unimportant.
Mourning periods provided scattered timetables in my life this winter, pouring in and taking over weeks at a time. It’s been four this season: three artisans and our lead artisan’s son, three weeks ago.
“This will change things, this week,” my manager’s voice was apologetic, while we discussed our lead artisan. “We can’t reach her during mourning.”
How many days? I ask.
Five.
“You didn’t expect that, working in Africa?” someone said to me recently. Like I should have expected death to come climbing in and hunker down on my desk while I run my business.
No. I didn’t. With ARVs and money in my partner’s pockets for treatment, I thought we’d avoid so many deaths. Somehow I ended up blaming myself – like I should have started my business sooner, grown it faster – done something. As if my business could act as some kind of Messiah, saving a community through the sales of accessories. And, that’s never what this was about. This was about a mutual celebration of the beauty of a culture’s craftsmanship, and sustainable development through it.
“This isn’t just fucking normal just because its East Africa,” I threw out. “It’s not normal. Death never becomes normal.”
And, so, I came to an impasse. Either I pushed to have women work through mourning periods, or I created a plan around them. And I came to the conclusion that traditional practices are higher dictators than the business practices a social entrepreneur like myself is attempting to implement – its not my job to change that.
There are local minds working on issues like these already – minds that understand their importance, and what their erosion might give or take to a culture and its economy. In 2003, BBC Africa discussed the pros and cons of ending costly funerals. Ms Kazibwe suggested, in her piece, that funeral practices are moved to Saturdays, and that each constituency within Uganda should have a mortuary with a fridge that could preserve corpses. Burials take up lots of time as well as productive vehicles, she noted.
“The idea sounds good if more time is to be saved for the sake of work. However, given the strong cultural rituals attached to death and burial of a relative, it is practically impossible to keep the body,” George, a gentleman from Musaka, argued in the comments below Kazibwe’s piece. “I know, for example, from the traditions of Buganda that it is unacceptable in society to go to work when someone has passed away in the same village until the body is buried. It is a strong belief that has existed for ages. So to change the status quo requires a lot of effort. Remember that traditional practices are not easily eroded in society!”
I think its rude to act like death is more acceptable at a certain latitude and longitude, bit of my friend’s head for insinuating it – and yet I caught myself doing the same thing – wondering why our lead artisan wasn’t on her game as usual, and then remembering her son just died. As if five days, in any case, could possibly be enough to be back upright.
I read and I struggled and I oscillated on these issues. And I landed on the truth that they have nothing to do with me. I can debate the economic effects, but I am not in the midst of the affected economy. I can wonder about funeral rituals, but I will never bury a family member of mine in a similar way. And, so, I’m learning that what matters is my cultural respect – my smart movement around these things, out of an acknowledgement that I have chosen to run a business in a society unlike my own.
We decided that, for us, its important to allow customs room to breathe, until they prove harmful. And, what I mean by that is causing immediate physical harm. Like the time I helped name my cook’s baby, and noticed a thin, white film of amniotic fluid that was never washed off his body. My village partner, Agnes, explained to me later that this was because of his mother’s family, and their superstition surrounding a newborn child being touched by water. That week, a friend of mine bought the family a baby kit as a gift, and Agnes took it to them and explained the health concerns surrounding following the custom.
I was pleased to find out how successful she’d been in explaining the risks, and how receptive my cook’s girlfriend had been in accepting a new way of doing things – one that was best for her child. But this line is a tight rope – you get that? It’s not my place to question traditions surrounding death, and its not my place to challenge the Shaman or to debate the way that a bride price might affect a family’s well being. And, it was Agnes’ place – a woman in her own community – to explain to her someone how she might be harming her kid. This is why I partner equally with locals. This is why I am not the one always on the ground.
It’s my place to give due honor to – show respect within – a culture that has different ways of giving birth and celebrating love and giving life over to death – and to allow that culture room to figure out these things on its own.
And, perhaps these rituals, in themselves, are teaching me something. These ways of being run like deep rivers beneath the women who work with me, carrying them along. I picture the erosion, like the caving in of deep banks of Ugandan red dirt, taking a culture with them. And I want to tread ever so lightly when it comes to inadvertently stealing tradition from a place – from a life running beneath a people who teach me how to stop, pay attention and appreciate all the new things I never knew about the world outside my own culture’s way of being.
And, so, we factored an extra week into our lead time, after this season – allowing for death, should it creep up, steal from my partners and sending them from their work for a week to honor the way that their traditions ask them to celebrate and honor the passing of life.
(Photo: Edward Echwalu for Nakate Project).
It Takes a Village: 10 Ways Bootstrapping Plays Out in Social Enterprise
November 2, 2012 § 2 Comments
I love Hillary Clinton. It’s not just about her foreign policy – it’s that I can get down with her love for the radical, the uncomfortable and the culturally risque. From the famed Saul Alinsky thesis to the gay parade marches, and – more lightly – the South African groove (grind?) she recently pulled off, Clinton’s nothing if not ballsy – evidence most recently by her taking the fall for the Libya Attack, and historically by her insistence on transforming herself post troubled marriage, failed presidential candidacy and her smooth slide into a career as the most traveled top diplomat in American history. Au contrare to The Corner, I find her 60s radical roots a bit, er, refreshing? And, I believe that her rejection of faith in revolutionary violence is, in fact, quite a, “meaningful distinction between 60s radicals and Hillary.”
As Susan Glasser so eloquently puts it, Clinton has managed to work out a, “perennially tough set of choices she faces between the human rights advocacy that means so much to her and the pragmatic politics that is often required of a hard-headed American secretary of state.”
I love her comments on Suu Kyi – the pressure of, “putting into practice everything she’s been thinking about and working on her entire adult life” – her assurance that Kyi, “cannot be immune from the criticism that will come because she is playing a political role.”
And – lest we forget – the famed, “Thanks for the many LOLZ. Hillary ‘Hillz.’” In her late 60′s, she’s insisted on re-connecting with an online generation she has never before entered into. And, she’s done it with flair.
Reuters calls her an, “adept behind-the-scenes operator, a tough negotiator not afraid to play the bad cop—or to make fun of the macho posturing of her many tough-guy interlocutors.” And, despite America’s insistence on putting Hillary in a women’s rights/development box, she has maneuvered sensitive issues such as rescuing Chen without blowing up the American relationship with China, and been lauded for taking her “people to people” diplomacy international.
But perhaps what I love most about Clinton is how she’s remade herself using the ubuntu philosophy she wrote of so long ago in her book, “It Takes a Village,” both by taking her role under her political rival with grave and humility, and through her commitment people to people diplomacy in the midst of her shift from advocacy to her new role as Secretary of State. Her lack of knowledge – not to mention a second language – has made being a team player has been a necessity for Clinton, and she’s made it work for her in unbelievable ways.
I’ve been watching Clinton as I’ve made my own small climb as the head of a social enterprise. I went through high school wearing my grandfather’s Vietnam army fatigues and high top red converse five days a week, and focused so heavily on internships and grades in college that I never read a single issue of the 5 style and fashion magazines my then boyfriend bought for me junior year. I left university as an idealistic, advocacy driven journ school graduate, back in 2010, with absolutely no idea what a business plan was, not to mention a pipeline, angel investor or a line sheet. And, I certainly didn’t know what colors were in for fall, not to mention that stylists, as such, rule the fashion world and are key to getting any product into the hands of and onto the right people.
And yet, here I was – looking to start a business entering into the fashion market and trying to make a splash.
Truthfully, I had no idea what the hell to do next.
You’ll read a lot on investors, but what you find less commonly is information about what comes before that point. And, frankly, need more of it. Its where the majority of us are – and where the majority of us need to make things work.
I’ve come to know bootstrapping as an all inclusive term, describing not only my financial situation but everything surrounding my company, and the large needs we have had to meet on a limited budget. And, while I hope that you land that impressive seed grant or large pipeline investor within your first year, reality is its far more likely you’re going to struggle for a few (very long feeling) years in social enterprise, before things begin to pick up – and you begin to get noticed by the right wallets and publications – not to mention your target market.
So, what do you do in the meantime?
Drink.
Ha, just kidding (mostly).
Here’s a few tips on how I’ve been able to hold things together (albeit sometimes loosely) while we’ve sought to grow as a company without seed funding, fashion expertise or an experienced leader (hey, at least I’m fearless – right?).
1. Find your “village”
Antonio Esteban is a celebrity stylist who has not only climbed quickly in his career as a stylist, but happened to know a friend of mine who reached out to him for me, and shared what I was trying to do. Esteban came on about a month after I started Nakate, and hasn’t left me since. Thanks to him, both my business (and my closet) is keeping up to date in the fashion world.
I would have never found Esteban if I hadn’t called a well connected friend and shared my need for someone. Our graphic designer, Shannon Labare, is a similar story – I met Shannon through a twitter SOS I put out for a designer. Shannon jumped in, decided work for us would be her commitment to change in Africa, and has been improving our design ever since.
What I’ve learned along the way as they keep answering their phones and responding to my cries for assistance is that these folks are not just my friends, they are believers in the vision of what I’m doing. Not to mention, the only person that expected us to make a large sum of money off the bat was…well..me. And, they understand the process of building something.
2. Admit to what you don’t know
When I first admitted that I didn’t have a business plan, or even know what a strategic plan, budget or predicted revenue agenda should look like, there were many, many people who jumped in to help me out. Contrary to my nightmares of ending up standing on a stage in bright orange underwear with everyone laughing at my messy word documents on a great big projector behind me, no one has ever laughed at me. To the contrary, everyone from a business advisor to import fashion lawyers, African fashion firms and, most recently, an import broker, have kindly walked me through even the most basic questions.
3. Trade your skills
Trading works like this: you meet someone you have common interests with, except they’re skilled in areas you’re not and vice versa. You engage in lively conversation. You laugh. You have a drink or two. You ask their advice, you learn through their expertise in conversation and – next thing you know, you’re grabbing coffee and catching up over an issue you needed assistance with. Two months later, you’re doing the same thing for them. This is, actually, one of my very favorite parts of networking – I love learning from people I not only respect but like talking to – people who break things down, help me along and don’t make me silly for asking my honest questions. Conversely, I love doing the same for others.
4. Air out your depression
There is an intense, hopeful idealism will carry you through your first six months. After that, you’re going to realize that you will have to make intense sacrifices for a result that no one can guarantee. You will lose faith. You will get tired of bouncing checks and living on a budget and telling your friends you can’t go out for drinks. You will also hit a point where you don’t know how to make things work – your talents and drive has limits. And, you will want to give up.
It’s time to call someone – not to remind you why you’re doing what you’re doing (though that would would also be a good idea) – but to help you get through your next set of hurdles.
I almost quit last year – at which point I called in a friend to work as a temporary VP while I re-gained my strength. He helped me move things past a point of shifting that I couldn’t do myself. By the time he took on a full time job and didn’t have the time to help me anymore, we had – together – moved past my point of crisis, and I was ready to go again.
5. Hire a coach
I have found that our generation is doing something unique in the world of socent, and is in need of unique skills and assistance. I needed an entrepreneur coach, more than anything, to help me believe in my business again, develop a strategic plan for how I was going to spend my time and to get me on track for branding that not only me, but would help us build business. At the end of the day, this is not about passion, for me – it’s about passion that will pay my bills. My coach, in particular, focuses on young female entrepreneurs, and helped me develop a working system that would stop me from feeling guilty for not working 16 hour days, and bring back some enjoyment into my budding career as I worked towards more revenue.
6. Do some hard streamlining
Don’t have the capitol to buy a large inventory, or invest thousands of dollars in your own business? I didn’t either – and now I’m paying the consequences of deciding to do so anyways. I’ve learned, along the way, that streamlining your processes works much, much better than preparing for a big boom that never comes. How can you create product development process that allows for growth without sitting on inventory or investing large amounts of money? It took me several months to figure this one out and, it took several volunteers on the ground in Uganda that were invested in my mission and could help me do so. Get creative. Find another solution. It will come quicker than you think.
7. Share your vision
On that note, I’ve learned that the best way to bring committed folks into your business is to share your vision. Sit down over skype or coffee and share – from your heart – about what you’re trying to build. You’ll be surprised how quickly people will say “ours” instead of “yours” – and how hard and far they’re willing to work to make a vision that they’ve now begun to share begin to take flight.
8. Offer up your failed ideas to the gods of great discussion
Umair Haque writes that, “My friend Steve…spent his twenties and much of his thirties in one failed venture after another — today, finally, he’s at the helm of a start-up that leaves him not just comfortable, or even ‘happy’ — but abidingly, almost overwhelmingly, fulfilled. ” I’ve already “failed” several times with ideas I thought world work. As I’ve worked through them afterward with others I respect, I’ve begun to see the holes in them – or the reasons they may have worked for someone else, but not for me. Airing all my dirty laundry has enabled better minds than mine to pick it apart and help me know how to put my ideas back together in a way that brings in revenue.
9. You just might need a part time job
A year into my enterprise, I was hoping I could start just living off my enterprise. While I expected to be on a budget, I didn’t expect that this would quickly drain the life out of my enterprise and that my little baby business was actually still at a point where I needed to be putting money in, instead of taking it out. So I landed myself a nanny job, and it was that job – and a strict budget – that got us through a restructuring period in year two.
10. Get some (like minded) friends
There’s nothing I love more than a productive, 16 hour work day. I could go days talking to absolutely no one, drinking huge amounts of strong coffee and sleeping only when its entirely necessary. However, every time I do this for weeks on end, this inevitably leads to burn out. And, I have to admit that I really and truly need friends – and friends that get it. Go join a meetup, get involved in a network or simply find a group of like minded entrepreneurs to drink with every Tuesday night. But, at the very least, find someone – preferably a few someones – who are living and working like you. What you’re doing is unique, and if you don’t have a community you’re going to burn out quicker than you think.
Lastly, it might help to let a little more humanist philosophy seep into your daily thinking. After all, “Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can’t be human all by yourself, and when you have this quality – Ubuntu – you are known for your generosity. We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole World. When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity” (Tutu, 2008).
Check out Nakate here.
#Sandy in Brooklyn: What I learned from a Hurricane
October 31, 2012 § 3 Comments
When I was a little girl, my mother taught me that every story is a three car train. Engine. Middle car. Caboose.
That stands for intro, conflict and resolution.
I know enough, now, to realize that every life event is a series of three car trains. Intro. Conflict. Resolution. You can live a thousand of them in a day, an election, or – more sensitively for some of us – a hurricane.
Millions of us, all together, braced ourselves for the storm this weekend, joking about hurricane parties and “pooh-pooing” the predictions. Reddit told us to stock up on condoms and alcohol. We checked in to “Frakenstorm” on twitter.
We didn’t know it would be worse than they predicted.
We didn’t know – or perhaps I didn’t know – how lost it would make us feel.
I know this city by numbers and letters on a grid. I was just getting to feel familiar with the transit system. And – just like that – I no longer find my bearings by the C and the 6 and the J to Jamaica Center. Now, I have to board buses, find shuttles and maneuver my way through a city I only ever knew to be invincible, not to mention predictable enough to get home even when I’m drunk and tired.
I’m luckier than thousands of other people who lost homes and store fronts, not to mention the unthinkable – family members and friends. All I lost was my bearings and some business. And, I only have to be brave enough to venture out in order to slowly get them back.
A friend of mine flew in for a visit a few months ago and commented that, “New York claims its own.” He said that those of us who have migrated here were, “unable to resist the pull” – meant to be New Yorkers, though we started out somewhere else. I laughed. I admitted it was true. This city, man, it gets in your blood. Kind of like Africa. Kind of like running a social enterprise. Kind of like everything that’s shaped my life into the story it is now.
There was a time of fear before the hurricane hit, and a time of fear after it was gone. I felt them both hard, and they both centered around uncertainty – “What will it really be like?” and, then, “What do we do now that it’s gone?” Sometimes it felt like the water would never stop rising, with friends sending panicked texts from Jersey and tweets going out from folks stuck in buildings. We – once again – utilized twitter like we never had before, and those of us that didn’t “get” the buzz about this social platform before certainly did during the storm, when NYPD and NYFD, rescue team, dispatchers all poured out information from one platform. Those of us with power stayed online through the night, with news reporters and hospitals, dispatchers and government officials keeping us connected to our friends and fellow New Yorkers in the midst of the storm. Once again, it was different in New York than I think it would have been anywhere else. The community feeling, the relationship to a common cause – it brought us together in a way that made this city feel so unbelievably special and – for a moment – so small, against the wind.
The thing about your first New York disaster is that you hit a point where you start wondering why the hell you’re here. Anywhere in the world you could have picked to be and you just had to pick New York. Kind of like earlier this year, when I hit my first real wall as a social entrepreneur. Not only was I new in New York, sales were down. Criticism was up. I felt like calling it quits and going back to what felt safe – a regular job, colleagues from my own culture – work in my own country. Giant, uninformed idealism carries you through until the middle train hits. And, that’s the threshing floor. The tides are high. The wind is strong. And all you know is that you’ve got to pull out of it sometime…but you can’t know when. And, damn it you just want it to quit.
God, I felt like that during all first six months I spent in New York. We had such amazing customers in year one, out in California – like every woman I’d ever met anywhere was coming out to support us, and I developed this routine of running to the post office three times a week and uploading products in between. We kept our inventory in Sacramento and LA. I went to Africa twice that year and brought back new stock. And, I thought knew just exactly what we were doing. I had my bearings.
Until New York, that is. Once we re-located here, our story had to shift. Our messaging needed to be refocused. I went from paying most my bills out of my social enterprise to paying into my social enterprise from an almost full time job, and re-organizing our company internally until we could produce differently than we had before. I couldn’t afford to go to Africa, and had to find a way to streamline our process so we made better product than ever before, without me getting on a plane.
I wondered if I hadn’t gone bonkers, lost touch completely – was this really going to work?
It’s after the disaster – that crazy, wild storm this weekend – that I have first begun to see why it is that New Yorkers love their city so damn much. It’s only after the storm that it becomes your city. Your people are in those buildings – the boys you’ve dated and the girls you’ve met for beers, the friends you’ve laughed with, networked with or perhaps just met for a coffee are suddenly your real friends. They care. They’re checking in. They miss you – “are you alright?” They all want to know if you’re holding up ok. “Let’s get a drink after the storm, ok?” New York pulls in tight, during a storm. There are people who only started following me three days ago on twitter, but were there cheering me on when I thought I’d try and take a bus in to work, and again when I realized transit was still closed from Brooklyn. They’ve sent photos and asked about my neighborhood. They’ve made jokes about our plight. They’ve asked me for outside updates when they lost power. We’ve kept in touch – every day since that awful night.
This morning, the sun came out for the first time since Saturday. I laid in bed and watched it, burning red light spreading across the train platform above my window. And, I knew, for the first time, that the worst was really over.
We’ll all be working to get around this week – to find our lives again. And, we’re all at different stages. Some of us lost homes. Some of us lost electricity, or paychecks, business or inventory. Some of us just lost our bearings. But, together, like New Yorkers always do, those of us that have come to know this as our city will begin to rebuild and find our way together.
That’s what uncertainty and change do, you know. That’s what happens in the storm.
You lose a lot.
You wonder if you’ll ever gain much of anything after it passes through. Clouds still rumbling. Rain mist in the air.
And – then – the sun comes out, burning red outside your window. Hope swells in your chest. The rebuilding begins. And, you remember why you came here in the first place.
You came here because you knew, somewhere deep inside you, that New York was calling.
Sometimes it takes a storm to remind you that you were right.
Photograph by @andjelicaaa via Instagram.
“Money Comes and Goes – From One Pocket to Another” – On Visiting the Mountain Top
October 23, 2012 § Leave a Comment
It’s getting chilly in New York, this month. I’ve been enjoying dark Oktoberfest brews, cooking warm soups, cobblers and buying fall flowers at the local market. This weekend, I even took to it and painted the Nakate office space a deep, warm shade of gold. Here’s to the changing seasons! I’ve been taking extra time to walk through colorful Central Park instead of taking the bus.
As the seasons change, I’m aware that New York is teaching me new lessons about entrepreneurship, about myself – about collaboration: both cross culturally and within my own, chilly city.
A Be Social Change friend commented this weekend that, “if we are not constantly meeting new people and living outside our comfort zone, in New York, we might as well have never come here.” Her comment was timely for me – it wrapped up a week full of inspiring conversations with people I hadn’t known before.
First, it was a conversation with a Chinese woman, working as a nanny on the upper west side. She began telling me her life story in a waiting room – about her past as a business woman, her solo journey to New York city, and her discouragement when she discovered that Mandarin was not the language they spoke in China town. She said she struggled with her identity when she came to the United States – giving up her dream to further her career, her financial situation and her thoughts on how she expected things to go for herself. Nine years later, she has put her daughter through school, and raised a nine year old girl she says she has come to love as her own.
“I returned to China and my father told me I had been to the mountain,” she told me. “He said, ‘before, when your life was easy, you were living in a valley – a village. Now, you have been to the mountain top. You have struggled.’”
He told her she had discovered what it is to be human – to struggle, and keep walking forward.
He told her that struggle reminds us of our true selves.
“Money comes and goes – from one pocket to another,” she said. “Your hopes, your beliefs, your love – if you lose those things, you have lost it all.”
I left my new friend for a meeting at the Issyra African Art Gallery in Hoboken, where my Senegalese friend Issa and I are planning an event this holiday season. Issa showed me a new painting he’s been working on – two faces are looking outward. In front of them, painted gold coins are dotted through out the air. Behind them, a group of tall villagers are dancing together.
“It’s history,” Issa told me. “You must remember where you come from. It is easy to get caught up in things, and lose your legacy.”
In case I wasn’t getting the message, I ended up meeting a gentleman at a party in Astoria this weekend who shared with me about his current job, and said he’s been working to find ways to say no.
“It’s so easy to become a yes person, when you get comfortable in what you’re doing,” he said. “I don’t want to be that person in my life – always nodding, always agreeing – losing myself. I want to remember to create discomfort, to challenge the status quo, and push things to the next level, even when I’m scared.”
I smiled when he said that – thankful for a brand and a company that always pushes me to the edge of my comfort zone, asks me to give more and find new solutions…thankful to be working with a group of people that are always creating discomfort, and challenging the status quo.
I am grateful to work with women that regularly take me to the mountain top – reminding me that love for others, finding joy in each day and living in the moment and its challenges are more important than things – that what’s in my heart matters infinitely more than the items in my home.
There is nothing as satisfying, for me, as collaborating across an ocean, making early morning Skype phone calls, emailing furiously back and forth and – finally – coming to find a beautiful solution between two cultures, for a group of talented women whose work we all are committed to celebrating.
What mountain tops are you visiting, this fall?
(This blog originally posted on the Nakate Project website).
How Do You Hire on The Ground? My Journey Toward Business Partnerships in Africa
October 8, 2012 § 1 Comment
I often find it necessary to remind myself that the majority of us begin working in Africa because of the ignorant idealism that flows from the infatuation behind a dream.
Maya Angelou writes, “now that I know better, I do better,” and I don’t struggle with ignorant idealism, as such. It’s just that kind of ignorant idealism that drove me to begin a social enterprise, never knowing the money, sweat and tears I was going to lose in the process. By the time it all hit me, I was too in love with my work to turn back.
I struggle with the individuals I meet that have spent years in the field and continue to hang onto old ideals – this kind of christianeze colonialism, that you shouldn’t share your email with the wait staff, or talk in a normal American accent to their children. The first time I spent a summer in Haiti I flew in with a medical team, and the woman in charge yelled at anyone who wandered out to discover nearby Port au Prince on their own. I still remember her wide open mouth yelling at a group of grown medical professionals – “DO I NEED TO SEND YOU HOME?”
And I can safely say that no one learned much of anything about Haitian culture on that trip.
I’ve been criticizing Americans in the international community for hanging on to their cultural paradigms within foreign settings for a while, now. But what I think that many of us from my vantage point have failed to do is say that we are such strong advocates for new ways of being because breaking through a closed paradigm into international partnerships is perhaps the most rewarding change we have ever made.
Change is a two step mental process. First – give up an old paradigm. Two – adopt a new one. In the field of social enterprise, I believe we often struggle with the former because we have no idea where to begin on the latter. You can let go of an old way of being, but no one likes to live in free fall.
After I switched over from a “White Savior” way of thinking, I was, most certainly, in free fall. I didn’t have the first clue about how to find talented locals, who to hire or how to join the community of professionals in a country where I was familiar with only the impoverished and uneducated.
A community of brilliant diaspora, two Ugandan managers and a few key Nigerian fashion partnerships later, I know an entirely different reality. And, I have found my network to be invaluable.
Contrary to popular opinion, you do not have to be on the ground for things to be, “done right.” Nor do you have to carry all the work on your own shoulders, or send an intern into a new culture and expect them to run quality control for you.
Below is a general road map to begin you on the journey of connecting your enterprise or nonprofit to professionals in the African community. I hope that it will transform your business practices the way it has mine.
- Join the online community
There is a large conversation on twitter led by diaspora and professional leaders in the African community, particularly on twitter. They’re more than willing to provide you with resources, explain growing trends and movements and introduce you to African professionals experienced in the areas you need help with. Engage with their conversations, follow their hashtags. Read their work.
Some accounts to get you started: @Calestous @TMSruge @Semhar @InnovateAfrica @afrolicious @enamara @spectrapeaks @adiatdisu
Introduce yourself! (and tell them my blog sent you – @shanleyknox).
- Decipher the discussion
Figure out what it is your seeing – who is displaying photographic talent? Who is an authority on business, politics, women’s issues? Who are these people connected to? Who is providing the content that drives the discussion? Who shows the skills of a community manager, blogger, innovator?
I found our most recent Ugandan photographer, Edward, through watching whose photos Ugandans were tweeting during crisis stories or cultural events.
- Ask for meetings
Virtual networking is just like networking in person (except with less alcohol). I started asking for Skype meetings with just about everyone, and found our most recent manager in Kampala through openly asking for his opinion on my business model. We met several times over Skype for him to explain cultural trends and methods of business within Uganda. After about four sessions, we began to discuss the possibility of us taking him on as an intern, and eventually hiring him as our manager.
- Engage with the criticism
Opening yourself up to the diaspora and African community means being held accountable – that when you revert back into branding that puts yourself as a “white savior” or misrepresenting the culture you’re working within, you will be criticized for it. I had this happen with Teddy, a Ugandan friend of mine, after I tweeted that I was looking for clothing donations for the artisans I work with. He criticized me quickly, but after I responded with questions, he came to my rescue just as quickly, providing educational materials and alternative ways of thinking.
Don’t fight it. Ask more questions. Get email addresses. Engage in the discussion. Once you swallow your pride and engage with criticism, you might find your loudest critic to be an invaluable resource, not to mention your biggest advocate.
- Ask to be involved
When I was first planning to move to New York City, I asked to be part of Africa Fashion Week New York. Founder Adiat Disu is a Nigerian socially conscious & culturally-driven PR entrepreneur for Fashion, Home Decor & Art. She not only welcomed me into the week, but introduced me to other valuable connections. Other examples include my requests to be featured in African publications and to join meet ups. The more I ask to be involved, the more the community welcomes me, and explains the ropes.
I suggest you do the same. Not only will you discover a professional network, but, quite possibly, a new group of dear friends.
Two years in to running my enterprise, I source quality control, product photos, promotional material, business development ideas and product development all from partnerships and collaborations with Ugandan professionals.
Follow my business: @nakateproject
What are some of your cross cultural networking and hiring stories?
I’d love for you to share them in the comments!
5 Ways Uganda Taught me to Simplify
October 2, 2012 § 69 Comments
I moved to Brooklyn October first. With a lease on a new (old) apartment, less work hours and more freedom to pursue my entrepreneurial endeavors, I discovered once again that New York is nothing if not a series of choices – most of them small: like a thousand raindrops for your life storm.
I took the wrong bus up Madison today, and ended up in Queens. $15 later, I thanked my cabbie and made it to a meeting on Upper West just in time.
That was a 5 second, 30 foot long, $15 mistake, starting at the right stop on 54th and Madison Ave, and ending at escaping the rain, and catching the wrong transit out of the city instead of my familiar territory on 79th to catch the crosstown. And, that’s how New York works – a bajillion baby decisions you make without paying attention that can throw off your whole afternoon (day? week?) and drain your entrepreneurial bank account, if you don’t watch it. And yes, my entrepreneurial bank account is that small.
I settled in Bushwick because I love the diversity here. The bodegas and the graffiti, the hip hop on the street on my way to Manhattan and the colorful home hair dye jobs waiting for the M train.
Somewhere along the way I got used to rubbing shoulders with people different from me. And, I missed that before I landed here. I wanted that back.
On a budget, in a new place, with a full plate, I’m reminded of all the things that have grounded me before when I was in this predicament. And, oddly enough, it’s the lessons I learned in Uganda that have been most relevant for me, in Bushwick – starting with leaving my comfort zone.
1. Move out of your comfort zone, and make a home there.
The first few weeks (months?) in any new city, country, place, you find yourself walking around wondering what the hell you just did. But it was in a village off the Kampala to Gulu highway that I first discovered that moving outside your comfort zone is the place where you begin learning about yourself. Once you get past feeling strange that everybody doesn’t look and feel like you, your own weirdness gets a whole lot clearer, and you’re free to let your freak flag fly.
2. Enjoy what you have.
Agnes wears mostly the same three outfits when I stay with her in Uganda, but she’s got a few crazy little numbers tucked away that she pulls out for special occasions. I’ll never forget the look on her face when she first walked out and showed me her red, floor length dress. Re-living an old favorite, in front of a new audience, is just the best.
Moral of the story being, budgets suck. And, I’m pretty sick of mine already. But it’s just when I’m tempted to die over looks 1 straight through 42 in Prada’s F2012RTW, I remember I really love my Frye boots, and my Jeffreys, and the Gap vintage patched jean jacket that I was dying to wear all summer. By the way? Happy fall, Manhattan.
3. Refry, reheat and repurpose.
I learned in Uganda that the way you eat is relative, and the perception that you can’t eat the same thing for a week is, in fact, a little silly. I’ve seen a single chicken re-heated and remade seven different ways – and enjoyed it 7 (okay, five), different times.
Lesson learned. I wanted to make brunch for friends this weekend, after a late show in Williamsburg. So, I bought groceries to feed five. Huzzah! I have been able to re-create brunch for every single meal this week, and haven’t gone grocery shopping since.
PS – thanks for all the left over beer, Kyle.
4. Can you make that at home?
I loved the way that food brought us together, when I lived in Kakooge and Wobulenzi. We laughed a lot more. We sat a lot more. We conversed longer.
There was this whole pounding in my chest panic attack thing the first day I realized how many things I was missing from my routine that I thought I “needed,” but about week four? I found a lot of things weren’t so necessary anymore. I’m finding it here too: with things like like going to Starbucks, when I could brew in my french press at home, or drinking a beer on my back porch in the crisp fall evening air, instead of buying gin and tonic out on the town. That whole happy simplicity part of me is waking back up, and I’m finding that I notice the little things more than I did when I was running through the line for my double breve Americano, and grabbing lunch to go every day. Not to mention, I’m finding that I enjoy my home – and the people in it.
5. Get some perspective.
Paring down, eliminating, going without are all things I think we get used to looking at negatively, but I’ve begun to realize that simplifying your life can actually be much more grounding, and help you keep your priorities in line. I’m looking forward to talking to people more. I’m noticing nature. I’m noticing ideas. I’m feeling creative. Isn’t that why we chose to be entrepreneurs? We wanted to put ideas and passions first, and stick it to the man, every now and then? I budgeted out shampoo and body wash, and I’m enjoying Castille soap again. It’s good for your hair. It’s good for your body. It’s good for your small shower. Not to mention, I love me some almond vanilla goodness. After that, I switched to straight coffee, on my Starbucks run through. And, boy oh boy do those .50 refills make me a happy camper on Monday (and Tuesday, and Wednesday and…shit. Let’s not talk about it).
Get yourselves some Oktoberfest six packs. Open your windows. Go without a few lattes, and buy a potted plant.
Happy simplifying, Brooklyn. I’m off to shower with some Vanilla Castille goodness, and fall asleep under the M train.
My Metamorphosis, and M’s West Coast Apartment
August 27, 2012 § 3 Comments
I met M and J three years ago in Grass Valley, CA – 25 minutes from where I grew up off Highway 49, and an hour’s drive on I-80 West from Lake Tahoe, where my brothers and I used to make bets on who could stay in the cold lake the longest. We used to make my mom laugh, running out bright red and gasping from the snow runoff to beg for Juice Squeeze and hoagies.
The girls separated a year later. I lost touch with J, after that, but M and I stayed close. She never talked negatively about her old girlfriend, despite the fact that they’d spent over seven years together, and J had been nasty about the breakup. M has this phrase that explains her philosophy of living – “arms up!” she’ll say. “Eyes closed. Roller coaster.” When she’s down, she’s expecting she’ll be back up. When she’s up, she’s aware she’ll be back down. But she doesn’t negate either place.
“I learned a lot from being with women,” she commented once. “Then again, I learn a lot from being with men. I guess I just love people.”
I’ve always been aware that putting a label on M’s sexuality would be a mistake. It has much more to do with a way of loving out her fellow man than it does anything to do with being pansexual or bisexual or gay or straight, and she never uses any of those things to describe herself. So, neither do I.
I lived out more than one metamorphosis in M’s west coast apartment – Shanley 2.0 and 2.5 and 3.0 all clusterfucked together while I figured it out. I’ve flicked cigarettes off the balcony and taken long, slow hits with my feet tucked up under me on the raffia furniture on the veranda until my head felt lighter and my temples buzzed. I’ve been brought home stumbling from Rohypnol and spent the night puking off the side of M’s bed until I could stand straight enough to get to the bathroom. I’ve spent dizzy hours cleaning up that carpet, and calling home to tell my mom I’m okay, that my friends brought me home, and nothing happened.
I’ve pulled someone close in that same bed, smelling cigarettes and Grey goose and tonic and I’ve felt the world stop turning for a while, in M’s apartment.
I’ve gone back to the balcony and the raffia on the veranda with my heart broken, and woken up with blistering insides on the white, leather couch and I’ve driven home late on the highway, praying out loud with my heater on full blast with my blistering, pulsing, hurting heart pumping up a hurricane inside my chest.
I’ve gone back again whole, and sat sipping cocktails at the counter and talking about new beginnings. M was the person I called the first time I kissed a girl, and knew instinctively that kissing girls wasn’t my thing. I called her the first time I slept with someone I didn’t know. I called her when I couldn’t forgive my body for shutting down, and when I rejoiced over it opening back up. I lost my way, along the way, but M’s path shone like a beacon, always allowing for new experience, but never doubting her direction. That’s where M and I differed. I was always a “what the hell” person. I pulsed through life pissed off and wondering ”What the hell? What the hell? What the hell?” while M danced, pulling in certain things and letting go of others, because M always knew what kind of beat she wanted to jam to.
Once, she told me that she’d gotten to that place of sureness through a lot of trial and error. That was the night I stopped being pissed at myself for asking “What the hell?” and recognized that it was part of my journey.
M is big on intuition and she’s big on trusting oneself. So, she supported me through planning a wedding, and then she supported me when it was time to let my plans go. I moved to Washington DC and Los Angeles and Portland and East Africa, and M closed her eyes and put her hands up for me, each time.
Roller coaster.
M was the person who introduced me to Martha Beck. Beck’s a Harvard graduate and life coach turned author, though perhaps not in that order. A lot of her writing centers on her son, Adam, who was born with Down’s Syndrome.
I still thought I had it figured out when M and I met, you know. I was this 19 year old with an agenda and a clear direction and I was making a lot of judgments on the world.
M didn’t care. That’s the beautiful thing about her.
She’d already learned the more you know the less you know – but she didn’t judge me for not being there yet. Instead, she quietly and kindly handed me Beck’s book “Expecting Adam” the night I first sat in her kitchen watching J flip chocolate chip pancakes at the stove.
All she said was, “read this. You’ll cry and you’ll laugh and it will change your life.”
She was right. I walked away from that book with a new perspective on success – that it was something that centered around the way you loved people and yourself and your work, rather than how much money you made or the title you carried. Or, so I thought. I mean, I guess I stored that information somewhere inside me. But, I must have forgotten it when I simultaneously chose to become a social entrepreneur and at the same time became guilt ridden and depressed because I felt I “should” be working in an office for a salary instead.
When I hired an entrepreneur coach to kick the guilt and the depression and find a clear path, I figured that meant spending the first two weeks of our time focusing hard on my financials – turning me into insta-success – helping me make more cash more quickly. But my coach, in true M-like fashion, wasn’t about to begin there.
Instead of talking about my bank account, she asked me to sit on the floor and start drawing a visual map of what my life looked like in three years.
Jesus. That was hard.
The first night I tried to map out Shanley 5.0 AKA who I’d like to be at 26, I put my hair in a high bun and changed into my yoga pants. I rolled out this big sheet of white paper and I crossed my legs indian styled in front of it – pen poised…
and, nothing.
I left to get a beer.
I left to get chocolate to go with said beer.
I called my mother.
I tried on a new American Apparel dress, for the third time.
I mediated, back in my yoga pants after taking off said dress.
Three days later, with a blank sheet of paper still rolled out on my floor I was perusing Beck’s writing for more information on Downs and I stumbled on a quote that reminded me of everything I’d first thought I knew after reading Expecting Adam.
You’re blocking
That’s all it said.
I spent a week on that one phrase.
Yeah.
It took a full week for me to come to terms with the truth that I probably knew several things about Shanley 5.0 – what she wanted, where I hoped she’d be living and what she’d be doing with her time. But, I was afraid that none of those things would pan out, so I was shutting her down. I mean, who wants to listen to a bright future when all they’ve got in front of them is schpleck?
Yeah, schpleck.
“I will not should on myself,” my coach directed that week.
Right. So, the blocking had to shift – from “I will never have what I want” to blocking out what my coach called the “little girl on your shoulder.” The little girl kept saying I should be in a corporate office, that I shouldn’t be be budgeting in expensive beer and going without good conditioner, that I should be making more money, should have gotten somewhere better sooner and, last but not least, really should be sending out sales pitches instead of doodling on a long, white sheet of paper I’m just going to shove in a drawer when I’m finished with it.
She thought the dumb map was bullshit anyways.
She kept talking the whole time I drew.
Halfway through the first 1/3 of my big, white roll-out sheet I dove in to more Beck. This time, she wrote that,
All this cheesy law of attraction stuff actually works—at least when you do it in a non-cheesy way, which I’ve been trying to learn and teach my whole life.
I imagined myself in an apartment by myself, then. I imagined myself quitting my part time job in a year’s time. I imagined myself writing, and working with my social enterprise and I imagined myself without guilt, sitting in this little studio with my grandfather’s tapa stretched out on the wall behind me.
I imagined M and her son dancing in their kitchen, and the night that she told me she had been crazy scared of having a kid, but that she envisioned herself as a mom – wanted to be a mom – and deciding to do it, despite fear, was the best thing she’d ever done.
Somewhere in between reading about Beck’s piece of forest property she purchased after pray rain journaling about it for months and finishing the second 1/3 of my map, I got a text from M telling me that she’d met someone, and it was going well.
“I’m not sure what the hell I’m doing,” she wrote. “But I’m breathing and I’m dancing in all this chaos and I feel this peace inside, because no matter what happens, I know where I want to be – and I know that I will find my way there.”
“Arms up,” I wrote back. “Eyes closed. Roller coaster.”
She sent a wink.
I finished my three year map a few days later. No where in it was there a corporate office, or anything close to the word “should.” In fact, it looked a lot like the direction I was already headed in – I just hadn’t known what to call it, before. Or, perhaps I should say, “draw” it.
I’m also happy to report that it has not spent a single, solitary moment in a drawer.
And, M?
M’s coming to my coast this year.
She says she wants to come take part in this crazy adventure I’ve embarked on, in New York city.
“I love that you knew what you wanted and you went for it,” she texted.
“Arms up.
Eyes closed.
Roller coaster.”
