At the age of three I suddenly stopped talking. Well, maybe not so suddenly. It was with the arrival of my sister Candace, born on December 31st, a birthday celebrated with fireworks and champagne toasts by the entire world. Of course, I didn’t know about New Year’s Eve. I just knew that my two favorite people were very preoccupied with a new baby, and I was fit to punish them with silence. The tactic worked. I effectively panicked everyone in my life. I was taken to psychologists and pediatricians, and I perplexed teachers who struggled to connect to the mute, nervous pre-school girl. At the age when speech development literally explodes in children, I was boycotting the English language.
During that time, I began turning inward to examine the world. I struck up a fierce and consuming internal dialogue. To this day, I spend a tremendous amount of time in my head, analyzing myself, my relationships, my sense of wonder and horror about this big “brutiful” world (brutal-beautiful, from my favorite author Glennon Doyle), turning over fears until they shine like polished stones. However, once I started speaking again (literally), I would continue to withhold most of these inner thoughts. My restraint no longer had anything to do with Candace’s arrival. I had outgrown her violent disruption of my only-child status, so the “why” was something else entirely. The fact was, then and decades later, I lacked confidence in myself. Those five words were birthed from five years of therapy.
Too often, we define ourselves by the labels others assign to us. In high school I was “gullible” and “paranoid”. I was also smart, kind, sensitive and fun, but somehow in the torment that is high school, I assigned myself the least flattering of these labels. I was 47th in a class of just over 200, and to me, that translated to average. It never occured to me that statistically this was still the top 25% in a high school known for a rigorous academic standard. (As an HR Manager, I despise the use of ranking systems in performance management.) In my junior year, I enrolled in creative writing, and at age 16 with my Brother word processor, I let the words flow. The blank page. Oh the comforts and liberation of the blank page…the love of nature, the sanctuary of a first love, the wonder of children, the power of laughter to heal, the fear of aging and death, the freedom to imagine a fictional world. There was this beautiful rush in taking the tangle of thoughts in my head and releasing them. When they landed, they weren’t as scary to me. I had a clear, strong voice inside this little body. I was onto something here.
The positive charge from that creative writing class was temporary. I was still like an anthropologist studying how to fit in and behave in society, as none of the ways of being me felt culturally appropriate. I was accepted to the private liberal arts colleges I applied to, but made the decision to go to UMass for business, a decision everyone decided was to follow my high school boyfriend to Amherst College. Was I was incapable of making decisions that didn’t involve the boy? I knew UMass was a great decision despite popular opinion on my life choices. Funny, nobody questioned whether he was following me.
In college, I continued with this intense inner monologue while letting the world excite, bruise, thrill and terrify me, a.k.a., the universal human experience. I did many things I was proud of in those four years. I nurtured meaningful friendships, became a Big Sister to a 7 year-old boy in heartbreaking circumstances, and graduated cum laude from the business school, but these were all things that happened to me, not by me. I didn’t attribute good things in my life to my own abilities, my heart or mind, or my hard work. After college, I took a job as an HR Generalist. With increasingly responsible roles and strong rapport at all levels of the company, I was eventually offered the HR Director position for the large multi-national division. I couldn’t work it out how and why they chose me. Did they remember I just had a baby? Was this a new diversity and inclusion initiative?
I considered the roles I play at home, spouse and mom. Scott and my two two boys, Adam and Josh, are my greatest blessing, and I am loved in a profound way. However, being loved by others is not an effective substitution for loving yourself. The path to believing in yourself can’t be walked for you. The steps aren’t transferable. It was an awkward realization. I was middle aged and totally uncomfortable with the concept of self-love which felt both selfish and indulgent. When I read about other people on their “self-love journey,” my reaction was how new-age, who needs that romantic bullshit, and isn’t this a Whitney Houston song? The gullible girl from high school was now a full-on skeptic.
So what was the key to finally trusting what I had to offer the world?
A catalyst was the Girls, Inc. author event “The Empress Has No Clothes” in the Fall of 2019. The speaker, Joyce Roché, rose from humble circumstances to earn an Ivy League MBA and become the first black female Vice President of Avon. Joyce was also an entrepreneur of her own successful business, board member of four Fortune 500 companies, and former President & CEO of Girls, Inc. As I devoured her words in a packed room of local business leaders, I let the tears stream down my cheeks as she relayed lifelong feelings that her success was an accident, that she was a fraud who eventually would be found out. I looked around the room, noticing I was the only one seemingly on the verge of a panic attack. Why had this topic brought me to my knees? At this point in my life, I was a Vice President, a trusted advisor within my leadership team, a recognized voice in my community, a Women of Isenberg conference speaker, and a mentor to many. Yet I fully related to feeling unworthy, of being a moment away from having success ripped out from beneath you, of being discovered for some dark secret you weren’t keeping, of always wondering if you belonged at the table. Later that same year, I was spooked to find a poem in my creative writing portfolio from 1991 entitled “Naked,” revealing these deep seated insecurities. Everything I felt as a 16 year old girl was still present as a 45 year old woman.
While that Girls, Inc. talk forever changed me, it was a combination of therapy and photography that ultimately proved effective in changing the way I spoke to myself. I plan to talk more about the transformation of therapy in another blog. When I picked up my first DSLR camera in 2016, I fell in love immediately with the process of making pictures. For awhile, I would tell anyone who saw my work, “It was a lucky shot,” or “It would be impossible to miss in that setting.” I was constantly undermining my work product, deflecting compliments and denying any real skill. Then I had my Instagram gallery hacked on my birthday, my images credited to a fake account, and I realized with immediate and laser-like clarity that I did not want my art to be attributed to anyone but me. The theft was violating, like someone stole a piece of me. It took that happening to decide it was time to reclaim not only my images, but also the credit of creating them. In came a watermark and my brand, Greene Images.
With this new awareness, I have come to treat myself more kindly than in the first four decades of my life. I hold my expression, whether words or images, as having value and credibility, as pieces of myself that I place out in the world with equal parts vulnerability and strength. I pull back from external validation rampant on social media, and decide for myself whether I am proud of me. I will honor what I think, feel and create. When someone offers up an idea at a meeting that I spoke just moments before, I say, “Did you not just hear me say that?” I don’t apologize for things that are not my fault. I won’t let bullies or trolls stop me from saying what needs to be said, especially about the injustices that show up everyday for so many. I curse where other words don’t work, and don’t allow societal expectations about what is ladylike to be foisted on me. I also know that mistakes are not only inevitable, but necessary. Above all, I have learned to be deeply grateful for the gifts that are mine. The world is full of wonder, this life an insane blessing. Believe in your story, and give the light inside you proper credit.
I found my voice, and the trail I’m on is well marked. I won’t lose my way.
All images are mine.
