Stepping Out from Behind the Scenes

I’ve spent years building brands, helping other people tell their stories and finding the thing that makes them different.

Telling my own story has been much harder.

That’s the truth.

I can sit with a client, listen to them talk and usually find the thing they don’t realize is the thing.

I saw it with Erica Williams-Parks at Headliners NOLA. Her gift wasn’t just doing hair. It was the relationship she built with the people sitting in her chair. She listened. She knew about the divorces, the new boyfriends and girlfriends, the marriage proposals, the babies, the deaths, the career changes and everything in between.

People weren’t just coming to get their hair done.

They were coming to someone who knew them.

I saw that and told her to lean into it. She did. The brand became stronger. The business grew.

I’ve done the same thing with other brands.

With Velvet Butch NOLA, I created the VB Manifesto and the Masc to Masc series on Threads. Some of those posts went viral because I understood who we were talking to. I understood the audience, what they wanted to hear and, more importantly, what they wanted to feel.

That’s what I do.

I can find the story.

I can hand somebody the words they’ve been reaching for.

But when it came time to turn that same lens on myself?

I froze.

It was put-up-or-shut-up time, and if I’m telling the truth, I wasn’t ready to put up.

Creating content for myself suddenly felt harder than any client assignment.

Client work is easy in that way. There’s a deadline. There’s a problem to solve. There’s work that needs to get done. Even when you’re talking through a client’s insecurities, your insecurities aren’t sitting at the table.

Mine were.

And for too many years, I let them run the meeting.

I used to say, “I like being behind the scenes.”

Therapy has a way of making you question the stories you’ve been telling yourself.

Sometimes what you call a personality trait is really a coping mechanism.

Sometimes “I like being in the background” really means, “I feel safer when nobody is looking too closely.”

Sometimes independence is armor.

Sometimes being useful to everybody else is a way to avoid asking what you need.

Sometimes staying busy building everyone else gives you a perfectly respectable excuse not to build yourself.

Therapy helped me see the difference between what I actually preferred and what I had learned to do to protect myself.

And once you see that, you can’t unsee it.

So I have to call bullshit on myself.

I wasn’t always in the back because I liked it there.

I was in the back because I didn’t want anybody looking too closely.

At my flaws.

At what I didn’t know.

At what I hadn’t accomplished yet.

At all the places where I thought I wasn’t enough.

Therapy also helped me see something harder: sometimes we hold onto the version of ourselves that survived because we mistake survival for identity.

The woman who stayed in the background served a purpose.

She protected me.

She kept me moving.

She made herself useful.

She figured things out.

I’m grateful for her.

But I don’t have to live there anymore.

That may be one of the hardest parts of growth: realizing that something can have saved you at one point in your life and still become too small for the life you’re trying to build now.

And because we are usually our own worst critics, my list of flaws was endless.

So fear did what fear does.

Tomorrow.

Next week.

Next quarter.

Next year.

And suddenly, I’m 50.

Fifty will make you do some math.

Not business math.

Life math.

There is more life behind me now than there was at 25. That doesn’t make me sad. It makes me aware.

I don't have unlimited time to keep postponing the life I actually want to live.

And being seen is part of that life.

That scares me.

Therapy doesn’t make fear disappear.

What it can do is help you understand what the fear is trying to protect you from.

Rejection.

Embarrassment.

Failure.

Being misunderstood.

Being judged.

Not being enough.

Once you can name the fear, you can decide whether it gets to make the decision.

For a long time, mine did.

Because sharing my ideas means opening myself up to criticism. Behind the scenes, the work gets judged. The logo. The campaign. The strategy. The website. The finished brand.

Nobody has to look too closely at the strategist.

But out front?

Now it’s my face.

My voice.

My ideas.

My name.

That is a different kind of exposure.

But what’s the alternative?

Living a life I don’t want because hiding feels safer?

I can't do that anymore.

I cannot stay in the back.

Comfortable.

Useful.

Invisible.

Here’s what I’ve had to admit to myself: You cannot build a brand strategy consultancy around the belief that Identity Is Architecture and then hide your own identity.

At The Curated Misfits, that phrase means something to me.

You build identity on purpose.

You decide what belongs.

You decide what doesn't.

You reinforce what matters.

You build something strong enough that when people walk inside, they know exactly where they are.

And maybe that is what therapy has been teaching me too.

Before you can build intentionally, you have to inspect what’s already there.

What did you choose?

What was handed to you?

What did you build because you loved it?

What did you build because you needed somewhere to hide?

What still supports you?

What needs to come down?

That’s architecture too.

I’ve been asking clients those kinds of questions for years.

Now I have to ask them of myself.

And honestly, New Orleans taught me better than hiding anyway.

This city doesn’t do anything quietly.

We second line down the street for the living and the dead.

Mardi Gras Indians spend an entire year sewing suits by hand, bead by bead, feather by feather, only to step outside and let the whole city see the work.

Think about that.

Months of work nobody sees.

Then comes the day when you have to come outside.

The showing is part of the craft.

I've spent years helping build everybody else up while somehow convincing myself that everybody else deserved that kind of investment more than I did.

That one is difficult to admit.

Somewhere along the way, I decided other people's dreams deserved my full effort while mine could wait.

Other people's brands deserved strategy.

Other people's ideas deserved nurturing.

Other people's voices deserved amplification.

And mine?

Tomorrow.

Therapy helped me ask a question I had avoided for a long time:

Why did I believe everybody else deserved more from me than I deserved from myself?

I’m still answering that question.

But I don’t have to have every answer before I start behaving differently.

I don't believe that old story anymore.

I cannot wait for permission.

I cannot wait until I feel completely ready.

And I definitely cannot wait until everything is perfect.

Everything I learn is data.

Every post that works teaches me something.

Every post that doesn't teaches me something.

Every yes is information.

Every no is information.

Every mistake gets me closer to understanding what I'm building and who I'm becoming while I build it.

If this ain't vulnerability, I don't know what is.

Because now I'm putting it out there and letting it speak.

I'm stepping into a season where I let myself be seen.

That means more of me in the work.

More of how I think.

More of what I believe.

More of what I'm building at The Curated Misfits and why I'm building it.

Some of it will land.

Some of it won't.

Somebody will have something to say.

That's fine.

For years, I thought silence was protecting me.

It wasn't.

It was just keeping me small.

And maybe that is the biggest thing therapy has helped me understand:

Protection and freedom are not always the same thing.

What keeps you from getting hurt can also keep you from being seen.

What keeps you from failing can also keep you from trying.

What keeps people from criticizing you can also keep them from knowing you.

And I don't want small anymore.

If I believe in what I'm building, I have to be willing to stand beside it where everybody can see me.

Not behind it.

Beside it.

So here I am.

Fifty years old.

Still building.

Still learning.

Still in therapy.

Still scared sometimes.

But finally willing to come outside and let you see the work.

Front of the line.

Umbrella up.

Let's go.