The Women Who Built Me!
Becoming a Curated Misfit
I come from a particular kind of woman.
Not perfect. Not soft in the ways people expect women to be soft. But present. Committed. Clear. The kind of women who don’t make a lot of noise about what they’re doing for you – they just do it. And you spend the better part of your life catching up to what that actually meant.
I am almost 50 years old. And I am just now fully seeing it.
There are five women who built me. My grandmother. My mama, Gaynell. My Nanny, Gennice. Ca. And Nat. My mother and her three sisters. I never called any of them ‘aunt.’ That wasn’t the relationship. These women were just – mine. Each one of them gave me something different. Each one of them lives in me in ways I’m still discovering.
But before I get to any of them, I have to start where everything started.
I have to start with my grandmother, Ella Louise Williams.
From my grandmother, I learned what home actually is.
I always thought my mama didn’t want me.
That’s the story I told myself for years. That’s the wound I carried without fully knowing I was carrying it. I was living with my grandparents while my mother lived somewhere else, and when you are child, you don’t have the tools to understand what that means. You just feel it. And what I was: she abandoned me.
The truth was different. I didn’t find out until after my grandmother died. In my 30s. And my momma and I were casually talking about my childhood.
When my mother left my my father, she left me with my grandparents so I could have stability while she found some. That was not abandonment. That is a mother making the hardest kind of love decision – choosing her child’s steadiness over her own comfort. But I didn’t know that then. What I knew was that my grandmother’s house was where I slept, where I ate, where I was known.
When my mother eventually went to my grandmother to bring me back home, my grandmother told her: she’s already home.
She didn’t keep me from my mother. She didn’t keep me from my father. She never restricted how much either of them could be in my life. But she had made a decision, quietly and completely, that I needed a place that was mine. A place that didn’t shift with circumstances. A place that held.
That was her house. That was my grandmother.
I lived with my grandparents until I left for college. I came back a few times after when I needed to get back on my feet. And every single time, it was home. Not because of an address. Because of her.
When I look at the four women I’m about to write – my Nanny’s honesty, Ca’s presence, my mama’s grace, Nat’s refusal to stop growing – I see my grandmother in all of it. These women are her daughters. They learned how to love from watching her love and then elevating it. Every quality I’m going to name in them, she planted first.
She was the blueprint. She was the foundation. She was home.
And everything I have ever built – in my life, my work, in myself – I built on top of what she gave me.
From my mama, I learned grace.
Gaynell Theresa Williams is not a perfect woman. She would probably be the first to tell you that. But she has a gift I did not recognize until I was old enough to stop being angry about the things she got wrong.
She always saw the good in people.
Even when it cost her.Even when it wasn’t returned. Even when you could make a reasonable argument that some people didn’t deserve it. She saw it anyway. She led with it. She loved from that place – open, generous, unwilling to write people off.
I spent year thinking that naivety. I know better now.
That is a choice. A daily, conscious, effortful choice. And it is one of the most radical things a person can do – to keep believing in people, to keep showing up with an open hand instead of a closed first, to refuse to let the hard things make you hard.
I do that. I do it in my work. I do it in my relationships. I do it when someone I’m betting on hasn’t figured out how to bet on themselves yet. That’s my mama in me. That’s her grace, living within her daughter.
She also gave me something I didn’t understand at the time: room.
When I told her I was a lesbian, she didn’t flinch. When I told her I was done with organized religion, she didn’t shut the door. She didn’t always understand me. But she never made me feel like I had to be someone else to keep her love. That kind of freedom – the freedom to be fully, exactly yourself inside of someone’s love – that shapes you. It shaped me. It is why I have spent my career building space for brands that refuse to blend in. My mama taught me that you don’t have to earn your place by shrinking.
From my Nanny, I learned that real love tells you the truth.
Everyone else calls her Aunt Gen. I’ve always called her my Nanny, my godmother. And if you’ve ever seen that look she gives, you understand why even at 49 years old I can be humbled back to myself in about four second flat.
She is not soft with her words. She doesn’t have many, but she uses all of them wisely. She doesn’t hand out compliments, she doesn’t cushion the blow, and she does not let you finish a bad argument just because you started it.
I was going into 9th grade. I wanted to transfer schools to stay with my AAU basketball teammates. I had the whole case built in my head.
She stopped me before I got there: “We go to school for academics. Not basketball.”
That was it. No debate. Just the truth, said plainly, be someone who could already see what was at the end of that road.
I did not appreciate it then. I understand now that it was love in its most protective form – love that cares more about where you’re going than how you feel in the moment. She wasn’t being hard on me. She was holding the standard. She was refusing to let me trade my future for fun.
I carry her in the way I work. I don’t tell clients what they want to hear. I tell them what I actually see. I ask the hard questions. I name the thing in the room that nobody is naming. That is not a business strategy. That is my Nanny. That is what it looks like when someone who loves you refuses to let you lie to yourself.
When she does gives a compliment, you receive it differently. You believe it. Because you know she doesn’t say things she doesn’t mean.
I want to be that kind of trustworthy. I want what I say to land that way – not because I’m withholding, but because when I tell you something is good, you know I mean it.
From Ca, I learned what it means to show up.
Ca never carried the title of mother. She is my mother’s older sister. But she has been present for my life in ways that go beyond biology and obligation.
The class ring. The family day. The phone calls in the middle of rebuilding, when I constructing something new and grieving something old at the same time. She was there. Every time. Without hesitation. Without needing to be asked twice.
There is a particular kind of love that doesn’t announce itself. It just appears. And you don’t always clock it in the moment – you clock it later, when you look back at the architecture of your life and realize there was a person in almost every frame.
That’s Ca.
What she gave me was the understanding that presence is the thing. Not grand gestures. Not performance. Just – being there. Deciding that someone is worth showing up for and then actually showing up. Consistently. Quietly. Without making it about yourself.
I built a business on that. The whole premise of what I do is showing up for brands that other people overlooked, being present in the strategy in a way that feels personal because it is personal. I don’t disappear after the proposal. I don’t phone it in. That’s Ca in me. That’s what it looks like when you internalize what real showing up costs and decide it’s always worth it.
From Nat, I learned to never stop becoming.
Nat is only eleven years older than me. She came in my life feeling less like an aunt and more like a big sister – the cool one, the one who made everything feel more alive just being in the room.
Then she had kids. And I watched something happen that I didn’t expect.
She didn’t stop. She didn’t settle into a version of herself and stay there. She kept going. She kept growing. She kept looking at herself honestly and asking more. That, to me, is the rarest thing. Because it is so easy – so deeply human – to arrive somewhere and decide you’re done. To let comfort become the ceiling.
Nat never did that.
And she brings that same refusal to the people she loves. She won’t just take your side. She listens – really listens – and then she asks more of you. Not to be difficult. Because she believes in what you’re capable of. Because she can see the distance between where you are and where you could be, and she loves you too much to pretend it isn’t there.
I named my whole business around the idea of becoming. The Curated Misfit isn’t a destination. It’s a direction. It’s the belief that the most interesting, most powerful version of yourself is always still in process – and that is not a problem to solve. That’s the point.
That’s Nat. That’s what she modeled for me before I had the language to name it.
I used to think identity was something you figured out. Something you arrived at.
I know better now.
Identity is architecture. It’s built over time, by the people who love you well enough to tell you the truth, show up without being asked, give you room to be yourself, and refuse to stop growing in front of your eyes.
And underneath all of it – underneath every lesson, every quality, every woman I’ve described in this blog post – is my grandmother. She is where all of it came from. She raised daughters who knew how to love because she showed them how. She raised me because she decided I needed a home, and then she became one.
I did not build myself alone.
I am my grandmother’s foundation. I am my mama’s grace. I am my Nanny’s honesty. I am Ca’s presence. I am Nat’s refusal to stop becoming.
And at
