Here is the blog I wrote to introduce Aunty Carol to the World in the fall of 2020
This is who I am. I’m sitting on the living room floor, red coffee cup from a French restaurant overlooking the Forbidden City and headphones to my right, iPhone with a flowery case to my left, laptop resting on a wooden table from Indonesia that I picked up from a wholesaler in Union, NJ, that imports for CB2.
I’m just as happy in yoga pants and a hoodie as I am in a fancy dress. I dress up to build my confidence, but I’m also joyful and strong sitting on the ground, especially when there are young kids and pets scampering around.
I have been given a small, essential truth of the universe through my turbulent childhood and years of shame and hiding. I am not hiding any more. I am learning to share the sadness and loss and confusion–my father, my abortion, my mother and sister and much of my childhood family, money, lots and lots of money that I never previously acknowledged having or wanting to have because I had this thought, which was a fact of the small universe I lived in, “people with money hurt other people.” I didn’t want to be like them. They yelled at people, and made them sit still when they wanted to roam free, and most of all they hurt their children and their children hurt me.
But I also saw how he who screamed and demanded was a business genius, a machine for finding the thing that was about to explode and getting in before it was really big. I also saw how his mother constrained him, and all his drunken blustering was in response to her constraints and demands. I understood that from my own mother, and her mother…
This is the thing: I always saw multiple perspectives. But I saw them in a way that erased my own truth, my own desires, my own complexity. Now I see that this was always the gift: vision top, middle, bottom; watching and waiting; the green side of the leaf and also the silver and gold.
Storyhood and The Golden Repair (now Story Medicine) are both part of this vision, this expression of the thing I have seen and felt since I was a little girl, that I hid for as long as I can remember because I was ashamed of feeling so powerful — powerful enough to push through obstacles even when the obstacles were other people. This idea made me like them; that thought about power and relationship to power terrified me in my bones.
So I am reckoning with that, and how hiding that has held me back. I am accepting that there is work that I need to do, that I am here on the planet to do, and that requires breaking the things that no longer work — in order to reveal the cleavages and let the community make choices about how to repair them.
For me to be free and fully expressed, teaching people how to release stories from their lived experience — to get more of what they want and deserve — must be both free to all and used as fuel for this larger vision. The old company (i.e. Story2, which I sold in 2023), one way or another, needs to be broken down and repaired as Storyhood: a thriving, growing, intersectional community of joyful and authentic storytellers.