I Had a Lawn

Six weeks into my MBA program, my value-based ethics professor pulled me aside and told me I should drop out.

He was calm about it. Almost kind. I don’t think this program is for you, he said. Save your money. He walked me through the math as if he were explaining a menu to someone who had ordered wrong. Twenty eight thousand dollars lost versus one hundred twenty thousand. He gestured at the wall behind him, covered in framed photos of corporate executives. Men and suits, mostly. The kind of headshots where everyone has agreed to smile the same way.

I was wearing leggings.

In my defense, we were there for ten hours at a stretch. I dressed for survival. He dressed for the wall.

What he did not ask was whether I was okay. No curiosity. Just the math, the wall, and a man who had decided he knew exactly what he was looking at.

He did not know what he was looking at.

What he was looking at was a woman in the middle of a quiet, ongoing panic she was not going to let anyone see. I was a couple of years out from a surgery that had taken me apart, out from a divorce, out from a stack of financial decisions I would rather not itemize. Just moved in with the man who would become my husband, who was never home because startups, and I was still largely raising my kids alone. My business was growing faster than I could staff or fund it. I had built an organic skincare line for kids from nothing, and I cared deeply about what that word meant. Undercapitalized, understaffed, in active acquisition talks with a company out of Hong Kong, and watching a competitor launch in my exact lane with more money, more star power, and a very loose relationship with the word organic. They were coming for my market, and there was nothing I could do about any of it from a classroom in Santa Clara.

I was doing all of this while sitting in his classroom, taking notes on business ethics.

The leggings were the least of it.

At night, I could not sleep. I tried Ambien but hated not remembering the end of the evening, so I lay there instead with everything I could not outrun during the day. The pain of feeling like I was failing my kids. The wreckage of a divorce I had never sat with. Every financial and business mistake. I had gone to business school specifically because I wanted to learn how to do it right. How to lead properly. How to build something that would not fall apart. Sitting in that room full of corporate executives, I was convinced everyone else belonged there, and I was pretending.

Wellbutrin to get through the day. Ambien to get through the night. I was so ashamed of my mistakes I could not look at myself long enough to find anything worth keeping.

The worse it got on the inside, the straighter I sat. They would never know. The performance was exhausting, and worse than the exhaustion was the gap between who I was and who I was pretending to be. That gap follows you home and gets into the walls.

I stayed in the program, and I never stopped wearing my leggings.

One of the closest friends I made in that program is a very powerful women in tech. I am not going to drop her name because that is not the point. The point is that every year she hosts a retreat for women in leadership, and I am on the list.

She saw me early. Not the performance. The person underneath, who asked inconvenient questions and did not stop asking them when the room got quiet. The one who, when our cohort was assigned a marketing presentation on Lego, decided to throw our marketing professor a Lego birthday party. I made Lego cupcakes. I recruited my entire neighborhood to spend a week building life-size Lego replicas from cardboard boxes and paint, and compensated them with beer and pizza. Our marketing professor walked into the room, surprised, bewildered, and completely delighted. It is a story he still tells.

I graduated. I led my team through the capstone, and we won. Near the end of the program, as my peers and I stepped into an elevator, my ethics professor stopped in front of the doors. He looked at me and told me he was wrong about me, and that he was impressed. The doors started to close.

I said suck it.

I wish I could tell you I had more class than that. I did not. To this day, my girlfriend still says it to me with a cheeky smile.

The day my ethics professor told me to drop out, I drove home and pulled onto my street to find my neighbor on his front lawn, shooting BB guns and drinking a 40. Not a sight you see every day. He was sitting with a woman who was another neighbor. They waved me over.

After the day I had, I was in.

I ran inside, grabbed a lawn chair, and took a sip of a 40. I do not drink beer. It is absolutely disgusting. I gag thinking about it. I drank it anyway.

About half an hour later, Brian pulled up fresh from work, still in his button-down. He looked at me. He looked at the lawn. He looked at the makeshift BB gun range my neighbor had assembled. Then he looked back at me.

Is this what we are doing, he said.

This is what we are doing, I said.

He went inside and came back with a Costco-sized bottle of tequila. We sat on that lawn until midnight. Tequila, terrible beer, a BB gun range, and a woman I had just met who would become one of my people. We knew exactly how ridiculous we looked to anyone walking by, and we did not care. Our laughter filled the air and floated down the street.

My ethics professor had a wall. I had a lawn.

That was seventeen years ago.

I look back at the woman I was then, and I feel sad for her. I also forgive her for what she didn’t yet know. She made stupid decisions. She made choices I wish she hadn’t. And every one of those decisions and choices is the reason I have the empathy I have now, for other people and for myself.

So yes, I like myself. I am human and flawed and wonderful, and I am okay with who I have become. I care about things deeply. And I am still finding parts of myself I didn’t know existed.