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 very 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 like he was explaining a menu to someone who ordered wrong. Twenty-eight thousand dollars lost versus one hundred twenty thousand dollars lost. He gestured at the wall behind him, which was covered in framed photos of corporate executives. Men, mostly. Suits, mostly. The kind of headshots where everyone has agreed to smile exactly the same amount. The wall said what he didn’t: these are the people who belong here. He let it do the talking for him.

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 say, what apparently was not in the curriculum for value-based ethics, was: I see you are struggling, how can I support you? No curiosity. No questions. Just the math and the wall and a man who had decided, with great confidence, that 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 that she was absolutely 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 series 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 that I would not remember 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 unprocessed wreckage of a divorce I had never really sat with. The shame of every financial mistake I had made, every bad decision, every moment I had managed my business on instinct and nerve instead of knowledge, and came up short. 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. And sitting in that room full of corporate executives, I was convinced of one thing: everyone else belonged there, and I was just pretending.

Part of me was never pretending. That part asked the inconvenient questions and showed up in leggings without apology. That part could not help but look at problems from the outside in, noticing how things connected in ways that probably made no sense to anyone sitting next to me. I did not always know what to do with that. I still do not always know what to do with it. But it was real, and it was mine, and no amount of feeling undeserving could make it go away. The other part, the part that had been told her whole life she was not smart enough, not good enough, the kid who barely made it to graduation, that part was desperately trying to be seen as someone who deserved to be there. I wanted their respect. I also believed I had not earned it. Both of those things were true at the same time, and they were exhausting to carry together.

I was medicating the depression instead of sitting with it. Wellbutrin to get through the day. Ambien to get through the night. Neither one asked me to look at why. I was ashamed of my mistakes and the shortcuts I had taken. It was hard to contend with myself when I felt so flawed and undeserving. The inauthenticity was not just about the room full of executives. It was about not being able to look at yourself honestly and extend any grace for what you found there.

And yet. Even drowning, even medicated, even lying awake replaying every mistake and every reason I did not deserve to be in that room, there was a part of me that would not go quiet. The worse it got on the inside, the straighter I sat. They would never know. But the performance was exhausting, and the worst part was never the energy it cost. It was the feeling underneath it. The gap between who you actually are and who you are pretending to be. That feeling follows you home. It gets into the walls.

I stayed in the program. I never stopped wearing leggings.

One of the closest friends I made in that program is now one of the most 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 from early on. Not the performance, the actual person underneath it. The one who asked inconvenient questions and did not stop asking them just because 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 out of cardboard boxes and paint, compensated in beer and pizza. Our marketing professor walked into the room, surprised, bewildered, and completely delighted. It is a story he still tells.

My friend saw all of it. The awkward, the fierce, the questioning, the cardboard Legos. She was not looking for polish. She was looking for real. And apparently I was very obviously that.

The same quality my ethics professor circled in red was the thing she decided was worth keeping.

There is something clarifying about being chosen by someone who has every option. It makes you reconsider who was actually doing the evaluating.

I did stay. I graduated. I led my team through the capstone, and we won. And 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 is a local surfer and now a dear friend. 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 just thinking about it. I drank it anyway.

About half an hour later, Brian pulled up fresh from work, still in his button-down shirt. 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 were very aware of how ridiculous we looked to anyone walking by and we did not care even a little. Our laughter filled the air and floated down the street.

My ethics professor had a wall full of executives. I had a lawn. I know which one I would choose every single time.

I look back at the woman I was then, and I feel sad for her. Not pity. Sadness. The kind you feel for someone you love who could not see herself clearly. She was doing her best with what she had. I have made my peace with her.

I can see the qualities that were always there. The fierceness, the Lego parties, the lawn chair, the suck it. Those were always real. But she was carrying so much shame she could barely feel them.

I am not carrying that anymore. I genuinely like myself now. I am also okay with my flaws in a way that younger version of me never could have imagined. I am not looking for perfection anymore. I am just looking to be human and it turns out that is enough.

My actions align with my values and that means more to me than any wall of executives ever could.

That is the only credential that has ever mattered.