Let me introduce myself

The world begs us to define ourselves in 280 characters or less, depending on the social media platform. Brand yourself. Drill it down. Keep it short. Optimize for SEO. Make it catchy, but not too avant-garde. What the hell does that even mean? Do I make something up? Distill myself down to my professional title? How do I take all the little bits and pieces of who I am and weave them in? I’m complicated. Wildly curious. Human. A chaotic collage of infinite interests with a brain that fires off zany and creative ideas at lightning speed. How do you explain that in a short bio? This question became increasingly pressing when I got laid off in March of 2020. Who was I now that my job was stripped away? And what was I going to do next?

I’d spent so much time tending to my neat little life that when the pandemic hit and the bat came swinging, I was cracked open like a piñata. I stared at the painful vestiges of my past life, witnessing my carefully constructed reality reduced to pieces of shredded tissue paper and cardboard- something that resembled sad confetti. Who the hell was I now? I didn’t know, but I was desperate to figure it out.

And thus began my undoing. My homecoming, but not the kind that comes with a marching band, streamers, balloons, and loud cheers. Coming home to myself was a quiet event- a private, painful, and deeply emotional journey.

And in the beginning, all I could do was run. I don’t love running, but I love that it’s torturous enough to keep my thoughts at bay. I crank up loud rap music, hit the pavement, and force myself to keep going. That’s all I’ve known how to do my whole life. Just keep going. And so I did. The farther I ran, the more layers I shed. I spent the next few months pouring equal time into dissecting myself and rebuilding, carefully picking up the scraps of cardboard and shredded tissue paper. Therapy. Journaling. Calls with friends. Long walks with loud music. And each step led me here. One insane cross-country move, two contracting roles, a month in my childhood bedroom, and many sleepless nights later, I wound up in San Francisco- over 3,000 miles from Boston, the city I had learned to call home.

I wish this story had some beautiful ending. A perfect crescendo. But that’s not life, and that’s okay. I’m still figuring out who I am. But in the time that I spent trying to define myself with a limited character count, one thing became abundantly clear: I was tired of being narrowly defined by the institutions I attended, accolades I accumulated, and roles I assumed. These labels were reductive. They couldn’t hold space for the expansiveness of my humanity. I wanted a rewrite.

So, I’d like to re-introduce myself. I’m the real Slim Shady. Just kidding. I’m Natalie, often called Nat. I was born in Campbell, California and spent the last nine years adulting- or some shoddy semblance of that- in Boston. I love hot honey on my pepperoni pizza, will spend the extra dollar and change for a waffle cone, enjoy endless walks to nowhere, and routinely add new songs to my chaotic Spotify playlist. I love snapping pictures of historic buildings, will hop on a plane at a moment’s notice to see live music, and have a completely irrational fear of snakes. I enjoy making connections wherever I go and believe in the transformative power of storytelling. Some weekends you can find me rummaging around a quaint, quiet bookstore. Other times you can find me hanging out with a boisterous group of friends talking about everything and nothing at all. I love to travel, and if you ask me where I’ve been, I could rattle off an impressive list of destinations. But of all the trips I’ve been on, the journey to the deepest and darkest parts of myself was the most remarkable. My homecoming tops the list.

Like most people, I hide past trauma beneath the veneer of a well-curated life. But if you chip away at the surface, you’ll quickly see. It’s a huge part of what makes me, me. It’s why I care about the work that I do. I want to create workplaces that create the space for us to be imperfect, ever-evolving beings with history. Spaces that enable and empower us to do our best work because we feel seen, heard, and appreciated for who we really are- the messy parts too.

And when I meet you, I want to know all the odds and ends that make you, you. I want to honor the fact that you are far more than 280 characters on a screen. You are wondrous and complex. One of a kind. I can’t wait to learn all about you, so let’s get to work.

I’m Nat. Who are you? Take all the characters you need.