It’s two years ago that I began this journey. Two years ago that I turned away from Blogger in favor of something more serious, something that would rouse me out of bed in the morning, something that would pin my favorite moments of my little sister to a page much larger than mine.
Back then, I thought I would lose her. And then, I thought I already had. But now, she lives here. Even as her Honda Civic heads southwest tomorrow, not stopping until she reaches the small Virginia town I used to call home.
This is a letter to the girl in the mirror, but it’s also a letter to her.
The her I hope to never lose. The her I hope sits in my inbox every once in a while, who buzzes me awake at 2 am. The her I hope to see before November almost hands autumn over to December.
This is for her. Written for me. A year ago.
“I’m thrilled but terrified. Excited but nervous. I look in the mirror and try to place the girl staring back: short hair, small curves, a shy smile.
I try to figure out where she came from, if she was always buried deep inside. I hope she still laughs at her own jokes and lights up when she gets a compliment. I hope she still reaches far but doesn’t expect too much. I hope her dreams grow into waking moments and that when she reaches them, she doesn’t look back and wonder why she ever wanted them.
I hope she grows up but not old and I hope she falls in love for real this time. With a boy who wants to love her back and doesn’t want to change a hair on her body.
I hope she doesn’t twiddle her thumbs through this next year and I hope she wakes up ready to conquer the world and she stops doubting herself because she has unconventional ideas.
I hope she isn’t trying to be someone she isn’t because she’s perfect just the way she is.”
If you could write a letter to the girl in the mirror, what would it say?
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I wrote a rather lengthy post on making your goals actionable and what college taught me about planning my life into manageable chunks, but this sentence pretty much sums that up. When you wake up in the morning and want to change the world, pinning pictures of chalkboards with cursive type telling you to “Be the change,” will change nothing.
The change you so desperately want begins the moment you swim in it, losing yourself to the tangibles, the planning, the step-by-step measurements that guide you like a yellow brick road to your very own Oz.
I’ve been blessed to know or follow or stalk (to put it honestly) these 10 world changers and they all have something in common: passion met action.
Nate St. Pierre
What doesn’t Nate do? He’s the founder of ItStartsWith.Us, and his story is the epitome of why you have to make the leap from writing your goals down to doing something about it. At a workshop with his company, he finished the phrase, “Next year, I will…” with “change the world.” And he has. Each week, the members of ISWU receive a 15-minutes-or-less mission to complete and discuss. He’s since handed the baton to Joshua Opinion, but he’s staying busy with his latest project: Mixup (The Web).
Katie Colihan
Replacing Lauren Dubinsky (see below), Katie took over Love Bomb (another of Nate’s projects). At one point, Katie had as many as five jobs. She now monitors the thousands of love bombers who literally pour their hearts into blog comments for a nominated individual each Thursday.
Lauren Dubinsky
Almost 18 months ago, Lauren wrote me an email about this project she had in the wings. At the time, she was struggling to define womanhood and put it back together after society had taken a chunk out of it. What she ended up with was The Good Women Project, a Christian blog that takes dating and marriage and singleness and working and being a woman and mentors those who need it. Now, thousands of women look to the site for hope and honesty.
Hannah Brencher
A year ago, Hannah opened her love letter project to the world. She had been writing letters and leaving them on subway booths and library shelves for strangers to find since October 2010. Now, More Love Letters has its own website where thousands of subscribers receive a monthly email to bundle up handwritten notes and turn them into a package of hope for those in need. She’s now a freelancer, too.
Tammy Tibbetts
I haven’t met Tammy, but she falls into the “friend of a friend” category. Up until a few months ago, she had Seventeen.com’s social media on the brain. Now, she’s full-time working on She’s The First, her nonprofit dedicated to sponsoring girls’ education in the developing world. Like Hannah, she’s living proof that what you love can become what you do—all day long.
Emily-Anne Rigal
I was first blown away by Emily-Anne because she’s so young: only just entering college next month. But besides that, she is wise beyond her years. She turned her own pain and bullying experiences into a national nonprofit, We Stop Hate, where teens around the country can band together via YouTube to spread words of encouragement for each other. She’s already been interviewed by Oprah, too.
Eryn Erickson
Eryn makes being 4’11” seem empowering (I’m 4’11”, too). She’s not only a musician with her own fan base. She also took self-love to another level when she started So Worth Loving, a clothing line that reminds people of their own self-worth and beauty. From small beginnings, taking mailed-in shirts to spray paint the words “so worth loving” on them, the site now churns out its own merchandise and ran a campaign in May called MayYou.be.
Nina Ainembabazi
Nina found her way into my heart through More Love Letters. She’s got her own agenda for activism, though. She’s taking the reigns for Marist College’s Heal A Heart, Remove The 1, an organization that seeks to crush the statistic of 1 in 3 young adults being in an abusive relationship.
Morgan Hendricks
Morgan and I worked together briefly in high school. Even then, she was driven. I should have known she’d put together a massive self-love campaign: Team True Beauty. She’s one of the co-founders and has backings from celebrities in all sectors of the entertainment industry. Even Channing Tatum, which certainly makes me feel good about my body.
Adam Braun
I’ve never met Adam, either, but his Zeitgeist talk on purpose is nothing short of mesmerizing. And he’s connected with She’s The First in the past, as he’s the founder of Pencils of Promise, an organization dedicated to building schools in the developing world. His life-changing moment came in the form of a young child in one of the countries he visited telling him all he wanted was a pencil. Pencils, Adam now knows, can not only educate but raise funds to build more schools in third-world countries.
What excites me most about this list isn’t that I’ve had the pleasure of connecting with many of these people. It’s that there are thousands of other examples of people who are turning their passions into careers and fueling movements during the late hours while the rest of us are asleep.
Truly, that is where your change resides. Not in pinboards labeled with inspirational Ghandi quotes, but in plans that outline actionable goals for building schools and designing clothing brands and writing stories that attach heartbeats to causes.
Who else am I missing? Share in the comments, please.
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There is only one book I have ever hesitated to throw out. And it’s not America’s Greatest Novel or the Guide To Getting Everything You Want.
The man who gave it to me, I haven’t seen since. But he slapped it down on my desk, gave me a crash course in how to read it, and handed me a pack of sticky tabs.
It was the first time in my life someone ever hinted that I could flip through a book and roadmap my life in a matter of half an hour. No matter that there were countless atlases available at souvenir shops in airport terminals worldwide. Or that I could sift through Amazon.com listings for books on career mapping and jumping from one goal to the next like lily pads.
This felt a lot more structured, what with a book of options in one hand and a yellow double-sided checklist in the other.
It was June 26, 2008. I had thirty minutes to decide how I would spend the next six months of my life, and those tools were all I had.
So I cracked the spine and started mapping out options, setting aside a Plan B and C in case someone else swept up my priorities before I could schedule the first courses of my college career, and I made decisions that didn’t feel weighted, even if they should have.
Over the next four years, I opened that course catalog routinely, sat down in front of my desk, and drew up a four-year plan. I grew addicted to the feeling of plotting out my life so easily, just by taking a checklist (with a myriad of options, each tailored to my own interests) and a list of options. I reveled in the weeks before it was my turn to register for another semester of credits.
I didn’t exactly give myself a moment to think about how that structure might evolve in the months after graduating. But it seems so silly now, knowing all I’ll ever have to do is make a list of what I need and what I want and find the center of the Venn diagram.
In that sliver of space, small for some and large for others, resides the key that all of us have the potential to unlock. But few of us think to look there.
I have spent post after post writing “Do what you love,” like doodles in the margins of your art history notebook, but I have forgotten to tell you that that four-word phrase means not to hoard your passions and qualify them based on possible and impossible.
It means writing them down and knowing them when you wake up in the morning. It means looking at yourself in the medicine cabinet mirror while brushing your teeth and thinking about where you want to end the day.
All I ever learned about structuring my life and plotting it like milestones to something grand, something I couldn’t even envision in the two weeks after high school graduation, I learned in college.
You can pin pictures of chalkboards with cursive type telling you to be the change until your shift starts at the local diner, but it won’t change a thing. The change you so desperately want begins the moment you swim in it, the moment you lose yourself in the tangibles, the planning, the step-by-step measurements that guide you like a yellow brick road to your very own Oz.
By the way, every month I send out a short + sweet newsletter brimming with cool finds related to the monthly theme. It'd be stellar if you subscribed. If it's not worthy, it doesn't go in the newsletter. That. Simple.
We sat in the frozen yogurt shop with lime green walls and hot pink stools for half an hour, while she threw her self-worth into the nearest storm drain.
“You’re so paaaasionate, Kaleigh,” she said. “My sister says I don’t care about anything.”
I started thinking I might punch my sister in the face if she told me that. Kels all coiffed in her latest thrift store skirt and fishnet stockings, ready to take hold of the Saturday night while I corral this girl into a future that doesn’t leave her feeling worthless.
Why do I care? Where did I dig up this passion?
I’m flashing back to nights spent in my red plaid pajama pants, laying in my bed, texting my roommate to come upstairs and make sure I wasn’t dying. The nights I laid on her bedroom floor and begged her not to drive us to the hospital if I got up now now now.
It’s not so much passion as knowledge: the kind that’s better suited on the pages of search engine results than locked inside my brain forever.
“You’ve just got to find what matters to you,” I say, racing through a green light and down a hill. “What defines you.”
The Logical Girl in the passenger’s seat sighs and I think back three minutes to my own self-doubt. The moment before we got in the car to trudge home.
I told her something I’d been holding in my gut for seven hours.
“I watched every single Ellen and Taylor Swift interview on YouTube today,” I blurted out, hoping my level of lame might trump hers. “And legitimately felt sad because I’ll never meet her.”
Sure, if I had enough money and time, I could wrangle up some bills and call all the Q102 contests and beg them for backstage passes to be a screaming fangirl with an autograph in my future. But that isn’t the kind of meeting I wanted.
I wanted her to tell me I was doing something. I wanted her to be my friend, reassuring me I had all the heart in the world, even if some people couldn’t see it. I wanted her to acknowledge a couple hundred hours of my hard work jammed into projects to raise girls up the way she does with her own time.
My friend just laughed, told me she couldn’t stand her—famous for tearing boys down.
And I wondered what passionate might feel like for her.
It has, for me, always been this: sitting against my bedroom door, writing fragments and images that hurt but heal. Images I know too well but might still conjure up a familiar feeling in a girl who finds them searching Google for “lonely crying girl” or “signs he doesn’t want a relationship.”
But it’s hard to admit that to her now, so instead we talk about the passion she can’t seem to find.
It’s buried under seat cushions like pennies and leftover Easter jellybeans to match the color of the shop walls behind us. It’s lurking somewhere deep inside her.
I know it. I know she’s got a wall built around her, a Logical Line that says the future must always be practical and controlled.
But if she wants to be happy, she might have to find a piece of passion. A piece of the girl who isn’t afraid to hum symphonies, pulling into a parking space. A girl who ignores the snickering neighbors, high on weed on the front lawn, while she digs house keys out of her purse.
She’s going to have to find a place in this world.
By the way, every month I send out a short + sweet newsletter brimming with cool finds related to the monthly theme. It'd be stellar if you subscribed. If it's not worthy, it doesn't go in the newsletter. That. Simple.
