#10 - A Tale of Two Braids
on conditioning, chaotic personalities, and holding contradictions
When I was a little girl, my mom braided my long black hair twice a day. At night, she applied some coconut or amla oil until the strands were slick and formed two braids so I wouldn’t feel a lump in the middle of my head on my pillow. During the morning rush before school she would unravel them, comb my hair smooth again after it had been plied with the fragrant grease, and make one thick, tight braid that would last all day, through class and recess, until we got home from the business after dark.
I didn’t dare touch the band that held my braid together. Other girls played with their loose hair at school and put little flowers in it from weeds on the playground. I was taught to look down upon these children because they were wild and lacked discipline. It wasn’t in our culture to unravel our tresses, to expose ourselves, and attract attention.
I only recently started wearing my hair down in my late 20s. It makes me feel pretty, but I still prefer how it feels up — cleaner, more modest, protected, and prudent. Wearing my hair down feels sloppy and vulnerable to me, as if I’m giving the world access to my power without proper consideration.
My tight braid came up in a conversation with my coach recently about life conditioning. She asked a question to get to the heart of some discomfort I’ve experiencing lately at work with Chaotic Personalities — people who don’t seem to plan or strategize things, and just shoot.
It’s a valuable impulse because sometimes, you have to get over yourself as the hump standing in your way, and go for things. I’ve been working on execution my whole life as someone routinely paralyzed by fear and stuck in holding patterns. I’ve since arrived at a gentler analysis of these seasons of my life as essential in their own way and quietly generative, but still — sometimes you have to muster your neuroses and push the button to counterbalance contemplation.
See how chock full of analysis I am? It’s not how the Chaotic Personalities operate. These “Ready, Fire, Aim” friends of mine are so comfortable on their runaway train of trying and seeing, a train I was taught never to get on. Yet they’ve blindfolded me and thrown me in the caboose to come along for the ride, jumpstarting parts of my venture I was taking my bloody time with. For example, now I’m doing some wholesale business I never planned on doing.
I know what you’re thinking — “That’s all great!” And you’re right, it’s so awesome. I am so grateful to have people in my life who are interested in my work and keep accelerating it before I feel ready. Everybody needs friends and colleagues who give them heart palpitations.
Knowing it’s right and good though doesn’t make it less terrifying, and I spent some time thinking about what scares me about the whole thing because I know it’s never only what it seems. Deep down, what am I afraid of? My ideas getting hijacked? Someone else getting the glory? I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m ashamed to say that these are foundational bricks of my ego that sometimes get uncovered when I’m pushed out of my comfort zone, and I want to barf whenever they do.
That tight braid emerged as a metaphor for my conditioning that there is a singular right way to do things, and that I am the keeper and controller of that way. If my braid came loose, I’d lose control. And if I lost control, I’d lose potency.
What does I do with this epiphany? Do I decide to stay true to the humble, well-intentioned values of an upbringing, a culture that wouldn’t have survived this long had my forebears not done the same? After all, did I not make it this far because that tight braid my mother wove served as a sturdy rope for me to climb in a new world full of strangers, uncertainty, and fear? Or, do I come up with my own approach, my own style to accommodate this new energy? What is safety and what is magic?
Is it strange that a tiny business can render these existential questions?
I can’t be alone in this. Rather than having politicized conversations about business all the time, I wish that we met on this ground of personal reflection more often because I’m convinced it would unify us.
I won’t deny my conditioning and the contradictions it forces me to hold. One of them is aspiring to employ teenagers, who are chaotic. Perhaps my level of discomfort working with Chaotic Personalities points to my doubts of whether I’ll be successful in this endeavor to create a truly borderless place of employment for youth. This is true. The beauty of holding contradictions though is that it affords both time and awareness to work on things. Rather than bat these doubts away and surge forward as if they didn’t exist, I’d like to build a shop where these wares are proudly on display.
Enter the braid again. We landed on loosening it, of letting life, experiences, and lessons pull on it a little to leave their mark. It is still there, but wider like a sail, able to catch more, but still preserving the essential shape my mother gave me.