I didn’t notice it when it happened. One Tuesday I was sitting in front of a half finished flyer, trying to decide on a font, when it hit me the way you notice a sound has stopped only after it’s been quiet for a while. I hadn’t wondered what I had to offer in weeks. For most of my life that question had arrived before I did, into every room, every job, every version of myself I was handed and had to figure out how to fill, so to understand why it had finally gone quiet I have to go back to a conversation that started with a horse.
It began with a woman named Beth, my broker at the firm I’m affiliated with. Beth already knew Cassandra, and she knew I was a veteran, so when Cassandra was hosting an event for veterans, Beth forwarded me the information. I went, and that’s where I met Cassandra in person. We stayed in contact after that, the way you do with someone who was simply always around once you looked for them.
Later, an opportunity came up to work with horses, and Cassandra invited me along. It was a program run by a young woman named Amanda, who works with veterans. We spent the morning walking horses and brushing them down, doing the kind of work that doesn’t ask anything of you except your hands and your attention, and it’s a good kind of tired, that work, because your mind goes quiet in a way it doesn’t during almost anything else. When we were done, the three of us were standing around still smelling like horse, just talking, and that’s when Amanda brought up Women Who Lead and said she thought I might be a good fit for it. I said I’d think about it, which is what I say when I mean I don’t know how to say no without sounding ungrateful.
Underneath the thinking about it was the question that shows up every time somebody hands me a room I didn’t ask for, which is what do I actually have to offer here. Everyone I pictured already sitting in that space seemed to know something I didn’t. I had a business I was still figuring out and a blog, and none of it felt like enough. I said yes anyway, not because the doubt resolved itself but because I trusted Cassandra, and by extension Amanda, more than I trusted my own read of what I was worth in that space. I borrowed their confidence the way you borrow a coat that isn’t quite yours yet, just to get through the door.
Kathy officially asked me to become one of the cohosts. I wasn’t convinced I was the right person, but she was, and I said yes the same way I’d been saying yes since Beth first sent me to Cassandra, borrowing someone else’s certainty because I didn’t have my own yet. Then she kept handing me a little more. The second hour. Promotions for Boots and Blazers, the new quarterly gathering we’d launched to bring people together in a more social setting. Eventually the Women Who Lead logo itself. Every new invitation carried the same quiet message that she saw something in me I hadn’t quite seen yet. None of it felt like proof of anything at the time. It just felt like the next thing, which is how I ended up back at that flyer, that font, that ordinary Tuesday, not answering the question so much as no longer asking it, because I’d gotten busy enough and present enough and useful enough in the small daily ways the work asked of me that the question simply ran out of room to keep asking itself.
I kept trying to figure out what I was supposed to bring. It never occurred to me that maybe I was the thing I was bringing.
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