TELL YOUR STORY
For years, I avoided telling the part of my story where we lost everything. Two years ago, I stood on a TEDx stage and told it anyway.
In 2005, we sold our home in England. We moved our family, three boys at the time, to Atlanta, and built a luxury children’s furnishings business there that was thriving. We had taken a leap and it had worked. Then the 2008 recession hit, and almost overnight, everything we had built simply disappeared.
We came back to England with nothing. I was pregnant with our fourth son. We moved into a friend’s dining room. I remember starting most mornings in tears and ending them the same way, but quietly, so my boys would not hear me. There was no business left to recover; that chapter had ended. Eventually, I did what I could with what was left, which was very little. What I had seen thriving in the US did not exist yet in the UK. No one was creating heirloom-quality, high-end nursery furniture. I taught myself how to build a website, took advantage of that gap, and launched what has now become The Baby Cot Shop, Chelsea.
I did not tell that part of the story for a long time because it did not feel like the kind of story you tell. It felt like the part you tuck away and hope nobody asks about.
Years later, a journalist asked me a simple question on her way out of a meeting. How did you get into this? I answered her honestly. The whole truth, the dining room, the tears. All of it. She sat back down. She called her editor and said, “We need to run this story.“
The very part of my journey I had spent years trying to keep hidden became my calling card. It led to an award. An invitation to Downing Street. A concession in House of Fraser, and eventually, Harrods UK. None of it came from the polished version of my story. All of it came from the honest one.
I think about this often now. The things we most hesitate to say are usually the things that do the most work. We assume our hardest chapters disqualify us, when in truth they are often the chapters that connect us to the people we are meant to reach. I have come to believe that if you do not write your own story, someone else will write it for you. They will fill in the gaps with assumptions, with their own version of what your silence must mean, and you will end up living inside a narrative you never actually chose.
So, tell your story. All of it. Tap into the superpower of authentic storytelling. You never know who needs to hear it.
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