Be where you are

When I was twenty-four, I drove around to people’s houses teaching music lessons.

The problem was, I felt really self-conscious about my car.

I was driving a fifteen-year-old Pontiac Bonneville that had a bunch of bumper stickers on the back that someone else had put there.

It also had no AC. In Atlanta.

I was teaching in some really fancy neighborhoods. It felt so awkward to park my junky car in front of a mansion. It was so clear that I didn’t belong.

So as soon as I could, I traded that car for a five-year-old Volkswagen. It was really cute! It was also much more than I could afford, and cost a fortune every time it needed a repair.

I still didn’t fit in with the wealthy moms, though. I wasn’t one of them.

What I didn’t realize was that I didn’t need to fit in. Now that I’m even older than most of the parents of my students were back then, I understand that to them, I represented a lifestyle that they were nostalgic for. I was an artist living in my first crappy apartment in a cool up-and-coming neighborhood. I had freedom and youth. They were stuck with their spouses and kids in a giant, expensive house driving expensive cars, feeling pressure to fit in with the other people doing the same thing.

I wish I had embraced where I was instead of wanting to race on to the next thing. It was costly and caused needless anxiety to try to present myself as more established than I was.

These days, I’m trying to just be where I am. Ironically, this means showing up to share my stories and advice and owning my age and experience. I’m not going to pass for Gen Z any more than I could have passed for a Buckhead mom back in the day.

It seems like a lot of us overlook the value of our own perspective. It tends to be invisible to us, so we go out searching for it without realizing that, like Dorothy’s power to go home, we had it all along.

Often, it’s the topics that feel too easy and obvious that would be most useful for us to talk about.

For instance, young people entering the workforce might try to fit in and not draw attention to their status. They might try to look older and appear to be more experienced than they are. However, they are missing out on that “It’s my first day!” energy. They have a powerful opportunity to get their senior colleagues invested in their success. Acknowledging their inexperience and eagerness to learn allows them to build relationships, gain mentorship, and grow in their role. Pretending to be well established would make them just as unremarkable as everyone else.

Meanwhile, my team and I forgot to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of my music school. That’s a bummer! Our legacy in our neighborhood is a key aspect of our positioning. We’re old, and that’s a good thing. We ought to lean into it.

If you’re feeling like you need to show up a certain way and look like you have it all together, I encourage you to question that. What if you don’t? What if you were to fully embody your present situation? What if you were to accept and appreciate exactly where you are?

And what if you were to share your experience from that perspective, as only you can?