After Amit proposed to me in January, the marriage visioning process has led me to rejoin the sisterhood of women. How did I leave the sisterhood in the first place? What did it mean to rejoin the sisterhood? Read on…
It all started with me wondering about my wedding gown. After 6+ years of RTR (get 40% off), I’ve long since normalized wearing bizarre outfits in my daily life, so I wanted my wedding gown to be next level “what is she wearing” crazy. I described the look as “futuristic sculptural,” wanted it to be something breathtakingly beautiful and strange that no one had ever seen before while also costing as little as possible, etc. I texted my middle school friends who I barely talk to anymore and learned that they know a LOT about style theory. I inhaled books based on the concepts they alluded to on color theory, bone structure, style essence…
My friend Kat coached and challenged me to talk with my vagina and I channeled a new persona: Nancy Hua Kardashian. Here’s what she had to say to my conscious leadership forum through my vag:
Elated by my vision, I wrote in a chat group:
i want to have a bridal shower where a pro stylist, makeup artist, and colorist come to analyze us so we can take our learnings into the future. i love experimenting on myself and self diagnosing from articles and youtube but i've never had a pro. i think it'd be fun to learn together so we can compare how to make someone else's look work for us and why it needs adjustment, etc… nancy kardashian's purpose is to inspire and teach people how to be more beautiful than they could've imagined, and she's a real ally to me when i thnk about the purpose of my wedding celebrations. how can i bring learning about love and beauty into my events so all my loved ones can connect and grow together??
I wasn’t sure what to call this event because my experience of the normal sequence of events is that we set a wedding date, I anoint a maid of honor who plans a bachelorette party (and maybe also a bridal shower?), then we fly somewhere and get drunk. I don’t drink, we hadn’t set the wedding date (and due to all the scope creep, we still haven’t set a date. Amit is the one with the big, unique wedding vision— none of the boring parts, so much love and togetherness and fun, totally on brand for our (especially Amit’s) love of delighting people with innovative, new experiences— so while we were forming our wedding vision, I pushed forward with bachelorette weekend planning), choosing a maid of honor stressed me out (and indeed, choosing who to invite to this bachelorette weekend was also stressful and caused women to sob, including of course myself), and submitting to someone else’s plans also stressed me out because I had my own unique vision of what I wanted to do, which was not something I could hand off because, like many of my innovative notions, the idea was still forming as I was conceiving and planning it— you can’t outsource the MVP.
In deciding who to invite, I felt fear. A middle school friend who had seemed so into the idea didn’t want to come. Why? Did she actually hate me? I was offering this irresistible invitation that I was so sure she’d like but she’s saying she doesn’t have a free weekend for months? What’d I expect— I barely talked with or saw her anymore. Since I’d entered the workforce, all my friends were guys because HFT and startup founding are male dominated— I didn’t have enough female friends. I cried and hated her, and cried and slowly let go of all my blame, and cried and told her how I felt. I cry a lot now that I’m more in touch with my feelings and liberating my feminine energy, etc.
I had so many women I wanted to invite but didn’t for various reasons that caused sobbing. I was scared to invite women I liked “too much” (ie. more than I think was warranted based on our hang out time, or more than I thought they liked me) because I didn’t want them to think I was a friendless loser. I was scared to invite friends who I thought would say no because I was scared of rejection. I was scared to invite friends who wouldn’t dote on me as much as I wanted.
It’s weird how this was the event that finally made me see how much I’m scared of rejection. I’m not scared of rejection at all in business. Who cares? It’s just business. You pitch a bunch of VC’s/ buyers and the right ones say yes and the right ones say no. But with my friends, rejection hurts. I saw how I do this dance where I make sure I like the person at most as much as they like me, because I don’t want to feel the pain if they reject me.
This is the video I sent to the women coming to my bachelorette weekend:
I spent hours choosing the vendors and shed many tears. Amit kept crowing, “I love how stressed you are about this!” I think he actually trusted me more in planning our wedding after seeing me plan this weekend, because previously I’d poo-pooed the difficulty in planning the wedding events he wanted and hadn’t empathized with his stress over it. I learned that minimizing/ arguing about someone else’s stress (ie. “Who cares? They’ll figure out how to get there”) might make them more stressed; people need empathy and acceptance first (ie. “You’re right, we do need to think about that”).
I messaged a friend:
in organizing this wkd, i see how i was getting really serious bc i wanted everyone to have an amazing time and this was ironically making it really un-fun for me
When the weekend finally came, Scarlet surprised me with amazing decorations and custom bags, schedules, and decorations that she designed herself. Everyone was really nice to me and seemed happy.
In contrast, I was scared it was going to be bad. People flew in for this! My fears of rejection/ abandonment were harder to ignore than usual. Part of me was scared that, even though no one in this group had rejected me yet, if the weekend didn’t go well, then they’d reject me. Part of me was always looking for rejection from people I loved.
During the ceremony with Diana, a middle school friend brought up my parents and how my mom had left me, and Diana sagely nodded. My themes of abandonment kept coming up again and again. Was it so obvious to everyone? I bet most people would be surprised I felt this much fear when I seem so bold and outgoing. But I’m only fearless when I don’t care about the person yet. Rejection only hurts when I need you, that’s why needing someone is scary.
Driving to the styling session at Danielle’s boutique with Erin Mathis, Lynn was talking about her daughter realizing that in some ways being a boy was “better.” This is how I felt from age ~15 to ~35. It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve gone through the final arc of this supercycle of my heroine’s journey, going from judging, fearing, and denying my feminine side (enshrining my Steve Jobs persona and having contempt for my Snow White) to embracing her unique gifts.
The heroine’s journey is what my movie and other creative projects show. I learned I needed to grow both my masculine and feminine sides to trust myself fully and feel more alive.
| Hero’s Journey | Heroine’s Journey | |
| My growth arc | I’m strong and independent. I can do it myself. I need to prove I’m as good as/ better than X. | I know I can do it myself, AND I need others. I’m enough. I don’t need to compete or adopt less than/ better than values. The feminine and masculine need each other. The masculine grows lonely, senseless, and lifeless without the feminine, while the feminine is chaotic and confused without the masculine. |
| How I see life | What’s “heroine’s journey?” Hero’s journey is all there is and it rocks. | When you’ve achieved everything you’ve wanted and realize it’s not enough, then you see you’re in the heroine’s journey (both genders can go on both journeys)— the hero’s journey was a side quest. |
I left the sisterhood of women when I entered the work world because the fields I was in were very masculine (I was the only woman in some of my MIT math classes, I was the only woman trader in the office for years, I was the CEO of a mobile SDK B2B SaaS startup and only met 1 other woman founder in any of those categories for years). The universally accepted approach to my work rewarded my Steve Jobs and other male personas, whereas my feminine personas like Snow White were more of a liability, especially because they weren’t mature yet, and I hadn’t known this or made any effort in helping Snow White grow up from a girl to a queen. In contrast, I’d put in a lot of effort in growing up my Steve Jobs, making him more and more formidable, smart, and ruthless. I loved my masculine side for his strength and only saw my feminine side’s weakness, so I pushed her aside. Until wedding planning invited her out, and I was learning about all her gifts.
I saw how the masculine side longed for and needed my feminine side, but I needed to help her grow up before I could trust her. I saw how I’d never fully trust myself if I never trusted my feminine side, regardless of how strong my masculine side was. No matter how rich and smart and hot I was, or how many martial arts I did, I needed to invest in the side of me that was sensitive, delicate, and loving to live a life that was meaningful to me. My feminine energy had always been there, but I didn’t appreciate her and I ignored her desires (she’s so unproductive and needy). Now I saw how she was a powerful part of me, how impossible and painful it was to deny her, and how she got everything she wanted so easily. My masculine side thinks it needs to grind away and toil and suffer because that’s how he thinks he’s gotten everything we have, but my feminine side sees how the best things we got were effortless, just us being ourselves and trusting the universe. My feminine side charmed and enraptured Amit, my friends, and everyone who’s believed in me, all through unlikely circumstances that my masculine side couldn’t have conceived.
Anyway, the style session was awesome. I’d never been to Danielle’s boutique before and it was amazing. I loved getting styled and changed my outfit plan for the photo shoot. I finally understood what stylists even do and why women packed so many things. This trip was the first in a 6+ week travel sequence for me that spanned many time and weather zones and my masculine side had packed minimally, but I saw how my feminine side needed variety due to the shapes and colors in my face (assuming I wanted my clothes to draw the viewer’s eyes to my face). Afterwards, Sonali said it was a relief that the style session was good because otherwise I would’ve been upset all weekend. Sonali’s smart.
We had a makeup class with Soyi Makeup and everyone collectively gasped when Kelly showed how to do eyebrows properly and transformed my face. Apparently everyone had been applying blush wrong, except Lisa who always knows everything.
Deena found a book Amit wrote at the Airbnb we were staying at and it turned out the host had a fine art tableau vivant photograph featuring Amit in her house! How lucky am I, marrying someone so famous!
Then Anna-Alexia came to do photography. I chose Anna because the women in the group are used to being photographed for Forbes and the NYT and stuff, and we know how to be cute/ hot for instagram, but Anna is another level: her portraits pushed our edges beyond professional/ pretty to: what if we’re works of art?
The unedited outtakes:
The fine art portrait:
Anyway, this is just the start of my amazing events, some related to our wedding, others mostly not. I’m leveling up as a host and reviews have been effusive. I’m holding more events as Diana’s manifestation ceremony revealed that I want to go out into my community and have a unique opportunity to craft it to my vision. Here’s a hint of what we’re planning for our wedding, from Nancy Hua Kardashian speaking from my V, to my conscious leadership forum: