You are an Overcomer, Don’t let your situation define you!

Hey there, everyone. So I know one of these days I will be able to share with all of you like a nice little post that'll say, in an hour I'm going live so you can join me. That is not how my life rolls right now, and so for some of you, you know that. Oh well, but here we are live. I do want to just, I haven't talked to you guys in a long time since really the, I guess when I left NPR to go to HackerU, which is amazing. I'm really enjoying the new role. But today I actually wanted to jump on because it's a bit of a momentous occasion, I guess. Is that the right word? But it's a day and obviously for many reasons, right? September 11th, had a lot of emotional weight on me already, um, because I was in New York City on September 11th, um, 2001. But more importantly, last year on September 11th, I was speaking on stage. Some of you might remember, um, I was speaking on stage at, uh, Digital Book World. Thank you for having me, but, um, Digital Book World. And I was talking about AI and publishing and how you could use AI to build better books and publish more content. And that day, uh, I ended up— I mean, basically my life got turned upside down. And I don't know, some of you might remember that day that I posted a link. Um, I mean, I was in Nashville delivering that, and my family, um, that was in trouble was in Seattle, and I could not get home fast enough. Um, but so what ended up happening, of course, is When I found out something terrible had happened, I got on the very first flight I could. I raced back. I didn't get back in time. I think I arrived at 3:00 AM the next morning. And all of my children had been placed in protective custody because I wasn't there. I then had to prove to the state that I was able to get them back. So 3 of the most horrendous days of my life. I instantly went dark on social. As I said, I think some of you might remember my post where I was just like, hug your babies right now. And I encourage you to do that every day, even though we're in a pandemic and we maybe are seeing more of them than we ever thought we would. But that day, I mean, September 11th, a year ago, it was, it was really bad, really bad day. And from there, I ended up finally getting my kids back, but we ended up having to somewhat run for our lives, so to speak. And we ended up moving across the country. We ended up having to deal with a lot of trauma and grief and stress. And all right, a month before that traumatic moment occurred, I had been, in my mind, unjustly fired from Microsoft. So I was also unemployed and with all the stress that comes into that. So right, I'm now in this moment where like a lot of bad things are happening. My children are in danger. They're going into protective custody in the state. I'm having to fight for them. I don't have a job. I'm worried for the safety of everyone. And even in those moments, right, I reached out to people and those people could not help me in that moment, right? My friends I reached out to and I was like, if I can find a friend who could take my children, they don't have to go into protective custody. This is me on the plane in like first class, I think I was, talking on the phone, begging my friends to take my children. Take my children, and no one did, um, or no one could for whatever reason, uh, but again, all these things just started crashing down on me in that moment, and it was terrifying. And I say this to you because I had, you know, basically 3 months of trying to figure out, which is what I encourage all of us, like, all of us have bad things happen, and this is not the bad first bad thing to happen to me. Good Bad things happen to good people all the time. But it's not the bad thing, right, that makes us who we are. It is literally what we do in the moment of those bad things. And it did not— was not an instantaneous choice for me. I actually ended up moving, you know, across the country. I ended up being dark on social for a long time. It actually required me— and I'm actually going to go check to see my friends on LinkedIn. Sorry, guys, I forgot to go check in. So I'm going to go see if I can find this post really quick and say hi to you fine people, because it's always nice to talk to you and be able to connect with you live on this channel. And of course, it always is really good for me to see if it's actually working. So we'll see. Hopefully it is. Hopefully it's like, you are now live. I don't know if I see it. Oh my gosh. I don't. So who knows if it's even working right now, or if you can hear me. Oh my gosh, what if you can't hear me? Someone tell me on Twitter if you can hear me, or on YouTube, any of these channels. Oh, cool. All right. So I think it's working. Anyway, so one thing that I wanted to make sure that you all knew was how important it is to choose in these moments of like what seemed to be the end of the world. I literally felt like my world was ending. I was scared and alone and I didn't have my children who are my life. It was really, it was really hard but I also had enough self-awareness in that moment to figure out that I needed that that wasn't my story. That wasn't the end. That wasn't how I was going to be defined. And so I started to work on me. I started to work on, you know, getting a new job. And I started to work on a lot of things. But I think the most important thing that I wanted to share with you today was like last year on this day, I thought my world was over. I crawled into a bed and I didn't really want to get out. And some of us have been there. And so I just wanted to share with you that if you are there or have been there, you can relate. That's not who you are, and that's not who you have to be. And that, that whatever that bad thing is, whether it's a failed relationship, you know, a death of someone you love, whatever it is, that those things can help you become the person that you were meant to be on this world. And you can choose to see the goodness in it and the light in it, and then you can share that light with other people. Because the one thing that I realized in that moment was— or I should say I thought I realized— is I felt very alone. I felt like I'm never gonna be able to say what happened to people, you know, what, what— I can't ever talk about this to people. I can't ever have friends again. I can't ever expose myself on social media. I have to you know, hide in a little hole. And that ended up not being true. And more importantly, the more I spoke about what had happened to me, the more people sadly came to my side and said, "You're not alone in this. This happened to me. This happened to my mom. This happened to my friend. I was a child of this type of situation." Like there was so much support, but that support never would have happened unless I got to the point where I could say it out loud. So that's why I started this new initiative called Lovefluencers. I started it because I want to give people the tools to tell their own story, to connect it to the work that they do, to be authentic, to lead with empathy and kindness, and to know that being human and being personal and being all the things, right? A mother, a daughter, a mother to a child with special needs, all the things that make you who you are is actually the most important thing in this world. And it's what people want to hear from you. So hopefully you can hear me. And this was, you know, useful. If you want to join my community, Lovefluencers, you can just go out to lovefluencers.com. You don't have to have any experience. I'm going to teach everybody how to build blogs and YouTube channels and podcasts and how to just start talking and give your message to the world. Because no matter how bad it is, and I've had bad, This is only one example of the bad. I feel like some of us know, you know, some of us feel like the universe, the universe is like disproportionately distributed some badness in our direction. Um, but it's not always— I don't know, I just feel like it's not. Sometimes you are given those struggles so that you can be the example to someone that it's going to be okay. And as hard as my life has been, I hope that that is part of my legacy, right? That that's part of my story. That as bad as things have been, as hard as things have been, that you would feel that you're not alone and that you can still have the dream that you have. You can still be successful. You can still do the things you want to do, even in the midst of struggle. So be an overcomer. You are an overcomer. Like, you've already overcome so much to even just be listening or watching this. So thank you so much. And I really am excited. I'm excited about the next year. I know it sounds crazy to say that because it's 2020 and we all know how this year has gone, but I still have hope. So be a hope dealer and spread it like confetti. And I really appreciate talking to you guys, and I will talk to you again soon. I never know when to cut— when these cut off. So if it cuts off in the middle of my sentence, I'm going to just keep talking so that at least, you know, I think you're important. I think what you say is important. I think your journey and experience is important. So I really, really hope you take a moment and share some of that with the rest of the world. So thanks again. I'm going to sign off. It was amazing. I hope you found it helpful. Have a great Friday. Okay. All right. I'm signing off. Talk to you later. Bye.