An uncohesive narrative
...mine, of course
It’s standard fare, when you meet someone and start to get to know them, to ask what they do and how they got there. My students often ask me, “How did you get to where you are?” aka “What was your career trajectory?” These are possibly the worst questions ever for me. Because where to begin? At the beginning? That would take hours. At the point where I think that person’s interest might lie? Then how will they know the crooked paths and intuitive ley lines that got me there?
When I was up for review at my program a couple of years ago, I was told my interests and work were too disparate, and that I should try to create a “more cohesive narrative.” While I understood the practicality of this well-intentioned feedback, a familiar rebellion arose from within, alongside a deep swell of shame for being 45 years old with two teen children, three degrees, and numerous successful businesses under my belt, and still unable to articulate a narrative of my life and work that was comprehensible to these seasoned teachers, who had mentored innumerable students and faculty alike. Certainly, it seemed, I had enough work on my CV. The problem was, it didn’t make sense. It didn’t add up. It was incoherent.
I have carried with me since childhood a fear and feeling of not being understood, of not being able to clearly articulate myself and my interests and ideas to the point that other people could get where I was coming from. Often times, I feel that when I am trying to answer the aforementioned questions, I am speaking incomprehensible gibberish. I have been called a Creative Executive, a Creative Entrepreneur, A Master of Reinvention, a Female Business Owner; I have called myself a writer, a CEO, a President, a Storyteller, a Creative Director, an Editor-in-Chief, a publicist/strategist/consultant. I see the look of confusion when, in my current position as highly trained (although not highly ranked or paid) academic, I mention that I was a massage therapist and bodyworker for over a decade. I don’t even add that I was a homebirth midwife assistant and birth and post-partum doula. Possibly I have already mentioned to them that I used to own and run my own businesses.
Almost invariably, people break eye contact and look down and to the right. When I first noticed this, I looked it up. In nonverbal body language, looking down and to the right can mean that someone is accessing their imagination through kinesthetic thoughts or memories, or creating self-talk. In other words, they are trying to put together a picture they can understand of the story I am telling, as it is one that doesn’t fit into a narrative familiar to them. If a sequence of events does not relate to a particular social narrative, it is unfamiliar. It is strange. It is incoherent.
Sometimes the conversation will continue. Many times, it stops abruptly, I think because the person doesn’t know where to go with it. First of all, in this iteration of the bodywork, we’d have to talk about the body and the fact that I’ve touched lots of people’s bodies intimately, which people are just generally uncomfortable with. This was true when I was actually doing bodywork. And second, they’d have to do the work of making the connection between the person they knew just a moment ago as a “professor,” an intellectual in an academic framework, and somehow tie in the “business” stuff, and that work is just too hard.
Listen. #notallpeople. I get that. This is a generalization, but it is a common enough occurrence, and bothers me enough, that I figured I might as well try to put together a little timeline.
I should also note that in 2021 I was diagnosed with inattentive ADHD. This is a longer story, but suffice it to say, the diagnosis helped clarify a lot of things. My multiplicity of interests and pursuits, and my ability to put my skills and talents to use across capacities and roles, which had always seemed perfectly understandable to me, suddenly made sense. Not so much that I hadn’t understood myself and my plan - that has always been pretty clear to me - but that my approach to the world, and the requirements of the systems in which I circulate, do not align. In other words, it’s not me, it’s them. Or that, depending on how you see a social system.
This disjoint can make for marvelous innovations and leaps of thinking and creativity. I won’t go into the many amazing people at the tops of their fields of interest who have identified themselves as neurodiverse. But it also takes a lot of work, to feel constantly outside a system; to accept your place outside and work to make yourself smaller or to fit into it, which I think in neurodiverse lingo is masking; or to push back and feel in a constant state of resistance. It’s exhausting, and can lead to depression and mental health issues, the flip side of the coin.
Getting a diagnosis can create complicated feelings. For me, it was a relief. It wasn’t that I was doing something wrong, or not enough, or that there was something wrong with me. Rather, some of the ways that I operate in the world simply don’t fit into our current social and cultural systems and norms. And it’s not that I am necessarily even choosing this, or not trying hard enough, but rather that my brain and approach simply work differently - and that I am not alone. There exists a language and words and a framework by which I can explain myself to people if I choose to do so. A diagnosis has offered me a lens through which other people could understand.
”Having ADHD” doesn’t really change anything for me in the way I approach the world. However, it has liberated me from the sense that I need to have a “cohesive narrative.” I still work within existing structures, and there’s much of it that I like. But now, I feel more free and validated to own my own story, to openly pursue my multiplicity of interests, and to feel comfortable if my narrative is uncohesive to some. I know my story.
And if when I’m telling it, someone looks down and to the right, I can just say: “Check out my website. It’s under Uncohesive Narrative.”
When I was up for review at my program a couple of years ago, I was told my interests and work were too disparate, and that I should try to create a “more cohesive narrative.” While I understood the practicality of this well-intentioned feedback, a familiar rebellion arose from within, alongside a deep swell of shame for being 45 years old with two teen children, three degrees, and numerous successful businesses under my belt, and still unable to articulate a narrative of my life and work that was comprehensible to these seasoned teachers, who had mentored innumerable students and faculty alike. Certainly, it seemed, I had enough work on my CV. The problem was, it didn’t make sense. It didn’t add up. It was incoherent.
I have carried with me since childhood a fear and feeling of not being understood, of not being able to clearly articulate myself and my interests and ideas to the point that other people could get where I was coming from. Often times, I feel that when I am trying to answer the aforementioned questions, I am speaking incomprehensible gibberish. I have been called a Creative Executive, a Creative Entrepreneur, A Master of Reinvention, a Female Business Owner; I have called myself a writer, a CEO, a President, a Storyteller, a Creative Director, an Editor-in-Chief, a publicist/strategist/consultant. I see the look of confusion when, in my current position as highly trained (although not highly ranked or paid) academic, I mention that I was a massage therapist and bodyworker for over a decade. I don’t even add that I was a homebirth midwife assistant and birth and post-partum doula. Possibly I have already mentioned to them that I used to own and run my own businesses.
Almost invariably, people break eye contact and look down and to the right. When I first noticed this, I looked it up. In nonverbal body language, looking down and to the right can mean that someone is accessing their imagination through kinesthetic thoughts or memories, or creating self-talk. In other words, they are trying to put together a picture they can understand of the story I am telling, as it is one that doesn’t fit into a narrative familiar to them. If a sequence of events does not relate to a particular social narrative, it is unfamiliar. It is strange. It is incoherent.
Sometimes the conversation will continue. Many times, it stops abruptly, I think because the person doesn’t know where to go with it. First of all, in this iteration of the bodywork, we’d have to talk about the body and the fact that I’ve touched lots of people’s bodies intimately, which people are just generally uncomfortable with. This was true when I was actually doing bodywork. And second, they’d have to do the work of making the connection between the person they knew just a moment ago as a “professor,” an intellectual in an academic framework, and somehow tie in the “business” stuff, and that work is just too hard.
Listen. #notallpeople. I get that. This is a generalization, but it is a common enough occurrence, and bothers me enough, that I figured I might as well try to put together a little timeline.
I should also note that in 2021 I was diagnosed with inattentive ADHD. This is a longer story, but suffice it to say, the diagnosis helped clarify a lot of things. My multiplicity of interests and pursuits, and my ability to put my skills and talents to use across capacities and roles, which had always seemed perfectly understandable to me, suddenly made sense. Not so much that I hadn’t understood myself and my plan - that has always been pretty clear to me - but that my approach to the world, and the requirements of the systems in which I circulate, do not align. In other words, it’s not me, it’s them. Or that, depending on how you see a social system.
This disjoint can make for marvelous innovations and leaps of thinking and creativity. I won’t go into the many amazing people at the tops of their fields of interest who have identified themselves as neurodiverse. But it also takes a lot of work, to feel constantly outside a system; to accept your place outside and work to make yourself smaller or to fit into it, which I think in neurodiverse lingo is masking; or to push back and feel in a constant state of resistance. It’s exhausting, and can lead to depression and mental health issues, the flip side of the coin.
Getting a diagnosis can create complicated feelings. For me, it was a relief. It wasn’t that I was doing something wrong, or not enough, or that there was something wrong with me. Rather, some of the ways that I operate in the world simply don’t fit into our current social and cultural systems and norms. And it’s not that I am necessarily even choosing this, or not trying hard enough, but rather that my brain and approach simply work differently - and that I am not alone. There exists a language and words and a framework by which I can explain myself to people if I choose to do so. A diagnosis has offered me a lens through which other people could understand.
”Having ADHD” doesn’t really change anything for me in the way I approach the world. However, it has liberated me from the sense that I need to have a “cohesive narrative.” I still work within existing structures, and there’s much of it that I like. But now, I feel more free and validated to own my own story, to openly pursue my multiplicity of interests, and to feel comfortable if my narrative is uncohesive to some. I know my story.
And if when I’m telling it, someone looks down and to the right, I can just say: “Check out my website. It’s under Uncohesive Narrative.”
An (unfinished) (sort-of) timeline;
or,
An attempt at linearity.
1 Born and raised in Los Angeles, California.
Spent a lot of time around the state on family trips, connecting with the places and people and histories. A constant reader, nose-in-a-book, daydreamer. Challenging family dynamics in a privileged “upper-middle-class” environment created a hyperawareness of presentation and appearance, the expectation to make things look good even when they are not. Lemonade from lemons, which has its upsides, and its downs. First job washing dogs for a delightfully flagrant mobile pet groomer; second, delivering pizzas for a neighborhood restaurant in the Palisades called Jacopos, which included many celebrity sightings in pyjamas and various states of disrepair.
2 LA -> NY -> Paris -> NY 1992-1996
Aspiring writer, early francophile, lover of the Beat poets and punks, captivated with the artists and cultures of the Western canon, not that I would have called it that back then. Scornful of LA’s obsession with “fake” beauty and celebrity status. “Escaped” LA to go to New York University and a year at the American University in Paris. Compromised with a father determined to push for law school while still pursuing writing with a BA in Comparative Literature from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, with a focus on French. Internships in Paris on the archive of the letters of Samuel Beckett with Prof Daniel Gunn; at DNA Modeling Agency in Manhattan connected by a former Parisian roommate; and finally at what would now be called a micro-audience startup magazine called Manhattan File, founded by socialite Cristina Greeven (now Greeven-Cuomo, married to Chris Cuomo). Internship in the fashion editorial department at MF with Fashion Director Jackie Astier working on cover and editorial stories led to assistant styling jobs on shoots for MF, Harper’s Bazaar, and J.Crew, amongst others; as well as music videos including the emerging Missy Elliott, MC Lyte, and then Puff Daddy (now Sean Combs) at the height of his 1996 breakthrough.
3 LA 1996 -> 2007
Daunted by the post-graduation prospect of living in New York, and demoralized as a creative writer by Derrida and deconstructionism, moved back to LA to reassess, with a vision of moving back to Paris or elsewhere overseas. Over the next 4 years, went through a variety of jobs that only later started to make sense in terms of honing recognition of creative work and talent and building the narratives around them through a variety of mediums, including (but not limited to): freelance styling jobs on editorial and video shoots; mailroom to assistant at literary and talent agency; assistant to award-winning songwriter Al Kasha; assistant and then junior agent at a business-oriented speaker’s bureau; event coordinator at Paycom, at the time an innovative and legitmate credit card processing company that made most of its money through online porn, my introduction to how the internet really operates.
Wanting to write, and fed up with jobs that only seemed to perpetuate the celebrity culture, decided to try to work independently as a massage therapist and on styling shoots. Living with soon-to-be husband Michael Sagol in Venice Beach, learned from a German neighbor in the apartment complex about lay midwifery and birthwork. Connected with local homebirth midwife Louana Siebold. Received certification as a birth and post-partum doula through DONA (Doulas of North America) and maintaining membership in Doulas of Southern California (DASC) and the Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA). Became assistant to Siebold, and later Nkem Ndefo-Haven, at prenatal, delivery, and post-partum care; and an independent birth (home and hospital) and post-partum doula focused on supporting families and advocating for their choices before, during and after childbirth through integrating and educating on both non-interventionist and medicalized approaches, embracing the reality that all birth is natural birth.
In 1999, was offered to take over the aromatherapy boutique and day spa The Bey’s Garden on Main Street in Santa Monica, founded by Marcel Lavabre, a pioneer in contemporary aromatherapy and essential oils. Over the next 7 years, was the sole proprietor for The Bey’s Garden, a hub for holistic bodywork and known for intuitive practice and offerings. Was one of the first day spas to embrace and offer all-organic products, before the proliferation of the wellness culture and Whole Foods retail. Continued to work with bodywork and birth clients.
In 2003, opened a second shop down the street, an interior design store called Blue Door in partnership with mother and sister to explore a shared love of design. Blue Door offered interior design services and featured then-emerging small production furniture, textile, and home decor lines including John Robshaw and Neesha Crosland.
In 2006, following the birth of baby Lucia and wanting to focus back on writing, sold The Bey’s Garden to an excited new proprietor.
The Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 saw the closing of both The Bey’s Garden by the new owner, and Blue Door, businesses and communities that had taken years to build.
To be continued...!
Two thoughts after having come this far. First, you should know this is as much for me as it is for you. And second, it was really quite fun and refreshing to write all this information down. It took a long time, but there’s a certain relief and satisfaction in getting the words down (as always). I’m excited to add images, and create a textual and visual representation that is not social media.
I highly recommend it.
3 LA 2007 -> 2018 (in-process!)
- Writing scripts and treatments for directors and production companies.
- Writers Boot Camp Professional Screenwriters Program
- Freelance public relations, events, and marketing for directors, projects, and production companies.
- Co-founder, Academy of Archivists. An independent modern resource working outside of traditional lines for companies, brands and artists in the creative fields.
- Founder, Raconteur. A consultancy focused on a creative storytelling approach to publicity, marketing, and brand strategy based in Los Angeles. Founded in 2011 by writer/entrepreneur Alison Williams, the consultancy serves as a leading resource for a range of forward-thinking clients on the cutting edge of culture and media creation. Clients include:
180 LA / Anonymous Content / Believe Media / Big Block / Black Dog / Caviar Content / Digital Domain / Epoch Films / Gary Baseman / Geena Davis Institute / Genpop / Iconoclast / J O J X / Knucklehead / Lively Group / Luma / MPC / New Land / Not Impossible Labs / Not Impossible Now / Partizan / Possible / Pysop / Rattling Stick / Ring The Alarm / RSA / Slim Pictures / Somesuch / Squeak E Clean / Stink / Strike Anywhere / Supermoon / Therapy Studios / Therapy Content / UKMVA / The Uprising Creative / VehicleVR / Visual Creatures / Whitehouse Post / Wolf + Crow
Media Writing & Placement:
AdAge · AdWeek · BBC · Buzzfeed · Communication Arts · Contagious · Creativity · Creative Review · DAZED · Dexigner · ELLE · Esquire · Fast Company · Forbes · Huffington Post · Hollywood Reporter · Hunger · Hype Beast · Juxtapoz · Los Angeles Times · New York Times · Mashable · Monster Children · Muse by Clio · NOWNESS · Pitchfork · PromoNews · Psfk · Re/Code · Refinery29 · Rolling Stone · Shoot · Shots · Teen Vogue · The Drum · The Guardian · TIME · Variety · Vanity Fair · Vice · Videostatic · Upworthy · USA Today · Washington Post
4 LA -> Ojai 2018 - 2023 (in-process!)
- 2018 Graduated Chapman University, MFA Creative Writing/MA English
- 2018 Sold Raconteur to long-time employees Olia Ougrik and Marissa Puget
- 2018 Moved to Ojai full-time with Lucia and Stella
- Started teaching part-time in the Writing Program at UC Santa Barbara
- Moved to full-time position just before the start of the pandemic
- 2023 Started Transart Institute PhD in Creative Practice