#42 Reinvention
About becoming a visionary
When you’re a little girl, no one treats you like a visionary.
Your toys are cute and your dresses too, your shoes must be polished, your ponytails must be sleek. Your dolls should be put back where they go at the end of the day. Endless playdates in the park, visits to the mall, trying on little dresses, gifts splattered with magenta and baby blue and lilac.
Girls are rarely treated like builders or movers or doers. Girls are playmates, team-members, they’re creative, sure, they’re sensitive, they’re community oriented. But they’re not the builders or the chiefs or the leaders.
I don’t have a clear idea of when exactly I started picking up on these things. I wasn’t a particularly “bossy” kid (I hate that word) and I wasn’t a loud one back then, either. I was complimented by my teachers often on my intelligence and my ability to understand stuff in the classroom. I was a high performer. I took on positions in extracurricular activities that gave me a leadership edge. From NHS President to a leading role in the school play, things like that. Yes, I lived in an extremely gendered society, but I also had the chance to lead smaller teams, if you can call it that, and contribute to our communities. It was through service work or the arts, rather than math or technology, but it was a way to take the lead nevertheless.
Then I got older and I got to university and into the workforce. I noticed something standing out, slowly and then all at once: women aren’t called visionaries often. They’re not labeled as builders, cutting-edge, or leading in their field. You can guess what demographic is. But I’m not here to write about that!
The past couple of months, I’ve been seeing/hearing the same words: “commit to the vision” “hold the vision” “focus on the vision!” and “have a vision” and all their variations. I was like, ok, lol. How do I even get a vision? Where do you go get those?
Enter @maiaben - a fellow Venezuelan creative, someone interested in self-improvement, spirituality and sustainable growth. A builder. A visionary.
She’s been taking about holding the vision for ages, and I didn’t really get what she was on about. Women being visionaries? That was a bit foreign to hear so blatantly, so out in the open. Assigning agency isn’t new; there’s a reason I chose it over my career over two years ago as a freelancer. It’s the embodiment of that agency that was.
She released a workbook from her passion project, Colectiva Magazine, sometime in early January. On the 4th of January, I went to my favorite working café and decided to give it a go. Journaling has been a life-saving practice before, helping me trace versions of myself back, helping me understand and picture the past into a coherent vision of my present. I had never used it to form a coherent vision of the future.
What happened is probably highly predictable but not any less surprising: after about 2 hours in the flow of writing, I came at a stop asking me to think of symbols, words, or mantras that I could latch my vision onto. I thought of a tree immediately. Specifically, the Araguaney.
The Araguaney is a sturdy, beautiful tree native to Venezuela and other Latin American countries, such as Peru, Panama, and Colombia.
It is remarkably resilient. It can be found in savannas, forests, and urban areas, a testament to its ability to thrive no matter the weather. This tree embodied my vision: to imagine a world filled with resilient, beautiful stories, encouraging me to remember the root of my message and purpose.
My purpose: to build a life that gives me freedom, space for creativity, and the ability to work with businesses that are focused on building a sustainable future. No more of “I love writing! I can write for anything/about anything/for anyone!” Enter the vision. The perspective. The specificity.
Holding a vision takes commitment: to a long-term goal, a long-term feeling, if there is one; to myself. I spent a lot of the past year floundering for what that vision was. Once you “get” what you wanted, what do you do? Where do you go when you’ve reached the remote-friendly, make-your-own-hours workweeks and vacations?
Then I came back to the necessity of viewing myself as a visionary. What kind of label goes with that? What kind of identifier feels good?
Now, I’ve just spent a week-ish deciding to start a new chapter in my professional career, making a big pivot from self-identifying as a freelancer to a founder. The shift is immense. Suddenly, there’s room for a long-term vision, for a mission, a purpose separate from myself.
According to investopedia, a freelancer is A freelancer is an independent contractor who earns wages on a per-job or per-task basis, typically for short-term work. The key word there is short-term. And there’s nothing wrong with it: fun, per-task work is satisfying. You can see the start and end of this type of work. Deliverables, submissions and invoices within month to month schedules or in periodical increments. It is very satisfying, yes, but it isn’t what I want any more.
Part of being in the (very privileged, very blessed) position I’m in is to recognize that there’ll always be an urge to reinvent. Or maybe it’s discovering that I will always have an urge, sooner or later, to reinvent. Shapeshifting is something I sometimes have the luck to choose willingly — more often than not, it’s something I start going through when I realize that my desires have changed, that I want something else, that I want more of what I love.
I don’t think this is particularly special, or unique, or gifted, or uncommon. I think we all want more of what we love, more of what makes us happy. We want to keep dreaming all the time. It’s our nature to. I guess what makes it difficult is knowing when to feel the pulse of something changing, of being constantly attuned to your inner voice, your deepest desires; of living without shame, of expelling the guilt of wanting more, of shapeshifting it into drive to make something new in the world. To become something, someone new.
And I’m always becoming. That process is deliciously ongoing in a very annoying way. I remember a friend of mine, Eliana, telling me something that changed the way I saw self-actualization, that devious journey: sitting on a bench after work in Amsterdam in 2019, she tells me, “You’re never done. You’re never finished. What would you do then? There would be nothing left to do.”
Thank God she’s right. Thank god for change. Thank god for visions. Thank god for wanting to follow them even when you were never told you were capable of them. Thank god for willing yourself into a new shape to accommodate your desired life. Your new life. It’s yours to build.
proud if u <3