Dangly Earrings and Other Breaks with the Past

Issue 138 — August 10, 2020

CBS Sunday Morning reminded me, in a piece about President Gerald Ford’s photographer David Hume Kennerly, that August 9 was the anniversary of the date in 1974 when President Richard Nixon resigned from office. Why is this relevant?

Well, it is quite relevant to me, for it marked a major turning point in my life and my career. As it happens, that is also the date on which I was offered and accepted my first CEO position. I became executive director of the small young Planned Parenthood affiliate in West Texas.

At the time, I was planning on becoming a high school social studies teacher. I had just finished my college degree after a twelve-year stint of balancing babies, college courses, and work. I had yet to do my student teaching in the fall to get my secondary school teaching certification.

I told myself that by taking the position, I could deviate from my career plan for just a few years. After all, this opportunity sounded interesting and in keeping with my social justice values.

Thirty years later, I retired as the organization’s national president.

Life is like that sometimes. You come to a place where a decision must be made quickly and unexpectedly. As the late baseball great Yogi Berra might or might not have said, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

I’ve generally said “yes” to opportunities that presented themselves to me, and for the most part concur with Yogi’s advice.

But after 30 years of representing an organization and a cause, I was exhausted and ready to have a voice of my own. I was at another fork in the road. What did I want to be in the last third of my life, and how did I want to make that transition?

In many respects the pandemic we are experiencing is forcing us to go through that kind of thought process now, not necessarily of our own volition.

I found that I needed to do something symbolic to, in effect, liberate myself for a kind of rebirth. While I knew I wanted to go back to where I had started 30+ years prior, into the larger women’s and civil rights space, and I knew that I wanted to write books and commentary, I wasn’t at all sure what form that would take. I was floundering for a while after so many years of laser focus on one thing.

So I started a newsletter and rudimentary website so I could stay in touch with the many friends and professional colleagues I had made along the way as well as connecting with new ones.

But I also did something symbolic. Perhaps it was symbolic only to me, I thought, but it marked a clear separation in my self-perception between the me in the rearview mirror and the new me eager to forge a new road ahead.

I got my ears pierced so I could wear beautiful dangly earrings.

Not a hugely radical act on its face, though for me it marked a departure from the buttoned up persona I had cultivated to represent a movement rather than myself as an individual.

Getting my ears pierced was a kind of liberation from the constraints of the past.

Then something unexpected happened. Of all the articles, photo, and words I put into my newsletters, that revelation generated the most comments, from men as well as women. It seemed that everyone had a story.

Here’s a way you can share your story and Take The Lead might just publish it.

Any act that represents a break from the past creates energy, sometimes negative, more often positive.

For all its downsides, this pandemic has forced us to have a great deal of creativity, along with the despair many people feel from being isolated, laid off, and generally unsure of the future. Way back in April, when it seemed we would get control of COVID-19 much sooner than we have, I made this podcast on how to normalize something better after a crisis.

I’m curious. Do you have a dangly earring story, when you made a big change or symbolic break from the past and into a new future? Would you share your equivalent of my dangly earrings? What have you done that represents the power to change in your life? Why did you do it? Was it by any chance prompted by the pandemic or some other major change in your environment? And what has been the result? I can’t wait to learn your stories. You can email them to me at powertoyou@taketheleadwomen.com or send them here.

GLORIA FELDT is the Cofounder and President of Take The Lead, a motivational speaker and expert women’s leadership developer for companies that want to build gender balance, and a bestselling author of four books, most recently No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power. Former President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, she teaches “Women, Power, and Leadership” at Arizona State University and is a frequent media commentator. Learn more at www.gloriafeldt.com and www.taketheleadwomen.com. Tweet Gloria Feldt.