Welcome!

It was a dark and stormy night—no really, it was.  Our boutique creative agency YOU + ME* was in need of a retreat/vision quest/mini sabbatical/whatever you want to call it and we decided the perfect location was Salt Lake City in January.  We weren’t there to seek inspiration at Sundance or on the slopes (though that would have been a solid plan following the storm that blew through town).  Instead, we flew three quarters of the way across the country to attend the Altitude Summit, lovingly referred to as Alt, a design and social media conference that attracts creative powerhouses from all over the country. If you think boondoggle when you hear conference, it might not be obvious why we expected to forge a bold new path for our business from the lobby of the Grand America Hotel.  But forge we did.  It was time to step away from the glare of our computer screens and into the warm glow of shiny notebooks and neon pencils.   We wanted to liberate our brains from practical matters like business taxes and invoicing systems and let our minds wander toward our biggest dreams and grandest plans.  Most importantly, we needed to meaningfully connect—with old pals, new friends, and each other.

Over the course of our four-day trip, we had a blast (um, as you can see), extended our wheelhouse with a few new tricks, and figured out the next step on our never-ending quest to create a business that reflects our values and leads to fulfilling personal and professional lives. We stayed up late into the night discussing the fact that our internet circles are closing, rather than widening, comparing our experiences of the world, and chatting about our desire to connect women to each other in ways that extend beyond what our houses and weddings look like, what we cook for our families, and how we conceive of and present our outer selves. We downed coffee after coffee contemplating the fact that the online world has been one in which women have been framed as tearing each other down rather than building each other up. We lamented the dearth of online content for women that acknowledges that we are more than our outfits, our homes, and our consumption habits.

From that, the Equals Project was born.

And it looks like others have been thinking along the same lines. From the growing "Things I'm Afraid to Tell You" movement among bloggers, to the focus on meaningful gatherings in Kinfolk magazine, to people sharing incredibly thoughtful stories online with the sole intention of helping other people achieve happiness, it's clear that the internet is evolving from a place where we store and showcase our (often-unattainable) goals into a place where we can be real, multi-dimensional people. As we slow down and think about what we are really consuming on the internet, it seems as if we as a society are aching for meaning and process, rather than destinations and results. We hope you will find here a collection of stories, discussions, and art from women across the country (and across the world) that compels you to think, contribute your own stories and thoughts, and most of all, to act.

We are more than what we can cook, we are more than what we can create, more than our makeup, our jewelry, our aesthetic tastes. We are people with complex ideas, and conflicting thoughts, who read, travel, discuss, do, and make. We are people who are influenced and inspired by the women who came before us, and we aspire to create something greater than the sum of our parts.

After many months of work, tellingly accompanied by more grins than swear words, it’s finally time for us to make the Equals Project a reality.  We still have to pinch ourselves a little bit when we think of the talent, the stories, and the passion found among this amazing group of contributors and collaborators.  And we only get more excited when we think of how the Equals Project will be interpreted in print early next year.  We've also taken to jumping up and cheering on an hourly basis when we think about kicking off Equals Does, our philanthropic call to action--money is not the only tool for making a difference in the world.  In a short while, we’ll be announcing our first project representing Equals Does and featuring a series of inspiring projects that share a similar spirit. If you’re interested in supporting the Equals Project, you’re in luck:

• Follow us on facebook and twitter for regular updates
• Share The Equals Project with your friends, family, and every nice person you meet
• Contribute your writing, photography, or video (see submission guidelines)
• Send us a story of how you’ve used your skills, talents, or sheer gumption as a force for good in the world

Let's continue this conversation and get to know each other better, shall we?

Warmly,

Elisabeth & Miya

Hope & Childhood

"Mommy, Baachan and Jichan will come back tomorrow, and we will all go to the playground together." We've just left my parents off at the airport; they are making the journey back to San Francisco after a week visiting us and shuttling my nearly three year old daughter around Brooklyn. She calls them by the japanese name for grandmother and grandfather. "Oh, honey," I say, "Baachan and Jichan will be back soon, but not tomorrow." "They will! Tomorrow they will come." And she leaves it at that, nodding to herself. It dawns on me: she is wishing, or more than wishing — longing — something that I haven't noticed her doing before.

I've found that one of the most unexpected things about having a child is that it brings back so vividly my experience of being a child. Though she is still so young that there have been just hints and glimmers of her inner life, through my daughter, I am starting to remember how I lived seamlessly gliding between reality and fantasy for much of my day, every day. There was the strong conviction, even though I logically knew it not to be true, that if I hoped for something with my eyes shut tight enough or felt longing strongly enough, the impossible would somehow become possible. The possibilities, as the saying goes, were endless, unconstrained by logic or physics. I could reverse time, my orthodontist would decide to override my mother's wishes and give me hot pink braces, my little plastic figurines would really spring to life at night and carry on a life of their own. My hermit crab, Zeus (yes, I was that child), would decide to crawl back into his mighty shell rather than apathetically dragging his nubby stub of a body around in little circles, a hint at the surrender he was planning. My parents would finally agree that the our new puppy, who at that point had been responsible for the destruction of not less than sixty percent of the flooring in our house, was lonely and wanted a litter of friends to play with. I hoped for smaller things, too (ants on a log, a sunny day to go to the zoo), but it was as if the things that I knew I couldn't control, and perhaps more importantly, likely wouldn't get were the things for which I felt compelled to hope with the most conviction.

Though I hope for many things as my life moves forward, I don't hope anymore with the same conviction that I did as a child. I don't throw my entire being into hoping or longing; hope at this point is often guarded, muffled by reality, translated into drive and action.  I am not sure at what point hoping for hoping's sake fell out of my emotional repertoire. I remember hints of it in my adult life: sitting on my grandfather's bed after he had died and the body had been taken away, thinking about my husband the night after our first date, being pregnant with my daughter and waiting to hear the results of all of the routine tests. I'm curious about whether hope of this sort can be reintroduced, or even whether it has a place in my inner life as an adult.

These videos are so evocative of that hope in childhood. The first, Caine's Arcade, is a wonderful story both because the boy is so passionate about his arcade and because there was an adult who recognized that passion and became caught up in it. The second, a video for "Tuck the Darkness In" by the Bowerbirds, just captures that hope so profoundly.

"Tuck the Darkness In" by Bowerbirds from Secretly Jag on Vimeo.

Image at the top is a screenshot from the video above via the fabulous The Fox is Black.

Learning to be Happy, With or Without a Baby

During my first year of infertility, I remember feeling sad about my life when I heard that other friends were pregnant.

We're talking...mmm...maybe I'll cut out of this party early because I can't hide these tears any longer.  No thank you, I'll just sit this 35th baby shower out.  Don't you dare hand me a flower at church to carry around on Mother's Day cause I am already seconds away from busting out of this building early.

For a solid year, I was just seconds away from the deepest feelings of desperate/teary sadness, anger at the cruelty of this unfairness, inadequacy as a woman, shame that apparently something was wrong with my body, fear that I never would get pregnant, resentment that I was being left behind outside of the circle of mothers, and worry that somehow my life was not going to be worth anything if I couldn't get pregnant & have a family.  WHAT A SAD WAY TO LIVE!!  It was sad.  Very.

Luckily, years two, three, four, five, six, seven, & eight of infertility have been a completely different experience.  It has been a miracle.

I started learning that if I didn't change my overall perspective on trials, even if I DID get pregnant, I would still be pretty jacked up!!  Because even with a baby in tow, inevitably there would be many other things that wouldn't go my way.  It’s not like all of life’s problems would be solved by a baby (ha!)  So I started to see the scary reality that if I chose to live this way, basing my happiness on perfect circumstances, that I could easily live & die and only have small glimpses of happiness, only when things happened to be lined up perfectly.  I realized that was not the kind of life I wanted nor the kind of woman or mother that I wanted to be.  And so, year two I became a changed woman.  I changed the way I thought about my trials.  And I haven’t looked back for a day since.

And one of the greatest side effects of choosing to be happy?

I don't feel the tendency to compare my life with others anymore.  My life is what it is….and it is beautiful.  I now get to enjoy being TRULY happy & overjoyed every time I see a little baby.  And I am thrilled each & every time I hear of a friend or sister or cousin or neighbor who is pregnant.  And I am amazed at the miracle of a birth every time I hear that a new little one has arrived to this beautiful life safe & sound.   Babies are miracles.  Getting pregnant is a miracle.  Birth is a miracle.  Creating a family is a miracle.  What a shame that hearing of these things used to make me sad & cause me pain.  They're the most beautiful things that ever happen in this life!  What a privilege it is to see it unfold and to be a part of it in many ways, even if I am not yet a mother.

-Mara Kofoed

Being "Camera-ready"

I had just gotten braces when I went to Europe for the first time with my family. There’s an entire photo album---with acetate sticky pages and all---of me looking awkwardly lanky and oddly unhappy in four weeks’ worth of posed shots: beside the Grand Canal, in front of the Coliseum, atop the Eiffel Tower, and below ground in salt mines of Austria. I didn’t want to smile and reveal a mouth full of metal and I hadn’t yet seen Tyra Banks preach the value of the “smise” (smiling with one’s eyes) on reality TV. And this was at a time when only a handful of people would see the glossy prints we had to wait two days for and pick up from the drugstore. I sometimes wonder what fourteen-year-old me would have done if there were the promise (or threat) of family photos on Facebook.

To bemoan the pressure young people must increasingly feel to be “camera-ready” for social media risks falling in the category of “good ol’ days” nostalgia. And as an adult with a personal blog as well as my own array of social media accounts (and a compulsion to document life), it also risks condescension.  In other words, feeling self-conscious and controlling one’s public image is not a new phenomenon. And getting over that feeling or letting go of control are not challenges reserved for the young.

Even now, I look at photos of my beautiful mother with me as a baby, images so fondly ingrained in my mind, and catch myself trying to compose myself for family shots with my son---hoping that he too will one day look back and think "look at me and my beautiful mother." If I look at a photo of myself holding the baby, fresh from sleep, with bed-head and pillow wrinkles still pressed into my cheek, I am apt to cringe and tempted to say "delete"---always seeing the images through the eyes of an imagined audience. But with the passage of time (even days), I find that my vanity fades and I see how valuable these candid captured moments are.

What feels new is that these challenges of being "camera-ready" must be (or at least now tend to be) met so often, even hourly. With blogs and social media, everything is documented and shared. The playground and the cafeteria extend into the living room; and if you're not the one telling your story, somebody else probably will be.

The cynic points to the unsavory image of pre-teens vamping in Facebook profile pictures, hoping to get more “likes,” or the attention (or envy) of others; the optimist talks about things like community, memory, and hobby (and maybe mumbles something about phases and trends).

At its most benign, the hundreds of photos we take with our phones test the limits of our hard-drives, but there are other more troubling consequences as the reach and the size of one's imagined audience grows.

French theorist Michel Foucault talks about the Panoptican effect whereby the threat of being observed at any given time leads us to self-police (control, inhibit, regulate) our behaviors to fit social norms. Essentially he argues that we internalize the expectations (or desires) of others, with dangerous results for those who fall outside the norm.

There's no resolution to this. There's no "outside" from social pressure. So I suppose the only goal can be mitigation. I wonder sometimes what I might say to a daughter. How does one advise someone to put down the camera phone for a while and just enjoy the moment? To stop waiting for that imaginary audience's approval? It’s something I could be better at, too.

[image by Brooke Fitts]