Karen Walrond, my guest on the Disrupt Yourself Podcast, is a native of Trinidad and Tobago. Her parents were well-educated, well-employed, highly accomplished. When she was eleven, they moved to Houston, Texas, where she lives today.
“Everybody had these very southern drawls and I didn’t....I had very short hair; I’m black, the neighborhood we were in was like 99% white and I had very short hair. I had a teeny, weeny afro—a TWA as we say. And I just stood out, like sore thumb. "
Karen has been a super-successful attorney in the oil and gas industry, and although she keeps her license to practice law current, she made a leap to a more artistic career path over a decade ago. It’s a classic tale of personal disruption, and I recommend the podcast episode on that basis alone.
But Karen also provides a lot of insight on the issue of diversity—not just the large categories such as race, gender and sexual orientation that we routinely identify with diversity, although those issues are certainly there—but the micro-diversity that makes each person unique and irreplaceable in the world, both in terms of life experience, distinctive strengths, and tender vulnerabilities.
Recognizing our distinctive strengths and choosing career avenues that help us play to and exploit them, is right in the mix of important accelerants of personal disruption. In fact, one of the ways to identify those distinctive strengths—things you not only do well, but that others around you do not—is to look at things that made us stand out, even in weird ways, when we were young.
However, as Karen’s story unfolds, it’s obvious that recalling those oddities of youth can be painful.
“It was the 70s, which was a lot less of an enlightened time, so I had students giving me a hard time. I had teachers...I had one teacher whom I will never forget who was just horrible to me.
“I didn’t understand what the big deal was. Having not grown up in the U.S., having not really been exposed to the history of the U.S....it just made no sense to me. And coming from a country where everybody was brown—not everybody was black—but Trinidad is primarily south-Asian and black and Asian and some white. And everybody’s mixed.... I just didn’t stand out in Trinidad.”
But Houston was a different story. Even at the young age of eleven, Karen wasn’t surprised to look different than her new Texas neighbors, but she was surprised to be treated differently because of it.
She wasn’t a confident misfit in those days. Who really is, at eleven?
“I immediately started changing as much as I could. I grew my hair out; I straightened it. I started wearing makeup which I hadn’t been doing. I got this, what I like to call CNN American accent...where you can’t really tell where in America I’m from.
“I couldn’t do anything about being black, but at least I looked more black-American, and then two years later we moved back to Trinidad and I looked like a freak. I had this weird accent and my hair was straight....So then I cut all my hair off again and got my accent back and started speaking the way I was supposed to speak.”
Fast forward 30 years to the publication of The Beauty of Different, and the mature perspective that diversity makes us stronger and that authenticity is essential to tap into our superpowers. And the big, beautiful afro that Karen sports today. Her superpower, or one of them, derived from the experiences of her youth, is to be a champion cheerleader for celebrating individuality.
Aging, after all, is the real problem. And it’s a diversity issue we haven’t addressed well; ageism is rampant, yet another bastion of discrimination we need to lay siege to.
I asked Karen what brought her to focus her efforts on this topic. “I got older. What I think about a lot is getting older....It wasn’t that I was worried about getting older because I’ve never worried about getting older; I’ve never had a problem about it and actually that was the point.
I was not seeing a lot of writing and content out there about the exhilaration of getting older; about how getting older is a really awesome thing.
“I was loving getting older. I felt stronger, I felt smarter, I felt more confident, and more secure in the person I wanted. I felt like I knew my values more and wanted to live them more and didn’t really care if people thought I should be living in a different way. And that was sort of the experience of my friends that were in similar ages. And so I started a photo project.”
She was ready for a change, a little disruption. Since leaving the practice of law, she’s been a speaker, photographer and writer. One thing that’s certainly true about aging is that we continue to change; our perspective continues to evolve, as do our priorities.
“I was kind of in the doldrums about my blog....I feel like I’m writing 100 percent for an audience, yet when I first started writing the blog it was really 100 percent for me. I just don’t have the passion around it that I did.” She didn’t want to stop writing, or speaking or shooting pictures, but she did need to reenergize and reinvigorate her work. A friend advised her to write what she wanted to read.
So she did. Now we too can read about growing and thriving and getting older not just gracefully, but grandly, and appreciating each other a little more along the way.
