Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life by Emma Grede - 7

If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.

—Dolly Parton

The other week, my oldest son, Grey, said, “No one sits with me at lunch.” This broke my heart until his friend came over for a playdate and confided in us that every day, she picks Grey’s lunch up and brings it to her table because everyone wants to sit with him—and then he moves away to sit by himself. When he heard this, Jens howled with laughter.

“Ohmigod, Emma, Grey is exactly like you. You always say, ‘I have no friends in Los Angeles,’ yet people are hunting you down for dinner and drinks—you always say no.” Jens isn’t wrong. I don’t suffer from a lack of invitations; I just rarely want to go. I have a lot of casual friends, but my closest confidantes live in London and knew me long before other people knew my name.

In some ways, I’ve always been a loner—and I’ve always felt lonely. I spend a lot of time by myself, and often by choice. Spending time by myself is critical to my mental health, and I’ve found that I can increase my feelings of loneliness when I spend too much time with people I don’t really like or know that well. Small talk is not my friend. I find it disorienting and sad, as we all really want to be known on the deepest levels. And I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t know me really well. I’m also conscious of the fact that if everyone sitting at your table is on your payroll, you have a problem. The people I spend the most time with, the people I feel the closest to, the people I love, respect, and have chosen to be with every day are people who work with me. Quite simply, they are the people I like the most. It’s a conundrum: I know I can’t just hang out with my staff, even though that’s often my preference.

There is a fair amount of mental illness in my family, including a tendency for prolonged and debilitating depression. This has always served as a warning sign for me. I knew I would need to tend to my emotional health so that I never found myself taken out at the knees. And instead of denying my sadness and pain, I would pay attention to it. When I was in London and first working in fashion production, I would try to power through hard days—without fail, I’d get a migraine and need to get in bed. Later, when I started my company, every six weeks—like clockwork—I’d be overwhelmed, and I’d have to allow myself to take a pause and process my feelings. I promise: If you don’t deal with life, life will deal with you. But it’s also very normal to expect some sadness.

I always talk and think about my life as a “Rule of Thirds” because I believe that if you’re doing something difficult, or you’re chasing your dreams with the rigor that you should, or you’re going outside the norm to push yourself into a new space, you can expect to be happy about a third of the time. The other third of the time, you’re going to be all right, and the last third of the time, you’re going to feel a little shitty. And that’s okay. This is part of the human condition, and we all need the resilience to deal with it.

The expectation that you should wake up every day and feel that everything is fantastic and you’re killing it—that you’re the best wife, the best mother, and the best at work—is not realistic, and you’re setting yourself up to fail. This is why I feel it’s so important, as a highly visible mother and woman in business, to be honest that I have difficult days and not everything is easy. I always use the Rule of Thirds as a barometer for how I’m doing. If things are too good, then I’m probably not pushing forward enough, or I’m not seeing clearly or missing something. And if things are too difficult, then the balance is out of whack, and I need to dial it back a bit. Throughout it all, I use my emotions as a way to tune in to where I am in space and time. I let myself experience them so I don’t project them onto other people. And I allow myself to take the room I need and have my process.

One of the things I grieve continually is all the people I’ve left behind. Some of this is geography: Bel Air is far from East London. But some of this is a function of living a very different life than I did when I was thirteen. Every time I’ve made a seismic move—whether it was moving to Essex to live in my uncle’s house while he was in jail so I could go to a better high school, giving up weed and all its corresponding compatriots, leaving my first job in fashion production to start my own agency, or leaving London to launch Good American in LA—I’ve lost people. I’ve managed to pull some relationships forward, but many are lost to time, or exigency. Certain habits and ways of being, certain social groups, and sometimes my comfort zones needed to be firmly left behind.

There’s a great quote attributed to Tupac: “Just because you lost me as a friend doesn’t mean you gained me as an enemy. I’m bigger than that. I still want to see you eat, just not at my table.” This is exactly how I feel about my childhood and my upbringing: To move forward, I had to prune a lot of relationships and then cauterize those wounds so I wouldn’t feel too much pain about moving on. But those wounds still needed to heal. There’s a lot of sadness that comes with slowly tending to that pain of loss. When I was young, the only way I knew how to deal was by quickly moving on and away from situations. Now, I can sit with discomfort and know that I can handle it. Or at least I’m better at it.

I have always kept a journal—not so much so that I have a record of my days but so that I have a container for my feelings. Honestly, it’s one of the best ways to get a handle on what I’m really thinking, as it pushes my thoughts past my judgmental mind. When I feel my emotional well getting full, I know I need to rest for a bit and write things down. I don’t reread it much; I just write. This always levels me out.

I’ve noticed that motherhood has also evened me out a bit. This is partly because my kids create a natural break in my day—when I get home, my phone goes away for a few hours, and only those with access to my bat phone landline can reach me, which gives me a mental reprieve from work and other people. It’s also calibrated my concerns. The minute I had a baby I had a revelation that I had been completely worried about the wrong things. Before I had Grey, I would wake up in the middle of the night to do amendments to contracts I’d be negotiating; I haven’t done that since. And, on the flip side, as soon as I had Grey I also felt a surge in ambition. I wanted to be back in the world and at work almost immediately. As much as I loved also being with him, having him made me realize how much I am capable of, and the bigness of my life. But I will say that having kids put a boundary on my energy in a way that’s been very helpful. I don’t kill myself during the week thinking that I’ll recalibrate on the weekends. A weekend with four kids isn’t restful, so I need to find a way every day to break the chaos and focus on myself, even if it’s just for ten minutes. I suggest you do the same.

Another way I apply the brakes is meditation. I started doing Transcendental Meditation this year and have miraculously managed to find twenty minutes almost every morning to practice. I’ve trained myself to think of it as a different kind of work so I don’t feel so selfish when I slip away to do it. When I find myself overwhelmed by politics, existential dread, and concern for my kids, it’s become an essential way to return to myself and fill my tank. I feel far more grounded and resourced when I’m done. I need space and time like this because I get hundreds and hundreds of emails and texts a day, and I’m pulled from pillar to post—it’s become increasingly important to find ways to slow myself down before feelings of overwhelm force me to. A lot of people think of meditation as a way to calm down the mind before bed, but it actually plays the opposite role in my life: I sit for twenty minutes, about three or four times a week, and clearing my mind fills me with energy and the space for creativity and problem-solving. Finding out what gives you energy is really worth spending time on.

I also drop everything anytime for the people I love. I will walk out of a meeting to take a call from one of my sisters. I will fly to London for twenty-four hours so I don’t miss a close friend’s birthday. When I love, I love deeply. We all need people in our lives whom we don’t need to explain ourselves to, who are massively supportive of us outside of our primary romantic relationships. For me, Chenelle, Melissa, Holly, Etty, and Poppy are these women. They are friends I found in my late teens and early twenties when I was working my first real job. I was broke, and because I never went to university, I was the youngest alongside Chenelle. Without fail, when I headed off to the night train, Melissa would insist on giving me twenty quid for a cab to get home. They paid for all my weed and every single cocktail for years. I’m forever indebted to them for showing me a different side of life, helping me have fun, never judging my choices, and loving me so hard.

As I think about it, it’s not that surprising that I feel lonely, particularly because as much as there is to love about Los Angeles, its relationships are largely transactional, and that can be a tough pill to swallow. It’s rare to find an opportunity where you really get into someone’s life story and come to know them deeply, without any expectation that there’s something to get from the encounter. This is why I love meeting cab drivers when I travel. I love hearing what people are about when there’s absolutely no agenda outside of getting from here to there. People are so interesting, and warm, and good, especially when you can both settle into the present moment without any expectation of a return on that time except for a great conversation.

Ultimately, as a culture, I wish we were all more comfortable discussing our loneliness and sadness, particularly when we’re people whom others perceive to be at the pinnacle of success, who surely must have it all figured out. I’ve figured a lot of things out, it’s true, but you can’t “solve” sadness. And sometimes I’m very sad. I believe it’s important to speak about this: It’s easy to use social media as a glossy highlight reel of permanently good times and “winning” moments. Not only do I experience a lot of sadness, but I experience deep disappointment, discomfort, and hard-to-hear feedback a fair amount, too. This is okay. Being sad won’t prevent you from achieving greatness; it’s an essential part of the human experience. I’ve come to not only expect it but to embrace it as well.

Social media will try to convince you that you should always feel great, but the reality is that life is sometimes hard, and in its own way, that’s great, too. When we start with ourselves, sadness is a signal to listen to. It invites us inward, asking us to take responsibility for ourselves. Sadness, when you welcome it rather than resist it, becomes a mirror—showing us not what is wrong, but what is unfinished. To expect sadness isn’t about being pessimistic, but about being prepared. Sadness is a natural response to living. In this way, it is not weakness but a useful tool for self-ownership.