It’s funny, every time I sit down to write anything to publish on Are We There Yet (AWTY) I think of my first senior editorial role at a men’s lifestyle magazine. The editor was also the publisher and “creator” of the publication. He’d woken up one day, after countless years of reading Arena, a very popular mainstream men’s title in the 90s, and thought. “This publication doesn’t speak to me, it doesn’t represent who or what I am.” And then promptly went off and started his own men’s magazine, Untold, a publication that said and portrayed exactly how he wanted to be seen. And he couldn’t have been the only man that felt dissatisfied with what main stream media was shovelling at the time as that magazine became the best selling in it’s category in the UK. Now, you may be thinking what does that have to do with AWTY?
Nothing and everything. Here I are in the fourth year of a journey started, in the main, because a group of women felt that there was a lack of inspiration and encouragement for women, young and old, trying to succeed, not only in their work but also in their life balance as well. We are more than the sum number of parts that mainstream media portrays us to be. Tamara Mellon, former Chief Creative Officer and co-founder of Jimmy Choo, once said that sometimes she would read an article written about her and feel that it was a caricature of what someone would assume a business woman would be like…and isn’t that right?! Heaven help the woman who wants to run her own business but still wears high heels and a great dress, she can’t be taken seriously, can she? Or the entrepreneur who feels that being ethical to the planet as well has her business is more important than a massive profit line. One of the singular pieces of advice given to a group of women Entrepreneur by Arianna Huffington that really struck home with me was when she said, and I’m paraphrasing; that we all need to re-assess what we mean by ‘success’ and how we achieve it. That as women we need to carve our own path to success, that we can’t follow down the path and blue prints laid down by men, i.e. stress and a build-up of pressure that leads to a heart attack in our early fifties. While Donna Karan reminded me once that though we are great care-givers and nurturers, on the whole women are notoriously bad at nurturing and taking care of ourselves and each other. At which point I remember just wishing she’d take me home and adopt me, I’d be over the moon to have Donna Karan be my care-giver.
I have been lucky enough in the months leading up to launching this site to make contact to a hugely diverse group of female bloggers. What I found when researching and connecting with these amazing women is that some of the biggest sites with the most unique users per month were dedicated to mothers networking or demonstrating, trying to make a difference in their own small way, in the words of Nancy Pelosi, taking it “from the kitchen to Congress.” Or they were craft oriented sites that taught you how to make…stuff; with an old blanket and a glue gun, I kid you not; there are hundreds of thousands of individuals who get satisfaction and gratification from these crafts sites every month. It gave me pause. I write to inspire, motivate and stimulate, the women around me have all gotten to where they have through tremendous hard work and effort, they are at the top of their field but I’m sure each of them will tell you that “the view at the top” is different for each individuals. So if I was being totally honest with myself and so by default with you, I’d have to ask, given the choice, in a utopia where food grew on trees and Choos came free, would I be the kind of person who would still be striving to make an impact on the world, to be successful, call the shots, is it nature or nurture that brings about palpations at the thought of ever having a boss tell me what to do again? Or would I be happy sitting in a tree, eating free Wotsits and making hats out of some banana leaves and a glue gun? The answer my friend is written in the wind…. But what success is? Only the person who it affects defines that answer.
