Read Beset Founder’s Origin Story

Transcript:

 When I was eight years old, my family moved into an apartment complex, and it was the first time I remember playing basketball. Talking to my brother recently, he referred to our apartment as a shithole, but that's not how I remember it. We had just moved in after my parents got a divorce, and although it was a tiny, funky little apartment, we were happy.

My mom, who was my rock and still is, was smiling again, and the energy had shifted. There weren't parents fighting every night. On top of that, she had magically figured out how to make a tiny apartment special for each of us. My sister and I had the garage to ourselves, and although it started as a garage, it became something really comfortable.

My mom went to the carpet store and filled the floor with all different colored carpet samples, and she hung beautiful tapestries on the walls. And the most precious part to me was the bed. My grandmother had given us this really ornate, metal framed bunk bed, but instead of stacking, you could fold them together, and it would create this little cocoon, and my sister and I would stay up late, laughing and telling each other stories.

It turns out it was really the only time we could share a room and get along for the rest of our lives. So I remember it as a happy place. And in this vibrant little complex, it was mostly single parents, a lot of single moms with multiple kids, some, like ours, from multiple fathers, and many were in the service industry in our small town of Ashland working hard and thinking about or starting to go back to college or start college for the first time.

And one of the things that I loved about coming from a small farm home where we moved from, was that there was just kids everywhere. And the hub of the community, as I remember it, was the basketball court. And although I wasn't very good at dribbling or shooting, I was damn good at defense, and it became my superpower.

It's one of the places where I found some confidence. Really for the first time, I was good at something I had just started. And so that became one of my activities. And as I got into middle school, I got onto the JV team. I was so happy. And the coach, who I had known since early elementary, saw my superpower and he nourished it.

And so my sole focus every time we would play was to try and get the ball without getting a foul from one of the other players on the opponent's team and hand it off to one of our players who was really good at shooting like Lorianna and who could just run down the court. dribbling away.

And then, something shifted in my life. 

After having found some peace and joy, things got a little complicated again in my family, and I ended up going to a very remote part of Malaysia, in Kelantan, with my dad and my brother, right after sixth grade. I didn't really know what to expect, but I was dedicated to supporting my dad on his new adventure and curious what it would be like.

It was the first time I took an international flight. I remember the smell in the flight was just nauseating. There were businessmen in the back who were smoking cigars, This was back when that was allowed. I was so sick the whole time. And when we landed, I just kind of vaguely remember taking a taxi into this home of our new family, my father's wife's family.

I don't remember leaving the bedroom for three days. I was just so disoriented and jet lagged and sick. I just laid there, listening to these different sounds, sounds I hadn't heard regularly at home, like prayer multiple times a day. I could smell delicious food.

After a few days I came out and I got to know this new family and this new place, and it was beautiful, and the food was delicious and the people were kind. Yet after a while, it became apparent that our ways from the U. S. was quite different from this part of Malaysia.

Even though I had been known as a relatively shy American, even in this part of the world,now I was considered kind of outspoken. I didn’t know how to fit in well enough to not create friction. 

We were able to get our own home on the edge of the village. My dad, his wife, my brother and I had this nice little cottage.

By then I had figured out that being a girl in this part of the world was really different. For instance, girls didn't play sports. In this part of Malaysia it wasn't accepted for me to go out without a chaperone. And so, I occupied my time mostly inside reading books and was expected to clean. And my brother on the other hand, who was two years younger and was a really good soccer player, was out playing soccer every single day with the village boys.

He was having such a good time. Although I know he had his own challenges, for instance, he didn't speak the language, he was adapting really quickly. He learned the language, and he was really good at soccer.

I was pretty strange, or, you know, our whole family, but especially me, because there really weren't any white American people who'd come to this part of Malaysia.

There was a lot of curiosity, so they would often trick my brother, the boys, the older boys, mostly into calling me out onto the porch so they could kind of get a peek at me and hear me talk. And kind of get a sense of who I was and we had a shade that pulled down and covered the entire porch.

So I would walk out, but they couldn't see me. And they would come up with random reasons to get my brother to call me out and ask me a question. And then I would go back inside feeling a little bit awkward. It just felt stifling. I loved learning the culture, I met so many lovely people, but for what I expected and who I was, it just felt a little too different. And yet, I was determined to enjoy it and to try and make a space for myself to have some expression. So one of the ways that I did that was when I had to mop the floor, I would get a boombox, and I would play Whitney Houston. I would blast it out of the house into the entire village.

At least that was what I imagined because the windows there were slats. They weren't like double pane windows, so any kind of noise would just go out into the rest of the village. And so I would put the boombox on full volume, and I would be singing at the top of my lungs, “I will always love you,” by Whitney Houston.

And while I was doing that, I was smiling and singing and just felt a sense of a little bit of my own power of expressing myself in the way that I could. So after about a year, we went back home and it was really hard to express my experiences to friends and family because nobody had traveled to that part of the world, and so a lot of it I just kept to myself.

Part of me really stayed behind there. It felt like my voice, part of my expression, an ease of expressing myself, was left behind in that small remote village behind the shade. And it took me decades to really unravel that and find my full self and my full voice again, and to process those experiences.

I was grateful to see such a clear form of sexism that wasn't hidden. Growing up in the part of the U. S. where I did, there was this sense that feminism was a thing of the past. There was no need for equal rights. We'd solved all those problems.

And when I was in Malaysia, it was so apparent what the rules were, and it was above board. And so it was easier to fight against them and to feel a right and a wrong. And as I came back to the U. S, I had a better sense of that, of where those practices and structures and systems and forms of expression and different expectations existed in our own culture.

I didn't play basketball on a team again, but I did play with some friends. The true expression of what I do in the world and what I want to do is just like my strength in basketball: It's defense. 

To figure out ways to, within the constraints of the status quo, gain resources, knowledge, experiences, people, supportive people, and to bring them to others who can go further than I can in making change, positive change for the world, for everybody, for equality, for opportunity, for a sense of safety and agency for all.

So, even though part of my voice was left behind, In that remote village in Malaysia, from that time forward my blinders were off.