Eat My Words

Johanna Almstead:
Hi, everybody. Today we're going to try something new. I am actually going to do a solo episode. And I decided that I'm going to entitle it Girl Dinner because I was the queen of girl dinners before girl dinners became a thing.
Do you guys know what a girl dinner is? It's like when you're home by yourself and you don't have to cook for anyone and no one's there to judge what you're eating and you make yourself a little plate and you settle in to Netflix or a book or whatever it is that you want to do. My girl dinner tonight is going to be a little cheese and crackers. It doesn't have to be real dinner. I usually do a little cheese and crackers, maybe some yummy goat cheese. If I could, I would eat that on a giant baguette, but I'm gluten free so that's a bummer. But I like to buy these little... They're like Norwegian flatbread crackers. They're really seedy. And they have everything bagel flavor one, so I love those. And if you spread a little goat cheese on them... My girl dinner always consists of some sort of pickles. I'm obsessed with pickles. I love cornichon, I love pickled peppadews. I'd have a little some sort of pickles, some goat cheese, maybe a little sharp cheddar too on my crispy little crisp bread cracker things and I think a little hummus and some veggies, like some cut up red pepper, carrots, olives. Really nothing fancy. That's what my little dinner's going to be tonight.
And tonight we're just going to discuss a little bit about me, actually. We've had an amazing run so far. People have been so incredibly supportive and enthusiastic about this little podcast that we've been doing, and so I first would love to thank you all who are listening. And one of the biggest requests that we've had is to find out a little bit more about me and my background. Welcome to my girl dinner. Let's dig in.
Hello everyone, and welcome to Eat My Words, my first solo episode, which is a little bit out of my comfort zone, I will be honest. The point of this podcast has been to hear other women's stories, which I'm really comfortable doing. I'm not always as comfortable telling my own stories, but you guys have asked. The people have demanded it so I will honor that request. People have asked a little bit about my background and want to know where I came from and how we got to this place of launching this podcast, so I figured I would just give you guys a little solo episode and talk about that for a little bit. If you guys know me already and know my story, go ahead, turn it off, switch to the next one. No biggie. I won't be offended. And you will catch you on the next one when we have probably a more interesting guest than me, me, myself, and I.
But again, I just want to start off by saying I am blown away, I am blown away by the enthusiasm for this podcast. I am blown away by people's support. People are coming out of the woodwork and enjoying it, so that makes me so happy. You guys are asking me great questions. You're engaging and you're sharing it with people, which is what we need. Our goal for this podcast is to create a community of badass women who hold each other up and support each other, so thank you, thank you, thank you to all of the people who keep tuning in. I'm floored, to be honest. And it makes me a little bit weepy because I have been dreaming about this for a little bit, and to feel it come true and to see people's response and to hear all of your wonderful feedback, good, bad, and ugly, we like all the feedback, has been really wonderful, so thank you.
I figured I'd start at the beginning. I was born in Michigan. I was raised in the metro Detroit area. I was raised in Farmington Hills, Michigan by... My dad was a Presbyterian minister. My mom was mostly a stay-at-home mom in the beginning, and then she was also a writer and worked for the Committee for Children's Television, all kinds of things. My parents were both pretty serious activists and politically minded, super smart, super community-minded humans, and I think that that was always part of our upbringing was that expectation that we too would take part in important discussions.
I was raised in Michigan until I was 13, and then we moved to New York to Westchester County. And if you listened to our last episode, you'll know that I moved in the middle of my seventh grade year, January of my seventh grade year. Brutal. Whoa, hormones plus moving across the country. But we moved to a lovely community and I made amazing friends. And I think having been in such close proximity to New York City and to the fashion world was a major opening of a pathway to my career and my life. I'm not sure I would've done that if we had stayed in Michigan.
I made the decision coming out of high school to go to fashion school. And it's funny because I think about this a lot. I ask my guests questions a lot about, "Are there pivotal moments in your life that you think, oh man, if I hadn't made that decision, what would my life have been like?" And I think about this a lot because it actually had a lot to do with my high school friends and my high school boyfriend.
I was raised in a super-duper academic household. My dad went to Harvard, my brother went to Harvard, my mom was a scholar, my mom was a writer and my mom was a teacher, so school and academia and doing well and all of that was very, very important in our household growing up. And it was fine. I did it, and I'm an avid reader and I'm so appreciative of my parents for that, for instilling in me the joy of literature and the wonders of the world in that way, but I wasn't necessarily an enthusiastic student on my own accord. And we started looking at colleges when I was a junior in high school. And my parents felt very, very strongly about me going to a liberal arts school. They really wanted me to just continue having a really broad-based education, and that was really important to them.
And I went on this trip between junior and senior year of high school. In hindsight, I'm not sure what the motivation was, but I'm pretty sure my parents were sick of me. I think they were like, "You need to get out of here. You're being a dramatic teenager and I think you need to go see the world a little bit." They encouraged me to look into study abroad programs that were for high school kids. Basically I opened up The New York Times magazine, and in the back there's like an advertising section and I just started calling 1-800 numbers that had summer programs for high school kids where you could travel the world.
And they left it up to me. And so I found this program called The Experiment in International Living, and it was like a mini version of the Peace Corps. You would work, you do volunteer work and community service work, and then you would also get to go on these wild adventures. I signed up for the Belize program because it was the cheapest and I was afraid my dad was going to not want to pay for it. I had never even heard of Belize. This is embarrassing to admit right now, but I had not heard of Belize as a junior in high school. And it was the cheapest, and so I was like, "Well, this is my best shot." And I feel like it was a life-changing program. It was so amazing and I met so many wonderful people and learned so much and saw so much and worked my butt off and bushwhacked my way through a crazy rainforest with a machete. It was intense. And we worked really hard. We had to build a bus shelter in a town. And it was amazing.
And through that program, I actually met several young women who I became really close friends with who were New York City New Yorkers. They lived in New York City. I lived 29 minutes on the train from Grand Central, but I was not in New York City. And they opened my eyes up a little bit to that world a little bit more. We had always gone into the city as a family to see theater and music and museums and stuff. But I met these girls who were wonderful and became really good friends of mine, and they opened my eyes to the possibilities of what was in New York.
As a senior, I was in high school. I came back from that summer and my life was really changed. I felt so different. My perspective was so different. My mind had been blown in many ways and in many good ways. And I was going through the process of applying for all these colleges and I was getting in to a lot of them, very quaint, New England liberal arts colleges. And my boyfriend actually at the time, my high school boyfriend was like, "What are you doing? You love fashion. You want to work in fashion. Why in the world are you going to go to rural Vermont or rural..." Or wherever some of these colleges were. "What are you doing? First of all, why don't you stay in New York City?" In hindsight, maybe that was a ploy to get me to stay because he didn't want us to break up, but also, "You want to be in the fashion world. Why would you go somewhere else?"
And on his encouragement, I actually decided to apply to the Fashion Institute in New York. And I got in and I made the very controversial decision to forego a traditional liberal arts college education and to really focus in the fashion world. And it was the best decision I ever made. I loved college. From day one, I had the best time. And that was really a pivotal moment in my life.
I studied at FIT. I studied fashion buying and merchandising without even knowing what that meant mostly because I didn't have the confidence to just study fashion design. I had never really been an artist, and so I was very insecure about my ability to design, which in hindsight also is such a bummer because that's what I was going to school... I could have learned at that school, but I wasn't confident enough to do that. And so I had heard about buyers, and so I thought, okay, I'll be a buying and merchandising major. And I learned a ton about the industry. I realized pretty quickly I didn't love the buying part of things because it was mostly numbers and math and I was going to fashion school to get away from numbers and math.
And so for the second two years, I changed my major to international marketing, and then I made the decision to study abroad my junior year. And I studied in Italy and became obsessed with Italian fashion and came back. And as part of my senior year, I had to do an internship, but I had come home obsessed with the idea of working at Prada. My internship program didn't have an internship set up with that company, and so I was like, "Well, can you call them, please? Just get me an internship." And they did, which is just amazing. I think I always talk on this podcast about advocating for yourself, and I always say I wasn't very good, but I think I was really good in that moment.
I got an internship at the New York headquarters for Prada, and that was my first foray into really high fashion, European fashion. And it was the hardest thing I've ever done. Impossible. It was so hard. I worked so hard, but I learned so much and it was amazing.
And it was my last week in my internship and I was like, "Oh my God, I don't have a job. I'm not in school." I was like, "I don't even have a resume." I hadn't really prepared. If you know me, you know that preparedness is not always my strong point and flying by the seat of my pants is. I was my second to last day and they asked me, "So-and-so is leaving their position in the Advertising and Communications office. Would you like to interview for her job?" And in my head, I was like, oh my God, no, this place is so scary, it's so hard, it's so intense, it's so all these things. And then on the other hand, I was like, "I don't want to make a resume and I don't want to have to apply for jobs. And if Prada is asking me to apply for this job, I guess I should do it." And so I did.
And I was a little bit cocky in the interview because I didn't necessarily know if I wanted it, and so I was very... "Why should you have this job?" I was like, "Well, basically because I've been doing this job all summer and I know how to do this." And I had a little more swagger than I realize now. And I got the job. I was a communications assistant in the Advertising and Communications department of Prada. And honestly, I learned so much. I always used to say after I had that job, I could do anything I wanted because it was so hard and I was exposed to the highest levels of the industry, the best stylists, the best editors, the best designers, the best PR people. It was really, really baptism by fire, but also an incredible bootcamp for the industry and for European fashion and for high fashion.
And so I worked and worked and worked and worked until I didn't. And then I made it a year. And I remember back then it was super important that you never left a job before a year. And I think I made it a year and a day, and then I quit my job with no other plan in sight. I ended up quitting that job and deciding to change careers completely. And I decided to go back to school. And I went back to school for acting, for theater and film. And so I studied for two years at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, which was incredible also.
But while I was in school, I was super lucky because I was still very much in the industry, and so I was able to... Actually, I did have a restaurant job too, I'd hostess, and then I kept getting freelance work. I had friends who were at all these other brands, and they were like, "Hey, what are you doing? You just left Prada. Can you help out? We need help out in the PR department here," or whatever. And so through that time, I ended up working for some of the most amazing brands. And I would go to school in the morning and then I would fly to my jobs in the afternoon.
First I worked for Ralph Lauren, which was amazing. It was such an amazing masterclass. It was such an amazing immersive education in building a brand and living a brand and watching the best of the best do what they do. Ralph Lauren to me still is one of the best brands in the world. That was incredible. And they were so nice. It was such a different environment from having worked in European luxury. And so I couldn't believe that I could do this.
There was these giant... In the waiting room... Which the waiting rooms were ridiculously gorgeous mahogany paneled walls with gorgeous oriental rugs and Ralph Lauren leather sofas. And there was this huge silver urn, a huge silver bowl, footed bowl that was filled with M&Ms. And I would just eat M&Ms all day. It was amazing. And the kitchen was stocked. It had bagels every morning with cream cheese and muffins and stuff, and then you could have free cup of noodles. And so I lived off of M&Ms, bagels, and cup of soup at Ralph Lauren. It was amazing. And I just, again, learned from the best of the best.
And then I started taking on all this other extra freelance work as a PR person, and it was incredible. I got to work for Coach. I became part of their PR team for a long time. I worked at Giorgio Armani. And it was like I just bounced around. People were like, "Oh, I heard you're not working full time." I was like, "No, but I'm free." I worked my butt off. I would go to acting school in the morning, work at these fashion jobs in the afternoon, then I would go and rehearse for hours with my scene partner because we had homework for acting school and then do it all over again the next day. And I just loved it. I felt so alive and so fulfilled creatively on so many levels.
And then after I graduated from acting school, I continued to straddle both worlds. I almost always had freelance work in fashion, and then I would be doing acting stuff on the side and at night. And I had a wonderful group of friends from acting school that we were always producing our own stuff, but I never really fully left the fashion world. And lived in LA for a while doing that.
And then I came back to New York and I ended up finally being like, "I don't think this acting..." The acting thing for me was didn't have enough control over my own destiny. There was too much left up to chance. I didn't enjoy that part of it. And I was never good at not having structure. It never really felt like my true self. The acting part did, but not the career part of it. Anyway, came back to New York and made the decision that I was like, "I think I'm ready for a real job and working back in branding and fashion and stuff," so I did that.
And then eventually I got called about a job through a former colleague of mine. She called me and was like, "Hey, I need a PR manager to come to Kate Spade." And I was like, "Yeah, I'm not really a Kate Spade girl." I had a lot of respect for the brand, I thought it was really beautiful, but it wasn't me. And I was like, "I don't know. I'm a little more edgy than that," whatever. And she was like, "Just come. I want you on my team. Just meet the people." And so I did. And it had been many years at that point that I'd had a corporate job. And so I was like, "I don't know if I want to go back to that. I'm not sure. I love my life that's flexible and creative and freelance and all this other stuff."
And then I went and through this interview process, which was pretty extensive. And I would go in being like, "I don't want this job," and then every time I would leave, I was like, "Maybe I do want this job. These people are so smart and so interesting." And even though I'm not really a, quote, unquote "Kate Spade girl," this seems like a really incredible place to work.
And I remember I had a meeting with our head of HR who I hope will be a guest on the show eventually, and she said something about one of the main goals of the place was that they wanted it to be a gracious work environment. And it was like my head exploded. The fact that that was a goal of the company and that that was part of their DNA was mind-blowing to me. I was like, "Oh my God, I'm not going to get cursed at in Italian and have things thrown at me and be yelled at for wearing the wrong things." And it was just a very, very different experience. And so that was actually what sealed the deal.
And they used to, I don't think they do anymore, but they would give people a copy of Emily Post's etiquette book on your first day when you register and do all your HR paperwork. And I just thought that was so charming and so revolutionary at the time. Again, we're talking about the Devil Wears Prada days and this idea that fashion had to be bitchy and edgy and you had to be an asshole to be successful. And I was like, "This feels like unicorns and rainbows. What is happening?"
But anyway, I took that job and it was such a good decision. And I spent the next seven years building a PR department there and building a global communications department actually because while we were there, we launched in many, many countries, including China and the UK and the Middle East and Brazil. And I got the privilege of working with some incredibly wise people, incredibly smart people. If you've listened to this podcast, other episodes, you've heard other people who were part of that team. Now I would say in hindsight, it was a very magical time. We had an incredible team of really creative, really smart, really risk-taking people. We had really high expectations on us, and it was just a brilliant and fruitful time of growth and excitement at that brand. And then that brand eventually changed, and management changed and ownership changed. And most of us who were part of that original group that were hired around the same time as I was eventually decided to leave for many different reasons.
And then I went on to work for another couple of companies, and eventually I started my own consulting business. I think after having had the experience of working in-house at a brand that was so exciting, and then going on to work in-house at a few other places and not having that same experience, it became really hard. And I was like, "Oh, I think I need something that I don't need to be all in both feet, both hands, all the way over my head into this brand. I need to do something else." And I wanted more flexibility.
Sorry, I should back up. I also had a baby towards the end of my tenure there, and that really changed how I could work, and the expectations around how I could work did not change, and so that became very, very difficult because I had spent most of my career there traveling many weeks out of every month in many different countries in many different time zones, often back to back. I remember a trip that I did two weeks before I got married where I was in China for 10 days. Right from China to Dubai, went right from Dubai to Abu Dhabi, and I got home six days before my wedding or something. It was crazy. That was the kind of life I was living, and I had a new baby at home and that just wasn't going to work anymore. I didn't have a baby not to hang out with her and see her. And because I had grown up at that company in many ways and I'd been there for so long, it was very hard for the company to adjust their expectations of me. They were used to me getting on a plane all the time when I needed to. And that was hard, among other things.
I made the decision to start my own consulting company, and I started working with brands again. It was so wonderful because I had these deep relationships with former colleagues that I had worked with over the years at other brands. And so they would always call and say, "Hey, what are you doing? I heard you're not working full time. Can you come and do this brand reboot with me?" Or, "Hey, what are you doing? Can you come and help me build a PR team?" And so I have had a consulting company for the last several years, and it's been wonderful.
And then our personal life got a little intense a few years ago. We had some illnesses in our family, we had some deaths in our family, and things got really dark for a while and it became harder and harder to not share that in my life on a daily basis. I think I was white-knuckling it at certain points. My father passed away, my husband's brother passed away, my mother came down with dementia, my husband lost two of his very dear friends. We had COVID. I mean we as a world had COVID. We also had COVID. But things felt really hard and I felt really alone. And I felt really like, whoa. This was the first time in my grown-up life that I couldn't really fall apart. I really had to keep it together.
And I remember just having this morning where I was chopping vegetables for my kids' lunches. And it was around the time my husband's beloved brother passed away, and I was making lunches, and my mother, who has dementia, was living with us at the time and wandering around in the kitchen. This was 6:30 in the morning and I had not even had my coffee yet. And my mom was very ill and confused. And if any of you are caring for parents who have dementia or Alzheimer's, you'll know that often it feels like you have another child in the house and you have to treat it as such. And so I had my grieving husband who was devastated and suffering greatly upstairs on a work call, and then I had my children running around and my dog running around and my mom getting in my way in the morning while I was trying to make lunches and try to make breakfast and try to drink my coffee. And I was like, something's got to give. This is all too hard.
And what I realized that needed to give was me giving myself a moment to process all of this because I really wasn't. I was white-knuckling it. I remember even white-knuckling that knife. I was cutting cucumbers or something, and I was like, "Oh, my God," and holding on with dear life to the edge of the kitchen counter just being like, "Deep breaths, deep breaths." And it was really hard.
And so I actually made the decision to tap into my creative side again. It felt like that was the place, that was the valve that I could release, maybe, that everything was bottling up and bottling up, and maybe if I could just release that a little bit and tap into my creative self that I always was partially in touch with, but not fully, that maybe that would help. And so I signed up for a writing class with the Brooklyn Writers Collective, which was amazing. And through that class, I really started to write about my life, write about my stories, write about my career, my fashion stuff, my parents, my mother, my dad being a minister, all this crazy stuff. And people were, number one, eager to hear it, which was amazing. And number two, what I learned was that just sharing stories was healing. Sharing my story was healing me, but also hearing other people share their stories was healing me. And I started working with this community of amazing women writers, and that storytelling and connection through our words and our stories felt like the place that felt good to me and healing to me and supportive to me. And so thus began another creative adventure, and so I started writing a lot.
And then also at the same time, if you've listened to the episodes, any of these episodes, actually, you'll know that one of my go-to coping strategies is to host a dinner party to gather women together. And this combination of those two being my coping mechanisms of this writing and sharing stories with women and then hosting gatherings of women or being a part of gatherings with women felt like there's something magical here. There's some sort of alchemy that happens. And I could tell that I wasn't alone, that I wasn't the only mother who was struggling with raising her children and still wanting to chase after her dreams or build a life that was separate from motherhood or parallel to motherhood, or I wasn't alone in dealing with aging and sick parents, I wasn't alone in dealing with loss and grief.
I think that brings us to where we are today, which is my goal is to build this community to be a place that feels as good as those dinner parties and those writing classes did, which is where we tell our stories, ask each other hard questions, support one another and show up for one another. And I just feel incredibly grateful and incredibly lucky to be in community with these amazing women whose stories have helped buoy me and who've listened to my stories and given me hard advice and played devil's advocate sometimes or just supported and listened. That's what this is meant to be about. I'm so grateful to all of you for being a part of this community. I hope that answers some of your questions about my background and how we got here and the reasons for being. But it actually makes me teary. I'm super proud of this community that we're building. And people are really sharing their stories and being vulnerable, and I think that's how we make change and how we can maybe build a better world for ourselves. Thank you. Thanks for listening to my little story.
Please follow us on Instagram, follow us on TikTok, share the episodes. Please tell us what you want us to be talking about. The whole impetus for this episode today was because people are asking, "What's your history? What's your story?" Tell us what you want us to be talking about. Tell us the topics that we haven't touched yet that you want us to get into. If you have ideas for guests that you think would be great, I have so many wonderful friends who are willing to be guests on this podcast, but please send us ideas. I want this to be a community, I want it to be a back and forth, and I want it to be a place where you feel like you can share your stories too. I am going to sign off now. This was a lot. But thank you again for the support and thanks for being a part of it.
Oh, guys, that was a lot. I made myself cry, but it is with great gratitude that you guys bring me to tears. I just wanted to thank you again for joining. Please like, share, download, subscribe. The episode, I think we say this every time, but we are really, really trying to build this community, build this audience so that we can support each other, help each other heal, challenge each other so please don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. Share it on social media if you can with your friends; text it to them. You can copy the link and just text it if social media feels too scary. And thank you again for joining. This Eat My Words podcast has been created and directed by me, Johanna Almstead. Our producer is Sophy Drouin, our audio editor is Isabelle Robertson, and our brand manager is Mila Boujnah. Thank you.