By Stephanie Soetendal, Age 33
Team members in our AI Stealth Start-up wrote “A Letter to Your 15 Year-old Self.” Inspired by their courage and raw vulnerability, I embarked to write upon my own letter to my younger self. 🌷
It’s been a while, crocodile! Alas, I am a Florida girl. I grew up in the suburbs where the grass was always green, and I had a safe childhood, far from the origins of my family: Bogotá, Colombia in the 80’s.
It was 2001 and I was 9. I rode my bicycle to school: Gator Run Elementary. The morning air was warm, fog in the skies, the sidewalks familiar. After school, I would ride my bicycle to the pool area of my gated community, where I would sit at the park tables, spreading out my notebooks, finishing homework while the sounds of rippling water of the Everglades were heard in the background.
When sunset hit, the sky turning shades of orange and pink, it was time to go home. My father had “pork with pineapple” prepared, a staple family dish from Dutch origins, with white rice always a part of dinner. The smell filled the kitchen.
Then came the silence.
Complete, awkward silence when we sat down as a family. The clinking of forks against plates. No words.
Since I was a young girl, I learned that I was responsible for performing. I sat down at the family table and would think, this is strange; we are a family, we should be talking.
So I began to lead conversations. Filling the quiet. Asking questions. Trying to create connection.
My brother would unfortunately put me down constantly, as it tended to happen since I was born. Before me, there was him and our eldest brother, Jan, who passed away when he was 21.
Two years later, our father— who once cooked pork with pineapple and worked tremendously hard as an entrepreneur in America without knowing much English— passed away from cancer.
My 14th birthday was his funeral.
Once again, no one in my immediate family or extended family wanted to say a few words at the podium. The room felt heavy. Still.
It was a familiar awkward silence. I felt responsible to be the voice for my father’s departure.
Shaking, I stood up and walked to the podium. My legs felt weak. I fell to the floor. My godfather rushed to pick me up and encouraged me to go back to my seat.
“No,” I recall telling him. “I want to speak.”
I stood up at the podium and lowered the mic to reach my height: I was a child. Just yesterday, I was thirteen.
Between tears, I spoke about how honorable my father was. How he always put his family first. How stubborn he was, but how successful he was as a father, a husband, and an entrepreneur.
I then mentioned that it was my 14th birthday, and how, for the rest of my life, I would have my father’s death anniversary the day before my birthday.
For many, many years thereafter, the night before my birthday, I would cry. It became a mourning ritual.
Until something happened at 26.
An epiphany: I should be celebrating his life. Being grateful he gave me life. Knowing that even in energy, I felt him with me in spirit.
That was a lesson learned: perspective matters. Things simply happen; we choose how we view them: towards growth and evolution, or towards pain and suffering. The choice is ours.
I’ll share a vulnerable memory.
The scene: winter in Boston 2023. I had just turned thirty. I was packing my suitcase to be interviewed in Davos. I had just partnered with IBM, being interviewed for a start-up developing AI holograms, and the tipping point of my career had just become reality.
There was a picture of my father, taken in 1970’s Colombia. He was a teenager, full of possibility.
I had taken this picture along with me throughout my young adult years when I embarked upon self-independence.
I picked it up. Hugged it. And cried.
Tiny Dancer by Elton John was fittingly playing: our song.
While crying and hugging his picture, suddenly, I was thirteen again. I could see it clearly: holding his right hand while my mother held his left. He was in a hospital bed. Machines humming. I was crying profoundly.
He took his last breath.
I saw the eyes of my mother: filled with pain, filled with tears. My father lost his fight to cancer, and I didn’t yet understand what that truly meant.
Now I was back in my Beacon Hill studio, 17 years later, packing to be interviewed as a self-made woman: an entrepreneur, just like my father.
I held his picture while sitting on the edge of my bed, tears falling to the floor.
“Dad, I wish you could be here to see my accomplishments. Everything that I’ve done. How lost I’ve been without you: but somehow I figured it out. I hope I made you proud.”
And into my suitcase went his picture: from Boston to Davos, Switzerland.
World Economic Forum 2023.
In a way, he was there with me during one of the most significant moments of my life.
The lesson I learned is this: you don’t always have to be performing: for your family or for society.
Your achievements do not make you. Who you choose to be as a person is what matters the most.
For the majority of my teenage years and young adult life, I chased success like it was salvation, like it was validation, only to realize that I had burned myself out while chasing my self-worth outside of myself.
People saw the brilliant woman. The tech CEO. The leader. The entrepreneur.
But they didn’t realize what it took to get there. They didn’t see the human behind the titles.
So this is a story to also reveal that our vulnerability is a gift we give the world to realize we are not alone.
We never were. We were simply under the illusion of separation, when in truth, we are all One.
The tears. The pain. The triumphs. The achievements. It’s all part of the human experience.
Success did not save me. Performance did not heal me.
Love did.
Truth did.
Vulnerability did.
It’s time to put the armor and mask aside, and begin living in harmony and alignment of our highest truth.
It is not about becoming; it’s about remembering: coming back home to yourself.
Back to your essence: your soul that is whole and complete. Always residing within since the day you were born: ready to be lit up once we remember turn on our inner light.
