I Spent My Whole Life Feeling Like I Wasn't Enough
A Coming-of-Age Story & The Manifesto of The GLOW
I spent my whole life feeling like I wasn’t enough…
As a student, I got straight A’s, but the only thing I desired was to be liked by the popular kids.
As a gymnast, I won gold medals, but all I wanted was another girl’s body.
When I got into Yale, I wondered why I couldn’t raise my hand, and fell silent in class.
When I started working at a hedge fund, I wondered why I felt inferior to the 19-year-old fraternity boy intern.
When I started fundraising, I wondered again, why the sloppy guy with no track record eclipsed my confidence.
When my advisor manipulated then kidnapped me into his home two hours outside of the city, I blamed myself for being stupid and too trusting.
I spent my whole life feeling like I wasn’t enough…
But there was always something deep down that knew I could do so much more.
There was something that knew that if I could grasp the ever-elusive confidence I saw the boys and men around me embody, I could be unstoppable.
This is what drove me - the vision of who I could be, despite who my mind told me I was.
So I kept pushing.
I kept pushing, and pushing, and pushing.
Pushing myself to do things so far outside of my comfort zone, sharing things so deeply personal and vulnerable because I knew,
If I couldn’t face my truth - no matter how ugly - I would be trapped forever.
People always told me I had “so much potential” but you know what happens to kids with “potential”? They do one of two things:
They accumulate approval, grow massive egos, and waste their potential
They feel extreme anxiety to live up to the expected potential everyone else sees in them
My biggest fear was not living up to my potential.
My projected potential buried me in self-doubt. It didn’t matter how much I achieved, how many medals I won, how many compliments I received. I was convinced that I was not good enough, not prepared enough, not experienced enough, not smart enough, not extroverted enough.
So I kept pushing.
I kept pushing, and pushing, and pushing.
But at a certain point, instead of pushing outward, I started pushing inward.
I pushed myself to look into the most painful moments in my past. The ones I had been hiding from all my life…
The first time I experienced the embarrassment of racism when that classmate made fun of my Asian eyes on the playground
The first time I experienced the pain of rejection when that boy decided he wanted to be with another girl
The first time I experienced shame of my body when I stuck a finger down my throat to copy the older girl’s eating disorder
The first time I experienced the loss of identity when I missed qualifying to my Olympic dream by 0.25 tenths of a point
The first time I experienced the fear of loss when an ex-partner threatened to take me down.
I always said that I never knew what it felt like to be angry… Even as I immersed myself in the pain of these past experiences, I felt sad, I felt confused, I felt stressed. But I did not know how to feel angry.
… And then there was the first time I experienced the ugly hand of sexism at work. And the ensuing confusion and anger of being undervalued, overlooked, and assumed as an inferior
By my boss who worked me like a slave, because he could
By the investor who blackmailed me, because I wouldn’t sleep with him
And most of all, by the man whose mediocrity was laughable… and yet still managed to dictate my self-worth, wear down my self-respect, and diminish my value as a human being.
And for the first time I experienced RAGE.
I experienced a rage so deep, a rage so potent that it turned into my blood and it flowed through every inch of my body. I needed to let it out somewhere, so I started talking to other women, and it hit me that these were not my stories alone. These were the stories of EVERY. SINGLE. WOMAN. Past, Present, and Future.
And it finally dawned on me that these were the stories that would set me free.
These were the stories that would set everyone free.
I spent my whole life feeling like I wasn’t enough...
But then, I found MY PURPOSE.
Today, The Global League of Women (The GLOW) launches with the fundamental mission of creating freedom by liberating the female stories and voices that have been hidden and suppressed by, what I’ve termed, The Dominant Narrative.
When I sold my last company, SheWorx, I reflected on all the things we had done in an effort to close the funding gap - education, mentorship, conferences, community - honorable things that many other organizations do, but the progress was slow.
It is still too slow.
In working personally with thousands of female entrepreneurs during my time building SheWorx, I finally grasped a fundamental insight that formed the key of my thesis around female power and success,
It doesn’t matter how many tactics a woman learns, at the end of the day if she doesn’t feel like she is enough, SHE NEVER CLOSES.
She does not close the sale.
She does not close funding.
She does not close the negotiation.
Why? Because she is subordinate. She is at the mercy of other people’s permission and approval. A woman doesn’t fail to negotiate because she doesn’t “know the right tactics.” She fails to negotiate because of her own lack of self-worth.
Her self-worth is tenuous and therefore she searches for it (most commonly) in a man’s validation - This man is her boss. This man is her boyfriend. This man is her father. This man is her husband. This man is the elusive investor.
But most dangerous and pervasive of all…
This man is The MEDIA, and every single subsequent message she has ever received telling her she is not pretty enough, smart enough, or capable enough.
When I first started putting together the idea for The GLOW, there was still something within me that felt like I had to prove something to the world.
It was tempting to try and create a company that was “on trend,” that directly addressed blatantly obvious problems.
It was tempting to follow the crowd and create another co-working space, another educational platform, another training program.
It was tempting to put jargon into my deck like AI/ML/Blockchain… just so I could.
But the reality is, I knew in my heart of hearts, that these things would only be able to scratch the surface. They would address the symptoms but not the underlying causes.
The underlying causes of inequality are fear and desire.
A primal fear of difference.
A primal desire for significance.
We mark difference through skin color, gender, religion, sexuality, nationality, and so on. We fear those different from us and yet we love that difference makes us feel unique, significant, like our lives actually matter. But in the process we begin to separate, to divide, to build walls to signal us vs. them.
What perpetuates this widening gap of inequality?
The people we surround ourselves with.
The media we consume.
The stories we believe - about ourselves and the world.
And this is when I recognized -
THE MOST POWERFUL COMPANY I can build is one that tells stories to remind us of our HUMANITY.
And this is why I am willing to go to the edge -
Because change begins with women who have THE COURAGE to speak up and challenge the status quo.
And this is why I founded The GLOW -
A media company that empowers ambitious women to challenge pre-existing narratives around WOMANHOOD, IDENTITY, and POWER.
I began this journey because I wanted to free myself.
I continue this journey because, as Toni Morrison wrote, “The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
Today, we are launching with the first full season of The Global League of Women Podcast
A first collection of powerful female stories that dig deep and show the full expression, strength, and power of women in a way that has never been publicly, vulnerably, and collectively shared before.
But this is only the beginning, and we are only just getting started.
We are not here to just create another company.
We are not here to chase venture funding and short term validation.
WE ARE HERE to create historical change that runs so deep that they will remember us when we die.
~ Lisa Carmen Wang, Founder & CEO, The GLOW