The Threads of Me and You Dinner

The Spiral, Not the Start Over

There was a moment inside the Threads of Me and You exhibit where a room full of strangers gathered around a table and unrolled a small scroll tied with thread that invited them to connect with one another while serving a connection to something bigger than themselves. 

The scene was set eight years ago, in a vision that started me down this path of transformation. 

I woke up in the middle of the night in 2018 with the entire idea that pulled me out of bed, and had me spend the next five hours quietly drafting every detail. The long unset table, candles, the scroll, the thread, a Booker T. Washington quote that invites participants to set the table together, to underline our service to one another as a way to lift ourselves. It was an idea for a meal experience that would fund a nonprofit while delivering meaning with every course and custom around the table. I didn't design it so much as receive it. It felt like I'd been walking toward that idea my whole life without knowing it, and I'd finally arrived at the stop where I was supposed to get off.

So I got off. I left my job. I started Meshin Movement with the sole intention of building that meal.

And then, almost immediately, someone told me it wouldn't work.

He was a business professor, and he wasn't wrong. You don't have a business model, he said. It's not sustainable. You'll never be able to scale this. Then, in the same conversation, he told me how badly his own family, with two teenage kids, could use exactly the kind of experience I'd just described. He believed in the need and doubted the business in the same breath. At the time, I only heard the doubt.

I did finally accept that the meal was never meant to be a scalable business. It was a social entrepreneurial pursuit, not a product, and once I accepted that and stopped trying to force it into an expectation, I let it go quiet. 

For the next eight years I worked toward something that could hold it instead—without knowing it. Carried by wonderlust, I did the deep, unglamorous work of unraveling my own patterns and reweaving them — a marriage I had to be honest with, a self I had to stop containing, a story I had to stop living other people's versions of. I wrote a book (Threads of Me and You). And along the way, I did a few meal experiences out of my house, but never allowing myself to believe it could be anything more than that. And all the while, I was carrying a judgment I never said out loud: if I really believed in this idea, I'd be doing it. The fact that I'm not means I let it go.

This June, inside the Threads of Me and You exhibition, I hosted a Meshin Meal for the first time in almost a decade — the fullest, truest version of the idea I drafted at two in the morning in 2018. Same thread. Same intention to fund a cause bigger than the room. It didn't happen because I finally got around to it. It happened because everything I built in between — the strategy practice, the book, the years of learning to tell a true story instead of a comfortable one, the strength to try and see what happens when you try and see if things can happen. So appropriate that the first public meal carried the name I’ve given to the story of the journey I’ve been on, following this thread all along.

I used to think the meal had been sitting on a shelf for eight years, waiting on me to build the courage to follow through. I see now it was spiraling. 

Picture a spiral instead of a straight line: tightly wound at the center where an idea starts, then widening, ring by ring, every time you pass back near it again. You don't walk away from the center and come back to the exact same place. You come back wider — with more of yourself gathered up along the way. Over the last eight years, the idea didn’t go away or lose itself into nothingness, it went underground and did its work inside everything else I was building until it was time to bring it to life as intended.

I tell you this because I don't think I'm the only one carrying a “should” or judgment about an idea she set down.

If you're building something, whether a business, a body of work, or a version of your life you can already see clearly but can't yet build, there will be a professor. Someone, maybe even you, will tell you the form you first saw it in won't work. And you'll have a choice that has nothing to do with whether the idea was real. Was the idea wrong, or was it just early? Did you abandon it, or did it need you to become someone else first before it could exist the way you originally saw it? Did you need to gather more skills, more perspective and more flexibility?

You are allowed to let the shape of something change without deciding that means you failed it. You are allowed to spend years doing work that looks like a departure from your original vision and find out later it was the only road back to it. The side path isn't proof you left the thread. Sometimes it's the only way the thread gets strong enough to weave the original idea into being.

The meal isn't finished spiraling, either. A few people who sat at that table in June are still with me. One conversation has already turned into plans for a Meshin Meal with another nonprofit, for their team and as a fundraiser, built on the exact intention I drafted eight years ago: gather people, mean something, give it away. The idea that started in my house in the middle of the night is starting to move through other people's rooms now, in other people's hands.

That was always the vision. It just needed the long way there.