Episode 107: Denayja Reese — To Tell a Great Story

Denayja Reese is an event strategist, producer & writer who has worked on campaigns with Uber, the San Francisco Giants, Live Nation and Airbnb, as well as on content production at Coachella. Her full-service event production company, Girl With That Laugh Productions, has worked on events including the A3C Festival & Conference and BlackTech Week.

During this episode, Denayja talks about:

• How she decided to become an entrepreneur
• Overcoming her challenges with self-esteem, mental health and addiction to build a brighter future for herself
• The book she’s been writing during quarantine about her own life story
• What it takes to make positive changes in your life

Learn more about Denayja and her work on her website at gwtlp.com and connect with her on Instagram @girlwiththatlaugh.

Subscribe to the FREE Beyond 6 Seconds newsletter for all the latest news and updates about my podcast!

 

A full episode transcript is available below.

Carolyn: Today on Beyond 6 Seconds.

Denayja: And when you’ve got a good story, people will cling to it, if you tell it well people will get excited about it and they’ll see parts of themselves in it and root for people and decide someone is the villain, you know, just all these things that happen when you just put a story out into the world.

Carolyn: Welcome to Beyond 6 Seconds. The podcast that goes beyond the six-second first impression to share the extraordinary stories and achievements of everyday people. I’m your host, Carolyn Kiel.

Carolyn: My guest today is Denayja Reese, an event strategist, producer and writer whose love of culture has fueled her diverse career journey. She has worked on campaigns with Uber, The San Francisco Giants, Live Nation and Airbnb as well as on content production at Coachella. Her full service event production company Girl With That Laugh Productions has worked on events including the A3C Festival & Conference and Black Tech Week. She’s guided by the principles of inspiration, connection, productivity, community and self-expression, applying the concepts as the ethos of her company’s work. Denayja, welcome to the podcast.

Denayja: Thank you, Carolyn. I’m really excited to be on the podcast.

Carolyn: Very happy to have you here today. So, yeah, I would love to hear more about your story, how you built your career and became an entrepreneur, so why don’t we start off just by finding out more about what inspired you to start your own business?

Denayja: You know, to be perfectly honest, I was less inspired to start my own business and more interested in just doing things kind of on my own. I started working at an agency right out of college and I was doing a lot of sales and a lot of business development and it just occurred to me that if I could do this for a company, I could do it for myself. And so I ended up moving to Chicago and decided to just, you know, give it a go on my own and started producing events for clients and working on different projects at other agencies and all of that. And I was actually looking for a job for quite a bit of time for almost a year and it’s just absolutely not happening. I applied everywhere you could think of in Chicago, in New York and it just wasn’t working, and at a certain point I said, okay, you can either keep trying to make this work or you can just step out on your own and see if that, you know, bodes a little better and here we are 5 years later from that decision.

Carolyn: Wow. Yeah, so, it sounds like you had that desire to work on your own and really try out entrepreneurship. Was that something that you were always interested in or was it mainly brought on within the last few years as something you wanted to try?

Denayja: Really in the last few years honestly, I’m very much not the entrepreneur, you know, I love that entrepreneur story where people are like, yeah, you know, I sold my first Girl Scout cookies when I was 10, you know, and had my first business at 16 and never looked back. And I think that’s great, I’m not that person at all. I think entrepreneurship for me was an option that was on the table, not necessarily something that I chased after. I think I’m just a completely very self-disciplined and self-determined person and so I think those two traits just kind of lead to entrepreneurship very naturally, but it was never the thing that I always thought I was gonna do. And actually for the first 3 years I vehemently denied being an entrepreneur, and I was in spaces with entrepreneurs all the time and they were always like, I think you are one of us, and I was like, I just don’t know about it, and even still, I just think that entrepreneurship has so many different shades and so I think that I see myself still as an entrepreneur. I think I’m a little bit of a different kind of entrepreneur but I think we are all these days becoming a different kind of everything.

Carolyn: Oh, interesting. So, yeah, what do you mean by like a different kind of entrepreneur?

Denayja: I think for me entrepreneurship is less of the job that you have and more of your sort of mindset and I think that in a way we are all kind of entrepreneurs in our own lives and so I see myself really as a creator of my own life and my own journey and I think entrepreneurship is a part of that. I think there are tenets of entrepreneurship in that, but I very much resist the idea of entrepreneurship as an identity because it’s not who you are. At the end of the day, it’s a job like everything else is, you know.

Carolyn: Yeah, kinda separate your job and your work from who you are as a person. It’s something important to remember.

Denayja: Yeah. And it is also really hard work to do and I think the more you align yourself with entrepreneurship, the harder it is to keep that and I think a big thing for me in the last couple months has been really reminding myself of who I am without work and who I am without that sort of constant hustle-bustle-make-it-all-happen kind of energy and just being more waking in vain.

Carolyn: Yeah. It’s important stuff to remember absolutely. So, in your intro you mentioned your love of culture that you’ve had throughout your life. Tell me a little bit more about that and what kind of impact that has had on your life?

Denayja: Oh, god I love that question because culture has meant absolutely everything to me. I think culture is so important to who we are. It is the best of what human beings create in this world. It’s what we leave behind. I mean if you look exactly what’s happening right now people are clinging to culture and you know, music especially has just been the back bone of my entire life, my earliest memories are of music. How I ended up an event production really started with me going to concerts my entire life. My mom took me to my first concert which was Pink when I was 11 years old and I never wanted to stop. Every summer I would get an allowance of concert money, you know, so my parents were like here’s X amount of money you can go to as to many or as few concerts as you want and there were some summers that would be like two shows that I really wanted to go that were huge, some summer I would go to a concert every other day that were like 10-dollar shows around my neighborhood so just always wanting to be around the energy of music. Television I think is so important to our world. I know I have seen in individual people’s lives the impact of television on one another, on their families. I mean growing up as a gay person watching other gay people on television with or gay characters rather on television with my mother and having that be something that really helped her to accept me and you know, how television has really been a reflection of our society and really helped to push it forward. So, yeah, I just think that culture is so incredibly important and being able to be a producer of it and a creator of it means a lot to me. I think that the individualization of culture is really important. You know, what people are doing in DC versus what they do in Florida versus what they do in Seattle are completely different things but there’s connections and there’s threads and I just think it’s like the interconnectivity of humanness, you know, just the things that we create: food, music, art, TV, film, community, it’s just, it’s what matters, you know, to me at least.

Carolyn: Right. So, yeah, so thinking of culture I guess very broadly as you mentioned, some of the examples you shared were kind of like a pop culture, but sort of the culture of the different parts of the country and what people are interested in, what people are thinking about. Is that the sort of culture that you are into?

Denayja: Yeah. I think everything really is culture. I think you know, there is a culture in your home, right? You know, how growing up you would go to a friend’s house and they would act completely different from the way you act in your house and it’s not necessarily that either is really right or wrong, it’s just this is the culture of your home versus the culture of theirs. I think it’s just everything that we create as human beings really is culture and that can seep into things like your ethnicity or you know, your race or sexuality or where you are from but it also, you know, can be things that we all engage with like music, like television and food, so I think culture is both broad and individual and micro but it’s everywhere and everything.

Carolyn: Yeah. It definitely shows up in all different parts of our lives absolutely. So, along with culture that’s very important to you is the impact of storytelling and this is something that’s important to you. So is storytelling something that you’ve been able to use yourself in your business to find success or is it something that you’re inspired by in general?

Denayja: It really is something I’m so inspired by and my big task right now is to figure out how storytelling plays more of a role in my career and really building kind of the next wave of my career around the storytelling more than I have before. Yeah, there are so many storytellers that I admire I mean from people like Glennon Doyle and Brene Brown who I love and they both really write about emotions and honesty and vulnerability and how much that’s helped me and so their storytelling kind of through that, it helps us to kind of get through this very big kind of important emotional things in life. And then there’s storytelling, just telling people stories like watching everyone fall in love with Tiger King. It’s so funny to me because it’s just a story. They are just people, these things happening in Oklahoma and Florida like they aren’t the biggest most important things in the world, but it’s a story and when you’ve got a good story, people will cling to it, if you tell it well people will get excited about it and they’ll see parts of themselves in it and root for people and decide someone is the villain, you know, just all these things that happen when you just put a story out into the world, so I really, I would like to see my career evolve more towards that and that’s really what I’m meditating on daily right now. I’m working on a book that is kind of a self-help book really for all women. I’m thinking of it as kind of what I would say to a young woman, who actually, I had a call earlier today with a young woman who found me on LinkedIn and she was like, your career just seems very interesting and diverse and I just kinda talk to her, she’s about 7 or 8 years younger than me and I think of this book as being for her and other young woman like her to just know that, you know, it’s not all linear, you don’t have to have it all figured out by X age or any of those things. This is your life and it’s not gonna look like anybody else’s and you have to own all parts of it and all of that. So, that’s what I’m working on with this book and there’s many components to it and to the release of it and so that’s kind of my big focus really for the next probably year and a half and really that being the first big push of my career towards storytelling as a real kind of centerpiece of it.

Carolyn: Oh, wow. So, has the process of writing the book encouraged you to kind of look back on your life and career and put that story together?

Denayja: Yes. And so I’ve done that with the life part. I’ve actually, I’m on the second draft of the book and I’ve sent it to a few different friends, a few kind of just complete strangers just to read and the whole general consensus is that it’s good and it’s on the right track. A lot of people are like “I can’t wait to read more of it.” So, now I have a sense that I’m on the right path with it but I’ve written pretty much up until this point, and Glennon Doyle says something that I love so much, and it’s that you have to write from a scar and not a wound. So it’s just basically the idea that you have to write once something has healed, not while you are healing from it and while you are kind of going through it. And so it’s not that I’m necessarily wounded in this time but it’s also happening right now. And so I’ve kind of caught up to this point and now it’s like, okay, well what do I say about these last 3 or 4 years as it’s still wrapping up a little bit. So, I’m kind of not entirely stuck. I’m working through as a writer, so I’m hoping to have a breakthrough in the next couple of weeks.

Carolyn: I see. Yeah, that’s right. Having that a bit of distance between, you know, when you are looking back on everything and when things have actually happened. It is critical to put that full story together because, you know, a lot of times when we are in the middle of it, we are not aware of the story or how things interrelate, it’s only when you have a little bit of distance and space to look back and say like, oh, okay, this is how it all kind of came together and I didn’t see it at that time.

Denayja: Exactly. You never ever see it at the time. I think that’s the number one thing I’ve learned about the tough moments in life, like including how well you are doing. I feel like right now everybody is being so hard on themselves about what they are doing, what they aren’t doing, you know, and all of that and you will look back 2 years now, you’ll be like wow I was doing great. I was doing a great job.

Carolyn: Absolutely. Yeah. Everybody certainly has their challenges and obstacles to overcome but I understand that you have had some big ones that you’ve overcome throughout your life and is that something that you are planning to share in your book or do you wanna share a little bit about some of those today?

Denayja: Absolutely. Everything is in the book. Absolutely everything, things about me, things about my family. You know, my mom had me when she was 18 years old and she spent really her entire adult life raising me. She actually passed away at 37 right as I was sort of turning 18, you know, she was really looking forward to kind of starting this new chapter of adulthood still a very young woman, you know, by all kind of intents and purposes and she didn’t make it and so losing her at 18 just seeing how fragile life was, it really inspired me to live and to not be… it’s funny, I look back now and I’m like, I should have been more fearless, and then I think about it, I’m like, you’re pretty fearless. I had self-esteem and depression and anxiety issues from a very young age, you know, it wasn’t easy for my mom in many ways and I took on a lot of that energy. I think a lot of only children and single moms can attest to that, you know, it’s really just you and her, whatever that looks like, and I think a lot of kids either, you know, become super responsible, which is very much who I was and very much feeling like a tiny little adult for most of your life, or you kind of just check fully into the child thing and you are just like, hey, I’m gonna do my thing as a kid hopefully she’s alright over there, you know.

Carolyn: Yeah.

Denayja: And I think either way is fine. You are a child, you know, you are doing your best. So I think for me I really took on responsibility and just felt like I had to maintain my own sort of emotions and all of that and so I became just very isolated and you know, I kind of just checked out of life to be honest from pretty much 10 until I was probably 25 years old. I just kinda wasn’t there, you know, I was lost in all kinds of things, depression, anxiety, obesity. I mean, really everything that my family has had to go through kind of different individuals that wasn’t really talked about in my family I sort of went through in my own life. And I didn’t realize that that was happening until really a couple of years ago but now, you know, I sit and think about it. Like all these things: addiction, obesity, issues with sexuality and sexual abuse, depression, anxiety, all of these things that different people in my family have gone through but people weren’t talking about, I ended up going through in my own life because my mom would tell me and from the time I was born just like, you know, I really had you because I believe that you could break these chains. You know, I saw in you a future where the best of this family could grow and the things that aren’t so great could find a place to kind of leave, you know.

Carolyn: Yeah.

Denayja: There’s a saying in therapy that trauma travels through a family until somebody is ready to feel it and I always say I was the one who was ready to feel it and who was supposed to feel it and who was supposed to heal it. And so it was like as much as I tried to avoid these things and I think as much as my mom tried to help me to avoid them, there were so many hills that I was gonna have to climb no matter what. And you know, I look back and I think about the things I’ve gotten through, you know, my issues with addiction which I had in my early 20s which is the reason why I left San Francisco when I was 25 and moved to Chicago because as I jokingly say it was cheaper than rehab. You know, overcoming obesity at 19 or 20 years old, growing up I was between 250 and 300 pounds for most of my teenage years and I’ve never gone back to that level of kind of weight and being out of control in that way and being so addicted to food and just all of the things, and bad relationships, it’s like I could go on and on, but all of that is definitely in the book. I’m very, very open about a lot of it because I think that shame is so harmful and so unnecessary to growth into the world because I am by no means the only person in the world who has gone through these things by a long shot, you know, and the more that we pretend that these aren’t things that everybody is going through, the harder it is for people to find their way through it. So, I’m very open about it. I plan on being more so as this project gets out into the world.

Carolyn: Yeah and it’s amazing what you’ve been able to get through and still achieve big goals in your life with your business and all the exciting work that you are able to do now. What were some of the ways that you were able to overcome some of those challenges? I know you mentioned therapy, it sounds like that was one way that you were able to approach it.

Denayja: Yeah, therapy is the best I got to say. I love therapy. Everybody go to therapy. Like the second you can do it, even if you don’t think you need it, you feel like the most well-adjusted person in the world, just go, and if you really feel like you don’t need it don’t go again, but you’re probably gonna go back because therapy is great. I actually didn’t get into therapy until about a few years ago. I went on a journey kinda on my own honestly. A lot of self-help books which is why I’m writing one because I know what it means to like either not be ready for therapy, not be financially able to get therapy, I think the storytelling aspect has a lot to do with kinda self-development and self-improvement. It’s that whole kind of you can’t be what you can’t see sort of thing. So it’s probably seeing somebody who has gone through these things and kinda found their way to another side does so much. That’s why in AA and NA you have to have a sponsor in order for it to really work because being able to depend on people is so important to getting through tough issues like that, and it’s so hard to depend on somebody who you feel like you can’t relate to or you feel like they may be not judging you, but you know, just coming from a different place. So, for me it was definitely self-help and hearing people’s stories, you know, Glennon Doyle’s book Love Warrior did a lot for me. Both the books Love Warrior and Carry On, Warrior did a lot for me just hearing another person’s story that it felt like, oh, you’ve been through this really scary things that I’ve been through but I don’t like to talk about because they feel too dark and you’ve found your way through them so maybe I can do that. So that helped a lot. I think therapy, exercise it sounds so cliche I know a lot of people really hate exercise and I get that. It’s not the most fun thing in the world but it really does a lot. Developing a mind-body-spirit connection it’s just so crucial. Spirituality, you know, finding my way towards God and prayer and just really all of the things, all of the good things that people tell you to do in your life, actually doing them really does work, and it’s so hard to believe that when you are coming from different places, places that I have been. You know, I think about myself 8 years ago being the person I am now. You know, I get up in the morning and I pray and I meditate, I journal and people call me when I wanna talk about tough emotional issues and you know, all of these things I’m like, I would have never been this person, and I think that’s so much of what growth is about. So I think there’s a lot of tools and resources out there and most of them I think we all kind of, not all, but I think a lot of us know. I think it’s a matter of leaning into them. I think the number one tip I have for people in overcoming tough things like that is believing that you deserve better. That’s probably like the hardest part it’s like a huge way to find your way out of addiction, find your way out of obesity or you know, anything you are unhappy with in your life is to say I deserve better than this because this is not making me happy. If you’re happy however you are, okay, cool, you are happy. Live your life if, you know, you feel like your life is fine and you don’t wanna change it, totally okay, keep doing that. But if you know your life needs to change and you want it to change, you just have to believe that you deserve that and that you don’t have to be perfect in doing it. It’s like you do it little by little and it’s a process, you know.

Carolyn: Was there a particular point in your life where you had that realization or was it kind of more gradual?

Denayja: Yeah, definitely. I had a really tough situation in San Francisco right before I left. I left after college. I graduated from art school. I went to school for fashion marketing and management in 2013 and then I left San Francisco after graduating in 2014 about a year and a half later. And that was really, like that whole year of 2014 was like a slow kind of eviction notice from the life that I was living. I was just partying a lot. If I wasn’t partying, I was working, sometimes I was doing both because I was working in like the San Francisco entertainment nightlife industry which is also kind of merging at that time with the tech industry, so there’s just a lot of youthful kind of ambitious energy in the air and I was very kind of caught up in all of that but it was destroying me. It was destroying me in ways that were honestly irreparable if I didn’t stop it. And it took the top of the year, I had a really bad accident and I could have died. I could have killed people. It could have been very, very bad. And I walked away from it and it still took several months for me to really get it and getting it was getting the hell out of San Francisco and moving to Chicago and just completely starting over. So it was very much this jolt out of my life but it still took me a while to really get it and really do something about it. To believe I deserve better.

Carolyn: Yeah. And that’s important. It really has to start with that mindset and I know you have to decide for yourself that you want better for yourself. No one can really make you change, you know, people can try to influence you, but you have to be the one who is ready and who finally has that mindset to say like, no I really want things to be better for me and I deserve more.

Denayja: Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Carolyn: Yeah. In terms of whether it’s your business or your life or your book, what other big goals do you have that you want to achieve in the next couple of years?

Denayja: Well, I got to tell you honestly Carolyn right now it feels really strange to talk about goals and kind of what’s coming up just because I don’t think any of us really know what’s gonna happen. I mean particularly speaking to the events industry and I’ve been talking to lots and lots of people about this over the last couple of months because, you know, we have been hit really hard. And coming back from it is going to be a long road. It just is. It’s a lot, it’s a lot to take in, it’s a lot to consider, none of the old rules really apply anymore. And so that’s really hard. I think for me it’s getting this book finished. In addition to the book, there’s like a whole different, multiple different ways I want to tell this story, because like the book is the core of it but then it’s like if you could picture like almost a diagram it’s like the book is at the center and then there’s like these things that are gonna shoot kind of out of the book. So the first thing is finishing the book, finding the right publisher or just the right kind of person to help me get it out into the world. I don’t know that it’s gonna be a traditional kind of publishing house company, I don’t know if it’s gonna be more of a distribution partner and a book publicist, I’m not sure but it’s getting it done and then finding the people to help me kind of put together the last version of and kind of push the book itself and then all the other parts of the project have to come together so that’s my big focus over the next year and a half. For me, I see it coming out at the top of 2022. What all of that looks like I don’t know yet, I’m still kind of putting it all together but for me it’s very much the project that if God forbid, you know, once I’m done with it, that’s it for me like on the earth I would be fine. I get this out into the world the way I want it to be and tell the story that I wanna tell the way I wanna tell it and it reaches people and all of that, that’s like my biggest goal in life right now because it encompasses not only my spiritual kind of soul goals but also my working goals in terms of like the work I wanna produce and put out into the world and what I want people to know me for. I feel like what’s interesting about where I am right now is that people know me as a person who is talented and who has different kind of skills and interests, but there isn’t that sense of like, that’s Denayja, like that’s who she is, that’s what she is about, and I think it’s something that I really need to improve and strengthen in the next year and a half and I think that this project will have a lot to do with that but it’s also for me kind of doing that on my own. Which I again have to thank you for having me on the podcast because I really love it and it’s really so in alignment with where I wanna go with myself and my career and the the work I’m putting out there, so this is a great step in the right direction, but that’s pretty much where I’m focused right now. And then once events get back to, because I produced large scale events, so for the business that I had built and what I was building, it is a long road back for me. It’s not gonna be until we are in a place where we are having hundreds of people in a room for a conference again that I really get fully back to business. You know, we are working on some virtual stuff here and there for existing clients but you know, I really live in the large scale kind of massive space and it’s gonna be at least a good year before we’re really in things like that again. So with that time, I’m just focusing on this project and doing smaller events on a community level more in-house no client kind of focus stuff over the next year kind of while that’s happening.

Carolyn: Yeah. The people that I’ve been speaking with lately on the podcast over the past few months, everybody is trying to do something different because everybody’s lives and livelihoods are disrupted to some extent. We are not doing the things that we were doing before in our work and our lives, so yeah, I think it’s wonderful that you’re focusing more on your book right now and your own story and yeah I’m excited to see how that turns into other creative ventures and spells out that diagram with the book at the center that you were talking about before. And I’m happy that you were on my podcast to talk a little bit about your story and extend that into the universe.

Denayja: Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate it. I think the platform that you’ve created just for people to share, you know, what you do after those kind of big moments and getting through these big challenges, it’s really what people need right now. We don’t have a lot of tools, you know, I find that really interesting like especially our American culture, I think, you know, less so maybe in other places but as an American, that’s all I can speak to. We are very big on the easy buttons, you know, we have a lot of beer commercials and have a lot of medications for you, you know, we have a lot of ways that you can kinda check out and avoid and not really do it but we don’t talk enough about the tools that are really sitting down with something and rumbling with it, and rising from it and all of that. So, I just love any platform like this where people have that space because it’s so important and it’s so true and it’s so good.

Carolyn: Yeah, I agree that we definitely are often looking for the easy solution or that’s generally what’s being marketed to us so I think there’s this expectation that, you know, oh, if we just take those class or buy this product then everything will be okay when in reality it’s not quite that neatly wrapped up with a bow, there’s a lot of hard work and a lot of uncertainty in terms of how to figure this stuff out. Yeah, I think we are all trying to work through that now.

Denayja: Yeah. Well, can I ask you how have you been working through it? I’m really fascinated by how everybody’s lives have been during this time because there’s no right answer and I think whatever has kept you here and kept you going and kept all your people intact is the right answer for you, so how has that been for you in the last couple of months?

Carolyn: Well, for me, in some ways I’m quite fortunate because the type of work that I do for my day job, I work in learning and development for a large Fortune 500 company and you know, I used to go, most days of the week I would go into an office and have a commute back and forth, but a lot of my work translated very easily to remote work and I’m also used to working with people on my team who are not physically in the office around me so that when I transitioned to just working from home all the time a couple of months ago in some ways the work still felt similar. My working flow felt similar to what it was when I was going into the office. I was still, you know, I’m still having the phone calls and the web meetings and video conferences and things like that. I’m just sitting in my house instead of sitting in the office. And with the podcast, which I have been doing for a little over 2 years I’ve almost always recorded remotely just like we are doing now over Zoom but I’ve used Skype or other methods that are online. So in some ways there was, I saw everybody else who was used to doing in person interviews trying to figure out the whole “how do I do remote interviews like what does that work” and that was always something that I just started out doing, that was just my model when I first started it out. So, in some ways I’ve been able to talk to a lot of people, you know, who maybe I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to talk to before because they are usually out traveling or their schedules are much more busy and sometimes, you know, they have a little downtime so they are more apt to come on the show in some cases. And then, you know, in others there’s always people who are interested in sharing stories and working on podcasts which is exciting. So yeah, for me in terms of work and activities, it’s been pretty good but even so even though I’m in a really good situation, it’s still hard to be home all the time and you know, not be able to see family or just try to adjust your life to being home sort of, you know, in your own space all the time. I don’t know what your experience has been like, obviously work is very much different. We are not doing big events at this time right now but where you are, what’s it like around the rest of life and how you are coping with that?

Denayja: You know, it’s been, I’m kind of in the same boat as you in that, you know, because I’ve worked from home for the last about 5 years now, even when I work for an agency I still work from home pretty frequently, so I just got very self-disciplined. So getting, you know, things done from like a home environment or when nobody is telling me to get them done, it’s not really a big issue for me. I think for me, I’m a big empath, and so it’s been really hard for me to operate with all of this going on you know, it’s like some days I get caught up just in the grief and the mourning of it all, you know, just being so sensitive to what people go through when they are grieving and just what everyone is grieving right now on the various levels and so it’s hard for me just kind of staying in a present and just kind of relinquishing the idea that I should be able to control anything and just kind of taking it day by day is what’s really helping me. Like I get up every day and I’m like, all right what are we doing today, that’s all I’m gonna focus on, I’m not gonna try to plan much. Once we get to around this time of the day I start planning tomorrow and that’s it, whereas I used to plan things 3, 4, 5, 9 months out, so that’s been a very interesting adjustment for someone like me and then also to be honest in terms of work, it kind of, there hasn’t really been any. You know, I haven’t really worked in the last 2 months because everything I did was large scale. So, everything I was even having conversations about, those conversations were squashed by I would say what, probably March 25 or something, and from there it’s been me kind of just worrying about taking care of myself honestly with all that I have been through and my issues with depression and anxiety. I’m just like, my big job right now is to stay centered and stay okay and get through this and you know, go from there.

Carolyn: Yeah. And I think that’s important when you said really take it one day at a time. Because I mean things are changing so quickly anyway you can’t plan definitely that something is gonna happen because we really don’t know day to day so I think all you can do is really just sort of take things, you know, try to stay in the present and take things, you know, one step at a time, one day at a time.

Denayja: Yeah. And lots of gratitude. I think in any moment just stop and be grateful for as much as you possibly can and that really gets to me through a lot. When I just stop and I think about, you know, how truly blessed I am to have so many things in my life and how, you know, I have a tattoo that says it could just have easily been otherwise and I’m really living by those words these days, just you know, it could still easily be another way that would be a whole other set of problems and so whatever I’m dealing with I’m grateful for that and I deal with it and I keep radical acceptance as well is a big one.

Carolyn: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I know you mentioned before that you were very empathetic so I think the gratitude comes along with that as well and just being aware of your situation compared to other people’s situations and knowing as you said that it could be different. Absolutely.
Denayja, thank you so much for being on my show. How can people get in touch with you if they wanna learn more about your career or your book or just talk and learn more about you?

Denayja: Well, thank you again for having me. If people want to know more about me, just follow me on Instagram honestly. It’s @girlwiththatlaugh, spelled just like that, girl with that laugh, also the name of my production company, but follow me on there, all my links are there. I post on my Instagram feed probably once a week but I’m very active on stories, so if you are a big stories Instagram person, I’m your girl. I post like 29 stories a day.

Carolyn: Oh, that’s great, wonderful. Denayja, is there anything else that you’d like our listeners to know or anything else that they can help or support you with right now?

Denayja: Yes. So there’s something I’m working on. If you are able to find me on Instagram, and you wanna know more about this please DM me, but it’s a project called the In Their Honor Project, and one of the things about this crisis with COVID-19 that really breaks my heart is that people aren’t actually able to have funerals right now. I mean some people were able to have very small kind of like, it’s very depressing to say, graveside services where people essentially kinda drive by and sort of pay their respects and like give flowers, you can only have 10 people in the family there and it’s just not the way to kinda grieve and as we know people can’t be together, they can’t hug each other and all of that so people aren’t really able to celebrate their loved ones that are gone in the same ways that they normally would. So, I’ve started a project called In Their Honor where I’m partnering with a bunch of my different creative friends to create this little projects for people that they can share with friends and family to sort of tribute and celebrate their loved ones. We have 3 options, one of them is like a mixtape with all their favorite songs and may be some audio messages through friends and family. Another one is a video with, you know, same thing kind of video clips and stories and then another one is just the kind of digital photo book where you just either direct us towards photos of your love one or you send some over and different little thoughts that you might want in there and we create something for you and it’s just, you know, something to have during this time until people can do a proper sort of celebration or be together again. So, if you are interested in that project, just follow me on Instagram, again @girlwiththatlaugh and DM me if you have questions about it or if you, yourself would like to have something creative for a loved one or you wanna refer me to someone, we were originally only gonna do it through this month but now I think we are gonna do it really as long as it is needed. Because another thing I know about grief is that it’s a pretty enduring thing and right now we are all kinda still in the middle of all of this so I have a feeling a lot of the people who will wanna do this, you know, might wanna do it a little later on and probably not necessarily right now. So we are gonna keep doing it and so far it’s been a really cool thing to be able to provide for people. So, that’s kind of the big thing I’m working on right now.

Carolyn: Oh, that’s wonderful. Okay, yeah, so I will definitely put links to your Instagram so that people can find you there and find out more about that project. That sounds really great. Awesome.

Denayja: Great. Thank you so much.

Carolyn: Thank you. It was great to talk with you today Denayja. Thank you again.

Denayja: You as well. Have a good day.

Carolyn: Thanks for listening to Beyond 6 Seconds. Please help us spread the word about this podcast. Share it with a friend. Give us a shoutout on your social media or write a review on Apple podcast or your favorite podcast player. You can find all of our episodes on our website and sign up for our free newsletter at www.beyond6seconds.com. Until next time.