Making Older Friends
11/5/21 - Women over 50 are too often erased, including on this very podcast. Grace Bonney has been collecting inspiration and advice from women of more advanced experience in her new book, Collective Wisdom. She's gathered interviews and intergenerational conversations with over 100 trailblazing women, who describe the ups, downs, and lessons learned while forging their unique paths.
Grace Bonney founded Design*Sponge, a daily website dedicated to the creative community, and Good Company, a print magazine at the intersection of creativity and business. In 2019, she shuttered both of these publications to focus more on in-person community, and she’s currently in graduate school training to become a therapist. She is the author of In the Company of Women: Inspiration and Advice from Over 100 Makers, Artists, and Entrepreneurs.
Transcript below.
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Spotify.
CREDITS
Executive Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Producer: Jordan Bailey
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Mercedes Gonzales-Bazan
Design Assistant: Brijae Morris
Ad sales: Midroll
TRANSCRIPT: MAKING OLDER FRIENDS
[Ads]
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend
Ann: A podcast for long distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I’m Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman.
Aminatou: Ann Friedman, what's up this week?
Ann: On today’s agenda, we are talking about aging, specifically being older, being an elder. Our guest is Grace Bonney, who has a new book out called Collective Wisdom: lessons, inspiration and advice from women over 50. This book is a revelation. It's a collection of interviews and intergenerational conversations with over 100 women who talk really frankly, about the ups and the downs and the lessons they learned while forging their identities and their unique paths in the world.
[theme song]
Ann: Grace comes to this work from a really interesting place. You might know her as the founder of Design Sponge, which began as a daily website, dedicated to the creative community, um, or perhaps you've read Good Company, which is her print magazine, um, which is all about creativity and business, or maybe you've heard her podcast, there was a good company podcast as well in 2019. She shuttered both of these publications because she wanted to focus more on in-person community rather than this kind of big diffuse online community. She had fostered. And right now she's in graduate school training to become a therapist. Her previous book was In the Company of Women: inspiration and advice from over 100 makers, artists and entrepreneurs. It's beautiful. It's on the coffee table of many women I know and love. Um, and I'm really excited to talk to her today about women over 50 and how we are both thinking about the future, our intergenerational friendships, and how we wished media talked about aging, particularly as it intersects with gender.
[interview begins]
Ann: Grace, welcome to the podcast.
Grace: Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
Ann: I don't normally start interviews here, but because of the subject matter of the book I want to start with, how old are you?
Grace: I am 40 years old.
Ann: 40. I love it. Tell me what else you would have to say about this time in your life. Like, do you identify as middle age? I'm about to turn 40 and I've been starting to identify as middle age and it's a really interesting experiment and people's reaction to that term.
Grace: I'd be lying if I didn't say I had a reaction to that term, I've punted middle age to 45. And so I've given myself a cushion, but I do think working on this book has made me realize what a freaking privilege it is to make it to middle age. I think I'm still in the processing part of really embracing and understanding how lucky I am to continue to get older mentally I'm there in terms of fully processing it. I'm like five years off.
Ann: Such negative associations, especially for women with claiming a term like middle age, even though for me, I'm like, yeah, it fits. I'm not young. I don't feel young. I also don't feel old. It actually fits pretty well.
Grace: I think I firmly identify as a grownup.
Ann: And has that been true for a while? Can you mark the beginning of your, like, grown-up,
Grace: That's a really interesting question. There have been stages of losing some of the earlier versions of myself and that can be bitter sweet. I moved past a certain phase of maturity when I came out at 30 and then I was diagnosed with type one diabetes when I was 35. That was a really rocky road to diagnosis. That was a huge turning point for me. Yeah. The older you get, the more loss you experience, the more trauma you kind of live through, at least that has been true for me. All of those moments of real personal definition, I've shed a layer of what I used to hold on to, I think protectively as kid-dom, I'm a grad student at Syracuse University right now, and I'm a class rep for the online students. And I was talking to the rep who represents the in-person students. She is considerably younger than I am. She said, oh, you're such a grownup. And a part of me would have bristled or been a little offended at first. But now I was like, yeah, I'm absolutely a grownup. I have a lot of bills to pay. I'm at the vet's office and the doctor's office a lot. I feel grown up.
Ann: God, it's so interesting how grown up in our culture is at once aspirational. There's a lot of shame if you don't do air quotes, grown up stuff. And then once you're there, it's like, oh, congrats on your waning relevance [laughter]
Grace: A thousand percent accurate. Then you juxtapose it with that trend of like, oh, adulting, that's accurate. And I think on one hand I can hold being a grownup and having a lot of responsibility is frustrating, but there is also a sense of privilege in it because not everybody makes it to that point of their life. But also I think a lot of people have experienced what it is to be a grownup much earlier in their lives. That's one of the things I wanted to focus on in this book was where in life stages, did people really start to feel the weight of responsibility? And how did that affect them as humans? I'm really fascinated by how we respond to needing to take care of ourselves and taking care of others in some way.
Ann: Yeah. It’s so true. And I think that there are also certainly some privileged, broadly defined things wrapped up. In what age we expect to be a grownup at people who, as you say, are really forced through circumstance to accept a lot of responsibility, much, much younger, and who are responsible for others in a way that maybe people with more financial privilege or more stable family structures might not. It really creates this false fixed idea of what a life progression looks like. And that's one thing I really appreciate about this book, the debunking of the notion that there is a set path with timed milestones.
Grace: Yes. They’re absolutely isn't, it's interesting because I'm learning about life stages right now in schools, I'm studying to become a therapist. And I kept realizing so many of these definitions of life stages are so defined and connected with predominantly white European culture. Especially if you're somebody who is an immigrant or your citizenship status is different than what the dominant culture decides as normal, the way you've experienced. And then re-experience some of these stages in life is just completely different the way we think of it, like you said, it really is rooted in this one, very narrow and very privileged view of what it is to be a certain age.
Ann: What made you want to do this book?
Grace: This book was actually inspired by my friend. Georgine. My wife, Julia and I volunteered for a long time, it started like a meals on wheels style program here in Kingston, New York called Angel food. I think the thing that kept me going there was that we got to cook alongside these two women who were in their late eighties at the time Georgine and Diane. And Georgine and I became quite close, especially when she dealt with some pretty big health issues towards the end of her life. And I got to be literally there in a hospital room with her while she was discussing DNRs and all sorts of stuff. That's really heavy. I think it put me into a place of perspective in my life that I didn't realize I needed and that I wanted, not that I wanted to have that feeling through someone being at the end stage of their life, but it really reminded me that I needed to have more friends and people in my life that were considerably older and in different phases of their life. So that I had that sense of perspective and that we could be there for each other, that friendship. And ultimately her passing was a huge turning point for me. It made me realize I was ready to leave the job I'd had for 15 years. It made me kind of reprioritize calmness and getting the hell off of screens as much. When I thought about what book I wanted to work on, I wanted to celebrate people like Georgine who are in their nineties. And I wanted to celebrate what those intergenerational friendships can bring to someone's life.
Ann: Yeah. I have thought about this a lot as, I mean, not to, and I talk about friendship publicly again and again, the ways that I not feel unfulfilled in my friendships, but like other types of friendships I feel are missing from my life. And like really deep intergenerational friendships are among the kinds of friendships that I find myself really eager to cultivate. And also kind of unclear about how, you know, our world is really set up to silo us generationally. The book features some individual interviews, but also these intergenerational group stories that really brought to the fore for me, this desire again.
Grace: Yeah. I think you're really right about that siloing. We're very much sold this false bill of goods that older people don't have anything to contribute to a friendship with a younger person or that a younger person can't be bringing something meaningful into that older person's life. If you approach intergenerational relationships from purely a perspective of this one-sided mentorship, where there's a wise older person, that's a hard thing to find, and it's not as rich as it could be. I really, really wanted to approach it from that perspective of why don't we provide some examples of how meaningful these relationships can be, even if they're not your best friends or something, but it's somebody you see every other month that commitment to being present with somebody with a completely different life experience and take on the world. It's really important. And I wanted to show that it can actually be quite easy to find.
Ann: It’s funny, hearing you talk about that. I start to think about how some of the most compelling television for me recently has been these little glimpses into the power and tension within women's intergenerational friendships. I think about that scene in Fleabag season two, when she's at the bar with Kristin Scott Thomas, and I have talked about that scene with so many women of my age and just how delightful and powerful and compelling it was. The whole sell of the show hacks is women with different feminist sensibilities of different generations. What happens when you smash them up against each other? What spark there is two,
Grace: And there's a lot of spark there. I mean, that's, I think that's probably one of the tropes we're most familiar with, kind of that older people in particular older women, there's no spark there anymore. It's just such a load of. Like there's so much happening in those later stages of life. And there's also often an appreciation of how special those moments are when they're happening. When I interviewed these women, I wanted to focus on what do you want to learn next? What have you not experienced yet? Because I think people who are older attend to only be asked questions that are like, what can you offer younger people? That's not the focus for me since they were mentioning shows the show Called My Agent on Netflix. I was that incredible character who was the older agent who had such a life story. I was glad that they touched on that now. And then, and then the actress had a huge moment in pop culture. There's women like that everywhere. My intention was to really tap into a really diverse group of people, everyone over the age of 50 to 106, to just see what an everyday life was like for people who are coming from very different communities, you know, one thing.
Ann: One thing that comes up for me when I think about intergenerational relationships, particularly among people who have a similar gender experience of the world, is that the decisions that maybe women had to make in the past about how to navigate the rampant, sexism, racism, classism in our society, don't translate perfectly into our moment, stepping outside yourself and thinking about how would I have acted in an era when I couldn't get a credit card in my own name or when the norms were just so much more locked in than they are now. I wonder if that came up for you. I know you just said, you asked a lot of these women about their futures, but many of the interviews start with the past. I'm wondering if you found yourself having to find that empathy for the different circumstances in which many of them grew up?
Grace: I don’t think I had any problem finding empathy, but I did kind of have to have some compassion for myself and the ignorance of my questions that revealed themselves. I was asking people what they wanted to be when they were little, most of the women, particularly women over 70 looked at me like what kind of question is that like a woman of my generation didn't get to dream about what they wanted to be, was a really draw out of the ground moment for me of, oh wow. I've only grown up in a certain type of world with a certain type of privilege that makes me feel as if I can dream to be something other than a wife, a mother, or perhaps a nurse or secretary that was really eye opening for me. It kind of contrasted how we think of possibility. It was Betty Reid Soskin whose beloved national park ranger, Rosie the Riveter park, talking about looking back and realizing how many different versions of her life she lived. But then still wondering how many more she could have lived if there had not been limits or caps or decreased expectation on who she was because of her gender. And also because of her race.
Ann: Right the many possibilities that were not presented to her as possibilities at the time.
Grace: Absolutely. There's a cultural difference in that question that I really loved when I interviewed Jamie Acuma and her mom and Jamie is an incredible designer, who's Native and she lives in California. When I asked her mom what she wanted to be. She looked at me like, what is this question? And then she said, I think I wanted to be a horse. You know, there was that moment of like the way I examine and think of life stages was just really different than the way that she experienced that in her community. As I ask these questions, depending on what community these women were coming from, the question itself could become their talking point because it was so rooted in my whiteness and very particular social class, but it also really gave us a chance to discuss how different cultures see age, how they see possibility, how they think about women and feminism, because feminist is just in no way a term that all of these women I spoke with thought was a great idea or thought it was something they would identify themselves with. That was also an interesting conversation that I didn't see coming, but I was really glad that I learned from.
Ann: How did you hit on the structure of featuring both these individual interviews and the intergenerational group stories?
Grace: The book originally started as a follow-up to my last book In the Company of Women, which is a format of just single interview back to back to back. I really knew that there had to be this intergenerational component because that's where my heart was for the book. And if there's not an element that I feel incredibly connected to and excited about the project suffers in a way I knew I had to have that in there, and we really had to play with format, how the flow of the book would move, and then what types of intergenerational connections I thought were important to include, because originally I was just going to do friendships. The more that I touched on matriarchy and families, that became a really important part that I thought originally that doesn't really apply because you're related, getting women of different generations of the same family to talk about things that they don't actually usually say to each other was so powerful. Those interviews that were originally supposed to be teeny part of the book, that was a little new addition to the format, ended up becoming my favorite part by far, those conversations made me realize just how much women within their own families or within their own communities really need to sit down and tell each other what they mean to each other.
Ann: Yeah that really resonates. A couple of years ago my uncle did like a big family genealogy project. And of course, because of the way we keep records in the United States, that basically means a quite literally patriarchal diagram. It really inspired me to sit down and talk to my grandmother about her memories of literally any woman I'm related to on that side of the family, because they are so erased from the record. And I realized that I had never done that. And I wish I had done it a lot sooner because my grandmother was well into her eighties at that point and was sort of like, yeah, I don't really remember all the details, but I find myself frequently thinking about the details that she did remember. Did it inspire you to try to have conversations with different generations of women in your own family?
Grace: It did. I sat down and I actually interviewed my mom and my dad with the same questions. I don't have many older women left in my family. I spoke with the ones that I was closest to. I don't come from a family that talks about these things, especially really vulnerable things that often. So I think I was asking them to get into a place that was a little too vulnerable, a little too fast. One of the things I hope people take away from this is that you don't have to ask people these actual questions so much as using it as a jumping off point for particularly contemporary issues. I think older people only get asked about what they did when they were younger. People have really interesting and important takes on current issues just because someone is 90 doesn't mean that they don't have an opinion on climate change or want to ask questions about why white feminism is a problem. So those are conversations that are really important to have in a way that feels appropriate to the relationship that you have with those people.
Ann: The things that can be a prompt for a book like this, weirdly sometimes don't feel as intrusive when they're coming from a stranger. Everything is more loaded when it's within the context of family. When we assume that we should maybe already know this stuff.
Grace: Yeah, I find most people not only don't know it, but they've never actually thought to ask each other those questions. We don't live in a dominant culture in the US that encourages intergenerational connection, or that encourages us to be curious about and appreciate elders in our community. I saw a lot more and people who were coming from nonwhite cultures, the queer community has thought about how we connect and support those generations in ways that straight or cis communities have not older people in the queer community who have lost a lot of their family because they came out in an era where that was a no way accepted, younger queer people are looking towards elders to say, how can we create a family support system outside of our biological families that hit me really hard. I think it's something we don't think about often enough in this country is how are we going to support each other as we get older, especially if, for people who don't have children of our own.
Ann: Yeah, I mean, it's a thing that I really thought about after I read Mia Birdsong's book, How We Show Up, which is a really fantastic book about re-imagining some of these questions of community support. And she'd certainly mentioned a lot of examples from communities of how being naturally outside of the boundaries of how the dominant us culture does and support has opened up some real possibility in part, because a lot of things have to be said explicitly, but at the same time, I think it can still be very difficult to kind of enact that in our own lives. It's almost like I was saying earlier about knowing I want friends of all generations, but then when it comes right down to it, I'm like, but how, I mean, we are still so naturally siloed.
Grace: There really isn't any part of our culture that encourages that, except from the perspective of what can young people glean from older people, that kind of one-sidedness is just really problematic. It reinforces that distance. We keep from each other. I think the more that we can connect with people, even if it's just your aunt, your great aunt, your grandmother and auntie in your family, those sorts of relationships can be a great place to start. If you are a younger and intimidated by the idea of reaching out to an older person, it's important to remember that that actually goes both ways. The number of older women I spoke with who said they felt intimidated to reach out to younger women and they thought, why would they be interested in hanging out with me? And I thought, oh my gosh, no, it's the other way you haven't reversed. That insecurity is very much a thing that the dominant culture and patriarchy hands down as a way to kind of keep us separated from each other.
Ann: So what's the way around that you had this lovely experience with Georgine and maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Was there ever an explicit moment when you were like, no, I actually really want to be friends.
Grace: Yes. I definitely kept showing up, but in little ways we had birdwatching in common and we both had plants in common. We would talk about that during our volunteer shifts. And then eventually we started driving her and dropping her off from the shifts, which Julia and I geeked out about every day about how can't believe we get to pick up Georgia and she's so cool. And then, you know, she would ask for help with her plants or help with her cat or just little tiny things around the house. And I would use those as ways to hang out for an extra half hour or something. All of these things are unique to whatever relationship you're pursuing, but with my relationship with Georgine, it was a lot more about learning to sit with silence. She would have these huge gaps in between things she said, I think at moments because of memory issues at moments, just because she doesn't feel like talking, that's so different from how I talk to my friends who are more in my age group. So that adjustment was really important. There's a version of that adjustment in every friendship. I would encourage people to pursue these moments in very small ways, have a cup of coffee with someone, help them pick up or drop off groceries if they need it. These little moments over time, actually add up to something much more substantive.
[ad]
Ann: Are there stories or conversations in the book that have particularly stuck with you? You find yourself thinking about again and again?
Grace: Oh yeah. There are two in particular that come up a lot for me. One is a mother daughter conversation with Abir and Huda in Chicago, they're both Palestinian. And we had a conversation about what it means to be a part of a diaspora and how you find and make new connections and a society that very much, it's not encouraging that or helping you do that. The conversation ended up being about how Huda, who is the mother, was looking for therapy at an older age and how controversial that was within her community, how her seeking out support for mental health actually inspired her kids. who are much younger, to themselves go look into therapy, seeing Abir, tell her mom, you have inspired us so much in this one, really brave act of asking for help. And the same thing happened with Mab, who is an amazing Iranian American activist. She was talking to me about how we have all these different versions of ourselves. We have to make peace with them and not push them off as if there are embarrassing versions of ourselves that we're glad we've moved beyond. They are very much a part of our current identities. She described it as being constantly at a dinner table with all of the versions of herself and sitting down every night to dinner with all these versions of Mab and really trying to discuss where she is now and why she feels the way she feels. The way she described being in dialogue with herself really helped me make peace with who I was at younger ages, the decisions I made, if I had better information and that sort of sense of perspective just completely left a mark on me that I don't think we'll ever leave.
Ann: I love that so much because I really do think about that. A lot of what would high school me think of this decision to me at the beginning of my career would be so proud of this thing that I'm kind of like shrugging off at this phase in my life. I really do call in those previous versions of myself and I love the dinner table vision of us altogether.
Grace: I don't think we often pause and appreciate how far we've come. Sometimes there are things that feel like a step forward and then a step back, but they're often just kind of a moment of re-evaluating or taking time to process new information. Like when I think about who I was in high school and what comes naturally to me now, it blows my mind. I never spoke up ever in school. And now it feels really natural to me to take leadership roles in a way that I think I would've just thought was totally alien, but I like thinking about sitting down with that version of myself and being like, look at what we feel comfortable doing now. Isn't that cool. It makes me really appreciate all the things that I think felt embarrassing or difficult about earlier parts of my life.
Ann: I'm wondering what you think about this idea that maybe lessons and advice from women over 50 should just be fully absorbed into all the media we make rather than siloed in a book. That's like the wisdom of women over 50. I asked that in part as an indictment of myself and our own decisions on this podcast. When I look at who we've had on the show, we very much skew toward our generational peers. And while we have definitely had women over 50 on the show, it's not a number that's as big as I would like it to be. And so I'm wondering your thoughts about that, about collecting all of the stuff together and there being power to these narratives being in one place. And at the same time, like maybe we need to spread it around a bit.
Grace: I think you're really onto something. And for me it's a yes and. Absolutely these stories should be absorbed and be an everyday part of all of our lives. At the same time. The reason I wanted to codify these stories was that so often the wisdom and the lessons shared between women is oral and it's not written and it's not appreciated for that reason or valued in the same way. I see these debates online now, and academic circles about how citations for sources that are oral storytelling, especially in Indigenous communities. There is no appropriate formatting for that, that values and on par with scientific or academic research. And it makes me think about why I wanted this to be in writing because it, in no way, even begins to scratch the surface of the wisdom and the storytelling that exists between women of different generations. While there are a handful of books that discuss aging and women, I would love to see infinitely more volumes dedicated to codifying some of these stories, because I do think it is how the dominant culture learns to value things. While on the one hand, I wish that was not the case and that we valued oral every day, storytelling and passing tradition and lessons that way I don't think we do. I do think there is this moment happening right now where white people in particular are learning about the traditions of Indigenous cultures and how much oral storytelling is the key part of that. And I hope that maybe burgeoning understanding of that tradition will shape the way that we value and seek out education as well for this place in society. I hoped this book would be a small contribution to the hope that these stories of older women are valued in the ways that we value the stories of older men.
Ann: Yeah. You're making me think of a conversation I had for this podcast a few years ago, with the music critic and writer, Jessica Hopper, who talked about how being kept from your history or your lineage is a form of violence because it gives you the idea that you need to start from zero every time. I totally agree with you about wanting to reevaluate and really value oral traditions while at the same time you're right, saying, okay, the tools we have to track an archive and allow future people to find this story that is important so they can know that and not start from zero.
Grace: There's always a moment when I work on projects like this, where I realize I've lost track of the end product. These 100 stories in this book created real meaningful moments for those people at that time. If this one project did that, I'm very fine with that being the end result. When I get into this stage of talking about the book, I start to have all the same questions that you brought up, did it do enough? Is it sending a message? That's the opposite of what I wanted to do? My books are always inherently imperfect. I do just want to see a lot more books and media in general, starting to highlight the stories of women who are older and really incorporating them alongside the stories of people of different ages when they do get siloed. Like you said, we start to put this label on it. It's just somehow irrelevant when they're anything but.
Ann: This podcast about possibility models, knowing what you want to aspire to in terms of assurance of self, the metaphor of having dinner with all my past selves, that feels aspirational to me. These stories are so important for me, feeling excited about aging.
Grace: When I put together In the Company of Women, I interviewed women primarily in their thirties, forties, because that was my age range at the time. I don't think a lot of people talked about self-assuredness so much as success. That's what I asked them about, so that made sense. But in these discussions that I had with all of these women who are over 50, that was a really common discussion when that inner confidence and self-assuredness showed up. So it made me think, of course, people in their twenties, thirties, and forties, aren't feeling those things yet. I really do feel like those are things that just come with the privilege of getting older. The more that we have those conversations and put them out into media. I think it provides a little bit of cushion and comfort about why it feels aspirational to imagine sitting at a dinner table with all of our former selves. That's not easy. It takes a lot of time to get to a place where that feels natural.
Ann: What do you aspire to at this stage for like the next decade or two of your life?
Grace: At this point, I'm probably four years out from licensure of being a therapist. So I think I'm kind of in that mindset right now of process over anything else and trying to trust just how emotionally exhausting this program is. But after that, my goal remains what it has been probably for the past five years, which is to try to create spaces for people to feel heard and seen and appreciated. I loved doing that in the creative community, but I'm really enjoying getting to do that on a one-on-one basis, as much as there are incredible privileges to speaking to hundreds of thousands of people at a time online, something about my internal happiness just really suffered from not talking to people in smaller groups. I really hope the next 10 years of my life can write the balance of how much joy and connection and grounding comes from talking to people one-on-one.
Ann: That sounds fully aspirational to me. That sounds great. It's funny. We're slightly ahead of something that I definitely wanted to ask you about in this conversation, because when you made the decision to shut down, stop producing new things for Design Sponge, and for good company, your publication and the podcast, you had this very frank conversation that you published with your wife about essentially that transition and why you were making the change. And I just want to bring that up because you alluded to it there in your last response, but I would just love to hear a little bit more about that development for you, of how you decided it was time to let go of this thing that had really built a lot of community.
Grace: You know, I think there's a difference between online community and in-person community. That's something I struggle with a lot, but I think in particular, when Georgine passed away and we went to her funeral, there was something about sitting in a room full of people who see each other almost every day and maybe realize that I didn't really feel that from my online community in the same way. That's not a failing of the online community. That's a failure of me to really seek out more in-person connections. In that moment, I realized, I don't think I can force Design Sponge to be something that it just isn't. If I am not feeling as connected to it, as I used to, I am not the person to be running it. I would say the last two years prior to stopping the publications, I thought about, should I be handing this over to somebody else? What does that look like? Am I just handing somebody a business model that is already kind of in decline because of the way social media has taken off, ultimately, after looking at 10 different versions of what it could look like to try to keep things ultimately a float, it came back to honoring the core of the site, which was just kind of like something that I felt really excited about and really passionate about. And then I looked around the community and thought, you know what, these conversations they're already happening in other places, it's a myth for me to feel like this particular platform has to exist for these dialogues to keep happening. A lot of closing the site was unraveling my identity and my ego from Design Sponge. And I think the way that we closed it, which was to announce it in January and then close and August, it allowed us to take time to figure out what parts of the site maybe were still valuable in the terms of community needs that we could hand off or reproduce somewhere else to make sure we weren't leaving anybody in alert. And then what aspects of the platform were still valuable and how could we best divest ourselves from those and give them to voices and communities that needed them more than we did. When Tavi Gevinson wrote her closing letter for Rookie, that for me was like the last nail in the coffin. She spoke in such detail about all of the different avenues. She pursued to keep Rookie open and I had done the exact same process. I didn't want to do any of that. It fell against what Design Sponge was founded on. So when I decided to close, I thought let's look around at the community and see who else we can support. We closed in August and then at the beginning of the next year, there was this huge racial reckoning of this era of the murder of George Floyd and so many other black and brown men and women at the hands of law enforcement. And I realized we still have this social media platform. What are we doing with it? So many people reached out to me to say, you're still sitting on this source of power. How are you going to divest yourself? I reached out to 30 or 40 people in the community just to see, like, would you want this? What is the best way for me to hand this over? And ultimately where I settled was I needed to be in control of it only because that's a lot of work. And for me to expect someone from a community that is traditionally asked to do that work for free to suddenly take over producing this content or having the responsibility of managing a pretty active social feed was again, just kind of an unfair ask. I took the Design Sponge leftover savings, divided it up over a series of takeovers from people of all different communities. And that's kind of been the format, then now remains a Design Sponge. The social platforms are there to highlight people from communities that I don't think get enough attention from the design world. I think in that way, it still lives on a little bit. And it's given me a softer transition into this new chapter.
Ann: Not to very intentionally yank this full circle to the term middle age, but I really do feel like if you've founded a business and shuttered it, like after many, many years of investment, I feel like that is not just grown up, but maybe like more than grown up kind of shit.
Grace: It felt very grownup to make a decision that was not the one that I think people wanted. Like my team in particular was so much more upset than I thought. And I had a really hard time sitting with those feelings and not trying to just fix them all for people to just say like, I'm sorry. Yeah. The way we do things, doesn't really jive with what we need to do to stay afloat and to stay solvent. So I have to make this difficult decision. That's going to make a lot of you very unhappy, and that was really uncomfortable. But ultimately I'm glad that I did it the way I did.
Ann: It seems like a real moment of that sureness in yourself that a lot of these women in the book describe of like, yeah, it's going to disappoint other people or yeah, it doesn't jive with maybe what capitalism wants me to do. And yet I still know it's the right choice.
Grace: I think that's the thing I was asked to more than anything else when people heard, what I was working on was when is the age that I just won't care what people think of me anymore.
Ann: [laughter] Oh, sorry. That's relatable. That's why I’m laughing
Grace: I don't think that age exists in terms of it being some magic thing that just happens. But I do think it is a slow process that starts happening probably primarily because mainstream society starts looking in the other direction because I no longer see older women as desirable. So I think it gives you a little bit of freedom from a number of different gazes to figure yourself out in a different way. Although it also comes with a ton of loss because when people think you're not relevant, they don't listen to you or support you as much anymore. It's a give and a take. But I did find that tipping point to be in the forties and fifties for a lot of women who felt like I got to make decisions based on just what I wanted to do.
Ann: Well that feels like a great place to end that aspirational idea right there. Grace, thank you so much for this book and for your time today.
Grace: Thanks so much for having me. This was a really nice talk. Thank you.
[interview ends]
Ann: In the show notes. You'll find the link to order Collective Wisdom. If you pre-order from Oblong books, you can get a signed copy through the link in the show notes. We'll also link to Grace's website and that final episode of Good Company that we mentioned in our conversation
Gina: And special, thanks to Imani Leonard for editing this week.
Aminatou: I will see you on the internet, my love.
Ann: I'll see you in the future. When we are old women and on the internet.
[outro music]
Aminatou: You can find us many places on the Internet: callyourgirlfriend.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, we're on all your favorite platforms. Subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. You can call us back. You can leave a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Our logos are by Kenesha Sneed. We're on Instagram and Twitter at @callyrgf. Our producer is Jordan Bailey and this podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.