This week I was asked, very kindly, to write a short bio about myself that might be pitched to a national paper’s blog. (Thank you, Naomi Kerbel.)
Here’s what I wrote:
Eugenie Teasley is founder and CEO of Spark+Mettle, a youth aspirations agency that builds character strengths, soft skills and networks for marginalised young people. She holds degrees from Oxford University and UC Berkeley. She has taught in south London and has lived and worked in San Francisco. Now aged 32, she lives in Brighton with her husband, son and two dogs. She speaks and writes on topics that centre around flourishing, entrepreneurship, feminism and youth development. Her blog (www.eugenieteasley.com) is written from the perspective of a young(ish) woman candidly reflecting on her daily thoughts and experiences as she learns to lead an organisation and find a way to balance it with her personal life.
She was sweet about it. But then I realised that I was just putting out the shiny version. Best face and all that. So much for ‘candid’.
Here’s the real version:
Eugenie Teasley persuaded some (admittedly pretty hotshot) buddies to become trustees to a fledgling idea in 2011. She’s run it mostly from her kitchen. The floor of which is as worn out as she quite often feels. She sends a lot of emails, but can regularly still be found in her pyjamas well after lunch time. For no apparent reason she tends to avoid phone conversations and only listens to voicemail about once a week. She has two dogs and even after her #Flourish40 experiment still barely walks them. She hasn’t cooked anything this month, yet feels disproportionately proud that she folded two baskets’ worth of washing a week ago. Her kid spends so much time with the childminder that he now mimics her facial expressions. She’s just discovered that there is a word for people who refer to themselves in the third person: illeist. She should have know that because her BA was in Classics, but she didn’t because she has forgotten everything she ever learned. Except that ‘education’ means to ‘bring out’ rather than to ‘indoctrinate’. But then again a lot of non-Classicists can figure that out.
