Content That Hits Different
I’ve always been a little self-conscious of being different. I knew there was a “right” way to stand out and I’d do anything to avoid standing out the “wrong” way. Over the summer I found the cure for that feeling on the Subway in New York - probably the only time anyone will find a cure for anything down there.
The Subway is a circus. Here’s a list of what you can expect to see on the train - someone flat asleep across a row of seats, someone blasting music on a boom box, someone having a loud argument with themselves, children, a person in transition, tube girl - and this is one carriage. I’ve never been in a place that had so much going on, and nobody was staring at any of it. And if nobody was staring at any of that, they definitely weren’t looking at me.
Photo by Josh Gordon on Unsplash
That made me feel kind of invisible on the Subway, but in a way that felt liberating. It was just normal to be different. It’s straight up one of the draws of New York - people from all over the world get to come and be the fullest version of themselves. Like most things on the Subway, this feeling was infectious. I caught the bug and spent the rest of my time in the city with this heightened sense of who I was - I started to practice expressing myself without self-doubt, judgment, or reservations, and it worked! Just by giving myself the mental permission to be properly myself, I noticed I was thinking, talking, and writing clearer.
Then like a train, it hit me - I don’t have to be in New York or the Subway to be me. It’s a mindset and I can take it with me anywhere. It’s not like when you go through immigration and the customs officer confiscates the parts of your personality that you’re trying to hide. You’re the one that gets to decide who shows up, and how.
It was the best reminder that different ideas are the ones that help us move forward. We ate all our food raw until we didn’t. We lived by candlelight until we didn’t. We painted things realistically until we didn’t. We thought gender was binary until we didn’t. I thought the Subway was batshit cray until I didn’t. It feels like in our collective story, the courage and the sense to be different help us be and do better.
So in this next chapter of the company, our mission is simple. To do things differently; we want to bring elevated ideas to the table, to write riskier scripts, to tell stories that connect deeper - to make content that hits different.
This is North West 7.
Content That Hits Different.
Article thumbnail by Eddi Aguirre on Unsplash