Pull up a chair and tell me your memory.
Why does it matter to you?
I want to hear your story, your point of view.
Tell me what happened to you.
Hi and welcome back to Tell Me What Happened.
The podcast that features folks from all walks of life telling us one true story, one childhood experience that's impacted who they are today.
I'm your host, Jay Rehack, and like you, I've had my share of childhood experiences.
Some of them traumatic, some of them traumatic, some of them pleasant.
But I like to think that everything that's ever happened to me has made me a better person.
Now that's not necessarily true, but that's what I'd like to think.
Alright, today I have as my guest a friend in mind that I met at Harvard a while ago, Lisa Linsley.
Lisa's 38 year career in finance has gone from investment banking to microfinance to shareholder activism and corporate accountability.
Most recently, Lisa was the director of investor engagement at Majority Action, where she led a team supporting institutional investors in addressing racial inequality and climate change in their portfolio companies and service providers.
She has lived in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico and holds an MBA from NYU and an undergraduate degree from Georgetown.
Welcome to Tell Me What Happened, Lisa Linsley.
Thanks, Jay.
Lisa, as I mentioned in the intro, I met you a number of years ago at Harvard.
We're trying to maybe adjust some of the thinking of trustees around the country to think of social consciousness.
But anyway, we met and you were kind enough to say you'd be willing to be on the show.
You told me a great story when we were back in Boston back in June.
And I asked if you'd tell it and you said you would. So are you ready to tell your story?
Yep, Jay. I actually think we met in Chicago originally.
Oh, my gosh.
At a Chicago teachers union meeting. Yeah. Yeah. And I was very, I've been very impressed by your leadership in the labor movement and your commitment as an educator.
Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that.
It's been a while. It's been a minute, as they say, that since we met, it's been a while, but we reconnected over the years.
I'm really happy to have you on the show. We're really kind of feeling quite lucky today.
I guess I feel lucky every day, but today I feel especially lucky that you're willing to come on the show.
So are you ready to tell your story?
Yep. I'll launch right into it. That's all right.
Yes. What I'm going to do is I'm going to mute myself, Lisa, so you know that I won't be interrupting you.
So take it away, Lisa.
So I turned 60 on Friday and I come from a pretty large family.
I only have one brother, but I have a lot of cousins and aunts and uncles.
And my parents were originally from Louisiana and I grew up in Texas and holidays, especially Thanksgiving and Easter.
There were always big family occasions when my family would travel back to Louisiana and we would meet up with all of our cousins at my grandparents' house.
And so one of my aunts and uncles had three children.
They had a son who was biological and they had adopted two sisters.
One sister was about my brother's age, so about two years younger than I am, and one sister was one year older than I was.
And I grew up with these cousins.
They were adopted when the younger one was six months old or younger and the older one was two and a half years old.
So at that time I would have been one and a half years old.
And we would play together, play football, play games, and inevitably someone would hit their head on the edge of a coffee table and end up in the emergency room.
Usually it was my brother. So and then one summer, the older of the two sisters came and spent two weeks with me and my family.
And I'm not really sure of the year.
I think that I was about eight, seven or eight, and we had a great time.
We took baths together.
We put silly paint on our faces.
We made that we were the Partridge family band, which many of your listeners may not know this.
It was a TV series about a family that was in a band.
And then my cousin went back home and her parents took her back to the orphanage where they had adopted her and left her there.
As though she were a gift that could be returned to the store.
And my parents had been talking to my aunt and uncle about the perceived problems and the family.
They had offered to adopt my cousin.
They had said that my cousin could come and live with us.
But my aunt and uncle didn't didn't take my parents up on any of that.
And they just took my cousin back.
And I remember my mom being on the phone and crying and I was asking her what was wrong.
And she told me that this had happened.
And I really didn't understand.
And I never saw that cousin again.
And while we talked about it in my immediate family, some at subsequent family gatherings, there was total silence.
As though that cousin never existed.
And it was very confusing for me as a little girl.
And I was left with the lesson that you could be as a girl, you could be disappeared at any point in time if you broke the rules.
And so in my whole life, I was desperate to know what the rules were and to follow them.
So I got, you know, I got really good grades.
I got into Georgetown. I went to work on Wall Street.
You know, I was determined to be successful so that this wouldn't happen to me.
And so that's one way it impacted me.
I was always very sensitive to feedback, negative feedback.
If someone honked at me in traffic up until a few years ago, I would flip out like, oh, you think I did that?
I didn't do that. You did that. That kind of thing.
Because the consequences of breaking a rule were catastrophic.
I was very, yeah, very reactive, perfectionistic.
I also think that this impacted my passion to speak out for people who aren't having a voice in society.
So after I was successful on Wall Street, I went into microfinance, which was helping people in developing countries get loans and hindsight.
Like that wasn't the most progressive thing I could have done because it's still capitalism.
And then I went into the labor movement where I felt like I really found a home and continued, you know, holding corporations accountable and challenging
the power of people who have a lot over people who don't have a lot.
So that's my story, Jay.
Wow. I heard that story a couple of months ago and I'm still stunned by it and I thought about it quite a bit, but I didn't realize.
And you've already answered my subsequent question to a degree of how it impacted you as an adult.
I could see to a certain extent how it would automatically impact you as a young child, you know, dramatically in the sense of that person's gone.
But you've sort of told me already how it's impacted you as an adult and the idea that you need to be perfect or you might be disappeared or something to that effect is really profound.
And then, yeah, talking about your career.
But I want to circle back a little bit when all that was going down.
I understand your mother was distressed, etc.
In subsequent years, let's say, let's call it your teen years and you're together with people.
Was it the idea that nobody talks about it?
Did your mother or somebody say, look, when aunt comes over, don't mention it?
Or was it understood that we don't talk about this or how did that play out in your younger life?
Right. So a few things happened.
One was that the alleged violation that my cousin did was to fight with her younger sister.
And so I as a child blamed the younger sister.
So I was actually mean to my cousin, which I'm really embarrassed to say that.
And, you know, I've thought a lot about what she must have been through, both she and her brother.
And I think that the relationship to answer your question, the relationship between my mom and dad,
more my mom and my aunt and uncle was really never the same.
And my mom is 84 and she's still angry.
I asked her the other day.
Yeah. And I think that there was a whole anecdote about my mom introducing my aunt to Christianity.
And my aunt had somehow justified this by like closing her eyes and opening the Bible and pointing to something that said, you know, cast out evil, blah, blah, blah.
And, you know, I wasn't like forbidden to talk about like within our house, but it kind of became after, you know, after a while, it became kind of normalized that when we went to see my grandparents, we didn't talk about it.
And how about your relationship with the sibling or the sister, whatever that she fought with her? Is that still, is that good or is that not great?
I actually don't have one. You know, once she became an adult, she kind of distanced herself from everyone.
I still have a relationship with the brother.
And I actually really admire that he has overcome, you know, all of this and he's a grandfather. He's moved his mother up to like live in a retirement home near him so he can take care of her.
It's admirable.
Yeah, it is. And I got to tell you, your story is amazing. It's stayed with me since you've told me the story.
It will stay with me the rest of my life. When you explained that it actually impacted you to the point where like you say you're like a perfectionist or somebody honks the horn at you and you're like, there wasn't me.
Please don't, you know, blame me or whatever.
Ascribe something that's, you know, wrong to me or whatever.
And then to think that you're involved so much in a labor movement and I would argue social and economic justice is really, again, I'm sorry it happened to your cousin, but.
Maybe it steered you in that direction ultimately. Maybe. I mean, that's for you to say now.
Yeah, I think it probably had had something to do with it. A couple other things. You know, it took me a long time. It's taken me a long time when I'm still like figuring out how this impacted me.
And it wasn't until a few years ago, really, that I started connecting the dots.
So I had to do a lot of work on myself to be able to realize there was a connection to this and how traumatic of an event it was for me.
I think also, you know, many organizations such as labor unions often have in office places, workplaces have unwritten rules, right?
And so it's not uncommon. It's like more common than not. And so those kind of things would be very tricky ground for me to figure those out and make sure I was on the right side.
And my work as an advocate often involves challenging rules that are unfair and deliberately breaking rules. And so that's very tricky.
Also, one other thing that happened, and I'm a little unclear as to the chronology of this, but at some point in my childhood, whether it was because of this or before that, I realized that, you know, and I grew up in Texas in the late 60s, early 70s,
I realized that women had no power. And so I started wearing short hair, I started dressing in the same clothes my brother wore.
I started writing David on my like elementary school papers, I called myself David Linsley, because David Cassidy, the Partridge family.
And, you know, that didn't last very long. But I do think that this episode had something to do with it because I was convinced that it didn't happen to boys, it only happened to girls.
Wow. Wow, that's incredible. I mean, again, your story is profoundly sad, but profoundly powerful. And again, I keep going over it. I feel badly for the whole family, for everybody.
But the way that you turned it around in terms of using it in some ways to advocate for the people who don't have a voice or to work with that trauma, I mean, I call it trauma, and turn it around.
I think it is trauma. And it, you know, and it took me, it took me a long time to acknowledge that just because it wasn't traumatic for my brother, didn't mean that like I, I, I minimized it for a long time and I delegitimized it.
And so acknowledging that it was a trauma for me, it doesn't matter that, yeah, no, I didn't get taken back. I wasn't adopted.
It doesn't mean that it wasn't a trauma for me. Because trauma is about trauma is about how, how it lands for the child, right?
Yes.
You know, and I think that the, the culture of silence in families is probably a pretty common thing. Pretending things are okay when they're not.
I also think that this was an issue of intergenerational trauma. I think that my aunt and uncle had suffered their own childhood trauma and it was playing out with their own children.
So yeah, it's a, it's a very sad pattern.
Oh my gosh, I can't. Yeah, the layers are too great for my capacity to do more than just mourn for everybody. That's it. I'm not.
I certainly don't have any background in psychology or anything like that. So what happened to that young girl would happen to your family?
What happened to your aunt and uncle for, you know, whatever, like you said, that's intergenerational. It must have been some profound deep problem with the idea of nobody fights or something like that because,
because kids do fight to be honest with you. I've been thrown out of my family many times. If I, for the times I fought with my brothers and my sisters, you know, I, I'm, you know, I'm not proud of many of those days, but we ultimately reconcile those children.
And so it's so sad to hear it.
Well, Lisa, thank you very much for coming on to tell me what happened and telling us that profoundly deep story and sad story and you're welcome.
It's going to stay with me for a while, like I said, but yeah, thank you.
You're welcome.
All right. Well, that's our show. I'd like to again thank Lisa Linsley for coming on the show and telling us that story.
And until next time, this is Jay Reaq asking you all to please stay safe out there and try not to hurt anybody.