1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:09,000 Pull up a chair and tell me your memory. 2 00:00:09,000 --> 00:00:13,000 Why does it matter to you? 3 00:00:13,000 --> 00:00:20,000 I want to hear your story, your point of view. 4 00:00:20,000 --> 00:00:28,000 Tell me what happened to you. 5 00:00:28,000 --> 00:00:30,000 Hi and welcome back to Tell Me What Happened. 6 00:00:30,000 --> 00:00:40,000 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. 7 00:00:40,000 --> 00:00:46,000 I'm your host, Jay Rehack, and like you, I've had my share of childhood experiences. 8 00:00:46,000 --> 00:00:50,000 Some of them traumatic, some of them traumatic, some of them pleasant. 9 00:00:50,000 --> 00:00:55,000 But I like to think that everything that's ever happened to me has made me a better person. 10 00:00:55,000 --> 00:01:00,000 Now that's not necessarily true, but that's what I'd like to think. 11 00:01:00,000 --> 00:01:09,000 Alright, today I have as my guest a friend in mind that I met at Harvard a while ago, Lisa Linsley. 12 00:01:09,000 --> 00:01:18,000 Lisa's 38 year career in finance has gone from investment banking to microfinance to shareholder activism and corporate accountability. 13 00:01:18,000 --> 00:01:33,000 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. 14 00:01:33,000 --> 00:01:43,000 She has lived in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico and holds an MBA from NYU and an undergraduate degree from Georgetown. 15 00:01:43,000 --> 00:01:47,000 Welcome to Tell Me What Happened, Lisa Linsley. 16 00:01:47,000 --> 00:01:49,000 Thanks, Jay. 17 00:01:49,000 --> 00:01:55,000 Lisa, as I mentioned in the intro, I met you a number of years ago at Harvard. 18 00:01:55,000 --> 00:02:02,000 We're trying to maybe adjust some of the thinking of trustees around the country to think of social consciousness. 19 00:02:02,000 --> 00:02:07,000 But anyway, we met and you were kind enough to say you'd be willing to be on the show. 20 00:02:07,000 --> 00:02:13,000 You told me a great story when we were back in Boston back in June. 21 00:02:13,000 --> 00:02:19,000 And I asked if you'd tell it and you said you would. So are you ready to tell your story? 22 00:02:19,000 --> 00:02:23,000 Yep, Jay. I actually think we met in Chicago originally. 23 00:02:23,000 --> 00:02:24,000 Oh, my gosh. 24 00:02:24,000 --> 00:02:34,000 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. 25 00:02:34,000 --> 00:02:36,000 Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that. 26 00:02:36,000 --> 00:02:44,000 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. 27 00:02:44,000 --> 00:02:48,000 I'm really happy to have you on the show. We're really kind of feeling quite lucky today. 28 00:02:48,000 --> 00:02:54,000 I guess I feel lucky every day, but today I feel especially lucky that you're willing to come on the show. 29 00:02:54,000 --> 00:02:56,000 So are you ready to tell your story? 30 00:02:56,000 --> 00:02:59,000 Yep. I'll launch right into it. That's all right. 31 00:02:59,000 --> 00:03:05,000 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. 32 00:03:05,000 --> 00:03:07,000 So take it away, Lisa. 33 00:03:07,000 --> 00:03:15,000 So I turned 60 on Friday and I come from a pretty large family. 34 00:03:15,000 --> 00:03:19,000 I only have one brother, but I have a lot of cousins and aunts and uncles. 35 00:03:19,000 --> 00:03:31,000 And my parents were originally from Louisiana and I grew up in Texas and holidays, especially Thanksgiving and Easter. 36 00:03:31,000 --> 00:03:40,000 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. 37 00:03:40,000 --> 00:03:45,000 And so one of my aunts and uncles had three children. 38 00:03:45,000 --> 00:03:51,000 They had a son who was biological and they had adopted two sisters. 39 00:03:51,000 --> 00:04:00,000 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. 40 00:04:00,000 --> 00:04:02,000 And I grew up with these cousins. 41 00:04:02,000 --> 00:04:11,000 They were adopted when the younger one was six months old or younger and the older one was two and a half years old. 42 00:04:11,000 --> 00:04:15,000 So at that time I would have been one and a half years old. 43 00:04:15,000 --> 00:04:24,000 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. 44 00:04:24,000 --> 00:04:34,000 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. 45 00:04:34,000 --> 00:04:37,000 And I'm not really sure of the year. 46 00:04:37,000 --> 00:04:45,000 I think that I was about eight, seven or eight, and we had a great time. 47 00:04:45,000 --> 00:04:47,000 We took baths together. 48 00:04:47,000 --> 00:04:50,000 We put silly paint on our faces. 49 00:04:50,000 --> 00:04:56,000 We made that we were the Partridge family band, which many of your listeners may not know this. 50 00:04:56,000 --> 00:04:59,000 It was a TV series about a family that was in a band. 51 00:04:59,000 --> 00:05:12,000 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. 52 00:05:12,000 --> 00:05:17,000 As though she were a gift that could be returned to the store. 53 00:05:17,000 --> 00:05:28,000 And my parents had been talking to my aunt and uncle about the perceived problems and the family. 54 00:05:28,000 --> 00:05:31,000 They had offered to adopt my cousin. 55 00:05:31,000 --> 00:05:34,000 They had said that my cousin could come and live with us. 56 00:05:34,000 --> 00:05:38,000 But my aunt and uncle didn't didn't take my parents up on any of that. 57 00:05:38,000 --> 00:05:42,000 And they just took my cousin back. 58 00:05:42,000 --> 00:05:49,000 And I remember my mom being on the phone and crying and I was asking her what was wrong. 59 00:05:49,000 --> 00:05:52,000 And she told me that this had happened. 60 00:05:52,000 --> 00:05:54,000 And I really didn't understand. 61 00:05:54,000 --> 00:05:57,000 And I never saw that cousin again. 62 00:05:57,000 --> 00:06:11,000 And while we talked about it in my immediate family, some at subsequent family gatherings, there was total silence. 63 00:06:11,000 --> 00:06:14,000 As though that cousin never existed. 64 00:06:14,000 --> 00:06:19,000 And it was very confusing for me as a little girl. 65 00:06:19,000 --> 00:06:29,000 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. 66 00:06:29,000 --> 00:06:35,000 And so in my whole life, I was desperate to know what the rules were and to follow them. 67 00:06:35,000 --> 00:06:38,000 So I got, you know, I got really good grades. 68 00:06:38,000 --> 00:06:43,000 I got into Georgetown. I went to work on Wall Street. 69 00:06:43,000 --> 00:06:48,000 You know, I was determined to be successful so that this wouldn't happen to me. 70 00:06:48,000 --> 00:06:51,000 And so that's one way it impacted me. 71 00:06:51,000 --> 00:06:55,000 I was always very sensitive to feedback, negative feedback. 72 00:06:55,000 --> 00:07:02,000 If someone honked at me in traffic up until a few years ago, I would flip out like, oh, you think I did that? 73 00:07:02,000 --> 00:07:04,000 I didn't do that. You did that. That kind of thing. 74 00:07:04,000 --> 00:07:09,000 Because the consequences of breaking a rule were catastrophic. 75 00:07:09,000 --> 00:07:15,000 I was very, yeah, very reactive, perfectionistic. 76 00:07:15,000 --> 00:07:27,000 I also think that this impacted my passion to speak out for people who aren't having a voice in society. 77 00:07:27,000 --> 00:07:38,000 So after I was successful on Wall Street, I went into microfinance, which was helping people in developing countries get loans and hindsight. 78 00:07:38,000 --> 00:07:43,000 Like that wasn't the most progressive thing I could have done because it's still capitalism. 79 00:07:43,000 --> 00:07:54,000 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 80 00:07:54,000 --> 00:08:01,000 the power of people who have a lot over people who don't have a lot. 81 00:08:01,000 --> 00:08:03,000 So that's my story, Jay. 82 00:08:03,000 --> 00:08:10,000 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. 83 00:08:10,000 --> 00:08:18,000 And you've already answered my subsequent question to a degree of how it impacted you as an adult. 84 00:08:18,000 --> 00:08:27,000 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. 85 00:08:27,000 --> 00:08:42,000 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. 86 00:08:42,000 --> 00:08:45,000 And then, yeah, talking about your career. 87 00:08:45,000 --> 00:08:49,000 But I want to circle back a little bit when all that was going down. 88 00:08:49,000 --> 00:08:52,000 I understand your mother was distressed, etc. 89 00:08:52,000 --> 00:08:57,000 In subsequent years, let's say, let's call it your teen years and you're together with people. 90 00:08:57,000 --> 00:09:00,000 Was it the idea that nobody talks about it? 91 00:09:00,000 --> 00:09:04,000 Did your mother or somebody say, look, when aunt comes over, don't mention it? 92 00:09:04,000 --> 00:09:11,000 Or was it understood that we don't talk about this or how did that play out in your younger life? 93 00:09:11,000 --> 00:09:13,000 Right. So a few things happened. 94 00:09:13,000 --> 00:09:20,000 One was that the alleged violation that my cousin did was to fight with her younger sister. 95 00:09:20,000 --> 00:09:25,000 And so I as a child blamed the younger sister. 96 00:09:25,000 --> 00:09:33,000 So I was actually mean to my cousin, which I'm really embarrassed to say that. 97 00:09:33,000 --> 00:09:42,000 And, you know, I've thought a lot about what she must have been through, both she and her brother. 98 00:09:42,000 --> 00:09:50,000 And I think that the relationship to answer your question, the relationship between my mom and dad, 99 00:09:50,000 --> 00:09:54,000 more my mom and my aunt and uncle was really never the same. 100 00:09:54,000 --> 00:10:00,000 And my mom is 84 and she's still angry. 101 00:10:00,000 --> 00:10:02,000 I asked her the other day. 102 00:10:02,000 --> 00:10:10,000 Yeah. And I think that there was a whole anecdote about my mom introducing my aunt to Christianity. 103 00:10:10,000 --> 00:10:20,000 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. 104 00:10:20,000 --> 00:10:38,000 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. 105 00:10:38,000 --> 00:10:46,000 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? 106 00:10:46,000 --> 00:10:54,000 I actually don't have one. You know, once she became an adult, she kind of distanced herself from everyone. 107 00:10:54,000 --> 00:10:57,000 I still have a relationship with the brother. 108 00:10:57,000 --> 00:11:13,000 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. 109 00:11:13,000 --> 00:11:15,000 It's admirable. 110 00:11:15,000 --> 00:11:22,000 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. 111 00:11:22,000 --> 00:11:33,000 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. 112 00:11:33,000 --> 00:11:37,000 Please don't, you know, blame me or whatever. 113 00:11:37,000 --> 00:11:40,000 Ascribe something that's, you know, wrong to me or whatever. 114 00:11:40,000 --> 00:11:51,000 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. 115 00:11:51,000 --> 00:11:57,000 Maybe it steered you in that direction ultimately. Maybe. I mean, that's for you to say now. 116 00:11:57,000 --> 00:12:08,000 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. 117 00:12:08,000 --> 00:12:13,000 And it wasn't until a few years ago, really, that I started connecting the dots. 118 00:12:13,000 --> 00:12:23,000 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. 119 00:12:23,000 --> 00:12:32,000 I think also, you know, many organizations such as labor unions often have in office places, workplaces have unwritten rules, right? 120 00:12:32,000 --> 00:12:48,000 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. 121 00:12:48,000 --> 00:12:57,000 And my work as an advocate often involves challenging rules that are unfair and deliberately breaking rules. And so that's very tricky. 122 00:12:57,000 --> 00:13:17,000 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, 123 00:13:17,000 --> 00:13:27,000 I realized that women had no power. And so I started wearing short hair, I started dressing in the same clothes my brother wore. 124 00:13:27,000 --> 00:13:35,000 I started writing David on my like elementary school papers, I called myself David Linsley, because David Cassidy, the Partridge family. 125 00:13:35,000 --> 00:13:46,000 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. 126 00:13:46,000 --> 00:14:00,000 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. 127 00:14:00,000 --> 00:14:16,000 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. 128 00:14:16,000 --> 00:14:33,000 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. 129 00:14:33,000 --> 00:14:42,000 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. 130 00:14:42,000 --> 00:14:51,000 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? 131 00:14:51,000 --> 00:14:53,000 Yes. 132 00:14:53,000 --> 00:15:04,000 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. 133 00:15:04,000 --> 00:15:15,000 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. 134 00:15:15,000 --> 00:15:19,000 So yeah, it's a, it's a very sad pattern. 135 00:15:19,000 --> 00:15:29,000 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. 136 00:15:29,000 --> 00:15:39,000 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? 137 00:15:39,000 --> 00:15:50,000 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, 138 00:15:50,000 --> 00:16:05,000 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. 139 00:16:05,000 --> 00:16:09,000 And so it's so sad to hear it. 140 00:16:09,000 --> 00:16:17,000 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. 141 00:16:17,000 --> 00:16:22,000 It's going to stay with me for a while, like I said, but yeah, thank you. 142 00:16:22,000 --> 00:16:23,000 You're welcome. 143 00:16:23,000 --> 00:16:30,000 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. 144 00:16:30,000 --> 00:16:48,000 And until next time, this is Jay Reaq asking you all to please stay safe out there and try not to hurt anybody.