Dear Erin,
I want to take this opportunity to reassure you about something I know you are painfully unaware of right now. You are enough.
There are pros and cons to being a girl born in a Chinese family, and growing up you definitely felt the expectations of a patriarchal society weighing down on you. There is an unspoken but prevailing belief that girls who marry well do better in life than those who have a career.
Your first love is art, and you go to art college. Your parents told you that you could achieve anything you wanted to, but the doubt niggling at the back of your mind always told you that those who mattered were the ones who became doctors, lawyers and fancy people who worked in banks.
When, at 25, you start your own business BerinMade, a stationary design studio, many will see it as a hobby. Friends will assume that you can just pop out for a coffee at your leisure. They will reason that work must come easy and you are just doing it for fun. When they find out that your husband has chosen to work in the business that you founded, you will be faced with disbelief. Frustratingly, years down the line, even when you have an off-site warehouse, employees in two continents and a book deal, some will still express surprise that you have made a career out of this.
In the early years, this will drive you. But you’ll find that living to prove your worth is exhausting.
Your biggest challenge has been, and will always be, being true to yourself. The creative industry champions individuality, but is always moving on to the “next big thing”. One year it was gold pineapples, the next it was flamingos. The key is to focus on what you believe in. You’ll eventually learn your brand voice is stronger if you don’t answer to the trends, but present your own take on them.
Your first season trading wholesale was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. You felt like you were dropped into a huge ocean, nervous you were going to drown. It was either sink or swim. Eventually the sales came through, and your dream national chain store made contact. When you first get their email, you must have re-read it a hundred times in disbelief. There was a realisation that perhaps you will be okay after all.
The feeling didn’t last long. A month after they promised to order, they pulled the product from their selection with no reason at all. It was brutal. That night you sobbed into a pillow, while your husband watched with worry in his eyes. To you, it was not about the money, but watching your dream being snatched away. You took it so hard, because you thought your product (and therefore, you) were not good enough; you didn’t even see the fact that a buyer from a world-renowned store took notice of you. Does it ever get easier? I think so. The key is to keep getting up and trying again.
At 30, you will sign your first book deal with your dream publisher to write a book about celebrating life’s best moments. The irony is not lost on you: it is a huge moment for celebration, but as you pause you will realise you still don’t feel like you’re enough. It shows in your frown lines, the way you bite your nails, and how you hate looking into the mirror sometimes. No achievement in your life is going to affirm something that you don’t already know inside.
I wish you would be less harsh on yourself. Two weeks after you gave birth to your daughter Phoebe, you went right back to work. The exhaustion of caring for a newborn and working all hours of the day will really take you to the brink. You still didn’t know how to cut yourself some slack.
Be patient with yourself. You are enough. It’s taken me a decade to realise that this is what I’ve been learning. Your achievements are nothing to you if you can’t enjoy the process. Live in the moments of rejection, don’t shove them under the carpet. These moments bring reflection and revelation that sharpen your focus, and put what really matters in life into perspective. You are and will always be a work-in-progress, just like everybody else.
Erin
Erin Hung is the founder of BerinMade. Her book, Paper Parties, is out in May.
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