Watching the surveillance cameras from the back office, I saw a man walk into the building and approach the reception desk. Carrying a clipboard and a thick manila envelope, he was clearly not a customer. A few moments later, reception phoned back that the man needed to see me. I walked up the hallway to the front in what felt like slow motion, my stomach sinking farther with each step. I knew what this was all about.
I signed the paper on the clipboard and opened the envelope, my hands shaking. The top of the page read, “The Superior Court, Shasta County,” and below that was 530 Collective’s name in the defendant box. The company was being sued.
In the fall of 2013, as I was settling into my seat on the planning commission, there was a disturbance in the 530 force. Seemingly out of nowhere, a seasoned manager suddenly developed significant performance issues. This was someone who had been with the company for a long time, someone I trusted implicitly, and someone whom I almost considered a friend. I couldn’t understand why her performance and attitude had changed so suddenly.
After close to a month of trying to rehabilitate these performance issues, I was left with no alternative but to release her.
A few months after her release, she filed a complaint with the labor board, alleging a number of falsehoods. That complaint was later abandoned when she, aided and abetted—or possibly the other way around—by two other former employees and an attorney willing to take their case on a contingency, filed a lawsuit in Shasta County Superior Court seeking $250,000 in damages for a refined list of fabricated claims.
Being sued was another new experience for me, including the emotions that came with it: outrage was in the lead with indignation and unease in hot pursuit.
I needed a labor attorney, and I needed a good one. Enter another one of my heroes: Benjamin Kennedy of Carr, Kennedy, Peterson, and Frost. First and foremost, Ben is a brilliant attorney, and he wins. However, it would not be his legal skills that I ultimately came to value most. Ben is extremely direct, and, as a client being billed by the minute, I appreciated that directness. Second, Ben has an incredible sense of humor. In retrospect, I believe it was his cutting wit and blazing sarcasm that kept me grounded through the upheaval of the lawsuit, which ended up shaking up both my personal and professional life.
One afternoon in 2014, John and I were engaged in a heated argument about the lawsuit. I wanted to file a police report over some missing money that I suspected had been taken by the former manager who was now the leader of the lawsuit trio. I felt this had bearing on the lawsuit and should be reported. My attorney agreed, but John didn’t. I didn’t understand why.
I would not give in, and, faced with my tenacity that he knew only too well, he caved and told me that he thought he knew why the money had allegedly been taken. He confessed that in the summer of 2013, he had been briefly—how shall we say—dipping his pen in the company ink, the ink being the former manager with whom there had been sudden performance issues.
I’ve heard that hell hath no fury as a woman scorned. Amen.
That day in 2014, staring across the room at him in utter disbelief, everything suddenly came into focus. In that split second I understood the primary motivation behind the lawsuit and simultaneously closed my heart to John, knowing with absolute certainty that I was done with him forever.
I filed for divorce within a matter of days. I also filed that police report.
Despite his repeated pleas to forgive him, I never again had anything to do with him, and he never again had anything to do with the running of 530 Collective.
Even with my new, sharper perspective and with John out of the picture, the lawsuit was becoming more involved. Ben had to depose the three plaintiffs in his conference room, which meant I had to sit across the table from each of them separately over the course of several weeks and listen in silence to their lies.
The charges were all labor law based, and while fabricated—which scandalized me—none of the claims themselves were what you would call scandalous.
The day finally came when I found myself sitting in the conference room of Carr, Kennedy, Peterson, and Frost for Ben’s deposition of the ringleader, the scorned woman. The plaintiffs’ attorney—a disagreeable creature with a sour expression and chip on her shoulder—was present as always, her head down, taking angry notes.
Ben was making his way methodically through his labor law questions when he, without any dramatic pause, without even looking up from his legal pad, asked, “At what point did you begin romantic relations with Jamie’s husband?”
The plaintiffs’ attorney’s head whipped up, and she looked at her client, eyes round with surprise.
She hadn’t known about the affair. The attorney immediately asked for a break so that she could confer with her client.
We had found a potential weak spot.
But the case was far from over, and the suit ground on for months.
I was juggling a lot of balls simultaneously: incessant text messages from John, who was not taking the divorce well, the divorce process itself, running an increasingly busy 530 Collective and managing its growing staff, and analyzing the first cannabis bills to hit the California legislature in twelve years. I had recently become involved with two trade associations, the California Cannabis Industry Association and the Emerald Growers Association (later rebranded to the California Growers Association). Cannabis was hot in the capitol, and I needed to be part of the conversation.
I was the busiest I had ever been.
Making it a priority to be part of the process in Sacramento, I started to put systems and processes in place in my store that would allow it to run semi-autonomously, like a well-oiled machine, regardless of whether I was across the street in my office or across the globe. These processes were integral to the future of the company and an important milestone for me in that I had to let the staff take the reins. I had to trust them more than ever before, all while being sued by three former employees whom I had also once trusted. While incredibly difficult for me personally, I knew I had to get the store to a point where it ran without my daily oversight. I swallowed my personal discomfort and did what I needed to do for the betterment of the company.
With everything that I had going on, I was stretched very thin, and the emotional drain was tremendous.
It was no wonder I was awake at 3:00 a.m.
But of all the above challenges, it was the lawsuit that was responsible for the lion’s share of those sleepless nights.
The injustice of their accusations hurt, but their lies—their deliberate maliciousness—coming from ladies whom I had hired and had genuinely liked, rankled. Had there been some merit to their claims, the lawsuit would have been easier to stomach, but the flame of injustice burning in me gave me strength.
Ultimately, it was because of those lies, and the malicious intent behind them, that I was able to eventually find solace, to realize a paradigm shift that would forever change how I dealt with crises.
That was when it hit me, again in the wee small hours, that it all came down to a very simple choice, which was becoming a conscious theme in my life.
I locked on to what I could control, and I was in total control of how I chose to spend my energy.
Staring at the words on this page, this sounds so simple. Yet the quagmire of distracting daily minutiae can be strong, and only by pulling free and taking time to breathe can one again see the forest.
My time each day was finite. I could control the time I woke up in the morning and the time I went to bed, but the daylight between those two points was all that I would be given that day. I needed to spend my daylight wisely. More specifically, this meant choosing to spend my precious energy and my daylight only on efforts that were positive and productive to myself and my business: exercise, staff training, new product education, customer appreciation, refining operational excellence, playing with my dogs. That last one may seem silly, but it is one of the main ways I ground myself. Then and now.
It came down to the question of what I wanted to give my attention to more. I could choose to spend my precious time and energy focusing on their lies, or I could get back down to business and focus said time and energy on my own success, the success of my store, and all the other important things that I knew needed doing.
Seen through that lens, the choice was simple: I wanted success more.
I let go of the negative emotions around the lawsuit; managing that circus, after all, was what I was paying Ben gobs of money for. I stopped focusing on the suit. I refocused on my company’s success and the positive things in my life.
It was shortly after this realization that the lawsuit wrapped up. The attorney who had taken the case on contingency had subsidized it through a larger firm in Southern California, and that firm agreed to settle for a pittance just to get it off their plate, taking two-thirds of that pittance for their trouble.
Throughout the process, I spent more money on Ben than I did on the settlement. Significantly more. But he was worth it. Ben kept me grounded through an incredibly stressful process. He provided valuable advice on ways I could tighten up my businesses to make them bulletproof in the future, and he helped me learn how to be a better employer from a labor law perspective.
I never saw any of those three women again. But Ben I have kept as a dear friend because he makes me laugh and because he is a very snappy dresser.
My experience with John was unlike any I had experienced before in a relationship. And whether or not his volatile emotional state was simply an excuse for bad behavior ultimately doesn’t matter.
John left deep scars on my heart, but, despite the havoc that he wreaked in my life, I’ve never regretted knowing him, nor have I regretted the experience of our marriage; he taught me a lot. Some of the lessons are obvious, of course. But I think the most profound lesson he gave me was in forgiveness. Not forgiveness in the forgetting kind, or the apathetic kind, or even in the karma-will-come-back-and-bite-him-in-the-ass kind, but in the choosing kind.
About a year after the divorce, while reflecting on all that was happening in my life and my current state of happiness, I realized how good—no, great—my life was. Duh, right? Of course I was loads happier living a life without John, but that wasn’t the point.
It struck me that I couldn’t simultaneously revel in my happiness while still carrying any sort of animosity or grudge.
You can’t have it both ways, or at least I couldn’t.
It was through that freedom of choice, the freedom that comes from looking both options in the face and consciously choosing happiness, that I finally embraced the true meaning of forgiveness.