My mom took her own life when I was eight years old, the collateral damage of depression warring with an unhappy marriage, the complexities of which I cannot hope to understand. In that destructive wake, my younger brother, Rory, and I were left with a dad who, as a construction worker, was faced with the challenges of being our sole caregiver.
Within less than a year, my dad remarried, and my brother and I found ourselves with a stepmom, stepbrother, and stepsister. The reality of six people suddenly thrown together, most relative strangers with quite different personalities, and all spread across a wide age spectrum, was nothing like the TV shows.
The emotional turbulence and tension were rough on everyone. My new stepbrother, Rob, and stepsister, Amy, weren’t thrilled about leaving their home and all they knew in the Bay Area to move sixty-five miles away into the country. My stepmom, Judy, wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the challenge of raising two more children, young ones at that, and I’m sure my dad didn’t enjoy his new role as mediator of family squabbles.
What I do know is that the tempest of the family merger perhaps most acutely affected a small boy and girl who had barely been given time to grieve, let alone understand or come to terms with, the loss of their precious mom.
I don’t have many memories of her, and those that I do have are more like snapshots, quick glimpses of bright color and emotion focused on a special moment in time, that are quickly gone. Her name was Patricia (she was born on St. Patrick’s Day), but everyone called her Teish.
I remember her as bright and silly; I remember her as warm and affectionate; I remember her as always having time for me.
I remember her as small and fragile, so easily broken.
My father could not have picked a more opposite person to marry when he chose my stepmom.
Maybe it was just the confusion of a blended family with kids aged seven to sixteen. Maybe it was confusion over what had happened with our mom. Maybe it was resentment over having to share our dad. Likely it was all of the above and then some. Abandoned first by our mom’s final act of depression, Rory and I now felt abandoned by our sole remaining parent, left adrift in the chaos of the new family dynamic.
Straight out of working-class America, my family was not wealthy by any means, but we always had warm meals on the table, new clothes at the beginning of every school year, and there were always gifts from Santa under the tree at Christmas. Certainly, to some, having those things may seem like a luxury. Yet at the end of the day, it was not the gifts from Santa that mattered. It was the sting of my stepmom’s disaffection, the chill of her indifference, that my brother and I felt in our bones. Looking back now from a forty-year viewpoint, I don’t know that she knew how to be demonstrative. It is warmth, affection, and understanding that every child craves above all. And I felt their absence acutely.
My dad and stepmom were strict, and, to be fair, a lot of their stringency paid dividends later in life, for which I am grateful: the mandate that I get good grades meant that getting into college was easy; the requirement that I get outside and play after school rather than watch cartoons meant that I learned to embrace physical activity; completing the daily chores encouraged a work ethic; not being allowed to gorge on junk food meant that I formed solid habits around eating; holding me accountable for my actions led me to develop a strong moral compass. Those were all good, important lessons, some of which undoubtedly factored into my business success, which is why I give credit where credit is due.
And yet . . .
At their core, my mom and stepmom were incredibly different people, and I could not reconcile those differences in my mind or heart. I always felt torn between the two, like I had to make a choice. And I chose the ghost every time.
That my stepmom was living figuratively in my mom’s shadow didn’t help anyone. My dad never moved us from the house where my mom took her life, probably because he didn’t want to create more turmoil in three lives that had already been turned upside down, and I can’t imagine what it must have felt like for my stepmom to live in that house, to live with my mom’s specter. I don’t know if I could have done it.
Regardless of the reasons, our household was rife with conflict, resentment, and hostility. In the mid-1980s, my dad took up the monumental challenge of completing his college education. Working construction during the day, he enrolled in night classes at Sonoma State University. He graduated with his bachelor’s degree in 1990, the same year I graduated high school. I know he made that decision to go back to school for the betterment of his family and suffered some grueling years grinding away at both the day job and night school, but it was the right thing to do, and I’m incredibly proud of him for achieving his goal. At the time, however, I was an immature, unappreciative creature and only saw that he was gone more than ever as a result. Consequently, the tensions between my stepmom and my brother and me worsened, invariably affecting our relationships well into adulthood.
I couldn’t wait to escape to college in 1990. My stepmom wasn’t there the day I finished packing my things and left. There was no goodbye, and I was glad. It would have only been awkward and insincere.
Through my college years and beyond, the relationship became even more stark and sterile, yet I kept hoping things would change, that things would get better. I kept hoping for the kindness and affection I had experienced from my mom to resurface in the relationship with my dad and stepmom—the child inside never stops wanting that—but that never happened.
One day in my midtwenties, I was with a mentor who, after listening to me complain about my fractured relationship and latest grievance with my dad and stepmom, asked me quite bluntly, “Jamie, why do you keep going to the desert for a drink of water?”
Stunned, I let that sink in. This was a pivotal moment in my life, a paradigm shift.
It was at this point that I began to realize that we are each the creator of our own reality, and as such, we must take responsibility for both the good and the bad that manifest during that process. This is a concept that I have continued to nurture and study in the classroom of my own experience ever since that day—a concept that can be hard to accept, but once accepted is both exhilarating and liberating.
We create our reality through our perspective, and that reality is reflected back through our lens. Change your perspective—change your lens—and you change your reality.
It may seem like a quantum leap to accept that it’s that easy to change one’s reality, so I again come back to the example of how we innovate as a global community. The starting point for all innovation is a shift away from seeing what is toward seeing what is possible. If that were not the case, we would never see advancement of any kind; we would still be living in caves. But innovation is an accepted process, an accepted truth.
Suddenly it doesn’t seem so great a leap to take what is already widely accepted in the world at large and apply it personally; to take the accepted process of innovation at large and use that same process as a guiding principle, as a creative force, in your own life.
This philosophy was still incubating in 2009 when I opened 530 Collective. I knew I wanted to build my store in a way that was different, and I definitely had a vision of what was possible. I chose that vision over what was and used it to push the endeavor forward. Visiting cannabis stores throughout the Northern California region in 2008 and 2009, I saw what was. In my mind I saw the type of store that I wanted to create; I saw what was possible. Fueled by creative force, I was able to innovate my vision into physical manifestation.
However, I had not yet realized that this was an approach that I could apply to every aspect of my life. This philosophy—this approach to viewing my world—would solidify over the years as the stores became more successful and I honed my craft as a businessperson. In doing so, I was also honing my skill as the innovator of my life.
I gradually noticed that as I focused on my store’s success and the directions in which I wanted to grow the business, those things became my reality. I came to realize that this was no coincidence. I was creating my reality; I was creating my success.
By shifting my perspective and focusing more on what was possible than what simply was, I was able to overcome some of my biggest challenges, both personally and professionally.
While I would further develop the aforementioned ideas over the subsequent decades, the seeds of that development were planted that day in my midtwenties when I realized that my dad and stepmom were never going be what and who I wanted them to be. And that really wasn’t their shortcoming; it was mine. In failing to recognize that, in continuing to expect them to be what they were not, I was always going to be trapped and defined by them, by their perceived shortcomings, and even trapped and defined by the tragedy of my mom.
And what I wanted was to define myself.
The gulf between theory and practice can be vast, however, and change does not happen overnight. The residue of past hurts doesn’t wash away easily, and the strained relationship with my dad and stepmom continued over the years. Yet because of that simple, profound question posed by my mentor, I had begun that day to view the relationship in a different way. As a result, I could maintain a relationship with them without being defined or hurt by it going forward.
I had learned a powerful lesson about choice.
We each are responsible for creating our world in which we can choose to play the role of victim or survivor.
We are each responsible for choosing a life of success or one of failure.
We are responsible for and in control of how we choose to see our world, the external as well as the internal.
I have clung to the memory of my small and frail mom, all while trying to avoid developing those attributes; I am her antithesis in many ways, which I consider to be both my greatest strength and my greatest weakness.
Many years ago, a friend told me that I am half dude.
What the hell did that even mean?
Not the outside, he had explained—the outside is quite feminine—but in the other ways, in my other characteristics that are more commonly observed in the male of our species: enthusiasm for beer, sports, and performance cars; an aversion to drama, gossip, and romantic comedies; and an inclination toward emotional unavailability.
The last of which will wreak havoc on personal relationships.
Allowing myself to be vulnerable—to be emotionally available—is still not something that comes easily for me. After a lifetime of running away from those feminine traits, I am now trying to nurture them, to achieve balance, and to accept all sides of myself so that I can be a whole person, able to both give and receive in a loving relationship. I am not an easy person to be with, but I’m always striving to be better, in everything and in all ways.
At the end of 2019, when my dad’s condition took a drastic turn for the worse, my relationship with him and my stepmom, Judy, took a drastic turn for the better. In death’s shadow, old hurts and wrongs, both real and perceived, finally wash away, and new perspective is gained.
The perspective and realization are that our time here is indeed very short and that we can, even at the final hour, choose to see the love that was perhaps there all along.
We can choose whom we embrace as our family. My brother, Rory, is my blood, my heart, and my constant inspiration. My stepbrother, Rob, and my stepsister, Amy—although we don’t share a single common gene—are two of the most incredible humans I’ve been lucky enough to know, their love and support a blessing. They are my brother and sister, as much as Rory. They are the family I have chosen.
I chose the same with Judy. I now see the strong, determined, loyal, and intelligent woman who took on the huge commitment of raising my brother and me alongside her own children. I can choose to see that some of her greatest strengths are also mine, and I do not believe that is coincidental.
After four decades, the pendulum has fallen silent. I have achieved balance.
I can choose both my mom, Teish, and Judy. And I do so choose.