Trauma ink hurts us all.
Olivia always hoped for this. A company with a purpose to rescue people like her. Because she's always been systemically disenfranchised.
She grew up as a gifted child in a small Central Illinois community. Her second grade teacher said her IQ was 143, 'Off the charts.' But, sadly, she felt like she had that taken away when something traumatic happened in her life. Her parents went through a dangerous divorce and neither could afford adequate representation. She became a product of the not so productive system. She felt like she was poor, unfit, and always in hiding. She eventually had nothing left to depend on expect the soles of my worn out shoes, and the pains of her throbbing feet. Pains in places system can't care about.
Fortunately, as a young adult, Olivia was able to hitchhike out of the state of Illinois and across the mighty Mississippi River. Like Mark Twain before her, she always felt like there had top be something safer out there. Something smarter for her future gifted children.
She found a decent job in St. Louis and began working hard for a new pair of shoes.
One Monday morning, the first day of the work week, Olivia's alarm clock buzzed and her social life should have been getting ready to buzz too. People everywhere were were rushing for their morning coffee, breakfast, and a quick kisses goodbye as they walk out the door pounding the proverbial pavement.
Olivia uses the public transportation service when she's in St. Louis. She travels from the historic Dogtown area south of Forest Park. Usually to the Cortex innovation hub. In between getting off the bus and onto the Metro-Link, she should've been eating breakfast in the cafeteria of Barnes Jewish Hospital. Where she normally stops. But restaurants like this where commuters used to be able to stop for coffee and eat breakfast were restricted because of Covid-19, and devoid of the typical frenzy of commuters.
Hungry, Olivia was met at the front door of the hospital to get her temperature checked before she went on inside into the cafeteria to get something to eat. But, the guard asked her if she was visiting a patient or eating, and she said eating. It was only 8:45 am and the cafeteria didn't open until 9:00 am. So, she was instructed to come back later.
Olivia needed to go to the library anyway. So she killed some time and walked to the St. Louis Public Library in the Central West End. However, the sign on their door said they were closed and would open at 11:00 am. "No worries," she thought, "At least I can walk back to the cafeteria and eat now."
When Olivia arrived back at the entrance at the hospital for her temperature check she was treated with the same routine. The security guard asked "Are you here to see a patient or something else?" Olivia said, "I'm trying to get something to eat." To which someone a hospital employee off to the side exclaimed, "The cafeteria is for employees only or for people visiting patients." The new guard agreed and said "Ya, it's only for employees or people visiting patients!" So, Olivia lowered her head sadly, turned around, and walked out the door.
On her way down the sidewalk towards the Metro-Link station she heard a lady yelling behind her. She turned and looked. It was the first lady who told her she couldn't eat there. So she turned around and walked back to the entrance where the lady was standing. The lady said that she could go and eat in the cafeteria.
However, Olivia said back to her quietly, "You know what, I've spent my whole life worn out being excluded for nothing. For this reason or that reason. It never matters. Now, I can longer believe your pretend inclusion." She pinched her fingers together in a closing motion and said, "Keep your food." She turned and walked away hungry.
It's a grave nightmare that's all too common these days. Olivia broke down crying and asked herself why, "Why is this the story of my life? From one state to another! Why do these rejections for pretend necessities seem to be my real daily routine?"
She walk sadly down the sidewalk. A homeless man was crossing the street. He asked her for prayers and a few bucks. She gave him $6 dollars, and then went on catch the Metro-Link at a nearby station. She felt the man.
Olivia planned to get off the train at the Cortex stop a few blocks away where she usually goes to work on her startup company. A company vividly aimed at trying to turn these similar pain points into some kind of purpose. But she still didn't know how.
Starving, and still in a state of mental paralysis, she missed her stop at Cortex.
When she finally looked up, the train was getting ready to stop near the Grand Avenue Station. It did and then there was a man standing outside one of the windows of the train waiving for her to get off. Delirious, and barely able to come to, she shook her head, looked around, and everyone was off the train. It must've stopped service for some reason. She tried to open the door but it was locked. So, someone evidently called the transit authorities over. They unlocked the door with a key and let her out. She felt the difference.
By this time, Olivia thought and laughed sarcastically, "Wow! This exclusion was my fault this time! I'm still physically famished, psychologically spent, and grinding myself to doom. And I don't even know what my next move is now." The pains and results are real.
She started to slowly walk away from that Metro-Link station on Grand near St. Louis University. She saw two guards standing in the way on the sidewalk conversing. And she thought about handing them her ticket that was supposed to be good for two hours of travel and giving them the same exclusion speech she just gave the ladies back at the hospital. But, then she remembered, a few weeks earlier when a Metro-Link guard was unfortunately shot and killed. Leaving behind a young wife and child. She decided to smile and just walk by. Remaining silent and putting on a front. Her bad hip was starting to hurt anyway.
She turned around instead and walked back up the platform. She waited for hours and eventually heard the one train pulling away and another train coming.
And then she remembered a podcast that she was listening to earlier that morning. It was an entrepreneurial show talking about the difference between company marketing and storyboard branding.
"Huh..." She realized as a little lightbulb barely started flickering in her mind. "I wonder what storyboard branding is?" She couldn't help but think, "If it's what I think it is, then my business of preventing gifted children from grave nightmares should be a storyboard about this morning. About my real life and my real daily routine."
Olivia shook it off and didn't give it much more thought. She was getting close to a number of downtown St. Louis stops anyway. She couldn't afford another set-back.
She thought about filling that growling hunger in her stomach. But, that too might be out of the question for now. She remembered that there was a library just a block from one of the stops at Eighth and Pine. So, if her bones could take the walk, then her little light was flickering a little bit more about going to the library and working on their computer. She needed to find out more about this storyboard branding idea anyway.
Olivia walked into the front door at the library about 10:45 and was thankful it was open. Yet, the library was just a part of the bigger building. And the guard at the front station said that the library itself didn't open until 11:00 am. "Absolutely!" She thought. But she said, "Okay, thank you," and turned to walk back out the door.
She had a lot of pressures on, but no direction now. She headed back to the Metro-Link station just thinking that she could take it to the Gateway Arch grounds and walk around to decompress. But then, when she went the underground station at Eight and Pine, there was a guy sitting there smoking. And soon a guard on the other the platform on the other side of the tracks started staring at him. A request was made for the gentleman to put out the cigarette. But then some really hostile words where returned instead. About ten minutes of that slinging profanity and the guard went up the stairs to the street and come back down the other side. However, Joe Camel had already packed up and left by the time the guard made it to her side. Oddly, she sensed the reverberating traumas that both Joe and the security guard must feel.
Then Olivia boarded the train and rode it to the riverfront. Also known as the Gateway Arch grounds. She got off the train and stared up at that giant arch. The gateway to the West. She walked around the paths a little to get refreshed. "Hmm..." she sighed. "Every interaction interaction in life these days seems to be a corner case."
Gifted Child's Faculty - From massively unsafe to ultra-safe
This brought her back to her childhood. And all of what she called "sheek sheering" that she had experienced since along the way. Like lawyers pulling her family apart. Psychologists gaming each side. Judges ordering the heaviest financial, social, academic, and emotional wedges. School friends laughing at her along the way because of what must've been, she thought, her timid worn out shoes.
Trying to get to a place wear she could comfortable finding a new pair of shoes was hopeless. She still felt starved of her birth right, shoes, healthy feet, food, psychology, freedom, and ability to work. And everywhere she went, happenstance seemed to remind her of that pain.
Olivia thought that people like her everywhere are also feeling like a mushroom in a Super Mario Brothers game. They have these promises of necessities and big dreams, but then every where they turn they experience perilous circumstances.
Super Mario is always ready and willing to navigate the path to his dreams, she thought. But he has the advantage of super jumping his obstacles, super immunity, earning points, automatically going to different places, and even his own context of scenes.
But gifted children like Olivia, turned inside-out, are simply the mushrooms in other people's games. A fly stuck in a fly ribbon. Some people, she thought, get blessed and blessed for having dreams while being super. But her, she thought, only gets hit and hit for not having a thing.
Then Olivia heard a story on the news about Joplin, Missouri. About how in 2011 an EF5 tornadoes hit that town and killed 161 people and leveled most of the city. But now Joplin of one of the newest towns in the West. "Now," Olivia thought, "that could be a safe place to be. They obviously know how to recover after monumental tornadic activities."
In Joplin, over 15,000, including buses, vans and semi trucks, were tossed up to several blocks away and either crushed, rolled into balls or wrapped around trees beyond recognition. Some owners never found their vehicles.
This is a lot like Olivia's parents who lose their children everyday because they are poor or injured and do not have retainer fee for counsel, nor a college degree to navigate family court. A lot like children who's lives are turned inside out and left to rot following each and every micro burst - each and every issue or idea being presented for answers. A lot like some of the property in Joplin was lost and never found.
Inside in the eye of major league storms
Helping people survive the wants and likes of a tornado was the only feasible solution to Olivia's chronic broken record - her sad groundhog day repeating itself everyday. And the people of Joplin know how to survive a tornado. Whether that's a financial tornado, social, emotional, spiritual, or physical. They help us learn how to turn sad commentaries into flourishing dreams.
Olivia's "Gifted Child's Faculty" at www.majorleaguefamily.com is a squashed mushroom, like Joplin was, trying to prevent those maximum cancelations. Those maximum exclusions and twisted children. Not by happenstance, but by inherently equalizing content, providing full access, improved community well-being, and enabling ultra-safety for all.
Olivia found her new purpose in life. Her purpose was to facilitate new pairs of shoes for other unrepresented children like her. So that pulverized mushrooms everywhere could begin to quietly blossoming. Or, they could maintain their original beauty organically.
Had she been able to grow past her traumatic life disrupted as a child, perhaps she wouldn't be so easy deflated each and everyday. She couldn't go back and erase her grave nightmares. But she could go forward and prevent others from their own unhealthy grave nightmares. She could gift gifted children, and prevent crime, and counter unequal Super Mario Brother advantages.
Olivia's value proposition, or psychological operation, for Life Winks® became to first and foremost prevent trauma inks, and to secondly measure routinely pivoting traumatic pain points into all-natural Life Winks®. Because it really is a nightmare out there.
And it's like Olivia always says, "Reframe the unrepresented lives, and we'll be a breakthrough community together. A place where we'll all have brand new shoes to wear forever!"
