I tell wonder-filled stories about hope and healing
Author: Christa Avampato
The short of it:
Writer. Health, education, and art advocate. Theater and film producer. Visual artist. Product geek. Proud alumnae of the University of Pennsylvania (BA) and the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia (MBA). Inspired by ancient wisdom & modern tech. Proliferator of goodness. Opener of doors. Friend to animals. Fan of creative work in all its wondrous forms. I use my business skills to create passion projects that build a better world. I’ve been called the happiest New Yorker, and I try hard to live up to that title every day.
The long of it:
My career has stretched across Capitol Hill, Broadway theatre, education, nonprofit fundraising, health and wellness, and Fortune 500 companies in retail, media, entertainment, technology, and financial services. I’ve been a product developer and product manager, theater manager, strategic consultant, marketer, voice over artist, , teacher, and fundraiser. I use my business and storytelling to support and sustain passion projects that build a better world. In every experience, I’ve used my sense of and respect for elegant design to develop meaningful products, services, programs, and events.
While building a business career, I also built a strong portfolio as a journalist, novelist, freelance writer, interviewer, presenter, and public speaker. My writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, PBS.org, Boston.com, Royal Media Partners publications, and The Motley Fool on a wide range of topics including business, technology, science, health, education, culture, and lifestyle. I have also been an invited speaker at SXSW, Teach for America, Avon headquarters, Games for Change, NYU, Columbia University, Hunter College, and the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America. The first book in my young adult book series, Emerson Page and Where the Light Enters, was acquired by a publisher and launched in November 2017. I’m currently working on the second book in the series.
A recovering multi-tasker, I’m equally at home in front of my Mac, on my yoga mat, walking my rescue dog, Phineas, traveling with a purpose, or practicing the high-art of people watching. I also cut up small bits of paper and put them back together as a collage artist.
My company:
I’m bringing together all of my business and creative career paths as the Founder of Double or Nothing Media:
• I craft products, programs, and projects that make a difference;
• I build the business plans that make what I craft financially sustainable;
• I tell the stories that matter about the people, places, and products that inspire me.
Follow my adventures on Twitter at https://twitter.com/christanyc and Instagram at https://instagram.com/christarosenyc.
Though I left engineering school after a year, I’m still a hopeless nerd for physics. One of my favorite principles is inertia – a body in motion stays in motion and a body at rest stays at rest until acted upon by an outside force. It’s true for physical matter, and true for the trajectory of our lives as well. We do what we’re doing until there’s a change.
For our lives, that change can be internal or external. We can choose it. We can slow down when we’re going too fast, and we can get ourselves in gear if we feel stuck. It takes a great deal of effort to cause that shift, but it’s possible.
Eventually something in life is going to throw us a roadblock and we’ll have to pivot and change. That is the game. That is the dance. Change within or accept the change forced from the outside. I’d always rather be the master of my own pivot so I keep changing, growing, evolving, transforming. It’s all I know how to do so I keep going. Which is its own kind of inertia. Ah inertia – the force of life that keeps on giving and follows us everywhere.
Want to run the 2014 ING New York City Marathon with me? 12 years ago I ran the Chicago Marathon with my dear friend, Mark. It was a profound and healing experience and the fulfillment of a dream I’d had since I was a teenage cross-country runner. After I completed the marathon in 4:23:13 on a high, I checked that accomplishment off my list never to run a marathon again. Or so I thought.
Yesterday I woke up early and attributed it to the extra hour from the end of daylight savings time. I quickly realized it was something else. I know what goes into taking all those steps, and I am so proud of these people for making the journey. Watching all the preparations in Central Park this week made me want to join their ranks. I was surprised to feel that tug in my heart, edging me toward the goal of completing my hometown’s biggest race and one of its hallmark celebrations of life. And with that, I decided to run it in 2014. I’ll be 38 by then and it will be 5 years since the apartment building fire that changed everything for me. It’s a bit of a process; I can enter the lottery, raise money for a participating nonprofit, or look at a variety of other options to make it happen.
Have you ever wanted to run a marathon? Does NYC’s race call to you, too? It would be fun to train with people. Whether you’re here in NYC or live far away, we can share our training experiences right here on this blog and encourage each other on the figurative and literal path. And then of course celebrate together at the finish line next year. If you’re interested, let me know. Let’s make it happen.
I know we can’t hang onto time though that doesn’t stop me from wishing it were possible. As I was admiring the stunning Fall foliage in Central Park, Phineas was rooting around in the leaves looking for a tasty morsel of something. My pup has a penchant for trash. I was explaining the dangers of eating things off the ground to him when we met one of our neighbors with her flat-coat retriever. This sweet dog was diagnosed with cancer during the summer, started chemotherapy, and then had to terminate treatment because of internal bleeding. “I’m not sure how she’s still alive,” said our neighbor through a lump in her throat.
My eyes started to well up with tears. Losing a dog is one of the worst kind of hurts I’ve ever known. I wanted to let my neighbor have her space and time with her dog so I told her how sorry I was and wished her well. I turned to leave to let my neighbor have her peace and so she didn’t see me cry. Phineas did something else, something I thought was quite extraordinary. He walked right up to his dear canine friend and gently bumped her chin with the top of his nose. Then he gave her a smooch. He knew what was happening. He was saying goodbye since we’ll probably never see this sweet pup again.
When we got a few blocks away and I finally got ahold of my tears, I knelt down on the ground and looked right into Phineas’s eyes. “Look Phineas,” I said, “I know you’ve got a lot on your plate but you’re going to have to find a way to live forever. Okay, buddy?” He gave me a smooch right on the nose, and I think that means he’s accepted the challenge. I can’t hang onto time; I’m hoping Phin can find a way.
It took me a while to get the hang of voice over work, to really understand how the performance works. Certainly there is a technical structure to how the script is crafted and how it should be delivered. Emotional connection separates good voice over work from great voice over work.
This emotional connection comes down to just one simple point: be who you are. I kept trying to embody a character, to be a certain way that I thought matched what the script wanted. It didn’t work. I just needed to be myself – a friend, a neighbor, someone to rely on. It’s a performance that shouldn’t be a performance at all. Voice over work is for real people who know who they are and what they care about. That’s what commercial voice over work, and life in general, is all about. Hooray for the triumph of authenticity!
A Jedi in training doesn’t say, “You know I think I’ll do my best to try to become a Jedi.” He (or she!) says, “I’m doing this. I’m committed to this path.”
I’ve got Star Wars on the brain this week because I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of commitment and its vital role in our happiness. And if ever there was an example of serious commitment to a way of life, it’s the Jedi.
That muddy middle of indecision is like a tractor beam and we have to fight our way free. Progress doesn’t live in the middle, and neither does success. When it comes to our future, we have to take a stand and decide to decide how it’s going to go. We have to be the Jedi knights of our own lives. It’s not an easy path, but it’s the only one I know that leads to a well-lived life.
About 10 years ago, my sister, Weez, had a difficult health issue. (Don’t worry – she is completely healed, healthy, and sassy now.) In those scary days, her doctor said something that has always struck me as quite possibly the best thing that any doctor has ever said to anyone facing an illness. “I don’t fish. I don’t play golf. I am a doctor. This is my hobby. It’s all I do.” For all the talk about balance between work and life, this doctor’s maniacal focus on his work was exactly what my sister needed to hear.
Rather than building careers that we need a break from, that wear us out and deplete us to the point that a vacation is the only remedy, what if we find a way to build careers that build us up and give us energy? What if we all had careers that mattered so much to us that a separation between work and life was unnecessary, unwanted?
I know this may sound like la-la land to some people. It certainly did to me a few years ago, though now this is exactly the career I have. I wake up every day and write. What I used to do as a hobby on the side is now my focus. I write early in the morning and late into the night. I shut it down when my eyes grow tired or when Phineas lets me know it’s time for his late evening walk before he puts himself to bed, whichever comes first. I work a lot of hours, every day, and I don’t mind at all because I work at the craft that helped me build a life I love, no balancing act required.
I want you to know it’s possible. Even if you have a lot of difficulties, even if all you’ve known is difficulties, it can happen. The only reason I can say this with such confidence is because I came from very tough circumstances. Every step on this journey was tough and took a great deal of effort, and that’s okay. I wanted this enough to work hard for it. It takes planning, patience, time, and passion. I have to commit every day to this path, and it’s still not easy. It is always worth it. Every day, I wrap it up and say thank you because I know just how amazing it is to finally be right here, in this place, doing exactly what I love. I’m a writer, a working writer, exactly what I always wanted to be.
A few weeks ago, I watched an interview with Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad fame. When he first started out, he met a lot of people who said they were giving their creative dream a shot for a year. If they didn’t have any success in a year, then they would pack up and go home. “That was amazing to me,” he said. “It takes so much longer than a year to realize a dream.”
This is exactly the reason I’m working on a new book, Your Second Step. You’ve taken your first step – you’ve identified your dream and you’ve started working on it – maybe part-time, maybe full-time. Maybe you haven’t seen the success you’d hoped for in the timeline you planned. So should you pack it in? Should you start to work on something else and come back to it later? In other words, should you hedge your bets?
Put aside any disappointment. Go back to the dream itself. Does it still matter to you? If the answer is yes, then don’t hedge and don’t give up. Commit. Double down. Invest more time and more energy, not less. Be Yoda. Don’t try. Do. And keep doing. Don’t back down now. You’re closer to your dream than you think.
A picture I snapped in Central Park over the weekend.
I just started a new project for CentralPark.com. I am curating 20 essays about Central Park written by college students. Essays will be roughly 500 words and can be about any aspect of Central Park. The essays can be from a wide variety of angles – a treasured memory of the park, the meaning of Central Park to the student, a recent event or experience the student had in Central Park, the history of the park, etc. Do you know a college student who is a good writer and interested in submitting a piece for consideration? Please send them my way – christa.avampato@gmail.com. Thank you!
“Here is my secret. It is very simple. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry from The Little Prince
“70% of our perception of the outside world comes through the eyes,” said my yoga teacher, Julia. I didn’t realize it was that disproportionate. The eyes are so powerful, so sophisticated that they overpower our other senses if we let them. Close the eyes, and we can hear, feel, smell, and taste with greater intensity. The information from these 4 senses is just as important as our sense of sight. Our combined senses lead us into our emotional intelligence. We need this give-and-take between our internal and external experiences. Together, they create the whole picture of our existence and help us to “see” clearly.
For a few minutes every day, I close my eyes during my waking hours and tap in. I scan my body for signs of change. I feel the ebb and flow of my breath. One of my favorite meditations is a sensory exploration. I imagine a place I’ve been or a place I’d like to go and I rotate through all of the senses to create a complete picture. What does the beach look like? How does it sound? What scents does it have? How does it taste? What does it feel like? And finally, how does it make me feel? This only takes a couple of minutes, and when I finally do open my eyes again, I find that a little piece of the beach is still with me. I carry right there, in my heart, and also in my nose, on my skin, in my mind’s eyes and ears, and even on my tongue.
From there, my experience of the world around me is richer because of what I’ve been able to imagine. Now I see not only what’s right in front of me, but also what’s possible which is almost always invisible to the eyes alone.
Christa Avampato 