Grit Diaries
The penny that rewired my life
Deborah Weed
A corporate director stripped bare by illness learns the difference between what you do and who you are.
Kintsugi Studio
Grit Diaries
Deborah Weed
A corporate director stripped bare by illness learns the difference between what you do and who you are.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
Deborah Weed spent ten years as a corporate director at Citibank, climbing the ladder in high heels and shoulder pads, never smiling, performing a version of herself that wasn't real. As a sensitive child, she had learned that sensitivity meant weakness, so she chased prestigious jobs and big achievements to prove she was something else. It worked, on the surface. She had self-esteem. She had credentials. What she didn't have was self-worth. The difference, she discovered, is everything. Self-esteem is what you do and have to keep proving over and over. Self-worth is who you are without needing to prove anything at all.
Then, at the height of her career, Deborah became severely ill. For three years she was bedridden, in pain, hemorrhaging, and misdiagnosed repeatedly. Doctors said MS, then Lou Gehrig's, then that it was all in her head. Her family, unable to identify what was wrong, withdrew. She was utterly alone. But in those long, quiet hours in bed, she heard about a 1943 copper penny that could be worth a million dollars. The idea struck her like a key turning in a lock. If a penny most people wouldn't pick up off the ground could hold hidden value, what was she worth?
From that small insight grew everything that followed. She wrote a children's book called The Luckiest Penny, then created Paisley's Fashion Forest, a musical about a porcupine who gives away her quills one by one until she has only one left. Paisley represents all of us, piece by piece surrendering our power to perfectionism, to other people's judgment, to the need to please. Now Deborah works with Quills Up, teaching people to understand the difference between proving themselves and simply being themselves. The musical is ready. She's waiting for the right producer to say yes.
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