3. Opportunity Makes Us Who We Are

Ten years ago this coming March, my husband Mark and I stared through our Skype screen with some friends and decided to start a chocolate company. I remember all the dreams swelling in me. A mixture of anxiety and anticipation of potential. My imagination was captured by the sheer opportunity to build something right from the dirt. 

My heart raced and I wondered if the anxiety I felt was an omen. At 23, it was hard for me to distinguish emotions and what they had to teach me. In order to learn from them and know myself apart from them, I’d have to be consumed by them for the majority of the next decade.  

As I sat on our spring-loaded, Craigslist velvet couch that smelled like someone else’s mothballs in our downtown Springfield, Missouri apartment, all I could think of at the time was this “Habitudes” illustration of opportunity: 

“In ancient Greece there was a statue called “Opportunity.” The statue had long flowing hair in front and a bald head in back. Although it was a little strange, it was meant to teach a lesson: opportunity is something you can grab while it’s coming at you, but you can’t catch hold of it after it’s passed.”

Starting the company felt like one of those statues. A once in a lifetime opportunity.
I was ready to grab onto it.

Somehow, I’ve hung on to that opportunity for almost a decade.

I get overwhelmed at the thought that I’m approaching 10 long years in this field. Almost with FOMO on the million other life paths I could or should have taken, wondering just how much it shapes me to continue choosing this.

In 2014, Mark and I had considered moving to London for Mark to go to grad school. Instead, we ended up choosing to move back to Northwest Arkansas for me to take charge of the company, and Mark went back to the University of Arkansas for his master’s. It was an opportunity we (or I) couldn’t pass up. Now I wonder what our lives would have looked like had he gone to grad school overseas. Had I followed him. Had I not started a business. Who we might have become.

As I get older, I start to see how many opportunities there are around us. Buzzing around like mosquitos in the summer, hovering, luring us to swat for them. I often play mental games to explore every opportunity that comes zipping past me, like a rabbit chasing shiny objects, veering off some path I chose, but can’t stick to. 

I often wonder – which one of these should I take a hold of this time? 

Only to realize in each rabbit hole that there are now many commitments I have and burdens I bear that make it less easy to grab on to that fistfull of opportunity. Meaning, that maybe in each new opportunity shining before me, I feel more at risk now than I did when I had earned nothing. When we’re young with nothing to show for ourselves, maybe it’s easier to commit to the first big thing that comes our way.

Now, I have to learn to choose opportunity wisely.

When we started the company almost ten years ago, I don’t think I imagined people introducing me to their kids as “the chocolate lady”, or that I would actually have some strange set of knowledge about a food that everyone loves. Or that I’d feel occasionally holed up in a niche longing for broader horizons. I certainly didn’t imagine how much I would have to grow and evolve to become whoever it is that I am now.

The things we do choose or have chosen, like marriage or starting a business or having a baby or moving across the world, have a way of shaping us into exactly who we are.

I am convinced that I probably couldn’t reach backwards for this opportunity if I tried. If I didn’t grab it then when I was 23 and completely inexperienced and naive enough to take on the world, I wouldn’t be “the chocolate lady” or the entrepreneur. My products wouldn’t have been in Oprah or Vogue. I wouldn’t have stretched myself inordinately beyond my limits to transform into a different kind of human year after year. There’s no way of knowing that other version of me. To be honest, I think I’ve been shying away from this identity – as a small business owner, a chocolate enthusiast – holding a 10 foot pole to being pinned down into someone else’s box of who I should be. Strangely, I am only now learning to accept that this is exactly who I am.

These days I gently nudge myself, “You know, you can like her. Who you are.
Who you have become.”