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Understudy+Co

@understudyco

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For women who notice…. Letters that give it language.

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Hi. I’m Jenee’.

Former pageant queen.

Current garden goblin and chicken wrangler.

Most days you’ll find me somewhere between a vegetable garden, a construction project, and a laptop with thirty-seven tabs open convincing myself they’re all somehow connected.

I spent years in television news asking hard questions for a living.

Now I mostly ask them of myself.

I was one of those women who was always told she had “so much potential.”

It turns out that’s both a compliment and a warning.

I have an unfortunate habit of adopting impossible projects.

Old churches.

Businesses.

Ideas.

Entire futures that don’t technically belong to me.

I’m still trying to determine whether that’s ambition… or a character flaw.

I’m married to a man I still have a crush on.

I’m raising a son who made me better than I deserved.

My parents live with us now because life eventually asks us to become the people who once carried us.

Jesus is my center.

Coffee is a close second.

I don’t do small talk particularly well.

Ask me what I think about the weather and I’ll probably tell you how modern life dismantled front porches instead.

Some people find that exhausting.

They’re probably right.

I’ve also learned that speaking plainly has a funny way of making people either trust you… or avoid you.

There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground.

Understudy exists because I kept meeting women who were carrying thoughts they had nowhere to put.

Not self-help.

Not hot takes.

Just the quiet observations that keep you awake longer than they should.

If that’s you…

Welcome.

I had a feeling we’d eventually find each other.
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#introduction #nicetomeetyou #understudy #understudyco #newbusinessowners by @understudyco

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3 months ago

Don’t forget to say hi! 👋🏼 by @understudyco

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3 months ago

Hi there. Nicki here.

Ex-auto racer and former high school vocal director.

(Two things that have no business in the same sentence).

Pianist by trade.

Obsessed with quantum physics, psychology, and WHY things are the way they are. You know, the types of convos everyone is thrilled to have.

Now, I spend most days taking care of my terminally ill Ma, building two businesses, and bouncing philosophical ideas off a very opinionated 16 year old hairless cat.

Playing for performers for 40 years gave me a perspective on human behavior most psychologists never get to see.

Sitting behind the wheel of a race car at 180 mph is a baptism by fire in self trust.

Watching someone bargain with reality and unlived life is an invitation for reflection on your own.

It was impossible not to notice the daily roles we perform from a script we didn’t write.

There has to be other people noticing this, besides my tiny circle.

So instead of doing nothing, I decided to build something: a place where people could think, and rediscover their own thoughts and opinions.

No performing, no chaos from outside influence.

And then Jeneé said,

“I want to build something, and I’m not doing it without you.”

Damn right you’re not, sisterpants.

It was the same something.

And Understudy + Co was born.

Two retired stage performers whose next role would be to create a space …for you.

Not hand you another script.

Not ask you to be part of another tribe.

But instead, to provide an environment for people just like you, who are ready to stop performing and finally become who they are.

To be under study of yourself.

I’m really glad you’re here.

#introduction #nicetomeetyou #understudy #understudyco #newbusinessowners by @understudyco

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3 months ago

The peace you’re looking for comes from within.

It comes from building internal trust that you know why you’re making the choices you’re making, and that they’re not wound-responses.

And if they are, that’s great, too. Because now you see them, and can understand and integrate them instead of them running the You show.

This is the difficult work, and it IS an inside job. No one can do it for you. But, if you’re lucky, you have people around you who are also doing this self-excavation, and they’ll sit in it with you.

You’ll know when you’ve had a break through when you start to laugh out loud at the thing you can finally see. And that’s when the magic really begins.

#whatwecarry #personalgrowthjourney #innerwork #understudyco by @understudyco

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3 hours ago

And maybe some part of us still thinks they will.

That eventually someone will notice how much we carried. How much we absorbed. How often we traded our own peace to keep the wheels on the bus.

Mostly, they won’t.

Not because they don’t love us.

They’re trying to make it, too.

Make it through the day. The bills. The marriage. The job. The thing nobody knows they’re carrying.

Maybe we’ve spent so long making it that we don’t recognize peace when it shows up.

Nothing is on fire.

Nobody needs us right now.

Nothing needs fixing tonight.

And still, we go looking for something to carry.

Peace doesn’t arrive with applause or recognition.

She lives quietly inside us. Most of us are too busy holding everything together to notice her.

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#UnderstudyAndCo #WomenWhoThink #InvisibleLabor #MentalLoad #SelfSacrifice by @understudyco

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15 hours ago

Self-awareness is a crucial human responsibility.

But somewhere along the way, we started treating every discomfort like a clue into our past and every feeling like a wound that needs attention.

Sometimes there’s nothing left to excavate. Sometimes you can put it down and let time work its magic.

If you allow it…. If you cast out what the world tells you to feel about your unfortunate situations…. You’ll realize you can in fact be as happy as a lark with a french fry. by @understudyco

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3 days ago

I keep seeing these reels and memes.

“To the woman who is nobody’s favorite friend.”

“The friend who checks on everyone, but nobody checks on.”

And almost immediately, we start taking inventory.

Who calls me first?
Who chooses me?
Who includes me?
Where do I rank?

Five minutes ago, we weren’t keeping score.

Then the internet handed us one.

I’m an only child. A Gen X only child, no less. I know something about being alone that has nothing to do with being unloved.

My parents loved me dearly. But there was no sibling beside me experiencing our family with me. And now there are parts of adulthood… parents, parenting, family responsibility… that I simply carry without that built-in camaraderie.

So aloneness has never automatically meant rejection to me.

Maybe that’s why these posts make me wonder about the metrics social media keeps giving us.

Who initiated. Who remembered. Who invited. Who posted. Who celebrated louder. Who appears closer to whom.

Sometimes those measurements give language to something that was already hurting.

But sometimes I wonder if the metric comes first.

And only then do we look around and discover all the ways our lives supposedly fall short.

There’s a difference between finally having words for something that hurts… and being handed a reason to hurt. by @understudyco

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7 days ago

We’re building a home for sovereign, wayward women who are fucking sick of the catty nonsense.

Welcome.

#catty #gossip #opinionated #understudyco by @understudyco

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10 days ago

Go be delusional…
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#permissiongranted #bedelusional #understudyco by @understudyco

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13 days ago

You say you’re not performative.

Then why are you performing for your own perception of worth?

#discernment #selfreflection #growthjourney #understudyco by @understudyco

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14 days ago

This woman is shopping at Home Depot with her parrot… remind me why you’re not doing whatever the fuck you want to do, again?

🤍 Jenee’ by @understudyco

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15 days ago

You need to excavate the layers of bullshit keeping you a victim.

I know, a lot of shit has happened in your life. I get it, I really do. Your head would explode if I laid out what my past 50 years looked like. But, it’s all my responsibility.

Not yours. Not society’s. Mine. Why?

Because I’m not a victim. The only time I have EVER felt victimized was from my own refusal to remove myself from terrible situations and to take responsibility for improving my life.

Once you’ve become an adult and you start noticing people around you seeing gains across metrics that you don’t see in your own life, that’s the entry point: to start looking at your upbringing, your own work ethic and biases, and to understand how your mind has used those things to form a story you believe is you, your personality, and your limits.

You cannot fix what you can’t yet see. (Or aren’t willing to acknowledge).

You can’t move forward until you understand WHAT you’re seeing, aka the basic ways the mind structures narratives which influence your lens on reality. And that is an exercise in humility, which is a death knell for the ego: the little monster that’s keeping you victimized by the lenses of stories it’s been piling on your face to keep the version of you IT CREATED “safe.”

You’re still reading? Great… let’s see if we can piss off your ego monster.

Then comes the daunting task of removing all the lenses that have been plastered across your face that you believed were just your eyes.

This is the shit anyone ready to actually take control of their life has had to do to dismantle decades of their own nonsense. And it sucks. Ask me how I know.

So I’ll be damned if I allow myself to fight for limitations and victimhood as if that’s the pinnacle of achievement.

Time to check the comments for the ego monsters fighting to keep their limitations alive. See ya down there

#discernment #selfimprovement #getittogether #quitbitching #understudyco by @understudyco

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17 days ago