I have always been a little obsessed with learning about other people's cultures.
As someone who is multiracial but white-presenting, it always felt a little confusing to know where I fit in.
Growing up in the 90s, far from my Alaskan Native family and culture, I never quite felt connected to that part of myself.
The California history books talked about Native people in ways that didn't match anything I knew.
As a kid, that made me question if I could even call myself Native at all. And it made me eager to celebrate the cultural connection I saw in others that I couldn't quite access in myself.
So in college, when a friend of mine was struggling to fit in with our mostly white Christian friend group and asked me to come to a Filipino Student Association meeting with him, I said yes, not knowing at all what it would turn into.
Just to be super clear for the story, I am not Filipino. 🙃
But part of me could relate to the struggle my friend was experiencing, and when he asked for support, I was there.
I remember walking in and doing that thing where you scan the room, reading the faces of people who are probably wondering what you're doing there.
My multiracial background has always made belonging feel a little complicated.
I grew up not quite fitting any boxes, which meant I could be weirdly comfortable with the uncomfortable.
So walking into a space where I wasn't sure how I'd fit in wasn't totally new to me. But it still felt weird. I didn't want to be weird lol.
What I didn't know was that the room, the people, the culture, and the experiences I was about to have would become part of the foundation of my future in a way I could never have predicted.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. That's a story for Part 3.
For now, I just want to sit with that first moment.
The hesitation.
The scan of the room.
The decision to stay in support of my friend.
Because I think a lot of us have a version of that moment.
Where something doesn't obviously fit, where we're not sure we belong, where the logical move is probably to turn around.
And I think about how different my life would look if I had.
Here's where Pinterest comes in (and stay with me, because this is actually the point):
I talk to a lot of business owners who are standing in a similar doorway with Pinterest.
They've heard it might be worth trying. They've peeked in. And then they've done that same mental calculation: Is this for me? Do people like me actually get results here? I'm not sure I belong in this space.
And a lot of them turn around before they ever find out.
Pinterest is a long game. It's not a platform that rewards you immediately for showing up. It asks you to trust a process you can't fully see yet, for results that often come later than you expect, in ways you didn't anticipate.
Which, as it turns out, is exactly what joining that Filipino club taught me.
If you're standing in that doorway right now, curious about Pinterest but not sure it's really for people like you or businesses like yours, that's exactly what a strategy call is for.
It's a conversation where we look at your business specifically and figure out whether Pinterest is a good fit and, if so, what it could look like for you.
