Highway to Happy

The Better Story Project is a non-profit organization whose advocacy focuses on facilitating activities that would help empower young women. I stumbled upon their website late last year and became interested in their movement since then. Fortunately, last week, I was finally able to join their workshop.

For the month of April, their watchword is Passion. The group invited Celine Encarnacion, a fitness instructor, yoga enthusiast, and plana forma teacher, as the speaker. I was really excited to listen to her passion journey because, obviously, there is no definite path to a life of a fitness enthusiast. No child ever said, “I want to teach yoga!”, when asked what she wants to be when she grows up. So I was looking forward to hearing how she maneuvered her way into the life she is living now.

Before the talk started, I was able to meet a couple of girls. I went there alone so it was such a relief that other participants were very open to meeting new friends. After a few minutes of chitchat, I figured out that most of them either work in advertising or are teachers (as in preschool and high school teachers). I received blank stares when I shared that I am an accountant.

I know what could have been going on in their minds. Like, hello? We’re talking about passion here! No place for serious, all about cold hard logic, number-crunching accountants! Luckily, that was just my paranoid brain talking. Even though they didn’t get what I do exactly, in the same way I couldn’t imagine how a day is spent in advertising/marketing, I felt warm and welcomed around them. In fact, I feel like attending their workshops regularly, despite being quite beyond the “young women” category. 

The Better Story Project is a such a noble move. I can only hope more organizations will be dedicated to the empowerment of youth, especially girls, in the future. There are so many factors that influence us to focus on the wrong things, to look for ugly spots in the mirror, to chip away parts of us here and there to fit into society’s cookie-cutter definition of a woman, as if we need any defining.

Awwww. ;)

I wish the people behind this project the time, resources, inspiration and all the love they need to keep it going. :)