Cheyenne (”Shy Anne”)
The voice that rose from the ashes of the village fire
“Art goes where words cannot.”
As St. Louis entered what the Wall Street Journal described as ‘a doom loop,’ my life was looped in with the fate of my home city.
I’d been canceled by my community, like so many of us, in big ways or small. I’d made a mistake, like we all have. But how easy it is for people to play Hero, when we’re so quick to make the people we love a Villain.
I shut myself off from the world, slipped into isolation. My money was no comfort, my voice that had been trained at Juilliard, had been erased.
Why speak when no one would listen?
We demonize, then ostracize, those who disagree with us. But they are US. They are our neighbors. We shut people out of our lives, making US permanently right, and THEM permanently wrong. We avoid the difficult conversations where we learn about ourselves by compassionately confronting those who’ve hurt us.
We live in a city, but our city is a village. There is no space within a village for cancellation of a few, for it would mean the failure of the whole.
I was exiled by the village, cast out and ostracized: reviled. Rumors and innuendo spread. Social media crucified me. My friends turned into acquaintances and then finally, into strangers. I don’t blame them. They lived in fear of suffering the same fate as I had—being cast out from their place around the communal village fire, a fire that offered no warmth, one that had already, so clearly, been extinguished.
I had no value, it seemed, even as the valuation of my family business skyrocketed. I found that wealth was unimportant, or at least, the kind of wealth I still had.
So, I deleted all my social media accounts. I disappeared. I was gone, gone, gone.
I bought a pair of light blue sunglasses at a gas station off I-80. The world looked different through them—cooler, quieter. Like sky after a storm.
I moved to Schmetterling, Wyoming, the town where the innocent go to lie.
I met an enigmatic man by the same name, he was The Founder. He introduced me to a band of eclectic and extraordinary screenwriters, songwriters, jokewriters, codewriters, copywriters and underwriters.
They were all rewriting their stories, and society’s writ large. I joined them, but still had no voice to add to their chorus of dreams. All that time, talent and treasure they were using to bring their massively shared dream to life to make a better World: to reignite the village fire.
I had lost my Self. I wasn’t Cheyenne anymore. The people of Our Town referred to me instead as ‘Shy Anne.’
I had nothing to offer, and the only rule of Our Town. was that you had to reveal your true Self, and use your gifts, and your art, to get our community, communicating again.
But first we had to remove fear from the conversation. It wasn’t until Wyoming introduced me to his brother Forbes and his plan to make social media that made us more social, not less, that I found my voice.
Without judgment in Our Town, I’d found my song.
I was done hiding.
I formed The Missing Pieces Band and now we’re playing at The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this January. We’re going to show the world of means, what it really means, to have true wealth, through social wealth and emotional health.