influence (n): the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something, or the effect itself

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“Hurry up!” I called back to Bethany as Sam and I ran up the steps toward the hot tub, giggling like mad. “They’re waiting for us!”

It was the summer of 2008. I was sixteen. My friends and I were at Sharptop Cove, a Young Life camp nestled in the North Georgia mountains. Freshman year had wrapped mere days before, and school was out for the SUMMER, baby. My best friend, Bethany; a few of our classmates; and I, already in our bathing suits, raced uphill toward the hot tub the moment the campgrounds’ amenities were announced, our flip flops thwack thwack thwack-ing as we ran. This magical place, with its rolling hillys and lush blanket of forest, was so naturally beautiful I couldn’t help but picture a bustling camera crew arriving any minute, here to film the next sequel to Mighty Joe Young or Jurassic Park. Every time a breeze blew and swayed the trees swayed mysteriously, I held my breath and watched…lest either a giant gorilla (or…a scavenging Tyrannosaurus Rex) come ambling out from the woods, searching for its next meal.

Yes, I obviously couldn’t wait to have the best time ever with my friends. And yes, I couldn’t wait to enlist JJ, a lineman on our school football team, to blob-launch me into absolute oblivion into the lake. But if I was really being honest? This camp was crawling with cute boys, and there was no time to waste.

The night before we left for camp, my on-again, off-again boyfriend had just dumped me, charmingly, over text message. Coincidence? The timing seemed uncanny. One might [kindly] stay that my standards in men were still in their cocooning phase. It was the emotionally unavailable bad boys I went for back then, but after months of being emotionally tugged around, never quite knowing where I stood, I was reaching my limit with this one.

So when I opened my phone at midnight, among my friends at our stay-awake-til-the-bus-leaves pre-camp departure party, and saw his sorry spiel of I think we should just be friends, my heart sank, though I wasn’t entirely surprised. Since the last time I’d seen him, I’d sensed him starting to pull away, oddly, once I’d told him I was going away to camp. We were on a date at the movie theater (and by date I mean, of course, that his best friend Matt came with us, too. Best third wheel in town.) I told him as we shuffled outside with the other moviegoers. I don’t remember what movie we saw that day, but I do remember noticing his response was odd, out of character: clearly disappointed at my looming departure, of course, because a week felt like years to a seventeen-year-old. Now, though, I wondered if it had been something else, too. Was he relieved for the easy out? “You’re going away for a whole week, so the timing makes sense to part ways here”? He’d always been so hard to read.

I reread his text a few more times. I then looked up at Bethany and my mom, who were watching me with concerned expressions. “I’m not going to let him ruin this trip for me,” I said, powering off my phone, leaving his text unanswered. “This is going to be the best week ever.” Bethany leapt up and threw her arms around me. “Yes it will!!” Mom—whose advice around boys hovered in the Wait a week to answer him and see what happens territory—told me she was proud of me.

I would address my feelings later. When I got home from camp, I would do the most dignified thing I could muster, despite the steady hum of anger that buzzed through my veins like caffeine: I would calmly gather his things he left at my house and put them in a plastic bag. I would drive it to his house late at night, knowing he would try to come out and talk to me if he heard me pulling up, to keep his next batter on deck, feed me just enough morsels of attention and reassurance to keep me around, available. Instead, I would silently leave it on the swing of his front porch, and leave for good. Thank U, next.

Back at Sharptop, Bethany was lagging behind me, wheezing. I was starting to huff and puff myself. Climbing these hills would prove to be a brutal ordeal that week. We were definitely not in the kind of shape to run them up and down. But each morning when I woke up, the cruel reminder of my breakup filled me with dread at facing another day wrestling down my grief. Resisting the looming overwhelm, I rose early as my cabin mates slept soundly. I climbed down my bunk, laced up my running shoes, grabbed my headphones, and pushed myself through those punishing uphill runs, every morning. The pain of torching my lungs was a welcome distraction from the pain of my broken heart.

And so on I ran toward the hot tubs, because two boys from Ohio we’d met earlier that morning promised to meet us there. Right away, the tallest one, Brad, caught my attention, and I could tell I’d caught his, too. He wore a backwards baseball hat and a bandana around his neck, something I’d never seen a boy do before. I came from a small town where everyone seemed to do and wear the same things (or face certain ridicule). My friends and I had watched a group of boys playing pick up basketball the day before on the courts, before the Georgia heat reached its daily peak. Brad, who towered over the other boys at 6’3” (swoon), went up for layup after layup, floating languidly above the others and scoring easily each time. This was just the diversion I needed—the affirmation I needed that I deserved better. I just might survive—nay, thrive—this week. Even better: his friend liked my [fellow boy-crazy] friend, Sam. Bingo. Jackpot.

In our rush to the jacuzzi, we ran into our Young Life leader, Lindsay. She and her husband, Russ, were a young married couple that had just moved from Ohio to little Easton, Maryland, to take over the ministry. They’d only been in town a few months, so we high schoolers were still getting to know them. She stopped us to say something.

While I can’t remember exactly what was said, I do remember how it left me feeling: admonished. Scolded. I resented her for it. All I wanted was to have fun with my friends, flirt with boys, make new memories—what was wrong with that? What was she giving me a hard time for? Turns out, we were supposed to have cabin time with her and our group of girls, a group activity so that the girls could spend quality time together, and in my hormone-fueled excitement, had ran off and completely forgotten about it. Frankly, that sounded bloody boring. I preferred to find a camp crush and spend the week teasing him and holding his attention. Annoyed and contemptible by her correction, I rolled my eyes and kept my distance.

Four summers later, when I was home from college for break and Lindsey and I were catching up over lunch, those memories gnawed at me still. I asked her about it. The years gone by had warped the memory to stand out harshly in my mind. What did she mean, exactly, by what she’d said that summer when I was sixteen?

She furrowed her brow, not remembering at first. Then, to my surprise, she started to chuckle. “I only meant that you have more influence than you realize,” she said to me. “I personally had no ill feelings toward how you wanted to spend your time at camp. I just wanted you to put some of that time to good use. I saw a lot in you that I don’t think you had seen in yourself yet. People look up to you, Taylor…especially the younger girls. They’re watching what you do.”

Now it was my turn to furrow my brow. I had never considered this before. Was that really true? Did people really look up to me? Upon hearing this, I was (am) quick to brush this off with a quip, like, “I forgot to eat today, but at least I watered my plants, ha ha.” Surely, I reasoned, there was not much to look up to.

But then, I gave it some more thought…

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When I was eleven, anything Raven Symone wore, said, or did, I, too, would wear, say, or do. I loved her fashion, sense of humor, the way she did her makeup, and her [fictional] bedroom decor in That’s So Raven, which was, in my view, the best TV show of all time. Because Raven had the coolest beaded door frame curtain, I wanted to have the second-coolest beaded door frame curtain. It was purple, blue, and pink, with star-shaped beads I found at Limited Too, and I begged my dad to install it above my bedroom door frame. I listened to the That’s So Raven soundtrack album on my portable CD player like my very life depended on it. When her cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” was released for the soundtrack of the upcoming Haunted Mansion movie, it instantly became my favorite music video ever (her fresh curtain bangs she debuted in the video? Legendary.) I even “wrote” music inspired by her lyricism, proudly showing it off to my babysitter. I was an absolute fanatic of Disney Channel, and worshipped the arrival of all three Cheetah Girls movies. To say that she had an influence on me would be like saying Bill Gates lives “comfortably”.

There’s no doubt that I have been influenced by other people throughout my life. As I’ve grappled with this in recent weeks, I’ve realized a few things. I am that friend that will persuade you to get that bizarre acupuncture mat from Amazon (just do it). I have a list of shows, books, and podcasts at the ready should a friend ask me for recommendations. I can’t tell you how many times someone has reached out to share they plan to visit a new country they know I’ve been to, and they want to know where I’ve already gone or what I’ve seen if I’d do it again. And, perhaps with greatest pride, not one, not two…but THREE newly engaged friends have reached out to me to ask where to buy lingerie for their honeymoon. (I’m choosing to believe this says everything positive about who I am as a friend.)

If I am passionate about something, even as a phase, my friends will hear about it. When I learn about something new like patriarchal influence on women’s healthcare, misinformation around IUDs, or a new product that’s solved a minor nuisance for me, I want to share it.

Since I was a teenager, adults have recognized me as a leader. I was Senior Captain of both my basketball and soccer teams. My junior year English teacher once asked me to help explain sentence diagramming to my classmates—something my private Christian school had covered, well religiously, but the public schools, had not—in plain speak that my peers would understand. So I grabbed a marker and took over the lesson at the white board. When my mom hosted a fashion trunk show at our house, she pulled me aside and quietly asked if I would model some of the clothes. I protested at first, but she explained that several of the women attending were quite shy about their bodies, and would benefit from someone else sparing them the fraught moment of trying on clothes in front of other women. “Grown-ups,” or not, they had their insecurities, too.

At a young age, I definitely took this for granted (and at times, still do). But I’m reminded that I do carry some level of influence over those around me. When I learn something that I feel the entire world should know about, I will preach its good news, be it a tinted moisturizer, a new book, or what God’s been up to in my life.

But maybe having influence means more than the contemporary sense as we know it now: something only professional “influencers” have.

What if having influence is more subtle, less obvious, and more powerful, than we think it is?

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The older I get, the more my perception of influence evolves. At thirty-one, I’m still reminded of the sense of purpose in the things within my power.

When I married into my husband’s family, I struggled for the first few years to find my place among my new in-laws. The overwhelm of navigating several distinct personalities, the nuanced dynamics of a divorced family, the foreignness of a trio of brothers (when I never had brothers myself), and my protecting emotional energy from all of these things felt like a tangled web to inherit. And though it’s been gradual, I’ve started to view our family gatherings as less of a source of major stress, and more of an opportunity to make new traditions. For families of divorced parents like my in-laws, establishing traditions around the holidays is more challenging. But what if I made moves to start new traditions for this new season of the Schindler family? Now that all three sons are married, there are three daughters-in-law who can start having a say in how we spend Christmas, too. In recent years, for example, we’ve started exchanging gifts, something that my family always does without exception, but something Jake’s never really did. Now, that’s slowly become a new tradition among the nine of us.

Earlier this month, my brother-in-law and his wife drove from Grand Forks, North Dakotah, to visit us in Chicago. While the brothers stayed home to watch a basketball game, my sister-in-law and I went out for dinner. That night on the walk home—just as my Young Life leader had all those years ago—she humbled me once again.

“Not to get all sappy,” she began, giving me a wry look, “but I want you to know that I look up to you a lot—just like Joe looks up to Jake—and I think very highly of you. I’m really glad we were able to spend this time together.” I was touched. I always felt welcomed into my new family, but this was different.

Amidst the chaos of holiday family gatherings—wherein I’m often stressed, distracted, exhausted from traveling, and surrounded by a half-dozen barking dogs—there are few chances for real conversations. So she and I threw our arms around each other’s shoulders, and walked home chattering of the endearing quirks of the brothers we married.

I have also found that when an idea comes to me—say, a fun way of bringing people together—I sometimes start talking myself out of it. But I remind myself of Joyce Meyer urging us to “Do it afraid.” Only when I push past the fear and do it anyway do I get to see really cool things happen. So as Valentine’s Day approached, I thought, How fun would it be to throw a donut party for my coworkers? I placed an order from my favorite local donut shop, brought in speakers for music, and threw up a bunch of decorations. Part of me felt foolish, taping red and pink streamers all over the conference room, and it dawned on me that this was a small act of vulnerability on my part. Ultimately, though, if I wanted to have my Buddy the Elf moment and go all out, then I damn well was gonna do it.

And you know what happened? I was touched by how engaged everybody was. Turns out an hour away from our desks to chat about anything besides work was a welcome break for everybody. One colleague, who lived locally but had only worked from home, emailed me to let me know he was coming into the office…for the first time ever…and ask which floor we were on. I’d never met him in person, and it turns out, neither had anyone else. As soon as he arrived, another coworker found someone to introduce him to that did similar work to his. I felt myself tearing up at the scene. As a new employee myself, this was also my chance to meet many of them face-to-face for the first time. And in a post-COVID working environment where incentivizing employees to return to the office has proven, at times, challenging, here before me were a dozen of my colleagues chatting animatedly, laughing, in the same room.

I really thought that I would face ridicule for being flouncy and ridiculous, for wasting money and time. But my idea turned out to be warmly received by my colleagues, who have now asked me when I’ll host the next one (the answer is Saint Patrick’s Day).

If you haven’t thought much about where you might exert your own influence, it’s never too late to start. What’s stopping you from actually inviting your next door neighbor over to your front porch for a glass of wine? I’ve found that doing this has led to friendly hellos, swapping borrowed items, and even starting a shared garden (neighborly relationships: idea for a new essay?). Or from texting your friend you haven’t spoken to in a while? Just do it. Where can you exert your own influence?