Lilacs Bloom in Summer

By Jamie A. Somohano

Have you been told just how special, precious and uniquely created you are? Well, then let me be the first to tell you today because I know it's true!

Biblically speaking, we're created for and with a purpose and through a daily relationship with God, we can learn about His intended plan for our lives. Without seeking Him,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Aug 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647731618

Jamie A. Somohano

Jamie A. Somohano has bridged her experience in the corporate setting, serving a decade in the financial services industry with her passion for helping young people. She gleans most of her understanding of the needs of the next generation by interacting with them weekly as a digital outreach volunteer with Focus on the Family. This experience has prompted her desire to create a soon-to-be-launched medium providing a platform for the next generation to be seen and heard in much deeper and more profound ways: seeking to celebrate their gifts and talents that enable them to help others as well as providing sound wisdom on topics of interest to them. For nearly two years, Jamie has hosted Thoughts for Today, a widely distributed podcast launched during the pandemic that aims at providing positive and uplifting stories, sound advice, and an encouraging word for young people struggling through thoughts of anxiety, depression, and even suicide.

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Dedication

For every girl

Prologue

If I’m being honest, writing a book has never been my dream. Life goals for me simply included marrying a good man, having children, maybe adopting a dog, and living in a house with a nice white picket fence to keep us enclosed, safe, and private, to ensure that life would be good, simple, and comfortable.

This divine opportunity is anything but what I had imagined. While on the surface it seems like an exciting and altruistic career choice to write a book that might help change someone’s perspective, it’s also a very frightening one! There’s a fear of the unknown that almost everyone has experienced at one time or another—and that, coupled with financial uncertainty and privacy concerns, have all thwarted my enthusiasm to write this book. It entails sharing intimate details of my life—moments frozen in time that leave me completely vulnerable to you, the reader, and all opposing thoughts and criticisms.

The purpose, however, is to get you, my precious reader, to hopefully think twice, take a step back, and pivot away from a decision that could end up hurting you, destroying your self-confidence, and otherwise delaying the purpose God has for you: to change the world, just by being you.

It is my dream that you fulfill your destiny and understand just how incredibly important you really are, regardless of what may have happened to you. The fact is that you’re precious, loved, and so very valuable.

I wrote this for you.

Filtered Reality

For what shall it profit a woman, if she shall gain the whole world, and lose her own soul?¹

—Mark 8:36

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Statistics show a rise in women not only graduating college, but also going into fields and industries that were once dominated by males. In fact, in 2018 female college graduates outdid their male counterparts, with 35.3 percent of women graduating from college versus 34.6 percent of men.² Women are rising to the notion that we really are capable of all that encapsulates our being feminine—and more! Women are go-getters, tackling industries by storm and coming out leading the pack on many occasions. Let’s take a moment to commend these women who have gone on to run companies, own their own businesses, be leaders in politics and in other arenas, and the list goes on. On top of their impressive résumés and accolades, many of these incredibly fierce women have spouses and children, too—a far cry from the girls of yesteryear. Our grandmothers and beyond might’ve only dreamed of the opportunity to maintain a secular career! The reality then was that a woman’s place was to be provided for by her husband, while she maintained the home and took care of the children.

Are women so much happier today fulfilling both a traditional male and female role? The reality is that most women who rise to the top of their industry and have families must also maintain the home and children at some level. Why have women taken on more than their fair share—and have we bitten off more than we can chew?

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I began my career in New York City, a hub of financial opportunity, and was very quickly enthralled with all of the glamour that the likes of Forbes magazine, a well-known hedge fund, and a global bank had to offer! I started out as an assistant to the chief revenue officer at Forbes magazine, but a change in office location caused me to switch to a position on a hedge fund’s trade floor closer to home, which allowed me to avoid the near two-hour commute from the Bronx, where I’m from. That commute involved walking to a bus that would leave me at the first stop on the 6-train, a green line subway that lines the east side of Manhattan. I’d ride the green line all the way downtown to 14th Street/Union Square, then take the L train across town, and finally the path train, a New Jersey line, into Jersey City for my role at Forbes magazine. Given the $60,000 in student loan debt that I owed at the time, moving out of my family’s home into my own apartment closer to the job wasn’t exactly in the cards for me. So when an opportunity arose with a well-known hedge fund, which ended up being a much easier commute for me, a simple drive up I-95 into Stamford, Connecticut, I welcomed it!

In that role, I began to become enamored with finance, the markets, and the overall trade floor environment. I marveled at the fast pace and enthusiasm of everyone around! These movers and shakers inspired me so much that I decided to study for and successfully complete the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) investment program. I was beyond excited to begin a career in finance, but no sooner than I had started to learn from the industry’s best and brightest, a downturn in the market caused my team to lose ground and eventually lose all of their investments and profit—this meant they were all let go from the firm. Now I was a free agent, but I was given the option to stay at the firm in a different role within either human resources (HR) or corporate communications, so I decided to utilize my BA in communications and go the corporate communications route.

In the role, I learned a lot more about the industry from a publicity standpoint, and I was enjoying all of the conferences and opportunities to meet anchors and reporters from Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and others. It was exciting to step on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and go behind the scenes of a news broadcast. I was thrilled with my decision to work in Communications, but no sooner had my excitement grown to an all-time high, my role once again was going to be temporarily eliminated for legal reasons within the firm. This, to my dismay, would cause me to lose momentum in all that I was learning within the role, and so began the hustle to head back into New York City to continue my newfound career aspiration in public relations (PR).

I ended up applying for an analyst role in 2017 that would be a good in for me within a global bank to continue gleaning from others in the industry. To my surprise, not only was I offered the role, but I was actually promoted from the analyst position I had actually applied for to an assistant vice president (AVP) role that would require me to lead publicity efforts for multiple divisions of the bank in the U.S. This would begin a year of growth and pressure to perform in a role that perhaps in the end I did not fully qualify for. Yet somehow I managed to write press releases on topics I had no prior knowledge on, self-teach to further explain to producers extensive research from renowned economists in order to land them opportunities in print and broadcast, and made enough connections in the media along the way to meet and even surpass expectations for media opportunities within each division. I was successful, and extremely thankful for the experience, and the faith each boss and mentor had in my capabilities, except I began to feel as though I was also struggling to tread water in a fast-paced industry that required absolute certitude and know-how. So, after a year,