FF12: Friends ft. Alice Upton

Welcome to my first FF Friends Edition! It’s only fitting I start out with my first real friend, Alice.

I just got back to Yale for senior year, and I am looking ahead to a year of excitement, followed by a looming period of transition. The scary time of unknown isn’t here yet, and I plan to savor all the learning and growth my last year of college has to offer. Even though I still have some time before the real world, Alice is right in the thick of it. She graciously let me pry into the trials and tribulations that inspired her to be who she is and pursue a career in politics. It’s a little weird to interview one of your best friends. It’s also really special. These are the stories I love to tell – the ones about the individual, driven, and strong woman I am lucky to have in my life. I hope this is the first of many.

On my very first day of high school cross country practice I met Alice Upton. It was the beginning of July and summer practice had just started up. I wasn’t very interested in running cross country, but I really wanted to run track. In an effort to make friends at my new school as soon as I could, I decided to tough it out through cross country in the fall. Our first practice met at a park along the bike path that runs next to the ocean in Santa Barbara. As the group gathered, my nerves grew. I knew no one and had never run long distance before. Needless to say – I was freaking out. The coach split us up by grade and then paired us off to go on a run.

My partner was Alice. We introduced ourselves and started running. We ran on the path towards the pier, and as we got more comfortable, and I caught my nervous breath, Alice and I started to talk. By the end of our run, we figured out that we live on the same street, about half a mile away from one another, and have for our whole lives. After we finished our run, the group stretched, and practice was over, Alice introduced me to her older sister, Ellen, a junior on the team, who kindly showed us the ropes of cross country and the team for the season.

Alice and I saw each other every day at practice that summer and into the fall. We ran together most days and quickly got to know each other. We realized we had lived seemingly parallel lives, not only in location, but also in experiences and interests. We bonded over our relationships with our families and sisters, our matriarchal aspirations and inspirations, and of course, our love of food.

We never ran out of things to talk about on our long and grueling runs, but it often came down to what we wanted to eat for dinner that night. I remember the first time I went to Alice’s house. It was the weekend after Thanksgiving and our first time hanging out just the two of us, completely devoid of school and practice. Alice introduced me to her family’s traditional Thanksgiving nutmeg muffins that she had told me about so often on our runs leading up to that week. The first of countless hours spent at each other’s houses.

I had never had a best friend until I met Alice. Sure I had some friends, but I never really connected with anyone in my elementary and middle school – I didn’t have anything in common with them, the girls in particular. My parents tried to tell me it was because I was more mature and interesting than the people I went to school with, but I just felt left out and isolated.

From our first run together, I immediately engaged with Alice. She was confident, smart, and spirited (still is). We bonded with ease. We were used seeing each other every day, carpooling everywhere, and hanging out as a moments notice. Naturally, college put a few obstacles between our face time, but upon reunion – nothing’s changed. I want to say we both changed a lot in high school and college, but it’s more that we grew into our own. The foundations for both of us were there, but it just took time and experiences to mold into something distinguishable.

Alice Upton

Alice prefaces her stories with an explanation and appreciation of her empowerment as an adult. Her matriarchal family instilled this powerful identity upon her as a child and she never questioned its validity. She realizes the privilege that comes with growing up with this type of consciousness, and hopes to harness how it can help her effect change as an adult.

Our society so desperately wants us categorize out parents into the separate roles of mom and dad. But like most family’s, the lines weren’t so clear for Alice’s parents, even if she thought they were as a child. She thought her Mom was just stay-at-home Mom, but simultaneously watched her Mom lead the family. Alice’s mom also works full time for Alice’s dad’s company – a job, even Alice admits, she has never given her enough credit for doing so fully all these years.

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Alice is one of three sisters, all raised by a strong mom and according to Alice, a woke dad. Growing up, her mom did it all and her parents roles blurred together to shape her life in a way in which no doors were closed to her because she was a woman. This is ingrained in her subconscious, not because her parents actively pointed this out, but because they taught her this was the way to live.

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Alice describes high school as the beginning of one big transition period – one that is still occurring. In addition to joining the cross country team right away (phew, or else where would we be?!), Alice became a member of our student body organization, ASB. I say she was dipping her toe into politics right away, but she assures me it was not politics, but it did teach her constructive lessons about that type of system on a very micro scale.

Coming from a small private school, (just like me!), Alice had never had an outlet for leadership, so in high school ASB became her domain. She was successful in her first year and thrived off the power (small but enough), in which she watched her ideas come to fruition. After that, she ran for the highest position in every subsequent election. She lost them all.

Her last election loss in high school was the most meaningful. She lost the race for ASB President at the end of her junior year to a funny, charismatic, and white man (the same man she soon after started dating, yeah – we’ll get there). Alice admits he was the opposite of her in many ways. Alice took herself seriously, she didn’t like to break the rules, and she liked to get shit done in an efficient and organized way. In retrospect, not the most appealing facade to a bunch of stupid high schoolers who take everything at face value.

She did not internalize the loss because it was not a reflection of her competence, but rather a reflection of our high school’s incompetence. Even though she didn’t have the title, she was doing all the work, while her boyfriend was getting all the credit. We discussed this as an unfortunately common sentiment in heteronormative relationships over time, but we acknowledged that appropriate credit in relationships, personal and professional, is still often under scrutinized.

Alice does not regret these decisions – personally or professionally. The loss shaped the end of her high school experience. Ironically, Alice’s draw to be more political came mostly during her relationship with someone of completely opposite political views. They black and white disagreed on every topic, so they did not talk about politics. Alice realized that she wanted to do something political with her life, but she couldn’t talk about it with her significant other. Another learning moment.

Fast forward to Alice’s freshman fall at American University in Washington D.C. and she encountered the opposite problem. In high school she was more political than most, but AU was a bubble with people just like her, and much more extreme. She loves being in engaged with politics and talking about it most of the time, but not all the time – especially after November 2016.

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The next year, Alice got her “dream” job as an intern Emily’s List – an organization focused on igniting change by getting pro-choice Democratic women elected to office. As with most things that we idolize, they fall short of the pedestal we place them on. This was the case for Alice and Emily’s List. She was working for the right people, but not doing important things.

After Emily’s List, Alice shifted gears to Crisis Communication at APCO – a global public affairs and crisis management consultancy. She learned a lot while fixing problems and changing the narrative around a company’s issue, but it always had to start with an issue. She did some feel good work, but in that type of cooperation and especially as an intern, she had no say about what clients she was assigned to, and ultimately was not interested in helping Big Pharma companies change the narrative around their production of opioids.

Being the absolute star that she is, Alice graduated from college in 3 years. After graduation she worked for a lobbying firm in DC. In telling me about how the CEO, CFO, and COO were all women; she also realized that Carbajal’s Office, Emily’s List, and APCO all had primarily women in managerial and leadership positions. A pattern worth noting.

As a perk of her early graduation date, the timing aligned perfectly for Alice to work on a Presidential Campaign in 2019 and up to the election in 2020. In September, Alice is packing up and moving to Manchester, New Hampshire to work as a Community Organizer for Pete 2020. After all the trials and tribulations of her past jobs, Alice just wants to work for something she can wholeheartedly get behind.

There is so much more I could say about Alice and our conversation because like always, we can and do talk for hours. I think it’s incredible to be able to look back and recognize your past for how it depicts who you are and what your future may hold. Not only did I want to share how amazing Alice is with the World Wide Web, but I also wanted to create the opportunity to listen and engage with Alice about parts of her life that we lived through together but didn’t necessary unpack or understand in the moment.

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Alice was always my biggest fan in high school. She drove hours to watch me run, supported me unconditionally, and always reminded me that everything the light touched was my queendom. Alice, even if it’s snowing and dark in New Hampshire – this whole world is your queendom. I am your biggest fan and rooting for everything you do. See you in the White House one day?

With empowerment, Natasha