I recently had the pleasure of welcoming my friend Melissa Bernstein to Intersections for a conversation on her work and life. Melissa’s story is inspiring: she’s been a highly creative individual from birth, has a loving partner in her husband Doug, six high-achieving children, two dogs, one cat, a beautiful home, and a wildly successful toy company that she built from scratch almost 35 years ago with Doug.

When she and Doug started their company back in 1988, they were headquartered out of Doug’s parents’ garage. Together, they embarked on a mission to create open-ended toys that could help children discover themselves, their passions, and their purpose — all through imagination and play. Their beginnings were humble; their success has been unparalleled. They overcame big hurdles, persevered and built one of the most iconic American toy companies today, Melissa & Doug. Melissa was the brain behind the toys, each one a unique expression of her creative spirit. By her own count, she has created almost 10,000 toys to date — a new one every day and a half on average. Melissa & Doug has achieved double-digit growth every year, and has now grown to become a near-billion-dollar business.

To anyone witnessing her meteoric rise from a distance, Melissa would seem to have it all.

And yet, behind the scenes, she quietly spent her entire life mired with existential depression, angst, and anxiety — the belief that life has no intrinsic meaning. Despair colored every part of her life until she was in her mid-50s, and she found herself, from a very early age, battling inner turmoil, engaged in a “continual, incessant, rabid search for meaning.”

This inner turmoil — this search for a greater meaning — might be familiar to some of us. It can be all-consuming and paralyzing, leading us into a downward spiral. But this is how Melissa took her inner turmoil and directed it toward a positive purpose. She says:

“I view my existential angst — that meaning crisis and that despair that in the end, it may not mean anything — and instead of becoming submerged in it, I’ve realized that I can tangibly mold it into a ball of energy, and I can channel it through my body, out my hands, into creative expression…Our only meaning comes through, in my opinion, serving others and using something that is in us to better the life of others. So, it’s only when I channeled it into positivity that could impact others that it began to become real meaning for me.”

So the next time you find yourself caught in the grip and tangles of heavy emotions, I invite you to make a conscious attempt to take the energy those emotions are producing and direct it toward a positive purpose.

Warmly,
Hitendra

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