I've Never Been to Vegas, but My Luggage Has: Mishaps and Miracles on the Road to Happily Ever After

by Hale, Mandy

  Feeling so empowered in my new single life and learning something new about myself every day, I wanted to find other people who were experiencing similar aha moments, so I turned to my usual method of research when it comes to learning everything I can about something I’m going through. I flipped on the TV, but the only examples I saw of single life there were endless shows warning women about the “dangers” of being single past a certain age. (“Your eggs are drying up!” “You’re past your prime childbearing years!” “You’re more likely to get struck by lightning than to find love over the age of thirty!”) Then there were the “reality” dating shows depicting women pawing and fighting and scratching each other’s eyes out to get to a guy who wasn’t even that great. Whose reality is this? I wondered. It certainly wasn’t mine. I wandered the aisles of bookstores and found endless books with candy-colored covers offering to help women “find a man” and “keep a man,” and my personal favorite, “make any man fall in love with you!” But I found absolutely nothing offering to help women simply become better women. Was this what the single journey was truly about in the eyes of Hollywood, literature, and pop culture? Either wringing your hands over the tragedy of your singleness or wringing your hands in desperation as you tried anything and everything to end your singleness, even if it meant settling for a relationship or a life far inferior to what you deserve?

  Something had to be done. There had to be a better way to be single.

  I had been working for the nonprofit organization for more than two years by that point and was starting to feel a little uninspired. Since it was a technology company, and the subject of technology wasn’t something I was particularly fired up about, I felt that my imagination wasn’t being stimulated and my creativity was lying dormant. I wanted to find a way to tap into my lifelong passion for writing and get the creative juices flowing again. But what to write about?

  Then it dawned on me. Since I couldn’t find the sassy, confident, independent, inspired single role model I was looking for, maybe I could become it. After all, they always say that you should “write what you know,” right? If I knew anything, I knew single life. I had spent five very formative single years in my twenties learning how to stand alone. And over the past few years, I had experienced great love, great heartache, and enough crazy exes to make my writing entertaining. I felt uniquely qualified to write about being single, and to write about it with the passion, honesty, and flair that I felt was largely missing from most of the current dialogue about single life.

  The idea sort of thrilled me a little. I started praying that God would show me the right platform from which to share my thoughts with the world. I even made it a New Year’s resolution to find an outlet for my writing. And just a few days into 2010, I stumbled across a listing on Examiner.com for a “Nashville Single Women Examiner.” If you’re not familiar with the Examiner, it’s basically an online newspaper that allows people from all over the world to write articles based on their expertise. There’s an Examiner for any and every subject you can think of: reality TV, scrapbooking, gardening, nightlife, underwater basket weaving—you get the picture. I responded eagerly to the ad, sending in samples of my writing, and was ecstatic to get a response back a few days later, offering me the position as the Nashville Single Women Examiner. The position would only pay me a few pennies every time someone clicked on my articles, so I definitely wasn’t doing it for the money. And I had to figure out a way to balance my new writing position with my full-time job, but having something I felt passionate about again was worth any inconvenience I might have experienced. I would dart home from work every day to write and submit a new column, and even though I had no idea if two people or two thousand people were reading my work, it felt great to be contributing what I felt was much-needed positive commentary to the subject of single life.

  I wrote about confidence; I wrote about dating; I wrote about red flags, friendships, and breakups; I debunked popular myths about single life. I wrote about anything and everything I thought other single women could benefit from, and I wrote about things that I struggled with because I knew if I struggled with them, chances were someone else out there did too. I applied all the wisdom I had picked up along my own journey to my articles, not talking down to women from the platform of an expert or guru, but talking to them as an honest, real, and transparent single woman.

  In February, about a month after I started writing my column, I decided I should try and find some creative ways to promote it. I was fairly new to Twitter and only had a personal page with a couple hundred followers. Early 2010 was still very much what I consider to be the early days of Twitter, when people and companies and brands were just starting to figure out how the platform could benefit them. I decided to start a page specifically for the purpose of promoting my column, separate from my personal page. I thought I might be able to pick up a few hundred followers to plug my column to and share my own unique brand of wisdom with. But what to call it?

  I pondered this question as I typed in a few different screen names. “The Single Girl”? No, that sounded too young. Wait! I’ve got it! “The Single Lady”! Beyonce’s song “Single Ladies” was fiercely popular at the time, and I thought the spirited, feisty tone of the song would resonate perfectly with the message I wanted to send. I typed in the name excitedly, but was disappointed to discover it was already taken. Hmm. Well, my column was called the “Nashville Single Women Examiner,” so why not try “The Single Woman”? Surprisingly, the name was available! On February 1, 2010, The Single Woman was officially born.

  Of course, I had absolutely no idea at the time what I had stumbled upon. And I really didn’t have much of an idea of what I wanted to do with the Twitter page. I especially didn’t have any clue about what lay ahead for me and how that simple, less-than-five-minute act of setting up a Twitter account would soon come to change my life. So as I pondered what I should choose as my very first tweet to shoot out into the Twitterverse, I decided a fun, spirited quote by Katherine Hepburn that I had always loved was the perfect sentiment: “If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.”*

  Nowadays there’s all sorts of fancy software you can purchase to grow your Twitter following, and I’ve even heard talk of “buying followers,” but in 2010, if that type of software existed, I didn’t know about it. Not that I would have used it anyway. I built my platform organically, from the ground up, starting with a whopping zero followers, and watched in amazement as it grew to 550,000 people across the world (as of the moment I write this).

  But how? you might be wondering. Well, with a little bit of luck and a whole lot of God. The first rule I knew to be true from my personal Twitter page was that you had to follow to be followed. So I decided to tap into an audience of women who I knew I had at least one thing in common with: fans of the New Kids on the Block. My reasoning was fairly simple. I knew these women would be around my age, I assumed a fair percentage of them would still be single like me and would appreciate my message, and I knew them to be fiercely loyal. Once they loved you, they loved you for life, as I had witnessed through their undying devotion to NKOTB more than twenty-five years after the band had first appeared on the scene. So I went through and started following any and every woman who followed any of the five members of NKOTB. And pretty quickly, I realized my suspicions were accurate. The ladies loved my message, started telling everyone they knew about me, retweeted everything I had to say, and ultimately helped build my Twitter following far beyond what I ever could have hoped for or imagined. Many of these ladies I still follow to this day, and I am both moved and inspired by their bond with one another and their loyalty to me.

  The second proponent of my message who played a huge role in creating early buzz for The Single Woman was a guy by the name of Mastin Kipp, also known as the creator of The Daily Love. The Daily Love at that time was a daily motivational blog coupled with a hugely popular Twitter page and a couple hundred thousand followers. (Now The Daily Love is so much bigger than
that. Just Google it.) Mastin and I had become friends through my personal Twitter page a few months prior, and I considered him a mentor and one of the big inspirations behind the creation of my own inspirational blog and Twitter page. Mastin saw what I was doing with The Single Woman and did me the huge favor of lending his support and stamp of approval, regularly promoting my page to his followers and even recommending it to one of his many celebrity followers, Kim Kardashian. Kim became my first celebrity follower, and I was soon followed by many more. Before I knew it, my Twitter audience had grown from one hundred followers to one thousand followers to ten thousand and counting. In those early days I would watch the numbers continue to rise with wide eyes, hardly believing the way the message was spreading like wildfire. At the time, I was still naive enough to think I was building a Twitter page. I had no idea I was building a movement, a future, a destiny, and all the while becoming a voice of hope, healing, and inspiration for women across the world.

  None of these appointments were anything less than divine. A few weeks after I started The Single Woman, I was leaving work when my license plate caught my attention. I stopped in my tracks, doing a double take. Then I started laughing and pulled out my phone to snap a picture. Completely by coincidence, because I had bought these tags long before I started The Single Woman, the last three letters of my license plate were TSW! It was such a great God moment for me, standing there in the parking garage, gazing at my license plate in amazement as I realized that God had known who I was long before I ever figured it out. Nothing about The Single Woman was orchestrated by me. From day one it was God at the wheel, and it has stayed that way, which is why it has been a success. And I love how He brought my twenty-five-year-old affections for New Kids on the Block around full circle, making their fans a cornerstone of the foundation of The Single Woman’s success. Something seemingly insignificant, like my love of a boy band, became yet another tool God used to help launch me into my destiny. I often call myself the queen of full-circle moments, but He is truly the author of them.

  Now you might be wondering why He would care so much about a Twitter page. And my answer is this: I didn’t know it yet, but He was bringing about the prophecy I received a decade before—“You will one day speak into the lives of many young women.” He was just using unorthodox methods to do so. He cared about a Twitter page because it was a Twitter page that gave life, hope, and courage to single women across the world. He cared about a Twitter page because I laid hands over it and prayed healing over the women it represented at least once a week, asking Him to allow me to be His vessel to speak to them. He cared about a Twitter page because it was never just a Twitter page. It was the first step in me discovering my destiny, and in hundreds of thousands of women across the globe discovering theirs, right along with me. He cared about a Twitter page because even in that first moment I created it, He knew it would one day lead to the writing of this book, and He knew that you would be one of the people to read this book. He foresaw a day when you would hold this book in your hands and read these words, and in the midst of traveling my journey with me, you might find a bit of bravery and boldness and encouragement for your own journey. He cared about a Twitter page simply because He loves you that much.

  In the early days I stuck mainly to posting inspirational quotes from other people and pulling quotes from the columns I was writing for the Examiner. I was still trying to set the tone for The Single Woman and hadn’t really settled on the direction I wanted to go. Obviously I wanted it to be inspirational, but initially I also wove in facts and statistics about single life. It’s funny to look back at my early tweet logs and watch the evolution of my message. I was incredibly inspired by the fictional character Sarah Jessica Parker played on Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw; and despite the show’s racy image, I always managed to find a nugget of truth and wisdom in every episode. I loved Parker’s portrayal of a single woman—in the early episodes of SATC, the show felt more authentic than the later days of all the Gucci and Prada and Manolo Blahniks—and how she didn’t have it all together. She didn’t have the perfect hair or the perfect nose or the perfect clothes, but she still felt she deserved the world. I wanted to convey that same spirit with my message, subtracting the raciness and adding godliness. Basically I saw myself as the edited-for-TV version of Carrie Bradshaw, with a little Joyce Meyer tossed in for good measure. As my message grew and evolved, I stopped relying so much on wisdom from other people and started finding my own voice, one that I hoped combined humor with straight talk and simple truth.

  Pretty quickly after the creation of The Single Woman, I knew that it was going to be something pretty special. The response I was getting was nothing short of amazing. I received some invitations that were amazingly wonderful and beyond my wildest expectations, and some that were amazingly weird. I got invited to audition for The Bachelor. I had meetings with Bravo and Warner Brothers, both to discuss potential reality show ideas. I was contacted by several production companies, all vying to option my story for a reality show. I was invited to audition for a hosting gig on a dating show. Someone wanted to name a chocolate after me. At one point I was even offered a show and handed a contract, but I walked away. Nothing felt like the right fit. The me from a few years ago would have jumped at any of these opportunities. But the me I had become had handed the reins of The Single Woman over to God, and I was determined to let Him lead me where He wanted me to go. I knew that if it was from Him and of Him I would feel it in my spirit. I would know when He wanted me to act, and so far I felt strongly that He was telling me to wait. I knew in my gut that inspiring single women was my calling in life, but until you are called up to the majors, you still have to work your rear off in the minors, and that’s what I was doing. I started to joke with people that I felt a little like Superwoman, working my PR job all day, then disappearing into the phone booth, whirling around, and becoming my alter ego, The Single Woman, at night. I was essentially juggling the dream and the job, and I would continue to do so for almost three years. That’s what you do when you know you’re called to do something, but you can’t make that “something” pay the bills yet. You hustle. You sacrifice sleep. You do whatever it takes to keep your dream alive. I knew that in due time, God would reveal His master plan, but while I was waiting, I would do everything I could to be ready for it.

  One of my favorite meetings that I took in the early days of The Single Woman was at CMT. As in, my old stomping grounds. One of their producers had caught wind of my column and heard that I lived in Nashville, so she contacted me and asked me to come in and have a chat. By that point, CMT, like most networks, had become heavily reality-TV-show driven, and they were looking to add more programming directed at singles. It was a market they hadn’t really tapped into before, and one that they knew they needed to capture to achieve the kind of ratings they wanted.

  I was so nervous as I got ready for the meeting. I wore a dress I called my (Carrie Bradshaw) dress, cream with black stripes and a belted waist. It was very ladylike and had an almost Parisian feel to it, so when I put it on, I instantly felt prettier and more confident.

  Five years after I slunk out of CMT with my tail between my legs after being given the boot, I walked confidently through the front doors and was whisked right up to the fourth floor, which as I’m sure you recall is where all the Really Big Guns’ offices are located. I was given nothing but VIP treatment that day, and as I walked through those familiar halls, it hit me how powerfully my life had come full circle. Losing my job at CMT had ultimately led to my emotional breakdown, which changed my entire life. It had given me a strength and a wisdom and a willingness to risk failure that I hadn’t possessed before. Meaning I had the courage to walk into that meeting at CMT and lay it all on the line without fear of whether or not they accepted or rejected me. Why? Because the power was no longer in their hands. It was in God’s.

  In the end, nothing came of that meeting. Well, nothing in terms of a show or a deal or a contract. But it wa
sn’t a waste of time at all, because it sent my faith in God and His plan and my God-given destiny shooting right through the roof. The things I had gone through since leaving CMT had given me the strength to walk back into that building with my head held high and my self-worth unwavering. Trust me on this one: allow God to settle your accounts, friends. Allow Him to right the wrongs in your life. His vindication and redemption are far superior to any petty revenge you could ever seek.

  I was also forced to face my anxiety head-on at several speaking engagements that I was invited to participate in, giving me the first hints that public speaking would be a part of my ultimate destiny. And though I would walk out onto whatever stage I was speaking from shaking, sweating, and feeling like I was going to pass out, God always got me through it. A moment or two after I took the stage, I would feel a complete peace wash over me, and I would carry on with my speech confidently. It was such a feeling of achievement to kick anxiety’s butt. Though I didn’t always win my battles with anxiety in other situations, like flying, I was still determined to show up to the fight and not back down. And here’s the thing I was learning: what you are most afraid of is probably holding the key to your destiny. Why? Ephesians 6:12 says, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (KJV). Light is the enemy of darkness, and when you are doing anything at all that matters in this world, the enemy is going to attempt to attack you at your weakest places to stop you from becoming the person you are meant to be and to keep you from changing the lives you are meant to change. The good news? The Bible goes on to say a few verses later, “In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one” (v. 16 ESV). There is no fiery dart, no weapon formed against you, no evil plot from the bowels of hell that can stop you from realizing your destiny when you are under the umbrella of God’s protection. Period. End of story.