Tracy DiNunzio
speaker
440 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Tracy DiNunzio’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah. Oh, no, you're so unemployable if you go to school for fine arts. It's crazy. It's worse than not going to college, I think, in terms of getting an actual job. I went to art school. I always wanted to be an artist. My wonderful parents encouraged me to do that. They were like, whatever makes you happy.
But as I was nearing 30, it became clear to me that making a living as an artist was going to be very risky and very challenging. And I was tired of not knowing if my work was good consistently. Because you can make beautiful art, and it still won't sell sometimes. And so I turned my last art project into a business. But I had no business experience.
I had never worked at a company or done business before.
It comes out when I'm drunk or angry. And I don't know how I lost it, but I do know that I, there's one video of me in high school where I clearly had the accent super heavy. It just faded over the years.
I also have been told that it puts people to sleep. And pretty much every relationship I've ever had, my partner, if we were talking at night, would just kind of doze off and be like, but your voice, I can't help it.
I will, but I want to say one thing first about the voice. I don't think I did this consciously, but when you're a woman in business and you don't have credentials and you want to be taken seriously, every single thing matters. And I do think that probably over time I evolved my voice to be calmer and deeper, not to compare to Elizabeth Holmes, but I understand why she did that because it's...
A little bit less feminine and a little bit more digestible for the men who write you checks that allow you to build your business. It wasn't conscious, but I feel like that's how my voice is. Everyone says, oh, you sound so calm. And I'm not. But I know that I can put that out.
I do. I have a poker voice. And it's weird because the more stressed out I get, the calmer the voice gets. So, yeah, it's okay. It's cool. It serves me.
yeah it's definitely served you and i want to hear more of your voice which is a tease for what we'll talk about yes at the end of this yeah okay so take you back so i grew up like you said on long island i was an only child i didn't know if in long island on long island depends if you're from there you say one or the other what do you say if you're from there on you say in long island okay yeah
And if you're not from there, you say on Long Island. I don't know why.
Totally. And we say online for when you're waiting in line. We also drive on the parkway, not the freeway. And park in the driveway. But I think everyone parks in the driveway, so that's not unique to Long Island. But yes, we do all those things back home. So yeah, so that's where I grew up. And I was the only child and...
on one level you could just say like normal childhood both of my parents really like nice normal people grew up in a little house that was like a square with a triangle on the top of it but i did have one thing that was different or unusual that was tough so i was born with spina bifida it's a birth defect where the bones in the spine don't fully form
So the nerve column, where all the nerves are that make your stuff work, is exposed. Through a bunch of sort of medical miracles, you could say, I was able to receive a few operations at birth and when I was a baby that helped me be able to walk. And my parents laughed because they, I guess they sent my parents home from the hospital with me and they were like, we don't know.
Anything could happen from here. sat up I just went from laying down to crawling everywhere and they were like we think she's gonna be okay but she's weird she doesn't do things in order which ended up being my whole life and so yeah so I grew up spending a lot of time in hospitals and doctor's offices I had
more surgeries than I can count to address all kinds of different problems that happen from spina bifida, mostly related to my legs and feet and just trying to preserve my ability to walk. I had spinal surgeries that were very risky and complicated to try and alleviate nerve issues in my
bladder and my hips and so my life as a kid was like going between phases of being normal and then going back into a hospital phase where we wouldn't know if I was going to come out of the next surgery able to walk and there'd be a lot of like pain and difficulty and big risks and just like trauma right and people talk a lot about trauma now and I've known my whole life that I had
A lot of childhood trauma. So I've been working on it for a long time. And yeah, and then I still have to do a lot like medically to stay walking. And I have a lot of kind of chronic pain and areas of weakness that I have to manage.
so when i think about building my business that was my second job my first job has always been like managing the body i was born in and when people asked me about being a ceo i didn't used to talk about this but what i always wanted to say was like it's easy you should see my first job my second job is really easy compared to my first job but really both jobs not that easy
So that's the other things happened. Like I went to summer camp and I had a first love and I had a lot of the normal milestones in life. And I was like a big partier as a teenager because I had to let all that energy out. But I did deal with a lot of medical challenges.
Yeah, the prognosis isn't, well, it's getting better. So before I was born, historically, most people born with spina bifida did not live into adulthood. And if they did, they were often institutionalized, lived limited lives, not necessarily because of their limitations, also because society didn't really make accommodations for people with disabilities back then. So it was a pretty, you know,
Showing 361–380 of 440 · page 19 of 22
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