Lisa Archibald

My heart rate steadily increases as Lisa and I move up in the line, at 3:00 a.m. in the morning, to enter the brutalist, prisonlike building in front of us. Sinister red lights are flashing from the upper-level windows, the squalid run-down walls are reverberating with pounding thumps, and yet, the only audible sounds outside the building are the leering murmur and the crunching gravel that I hear when the line of menacing pale apparitions moves forward.

If we are overdressed or underdressed, I can not tell. Whichever it is, I reason, the two of us clearly stand out. Lisa with her white tee and beige leather jacket, I with my flamingo-patterned tank top and purple hoodie; the two outsiders starkly contrasted with skinny figures slouching in head-to-toe black—some wearing leather, some worn-out denim. This all suddenly seems like a big deal, which I assume should make me hyper self-conscious, but I am oddly enjoying our unintentional disrespect of the dress code.

It is July 12, 2014, and in the wee hours in the Friedrichshain neighborhood of Berlin, Lisa and I are in the line to get into Berghain. It sounds like an ordinary night for the local partygoers, and even for the starry-eyed tourists who flew in for the weekend to get a taste of the decadence behind these walls. For us, that’s not the case. Primarily because we are in Berlin for our summer internships, and because, up until a week ago, we had no idea what Berghain was. By mere happenstance, I saw online that Holly Herndon—whom I had discovered a few months beforehand when she opened for St. Vincent’s tour in Boston—was performing at Berghain, so I told Lisa we should go.

For the past forty five minutes, we have watched the bouncer unapologetically reject almost every other group at the door, waving his right hand toward the desolate gravel, but when the two of us reach the front of the line, I am suddenly overcome by an alien conviction that we will get in. In a split second, I notice him scanning us, a faint smirk on his face indicating that he knows with certainty the two of us are unashamedly clueless and therefore inherently receptive to whatever it is that Berghain has to offer tonight.

“Zwei?” he asks.

“Ja,” both of us nod.

He waves his hand toward the entrance and lets us through. Lisa squeezes my left wrist.

“Denis,” she gasps, emphasizing the s in my name, “we’re in!”

The cavernous depths of steel and concrete swallow us completely for the next six hours as we get baptized into union with the techno capital. When we emerge back onto the gravel, we are sweaty and ecstatic and dazed, probably three pounds lighter each from all the dancing. It is 9 a.m. on a Sunday, the July sun is already scorching the streets, and neither of us are talking much, both silently acknowledging that we had just sealed a contract of lifelong friendship.

I would often think back to this weekend in the years to come. As a matter of fact, I find myself thinking about it, almost a decade later, when Lisa squeezes my left wrist as we move through a crowd of people, this time at the Festival Mode + Design in Montréal, Canada. It’s now Friday, Aug 25, 2023, and all the elements of the Berlin weekend are here in Montréal as well: summertime, throbbing techno, vibrant nightlife, and the two of us being foreigners in a big city.

But we are also ten years older now and we are no longer college kids living in Boston. I live in San Francisco, Lisa lives in New York, and we only get to see each other once a year when we do a friend trip like this. All to say, this time around, Lisa is holding my hand because we are trying to escape the action and make the best of the little time we have together in Montréal.

“I am glad we are doing the interview here in Montréal instead of in New York,” she says as we make our way to Le Darling, a trendy bar in the Le Plateau-Mont-Royal neighborhood.

“Why’s that?”

“You’re catching me at a transition point,” she answers assuredly. “I am reinventing myself. I am not really sure where I am headed, so it feels right that we are not doing it in the city where I live. Feels right to do it in a city I don’t know.”

The past year has brought a deluge of changes for Lisa. After six years of living in Philadelphia and working in the pharmaceutical industry, she quit the pharma job, packed her bags, and moved to New York to start a job in the tech industry. And then, eleven months later—not too long before we met up in Montréal—she ended a nine-year relationship.

It was only after all these changes took place that it became clear to her that she had detonated the essence of who she had been her entire life. She was suddenly Lisa with a clean slate, which meant she could finally ask herself the two big questions: what does Lisa need and what does Lisa want?

“And, I think, to answer that,” she describes, “I had to learn how to no longer be confined by the constraints I had put around myself. I guess you could say that I have started shedding my skin and started going through my awakening.”

She is not dramatizing. As her friend, I can clearly see the process that’s unraveling within her, but, at the same time, I know I cannot intervene because it’s one of those formative life turmoils bound to happen to each of us. Plus, what’s really special about Lisa is that she doesn’t do things superficially or haphazardly. So, if she is going to go through a powerful transformation, she is going to make sure every aspect of her life goes through a metamorphosis of the same intensity. Professional, personal, and existential—all three are fair game.

About thirty minutes later, we arrive at Le Darling and get a table with a great view of everyone at the bar. The vibe is excitingly chaotic. Massive plants dominate from the most unexpected corners. Bizarre mannequins stand against the backdrop of the steampunk aesthetic. Servers frantically move from one loud table to another. Drinks and food come out in droves from the bar and the kitchen. It’s exactly what we needed: entertainment that we can passively observe while we drink mocktails and eat steak frites.

Earlier in the day, when we grabbed brunch at a charming café called Le P’tit Rustik, Lisa briefly described what the first aspect—the professional transformation—has looked like over the past year. That said, we wanted to spend most of our day discovering Montréal, so we didn’t get the chance to discuss it that deeply. I also had to prioritize taking good shots of Lisa because her impeccable outfit was giving big-time magazine-photoshoot energy that simply had to be captured.

Now, at Le Darling, we dive right back into our conversation.

“Do you think you’re happy that you transitioned to tech from pharma?” I ask.

“I am,” she answers, “but it has not necessarily been an easy transition. Tech is exciting and I really like what I do, but after being in the industry, I started to see myself in a different light. I think I am feeling this turmoil in my professional life because I have become more aware of my artistic side, which I have ignored for a long time, by being so deeply immersed in an industry that is hyper technical and hyper analytical all the time.”

Anyone who knows Lisa well would find this statement almost laughably implausible, because art emanates vividly and effortlessly from every fiber of her being. How could she have ignored it? She is an artist.

She plays the guitar. She paints. She has a knack for interior design. She has a refined sense of style (a quote of hers: “You won’t see me going to buy bread wearing sweatpants”). She makes stunning food (a quote of hers: “Food that looks good tastes good”). Her eye recognizes the tiniest manifestations of beauty wherever we go: the geometric curation of books on a table in a bookstore, the shimmering raindrops on pink rose petals, the accidentally dazzling image of an almost-empty Coke bottle next to lush greenery.

At the same time, there is a reason why I met her at MIT, of all places, and why she took up analytical roles at work, and why she now works in tech. Because, at her core, Lisa is a scientist as well. She thinks in numbers. She seeks knowledge. She questions assumptions. She doesn’t stop investigating until she feels she has determined the truth. Perhaps the most telling sign of her scientific inclination is her ability to dissect her own life unguardedly and transparently, and to treat her own emotions as publicly available data points in need of objective interpretation. It’s what makes her a great interviewee.

But these two opposing selves create a tempestuous pendulum, and make it hard for her to fit into the professional world, where the pendulum rarely rests in equilibrium, and where both selves rarely coexist. As a result, to the artistic crowd, she can appear too analytical. To the technical crowd, she can appear too soulful.

“When I was a kid, my mom used to get me all these art supplies and I spent hours drawing and painting,” she says, “but I also remember coming to her and saying ‘I like art, but I don’t want to be an artist. I want to be a businesswoman, just like you.’ Even back then, I was already feeling this tension.”

Lisa excelled as a high school student in Istanbul, Turkey. She loved physics. After watching MIT’s OpenCourseWare physics classes online, she even turned her notes into teaching materials for tutoring her classmates. She did a summer physics camp at Stanford University. Up until college, she was convinced she would major in physics and then go on to complete a PhD. But there were forces that tried to pull the pendulum away from the technical self, making her feel that she would never fully fit within the world of scientists and engineers.

“I was also very social, had friends, had hobbies,” she adds, “and when I toured colleges with my mom, I remember seeing all these physics labs, under the ground and with no light, and I remember my mom being horrified by how sad and lonely they all looked. I think I was definitely influenced by that. Later on, at MIT, I went in the direction of chemical engineering, but my undergraduate advisor made it very clear that he thought I would never be able to get into a PhD with my undergrad grades. He didn’t think I was good enough. That crushed my soul.”

She did not end up in a PhD program, but the pendulum kept fighting to stick to the technical self. After graduating with a degree in chemical engineering, Lisa moved to Philadelphia and, for the next six years, wore different hats within the pharmaceutical industry as she went from commercialization to operations and then to data management.

While working, she also completed a remote Master’s program at Purdue University in Biotechnology, Innovation, and Regulatory Science. Empowered and more confident in her technical chops, she then moved to New York and transitioned to tech, taking up a role at the intersection of client success, data engineering, consulting, and project management, all with the goal of further advancing her technical expertise.

What she did not expect was that the hyper-technical environment would bring out her need for creative expression. She did like working on rapidly-evolving tech. She did like the intensity and the speed at which the work moved. But she also needed time to nourish and express her soul. And so, the pendulum then rapidly swayed over to the artistic self.

After a full year of working in the tech industry, however, it feels that the pendulum is finally finding its equilibrium. It took a bit of time, but Lisa now sees that the tension has created a unique space for her to occupy in the professional world and that there is a way to do both. She is slowly but steadily reclaiming what was always hers.

“I am now becoming more aware of what I am good at,” she adds, “and it’s that I bring harmony at work by being able to operate from that intersection. I’ve been told that I bring positivity and zest to work interactions, and those can become very dry when you’re in the world of tech all the time. On the other hand, I am also able to get into the weeds of very messy technical situations and then transform them into a system—an understandable big picture, something that can become a framework for others.”

Two hours into our conversation, the vibe at Le Darling is even more vibrant, but Lisa and I are not. We go back to our Airbnb, conk out, and wake up rejuvenated in the morning, ready to spend the entire Saturday walking around the city again.

Lisa wants to see the Old Montréal and has another stunning outfit prepared, so we grab the Metro and spend most of our day in the city’s historic center. There, we stumble upon Pointe-à-Callière’s 18th Century Public Market, an impressive annual historical reenactment of Montréal’s first marketplace under the French Regime.

When writing this interview almost three months later, I would learn through research that what we saw at the reenacted market were highly-valued Indigenous trades of the past: weaving, lacemaking, wool spinning, leather tanning, basketwork, among many others. Of course, the day of, I am ignorantly unable to identify what any of the activities are, and my sentiment that I share with Lisa, once we conclude the tour of the market, is a succinct appreciation of “the wood vibes.”

Walking around with Lisa and interacting with the world around us is one of my favorite activities. She enjoys people watching and is unafraid to strike up conversations with strangers. Just yesterday, after our brunch at Le P’tit Rustik, we went to a small boutique where Lisa ended up chatting with Clementine, a French girl working at the store, who gave us tips on what to do and what to avoid in the city. Lisa handles these interactions with coolness and grace.

My theory is that she can do this because she is a social chameleon. Born to a Turkish mother and an American father of Scottish ancestry, Lisa effectively grew up at an intersection of two vastly different cultures. It doesn’t mean that she always knew how to navigate that junction. These cultural polarities had unsurprisingly created another tension, one that influenced her way of relating to others and that ultimately caused her personal life to go through a metamorphosis as well.

“The thing is,” she tells me, “in college, I found my own bubble within Number Six. We had so many international kids living in the house, and we rarely interacted with other groups on campus. So, I went from living in Turkey to living with an international group of friends in college. I think I experienced a culture shock after we graduated, and once I moved to Philly and started living as an adult. I struggled with making friends. I expected it would all happen much quicker.”

Lisa is referring to a coed fraternity that we were both part of during our time in college. It was a social group of predominantly international students, which meant it inherently softened the blow, for many of us who didn’t grow up in the US, that came with the sharp transition into American culture. But, both Lisa and I see that softening with new eyes now. It also meant that we played it safe and that we delayed our process of inevitable assimilation to American culture. For Lisa particularly, leaving that bubble meant going back bravely into the tension between her own cultural polarities and finding belonging within herself—not within the world around her.

“Looking back, I see now clearly that I struggled in my early twenties to fit in,” she adds. “I was scared of not belonging. I wasn’t confident in myself and so I played it safe. I was ‘Lisa’ who was defined by other people’s values. But, after college, with each year, I felt that I was growing into myself and that I was beginning to realize I needed to define my own values and that I needed to trust my own gut.”

I don’t think Lisa would say this process had anything to do with her half-Turkish, half-American background. On the contrary, she always says that she considers herself unequivocally Turkish. But I will be bold and say that—even though Lisa might disagree—there is Americanness in her DNA.

Her positivity, her excitement for life, her comfort with taking risks, and her willingness to reinvent are, to me at least, all uniquely American qualities. So, when she tells me that she had made two good friends while waiting for a train in Philly, or that she had gone to an opera with a coworker from the tech job, or that she had gone to a performance at a gallery in New York by herself and then met another girl there, what I see is the Lisa who is defined by her own values. And, perhaps one of those values is creating space for both worlds, the Turkish and the American, to coexist within her.

After the reenacted market, Lisa and I sit down at Le Petit Dep, a cute café in Old Montréal, for cappuccinos and sandwiches. Our timing is impeccable because heavy rain descends on the city and, in the blink of an eye, the Montréal summer retires and makes way for the city’s wet, gloomy fall. The downpour is uncannily on the cue for an additional reason. Lisa and I have reached the point in our conversation when we need to talk about a poignant event that is at once a side effect and a driver of Lisa’s personal upheaval: the end of her nine-year relationship.

“So, this is a tricky one for me,” I say, “because the interview cannot ever be complete without talking about the breakup, and yet I also want to respect your boundaries.”

“It’s okay,” Lisa says softly.

“Well,” I hesitate, “I mean, I’m not even sure what the right question to ask is. I’ll just go for it, I guess. How do you feel about the situation?”

She looks away, gazing into the distance. I know this is a hard question for her to answer because Lisa’s ex-partner is my friend as well, but also because we both know that no answer can ever be adequate enough to describe what she feels in this particular moment, which is the deep abyss of grief. Grief over ending a relationship with her first true love. Grief over ending a relationship with her best friend.

“It’s hard,” she answers quietly. “He was my safe harbor. My best friend. With him, I was able to be a hundred percent myself. He showed me the foundation of love. And I mean: real, true love. He was trusting, he was caring, and he never showed any jealousy.”

She pauses. I want to interject with an additional question but quickly realize that being silent is the only right thing to do in this situation.

“And he influenced who I was,” she adds. “I loved his sense of humor. He was passionate about cooking and about music, and I became passionate through him as well. The thing that’s hard about all of that is that, throughout the past ten years, we grew from kids into adults together. I mean, I was only twenty years old when we got together. But, in that process of maturing and growing into myself, I also changed as a person. I am no longer who I was back then.”

Nine years is not a trivial amount of time. I know how influential this relationship was for her. I have witnessed firsthand how many monumental milestones they had gone through together, and I imagine that becoming single after a decade of having someone by your side feels like jumping off a cliff.

Lisa’s comfort with accepting this level of uncertainty is even more admirable because this is not the first time she has experienced a profound sense of loss. In December 2011, when she was seventeen, her dad Bill passed away. I have known for a while this event had irrevocably altered Lisa’s sense of self, but it’s not a topic that I have broached often.

At the risk of overstepping her boundaries and making the interview unpleasant, I decide to make a deeper incision and I ask her to tell me about her dad. I am aware that many friends would tell me to stop there and keep the topic off the record. But, that’s not Lisa. She takes a deep breath and, without hesitation, tells me how it all happened.

“I had just finished my summer physics camp at Stanford in 2011,” she says, “and my dad, who already needed to do an open-heart surgery to get a heart valve, was starting to feel worse that fall. He was delaying the surgery for as long as possible, because it is a risky procedure, and he wanted to see me graduate from high school.”

“This was your senior year of high school, right?”

“Yes,” Lisa answers. “In December, my parents went to Ankara for the surgery. I stayed in Istanbul because it was the final exam period. I didn’t know that they weren’t telling me the full story. I knew that the initial surgery went well, but in the end, his body didn’t accept the valve, and he passed away.”

Lisa didn’t find out until her mom Yaprak came back to Istanbul. She describes hearing the news as an out-of-body experience, feeling that her body and soul separated for a brief moment while everything went into slow motion. But she didn’t tell anyone for an entire week. She pushed through those disorienting seven days, finished her exams, and slowly started learning how to go on without her dad.

She tears up as she tells me this, and rests her head on my shoulder. For a few seconds, we say nothing and simply watch other people at the café put in their orders at the register.

“I really went for it there, didn’t I?” I say cheekily.

Lisa laughs through tears.

“What was he like?” I then ask.

“Gentle,” she says slowly, “soft-spoken, loving. Adventurous. He lived in Venezuela, Egypt, California. He met my mom in Turkey and ended up staying. He drew. For years, he and I went to painting classes together. He was also in finance like my mom, but deep inside, I don’t think that was his passion. I think he accidentally ended up in that profession.”

Lisa’s mom is the opposite of her dad. She is a force of life. Energetic, fierce, rational, resourceful, and stylish, she has always been the more diligent, future-oriented parent. She and Lisa don’t always see the world in the same way and can often butt heads, but what I see, as Lisa’s friend, with incontestable certainty is that Yaprak has instilled many of her own values in Lisa: dedication, perseverance, taste, and ambition.

“My mom wanted to stay strong for me and be brave for me,” Lisa adds. “She was very proactive in managing our grief after dad passed away. But I can also see that she misses a life partner.”

A conclusion draws itself in my mind at La Cour Des Arts du Vieux-Montréal, an enigmatic courtyard filled with petite artisanal shops, where Lisa and I end up after our breakfast at Le Petit Dep. It is somehow raining even more heavily when we get there, so we find a small nook and hide there. Lisa has bought beautiful earrings at one of the shops, and is telling me about her love of fashion and about the connection she feels with her mom through their mutual appreciation of style and beauty.

It’s at this moment that it occurs to me there is an existential metamorphosis happening in Lisa as well. Over the past year, she has been solving the two big questions: what does Lisa want and what does Lisa need? But I also see a third question forming in this process as well; one that cannot be answered through professional or personal transformation. It just might be the biggest existential conundrum of all: who is Lisa?

In the same way there have been tensions created by polarities governing her professional and personal transformations, there is a tension created by polarities—one being the Lisa by way of her mom and the other being the Lisa by way of her dad—that govern her existential transformation.

The fierce, persevering, and gritty Lisa who graduates MIT, who gets a Master’s degree while working, who project-manages trips with friends, who is unafraid to tell you what she likes and what she doesn’t like. Versus the spontaneous, adventurous, unworried Lisa who spends three months in Tanzania and comes face-to-face with a lion, who says yes to hours of dancing between sweat-drenched walls in an old heating plant, who moves from one place to another unscathed and unfazed.

It seems to me that Lisa is, for the first time, trying to find the equilibrium between these two selves. An uneasy process it is, for sure, but it is also a magical one. Because when that equilibrium forms and the pendulum no longer swings to just one side, the third metamorphosis will be complete and we will get to see Lisa in all her shining glory.

In the evening, I get a glimpse of that equilibrium forming, when we sit down for dinner—steak frites again–at L’Express, an iconic Parisian-style bistro near our Airbnb. While we’re savoring our food and talking about the things we’re looking forward to in the next decade, I ask Lisa if she has any major life goals.

For major life goal number one, I am presented with the Lisa by way of her mom. She instinctively straightens her back, picks up her glass of wine with a flourish, and looks at me intently.

“Okay,” she says, “I definitely want to build and design my house. And I mean, from scratch. Build it exactly the way I want to, with my own layout, everything being built exactly the way I envisioned it. And then also do the entire interior design myself.”

For major life goal number two, her body language changes subtly. A gentleness in her hand gestures. A softness in her smile. A spark in her eye. The Lisa by way of her dad comes through.

“At some point in my life, also,” she adds valiantly, “I will sail the Atlantic Ocean.”