Elina Ashimbayeva

Feeling home

When I ask Elina about feeling like home in Auckland, she tells me that this was a process.

I feel like New Zealand is one of those places that requires you quite a bit to feel like home. You kind of need to feel the lay of the land.

When she first arrived, walking around the city, she was struck by how quiet it was.

Where is everyone? Why is it so quiet?

Kazakhstan by contrast was never quiet at 10pm. Every apartment complex had a playground in the middle of it. Thirty kids playing, mothers watching them, chatting. She tells me it made New Zealand harder to feel at home in. You just don’t see people as much.

In her late teens, there was also a year and a half with a man who was manipulative and abusive.

That just left me feeling even less like home.

It was shameful to be in this relationship that I’m controlled by this person. I’m not supposed to text my friends. I’m not supposed to talk about this relationship to anyone, because then he would get upset over it.

Her mother, on the other side of the world, didn’t know how bad it was. Neither did her friends. Elina had always been the strong-minded one, the self-described feminist, and she tells me that was part of what kept her silent.

She didn’t want to worry her mum from that far away.

When the relationship ended, she started to feel a shift. The bad-relationship energy lifted, and she remembers that summer.

I remember crying in bed being like, oh, I feel like home here. I’m not a tourist anymore.

Two and a half, three years in. The Domain. Mission Bay. Takapuna. That was when Auckland became hers.

Now Auckland is my love. I love Auckland and it feels like home everywhere I go. It’s all mine.

Storyo is born

Before Storyo, Elina was working in biomedical science. She’d written her thesis on breast cancer. She loved the work. But she started to notice there were other ways to contribute to the world besides medicine.

As a teenager and as a kid, the only way I knew was through medicine or science. And then I got a bit older and I started working and I was like, oh, there’s all these other ways.

She started moving. EY, the Ministry of Education, a music education startup, a postgraduate degree in human rights during COVID, the committee of Women in Tech Auckland, the emergency department. Contribution, she tells me, had never had just one shape.

Around this time, her partner was running a marketing agency and interviewing small business owners for content. He noticed most of the people he was reaching were white men. He came to her one day with a question: what if they interviewed women?

Elina took the idea and made it her own.

She widened it. Women and gender-diverse folks. Mostly people of colour. Everyday people, “not Forbes 30-under-30 founders”. Written interviews at first. Then video. Then in-person events.

None of it was her background.

At every step of the way, I didn’t know what I was doing. After I did all the written stuff, I’m like, okay, I don’t want to write anymore. I want to make videos. I’ve never held a camera in my life.

She interviewed thirty people. Then two hundred.

What Storyo actually became was about people.

I would have comments from people. They met their best friend through an event they attended. Or they got a job through Storyo. One person realised they were on the spectrum and got diagnosed, through coming to one of the events. I gave them money out of pocket to go and do the diagnosis in the hospital.

I’m like, this is the work that I love doing.

An ancestral assignment

When I ask Elina how she defines success for Storyo, given everything she has built, she tells me she has stopped using the word.

I don’t even use that word. I don’t really define success for myself. We have too many connotations with that word, tied with the very capitalist notion of money-making or being known or numbers. The word itself feels very loaded.

Instead, she uses a different frame (inspired by Simone Seol): her ancestral assignment.

I did this course recently. They talked about ancestral assignment, like as if you get an ancestral assignment, this is the work that you’re meant to be doing. I definitely felt that way of Storyo.

She also reframes how she thinks about the results.

If you think about the history of the world, so much amazing work happened, people have died without seeing the fruits of their labour. So it’s nice to reframe and be like, actually, I might not see the fruits of my labour.

Instead, she thinks about seeds.

I know that this work will contribute. It will sow enough seeds that might bloom.

Two hundred people whispered the same thing

By the end of five years, Elina had interviewed more than two hundred people. When she asked them, in one way or another, whether they felt enough, she kept hearing the same thing: that they often felt they were not.

Having interviewed 200 people who are all wonderful. Social workers, teachers, sex workers, artists. And I’m like, wow, we all feel this way, but we don’t want to feel this way.

She points at something bigger too. Social media pressure, she says.

I think it’s because we’re constantly bombarded with people who are starting their own thing and making money off their own whatever. And I think it makes everyone else maybe feel a bit inadequate.

We live in the systems that were created before us, that kind of support us feeling this way. And I’m like, I don’t want to feel this way.

But she has a different answer to all of it. What she has learned from two hundred people, she tells me, is small and close to home.

You are enough as you are. This is your wonderful, magical, and you create so much. In your little bubble of influence, whether it’s your family or your neighbours and friends.

Everyone is amazing in their own beautiful way.

Start with three neighbours

When it comes to starting something new, Elina thinks we overcomplicate things. We tend to build up a massive checklist of everything we think we need to figure out first.

You don’t know anything and you won’t know anything. You just have to keep going. You don’t need to get it all perfect.

She gives me an example. If someone wants to start a home-baking business they don’t need to think about the shop they might open one day. Before they start, they can just literally make food and offer it to three neighbours.

That’s already scary. That’s a good way to do it. Versus thinking through all the things, because then we will think ourselves out of it, because it’s just too much.

Three neighbours, she tells me, is how she thought about Storyo too.

It doesn’t need to grow big. You might be like, actually three is plenty and I’m tired already. I don’t want to do any more. Cool, great. Or three is perfect. Or 30 is perfect and I’m actually making money now.

The message to her younger self

To wrap up the interviews, I always ask the same final question: what would you say to the younger version of yourself getting on the plane to come to New Zealand?

For Elina, that means looking back at a sixteen-year-old girl packing her bags in Kazakhstan.

She thinks for a moment.

Oh my God, just give her a hug. Just be like, girl, you’re in for an adventure. Nothing. There’s no advice to give. She did really good with what she had.

She confesses that what she actually needs, right now, is a fifty-year-old Elina to travel back in time and tell her she’s doing okay.

And it’s funny, if you ask me when I’m 50, I probably will give the same answer. She is where she needs to be. She’s learning what she needs to learn.

Either way, she says, the message is the same.

You’re going to be okay. You will be okay.