We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kira Ayla Friedman a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Kira Ayla thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?
Making this movement and standing up against injustice was something I had always wanted to do throughout my life, but I couldn’t. I was in circumstances that never would have allowed for that to have happened. However, things changed when I was finally out of the toxic situations that had once overtaken both mine and my mother’s lives.
It all began one August morning in 2021. I remember riding in the car with my mother, and one thing led to another, where we both had the desire to stand up against injustice. After what we had both been through with discrimination and inequality in our lives, we wanted to do something about it and make a change in the world. We wanted to be a voice for the silenced because we knew exactly what it was like to be silenced. This came during a time when I had lost a lot. Both my mother and I had to remove ourselves from toxic situations that were destroying our lives, our dreams, and our aspirations. As a result, life felt very scary, very empty, and very bleak for the first time. Reality had hit me where my dreams of being a violinist were shattered. And all the memories of the life I once had of practicing my violin every day and every night for hours during my teenage and early adult years, playing at Carnegie Hall, attending the Meadowmount School of Music summer program, and studying with the late Ms. Sally Thomas of the Juilliard School, to name a few memories, were ghosts. I had no desire to pick up the violin again despite encouragement from others, and I had to come to terms with an uncertain future. But on that morning in August of 2021, when my mother and I both decided we wanted to take action and make a change in the world, I felt as though I was reborn and my spirit was filled with hope. I knew that this was what I had wanted all along. The process, however, wasn’t easy.
On the very first day my mother and I began our movement, we planned how we wanted to tell our story and wrote down all our ideas, our mission, our vision, and more.
Within a few months, we found some people who were willing to help us and guide us with the movement. Unfortunately, other priorities took precedence and the movement was on the back burner for several months. After the priorities were taken care of, in spring of 2022, we returned to the movement and began the process of creating it with our team at the time. The first steps that we needed to take were to create logos, make a website, apply for trademarks, set up a social media presence, make flyers for our movement, and more. After we had everything in place and ready to go, we launched our movement in February of 2023.
Unfortunately, our movement’s first launch didn’t turn out the way I had hoped for. By late Spring of 2023, nothing was really going anywhere, and we ended up parting ways with our team. I felt very sad and disappointed. After recovering from the heartache, I went online and researched potential people/firms who could help us. I fortunately found a wonderful new team (now our current team) who knew exactly what to do with this movement and how to make it authentic. It turned out that our movement was in dire need of rebranding before it even started! And unfortunately, our old website, social media accounts, logos, trademark applications, flyers, etc. ended up being for nought. We quickly learned that doing our own branding wasn’t the way to go. We also signed with a PR firm that summer who we worked with for about six months and who definitely got us started and got us into some press, which I would say is a good thing.
While working with our new team on branding, we relaunched our new Facebook and Instagram last winter. We now have a social media presence, new logos, we just set up our YouTube channel, and we will be launching our new website.
Right before 2024 had begun, I picked up my violin and started playing again. I found a wonderful instructor who has been helping me, and I just made audio recordings of the pieces and tunes that hold a special place in my heart for the movement.
More plans ahead!
Kira Ayla, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I was no stranger to discrimination and inequality throughout my life. I have always despised injustice since I was little, but I felt very powerless to do anything, especially when I witnessed it happening right in front of me. When I gained the courage to speak out, I was immediately shut down, which hurt my self-esteem. As a result of having low self-worth, I became a target for bullies at school. In my school environment, discrimination was also rampant, which made me feel very powerless.
Music has always been a big part of my life since I was little. My mother sings opera, and I have played the piano for about five years. When I was twelve years old, I picked up the violin, hoping it would give me the voice I felt I never had. I would say it definitely gave me a voice and gave me some wonderful memories along the way. I ended up being prepared by a top teacher from the Juilliard School to study with her there.
The traumas and the toxic circumstances that were overtaking my life at the time became crippling both physically and emotionally, and Juilliard would no longer be a reality as a result. Eventually, things got worse as the years passed, and I felt so hopeless that I stopped playing the violin. Witnessing my mother being treated unequally as a woman and being constantly put down in my environment caused her to give up her dreams of singing and cooking. I knew that things needed to change. I also knew that those kinds of circumstances that marred my life and dreams as well as my mother’s life and dreams infiltrate our world on a daily basis.
Being in these toxic environments was, unfortunately, a major part of my journey until one day, my mother and I removed ourselves from them. Three months after we were free from those negative circumstances, my mother wanted to speak out for those who were wronged as well as I. That was when our movement It’s OVER. was born.
Our movement It’s OVER. End Discrimination NOW. is a movement that my mother and I created in hopes of ending discrimination and inequality that infiltrates our world through spreading awareness, storytelling, journaling, music, and more to start. We hope that through sharing our stories, others will be inspired to share their stories as well. We also hope to develop a supportive online community where people can help and support one another. Our goal is to live in a world where love, hope, and equality are the new normal for us and for our future generations.
I would say that the thing I am most proud of is how far this movement has come. Building this movement was and can still be a tricky process. New challenges that come with building this movement can be daunting, but we always find a way to push through them and resolve them. I’m proud of that. :)
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
After leaving the violin for four years, I didn’t think I would ever pick it up again, as I believed that the violin ended up to be one of my biggest failures. Picking up the instrument again meant having to revisit all of my traumas, flashbacks, and old unrealized dreams that I never wanted to revisit again. I believed that my days of playing the violin were a thing of the past and were long gone. And I learned to come to terms with the fact that my musical notes that once gave me hope were now my musical ghosts. The instrument that I once felt gave me a voice made me feel voiceless in the end. Despite some encouragement from others to play again, I had no desire to play that instrument, nor did I ever want to talk about my days of playing the violin again. I believed that the violin was just a story from my past, and I just wanted to focus solely on my movement. But two days before 2024, things changed.
I knew that if I were to tell people not to give up on their dreams, goals, or ambitions as a result of toxicity in their environments, I knew that I needed to set an example for those people and show them that I was broken, but I didn’t break. Scared of how I would sound on the instrument after not playing all those years, I gained the courage to put the violin under my chin and in my hands once again before the new year. It felt utterly scary, but I slowly eased myself into it until I began to play again.
I started by playing some fiddle tunes that were very special to me, and as soon as I was able to play those tunes a bit, I began to work on playing some Bach again. I took frequent breaks between practicing, where there were still days/weeks I would go without playing to ease myself back into it.
As I played more often, I soon realized that the notes I was playing on the instrument sounded distorted at times, whereby certain notes sounded sharp. For example, the note G sounded like G sharp and the note C sounded like C sharp. This was very upsetting and scary for me, as I soon realized that I was losing my perfect pitch, which was something I was born with. Hearing notes sounding distorted like that not only made me miss my perfect pitch, but it made me wonder if I could ever play in tune again. I was scared enough, and this distressing circumstance only made things feel scarier, as I never had to deal with that kind of challenge before in all my years of playing music. I soon made my violin practice grueling by tuning every single note I was playing to a tuner to make sure I was playing in tune. Not to mention, my violin was also a mess, as it was in dire need of new strings, a repair, and my bow was in need of a rehair.
After playing the violin again for a few months on my own, I knew that I could not get back into shape with this instrument alone. I knew that I needed an instructor to help me. I had my own fair share of traumas with violin teachers in the past, and I didn’t want to revisit that path again. However, I knew that if I wanted to achieve my goals, finding an instructor to help me was what I needed to do. Soon thereafter, I found an amazing instructor who knew exactly how to help me and how to get me back into shape, and as a result, I had been progressing on the instrument like never before. My new instructor helped me get my violin and bow refurbished, and they both sounded like new again. I just recently went to the studio to record all the tunes/pieces I had been working on almost all year long and that hold a special place in my heart. For that recording, I was loaned a high-end violin and a beautiful bow to go with it. Soon, I will begin working on a new repertoire.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
I would say that the lesson I am still in the process of unlearning is preparing for the worst. The environments I was in were always setting me up for failure instead of success, and so I learned to do that for myself as a form of protection from getting hurt. It’s always good to have some sort of backup plan in case something doesn’t work out the way you had planned and find a way to pivot around it so you can get your desired results, but you should never expect yourself to fail. Instead, you need to hope for the best and expect the best.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsover_endnow/?igshid=OGQ5ZDc2ODk2ZA%3D%3D
- Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/61554483174267/
- Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/@itsover.enddiscrimination
Image Credits
Julie Dassaro Photography