A Rabbit Costume Taught Her to Read the Room

Lulu Cheng Meservey walked into school in Oslo on October 31 ready for Halloween. She wore a full body rabbit costume, complete with gloves and a tail, and expected a parade.

No other child wore a costume. Meservey, now the founder of the communications firm Rostra, was then a new arrival in a Norwegian welcome class for immigrant children who did not yet speak the language. She spent the whole day trying to hold her pencils in rabbit paws.

She had followed what the class had discussed about Halloween. Everyone knew the date, and she assumed they shared the same plan. That confusion between talking about something and understanding what people actually do became the skill behind her work with founders.

Meservey had spent her childhood moving and, as she put it, "always being the weird kid with the weird accent and the weird clothes." Survival meant developing an extreme habit of what she called "super duper reading the room and then figuring out how to become and speak as someone that the room would accept."

Language made that harder. After moving to Canada, she learned English from a textbook literally called English, a green and blue book she remembered looking like a bus seat. Meservey said she finished it feeling "like Neo waking up from the Matrix," convinced that she knew English, but she had not learned how people actually use it.

Years later, in a college interview for a consulting job, she meant to say she had experience under her belt and instead announced, in her words, "quite a bit of experience below the belt." She says she is still learning the fine textures of words.

The rabbit costume gave her the larger lesson. A lot of context goes unsaid because people assume everyone already has it, and the misunderstanding only becomes clear when someone acts on the wrong guess. Today she runs Rostra, a communications firm that advises tech founders.