The 9 Necklace: Jasmine Bina
On tenderness, mythologising, and falling in love with yourself
An Object Story is a series about the things we own and what they reveal. Each week, one guest brings a single object — something inherited, found, coveted, or kept for reasons they can’t quite explain.
I started this series because I believe that the things we keep say more about us than we can say about ourselves. These conversations are my attempt to find out why. Not about the object itself but about the person holding it.
And often, about me too.
I have admired Jasmine Bina for some time. Her writing, her thinking, the way she moves through the world with what looks like absolute clarity and confidence. I had idealised her a little and if I’m honest, made her into someone who had already arrived at the place I was still trying to reach.
And then we sat down to talk, and I realised we were far more similar than I had understood. The same wounds in different shapes, the same hunger for safety, the same complicated relationship with mothers. We’re both navigating the same work of learning to be kind to yourself. I left this conversation more reflective than I expected to be and filled with gratitude that Jasmine would trust me with her story.
Jasmine Bina is the founder and CEO of Concept Bureau, the Beyonce of the strategy world, and one of the most original thinkers I know. I hope you enjoy.
What did you bring me today?
A gold number nine necklace. I get asked about it a lot, and I want to make sure I’m clear about the story, because I think it could be misread.
Tell me about it.
It’s a piece of jewellery that Jean-Louis bought for me. We’d had a fight — I don’t remember what it was about anymore, but a blowout. And I needed to diffuse the energy once it was over. So as a joke, I asked him — hey, on a scale of one to ten, what am I? And he said — you’re a nine, but you could be a ten if you had a good attitude.
We laughed about it. And then he bought this necklace to commemorate the argument.
Why I treasure it is for a lot of reasons. I grew up in a home where there was a lot of intensity, a lot of difficult emotions, and I spent a lot of those formative years holding on to feelings. Staying angry, holding grudges. Somehow with Jean-Louis, our relationship has always been about laughing at our worst moments. We’ve developed a really strong muscle of mythologising — creating stories around things, memorialising them. We’ve survived a lot of intense situations together, building this business together, both of us getting out of the situations we were raised in.
When I think about how I grew up holding on to anger, and how he has been such a great partner in teaching me how to laugh at those things and make them part of our story — it’s been a tremendous gift.
One time I had one of those trendy card decks that were really popular for a while, about how to live your life. One of the cards said yes, yes, yes — say yes to everything. We got into another fight, and he put that card on my desk. I got so angry I tore the card up. And then we joked about it afterwards, so I framed the torn card on my bookshelf where it says yes. I always remember — I did not want to hear that message at that time.
He’s brought a lot of levity to my life. And this real power of — we are always rewriting our story.
The other thing is, he could have been very cruel in that moment when I asked him that question. But he’s never once been cruel. Ever. And I’ve never known a man like that in my life. The men I grew up with could be tough. But he’s always had a gentleness. I’ve never had that in any of the pillar men in my life.
And then also — jewellery is really important to me. I love jewellery. But nobody’s really ever bought me jewellery. Jean-Louis buys me jewellery because he knows I love it. So it’s a lot of reasons why this necklace means so much. But people always think it’s astrology or numerology, or they try to tell me what it means. I like all those stories too. I don’t really correct people but this is what this necklace really means.
Do you share the story with people when they ask?
I used to feel like it was kind of personal, and like people wouldn’t necessarily appreciate it. But I love hearing myself tell it. Mythologies are true because we repeat them. So I repeat it when people ask.
What’s the mythology you’re holding on to?
That we can get through anything together. That nothing can overcome us as a partnership.
And I want to be clear about something — I know I’m not a nine. I know that. But he thinks I’m a nine, and that’s all I need. This is not about me being a nine. It’s that even in that moment, he’s so tender with my feelings. To think that somebody thinks that of me — that’s kind of all I need. I don’t even want to be on a scale of one to ten.
We bounce back from anything. That’s what this is about.
You mentioned you’ve been on a self-love journey this year. Tell me about that.
I can’t even really share the experience with anybody. It’s so personal — it’s just me and myself. I’m not even thinking about what other people think. It’s the first time I’ve gone through something where there’s really nothing to share with anybody else.
Working and living with Jean-Louis and raising children with him, 99% of our lives are overlapping. But this is one thing where I just have nothing to give to anyone else. It kind of actually reminds me of the first time I did ketamine therapy — it was such a beautiful experience, and afterwards I told him I don’t think it’s even something I need to share. I just kind of like it’s just for me and I rarely get things just for me.
How did this self-love journey come about?
I just started feeling it emerge, maybe three months ago. I started looking at myself differently, feeling comfortable with myself in a different way.
I can’t remember a time growing up where I wasn’t always seeing myself through somebody else’s eyes. Adjusting my shirt, fixing my hair, imagining how I looked through somebody else, imagining how my words sounded when somebody else was reading them. My recent articles — nobody even reads them before I publish them. I just put them out there without another set of eyes. And that’s kind of what I mean when I say self-love. There’s nobody else in the room. I’m just vibing with myself.
Reading books without them having to teach me something. Wanting to take a walk by myself, not because I need to clear my mind, but because I enjoy my own company. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that before, really.
What does it feel like?
It feels kind of romantic. I don’t know how many times you get to fall in love in life. I only fell in love with my first high school boyfriend and Jean-Louis, and those things fade. Falling in love with yourself feels quite romantic — for the first time.
It feels like I’m in a bubble. Floating in this protected space where I can be generative and creative freely, without thinking about an output. It probably helps that the businesses are at a moment where we have our footing, and I have the energy to direct it somewhere else right now.
Your daughter seems to be part of this too.
She’s probably impacted me more than I’m impacting her right now. I always follow her lead. She’ll change her outfits three or four times a day for nobody — just herself. She loves mixing and matching, wearing jewellery, doing crazy things with her hair. Maybe she’s part of the reason why I arrived at this moment right now.
She’s the only person I really want to share this with a little bit. I’ll show her my hair, my nails, my flowers. She’s the only person I think can get it.
Were you like that at four?
I really wonder. I don’t remember much of my childhood. I have a strong feeling I probably was, but it was kind of conditioned out of me pretty early. I often wonder who I would have been if I was raised with a different set of conditions. I do think about that a lot.
Tell me about how you met Jean-Louis.
At a bar in England. I had a PR agency, a small one, and I kept waiting to have permission to travel. One day I realised I needed to just start booking things. So I booked tickets for me and one of my employees to go to the UK and just made meetings happen.
Before I left, my mum asked why I was going. And I said — you know what, I think I might meet my husband. I had a weird feeling. And then I met him at a bar, a tech week meet-up kind of thing. He pitched me his app. Then he took me dancing that same night, and he was a really good dancer and that was what started it.
When did you realise he was the person for you?
Probably in the first couple of weeks. He’d shown me a great night the night we met, and then I went on a really bad date a couple of days later and realised — I met this really nice person, why did I brush him off? So I texted him back, which I wasn’t planning to.
And then he would plan these really ornate dates. He’d take me to clubs he belonged to, we’d go listen to live music, eat good food. He was just really, really thoughtful. You kind of know when you’re not going to meet somebody like that again.
You’ve talked about your upbringing a little. What was it like?
It was very intense. I’m always trying to reconcile how much of it was choices they could have made versus choices they didn’t have. How much of it is me looking back through a lens that maybe isn’t complete. Honestly — they’re not being interviewed, so they don’t get to tell their side of the story.
But there is a fundamental truth that they were both pretty chaotic when I was being raised. Intense swings, intense personalities. My father was great in a lot of ways — he taught me to be entrepreneurial, he was very supportive about certain things. But he could also be heartless. I was a pretty sensitive kid, and he could take advantage of your emotional generosity. I still have a problem when I perceive somebody’s trying to take a little bit more from me than they should. All of my alarms go off. I don’t think I ever had healthy boundaries with him.
My mother gave us love. But I knew I wanted to be much closer and emotionally intimate with my kids.
When you have kids you either see your parents with more empathy or less empathy. I think I got clearer on — I don’t know how they weren’t obsessed with us. Like, I’m obsessed with my kids. What else is there? Children are the only dose of pure innocence, pure love, you know? They show you the potential of humanity. I don’t know how they didn’t see that they had two really sensitive, kind, generous daughters and for some reason they didn’t protect that.
They were both surviving. They came to a new country, they had bankruptcy. There were a lot of conflicting truths, and none of them are really wrong.
I resonate with a lot of what you’ve shared. My mum was the emotionally distant one for me too. She once told me I never gave her a reason to smile and it still cuts me.
That’s the deepest wound. It really is.
What do you feel when you look at the necklace?
That I’m in a safe place. That I have lots of love. And that life is actually quite easy. When Jean-Louis makes light of the darkest things, life feels easy. Life always felt so burdensome before. So hard. So ugly.
I don’t think I’ve ever really felt safe in the world. Even now, with the news, I’m probably always feeling a little unsafe, especially with children — you always feel so at risk and exposed. At least in this family, in our home, in this relationship with him, in this life we have together — it’s the truest form of safety.
He’s never let anything change who he is. He always knew he was a good person, a kind person. He’s the reward for everything else I dealt with.
Last question — if you had a wish for yourself and your family, what would it be?
That this sense of love and safety and freedom lasts for their entire lives. That they can give it to their children. It will help them weather any storm.
My dad used to say — and he went through a lot of grief as an immigrant, lost a lot of things — he would always go back to his memories of childhood with his grandparents to pull him through the darkest times. I can understand that.
I hope that this dreamy energy, this love and safety that we have between the five of us, is something they can carry forever.
Editor’s Note: As we were wrapping up, I looked up the meaning of the number 9. Completion, wisdom, humanitarianism, returning to itself, spiritual awakening. Jasmine smiled. She’d heard many interpretations and she doesn’t correct any of them.
“There’s nobody else in the room. I’m just vibing with myself.”
— Jasmine Bina
An Object Story is a series about the things we own and what they reveal.
Each week, one guest brings one object. Not to display it but to open it.
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I feel like Jasmine is the den mother of the "Daughters of Traumatized Parents" Club. And we thank you for seeing us, hearing us, and bringing us together. Jasmine, your story is both heartwarming and an inspiration for me, as my husband Lu and I continually navigate how to change ourselves in order to move away from our screwed-up upbringings and give our kids a different story. Keeping a light heart is a really good lesson for me, and that's something I need to think about more often. (I mean, Jean-Louis is already the ultimate Dad-fluencer, maybe that should be expanded to relationship-influencer).
This is so tender and heartfelt. Thank you for sharing so vulnerably 💗