Where does your grit come from?

An old friend asked me this recently so I thought I'd try to answer.

An old friend (from my 20s!) who I have recently been in touch with asked if I’d write a post about the “source of internal fortitude/faith/grit, especially during your darker moments [. . .] we know, no matter one’s political or religious preferences it is not all fun and games between our ears.” Ain’t that the truth.

At first I thought — well, I kind of wrote about all that in my book. But I guess I didn’t really. I wrote about what happened during covid and my life as a 30 year veteran in corporate America. But not so much how I got through it all. Not so much what happened between my ears.

And I’m not sure really what I do to get through the exceedingly difficult times when my brain turns on me. Except to just keep going. Putting one foot in front of the other. Never give up. Just move forward. And this is what I learned in sports. Resilience. It doesn’t matter if you face unfair circumstances in a competition. You can either give up or move forward. Period. I always choose to move forward. My body in motion hurts less. Both literally and figuratively.

I thought I’d try and summarize my thought process for myself. And my friend who asked. So here goes.

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First off, I don’t think about things too much — should I or shouldn’t I — before I start. I just start. That staves off a lot of internal conflict. I don’t debate whether or not it makes sense for me to say x y or z. I don’t think about if saying something is expedient or beneficial to me in some way. I just say it, if I believe it. Saying what I believe is one of the highest values I seek to uphold in my own behavior. So I try to honor that in myself.

If I pause to have a conversation with myself — which I often do (don’t laugh) — it is to say: What do I believe? Not what should I say and how can I avoid making people mad? Will it help me somehow if I say it? No. That is not the way to look at it.

What do I believe and does it matter to say something? Does it involve a core principle that I care about: freedom, women’s rights, protection of children.

To get to what do I believe, I spend a lot of time thinking through it. Which may seem at odds with what I said above — I just start — but it isn’t. I think through the subject matter, I read to inform myself. I don’t agonize over how I’ll say it to avoid making people mad. I just say it. Or just sey it, as our t-shirt at XX-XY Athletics says (sorry, now sold out).

In challenging covid lockdowns and school closures, I had read every medical journal article I could get my hands on, I’d reached out to doctors who were skeptical of lockdowns to ask their opinions. (I didn’t need to ask doctors who were supportive of lockdowns, they were everywhere! All I had to do was turn on CNN or read the panicked New York Times headlines. I was looking for an alternative viewpoint.)

“Doing my own research” (which the Left thinks is stupid and conspiratorial and right-wing) prompted me to see the folly in the fear-mongering of the mainstream media. And I felt grounded in fact and data before opening my big mouth. That said, even without data, I feel strongly — and felt strongly then — that lockdowns and censorship should never happen. It’s an egregious violation of our civil rights and if we agree that they are a viable tool, we set ourselves up for government to decide whenever they feel like it that censorship and lockdowns are warranted, so long as they say so. For this reason I’m an anti-lockdown, anti-censorship, free speech absolutist.

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For what it is worth, I’m just not an over-analyzer. I was the same in deciding to have two kids late in life. I just started that long, grueling and emotionally draining process. I leap without much thinking. I want to cram as much life into my life as possible and I don’t think you do that by being paralyzed with fear in the face of every decision.

As I often joke with my husband:

I apply the 80/20 rule. Meaning: I can get 80% of the insight and knowledge I need to make a decision very quickly. And I’ve got an 80% chance of probably getting it right. The last 20% to achieve certainty would take me a LONG time and it’s just not worth it because it doesn’t/wouldn’t improve the outcome enough. I’d probably just end up making the same decision but having spent (wasted?) a lot more time on it. So I go with the 80%.

I believe in action over inaction.

And I’m the same when presented with data and scenarios in a work setting. I don’t need to see thousands of example or scenarios or possibilities. If I see one great creative idea, it is enough. I don’t need to see 5 additional bad ones, to rule them out, to know that the great one is great.

It used to drive me crazy in the corporate setting that some people needed to see endless scenarios before making a decision. But then I came to understand that some people just make decisions differently than I do. Some people NEED to see a gazillion scenarios to know which one is the best. They can’t make a decision until they do. It drove me bonkers because I was the one running various scenarios often times, to present and then re-present, and it seemed like a lot of work and a massive waste of time. And a tactic to delay decision making. Which maybe it was. But I had to do it and came to respect the personality/decision-making approach. What choice did I have anyway?

Mine felt to be an atypical personality type in the corporate setting (perhaps more prevalent in start up land?) and I can’t remember which of the letters in the Myers-Briggs test it is (I’m an INTJ for the record, so maybe it’s N?) that I embody.

Here’s a brief summary of an INTJ:

“INTJs aren’t known for being warm and fuzzy. They tend to prioritize rationality and success over politeness and pleasantries — in other words, they’d rather be right than popular.”

So there you have it. Perhaps it was always true of me, but it is definitely true more so now in my 50s.

Moving on.

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I tell people this all the time. You know — you know — the right thing to do in any given setting. Whether it’s your faith that tells you, or an internal moral code or your dad’s voice in your head. You know. So do it.

Everyone is always weighing “but what if . . .” someone doesn’t like me if I say it, I get called a name, I lose my job, I lose my friends, I embarrass myself. What if, what if.

Well, what if doesn’t change the right thing to do. So you are either a person who does the right thing or you are a coward. Which is it?

Most people don’t do the right thing. They would rather stand with the crowd, be obedient and obey authority, than stand up and do the right thing. This has been proven across eras and geographies since the beginning of time. It’s been shown to be true with the Milgram Experiment, the Stanford Prison Experiment, and in endless atrocities that have been committed across history. Yes, Nazi Germany bore this out; but so did Japanese internment camps, McCarthyism, and slavery and on and on. Any “progressive” white person who thinks well, I wouldn’t have had slaves, those are terrible people is almost 100% wrong. They would have.

Know thyself is a very high priority for me. And to know myself honestly, not the ideal of what I’d like to be, is key. Often that means elevating (forcing?) my behaviors and actions to fit my lofty ideal, compelling myself to do so, rather than re-jiggering my actions in my mind — lying to myself — to fit my ideal (main character syndrome).

Ok I realize I haven’t really answered my friend’s question yet. I haven’t tackled how I felt in the moment being attacked during covid, how I got and continue to get through that.

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How do I get my head right?

The real answer: I don’t. I suffer. I don’t like it when people hate me. I don’t like it when I am attacked publicly. I don’t like it when random strangers start petitions to remove me from my job calling me a walking-talking ethics violation and then continue to smear me in an attempt to remove any possibility of my ever having a job again. No, I don’t like that at all.

I don’t like being hated, but I don’t like lacking integrity, being a coward and failing to live up to my own principles more than I don’t like being hated. I care about children more than I don’t like being hated. I care about freedom of speech more than I don’t like being hated.

I don’t like it when my friends of 30+ years refuse to answer my emails. Or before that stage, pretend they were busy if I happened to be in town and asked to have lunch or dinner. It took me a moment to realize what was happening. I took them at their word. We all get busy!

I didn’t realize it — really realize it — until an old friend, one who I do still speak with, told me a little story, post-covid: this person told me that they’d reached out to a bunch of my closest friends to say hey check in on Jen, she’s having a hard time. And a few of my formerly closest friends said: NO.

That hit like a ton of bricks. One, that the friend was so kind to do this for me, made me cry on the spot. And two, any illusion I’d had that we’d all just been “busy” for the last few years came crashing down around me. I was too awful to console, apparently. I was too awful to care about. Those friendships, which I’d held out hope for, were over.

Of note, these same people believe in concepts like restorative justice — which involves forgiveness for murders. But I was just too horrible for thinking low-income kids should get to go to school? That’s fucked up and ridiculous. I can’t take these people seriously.

I suffered for sure. I lost ten+ pounds, my hair was falling out in clumps. Menopause? Maybe. Stress? Definitely. My auto-immune acted up and I was in a lot of pain.

I cried. I didn’t sleep. I probably had too many daily drinks. Who am I kidding, I definitely had too many daily drinks.

I walked. And walked. Miles and miles every day. Until the rhythm of my footsteps would drown out my own negative thoughts. I’m not religious and I don’t meditate but walking was and is my meditation.

I hugged my kids. And, as corny as it sounds, I thought of the example I wanted to set, the behavior I wanted to model. Would I ever advise my children to not do what they believe in, if mean people call them names? No. That’s dumb. Anyone giving their children that advice is . . . well, giving them very bad advice.

Then I hugged them all some more.

And I braced myself and kept going.

And I had my husband. Who said to me many times: Why do you care what those people think of you? They are morons.

It was us against the world. And so that is my number 1 defense against the world: I love my husband and we stick together. Which isn’t to say we don’t disagree. We do. We did over the weekend. But it doesn’t matter. We keep going.

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To be clear, I’m not unscathed from the last 4 years. My life is unrecognizable not only from what it was in 2019 but from what I thought it would be when I turned 55. I live in an unfamiliar place, I don’t have many friends, I have a start up that I am moving up a mountain with my bare hands ever day. And it’s hard. And I don’t have health insurance through work!

I don’t trust people these days. I don’t really want friends. I don’t want to engage with the world. I don’t seek people’s opinions. I sort things in my head or with my husband. My human interaction is with work colleagues — who are friends, it’s true — and my husband and kids.

I used to have scores of girlfriends. I don’t anymore. If I coax myself out of my shell and make plans with a new friend I usually find myself dreading it beforehand. But then I have fun. But it’s not the same as hanging out with people you’ve known for 30 years.

I don’t trust anyone. That’s a loss. To be sure.

But I am happy. I have my husband and my kids and my parents. And I have myself and my integrity. I don’t shrink myself or shave the edges off so that people like me.

This is me. That’s enough.