An email arrived from a friend this week. She had an idea for me. Write about resilience, she said. She had just come from a seminar on it, and she thought the topic had my name on it.
Then she made her case, and her case was my life. Becoming a cop when women didn’t. Making chief. Coming out. Standing on stages. You must have had a lot of resilience, she wrote. Maybe it comes from an inner self-confidence.
She saw the end version.
She didn’t see the smug face and the witty quip I put on every time I was undermined and underestimated. She didn’t see the training and the degrees and the certifications, which look like ambition on a resume but were really fear. Fear of being irrelevant. Stacking accomplishments like sandbags so someone would take me seriously.
She didn’t see the failures. I made it to the final two for chief’s jobs in dream cities. Chicago. Nashville. I was not chosen. There is no soft way to say that. I failed.
And she doesn’t know about the file.
I have been turned down for 88 speaking engagements. I know because I counted. I keep a file of every organization that reached out, considered me, and decided on someone else. I open it every other day.
For a long time I told myself the file was proof of perseverance. Look at all this rejection, and look at me, still going. That was the cover story.
Here is the truth. I don’t open the file to remember that I kept going. I open it to check that the wound is still there. It always is.
There’s more. After my keynotes, audiences fill out feedback forms. Out of 500 responses, 499 are glowing. One is not. I can quote the one from memory. I have never once sat down and reread the 499.
I put more weight on the one than the five hundred. I know the math is broken. I do it anyway.
I wanted to call this a dichotomy. The woman who is catapulted by applause and haunted by a single critic. Two opposing forces, look how complex I am. But it isn’t two forces. It’s one. I handed my worth to strangers a long time ago, and strangers pay in two currencies. The ovation and the shrug come through the same door, because there is no wall there.
And the applause, when it comes, is indescribable. Those faces. That sound. It catapults me somewhere I cannot explain to you.
It lasts days.
Then it dissipates, and I start reaching for the next stage so I can get the feeling back.
It took me until this week to name my own drug of choice.
Even my doctorate is part of it. I tell people I’m pursuing a PhD because I love learning, and that’s true. But there’s another truth buried there. It’s a backup plan. Insurance for the day the phone stops ringing. Some part of me is certain that day is coming, because the part of me that keeps the file has never once believed the bookings are real.
So when my friend calls me resilient, I don’t know what to do with the word. The seminars define resilience as bouncing back. But nothing bounces off me. The applause passes through. The criticism moves in. What looks like resilience from the outside might just be a person who found a reliable supply and keeps showing up to collect.
I’m not going to tell you I deleted the file. I didn’t. I’m not going to tell you I stopped rereading the one comment. I haven’t. This is not that kind of ending, because I am not there yet, and I won’t pretend otherwise to give you a clean last paragraph.
Instead I’ll ask you what I’m asking myself.
You have a file too. Maybe it’s a folder. Maybe it’s a screenshot. Maybe it’s one sentence somebody said in a meeting six years ago that you can still recite word for word. You call keeping it high standards. You call it motivation.
Those aren’t its names. Those are its aliases.
I know because I used them. I called my file perseverance for years. It took one email from a friend to make me call it what it is.
So the only challenge I’ve earned the right to hand you is the one I just went through. Name yours. The real name. Say out loud who holds the deciding vote on your worth, how long they’ve held it, and what it has cost you to let them keep it.
You don’t have to delete anything. I didn’t. But you don’t get to call it motivation anymore either.
What’s its real name?
