👋Frame Your Little Failures

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Adam often laughs when he sees me scrolling through Facebook.

I’ll be at the kitchen table, pretending to do work, and he’ll see my screen stuck on someone’s Facebook post, as I spend minutes reading through comments left by people I don’t actually know.

I think you’re one of the rare gems who actually uses Facebook every day, he will say to me.

For good reasons! I shoot back. It comes with perks!

I keep Facebook around because it reminds me of people’s birthdays. Not people I love love. Their birthdays are memorized. But people I like like. Their birthdays might be forgotten if not for Facebook.

But more than anything, I use it because it stores the deep tracks of the last decade and a half. Every day, when I open it up, it shows me posts from those years, memories that I’d otherwise never remember.

Last week, it showed me a picture from 2011 that I felt like an idiot for not framing and hanging on the wall. Why? Because it represented so much BS from my life. The kind of BS that is good to remember because it comes with strength, courage, and focus.

👋Welcome to the Monday Pick-Me-Up. Knowing my purpose has never been my problem. I’ve known that from an early age. But ignoring the people who have tried to stop me from doing what I absolutely love has been a challenge since the age of 14. I was reminded of that thanks to Facebook and the photo below.

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👋Frame Your Little Moments

Hello, that’s me. The year was 2011. I was holding a check for $58. It was the first check I ever received for my writing. A local magazine published an article of mine about....I have no idea. I don’t remember. I just remember getting that paycheck for $58 and thinking: wow, it can happen. It really can happen, even when so many people tell you that it won’t.

I have always known that deep in my soul I was meant to spend this lifetime of mine writing. It’s my purpose. I don’t know why it’s my purpose, but it is. I am not meant to sing, or dance, or do anything that involves math equations. I am meant to write. Maybe it’s to help other people. Maybe it’s my means to survive.

When I was a little girl, it brought me joy. I remember being so desperate to learn how to read. I would hug books hoping to absorb what was inside of them. I wanted all of the words to be mine. I wanted to use them to tell stories.

I wrote poems on tissue paper. I wrote books about my babysitter, Erin, and my dog. I maxed out the space on my first desktop computer with word documents. I wrote without thinking. Storied leaked out of me. I couldn’t hit a softball and I was quite awful at learning geometry, but I did those things when I had to just so I could go back home and write.

I was 14 when I learned that people will try to crush your dreams and it won’t be with their fists, it will be with their words, their actions, and their laughter.

First, it was my journalism teacher. I was a freshmen in high school and I applied to write for the student newspaper. I submitted writing samples and a personal essay about why I wanted to join. I was rejected. My name didn’t make the list.

It took me weeks to find the courage to ask my teacher why. It seemed like everyone else who applied made the newspaper staff, except for me.

I don’t know how to tell you this, he said.

I stood up straight because having good posture helps you fall slower when a person is about to knock you down.

But you’re just not a good writer and if I could recommend something to you, at a young age, it would be find something else to do with your life, anything, really.

I melted onto the linoleum floor. As the bell rang for the next class to start, other people’s footsteps pushed me out of the door.

Eventually, I confessed all of this to my mom.

You’re really going to let someone else tear down your dreams with one comment?

Yes, I said. Tossing out notebooks that contained years of writing. Unplugging my computer to throw it out the window.

Well that would be a shame, perhaps the biggest mistake of your life.

At 14, if someone tells you something about yourself, you believe it. Your entire identity at that age comes from comments and feedback, gossip and teasing.

I was a bad writer. It had to be true. My own teacher told me so!

And If I would have believed him, I never would have found myself in the same situation, 8-years-later, about to graduate college with a journalism degree and a completely empty resume.

I wanted to ask you how I can make a career out of being a writer, I said to my journalism professor during his office hours.

I wasn’t one of his favorite students but he also didn’t think of me as dirt.

I was a B student because I didn’t want to follow his directions and just write breaking news without first writing 50 words of fluff describing the colors, sounds, emotions, surrounding local news we had to report on.

Cut it all out, he’d circle the first paragraph of my homework. All of it.

Jen, he started off. I would have told you this years ago, I just don’t see you in this industry. You might have been better off studying something else.

What an interesting thing to tell a college senior weeks away from graduating, I thought.

You’d be great doing something else. He recommended. Marketing, perhaps.

And if I would have listened to him, I wouldn’t be smiling in that picture above, holding a check for $58, for an article published in a magazine about….??? who even knows.

But that check got me hired as a full-time editorial assistant for the publisher of the magazine, who at the time was someone I absolutely admired.

She wrote a monthly column in that magazine that was so good that I’d cut it out and read it 10x over. She was the best writer I had ever read. Getting hired to work for her, full-time, was my big break that quickly became a nightmare.

She refused to let me write and instead kept me doing everything else. Cleaning her house, wrapping her Christmas gifts, scrubbing dog pop stains off the office carpet….those kinds of things.

Months into working for her, after doing everything she asked, I knocked on her door and asked if I could write for the magazine.

I’ll write anything, even the ads in the back. I offered.

She laughed and said:

You? No. You’re not a writer. You’re not ever going to be a writer.

I was 22. I had started a weekly blog, it had 10 followers, I was, by the definition of a word, a writer.

But it’s what I want to do with my life...

Hahahaha. Her laughter bounced off the walls and onto the freshly scrubbed office carpet.

Keep dreaming, she said.

If I would have listened to her, I wouldn’t have quit two weeks later, moved to New York City, kept writing my blog, and eventually land my first book deal, and then my second with Simon and Schuster, where I’d hold a check much, much, much, larger than the one in that picture above for 58 freaking dollars.

I’m so glad Facebook showed me that photo because it made me think about how stupid we are for just framing big things in our lives -- diplomas, wedding photos, pictures from a family reunion.

Hello, dear friend, we must frame our failures, our rejections, our tiny little moments of success. Looking back, I am smiling as big as my cheeks would let me because I know that $58 isn’t just going to be $58. It will be a lot more if, and only if, I don’t give up on myself, or worse, listened when other people gave up on me.

Yes, of course, I sometimes imagine that high school teacher and the college professor and the magazine boss all sitting around my dining room table listening to my audiobook play out as I serve them pizza and a long list of my thoughts.

I don’t think any of them would say yes to my invitation.

I don’t think any of them expected I’d be where I am now. What if I just listened to their advice?

What if I did?

ehh, it’s not worth wondering.

I didn’t. Thankfully, I didn’t. Thankfully I believed that one day I’d prove them all wrong.

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⚡Instant Pick Me Ups

📚: A lot of rom-com readers are raving about this new book.

🎵: I really took to the chorus of this song. I sang it on repeat for a week and many of those times was while I was looking in the mirror pumping myself up.

💄: I love these natural makeup remover wipes. They take everything off my face and don’t leave a greasy feeling after I use them to clean my skin.

👗: I love the idea of putting together a gift basket for a friend in need of a little pick-me-up. Here are the items I grabbed for a friend going through some low, lows in life:

• Funky hair clips

• Temp tattoos

• Custom name bracelet

• Cozy socks

If you’re not the best gift curator, my fav company to use to put together fun boxes to send for different occasions is Happy Box. They sent me a Mother’s Day box as a surprise and it was so fun to open and all the items inside are things I actually will use.

Why you’re getting this: I'm Jen Glantz and this is The Monday Pick-Me-Up newsletter. I've been sending it every Monday, for 9-years, to thousands of awesome humans, just like you. Thank you for letting this email live in your inbox. It truly makes my heart explode with joy.

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