Friendship is a Sacrifice
It's Monday. I'm Here for You.
The Pick Me Up is a Monday morning newsletter filled with advice, personal stories, and tips to help you get out of bed and jumpstart your week.
Greetings, friend! It’s me, Jen Glantz. I’m writing to you from Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
I haven’t traveled anywhere in a long time. The last time I was on an airplane was at the end of November. Years ago, I was on an airplane every single week. One year, I flew 96 times.
I’m telling you this because I used to use getting away as my way of handling trauma and as my go-to for avoiding making decisions. Rather than focusing on fixing, I focused on finding ways to get out of the situation by getting on airplane.
You know what that left me with?
A lot of airline points but even more serious problems.
Now, I’m sitting home for a while, experiencing the biggest life change that’s ever happened to me (hello, ) and even though sometimes in the middle of the night, when I’m bouncing a baby to sleep, I want to sneak out the door with my suitcase. I want to get away. But I can’t. But I won’t.
For the first time in my lifetime, I’m here, for a while, figuring things out without a getaway plan.
And it feels so messy and scary, but also so pure.
In this issue: How friendship feels like a sacrifice, organizational hacks from the internet, and a few more of my favorite things.
Why you’re getting this: I'm Jen Glantz and this is The Pick-Me-Up newsletter. I've been sending it every Monday, for 8-years, to thousands of awesome humans, just like you. Thank you for letting this email live in in your inbox. It truly makes my heart explode with joy.
Instant Pick Me Ups
🍪: A challenge for you today is this:
Learn something new today. Anything. One tiny thing.
For example, I just learned: Humans are the only animals that blush.
I didn’t know that before and now that I do, I will think about it when I feel my cheeks flushed and my heart racing.
Learn one new thing today. It will make today feel different than yesterday and tomorrow.
📚: A lot of people are talking about this book - and by people - I really mean people I follow on Instagram. It seems like a fun read and I’m adding it to my list.
🎧: This song always pumps me up.
Friendship is a Sacrifice
Friendship is a sacrifice.
Any relationship in your life is.
For most of my twenties, I didn’t have deep friendships.
I had friends. I also had so many secrets I didn’t tell my friends. I kept them at a distance. I prioritized myself, and my work, over them.
Looking back, it feels like I did everything wrong. But what did I know?
I never really had close friends at any point in my life, until now.
Growing up, I was an outcast. I went to a small school. There were only 40 people in my grade. Everyone in the grade was invited to birthday parties. My invitation was always lost in the mail.
I wanted friends but I didn’t have any and when I started to make them, I didn’t know what to do.
Friendship is something you learn on your own. If you’re lucky to grow up with good friends, you learn a lot of lessons around patience, forgiveness, and loyalty.
If you don’t, you learn a lot of different lessons, like how to entertain yourself and have your own back and trust very few people.
Everyone is on a different path, but some of our life experiences push us in one direction over another.
When I was nearing the end of my twenties, a best friend I’d had for many years, broke up with me. She didn’t give me a reason. She just said: I don’t want to be your friend anymore.
The news made me ache for such a long time. It was about way more than her making that decision, which I’ve made peace with and respect, it was also about feeling like a failure, feeling like I was 9-years-old again, sitting at the lunch table all alone.
I’ll probably never know the real reason why she ended our friendship. It doesn’t matter. It’s not about that.
But it did make me look at how I treat the people in my life and back then, it wasn’t very good. I was too self-involved to even realize.
I’ve lost many friends since then. But I’ve gained a lot of new ones.
I’ve learned that being a good friend is a sacrifice. It’s giving time, energy, love, emotion, patience, empathy, curiosity, thoughtfulness, to another human being.
And it’s scary, sometimes, because you don’t know if that friendship is going to last a decade or a few more days.
I wasn’t doing enough of that in my twenties. I was building a business, writing books, tip-toeing around a closed-off world that I didn’t want to let anybody else in.
But that was life was lonely and sad. It didn’t have meaning.
And that’s when I realized, if I want things to change, if I want closer, better, deeper relationships in my life, I need to make sacrifices.
And those sacrifices are never something I regret.
It’s allowed me to build a life with Adam. It’s allowed me to have really real friendships in my thirties. It’s allowed me to become the type of friend that the 9-year-old version of myself would have been proud of.
Just like the 35-year-old version of myself is.
All my love,
Random Pick-Me-Ups
Organization hacks: I’m constantly trying to reduce clutter in my life. Here are some of the interesting ways I’m doing that.
This video gave me some good tips
Loved this article on 10 (1-minute) organization hacks
I bought a bunch of stuff from this list too
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Ps. Let’s work together - here’s how:
👏1:1 coaching: I specialize in working with people who want to switch careers, start their own business, improve their personal brand, or are feeling lost in life. Book a session and let’s work together this month.
👏Courses: Want a quick pick-me-up? I offer a handful of digital courses that include videos, assignments, and real-time personalized feedback from me along the way. Check them out here - the most popular one is the personal branding course.
👏Company workshops & speaking: I offer company workshops and conference keynotes on topics that include personal branding, social media trends, storytelling, and more. I’ve worked with Google, Apple, HBO, ESPN, and more. Learn more here.
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+ Random:
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