Jenine’s Journey
My childhood really set the stage for where I account getting a lot of my grit. For example, my home included growing up in a barn. In third grade, my parents decided to move and within 24-hrs my childhood home had sold. For reasons unknown to me at the time, we (my parents, two sisters, my brother, and I) moved to a 20-acre farm that did not include a house in a town of less than 1,000 people. At the time, I was young and imaginative and did not understand how difficult these new conditions would be.
An afternoon golfing with my boyfriend, Josh.
We lived in tents that first year. We worked on the farm and lived with the animals as the barn slowly came together. Even though my life was never the same after the move, looking back, I am thankful for the opportunity to grow up in a non-traditional setting.
I learned a lot from this:
Family is everything.
You must work harder than ever imaginable sometimes to make it through a situation.
And most importantly:
Everything is going to be okay.
I was forced to be tenacious. I was forced to be resilient. And as I came out of it with an extraordinarily strong work ethic, I did not have a lot of confidence in who I was outside of that experience.
I pushed through everything because that was all I knew how to do. I pushed through high school, graduating early and getting into the school of my dreams in Las Vegas. I pushed through my bachelors degree taking 32 credits per semester while working full-time. I pushed to fulfill my dreams of making a difference and competed in pageants earning myself a local title and competing at the State level. I pushed myself through the need for friendships and connections and more because I was still living in survival mode. And most recently, I pushed myself to move across the country to start a new job in a new industry in a two-week turnaround time.
It was all I knew because when I stopped, I had to face how I really felt - lost and alone.
I am now 24 years old. I have been through a lot and have made it out on the other side. For the first time in my life I have truly stopped and accepted I was lost. I confronted the deep sense of loss just like I had with everything else in life - with tenacity, grit, a sense of self love, and acceptance that I had never allowed myself before.
This is why this podcast is so important to me and so much more than a podcast. I see you out there giving everything you got. I see the tears you hide because of the constant feeling of inadequacy. And I see YOUR journey - the journey I was so lost in and working my way through.
I still love every facet of my story because as rough around the edges as it is, it made me who I am:
A go-getter who is not afraid to show love and compassion,
A dog-mom,
A driver of change in my industry; and
A woman full of glaze and grit who could not be prouder of the story I am creating.