Embracing My Inner Smart Ass

Ask yourself: What would you scream from the rooftops if you knew you wouldn’t get smacked in the face, or fired?

"When I talk to my younger self, I reassure her that everything will be okay. Embracing her means accepting all the fears and doubts she had, and loving her for all her strength and potential.”

—Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within

"When I talk to my younger self, I hold a finger to her lips, hand her duct tape and tell her, ‘It’s better if YOU do it before someone else does.’” 

—Jory Des Jardins, early in her career

As a kid, I was kind, rule-abiding, and respectful of authority; though I moonlighted as a Smart Ass. 

I used to create mini-books with images I cut out of magazines and pulled together into collages that parodied friends, family, and the celebrities of the time (something I still do today, parodying my inner dramas, but without a glue stick, using Midjourney). 

I was also a joke teller. I loved me a good, scatalogical narrative with a powerful punchline; but even more so I was an Improvisationist: One of my siblings might say something in pure innocence and I would finish their sentence with something ruthless. I didn’t think I was being nasty; I was just verbalizing words in my head in real-time, with no real thought or judgement of those words before repeating them out loud.

I didn’t think my one-liners were that provoking. I don’t even recall the one that I threw out at the family dinner table; but I do recall the smack in my face from my dad, who I don’t believe found it very funny. He never explained why what I said provoked him, only this:

“You can be funny, or you can have friends. Take it from me: I don’t have many friends.”

My Dad had a point. There wasn’t a fast-food drive-thru worker or Jehovah’s witness who didn’t regret engaging the seemingly harmless man with the wire-rimmed eyeglasses, ruler-straight side part, and radio announcer's voice (my dad’s side hustle was being The Voice behind his auto dealership clients’ TV ads). He would often debate, challenge, or point out inconsistencies in their messaging, causing my mother to hide her face in the passenger seat, or say from behind the front door, “Leave them alone, Joel!” He was both the Life of the Party and the most feared guest. 

I have to admit I had, perhaps, inherited his way of riling people up in my chosen medium, which was print. Sometimes I riled people up without intending to. In high school my “fearless” reporting of underage drinking resulted in some teenage side eye, to which I figuratively gave my detractors the finger, ignoring my pot-like tendency of calling the kettle black. 

Later, in college I wrote a weekly column that satirized, parodied, and ripped the curtain off the inanities of Greek life, which put me in Pan-Hellenic hot water, especially after writing about the incident that put me — a mere pledge in my sorority — on social probation for a year. It never dawned on me that airing my, and by extension my sorority’s, dirty laundry via newspaper column could be so devastating.

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I only started thinking about the ramifications of my writing one winter in college, when a meningitis outbreak put everyone on high alert. Some students were hospitalized and one even died. I was terrified.

I had a column to write and knew I needed to address the outbreak. But, being a Smart Ass not yet fully capable of processing the range of human emotion, I struggled to explain my feelings. My editor, reading the reams of copy I wrote attempting to do so told me to just get to the point, so I wrote one: "Shit happens".

The day the column was published I knew I had done something wrong. Calls came into my dorm room; threats actually. Letters to the publisher arrived, denouncing my columns, and worse, calling me MEAN. I had been quite adept at getting people to laugh with me while poking fun at something. But I proved awful at getting them to cry with me; to commiserate; to be vulnerable.

It was another smack in the face. 

And it was a warning to be careful. To choose my words. To play it like everyone I engaged with was meeting me for the first time. Let them think I was a nice person and keep the inner voice in my head.

I stopped writing a column after that semester. I reported; I became an editor supporting other writers’ work, urging them to rip the curtain off of life. I didn’t trust that my capabilities could connect with my values in a way that wasn’t irresponsible. So I trusted in others speaking up and letting them get smacked in the face. 

This was how I entered the world of work.

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In case you missed it: Jory and Elisa chat about Impostor Syndrome: Is it really a thing, or is it humility in self-critical clothing? Catch our discussion here.

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Interestingly enough, I found that, sometimes, when I was just minding my own business and being a good little employee I still occasionally got smacked in the face... for doing my job... for doing it well.

• As a young magazine editor my boss told me, in a review, I was “arrogant” working with other writers. That was the only part of my job that I actually loved; I often had great conversations with writers and other editors I admired. I took my boss’s comments very personally. Looking back on this: Maybe I was arrogant, or maybe my boss was uncomfortable with a 25-year-old being comfortable working with people who were at the height of their superpowers. I’d always believed the former; but lately I’ve chosen the latter.

• As a young producer I was told I "didn’t get it" by a boss, who threatened to fire me every week, starting my first week at the company. I left the company willingly, thinking I didn’t get it. She left the company unwillingly, a few weeks later. Apparently she didn’t, either.

  Side note: That company became my Series B investor, ten years later.

The always thought-provoking Kristi Coulter shares an article, identifying a word many of us females in leadership roles hear a lot in peer reviews: Abrasive. I looked that word up:

"caustic, cutting, grating, biting, acerbic, vitriolic; rough, harsh, hard, tough, sharp, curt, brusque, stern, severe; wounding, nasty, cruel, callous, insensitive,  unfeeling, unsympathetic, inconsiderate”

For years I’ve used these words to describe the voice in my head. I shush her a lot, but I’ve noticed that when I let her out occasionally for some fresh air, she comes out swinging, not nastily but truthfully. She still has the capability of scaring the bejeezus out of people, sometimes she offends. But she’s not in it for laughs anymore. 

She tells me, “You can trust me now.”