The Upside of Being Down How Mental Health Struggles Led to My Greatest Successes in Work and Life - Jen Gotch

Introduction

Here’s the thing about writing a memoir: the person you are when you start and the person you are when you finish are practically strangers. It’s like those before and after pictures on makeover shows, except all the transformation happens on the inside. Well, my hair got longer too, but you know what I mean.

Writing this book has changed me. There has been so much learning involved, especially about myself, and it has required a depth of introspection and emotional excavation that I sure as hell didn’t anticipate when I signed on for the job. In writing chapters about my childhood and my family and my marriage and my ego, I was forced to ask myself some tough questions—Why did I feel that way? What was I really yearning for in that moment/relationship/job? What went wrong? How much of the blame did I need to own? The answers weren’t always pretty, and accepting responsibility in failed relationships can be hard, although important. At points throughout the last year, the difficulty of this endeavor pushed me to some low places, full of frustration and self-doubt, and left me feeling defeated. But now that I’ve landed on the other side, I feel stronger than I have in years. I’m more self-aware, hopeful, and content… and frankly a hell of a lot less anxious than I ever could have envisioned. It’s been a fitting journey for a book called The Upside of Being Down, a manifestation of the fact that our struggles can lead to our greatest successes, and I am so excited to share what I’ve learned with you in the process of this book and of my life.

I have wanted to write a book since I was a tiny sun-kissed six-year-old in Boca Raton, Florida, propped up on phone books so I could reach the typewriter (yes, a typewriter, it was the seventies, that’s what we typed on). Little Jen, with her blond pigtails and tan skin and incredibly hairy arms, almost always wearing a sundress—blue with swiss dots, maybe, or white with lace trim—banging away at the keyboard in her father’s office, drafting the story of a princess who lived among polka-dot mushrooms in a faraway land filled with glitter, unicorns, and rainbows. It was destined to be a bestseller. The final product of all this typing was less intelligible and more like a series of random letters jammed up against each other, but the story I was trying to convey was definitely the one I just mentioned. But I didn’t know how to type—or spell—yet. I put the book on hold for a while (and by a while I mean forty years), but somewhere in the midst of growing up and moving away and changing careers and changing again and going to therapy and managing my mental health and starting a company and then selling a company, I found my voice. It was my voice and vision that helped launch and grow ban.do, the bright, optimistic multimillion-dollar lifestyle company where I am now chief creative officer. It was my voice on my podcast, Jen Gotch is OK… Sometimes, which is where I first really dug into my struggles with mental health (though my Instagram followers know I’ve been sharing that part of me for years) and let listeners in on my spirited yet very one-sided conversations with my dog, Phil, and my cat, Gertie. And it’s my voice that will drive this story—now with fewer unicorns and rainbows but much improved spelling—as I take you through my own winding journey in an effort to help you navigate yours.

In the course of my life, I have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety, and ADD. I feel like there’s also some lactose intolerance in there, but who’s to say? My success has come in tandem with these diagnoses—sometimes despite them, other times because of them. You’re probably used to seeing creative types depicted as successful or suffering, one or the other. My story is both.

I’ve considered my mental health struggles a gift ever since someone first put a name to them in my early twenties. Before that they were truly a pain in the ass, but once I understood and had a vocabulary for what I was dealing with, I found strength and empathy and patience. Calling on these traits isn’t always easy, and I am not in limitless supply (because, who is?) but I have enough on reserve and know how to access them when I need to, thanks to