From the Dominican Republic to the American Dream: A Tale of Resilience and Triumph

Emerging triumphant through life's tempests is a testament to the human spirit's resilience, something I've come to know intimately. From the humble beginnings of my youth in the Dominican Republic to the pursuit of my American dream, this episode is a chronicle of the sheer willpower and indomitable grit that marks the journey of those who refuse to be knocked down by adversity. Listeners will be riveted by tales that not only strike a chord but also infuse the courage to carve out a destiny against the odds.

As we navigate through the chapters of my life, I unravel the transformative impact of stepping beyond the familiar and embracing the unknown. Reflecting on my time in the army, my journalistic ambitions, and the quest for higher learning, I lay bare the saga of a single parent battling to craft a brighter tomorrow. This discussion isn't just about survival; it's about how a resolute commitment to one's goals and an unwavering spirit can light up the path to personal triumph and lead the way for others to follow.

Enter a world of fear, resilience, and generational trauma in "The Devil That Haunts Me". Follow Isabella and Julitza as they confront their demons in a tale of suspense, mystery, and the supernatural.

Explore the first seven chapters here

Chapters

• 0:03 Overcoming Obstacles on the Path
• 15:31 The Power of Grit and Determination

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to this new season of have a Cup of Joani podcast. In this season, we are embarking on an exciting journey, one of shameless learning. We're tossing out the fear of judgment and embracing curiosity with open arms, whether it's exploring new ideas, tackling challenging topics or learning from our missteps, or doing it all without shame or inhibition. Can't wait for y'all to listen to this. Hello everyone, alright, so we have talked about the power of habit, we have talked about atomic habit, but, as we all know, there are going to be instances when shit happens, when life just gets tough and we want to put our heads down in the sand or, like me, crawl under your bed in the fetal position and not want to come out from there. True story, true story. But to achieve goals, we need to know how to tackle those bumps in the road right. So, on today's episode, we are going to talk about the whole tackling of these bumps on the road to achieving our goals, or on the road to accomplishing our habits that lead to our goals. Are you ready? Yes, you are Alright, let's go. So, like I said, every journey has its obstacles. Oh, my goodness, I can tell you about a lot of them, but it's how we overcome them. That defines our success. So it has to do a lot about mental mindset and resiliency. I like I told my therapist I'm like I wish I didn't have to learn how to become resilient, but unfortunately so many things happen in my lives, as it has in other people's lives, that pushes to survive and in that survival we learn how to overcome these obstacles through sheer determination and grit. Because when I look back I know that there was nothing out there. I had no resources. I had nothing but just grit to get me through. I don't believe in thinking trauma for my resiliency. I wish I would have learned resiliency by other means, kind of like by the skills and the master resiliency training modules and the Army, but nevertheless, let's talk about the book Grit by Angela Duckworth.

Speaker 1: 3:42

So I come from a very, very poor background and it's something that I didn't really pay much attention to growing up. But there were certain instances that brought it all home to me. My grandma used to put food on layaway. Yes, there's such a thing in the Dominican Republic as layaway food. You write it on the little notebook and then the owner knows that eventually you're going to pay them. Thankfully, my grandma was well known in the neighborhood and was known as being someone that paid her debts. So we were good to have rice and beans on layaway until we got money from my mom when she sent it from the US. So it was little things of the environment I was in and how I was raised.

Speaker 1: 4:41

And then when I came to the US, I wasn't well off either Automatically. I didn't become this well off person just because I crossed this border into here. Guess what, from low income to low income, but not only that. Then you have other things as well when you come to the US, that kind of push back on you, such as ethnicity, race and gender, and then all those other things on top of economic status. So it was so many things that I encountered in my childhood and in my adult life that it became this fight me against the world kind of fight where I became like this completely different person, just to survive. So while I'm still this very jovial and easygoing person, I had to grow this layer of a new me to cover me that was a stronger, tougher, a more no-nonsense person, so that way I can combat against those obstacles that were in my way, obstacles such as I don't know if you listened to a previous episode, but I talk about going to my first writing conference and wanting to be an author and going here for the sake of learning and for the sake of making connections, and finding myself in a room that was not welcoming to me and the culture that I come from and the culture represented in the book, and I found that to be very demeaning and unwelcoming and it gave me room to quit and I went home from that workshop thinking I am not good enough, my work is not good enough, I should just quit, because my culture everything from the Spanglish to the characters being Dominican, to the foods portrayed there, to the family dynamics portrayed there it will not sell in the US. And that's what I went home with, because that was what I encountered in this workshop. Verbatim I'm not, this is not me paraphrasing verbatim your books, your stories will not sell here. Try Latin America. So it is.

Speaker 1: 7:54

It is like these kind of roadblocks and I know you have your own stories of various roadblocks that you encounter and route to your goals or to your habits and how you had to fight through it through sheer grit and willpower to just get on to the other side of that block, and that's what I did for me to get over the other side of that block. I needed time to be able to validate what these people have told me and to be able to nourish my confidence and self esteem back up, because you do need that. I didn't understand back then why I needed confidence so much as an author and as a writer, but on that day from that experience, I learned that you really do need to be confident about yourself and your work when presenting it, because so many people will tear it down for various reasons. They're not necessarily all good reasons per se. They can be nefarious reasons due to a bias that they don't even know that they have, or preconceived notions that they don't even know they have right, because not everyone is self aware of all those shadow elements in their personality. So they say these things, they present these things to other people from a place that is not heal and it hurts other people. And that's what happened here. And the worst part is that most likely, that person didn't even know that they had hurt me in this manner. They probably thought that they were giving me great feedback, that they were helping me out.

Speaker 1: 12:06

That's what I meant, like I had to go back to heal with time and nourishing my confidence and self esteem, because I had to go back in my head and prove to myself that that is incorrect, that I do have a talent and that I have had teachers, strangers and family, but I don't put too much emphasis on family, because family will always say you're perfect when you're not. Well, at least my family. So I have had those feedback from people explaining how my writing and the story it's a transformative thing that they have read it is immersive. They enjoyed it, which is really what any creator will want is for someone to enjoy their art and be able to immerse themselves and lose themselves in that art, and I have gotten that feedback before. So I had to go back in time and invalidate that, to invalidate my most recent experience and therefore be able to overcome this obstacle that was thrown at me, so that way I can go on to write and publish not just that story but other stories, which have received great reviews, by the way you see.

Speaker 1: 13:41

So the book grid talks about how, while we tend, as a Western culture, to rely on intelligence to assess whether somebody will succeed or not, something that is not necessarily measure and it's hard to measure is grit, that X factor that the book said. That is like that Jeanne-Séquoise factor that you can't really pinpoint, but when somebody has it they can surpass a smarter person that is just sitting still on their metaphorical smart chair, and you can see this example of a people that surpass great odds just because they refuse to give up. In her study, duckworth thinks that grit is likely a significant factor when it comes to college completion, even from low income students. And, like I said, my background if I rely on where I come from, I would be to this day still in that environment, a single mom and working from paycheck to paycheck, because usually that's what that environment nourishes, because of the various roadblocks there.

Speaker 1: 15:32

But I found it within myself to one step out of that environment. That's one, and I did that by joining the army. But people can do that other ways. You don't have to join the army to get out of that environment. You can go to college, or you can go find a job at a cruise line, be a flight attendant. There's so many jobs that you can jump in in order to leave the environment that you're in. Studying abroad is another one, or finding a job abroad it's another one Because I feel that a lot of the times that the roadblocks are in that environment, I know for me that's what happened.

Speaker 1: 16:21

So when I left it and I find myself learning a new job, I found myself getting good at this job, the logistic job, and advancing through it. Then I was able to assess myself a little better and have the courage to make goals for myself, because I found that when I was in the environment that I came from, it felt almost as if my destiny was written for me. Hope that makes sense. Like everything was laid out. I do this, I do that, I do that, and my family dynamic was really constrictive as well. So I had certain expectations to just stay there and find a job there and help out my family and stay there. But in my mind I wanted something different for me. I wanted to see the world and to experience at different things. I didn't want to be there. I also wanted to be a journalist, I wanted to be a writer, and for that I needed to experience a lot of things.

Speaker 1: 17:43

So with that mindset, when I saw this recruiter come through on my first year of college, I really I looked at this person like a ticket, like the stepping stone to my bigger life that I saw myself in. So, you see, so it was this certain vision that I had. It was very unclear back then. I was a 16 year old kid, okay, so it was very unclear, but I knew that taking that ticket out was a start, you see. So for me, I had to have the courage and the gall to have a different vision than what my environment gave me and from there that picture of my different life became more whole and I was able to piece it together little by little.

Speaker 1: 18:42

But it was really through that mindset, that grit, that it's like I'm going to do it, I have a right to do it, I can do it. To me. I look at it as like foolish kind of like these foolish thoughts that I had back then that I dare to think that I can do anything. And I did it. And, mind you, most of my family didn't think I was going to make it. They really were waiting for me to come back, to come back home and say I didn't make it, I failed, bootcamp was too hard, take me back in, and they were really waiting for that. And they told me that once I graduated and that was already a year in. They told me that, so I knew that that was in their mind.

Speaker 1: 19:36

But because I had the audacity to think that I dare to have a different path than what was presented to me, that really was the trigger, that the domino effect, that first domino, that film, to lead me to the life that I am in right now. And I see that as that audacity to hope and the audacity to think that I can do that. And then I think I started to lean on that grit, because embarking on a life that is not meant for me and I'm doing air quotes here right, if I would have stayed in my environment, that was written for me, I think that would have been a path that is kind of like easy, because that's it right. There I stay home, I find a job home, it's scripted already, it's ready. But because I stepped outside of the known into the unknown, then it's like my grit had to be turned on, because now here I am having to fight against people's perception of me, the way that I look, so all my identities when I'm outside of my environment are being opposed and I have to keep proving myself to them, proving myself that I am worthy of a promotion, that I am worthy to be there, that I can hang like the rest of them, be it physically being, mentally being, through knowledge and education.

Speaker 1: 21:35

It was grit that leveled me up, because through grit I didn't give up. Even when I found myself a single parent, I knew in my heart of heart that I will be different, that I will not follow the course of single parenthood from the environment I come from, that I will not follow that. I knew that I will not follow that. I knew that I will be different. I knew that that will not stop me from achieving the education that I wanted to achieve. And because of that knowledge that gave me that fire that propelled me to accomplish these things, because I knew that there was something different for me. You see. So even when I had those, I wouldn't call my son an obstacle, but I had those things that happened to me that forced me to grind down and aferrarme to that idea that I'll be better, that I'll be different. So because of that idea, I refused to give up.

Speaker 1: 22:52

I used to say, like I'm this very stubborn person and I don't know if that's what grit is that I just I've refused to give up. Maybe that's what it is Duckworth describes it as this personality that makes it so that people persevere, even in situations where some may give up. And that's where I have found myself in some instances, when I wanted to give up but I refused because I just knew that there is something better for me and that I can accomplish those things so that way I can have something better in my life. So, for me, grit has manifested into this thought, this voice in my head that just propels me to keep moving forward with this, like just stubborn streak that refuses to give up. And my sister told me I guess I've had it since I was little, because she was like you're always pushing boundaries. She used to tell me you're like you're gonna push it until you fall. And that's basically what I do, like I have to, like fall on my face and fail before I fall. And even when that happens, like I have found myself looking back and thinking how can I then change this so that way I can succeed? Because I'm just like I don't know.

Speaker 1: 24:32

It's just this stubbornness in me that refuses to believe that a failure is just that. I see a failure. That's why I have this podcast. I see a failure as like this is something to learn from and let's try it again After we learn from it. Let's try it again with what we are implementing that is new and see if that works. And it's just, I don't know, sometimes that works against me, sometimes it works for me. I say it works against me because sometimes I'm just like I'm so stuck on this, on getting this done, that I can waste time on just that one thing as opposed to moving on and doing something else. But sometimes it works for me because I have found that just the first failure it really is not the one. All to be all that I can learn from that and then I can succeed once I've learned from it.

Speaker 1: 25:33

I don't know, read the book grit to see what you get out of it. That's what I got out of it. I saw myself a lot while reading the book. I went through memory lane quite a lot when I found myself with these odds and just like that mindset that I have that refusal to give up and then just doing the damn thing. I'm assuming that that's what the author meant by grit. I hope you learned something from this.

Speaker 1: 26:07

I feel like I was just rambling a lot in this episode. It's a little comfy to talk about my past. That's not something I like to do, but how can we move forward if we don't dissect it a little bit, learn from it, so that way we can make things better for us and for the next generation? So I hope you grab grits by the and you make things happen for yourself. All right, okay, I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Bye, oh, we can. We can fly. Thank you so much for listening. I wanna hear from you, leave me a comment, do a rating, if you can, on the podcast and share it with somebody you love, but, most importantly, come back. See you next time. Bye.