FROM MY HEART: my New Year's resolution to learn from the past
A heart needs time to mend its broken pieces. Once it does… what then?
Nothing like a weekend sickness to make you reflect on life. Am I right?
On Friday’s show I tried to convince myself (and everyone watching) that I really was okay. It was just a bit of throat irritation, I said, brought on by an espresso experiment gone awry. Wishful thinking, clearly: before long I was under the covers, shivering, hacking and generally miserable. (Feeling better now, but still recovering.)
Making matters worse: I was all alone. My partner was traveling for work, and I didn’t have anyone I could call to come see about me or help me. Thankfully he returned home the following night, so my isolation was short lived. But it reinforced a pain point for me that’s grown over the last seven years, when I moved from San Francisco to Washington and became a national network host.
It’s easy to catastrophize when life knocks you down, punishing yourself for bad decisions or indecisions, real or imagined. This can easily spiral into indulgent emotional chastisement. “Catasturbating”, if you will.
(You’re gonna need that word in conversation one day. You’re welcome.)
But sometimes life hits us with a brick to warn us that a wall is crashing down. This wasn’t even a new brick, and it dented the same soft spot, but now I think I have the clarity and strength to spare myself more pain.
Usually the brick hits on Instagram, as I scan my friends’ carefully curated, frequently filtered, sometimes Photoshopped pictures of their fabulous lives and/or bodies. This is not a representative sample of their whole lives, but it stems from real events with real people. There’s some actual life happening there… a life I chose not to live. I chose to walk away from many of those friends seven years ago. WAMU gave me the rare opportunity to host what became the NPR talk show 1A. I take pride in that work, including giving the show its name, but the price of sacrificing friendships and deep bonds for my career has left me flat.
Especially when I just need some chicken soup.
A growing body of evidence shows how exceptionally harmful social media can be to our minds and hearts. Tennis pro Coco Gauff credited avoiding social media for helping her win the US Open. Recent court documents against Facebook’s parent company Meta allege that the tech giant knew as far back as 2019 the neurological effects its services had: specifically, the release of dopamine in teenage brains. To say that social media should be held at arm’s length might be too generous, even for the most resilient and grounded among us. FOMO — the fear of missing out — can be highly toxic.
But maybe, oddly… productive.
Perhaps the real risk is not just making people (especially young adults) feel bad about their own lives. Maybe another issue is knowing how to respond to that. Those posts my fierce gay friends put up, curating the fiercest parts of their endlessly magically impossibly fierce lives… they make me want to punch them. But only after I punch myself. Because I most likely could have had what they now have if I hadn’t somehow believed that pouring energy into myself would be stealing from my career. That sounds insane to me now, but in 2016, when I was between jobs and offered an NPR hosting gig, it seemed inescapable. I had huge goals, sacrifice comes with the territory, and I would sacrifice everything I had to in pursuit of my potential.
From day one, it didn’t work.
The moment my plane left SFO en route to Washington, my heart broke. I knew I’d messed up. That old Tony Bennett song was a prophecy in disguise.
I remember sitting in the aisle seat, with two old ladies next to me. They talked with me the entire flight. Angels in disguise, they were. Without them to keep my mind occupied I might’ve spent all five hours on that plane ruminating on my decision, drowning in loneliness, fearfully praying that this sacrifice would be worth it.
Nothing in my national broadcast career thus far has justified the frustration, judgment and perfectionism I endured. Yeah, everyone wants to be the quarterback… until they realize almost no one’s blocking tackles for them. You have to pass, run, score, strategize, motivate, soothe, encourage, anticipate… all without raising your voice a decibel or sweating a drop. Who knows: maybe I was just in over my head. That’s possible. But I believe these roles are absolutely doable if, and only if, you have people who you can sweat around without judgment.
I rarely did. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t build that network. My own fears made it hard to reach out, especially during the emotionally overwhelming ups and downs of the Trump Administration. I was so lionized for the work I did on NPR that making friends who’d just see me as a person was amazingly difficult. Very few people could. It’s hard to make friends with people who already have a firm opinion of you, even if that opinion is overwhelmingly positive. Yes, it’s positive… but it’s overwhelming.
One night at a bar, a buddy of mine introduced me to some of his friends. I’d looked forward to it: a chance to connect without professional baggage. Believe it or not, lots of DC insiders treasure those connections as a key to longevity in the District, as a sanity saver if nothing else. My buddy went around the circle making introductions:
“This is so-and-so… and this is such-and-such…”
— and then he got to me —
“…aaaaaand I’m sure you already know… from National Public Radio… *beaming* the host of 1A, Mister JOSHUA JOHNSON…!”
He meant well. He was genuinely proud of me and my work. The way he expressed it, however, was inappropriate. I later told him that if he ever did that to me again, we would never speak. He apologized, acknowledging how deeply he’d embarrassed me.
It was clear after 1A that I had to build a fuller life for myself and break down the walls around me. I put them up thinking they would keep out judgment and keep me looking perfect. They may have done that, but at the cost of also keeping out connection. I had to get a life, perfection be damned. It was scary to punch through that, knowing that my bosses wanted to keep my reputation — in their words — sterling.
Like a Faberge egg. Valuable, fragile. Jealously guarded.
Candidly, it also fed my defensive strategy for enduring a relationship that turned emotionally abusive while I was in Washington. The mistreatment affected my resilience at work, which deepened the pressure to be perfect, which created more stress, which made surviving the relationship harder, which accelerated the cycle. Perfectionism is what Brené Brown calls the “20-ton shield”: perhaps keeping us from being hurt, but definitely from being seen.
“When perfectionism is driving, shame is always riding shotgun.”
—Prof. Brene Brown
By the time I got to New York, I was eager to make some major life changes. I arrived at NBC in February 2020. One month later, the world shut down. Connection meant nothing in the face of a global pandemic. Then George Floyd was murdered. Then the election. Then the insurrection. The world suddenly felt like a shaky, angry pressure cooker… on top of the stress of just living in Manhattan on a “normal” day.
That set the tone for everything that followed. I failed to reconnect, again.
So far I’ve lived in Las Vegas for about six months with my partner (he is my one great blessing from living in New York). It’s been just over a year since NBC let me go. In that time I’ve met some great people here but almost no one who would, for example, invite me out anywhere or touch base to just see what’s going on. To be clear, I do not blame anyone for that at all. It’s not their job to reach out to someone who’s not actively reaching toward them. I get that. Frankly I’ve needed much of this time to finish licking my wounds from 20+ years in journalism. Who knows: maybe I haven’t been ready to make friends yet. Would I have even been a good friend at the time?
Leading up to my national platforms, and continuing through the network shows themselves, a pattern emerged of isolation and perfectionism that made it excruciating to reach out. I succeeded at doing it in San Francisco, then failed all over again in Washington and New York. My career has been all about helping other people connect, but it cannibalized my own connections. Now I see the breadth of it, and now, for the first time, I can break the cycle for good.
So… what’s my New Year’s Resolution?
Jane Fonda once said, “We are not meant to be perfect. We are meant to be whole.” In 2024 I resolve to prioritize wholeness.
I will strive to be one person, on-air and off-air, publicly and privately. I’ll still keep some things very private, I won’t recede from public life, and I won’t overshare on Instagram. (Some things are for Close Friends only.) More importantly, I won’t always succeed at this, so I’m building in lots of grace and self-forgiveness. But I will learn for the first time to protect my spirit ferociously. And I resolve to fight anyone or anything that threatens to rip me away from my wild, playful, kind, creative, powerful self.
Especially in an election year.
This could be extremely hard to do with America and the world and everything and everyone and all of humanity on the line. Or so they say. A lot of recent articles argue that democracy faces destruction in various ways should former Pres. Donald Trump win a second term. Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of think pieces. Their arguments may be quite valid; Mr. Trump has been vocally fantasizing about crushing his critics if he’s re-elected. How can one protect one’s spirit in days like this?
I think the key will be to have spaces where we can focus meaningfully on big issues, and then also have spaces where we can purposefully step away from them. It’s not either/or; it’s both/and. That’s what I’m here to help with, both through The Night Light and another project I’m developing (more details soon). We have a lot to live for beyond this presidential election, and I refuse to plan for my world to end on November 5th, 2024. No matter who wins I will not only live but thrive, because… hell, what’s the alternative? Roll over and die? Go through all this headache, heartache and hardship just to fall apart now?
The fact is, I don’t really need the same experiences my friends have posted about. I need the bonds that generated those experiences. Human connection is a gift, often taken for granted by the flaky and the fickle. For so many reasons I thought that I wasn’t allowed to have that and also be a Trustworthy News Anchor Neutral Journalist Man. And perhaps I was right: the path I was on might indeed have crumbled under me if I’d tried to live out loud during the Trump Administration, considering the cruelty of his allies toward the press. Now that I can build those bonds without boundaries, I have a lot of reasons to do so.
Case in point: in 2025 I will celebrate my 45th birthday! My dream trip: A week in Australia for Mardi Gras, then a week in Japan. I’ve never traveled outside North America, and there’s so much of the world that fascinates me. Plus I want to build my company into something powerful and meaningful. I want to foster civic spaces that can strengthen and heal our democracy. I want to take great care of the people I love. I want to play. I want to prosper. I have a lot to live for, and I bet you do too. The trick is to carefully split our focus between today’s dramas and tomorrow’s dreams.
What will you focus on: dramas, or dreams?
For many of us this split focus will begin now during the holidays. It might feel like the calm before the storm, stuck with family members who are toxic to or disinterested in you. If that’s the case for you, I’m sorry you have to endure that. Toxicity is not something I’d ever wish on anyone or urge you to put up with. Hopefully you’ll find ways to focus on a distant point away from the mess, giving you direction and clarity despite it all. We can’t always find joy, but we can choose focus.
These days my focus is on building camaraderie, friendship, support and joy. Giving that to others enriches me as much as getting it. I want more from people than admiration for my work — admiration can create distance, and the mountaintop is lonely. Worse, once you’re pushed off the summit you may find no one’s at the base camp to pick you up. A lot of people let me down in that regard, especially my leaders. Forgiving them will take time.
But hey, I still struggle to forgive myself for not building a stronger base camp. If only I’d thought more of the people who love me for who I am, not for what I do. Both matter, but in very different ways, and they are absolutely not interchangeable.
I think most of these wounds from that fall have healed up: at least enough for me to stop picking at them. Cursing them… yeah, I’m still working on that! But now I can feel my legs again. I’m moving on and picking up speed. There’s a new path ahead of me, and this time I’m going to walk it the right way. I’m not going alone. Because there’s one kind of FOMO I refuse to succumb to — fear of moving on.
If you’ve read this far, then you’re invited. Come with me as I keep this resolution. It’ll be worth it, and it’ll be fun.
And if you like… I'll come with you, too.
Like the previous commenter, I too have followed your career and worried about you when you left MSNBC. I am glad to see you have set a path to a more balanced and fulfilling life. Know that many of your readers/listeners, while they may not be your "close friends," are rooting for you to find happiness and success and love.
I have also been listening since 1A started. You have helped me learn so much. Your approach to communication is rare. Thank you for sharing the cost of your excellence. As a mentor for several Purdue University students and recent grads, I plan to share your message.