A Reveille for the Underestimated

An excerpt from Mary Marantz’s new book, Underestimated

Note from Monica: I recently joined a mastermind group of wonderfully gifted, hard-working Christian authors. I was thrilled to find that Mary Marantz was in the group as I have admired her from a distance for a long time. You might know Mary from her wildly popular book, DIRT, which tells her story of going from a single-wide trailer in the mountains of rural West Virginia to the halls of Yale Law School. (it’s powerful!) Mary is not only an incredibly gifted writer but also a ton of fun, and super smart (not surprising – hello Yale Law School)

Mary’s next book, UNDERESTIMATED, just released this week and I am thrilled to get to share an excerpt and a giveaway with all of you here! Read below, then leave a comment at the bottom to be entered to win!

A Reveille for the Underestimated

from Underestimated, by Mary Marantz

I suppose now is as good a time as any for us to talk about that word underestimated, fraught though it is.

I say “fraught” because for a word that is supposed to describe something or someone as being deemed less important than they actually are . . . ironically, for some of us this word has become the single most important thing about us.

I grew up in a single- wide trailer in rural West Virginia before eventually going on to Yale for law school.

So, it would be safe to say . . . I speak fluent Underdog Story.

Give me your Rudys, your Goonies, your Molly Ringwalds in a homemade pink polka- dot prom dress still not good enough for the “snooties.” While we’re at it, I’ll take a ring full of Rockys, every Daniel LaRusso and Mr. Miyagi, and the entire roster of a 1980s miracle team that loved to play hockey. These are my people.

In my first book, Dirt, I wrote about this feeling of looking at my life, even from a very young age, and somehow knowing I was meant for . . . more. I knew that one day all of it was going to make sense. The muddy, the hard, the broken, the beautiful . . . the caved- in ceiling where it rained just as hard on the inside as it did on the outside until the particleboard floor began to crumble beneath our feet. Until the only things left holding that shaky foundation together were the
remnants of some threadbare, dirt-caked, brown shag carpeting . . . and each other. Even then, I somehow knew. “One day God would put words to it. And then I’d see. My story wouldn’t be wasted.”

And yet, I also talk about being so convinced I would fail out of college, despite being among the top of my high school class, that I almost didn’t apply. How the sickly- sweet smell of mildew mixed with dollar store vanilla perfume followed me everywhere I went. How it still follows me to this day. I wrote about how words have the power to speak life or death and how these labels we wear can either become a lifeline . . . or a lifelong curse.

So, I know what it is to be both simultaneously driven by this unshakable sense you’re being called up to something greater, to know in your bones you were somehow meant for more . . . and, at the very same time, still doubt that a person like you will ever get there.

And then, as if we don’t spend enough time counting ourselves out, there is a whole world out there always more than willing to underestimate us on our behalf.

For most of our lives, we have been the ones left out on purpose when the invitations were made. We don’t seem, at first glance, to be one of the shiny, shiny perfect people, so we get passed over again and again. There has always been someone louder, someone more outgoing, someone more popular with the crowds. We are the last ones anyone would ever think would go on and do big things.

We are the kind ones, the quiet ones, the ones so often overlooked.

We are the tender hearts, the gentle spirits, the old souls so often missed despite all these see- through layers of thin skin. The ones who never take up too much oxygen in the room.

They mistake our kindness for weakness. They mistake our humility for not really mattering. They mistake our silence as us not having anything particularly interesting or important to say.

And in doing that, the mistake they really make is that they MISS it . . .

The quiet one who is actually a prolific writer.
The misfit who etches beauty from pain with every brushstroke.
The hidden one who sings a new song, and it calls heaven closer.
The humble one who is, in fact, a brilliant business owner.
The unassuming one who dances, and every gesture forms a posture of prayer.
The one who has a teacher’s heart that changes the trajectory of other people’s lives.
The overlooked one who shrinks into corners at cocktail parties but opens their mouth to speak from the stage, and it’s as if the whole room floods with golden light.

It’s so easy for other people to look right through us and miss the
pure magic we hold inside.

And years of accumulation of other people’s doubts have now
blurred and bled into one another, at once auto- tuned and amplified,
until they’ve become the singular voice of reason in our own heads.

Every day it tells us, It would be safer not to show up.

For some of us, the weight of those doubts crushes us right where we are. Keeps us standing in one place. We are forever ready to give up before we even begin. Day by day, faced with the choice between creating nothing and creating failure …we choose nothing. We hide in plain sight. We wait on perfect. We contort because it is easier than to be criticized. And yet another year goes by. The clock goes on ticking. And the world is worse for our absence.

For others of us though, in a true Jeff Goldblum–worthy “Life, uh . . . finds a way” adapt-or- find- yourself- extinct moment of clarity, we take those petrified doubts, inject them with every ounce of survival wired right into our DNA, and hatch an entirely new species of success altogether.

We take their underestimation, and we wear it like an eternal badge of honor.

Now we are the keepers of every perceived slight. The oracles of the uninvited. Patron saints of the underdogs. These modern- day alchemists who take other
people’s doubts and turn them into our own determination.*

**I heard this line from my favorite instructor, Robin Arzon, one day on the Peloton,
and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

For those of us among the Sacred Order of the Underestimated,we have become experts in our own internal combustion. We found a way to take other people’s words and shove them down, bottle them up for future use as an accelerant of explosive proportions to show everyone who ever doubted us just exactly how far we’ve come. We figured out somewhere along the way how to harness the decomposing, off-gassing, hot piles of rejection rotting in the backyard corners of our minds . . . and turn it into jet fuel.

Or, as the sweatshirt I once found on Etsy so succinctly put it, “Underestimate me, that’ll be fun.”

And at first glance it is fun, isn’t it? This dedicating our entire lives
to proving other people wrong.

Spoiler alert: The hero gets everything they ever wanted. Oh, you
thought you should bet against me? You thought I couldn’t do it?
Big mistake. Huge. Cue the Rodeo Drive shopping- spree montage.

So why then does it feel like we are the ones always left holding the boulder when it all comes crashing down?

That’s because in our most honest moments, when it’s just us and the darkness settled in, we know we have made an external enemy of anyone who would ever doubt us because it’s easier than having to deal with what’s on the inside. If you think we’re mad at other people for underestimating us . . . you should see how much we hate ourselves.

What’s on the inside.

At this I picture a Pandora’s Box— inside is a glass menagerie of all our most fragile doubts, our most shattered self- sabotaging, the sharpest shards of all our second- guessing, perfectionism, overthinking, overapologizing, and generally taking ourselves out of the race before it has even begun. They are all stuffed down and hidden, temporarily kept captive even, in this gold music box we keep proudly displayed on the mantel and take down at least once a day to spit polish until it shines. We’ve been told that it’s one of those music boxes with a tiny ballerina inside, her feet grotesquely fused directly into the metal spring meant to keep her forever spinning out. It’s in there now to remind us how we must always be on our toes, and how if we ever let anything drop, including the act, we will just cease to exist altogether.

But we don’t dare ever look inside to confirm this.
Because once you lift that lid there’s no going back.

Here’s what they don’t tell you about Pandora’s Box. We know it as the latch that was lifted and let a swarm of evils loose on the world. But did you know that at the very last second, when it was all but too late, the box was slammed shut, leaving only one thing remaining inside: hope.

Philosophers have argued for years about whether this silver lining of hope was intended as a “divine gift . . . a lifeline, a spark that can see us through the darkest of nights” in a world with so much trouble. Or whether that kind of hope— the hope that says you will always get everything you ever wanted if you will only just keep pushing harder— was intended as a curse itself, “offering the illusion of comfort while keeping us in perpetual longing, and when our dreams shatter, plunging us [back] into despair.”

Anyone who has spent a lifetime playing small knows what it’s like to be suspended in a perpetual state of longing. We know what it’s like to act as if it’s all on us. We know the curse we walk around with— carrying both the heavy weight of our wildest expectations and the even heavier regret of all our many deep disappointments—knowing full well that we only wound up back here, back down at the bottom, because we are the ones who once again dropped the
ball.

Sisyphus and his elusive boulder roll all the way back down the mountain to offer us this cautionary tale. We think that’s a story solely about having to spend an eternity carrying very heavy things in order to get to where we’re going. But the truth is, the real curse was always a lifetime spent putting our hope in the wrong things, perpetually starting over thinking this time it will be different, only to get to the end of our lives and realize these decades of heavy lifting were, in fact,
meaningless all along.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.*

*Often attributed to Albert Einstein.

For you and me, our hope does not rest in pushing and pushing until we get everything we ever wanted. It’s going back to the beginning, busting the lid off of things, and healing everything that made us think we had to push so hard in the first place.

In Dirt, I talk about this dream I once had where the trailer I grew up in was sinking:

In a panic, afraid of losing it all, I found a garbage bag and began to
fill it with things. Ratty stuffed animals and musty old clothes. My
hands couldn’t move fast enough to take it all with me. It was just
then I heard a voice telling me that there was still time for me. That
it wasn’t too late.
But I first had to be willing to lay that junk down. This baggage I
had been trying so hard to hold on to. These scraps of my life that no
longer stood for what I thought they had. This supposed evidence
of something always lacking, a scarcity mindset that now no longer
served. . . .
It was a rhapsody and a reveille of a wake- up call that came to me
once in a dream. It told me there is freedom in laying down these
heavy things we were never meant to carry.

For a lifetime, being underestimated and trying to prove other people wrong has been one of the most important things about you.

But now, the blast of a new refrain fills the air.
The sharp, brass notes flood your veins like a fight song and tell you it’s time to RISE, this time not to prove something but because you have something to say.
It is a reveille of a wake- up call that will no longer be silenced.
A screaming alarm going off in every waking cell of your body.
It repeats over and over until you finally refuse to ignore it.
With an ever- rising, urgent crescendo, it at last opens your eyes.
The person underestimating you the most . . . just might be YOU.

---

Mary Marantz is the three-time bestselling author of Underestimated, Dirt, and Slow Growth Equals Strong Roots, as well as the host of the popular podcast The Mary Marantz Show. She grew up in a trailer in rural West Virginia and was the first in her family to go to college before going on to Yale for law school. Her work has been featured on CNN, MSN, Business Insider, Bustle, Thrive Global, Southern Living, Hallmark Home & Family, and more. She and her husband Justin live in an 1880s fixer-upper by the sea in New Haven, Connecticut, with their two very fluffy golden retrievers, Goodspeed and Atticus. Learn more at MaryMarantz.com.

Comment below answering one of the following questions and you’ll be entered one of TWO copies of Underestimated! (Winners will be announced next Wednesday!)

• Is there a dream in your heart that you’ve hidden (or ignored) because it just doesn’t seem possible in light of your real life? (If you have the courage, I’d love for you to share what it is!)
• Is there a time you can share that you dared to belief in yourself against the opinion of others (including your inner voice!) I’d love to hear how that played out! 🙂

Leave a comment below and I’ll announce winners next week (on Wednesday, May 7)