The interview went viral because she didn’t just speak like a champion; she spoke like someone who understood herself. After her gold medal wins, Eileen Gu began her interview by apologizing for being late. Her grandmother had just passed. There was no spectacle in her grief, only composure. She called her grandmother a steamship … steady, powerful, impossible to ignore. A woman who commanded her life rather than waiting for it to soften.

When she said that, something in me settled and stilled. I smiled and thought of my grandmother Rosie. When I picture Grandma Rosie, I don’t first see loss. I see the cool, unmistakable scent of Noxzema lingering in her bathroom, that clean softness that meant morning had begun. I see the rosy red lipstick she saved for special occasions …holidays, weddings, any moment that required her full presence. She applied it slowly, deliberately, as if steadfastness itself were a ritual.

And then there was her jewelry box.

I would sit cross-legged on the floor and lift the lid as if opening something sacred. I’d take everything out … each bracelet, each brooch, each delicate chain, laying them beside me in careful rows. I would try them on one by one, holding each trinket in my hand and inventing a story about where it had been, who had given it to her, and what room it had once entered. In my mind, every piece carried a past. When I was finished, I placed them all back exactly where they belonged, closing the lid gently, as if returning her strength to its container.

Grandma Rosie lost her mother, her husband, and her youngest son within three years. Grief could have dismantled her. It did not. She recalibrated and gripped the wheel of her life and steered. There was no dramatic proclamation, only motion and resolve. Grandma Rosie lived her life her way.

Watching Eileen speak about her grandmother felt like watching lineage echo across continents.

I recognized the instinct immediately, the refusal to drift. The understanding that no one is coming to captain your ship for you. I have felt the same tightening of the hands around the wheel. The same decision to make life work for me rather than be carried by it.

But here is where evolution enters. In another moment, perhaps the same interview, a reporter asked her, almost surprised, “Do you think before you speak? You’re so articulate.”

Gu’s answer was brilliant in its calm. She journals. She dissects her thought processes. She believes in neuroplasticity, the idea that the brain can be reshaped, that patterns can be interrupted, and that what we think and say is not fixed. She described herself almost like a scientist, tinkering with her own evolution, modifying her behavior so she can become a better human.

I felt that in my bones.

Those are my private rituals, too. Endless journal pages filled with self-inquiry, the belief that awareness is power, and a quiet practice of adjusting tone, reaction, and belief … not to become someone else, but to become more fully myself.

That is why I wrote Love, Me, an epistolary memoir to my eleven-year-old self. Because I, too, look back on that girl with reverence. Little Shannon sensed more than she could articulate. She endured more than she should have. And she was already building the neural pathways of resilience long before she knew the word for it.

To be proud of your younger self is a radical act. It means you are not at war with your past.

Our grandmothers were steamships, built to endure weather. We are part of a generation that inherited that force and chose to interrogate it, to study the storm, to map the currents, to believe the mind itself can be rewired. Grandma Rosie taught me how to steer. Introspection taught me how to steer with intention.

Somewhere between the scent of Noxzema and the sound of my pen on paper, I realized tenacity isn’t something I inherited. It’s something I keep refining. I am not just carrying her strength forward.

I am tinkering with tenacity.