Good morning! New York Gov. Kathy Hochul will talk with Trump, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex has a new podcast, and Amy Griffin found the power in vulnerability. Have a restful weekend.
– Telling her story. About five years ago, Amy Griffin started remembering. Through a combination of journaling and MDMA therapy, a long-buried trauma—repressed memories of childhood sexual assault—finally came to the surface. It’s a story that Griffin shares in her new book The Tell, which was just named the latest Oprah’s Book Club pick.
In the memoir, Griffin recalls the picture-perfect version of her life growing up in Texas, before shattering that image with these memories—then retreading that narrative and reevaluating everything. During the time period that Griffin recounts experiencing an endless onslaught of memories, she was only a few years into running her firm, G9 Ventures. G9 has backed female-founded brands like Bumble, Saie, Bobbie, and Midi.
Yet as she remembered this experience herself, and then began telling others about it, she found that doing so strengthened her relationships in all areas of her life—including the burgeoning relationships in her professional life. (Before founding G9, Griffin says she had “been in the background by choice,” raising her four kids with her husband, the hedge fund founder John Griffin.) “I realized that once I was first honest with myself, I was able to go and be honest with other people—the women in my life, my children, my family, my husband,” she says. “Everything was better in my life when I was vulnerable. There’s a power in vulnerability and it changed my relationships for the better.”
During those most intense months, Griffin remembers “days when I could barely get up off the floor, when I was trying to go on Zooms for work and put on a face to say, ‘Yes, I’m helping others, I’m taking this call to build businesses and create value for women,’ and yet I could barely get dressed.”
Once she stopped trying to hide what was going on from others or from herself, it changed how she built relationships with the founders in her portfolio. She can show up as her “full self” to help them, now that she knows who that self is. She isn’t scared by what once seemed like big problems. And she’s not afraid to have the hard conversations anymore. “I have a confidence now in the idea that it’s all going to work out,” she says. “When someone’s panicked about funding or they’re not growing at the rate they should be, we just have really honest conversations and we figure it out.”
She found unlikely connections between her work as an investor—where she is most passionate about brand and creative—and telling such a personal story. “Brand-building is what I love to do—this wasn’t a brand, but there’s the idea that I would tell my story and be honest about my truth,” she says.
Griffin says she looks for “humility” in founders. And many of those founders and friends have shown up to support her, through her process of remembering, writing, and now publishing her story, from Spanx’s Sara Blakely to Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd to Kitsch’s Cassandra Thurswell, to Reese Witherspoon and Gwyneth Paltrow.
Her biggest takeaway, though, applies beyond her close-knit circle. “You never know what’s going on in someone’s life,” she says she’s learned. “Always give someone the most generous belief in what they’re going through.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
