Trigger Warning: Dena’s talk included discussion of suicide and suicide attempt. If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.
Okay, I’ll be honest with you. I wasn’t expecting to get all emotional at a conference. I figured I’d sit in on some sessions, grab some good ideas, connect with some people, and head home with a notebook full of actionable stuff. You know, the usual. But then Dena Gillis walked up to the front of the room at the 1% Better Conference, and within about five minutes, the entire place went completely still.
Not a phone in sight. Not a side conversation. Just people… listening. What she said has been rattling around in my head ever since.
Look, I know this blog is typically about money and stuff. It’s about building financial freedom, breaking bad money habits, and figuring out how to actually get ahead in a world that sometimes feels stacked against you. But I think about this a lot, right? The reasons most people struggle financially isn’t because they lack information. It’s because life knocks them down, and they don’t know how to get back up. That’s exactly what Dena talked about. It was one of the best sessions at the conference, and I think it’s one of the most important things to share with you.
She Walked Into the Room with Something Real
Dena opened her talk by saying something that landed hard. She said, “Resilience isn’t something we’re born knowing how to do. It’s something we learn, often unwillingly, when life refuses to go according to plan.”
Yeah Man. I felt that one.
“Resilience isn’t something we’re born knowing how to do. It’s something we learn, often unwillingly, when life refuses to go according to plan.” – Dena Gillis
Dena grew up in a small town in North Dakota, upper-middle-class family. She got good grades, did cheerleading, theater and music. From the outside looking in, it looked totally fine. More than fine, actually. But she when on to point out that there was something missing on the inside. Something no amount of external achievement could fix. Real, emotional connection wasn’t really there. Back then and in her family and in school mental health was treated like a weakness. And the message she got, over and over, was that feelings were something you either pushed through or kept to yourself.
At the age of 16, carrying pain she didn’t have the tools or language to understand, she attempted to take her own life.
She told this heavy, heartfelt and powerful story quietly with no drama. Just the truth. When she quickly regretted it and ended up on a dirty bathroom floor at school begging classmates for help while they told her she was being dramatic and just over-reacting. Dena was rushed to the hospital. After being treated and sent home to parents who were, as she put it in one word, “embarrassed.” They actually told her they would never speak of it again. This was so hard to hear. I was choked up and teary eyed. I was feeling all the feels.
I want to sit here, on that for a just a minute. I think a lot of us have had those moments where the people who were supposed to show up for us, didn’t. It’s not because they were some kind of monster. But because they were operating from their own unprocessed pain and their own generational baggage. Sometimes it’s a father that had also survived an abusive household. Or a mother had been raised to keep up appearances and keep her opinions quiet. They were doing the best they knew how. But unfortunately, the best they knew how still left a mark. That part of her story isn’t a detour. It’s kinda like the whole foundation.
Resilience Is a Muscle, Not a Mindset Poster
Here’s the thing Dena said that I keep coming back to. She described resilience not as some inspirational catchphrase, but as a muscle. One that gets torn. Rebuilt. And strengthened over time. That tracks with literally everything I know about getting your finances or any part of your life together.
You don’t become financially resilient by reading one blog post or listening to one podcast episode and having a lightbulb moment. You build it by making mistakes, recovering from them, and doing something differently next time. You build it by getting hit with an unexpected expense and surviving it. By taking on too much debt and finding your way out. By maybe trusting the wrong financial product in the beginning, or the wrong advisor, or your own worst impulse purchases, and learning from it without completely falling apart.
Dena wasn’t talking about money. But she was absolutely talking about the same process. She lost her brother at the young age of 33. He died suddenly from an undetected heart defect. She said she was on the phone with her father, and then collapsed to the floor. In a single phone call, she went from little sister to only child. “There is no road map for that kind of grief,” she said. “No timeline. No checklist. No right way to mourn.”
Anyone who has ever had the ground fall out from under them, or the their world come crashing down around them knows exactly what she means. And the parallel to financial rock bottom is uncomfortably real. When you’re drowning in debt, when you’ve lost a job or a business, when you look at your bank account and feel that particular brand of shame and hopelessness, there’s no neat five-step plan that makes it okay immediately. Grief and financial devastation share a lot of the same emotional DNA. This unbearable weight that is just crushing us.
“There is no road map for that kind of grief,” she said. “No timeline. No checklist. No right way to mourn.” – Dena Gillis
Breaking the Cycle Is the Work
One of the most powerful threads running through Dena’s entire talk was this idea of breaking cycles. Her parents, for all their flaws, were trying to do better than the generation before them. They didn’t fully succeed. But Dena took that baton and ran with it in a completely different direction.
When she became a mother, she made a decision. The cycle of emotional unavailability was ending with her. She promised herself her daughter would never look out into a crowd of parents and not see her face. She told her she was proud of her. She showed up.
This is something I often reminded my foster daughter. I recall times when she would express that her mom ended up struggling, her brother ended up struggling, and she’d just follow and end up struggling too. Her cards were already dealt. I would remind her, she can break the cycle. The “bad luck” or poor decisions can end with her and she could change that family tree! This is financial independence work too. Not in some abstract metaphorical way. Literally.
So many of us are carrying financial habits we didn’t choose. Spending patterns, debt avoidance, fear of investing, impulse buying for emotional relief. These are the money scripts or beliefs that get passed down just like traits like eye color! The parents who never talked about money, or who fought constantly about money, or who treated credit cards like free money, shaped how we handle our own finances today. Breaking that cycle requires the same intentional, and yes, sometimes painful work.
Your Lowest Moment Is Not Your Whole Story
Near the end of Dena’s talk, she listed what resilience had taught her. I jotted these down as fast as I could, and I want to share them because they can hit different in the context of a financial journey.
- Asking for help is a form of strength, not weakness. Plenty of people white-knuckle their financial stress alone because admitting it feels like failure. It’s not failure. It’s the first step.
- Pain doesn’t disqualify you. It shapes you. Getting into debt, making bad financial decisions, going through a bankruptcy or a foreclosure doesn’t mean the game is over. It means you have information now that you didn’t have before.
- Your lowest moment DOES NOT define your highest potential. Read that one again. Read it ONE MORE TIME!
Resilience is quiet. It doesn’t look like someone jumping up on a table and shouting about their comeback. It looks like opening your bank account when you’re scared to look. It looks like calling the credit card company and asking about hardship options. It looks like making one small better decision today, even when everything still feels heavy.
The Part That Got Me
At the very end, Dena talked about her daughter, who recently moved away for school. She described how hard it was to let her go, and then how much joy it gave her to watch her daughter thrive. And then she said something that just wrecked me, “My daughter calls me every single day, just to visit. Not because she has to, but because she wants to.”
She said that daily call is the highlight of her day. That the goal of parenting was never perfection. It was connection. And somehow, through all the imperfect moments, they built something strong enough that her daughter chooses to call. I was thinking of how I’d like to improve my connection with my own children. I’d like to know how their day was, and how they are doing.
That’s the f’n finish line right there. Not a number in a brokerage account. Not a paid-off house. It’s connection and purpose, damn it! A life that means something to the people you love.
What This Has to Do With Your Money
Well, Everything.
Because the reason you want financial freedom isn’t really about the money. It’s about time. It’s about presence. It’s about being the parent in the crowd. It’s about having the capacity to help the people you love, and the bandwidth to actually be there, emotionally and physically, without financial stress eating you alive in the background.
This story is about resilience. But at its core, it’s about getting back up, about choosing over and over again, to build something better than what you were handed. That’s the same thing we’re trying to do here at Heavy Metal Money every single week.
You can come from financial chaos and build real wealth. You can break the debt cycle that your parents never could. You can create something your kids inherit as a gift instead of a burden. But none of that happens without the kind of resilience Dena described. The kind that gets built in the hard moments, not just the easy ones.
So wherever you are right now, whether you’re on a roll or you’re in the middle of a season that’s kicking your teeth in, please remember you ARE stronger than you think. Your story isn’t over. And the version of you a few years from now is grateful you kept going.
Horns up my friends \m/ \m/
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