The heat from the soldering iron is a physical weight on my knuckles, a dry, metallic hum that fills the 18 square feet of my workbench. I am hunched over a panel of 13th-century style leaded glass, trying to fuse a joint that’s been stubborn for 48 minutes, but my mind is three rooms away, stuck on a PDF that won’t upload. It is 8 am in July, and I spent the better part of the morning untangling a string of Christmas lights that I’d left in a heap since December. Why was I untangling them now, in the sweltering humidity? Because the mess had become a structural threat to the closet, much like the 28 browser tabs currently open on my laptop are a threat to my sanity. I have a 48-page permit application sitting in my inbox for a restoration project at a municipal library, and the digital portal requires a signature from a specific historical consultant who, according to three different phone calls, retired in 1998.

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from fighting a ghost. It isn’t the noble fatigue of a long day’s work; it’s the corrosive drain of trying to follow a process that was never designed to succeed. We’ve been taught to call this ‘the hustle.’ We’ve been told that if we just push a little harder, if we send that 88th email, or wait on hold for another 18 minutes, we are building character. We are being ‘resilient.’

The Illusion of Grit

I recently listened to a podcast where a host was interviewing a jeweler who had just opened her first boutique. The host’s voice was dripping with that performative awe we reserve for survivors. ‘Tell us about your grit,’ the host urged. ‘Tell us how you overcame the impossible hurdles of local zoning and the 18-month delay on your business license.’ The jeweler obliged, recounting stories of sleeping on the floor and hand-delivering papers to 8 different offices because the online system didn’t recognize her tax ID. She laughed as she told it, and the host laughed too, and they both agreed it was a beautiful testament to her passion.

Off-mic, I know that story feels different. Off-mic, that jeweler wasn’t feeling like a hero. She was feeling like a victim of a system that offloads its own inefficiency onto the people least equipped to carry it. The hidden mistake we make as a culture is treating institutional dysfunction as a character-building exercise instead of what it actually is: a design failure. We romanticize the heroics required to navigate a maze that shouldn’t exist in the first place. If a bridge is falling down, we don’t congratulate the driver for their ‘persistence’ in flooring it across the gap. We fix the bridge. But in business, and especially in the creative trades, we expect the driver to be a stunt pilot.

The Scaffolding Solution

Grit is a bandage for a wound the system keeps reopening.

I’ve spent 18 years working as Luna B., a stained glass conservator. My job is literally to pick up the pieces of things that have shattered and put them back together in a way that lasts another 108 years. You’d think I’d be a fan of grit. But when I look at a window that has bowed under its own weight because the original lead came was too thin, I don’t blame the glass for not being ‘tough’ enough. I blame the structure. The glass was fine; the scaffolding failed.

When I was untangling those lights this morning, I realized I was doing exactly what I do with my business taxes. I was trying to solve a problem created by previous negligence-my own and the system’s. The lights were a tangled mess because I didn’t have a spool to wrap them on. I didn’t have the right scaffolding. So I sat there, sweating in July, doing ‘the work’ of untangling, which added zero value to my life or my art. It was just maintenance on a mistake.

We do this in our professional lives constantly. We spend 58% of our time (I’m making that up, but it feels right) dealing with the friction of being an ‘entrepreneur’-the filing, the chasing, the reconciling-rather than actually doing the thing we are supposed to be doing. We’ve normalized the idea that to be successful, you must first survive a gauntlet of administrative hazing. If you can’t navigate the 18 different logins for the state revenue portal, maybe you just don’t want it enough?

That is a lie. It’s a lie that protects the bureaucracy. By framing the struggle as a personal test of will, we absolve the institutions of their responsibility to be usable. We allow them to be opaque, sluggish, and contradictory because ‘that’s just how it is.’ We celebrate the person who carries 108 gallons of water in a bucket with 8 holes in it, rather than the person who suggests we should probably just use a pipe.

The Scaffolding Analogy

This is why I’ve become so obsessed with the idea of scaffolding. Durable, entrepreneurial scaffolding. It’s the difference between a person hanging off a cliff by their fingernails and a person standing on a platform with a railing. Both are at the same height. Both have the same view. But one is able to actually look at the view, while the other is just trying not to die. Most of us are just trying not to die, and we’re being told that the burn in our fingernails is ‘growth.’

Architecting Your Environment

I remember a project 18 months ago. I was commissioned to restore 8 windows for a private chapel. The client was wonderful, but the logistics were a nightmare of $1588 in unexpected shipping fees and 28 missed calls from a contractor who didn’t understand that you can’t just ‘power wash’ a 100-year-old window. I found myself in a state of constant, low-level panic. I was hustling. I was being ‘resilient.’ And I was doing absolutely terrible work. My joints were messy, my cuts were jagged. I was so busy surviving the process that I forgot to respect the craft.

It wasn’t until I sat down and forced myself to build a system-a literal physical rack for the glass and a digital tracker for the communication-that the project stabilized. I had to stop being a hero and start being an architect of my own environment. I had to realize that my ‘grit’ was actually a symptom of my lack of support.

This realization is what leads people toward a prison art marketplace, where the goal isn’t just to cheer you on while you struggle, but to provide the actual scaffolding that prevents the struggle from becoming the default state. We need systems that absorb the complexity so the individual can focus on the contribution. We need to stop asking artists to be lawyers, accountants, and IT specialists just so they can be allowed to paint.

Refusing to Romanticize Suffering

I look at the $878 invoice on my desk for a specialized kiln part that I had to order 8 weeks ago. It still hasn’t arrived. The old Luna would have spent the afternoon calling the company, demanding to speak to 8 different managers, and then posting a ‘hustle’ quote on Instagram about how the path to success is paved with obstacles. The new Luna just sends one firm email, records the delay in her project timeline, and goes back to her workbench. I’m not going to let their failure become my character-building exercise. I’m just going to wait.

There is a profound power in refusing to romanticize your own suffering. When you stop seeing the maze as a challenge and start seeing it as a waste of time, you begin to look for the exit. You start demanding better tools. You start looking for the scaffolding.

I finished untangling the lights at 10:08 am. They are now wrapped neatly around a piece of cardboard I cut from a shipping box. It isn’t ‘heroic.’ It didn’t make me a better person. It just made next December 18th slightly less annoying. And sometimes, that’s the most revolutionary thing you can do: refuse to struggle for the sake of struggling. Stop the hustle. Build the scaffold. Let the glass be glass, and let the structure do its job.