2020: A Year I Will Never Wish Away

I feel it’s important to start this post with an acknowledgement: my personal experience is one that reflects privilege. My heart sincerely goes out to those who had to face much larger problems than I did in 2020, whether that be loss, illness, or an inability to make basic ends meet. I hope it will come across that I recognize and do not take for granted how fortunate I am.

2020. A year for the books. The world has spent the last week cheers-ing away a year that has been widely labeled the worst in our lifetime. Funny memes and commemorative 2020 dumpster fire Christmas ornaments abound. Don’t get me wrong, the memes were hilarious and I mean no offense to anybody who is throwing a joyful farewell party to 2020, but I find myself sitting here thinking…

Am I the only one who feels like 2020 was the best year of my life?

I recognize that this is a strange statement coming from someone who hasn’t had a vacation in over a year, lost two jobs in under thirty days, moved out of a condo she could no longer afford, set a personal record for street sweeping tickets received in a year, and spent most of the year without income. 2020 wrecked my $hit too ya’ll, but it broke things that, for me personally, needed to be broken.

Complacency

I made an awesome friend on Lunchclub recently (message me for an invite!) named Andrew. His company Story Source hosts a variety of awesome networking and storytelling events. I attended one such event this past week and it proved to be an incredibly thought-provoking way to end the year. We chatted about the idea of “resolve” and were prompted with three questions:

• What got resolved in 2020?

• What do you want to resolve in 2021?

• What do you resolve to not resolve in 2021? (I.E. what are you going to learn to accept?)

I didn’t have to think about the first one for even a second. My answer was complacency.

Before 2020, there was a disconnect in my life. Don’t get me wrong, I liked my job. I had great coworkers. I had incredible friends who I loved to paint the town red with and a growing list of memorable trips abroad. The disconnect existed in the fact that I was living a day-to-day reality that was not fostering growth or progressing me towards the goals that I really wanted to reach. My reality was not aligned with what I’m actually passionate about.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of spending the first morning of 2021 in a Beats + Breath Masterclass hosted by two amazing teachers and IndiFit partners, Rajiv Nathan and Meenakshi Wadwha. Meenakshi offered an incredible insight as she led us through meditation:

“Many of us cannot experience bliss because we are too preoccupied with our own comfort”

This resonated so much. This is exactly what I had spent the last several years doing: optimizing for comfort. I was coloring inside the lines, taking very few risks, and as a result experiencing very little personal growth. I had very few lows and nothing to complain about, but I also had very few highs and nothing to be authentically excited about. I was complacent, but boy did that get resolved in 2020.

Freedom

On April 29th, I had one of the few panic attacks I’ve had in my life. No, April 29th was not the day I got laid off at Ritual. That was April 2nd, just 27 days earlier. April 29th is the day that I got a call from Uber notifying me that they would be regrettably rescinding a job offer that I had accepted a few days prior (confirmed start date and all.) The rescission stemmed from a leak that spurred headlines about Uber laying off up to 20% of its employees. I now look back on this as one of the most significant “everything happens for a reason” moments in my life.

What ensued was one of the largest pity parties in history (shoutout to Katie and Brian, two true friends whose small act of kindness on that day I will never forget.) I was paralyzed in a state of fight or flight for days. After taking an accelerator workshop with Dr. Gary McGrath a few weeks ago, I now understand the science behind what was happening to me: I was in an “amygdala hijack",” wherein the part of your brain that carries out rational cognitive thought literally turns off and the part of your brain that controls emotion (fight - flee - freeze) takes over entirely.

I froze and experienced a period of time that genuinely felt like the “rock bottom” of my adult life at the time. I froze because it turns out that fear of financial distress is a powerful trigger for me. (Side note: I’ve never shared this next bit publicly before now, but over time I’ve realized that it’s important for us to normalize vulnerable topics like personal finance. Over the years, I’ve been shocked by how many of my closest friends were navigating the same struggle I was at the very same time and we never once spoke about it.) My sensitivity to financial distress is two-fold: first, as I’m sure many can relate to, if you experienced a sense of financial scarcity as a child, there’s always this drive to “escape” that and never experience it again. More than that, however, it’s a trigger for me because when I was 25 years old I found myself $16,000 in credit card debt.

Writing that sentence still makes me cringe. I made so many mistakes and I carried so much shame as a result. I ended up making a commitment to myself to fix the problem in early 2016. It took me 3 years to dig out of, but as of Jan 2019 I was debt-free once again. A big lesson was learned, but some tenderness was left behind on the overall topic of personal finance (which I am always happy to chat about 1:1 if you need it.)

Moving on from the Uber setback required me to re-assess my finances in a big way for the first time in quite awhile. I started to look at things through a different lens: what purpose did each financial commitment serve and did it authentically spark joy?

The result was freedom. I started to realize that I didn’t need nearly as much as I thought I did. With that realization came optionality. If I could make a bunch of sacrifices and stretch my savings, maybe I could do something crazy like chase my dreams. Thus, IndiFit was born.

Suddenly I had a powerful yard stick for decision making every time I considered spending:

“is this worth reducing the personal runway that I have to to build my company?”

It turns out the answer is almost always no. To my own surprise, there is no happy hour and designer shoe-shaped hole in my heart. There are no deficits because I’m genuinely finding joy in something that is worth all of the sacrifices. I just wish I had done it sooner.

Agency

When I think back on the vicious cycle that I was in before 2020, I realize that I knew something was wrong, I just hadn’t pinpointed what it was. As they say, “hindsight is 2020.” (Pun intended)

The root of the issue was that I lacked agency in my own happiness.

I watched an awesome Netflix documentary yesterday called Less is Now. It did an incredible job of putting all this into words. The punchline of the documentary is that we often attach our happiness to material objects, try to buy our way out of our problems, and we create so much noise and clutter that we can’t even savor the things that really matter. Boy did that hit home.

I was stuck in a cycle of believing that I needed “stuff” to solve my problems and be happy, which meant that I had to earn lots of money to make sure I could buy all that stuff. I was earning the money and buying all the stuff, but somehow it still wasn’t accomplishing the end goal of feeling happy.

2020 felt like a very different year. There was way less money, way less stuff, but way more happiness. Hm, maybe I had it backwards?

Here are some specific examples of the way that my brain was wired to work prior to 2020 and the contrast that I experienced this year:

2019: I want to be really fit, so I need expensive gym memberships, activewear, and equipment.

2020: I’m in the best shape of my life and it’s a result of doing bodyweight exercises in my dining room and in local parks with amazing independent instructors who inspire me.

2019: I want to be self confident, so I need clothes and accessories that make me feel good.

2020: I’ve never felt better about who I am or how I show up in the world. I’ve worn “hard pants” maybe three times since April and I’ve joyfully sold a large chunk of my wardrobe on Poshmark.

2019: I want to relax and feel less stressed, so I need expensive vacations that help me escape my daily reality.

2020: I manage stress by doing my best to authentically find joy in the process vs. focusing on outcomes. I no longer want to “escape” my day to day.

2020 helped me to stop attaching my own wellbeing to an external object or force. I found intrinsic happiness and motivation, and It turns out that happiness is a lot harder to extinguish when it comes from within.

Abundance

One of the most ridiculous manifestations of my former worship of material objects was a black Valentino handbag. I bought it with a bonus I received shortly after digging myself out of my aforementioned mountain of debt and bad decisions. I’m not sure exactly what I was trying to prove with this purchase - maybe that I had arrived in life? That the objects that left my house with me were so important that they deserved a two thousand dollar container to transport them in? IDK.

The bag might have sparked joy for a little while, but it sure faded more quickly than expected. After losing my job and radically changing my mindset over the course of 2020, I found that my disdain for that bag grew every day. Not only did it never leave the house, but it seemed to perfectly represent the excess that I was trying to shed. I was trying to transition from an abundance of “stuff” to an abundance of joy and community.

As I was going through this whole downsizing journey, however, there was one pricey item I wanted really badly: A Peloton.

I know what you’re thinking - I’m the founder of a fitness startup. Shouldn’t I be booking workouts on IndiFit? I assure you that I do, but as an ambivert I also find solo fitness to be a necessary and energizing part of my routine. I also love the opportunity to snoop on the underlying magic of other platforms and think about how we can incorporate those same ingredients into IndiFIt to help our partners succeed.

I ended up selling the Valentino… along with nearly $1k of other crap on Facebook marketplace (a platform I could rant about at length) and buying the Peloton (@chicago_cheryl.) It was a surprisingly rewarding experience because it felt markedly different than other large purchases I had made in the past. Rather than spending out of pocket, I had sold things that didn’t matter to me in order to trade them for something that I knew authentically would. The purchase aligned with my core objectives to be inspired, healthy, and connected with community.

(Again, pardon the privilege - white woman tells story about trading Valentino bag for a Peloton. I get it, but I hope the underlying message is clear.)

Fast forward to this morning: I was riding to a recorded version of Ally Love’s 12/20 Sundays with Love ride (on a Saturday because I like to live #dangerously.) In the middle of the ride, Ally shared a parable as the beat dropped to heart pumping EDM music.

The story goes like this:

A father takes his son on a journey to see how poor people live. At the conclusion, he asks his son what he learned. The son answers:

Well Father, I saw the poor people - we have one dog and they have four.

We have a pool that reaches to the middle of our garden. They have a creek that has no end.

We have imported lanterns in our garden. They have a sky of stars. 

Our patio reaches to our front yard. They have a whole horizon.

We have a small piece of land to live on. They have fields that go beyond sight.

We have servants who serve us, but they serve each other.

We buy our food. They grow theirs.

We have walls around our property to protect us, but they have friends to protect them.

The boy’s father was speechless. Then the son added: Thanks Dad, for showing me just how poor we are.

That’s what 2020 did for me: it showed me how poor I was. Reflecting on a valuable lesson about life while doing a Peloton ride on a bike that I purchased with the sale of that stupid handbag somehow seemed like the perfect metaphor for my 2020.

While I was rich in material comforts before this year, I was poor in fulfillment, freedom, and motivation.

Today I am financially “poorer” than when the year began. The best case scenario is that sometime this year I’ll be able to start to pay myself a salary that is about 1/3rd of what I made in 2019 and roughly equivalent to what I made in my first job out of college 9 years ago.

But, boy do I feel rich. I feel rich because I have the privilege of running a mission-driven company serving partners who have also become friends and doing it with an incredible team who I trust. I feel rich because COVID has created a world that feels smaller than ever, where connecting with like-minded people on a global scale has never been easier. I feel rich because I have more time in my day to do things that make me feel balanced, like prioritizing fitness and getting plenty of sleep. I feel rich because I do things on a daily basis that intimidate me and stimulate growth. Finally, I feel rich because my happiness and satisfaction come from inside instead of being attached to external objects.

And for those reasons, the Christmas ornament that I’ll hang on my tree to remember 2020 will certainly not be a dumpster fire.