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jessgartner · 10 years

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2013 Life Olympics

I don't want to tempt (or limit) the fates by awarding this year any premature superlatives, but I have a suspicion that I will always look back on 2013 as a pivotal year in my life.

It's a little surreal to think that so much of what brings me daily joy and fulfillment didn't even exist a year ago.

For the past few years, I have come think of adulthood as the Life Olympics: the constant striving for balance between Career, Home, Relationships, Health, and Wellness.

The results are in for 2013:

Career - Gold Star

Founding and growing Allovue has been a thrilling and fulfilling journey, and I can't wait to see what next year brings. Despite the popular myths about startup founders failing to sleep, eat, or do anything unrelated to business orders, I think I succeeded in striking a pretty fair balance with the other 4 realms of my life, but there's still plenty of room for improvement.I resigned from my job the first day back after the New Year holiday. I had come across this quote on Pinterest from We Bought a Zoo, and just kept repeating it to myself: 20 seconds of insane courage.

Emphasis on insane.

I had no plan, no funding, and no experience - just some gnawing intuition that I had to go bring this idea in my head to life, or feel the churning discontent of regret forever. So, into the abyss.I woke up on Monday February 4 - my first day as an untethered, fun-employed entrepreneur - feeling an odd mix of liberation and terror. For the first time in my adult life, (maybe my entire life?) I felt solely responsible for myself. There was no one to tell me what to do or how to do, but then, there was no one to tell me what to do or how to do it. I was a bit paralyzed by the weight of my newfound freedom at first, and then at 9:49am, I remembered: "To begin, begin," and so I began. I'm not sure what I did that first day, but I must have felt some vague sense of accomplishment, because I had this to say at the end of the day:

I know it won't always be this fun...But isn't it ok to bask in the sheer exuberance of it - just for a little while? Just for today, I'll relish in the joy that accompanies the audacity to live the very life I imagined. Just for a moment, I'll play in that narrow intersection of pleasure and purpose, feeling infinite and electric.

Fortunately, that feeling lasted more than a day. The chaos of "startup life" feels oddly natural to me in a way that the routine of other jobs never had before. I think I worked on 8 different jobs this year to make it work, but I did it on my own terms, so I can finally read this speech without the nagging feeling of being slightly off center:

The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.

- Steve Jobs

Relationships - Gold Star

Speaking of matters of the heart, two weeks before I started Allovue, I decided I was tired of eating dinner alone and revamped my online dating profile for what I promised would be the last damn time. I agreed to exactly one date the day after I activated my profile. On the way there, I reminded myself (aloud) that I was officially done compromising on my non-negotiables in relationships. Maybe the universe just wanted to hear me say it out loud, because I went into Brewer's Art that night to meet the actual man of my dreams in real life. I don't know if there's ever a good time to start a new relationship, but I'm pretty sure it is not two weeks before you leave your job to start a company. I've heard it said that you find love when you find yourself - I just wasn't expecting it all to happen, like, immediately, all at once, very fast.

Home - Silver

In the Home category, I include basic home maintenance, cleaning, and keeping personal finances in order. My home was probably cleaner than usual this year, because I was constantly hosting new AirBNB guests. Talk about an incentive to keep the house in order when people are literally rating your house on its cleanliness! Of course, part of my strategy was to just relegate the mess to my room, but even that's had to change with the addition of our new kitty, Darwin, who likes to scratch, sniff, claw, and eat anything in reach. I'm running out of room to stash junk and mess, so it looks like I will finally have to be a grown-up and either purge excess or keep things tidy! #likeanadult

Health - Bronze

As it turned out, it was a good year to start dating a doctor/lawyer. At the end of January, I found myself engaged in a class-action lawsuit after it was discovered that my doctor had been allegedly secretly photographing patients with a camera pen and subsequently committed suicide. Feeling anxious about the care I had been receiving for the past 4 years, I quickly sought a new doctor and was diagnosed with endocervical adenocarcinoma in situ - stage 0 of a fairly rare form of glandular cervical cancer. My doctor said it was usually difficult to catch this type of cancer so early, but since we did, I was able to have a minor surgery to remove the cancerous cells. I just had my 6 month check-up, and my tests came back normal!

So this whole litigation/investigation process turned out to be a bizarre, potentially life-saving blessing. Unchecked, the cancer would have very likely progressed and I would have been facing far more invasive treatment options. This made me think about all of the men and women who put off visiting a doctor for routine check-ups because they lack basic insurance. If my father hadn't harangued me about securing private insurance before I left my job-with-benefits, a health crisis would have been a financial catastrophe, too. Even my small surgery would have cost over $10,000 without insurance. This whole ordeal gave me a deeply personal lens with which to view the Affordable Care Act debate this year. I'm thankful our country is finally making an attempt to fix what I can attest to be a very broken system.

Despite attending more Bikram yoga classes this year than either of the past 2 years I've been practicing, I still didn't get to as many as I had aimed for. This is an area of my life that I really to need to work on making it a permanent habit. It's (sadly) looking like the best way to do that is to just get up at 5:30am to make the 6am class. I've gotten better at it, but it's still going to take some practice to make it less of a struggle-fest in the morning.

Wellness - Honorable Mention No surprises here. Personal wellness falls to the bottom of my priority list, year after year. I define personal wellness to include the things that feed my brain, creativity, and soul - probably not where I should be slacking off. This realm looks different for everyone, but for me it includes reading, writing, singing, cooking, taking pictures, and going to yoga. I fell woefully short of my book-a-week reading goal this year and abandoned my photo-a-week project in February. I did maintain my singing lessons every other week, which is a small victory, and I've started to carve out time for cooking delicious things on Sunday afternoons. This area definitely needs more work in 2014, and I think it needs to start with a shift in value judgment. In my gut, I know most of the inspiration for my "real" work comes from this personal creative time, but it's so indirect and quiet that it's easy to write-off these activities as less essential. No more! Wellness is essential.

You'll Figure It Out. In 2012 I wrote a lot about gender politics in the tech world. One day, I stopped and took a hard look at my own life. Technology, specifically as it related to solutions for education, was clearly a big passion of mine. Why wasn't I doing work in that field? Why wasn't I taking a leadership role in the very area that I was lamenting a lack of female leadership? The answers were all rooted in blinding fear. I was afraid I wasn't appropriately "certified" to do what I wanted to do. I was afraid I didn't know how to do what I wanted to do. I was afraid of what people would think, or say. Then, I realized that none of these were particularly good reasons to not do a thing that I wanted to do. So, I decided to just muster up that 20 seconds of courage, and force myself to figure it out. I surrounded myself with smart, helpful people, and asked a LOT of questions along the way. "Leap and the net will appear," says an old Zen proverb. Sometimes, you just have to build your own net.

#lifeolympics

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