New Normal
If you prefer an audio format below is me reading the blog out loud-
Amongst my friends, I refer to this affectionately as #autumngetsalife (and yes, I say ‘hashtag’ out loud). But new normal works too. If you’ve ever seen ‘How Stella Got Her Groove Back’ this blog is sort of like that except without anyone nearly as attractive as a young Taye Diggs. In a post-pandemic, fully remote work life, in an older body, and a new state, I’ve been trying to get back to something.
In a past life before I even knew what the datafam was or before the world knew what COVID was I lived in a cute little apartment between Little Tokyo and the Arts District of Downtown Los Angeles. I was a Senior Analyst for the Walt Disney Company, a proud Trojan (Fight On!), and was always up to something. LA sort of lends itself to that. If you can look past the rent prices, the traffic, and the smog there’s a surplus of opportunities to have a good time. When I wasn’t at work I was spending 16 hour days at Disneyland, scouring through piles at the Rose Bowl Flea Market, attending music festivals, hiking, at the beach, going to the movies, walking to the Walt Disney Concert Hall or the Staples Center, you name it. At that time in my life I knew how to stretch my legs and stretch a dollar.
March 2020 changed that.
Some of us don’t give the pandemic enough credit for the way it upended our lives. We mourn the losses but if we didn’t have personal experiences with that, it can be easy to feel rather unaffected with the only lingering symptom being that we’re extra alert when someone coughs on a plane. But this summer I paused to reflect on just how different my life is now.*
*Disclaimer: I know that because I don’t have any chronic health issues that I am privileged to not have the very real risk of getting COVID still be as large of a part of my daily life and I in no way am trying to suggest this is everyone’s reality, just that a lot of people feel like the pandemic is ‘behind them’.
Some of the changes were natural and probably going to happen regardless. Pandemic or not I was going to get older and [hopefully] wiser. I have a different job that’s brought me different challenges. But I had quite a big lifestyle shift that spring. In LA, it felt like COVID went from a 5-letter word to a natural disaster over night. I remember sitting at my desk in the Burbank office when we got the email saying not to come in the next day and that this was the plan indefinitely. I had already been contemplating moving out of my apartment at this time (I loved it but my wonderful roommate William was buying a loft nearby and moving out and I didn’t want a new roommate) and I saw this as a sign to make a big change. I called Shanny (my mom) who lived about 5 hours away in Gilbert, Arizona and asked if I could come home to wait out the storm, save up a little money, and move back to the city when things lifted. I didn’t own much - we were able to fit everything in my Honda Civic and her Toyota Corolla. And I left LA with every intent to return.
Me in my car on the drive from LA to Arizona on March 15, 2020
Now at the time I was speculating that the pandemic was going to last about 4-6 weeks and I’d be back in a new apartment in LA shortly after ready to pick up where I had left off. Spoiler alert: I still live at home 4 years later in Macomb, Michigan (we left Arizona for our hometown in the summer of 2022). But I, well all of us, heavily underestimated what the next couple of years were going to look like. I could never have imagined the fear and restlessness that would envelop us and that this was the start of a new chapter in my life where I would never return to LA at all. For a little over a year I only left my house once every two weeks, to the grocery store, maybe the pharmacy, and came right back. The days in the house blurred together. I tried to keep myself busy - learning new things, reading, art, and I had discovered the datafam so lots and lots of vizzes. I’m an only child so if there’s one thing I know how to do it’s occupy myself. But it felt a little sporadic and far from the lifestyle I had been accustomed to for almost a decade. I had also gotten a new [fully remote] job in October of 2020 (I just had my 4 year anniversary). This new company and role challenged me and excited me and gave me a LOT to do. It wasn’t until May of 2021 I did my first activity, dinner with a friend who was in town. Two months later, I began to travel, and that did bring a lot of color back into my life. But things were still definitely different.
I had different routines and different priorities. COVID isn’t entirely to blame, it was just the catalyst. I became hyper focused on my career, the cross between discovering the Tableau community and progressing at my new company motivated that. Paired with the fact that I live in a society that values productivity and labor above our sense of self. It is easy to get caught in the undercurrent of that mentality, where labor and your relation to it feel like the most valuable thing about you. And in the process, and in a new city I hadn’t gotten much chance to discover, I had lost touch with some of the more recreational aspects of my life.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m really proud of and grateful for the positive impact from the past few years. I started a blog, presented at Conference, was named Ambassador and Visionary, became a manager, and a grand manager, and now a great grand manager, and got promoted 3 times. I’ve also gone on over 50 trips (a viz or blog to commemorate at a later time). But while these accomplishments filled my professional life with purpose, when I thought about my day-to-day life, that’s all I was seeing. I was growing my career, but I was losing the parts of me that once made life feel adventurous, playful, and fun. The pie chart of my life had very few slices.
I wouldn’t consider myself a workaholic by any means but I am a hard worker and sometimes that meant spillage into my evenings or weekends. But maybe the more insidious part of it was that my day felt so full mentally with work regardless of how many hours I was actually working that in the evenings I wasn’t doing much of anything. And because I was working fully from home (which is a privilege I’m really grateful for) there were stretches of several days where I didn’t even need to leave the house. Then I would try to cram all of my life, though that still didn’t include a lot, into the weekends. And those were never long enough.
This is an oversimplification and will probably sound superficial but I felt very uninteresting, like I was in the sepia version of my life when it used to be technicolor. I felt overly defined by my profession. It consumed not only a lot of my week and mind but a lot of my identity. If you took away those titles (Director, Visionary), I didn’t know how to talk about myself or how I spent my time or what I liked to do. The person who was always up to something felt far away from me. There’s nothing wrong with leaning into your career but I leaned so hard I fell in.
This is where #autumngetsalife was born.
I returned from a trip at the beginning of July determined to make some lifestyle changes. Because of remote work and the reduction of my hobbies, my life was very sedentary. It was feeling a little 2D and I wanted to bring more, well, life to it. My plan was quite simple: do more stuff. I wish it felt as easy as that sounded. And I’m going to be completely transparent, I was really tired during the first couple months of this. Work was still draining a significant part of my battery daily and I was using up the rest at night in a way I just wasn’t used to anymore. But I do feel like I have gotten back to a me I haven’t seen since March of 2020.
What does this look like?
There are sort of 3 tenets of it: leave the house, move more, do something that’s not work every day.
Leave The House
As I mentioned, I could go days without needing to leave. And while I don’t necessarily have the goal to leave every day, I did want to get out more. A positive byproduct of this is also the fact that it was going to force me into starting some social hobbies. Yoga has been a big part of this, which I discuss more in depth in the next section. I’ve also gone back to seeing movies in the movie theater more regularly. I’ve only seen 5 over the past few months but part of that is because there were weeks where I had seen everything playing or they were too scary for me. I used to go once a week leading up to the pandemic. I love movies and I love the theater experience. I take a blanket and order the kids combo pack which has a small popcorn, small soft drink, and a fruit snack and is the perfect movie complement. I took a pottery class and intend to take more. And even added smaller things more regularly like going to local coffee shops or the farmer’s market. There’s other things I’ve looked into as well that I’ll put below as inspiration if you too are trying to get out more:
cooking classes, sewing classes, ballroom dancing classes, events at my favorite local museums, events at my favorite local theaters, events or classes held by my county’s Parks and Rec department (no it’s not just in the show they really do exist), gardening classes/floral arrangement classes at local florists, book clubs, volunteering
Move More
Leaving the house more obviously helped with this. I had gained weight during those years so physical activity was something I was pushing myself to get back to. The vanity of the weight didn't bother me nearly as much as what it signified, which is that I just wasn't doing much anymore. But I also was aware of the health impacts of it. Things felt harder. Again, I'm also older now (which has made me much pickier about my pillow quality), but getting more regular movement and back to a more mobile version of myself was a main goal of these efforts. I joined my local gym. I still hate it. I feel so aimless. But I do go. I also started using a walking pad that I already owned more regularly. I didn't have many specific goals outside of just making sure I was moving every day. And I joined a yoga studio in my area that I adore - over the past 3 months I've been to 38 classes and counting (I was also out of town for 2.5 weeks of this time period). I had tried yoga briefly in college and enjoyed how it made me more attentive to the way I moved and took care of my body. I can see a clear improvement in my strength, flexibility, and mindfulness as a result of being consistent with my practice. I have several yoga goals that I’m working towards. I have also looked into a reformer pilates studio though I am very intimidated by that.
[I hope to put out a viz soon about what my step count has been since I’ve started this journey.]
Non-Work Activities
Again, the aforementioned goals do support this as well but a key area I was focused on was having parts of my day that weren't just about work or my career. I see no reason at the point that I am in life that I should regularly have days where I work, feed myself, and nothing else. Not to get too existential but life is a finite resource. And there’s so much more I want out of it and want to put in it, besides just my job. I’ve already mentioned what this looks like for the out of the house activities but at home I’ve started to do more crafts and I’ve taken up sewing. Sewing is something I’ve always been interested in. It has high utility while still being a creative outlet. It does take an investment to get a sewing machine and initial supplies if you don’t own them already but afterwards can be cost effective if you put in the effort. I started with altering things I already owned that I wasn’t wearing or didn’t like the fit of. Then transitioned into buying thrifted items. I’ve even found fabric at the thrift store (I just picked up a wonderful print I’m hoping to make into a purse). Lastly, I've been trying to make even regular home activities more interesting. We recently got an inflatable screen and projector to do movies in the backyard.
I’ve been trying to find a balance between holding myself accountable to really put energy towards this shift while also giving myself grace in the fact that this is my first time living life and there’s no handbook on how to get back to your most authentic self. #autumngetsalife isn’t about fixing everything overnight or a specific and rigid structure on what my life is supposed to be. It’s about the small changes and effort that turn sepia days back to technicolor. And while I’m still on that path, every day brings me closer to living a life that feels 3D again. Maybe it’s time for you to start your own #getmylifeback journey too.
Whether you’re in a place where you’re also re-evaluating what “you” looks like or you’re already living your best life, I’d love to hear about things you do outside of work or are interested in doing!
A big theme of this blog is work-life balance. My journey with that lately has been through the lens of evaluating my day-to-day lifestyle. But an equally important and valuable aspect of that is ensuring you’re taking time away from work at a bit of a larger scale. My dear friend Kyle Massey wrote about this on his site in an encouraging and thoughtful blog about taking your PTO. I already know you’re interested in reading that too so you can find it here.
