Only big T trauma kids need apply

poor mental health for the win

Jul 20, 2024

Last week I was invited to speak to a group of virtual small business owners in the fitness field (yes! that’s a thing - fitness professionals of all kinds from physical therapy to pelvic floor health who exclusively teach virtually). I talked for almost two hours about owning a 13+ year old small business. The goal of the talk was to inspire, while also creating reasonable timeline expectations for success (this particular cohort is in the first stages of small business life). I had a lot of ground to cover… for example completely reimagining my previously brick and mortar business and business model into a fully virtual one in the space of about 3 days in 2020...

I finished the talk high on sharing and connection, giddy with the engaged questions and thoughtful reflections from the group. One of the comments I got most frequently was that ‘stress’ seemed to be a common theme. (yah think??) That and my ability (perhaps my superpower) to take risks, big ones, but with willingness to back them up with (one might say the endless) work needed to make the risks pan out. I felt proud of my achievements. I even learned some things about myself via their reflections.

The next morning I woke up thinking of this quote in relation to the conversation.

“No sane person who has lived a stress or trauma-free life typically indulges in the voluntary trials, difficulty, and mental and physical dark places that the sport [Ultra Marathon] requires,” Kevin Leathers, Run Coach

I read the article this quote is from several days before I gave the talk. At the time I thought about how our traumas can give us strength just as much as they can make us fearful. Most of my close friends are traumatized people and we often joke that if we were picking an apocalypse crew to survive end-times with… ( you know, normal conversation topics these days) we’d ask anyone with PTSD to step forward. Pardon me, but I’m not looking for the fastest, strongest, smartest...(zombies are rarely outwitted that way) I want people with grit, determination, and the kind of dogged survival instincts that only trauma can forge. (plus traumatized ppl will be less upset by the zombie carcasses because we’ve ALREADY anxiety-imagined them! I’ve really thought this out!)

Culturally we think of mental health issues as being negative. Largely I would agree. I would not wish my daily early AM intrusive thoughts on anyone (laying in bed casually imagining everyone you love dying, being dead or being killed, sort of negative). But mental health issues exist regardless of whether we think they are negative or not. I have them. We have them. You have them. And if I didn’t have them I also don’t think I would be here: a successful solo small business owner with 3 different storefronts, a pandemic, and a rebrand as a completely virtual studio in my past.

Part of being an adult is recognizing that we re-create the challenging circumstances of our childhoods, not just in relationships, but in environment. I consistently put myself in precarious, knife-edge situations where everything seems like it could fall apart (starting a biz with no money in the bank.. buying a house with no means to pay the mortgage) because not only have I learned to be comfortable in that level of risk and stress but it seems fairly normal to me (not gonna lie.. sometimes it even gives me a thrill!).

Life was scary when I was young. The message I got was that everything could be taken away in an instant: don’t trust stability, it doesn’t exist. I’ve done a great job at setting myself up to experience that loss over and over again, only to prove to myself that I can get out of it. I can create stability. I can persevere where others give up.

One key aspect of my small business skill, an ingredient not just in mine but so many stories* of triumph against odds, is poor mental health. We hear the boot-strap stories of rags-to riches, or the near-misses star athletes and celebrities overcome to reach success, but we don’t hear about early psychological pain. We don’t hear how often determination is shaped by core emotional damage. We don’t hear about grief’s long arm, depression’s sneaky staying power, and how the drone of anxiety and gut-clenching fear behind every action CAN actually motivate us to achieve our dreams. (new self-help book idea: anxiety your way to your best life! … I actually think a lot of us are doing that already…)

I am resilient. And to be a successful small business owner you either need to have independent wealth, investors (which kinda means you aren’t a small biz), or be resilient as fuck. A lot of the trauma I experienced as a child meant that I was left to meet my own emotional needs (and also learn to live without them being met). I was ‘parentified’ from a very young age, which made me a serious, strange child, but also turned me into a tough mother-fucker. I learned (far too early) that no one was going to help me but myself. This is an IDEAL skill if you want to own your own business.

I trust myself. I regularly count on myself. So many people are terrified to trust themselves in all sorts of small and big ways every day, but Myself is what I have been leaning on for most of my life. Knowing that meant I didn’t hesitate to advocate for my business at every turn. It also meant I already had the skills to do that, even at the tender age of 28, when I opened my first store-front.

I know when the zombie apocalypse arrives (in what.. 2026?) I won’t stop fighting until the last zombie stops re-animating. (I know my zombie problems.) When people joke about wanting to be in the first wave that gets obliterated (there are lots of ways into the zombie apocalypse, nuclear 3rd WW being high on the list), I have to pretend to agree. I know I won’t go out early. I’ll be one of the haggard last. Which is to say, being resilient is not always fun and empowering. (cleaning raw sewage with a plumber at 10PM on Xmas Eve in one of my brick and mortar studio spaces springs to mind..) Resilience isn’t all photo finishes and retirement watches. Sometimes, a lot of times, it’s that you just kept going.

Fortunately, as so often happens in the crazy matrix that makes up our lives, the pattern I kept repeating also shifted. I slowly learned that there is support, not just hurdle after hurdle to overcome. I also came to see that another unique power and strength I have, is that I seek out support (something I’m not sure my parents did much of when I was little). I do the research. I find the answers. As a child and through much of my adult life, I believed the message my parents told me, and believed the feelings gnawing in the pit of my stomach. I thought all of life was just at the whims of fate. Every success and every failure, every trauma, every tragedy due only to chance. I don’t think I could have articulated that at the time but a mother lamenting ‘ I don’t know WHY this happens to you! I don’t know HOW to help you!’ certainly set those feelings that the world was intractable, impossible, chaotic. It terrified me.

A lot of people don't do scary things because of scary things that happened to them. And a lot of people do scary things exactly because scary things happened to them. The long game of anything, from business to marriage to building a career to (I assume) being a parent, is not for everyone because it requires an amount of resilience and fortitude that not many people have needed to draw upon, or learned to create in themselves (or want to learn to create in themselves). And while of course accidents happen, illness exists, natural disasters (and world-wide plagues) do damage, I also learned that effort, connection, community and reasonable (not fear and anxiety-ridden) caution do a lot to mitigate the chaos that seemed to strike my childhood at random.

I have a lot to be proud of as a small business owner. And a lot of it is very glamorous and great, like, I am a damn good teacher, and I think of really good ideas that people like. And those are just fun, cool, things that are unique to me and definitely part of my success. And some of my small business story is absolutely fantastic luck like Bjork and Jemima Kirke wandering into my studio and becoming my clients. But too often we sell the story of American entrepreneurship as all guts and glory, late nights and early mornings, as though if every young business owner just had enough caffeine they could conquer every challenge. But small business is an ultra marathon. The end is not visible. The challenges don’t stop. The highs are high and the lows are low. It takes more than spreadsheets and coffee to make it through.

The tragedies and traumas I experienced as a child, in many ways, probably could have been avoided. But they weren’t. And I lived through them. And now, 42 years later, I use the raw determination, the strength that sustained me, and create a life of peace, stability, and joy. And I use that strength to help solve the endless challenges that come with running one’s own company. Because one’s own venture should be like one’s own life: always changing, always challenging and always growing.

Only big T trauma kids need apply

poor mental health for the win

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