It's OK to decide to quit.
How getting and recovering from long Covid has impacted my business and life.
A slight trigger warning for today’s newsletter in it I talk about long Covid and how it’s affected my life in the past 3 years. It also touches very briefly on depression and anxiety.
Over the past two years, navigating my business has been tough. I crossed my 10 year anniversary in 2022, and while I should have been super proud I felt exhausted and trapped.
2019 through the beginning of 2022 were my most successful years ever. I reached the coveted milestone of earning “six figures,” began building a team, and found a fulfilling way to work with clients. It felt like I had finally established a legitimate business.
However, I was battling long Covid with absolutely no idea.
I had gotten sick in the beginning of March of 2020 and was initially misdiagnosed with Legionnaires’ disease. It turned out it was Covid, but I had some of the stranger symptoms (nausea, GI stuff, hallucinations, vertigo, etc.) and because I didn’t have trouble breathing I was told to just stay home. My experience with Covid was (luckily) pretty mild.
By the fall of 2020, I noticed that simple activities like walking to the end of my driveway left me winded and extremely exhausted. I was constantly bone tired, and my joints ached. I assumed this was due to the demands of my business, a challenging long-term client, and of course, middle age.
I mean, whose body after the age of 40 doesn’t have weird aches and pains? Don’t we all feel exhausted by the state of the world? Maybe this was normal?
Initially, my doctor suggested it might be depression. And because I seemingly like to be a co-conspirator in the ways doctors tend to gaslight us, I ignored how I felt and told myself it was in my head. I just needed to lose weight and eat better. Fuck me.
Except try as I might, I couldn’t ignore what was going on. I started to notice things were definitely not right. I know what depression and anxiety look like; I’ve dealt with it since I was a teenager. This was not that. Taking my dog on our afternoon walk was debilitating. I’d often start to walk her and have to turn around after 5 minutes and head home. I was also taking 2-3 hour naps every afternoon. I told no one about this until after the fact because I felt such shame that I wasn’t trying harder.
By mid-2021, my symptoms had escalated to the point where leaving my house was nearly impossible. (To illustrate: my car, bought in late 2020, had only 7,500 miles on it after three years, compared to the typical 30,000 miles. Obviously this was during the height of the pandemic but the car guys were actually floored when they saw my odometer.) It wasn’t until I got on medication to deal with a major symptom that I was able to realize how the quality of my life had been decimated.
While my experience wasn't like the stories you hear about in the news, ex: long distance runners that can’t walk up a flight of stairs, or people bedridden for months or no longer able to work. It did however wreak havoc on me that to this day I’m still dealing with.
During this period, I made an unfortunate pivotal business decision. Mistakenly believing my exhaustion stemmed from client work, I pivoted to project-based work in spring 2022. This was not a good move; I was a shadow of my former self and my ability to market and network like I once had was diminished significantly.
This period was incredibly tough and disorienting. It wasn’t until late spring of 2022 when I got in to see specialists that confirmed my symptoms were in fact long Covid. I finally felt like I wasn’t losing my mind.
Like most Gen-X, I’m a late bloomer. Plus, I’ve never really thought “long term” (thanks, ADHD!) about what my life might look like in my 60’s and 70’s, but getting chronically ill changed that.
Getting long Covid scared me in ways that are really difficult to describe. It gave me an existential wake up call that I really wasn’t prepared for. I started to see life very, very differently.
I once heard someone talk about small business owners as being extremely risk averse. I swear I’ve never felt so seen. I thought, oh that’s what’s wrong with me lol. But it’s true, one of the reasons I’ve been able to stay in business for so long is because I’ve been nimble, made changes quickly, and taken big risks.
However, when you get sick and there’s no plan in place to deal with it it’s a fucking wake up call to the choices one has made. To be fair, we live in a hellscape that has left most people one bad decision or one emergency away from financial ruin. So there’s that.
Anyway, the lasting effect for me was that it made me see that I’m simply done with being a full-time business owner.
The truth is I simply do not want to market, create content, sell, consult, do admin work, deal with PITA clients, and every other little friggin’ thing small business owners have to do every single day…ever again. Like never ever again.
I know, I can hire people to do this for me. I’ve done that. I’ve built teams for myself and for my clients, except now I simply do not have it in me to do it again without a weekly paycheck. The low points are too much for me to weather anymore.
I’m not sharing this so you feel bad for me, although I’ve known my readers long enough to know that’s the last thing you’ll feel (thank you for that). I’m sharing this because this is the type of content I want to read. It’s the type of content I have needed. I want to know that people who look successful struggle and sometimes don’t come back from it. I wish people would be more open about how common it is to had have really great years and suddenly life deals you a shitty hand and you have to recalibrate.
I want to normalize that shit happens and people struggle. I want to break these narratives that we always have to turn failure into some hero ending. But I also don’t want to be Eeyore. I just want to talk openly about facts that happen in business so others know it’s extremely normal to have setbacks.
It’s not failure, it’s a new chapter. I’ve done everything I can and I’ve come to realize I’m done and ready to move on. As my Grampa used to say, I gave it the old college try 6 or 7 times lol.
One of the best things about the Internet is the possibility it offers us if we’re open to changing our perspective. I closed my final long term project a few weeks ago and decided to start looking for a full-time J-O-B. And because we live in a dynamic world where we can do multiple things, I also plan on growing this newsletter, selling my courses, and continuing to offer one off services.
That feels freeing to me. Now, if I can just find a job where people understand my resume.
You might be wondering how I am today. I’ve pretty much recovered and no longer have any symptoms of long Covid outside of fatigue. But I am dealing with how my body has been affected. I used to walk upwards of 90 minutes a day, I’m lucky now if I can get in a 15 minute walk. Baby steps. I’m extremely grateful I’m OK though and that I have options. ❤️
I want to share two podcast episodes that have helped me see the above experience in a much better light than I’ve felt over the past few months.
The first is from Hidden Brain, Healing 2.0: Change Your Story, Change Your Life. My friend Kari recommended it to me, I’ve listened to it multiple times.
The second, is from Freakanomics, How to Succeed at Failing, Part 3: Grit vs. Quit. I listened to this while cooking on Sunday and it was extremely cathartic.
By the way, the newsletter now has a name! I’ll share about the origin of this at some point. But suffice to say, it’s pulled from an idiom that emphasizes hard work is almost always the only option to get somewhere we want to be. More to come.