In similar fashion to my last blog, this topic was spurred by all the questions I've gotten in the last month: "Why did you leave New York?" "Why'd you go back to NC?" “What are you doing for work?" and so on and so forth. I think I’ll just start steering people here when I get these questions now.
Why I Left New York
Oh, New York. I was one month away from my 4th year anniversary living in Brooklyn when I closed the cover on my New York chapter. I don’t want to paint New York as this dirty place of suffering or chaotic stress, but these notions certainly do come to mind when I think about my experience there. Sure, on some days New York was a romantic, energetic creative haven where I was excited to wake up and join the masses in another adventure. Ultimately though, I left because I felt over-stimulated and unrested. I worked crazy long hours, slept little, and as a natural introvert, felt overwhelmed by the amount of people I had contact with in a day (from my living situation, to the subway, to my bike commute and traffic, to my job as a face-to-face personal trainer, to my actual social life), and didn’t have enough me time.
She’s a beaut though
Why Did I Go Back To NC?
This was a pretty simple decision, as I’m from NC and I have family here. While living in NYC, I was lucky if I got to see family 2 times a year so being able to spend time with them now is super important to me. My parents also happen to have a mountain house in Western NC that I’ve been privileged enough to decompress in. Do I think I’ll stay here forever? Probably not. I have my sights on the west — Colorado, Oregon, and Montana being at the top of the list. If it isn’t obvious by now, I crave natural settings. The mountains put me at ease and trees feel like home.
Jace, my nephew and I in Max Patch, NC (on the Tennessee border!)
What Are You Doing For Work?
Now this is a good question. Apart from just catching up with my family, traveling, and de-stressing, I have been training a few of my clients from NYC via FaceTime and a have a handful of clients here in NC. I know for sure that I want to continue training people, I just don’t think I will ever work for a gym as a full-time trainer again. Equinox was an amazing experience, I got hands-on learning from some of the most educated and successful trainers in the business.
However, as I’m sure all my fellow in-person trainers out there know, working in a gym is taxing. Working in a gym that requires you hit certain quotas per week, is even more exhausting, and honestly, without those bonuses i.e. spending an excessive amount of time at work, I wasn’t living comfortably financially in New York City. I’d often get up at 4:30am, bike an hour to the gym, train clients from 6am to 9pm (with a few breaks for a workout, meals, a nap, or running errands in between), bike home, and try to get to bed by 11pm, just to get up and do it all over again. As much as I loved my clients and helping them change their lifestyles, this just wasn’t a sustainable way to live for me and I was spreading myself thin while not giving each client as much attention as I wanted to. Does this mean I don't think new trainers should work for a gym? Absolutely not. I would still go to Equinox or another gym with a proper education system or access to education for practical experience to start if I had to do it over again.
Now I am in the process of developing my online training business, as I want to help as many people as possible become the best versions of themselves. Additionally, I am working on developing my voice. Consistently, the things I’ve been good at my whole life (well, since I could walk and was literate) have been athletics and writing. Growing up, I would fail at math tests time and time again, do okay at science and history, and excel at and enjoy writing and reading. I’d say writing was really the only area I felt confident in, as there was no memorization or numbers, and my teachers and even peers confirmed this confidence when they complimented my work.
My love of the written word is why I majored in English and initially moved to NYC. Though my dream was to go to New York and be a creative writer or work in publishing, the need for money (ugh, what a drag) and lack of experience squashed my dreams and I did what I had to do to survive with odd jobs. A couple of these jobs did include writing, but not in a capacity that satisfied me or my creative whims, and once I became a trainer, I had zero time for that (or so I told myself).
Welp, here I am, writing just to write, to put my thoughts out into the universe, to hopefully connect with, educate, or encourage someone through words. I want to contribute writing in other spaces outside of this blog as well, specifically in the health and fitness realm. Write what you know, they say. The beauty of the internet is that this desire to create content could take shape in so many forms and I'm opening my mind to whatever that may look like.
“I am working on developing my voice.”
I am optimistic for sure. Naive? Probably. Nevertheless, I know that every time I put my mind to something and work hard, I make sh!t happen. So that’s what I’m doing. Join me or don’t, I’ll be here fighting to make my dreams real life.
Thanks for reading!