Forever Alone | Chapter 6: Covid & Copping Out (Part 1)
In which I get called out so hard I break out in cold sweats, offend people at a wedding, surprise myself by getting a job, and rant like my life depends on it.
I published Forever Alone: One Introverted Millennial’s Half-Agonizing, Half-Hopeful Journey Through Singledom in 2021 as a 7-part podcast miniseries. I’m re-publishing it here on Substack for the first time in written form! Start reading from the beginning here.
About a month into therapy, in an ongoing attempt to take responsibility for my mental health, I finally sat down and took the Enneagram. It’s a personality test—but more specifically, it’s a system for mapping out 9 distinct types of personalities. But unlike other personality tests, the Enneagram isn’t necessarily fun. It’s not a quick little quiz that makes you feel great about yourself and then promptly forget 10 minutes later … kind of the opposite.
The Enneagram isn’t here to say, “Embrace yourself exactly as you are and you’ll be awesome!” Instead, it reveals some of the ickier, more uncomfortable patterns you might find yourself in. We all have a home base—a comfort zone we default to, especially when triggered or under stress—but the more you operate from that home base, the more you’re trapped by the tendencies of your type. The Enneagram shows you where you live, so that you can choose to grow beyond it on every level—mentally, emotionally, spiritually. But I didn’t know all that when I took it.
I discovered that I’m a Type 4—The Individualist or Romantic … big surprise there, right? As I scrolled through the results, I read, “At their best, healthy Fours are inspired, creative, and honest with themselves. They own all of their feelings and can look at their motives, contradictions, and emotional conflicts without denying or whitewashing them. They may not necessarily like what they discover, but they don’t try to hide them from themselves or others. They are not afraid to see themselves ‘warts and all.’”
OK, pretty true so far! But then I read this: “Fours are somewhat melancholic by disposition, and under stress tend to lapse into depression. They also tend to be self-absorbed, even under the best of circumstances, but when unbalanced, easily give way to self-indulgence which they perceive as being fully justified as a way to compensate for the general lack of pleasure they experience in their lives. Rather than look for practical solutions to their difficulties, Fours are prone to fantasizing about a savior who will rescue them from their unhappiness.”
I don’t exaggerate when I say my stomach turned. I felt queasy; almost clammy. I’d just been pleasantly scrolling through the results of my harmless personality test, only to be blindsided by a ruthlessly accurate punch to the gut. The Enneagram had just taken all of the most secret, shameful things about me—things even I was trying not to know about myself—and exposed them to the light of day.
To give myself a little credit, I could have turned away. I could have said, “Nope nope nope,” slammed my laptop shut, and numbed out with Netflix until the queasiness went away. But I didn’t hide from the ugliness of what I’d just read. Instead, I sat with it for days and weeks. I let it gnaw away at me … and in that discomfort, I found truth.
Melancholic by disposition, and a tendency to lapse into depression when under stress? I can’t argue with that. Self-absorbed, even under the best circumstances? Yikes. Buuut … when you’re an intense personality with a penchant for the dramatic, yeah, you tend to believe your own thoughts and feelings are more interesting than whatever’s going on around you. And the worst part—the part that really made me break out in a cold sweat—self-indulgence that you justify as a way to compensate for not getting what you want; fantasizing about being rescued rather than finding a solution, yourself. Woof.
That last one … it hit an incredibly tender spot. I’d half-suspected for a couple years that there was responsibility I was shirking; important things I was copping out on because I’d rather they get magically fixed than me bother to fix them, myself. But given that I was now in therapy, taking radical responsibility for all of my thoughts and feelings, I couldn’t continue in avoidance mode.
The Enneagram had blown up my comfort zone so effectively that there was no home base left to return to.
Kristen and I were naïve when we started a business, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If we hadn’t been young and inexperienced and desperate to make it work, there’s no way we would have had the nerve or energy to persevere through the countless ups and downs that are inevitable in entrepreneurship.
For years, our fuel was stress—a potent cocktail of adrenaline and cortisol. Remember how, back in 2012, I quit my nannying job because I’d run out of money and run up my credit card debt? I worked as an admin at a law firm, barely making ends meet (and certainly not replenishing my savings nor paying off debt), for all of 2013, then in early 2014 quit that job to officially go full-time in Clarity on Fire. Kristen had quit her job six months before that and it was clear almost immediately that we’d both been severely optimistic, or maybe delusional, about how easy it would be to make money once we had nothing but time to work on our business.
For almost two years, we ping-ponged between panicking and hustling, worried about money almost every minute of the day. We didn’t have a backup plan, nor did we want one. If you don’t have a plan B, then plan A has to work … and we were willing to do just about anything to make sure plan A worked. Our business strategy was mostly throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what stuck. We tried a lot of things; in hindsight, some of them pretty embarrassing and cringeworthy. But eventually, by early 2016—two years after I quit my job—we had started to make more reliable, steady money. Business was growing. Not exponentially, but enough that it finally felt safe to relax.
But when you’ve been running yourself ragged for years, fueled by nothing but desperation and stress, you don’t “relax” when you slow down … you crash. The burnout we experienced was intense—for years, almost as long as it had taken to build a stable business—we were exhausted. We continued to show up in business—we coached people, wrote blogs, ran courses—but we had no energy for growth or creating anything new. We were content to do the minimum we could reasonably get away with, without endangering ourselves, financially.
At one point, a year or two into the burnout, we hired a marketing coach to help get our energy going again. We’d been exhausted and unmotivated long enough to know that unless we got outside accountability, the status quo would never change. Our coach, who eventually became a very close friend, asked me during a 1:1 session what my big vision was—what purpose did my work serve?
I told her the truth: “Yes, this work is important. I enjoy it. I’ve helped a lot of people. But I’d be lying if I said that’s the big goal. What I do is just as important to me as how this business allows me to live—the life it enables me to have. And what I really want is a family of my own. I want to get married, have kids. I want a nice, white house with a wraparound porch, perched on a hill somewhere, a river nearby for the dog to swim. I want to learn how to grow some organic fruits and veggies and teach my kids where their food comes from. Sure, I could spend a couple hours a day working, but mostly I want to live.”
Around the same time I shared that vision with my marketing coach, my younger brother got married. While seated at dinner during the reception, one of my dad’s friends politely asked me how business was going. I paused, sighed, then blurted out, “You know, I really don’t want to talk about that right now.” To my left my aunt let out a little gasp: “Rachel, that’s rude!” Later that night she told my dad what I’d said, and he admonished me for snapping at his friend.
Maybe it was rude. But in that moment, I didn’t have any fucks left to give. It wasn’t that nice man’s fault, of course, but he was just one in a long string of well-meaning people who never knew what to ask me besides, “How’s business going?” Every time, the question felt like a barbed reminder that, “This is all you are. If you’d been able to get what you really want—a husband, kids, a full life—then people would have something to ask you about other than this one thing.”
I was grateful for what I’d achieved. Proud of me and Kristen for everything we’d done. But I’d grown tired of my life being defined by my work—which was my fault, I know. I’m the one who threw myself into my career, thinking it would save me from my unhappiness, while also hoping it would distract me from my belief that I’d never get the relationship I really wanted.
But by this point, I’d harbored enough good doubt that I did sort of believe I could have a real partnership, and I felt deeply ready to move on to that phase of my life. I didn’t want to throw more time and energy into business; it felt like doubling down on a one-dimensional reality. I was so tired. Not just burnt out by how hard I’d worked, but bone-weary at how difficult it was to do life alone. Yes, I had Kristen, which was no small thing. But we couldn’t support and nurture each other properly, because we were in the same boat.
I’d look out—when I was at weddings, or hanging with friends, or at events with business owners I met online—and all around me I saw people who had partners. I saw business owners who didn’t have to worry about whether or not they’d be able to pay their mortgage that month, because they had a spouse and a dual income. I saw friends who didn’t have to shoulder the entire burden of their stress and emotional baggage, because there a partner was, filling them up when they felt like couldn’t go any further.
Toward the end of Eat, Pray, Love—the book, not the movie—Liz is scared to start a relationship with Felipe, the older Brazilian man she met in Bali. She finally decides to be his lover when he shares his terms: “That he wanted absolutely nothing from me whatsoever except permission to adore me for as long as I wanted him to.” She goes on to write that that night, after she finally let him lead her to bed, “He said I seemed terribly young but also open and excited and relieved to be recognized and so tired of being brave.”
God, was I tired of being brave, too. And damn, did I want a man who’d make me feel as seen and held and safe and adored and cared for as the one Liz had found in Bali.
This was Chapter 6: Part 1 of Forever Alone. Read on for Chapter 6: Part 2!