As I mentioned in our last post, I’m launching a podcast and blog called Imperfectly Honest with my friend, Sheila Lamont.
Especially since many of you are friends, family, and colleagues, we thought it might be helpful to share why each of us decided to embark on this journey. Sheila will be sharing her thoughts in the next post.
Here’s my story:
After a serious health scare and a perfect storm of related and unrelated events, I’m shifting from the routine and comfortable life I’ve led for the past twenty years to become the person I really want to be and to do the work I feel I was born to do. I want to share the lessons I’ve learned through my successful and not-so-successful attempts to be the real me.
First, a life update: I have had a transformative couple of years. Two years ago, my husband and I moved from Colorado, the place I had called home for my entire adult life, to Montana. I am grateful that I made this move. There is much to love about Montana, and I’ve had a lot of realizations in the process, including the realization that it is time to sunset my marriage. I have the utmost respect for my ex-husband, and I am grateful for our twenty-year relationship. We have simply decided that our marriage has run its course.
In the midst of the move to Montana and while having this realization about my marriage, I had a serious health scare. I am more or less back to normal now, but it has been quite a ride. My health scare resulted from the domino effect of the non-life-threatening but time-consuming and annoying health issues that I’ve been applying band-aid solutions to for nearly twenty years. I believe that most, if not all, of my health issues are intertwined and that the stress I put myself through as a first-time entrepreneur was the catalyst. Because I was simply “too busy” trying to be the person I thought I “should” be, I allowed my symptoms to persist for so long that I literally altered the shape of my spine.
This perfectly poetic medical phenomenon was the wake-up call that allowed me to see the pain I had caused myself by failing to find the literal and figurative backbone I needed to be “me.”
Now, at 42, I think I am finally finding this backbone, in part because my health issues have forced me to, but mostly because I have learned to be honest with myself and with nearly everyone I encounter, including my friend and Imperfectly Honest cofounder, Sheila Lamont.
When I was in the depths of my health scare, Sheila called me for the first time in over eight years. We had had a falling out in 2014 and had not spoken since. She was calling to let me know that she had been battling cancer and wanted to reconnect. We were able to do so in a meaningful way because we found the courage to have the honest conversations we were too afraid to have eight years prior. Our weekly successful and not-so-successful attempts to have honest conversations became the inspiration for Imperfectly Honest.
This has been a long journey, shaped most notably by my white picket fence childhood, my successes and failures as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, a slew of health issues, my decision to opt out of motherhood, my choice to leave a picture-perfect 15-year marriage, and a lot of random events along the way.
I have learned equally powerful life lessons from the times when I have failed and the times when I have succeeded in finding my courage to be the “real me.” Because of this, I have very few regrets. Still, I am aware that I have done irreparable damage to myself along the way, almost all of which could have been avoided with some better guidance and some better listening on my part. I want to tell my story in hopes that others can learn the same powerful lessons without the same powerful pain.
Stay tuned for Sheila’s side of this story.
Onward.
