Q2 2021 Review
In my first job, Q2 was the dreaded quarter. For reasons that were never quite pinned down, interest, enquiries and sales bombed during Q2 – which, of course, led to morale dropping and stress levels increasing. My Q2s since then had levelled out, being neither great nor awful, but this year the curse of Q2 came back to bite me. In every conceivable way, this has been one of my worst quarters to date.
It had started so well. In April I felt I had the whole world at my feet: lockdown was easing, the weather was warming, I was dating, turning 30, and seeing friends and family, I was fitter and stronger than I’d ever been and I had just signed up for a hiking challenge. I ran a flash sale around my birthday and made nearly half my quarterly financial target in one month. Ahead of me stretched a summer full of sunshine and decadence and possibility.
At the beginning of May it rained and rained. It was cold and grey and so wet that the apple tree didn’t blossom. In my early twenties I’d struggled with recurrent UTIs and in May they decided to join me in my early thirties. I tried to push through by drinking lots of water but after a week the night sweats and fever set in, so off I went for tests and antibiotics. The symptoms lulled, and, anxious that I’d fallen a week behind on my Welsh 3000s training, I went for a run and came back to do some yoga, at the end of which I decided to go into full lotus for a bit of fun. As I dragged my right foot onto my left thigh I heard a clear and unmistakable pop. Oh shit.
It wasn’t remarkably painful, nor was it swollen or bruised, so I thought I’d be able to get away with a few days of rest and ice packs. But it continued to ache and to stab if I twisted, and as much as I was trying to convince myself I knew it wasn’t looking good. The NHS physio assessed that it, thankfully, wasn’t ligament damage, but that it was damage to the joint capsule – a 12 week healing time. And just like that, my plans of summer hikes and climbs, and my hiking challenge, were dead in the dirt.
I was angry at myself for a long time. I still am, if I let myself be. Angry that a second of complacency and arrogance cost me my summer of hiking, my fitness, possibly the strength and mobility of that knee for the rest of my life. Going into June, a combination of the anti-inflammatories I was on for my knee, the iron supplements I’d been prescribed, and my sudden drop from exercising daily to virtually never moving gave me stomach problems which contributed to a second UTI flare up. The last month of the quarter became about keeping my head above water as I attempted to heal on three different battlegrounds in my body. I wrote in The Messages In Disappointment that I felt my knee injury was my body hammering home the message that what it really needed was rest right now – but that doesn’t always make it easier to swallow.
Everything lost its sheen. The men I was meeting increasingly came waving red flags and dating began to feel a lot less fun. My work became a slog rather than an escape as my creativity dried up into an apple pip and could not be coaxed into germination. I realised that hiking in the hills is what keeps me connecting and aligned with myself, and not being able to do so made me feel constantly out on a limb. My house sold, which while being a good thing came with mixed emotions and a very real deadline to decide what the hell I was going to do. Between worrying about my health and the stress of selling a house, there wasn’t room for doing anymore than the bare minimum with work – and I didn’t even manage that.
This, of course, followed financially. When I’m not producing content, I’m not getting in front of people, and there’s no reason for them to go to my website; and if they’re not going to my website, there’s no opportunity to buy from me. After a good April, in May I just about broke even – in June I didn’t make enough to cover my bills. Between my tax bill and mortgage payments I’ve run down my savings, although I am in the privileged position of knowing that as long as the house sale goes through on time I will get a little financial buffer before I’m really in dire straits.
But all in all, it feels like a long fall from where I was in April; I barely recognise that version of myself now.
Of course, it wasn’t completely all bad. After a lockdown winter in which I saw three people in three months I am still in raptures at being able to just pop over to a friend’s for a paned. Two of my oldest friends came to visit, one of whom I hadn’t seen in over two years, and the laughs and conversation and intimacy of those weekends recharged a battery in me I hadn’t realised was even there. I also, more than I noticed at the time, moved things along in terms of the pivot of the business. At the beginning of the quarter I had no idea whatsoever; while I now don’t really have anything I can put into words, I definitely know how it all feels – and I have a plan for the future of the podcast and what my business model is going to look like.
So what now? I suppose the good news is that it can’t get much worse (written as I touch every piece of wood in the vicinity). My intention for Q3 is “tie up the old loose ends ready for a new life”. That means getting this house sold and finding a rental in North Wales (please hit me up if you know of any), it means getting this UTI out of my body and patiently and carefully restoring my knee, it means closing up the old commitments to make room for new work. It also means getting inspired again – picking up a book instead of my phone if I am going to waste four hours, listening to podcasts in the car, fully committing to the mastermind I’ve signed up to.
My hope is that I write my Q3 review in three months time sitting on a clean slate. I hope that I am healthy and not taking it for granted, I hope that I know where I’m going to live, I hope that I have a vision and new things to tell you about. Getting there is my focus for now.
