I learn a lot from my intergenerational friendships and my 30 year old pal Laura Brooks said “My job is not my identity” during our first conversation and it blew my mind and changed my life.
When I left my career as an attorney I didn’t have anything I was leaping into other than the temporary monetary cushion of a fiance who wanted me to move to Los Angeles with her and was willing to support my career transition. A lot of times life is like that, we have to leave the familiar for the unknown and then it sorts itself out.
About nine months after the move I had already started working on a tea business, overlapping with that is when I got the idea to start teaching aerobics. I took a class at the World Tea Expo about liability and small product based consumable businesses and knew I couldn’t do it with no capital. Forever learning the Capricorn lesson about not monetizing all of my passions (I remain very passionate about herbs and tea).
Once I started teaching my aerobics class, Fat Kid Dance Party shot off like a rocket. Replacing “I’m an attorney” with “I’m an aerobics instructor” was an ease of mind I didn’t realize I needed.
I also didn’t realize what I was doing was, once again, externalizing my sense of identity and safety outside of myself.
“My job is not my identity” is such an accurate thing to say because, in capitalism, making our identity about how we create capital for the state makes that the most important thing we do. I believe we incarnate on Earth to perfect how we love one another and ourselves. That has more to do with being the best person we can be, not the best at making money or being “successful” in the eyes of capitalism.
Here are all of the ways I experienced income during Summer 2024 (that I can remember):
Patreon memberships
Pet sitting
Cleaning hotel rooms
Personal shopping for health / wellness / home products
Gifts to support my podcast, this blog and other free content I provide on social media
Arts grant panelist (this was 30 hours and intense!)
Sales of my online aerobics video series
In person aerobics classes (but to be accurate I actually went out of pocket for travel to teach in Seattle for 4 out of 5 of the recent classes)
None of these things is my identity!
I’ve been going through a lot emotionally over the past couple years as the revenue from my aerobics class has waned. I don’t know any entrepreneurs who did well financially in 2023 and I ended up getting a couple of gigs to supplement my income, while still doing the same amount of work in my entrepreneurial ventures.
If you’re part of the entrepreneurial “2023 was trash” experience, I highly recommend season 5 of Luvvie Ajayi Jones’ Professional Troublemaker podcast!
I didn’t realize a big part of why it was so hard emotionally was because I put so much of my identity in being “an aerobics instructor” versus just being the best Bevin I can be.
True, figuring out what I was meant to do in the world gave me so much peace. I spent a long time teaching about body liberation and self love without having a thing I could point to that made money from it. And then! Getting to say I made all of my money to live off from my art and activism was such a sweet experience. A dream come true!
True, it took shrinking my needs waaay down by moving to the forest and hardly heating my house in the Winter. But I got to work full time in my passions in a way I always wanted and to be a full time mom to my Feline Overlord, Biscuit Reynolds.
I started this post yesterday and a couple hours later found out one of my steadiest jobs is coming to an end. It’s wildly unsettling to be thrust into the chaos of “Oh I was counting on this thing and now it’s gone” but that’s grief in a nutshell. When I got laid off in 2008 from a lawyer job I had been at for five years I realized that job security is a myth and at any moment everything can change.
I think we all learned during the onset of the quarantine that something we have never heard of before can come through and change everything about our lives.
The only thing consistent in life is uncertainty and I’m proud of myself that my reaction to losing this steady income was to check in with my intuition and reach out to a couple of my besties for moral support. And trust that another stream of income will flourish!
I’m Bevin and that’s enough!
For further listening on this topic, my podcast episode with Jonathan Koe on redefining success is a good one!
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